Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Her speech was widely reported, with left-wing newspapers and magazines being incensed by its dismissal of the welfare state. The New Republic remarked that she had made a “classic fool of herself.” But Time called her address a model of partisan politics. An editorial in Oregon’s Salem Capital-Journal, a newspaper of small circulation but considerable political influence, remarked that in Clare Boothe Luce the Republicans had found “their ablest campaign orator, next to Wendell Willkie. In fact, she excelled him as “a better master of satire [and] invective … using the rapier rather than the broadsword.”20

  Nine days later, she spoke in New York at a Columbia University gathering of the Institute of Arts and Sciences. Showing her versatility, she broached the vexed question of immigration, calling for the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and noting that it had been proved unjust even in its own time. Now in place for sixty-one years, the law seemed to condone “the whole Hitler doctrine of race theology.” It was time to guarantee Chinese aliens a part in “the long-established quota system.” Issuing a hundred or so work permits a year hardly posed a threat to American labor, or “even our so-called white civilization.”21

  Such challenging rhetoric, coupled with Clare’s ever-stylish appearance, assured her of continued media coverge, and compounded the already considerable jealousy of less noticed legislators.

  As part of his job, Henry Luce regularly visited different parts of the country, lecturing and looking for article and pictorial subjects for his magazines. On a trip to meet with the Governor of Georgia, he had spent a night at Redcliffe, the estate of John Billings in South Carolina. It reminded him sadly of Mepkin, his own nearby plantation on the Cooper River—closed for the war’s duration. He had bought the crumbling property for Clare early in their marriage, and restored it extensively.

  As he and Billings sauntered through Redcliffe’s gardens, the managing editor, a large, shy man, was pleased to feel no social strain with his boss. Somewhat solitary now that his wife lived mostly in Washington, Harry seemed to have a need to talk.22 China was a big subject for him, going back to his birth and schooling there. He raised money for the Nationalists and gave frequent coverage to their leader. Rather self-importantly, he told Billings that after a recent China Relief rally at Madison Square Garden, he had spent three hours with Madame Chiang Kai-shek. She had told him confidentially that “after the war, China’s capital would be moved to Peking.”23

  In the final House debate before the two-month summer recess began on July 8, Representative John W. Flannagan, Democrat from Virginia, launched into a diatribe against members who were “wrangling and fussing” on partisan issues instead of supporting their Commander in Chief. Without mentioning Clare by name, he made an overwrought attack on the “slim blonde creature of symmetrical lines and a face of beauty,” who had emerged as such a maverick during the current session. She, “whose graceful form was richly gowned, whose long swan-like arms and tapering fingers were encased in jewels,” had distracted the attention of the House from serious military matters. Clearly struggling with an erotic fixation, Flannagan even invoked her “left breast … bedecked with a rose crimson as the precious blood that oozed out of the ghastly wounds suffered by our boys as they fought from the foxholes of Bataan.” These feminine attributes had not stopped the gentlewoman from Connecticut from giving “vent to spleen that I would never associate with a form so fair.” In his view, her voice lacked “the ring of American motherhood.”24

  Another colleague tried to flatter Clare by suggesting she had “a masculine mind.” She declined the compliment. “Thought has no sex. One either thinks, or one does not think.”25

  As the last day of her first six months in Congress came to an end, she stopped at her office to sign a batch of mail. Though she was obviously tired, reporters peppered her with questions. Would she be interested in running for the seat of Connecticut’s retiring Republican Senator, John A. Danaher? Clare said no. She thought that a Democrat would win it. She intended to seek reelection to the House, “if the party wants me to run.” What about the vice presidency? Clare laughed, saying the time for an American woman in such an exalted position was “a long way off.”26

  This did not quell rumors of her ambition. A few days later, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a picture of her taking leave of Speaker Rayburn. “Home to Henry goes Clare Luce,” the accompanying article read. “And if Henry isn’t careful he’s likely to find himself the hubby of a Senator. That Clare is just loaded down with ideas!”27

  5

  SUMMER INTERLUDE

  It is better to be rare jade and broken, than to be common tile and whole.

  —CHINESE PROVERB

  During the recess, Al Morano and two or three other staffers handled business from Clare’s old campaign headquarters in downtown Greenwich.1 She stayed mostly at home in the thirty-room country house on King Street that Harry had bought before the war. There she caught up on sleep, swam, played tennis, and wrote—usually in bed and sometimes at a circular desk facing it in her aquamarine boudoir.2 As a member of the Committee on Military Affairs, she felt obliged to venture out occasionally to inspect war plants in Bridgeport, Norwalk, Stamford, and Danbury. Harry, meanwhile, commuted to his New York office.

  Clare’s solitude was soon interrupted by the appearance of David Boothe—“that wicked and wonderful brother of mine,” as she ambivalently described him. He was attracted, as always, by the prospect of free accommodation, plentiful liquor, and the company of his adored sister.3

  The siblings could not have been more different. David, one year older, was as dark and swarthy as Clare was fair and ethereal. In manner, too, they were opposites. He was coarse and brusque, she was smooth and deliberate. Three attributes they shared in abundance were physical courage, charm, and sex appeal. David had been no older than thirteen when he seduced his first girl, and Clare had begun to attract adult men in her mid-teens.4 They also had mutual memories of maternal domination that had damaged them both—David perhaps more seriously. His early alienation from conventional mores had been sparked by his mother’s tendency to identify him with his nomadic, untamable father, not to mention her repeated predictions that he would be a failure.5

  Divorced since January from Nora Dawes, his Canadian wife of three and a half years, David, as always, needed money. He was currently a staff sergeant in the army. But having qualified as a pilot (thanks to a $10,000 training course paid for by Harry), he aspired to a commissioned rank with better pay in the overseas Army Air Corps. At forty-one, and suffering from high blood pressure, he was unfit for aerial combat, so Clare had used her influence to get him assigned as a liaison or service pilot. She hoped a career in military aviation might give her brother’s life the structure it lacked. He was now set to leave for the Far East, where he expected to fly reconnaissance and transport planes in the Pacific theater.

  David Boothe, c. 1943 (illustration credit 5.1)

  Although always in arrears on income taxes, David habitually shopped at Brooks Brothers or Abercrombie & Fitch, and had his bills sent to the Luces. Even Nora, the daughter of a wealthy Montreal brewer, seemed to think her in-laws should take care of any purchases at Bonwit Teller over and above the $300 monthly stipend they already allowed. This Harry refused to do, although he felt compassionate toward Nora, who had undergone a hysterectomy after David infected her with gonorrhea.6

  In advance of her brother’s arrival, Clare had written him an angry letter itemizing $190,000 in loans or cash gifts that she and Harry had given him since 1936.7 “I doubt if there is any man in the world who has had as much help so constantly and has fallen down so often as you have,” she wrote, telling him he should get “once and for all off my husband’s shoulders.” Now that he had a respectable job, he must not expect either of them to finance him again.

  I have no doubt that it will always be possible for us to keep track of your whereabouts as you borrow money from whatever friends of ours you can manage to lay your
hands on. But I would just as soon not keep track of you. I know this is hard and harsh, but after twenty-five years of having been pretty much of a softie about you, I don’t feel it’s so bad.8

  Unfortunately, she would always be “a softie” for David, as for nobody else. And he would forever find in his sister the only anchor he had or wanted. Time and again, he sailed back into her secure harbor, hauling his myriad physical, psychological, and financial problems with him.

  Clare saw an opportunity that July to unite the three people she currently most cared about. General Willoughby was still in the United States, on temporary duty in San Francisco. Ann was at Stanford, taking extra classes in order to graduate a year early, in the spring of 1944. David, en route to the Far East, could use his considerable powers of persuasion to ingratiate himself with Willoughby, and travel there in more comfort with him.

  On July 17, Clare and David flew to San Francisco. Ann Brokaw, eager to meet the high-ranking officer she had heard so much about, went north from Palo Alto in advance of their arrival, and dined with Willoughby and a Colonel and Mrs. Davis at the Hotel Mark Hopkins. They talked until midnight, and then all four spent the night in the Davises’ quarters at Fort Mason.9

  The combination of a general’s star, battle ribbons, and tall, dark good looks worked its inevitable spell on the eighteen-year-old. “General Willoughby is the most romantic, one of the handsomest, and most intriguing men I have ever met,” she wrote in her diary. “If he were twenty years younger (he’s 51) I should be madly in love with him! I can understand why mother is so fond of him.”10

  The following morning, Ann reunited with Clare and David at the Saint Francis Hotel. Her mother, she thought, looked “beautiful and lovely as ever.” But the change in her uncle’s appearance shocked her. David, formerly well built and copiously thatched, seemed “so thin and small and different in his Sargent’s [sic] uniform and new haircut.”11

  At dinner that night, Ann again met Willoughby. Her infatuation with him deepened: “Oh the General is divine!”12 Next morning, she attended Sunday services with Clare and “Charles.” David, typically, had something else to do. After lunch, they went to Clare’s suite, where she and Willoughby entertained Ann by reading aloud all three acts of Jacinto Benavente’s Princess Bebé. That night, the three of them dined in the hotel restaurant. By now Ann was in love. “Oh gawd why isn’t the general 20 years younger!”13

  At her best, when not combating teenage angst, Ann was a lighthearted and uncontentious young person. She brought a breath of warm air into the chilly atmosphere between David and Clare. Her relationship with her mother, however, was not uncomplicated. Though she loved her deeply, she was in awe of her beauty, and found her more intellectually challenging than anybody except Buckminster Fuller, whom Ann had judgment enough to realize had a greater mind.14 Equally important, for a girl about to turn nineteen, was Clare’s wisdom. She seemed to have an answer to all the pesky questions of life, such as “how people get in trouble by having affairs before they’re married.”15

  Mother and daughter understood each other’s mercurial temperaments. Both could switch from happy to sad in a flash.16 Otherwise, they had little in common except melodious speaking voices. Ann lacked Clare’s wit, multicreativity, lightning perceptions, luminosity, and seductive charm. In addition, she had a plain Brokaw face, with a long nose and crooked teeth. At almost five feet eight, she felt too tall for most men, and lamented her bony feet and large-knuckled fingers. “I’ve always wanted long artistic hands like Mummy’s.”17

  She was not without social graces, although the mother of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin found her “spoiled, headstrong, self-centered.”18 Educated at the prestigious Foxcroft School in Virginia, with good grades in English literature, American history, and French, she had poise and was at ease in society. Her most striking physical assets were her slender figure, dark blue eyes, fair, slightly freckled skin, and long, chestnut hair.

  At Foxcroft, Ann had shown a talent for playing the piano and violin, inherited no doubt from her maternal grandfather, William Boothe, a prodigiously gifted musician.19 She sang well, too, and even tone-deaf Clare thought Ann had “a voice as pretty as a bird’s.”20 Not surprisingly, she loved opera and could lip-synch arias from Madame Butterfly and other vocal works.

  Having no illusions about a professional music career, and prevented by the war from going to the Sorbonne, her first university choice, Ann had opted to major in political science at Stanford, in the hope of eventually becoming a diplomat.21 She joined the esteemed sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma, and was due that fall to be treasurer of the Stanford chapter of Pi Delta Phi, the national French honorary society. To her serious mind, proms, dates, and small talk felt like a waste of time. Her professors and peers, no matter how cosmopolitan or well-read, could not compete with Clare’s stimulating presence, not to mention the endless stream of elevated conversation at Henry Luce’s dinner table.22

  Well aware of the superiority of her parents, Ann compared herself unflatteringly with Clare. “I have none of Mother’s versatility or brains. I’m so mediocre it hurts and I get dumber (and less hair I might add) all the time.”23

  Stanford being even more remote geographically from the Luces’ world than Foxcroft had been, Ann pined for her mother to write, telephone, or visit. But Clare always had excuses. In the past, she had been forever traveling somewhere, or “working on a new play.”24 Now she was in Congress, and often too preoccupied to keep in touch. Ann pleaded for the slightest snippet of news. “Do call me again when the budget permits. You’ve no idea how good it is for my morale!” And, “Mother dear what have you been doing? I haven’t heard from or about you in ages!”25

  More recently, she had begun to blame herself: “Forgive all my stupid little letters in which I normally ask you to write me! Somehow I always forget how very busy you are—and all the good you are doing—until I get a batch of clippings! Then it’s always a wonder to me how you even manage to survive the work you have to do.”26

  Introspective and often lonely, Ann kept a diary at her mother’s suggestion. Writing it, she said, made her think more clearly, and took the place of friends.27 During her freshman and sophomore years, she had emerged from her shell, and carried on a flirtation with Walton Wickett, a tall, fair, twenty-nine-year-old engineer at Pan American Airways. She thought him “brilliant,” and said that he was the first boyfriend with whom she “felt the fun of thrust and parry with words.” He also played the piano “beautifully.” But she found his parents lackluster and his bourgeois world too remote from her own, complaining that he was too much like her in being moody, introspective, and selfish.28

  Walton was a devoted beau, but bothered by the fact that he had less money than Ann. She was, after all, a Brokaw heiress, with an income of more than $30,000 a year, and the stepdaughter of a press tycoon who gave her gifts of Time Inc. stock.29

  Since he frequently irritated her, Ann was puzzled by the endurance of their friendship. She fantasized about what might have developed romantically had Walton “been truly handsome.” Reading Ethan Frome, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and other novels of passion made her long for a “feverish inner life and a lover.”30 When Walton querulously asked, “If I were famous, Ann, would you marry me?” she said she didn’t know.31 She continued to feel ambivalent about him, possibly because of a streak of violence in his normally sedate behavior. She recorded him slapping her face in a fit of jealousy, with “the strangest glint in his eye.”32

  Clare had met Walton briefly on her last trip to California, and quite liked him.33 But when the young man tried to confide in her, writing that her daughter was “the most stimulating person” he had ever known, Clare had written back frankly, saying that she did not object to him as a son-in-law. But with a playwright’s perspicacity, she dissected their situation:

  You see Ann is plainly greatly impressed by her family, fascinated by the lives we lead (and totally unaware that great chunks of them are very bor
ing and shallow and sterile really). At any rate Ann is determined either to go on living that life with us, as our “unmarried and much sought after daughter,” or if she marries, make a similar life for herself. As she doesn’t have (at 18 anyway) the intellectual equipment or talent, forthwith and overnight to recreate the atmosphere of the Luce household, she knows she will need help, lots of help in doing so! In short, she is looking for “another Henry Luce.” The unhappy part of it—and which she will not face, is that she wouldn’t know another Henry Luce at the age of 22 to 28 say, if she met him face to face tomorrow. (He stuttered slightly, was already a baldish fellow in his middle twenties, covered with cigarette ashes, endlessly opinionated—was always broke—had no artistic friends, and few journalistic ones.) He would decidedly not have impressed Ann at that time, as being either handsome, charming or “fascinating.” But it is quite useless to tell Ann all this; she doesn’t believe it. Neither does she quite believe (although she has seen with her own eyes to the contrary) that my “success” is largely the result of infinite patience, and hard work, and, in earlier days, considerable sacrifice of many of the things which she believes now, I have always enjoyed. In short, Ann, having no true perspective on the lives of the Luces—in spite of my constant efforts to give her one—can have, but does not have, a true perspective on her own life, since (quod erat) she wants hers to be exactly like ours.

  Now to return to the question which interests you most—yourself vis-à-vis Ann. Well, you don’t fit in, as a husband, in the heroic, or rather outsize, Luce mold; you don’t fit into this false picture she has of her world—and ours. Nor, I predict, can you be made to fit, unless you become a national military hero overnight, write a great opera or novel, become managing editor of Time, run for Congress, be appointed ambassador to Spain, or inherit five millions.…