Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  My advice is this: ignore Ann completely for the next six months—or better for a year. Go away, don’t write her, if possible find another girl to go out with. Behave exactly as you would if you had grown tired of her.

  And truly Ann is very young. I find myself fundamentally angry with you for importuning her in such a serious matter when she is still so far from graduating. I think it shows a lack of adult comprehension on your part too, my lad.

  For the rest, you are quite right to love her, for she is a darling and lovely girl, with enormous possibilities. And she is quite right not to love you: you are far too demanding and insistent, in the circumstances. So, alter your tactics, and you may succeed. I do wish you well.34

  As it happened, Ann had other suitors, who were no more successful than Walton in proposing to her. There was Geza Korvin, a thirty-four-year-old Hungarian actor with a chiseled face, thick dark hair, and copious Continental charm.35 “If only he were younger and better off!!!!”36 And there was Captain James Rea, a short, good-looking test pilot who drove an expensive car and took her on trips to Yosemite.37 He believed that her too-small breasts could be improved by regular massage.38

  In rejecting him, Ann wrote a letter that unwittingly confirmed Clare’s analysis of her.

  I live for the day when I graduate—when I can begin to lead a really interesting life, when because of the fortunate—or maybe unfortunate—accident that I happen to be the daughter of a very brilliant, famous & powerful woman & stepdaughter of a brilliant, famous & powerful (for he is that) man … when I can be around the leaders of, or at least the people who influence the lives of millions, whether politically, artistically, intellectually or spiritually. And not just be around either—but learn & absorb from them as much as possible.…

  The price is that I know no field well & many superficially.… A still greater price is loneliness—you must have guessed how lonely I am though one shouldn’t admit it. 39

  Ann continued to toy with Walton—“something keeps drawing my thoughts to him.”40 She told him she hoped to marry soon and have several children.41 But her ideal man was still her stepfather. Harry loomed in her mind as a sort of god whose passions made the whole house rumble. “Until the thunder has quieted down,” she wrote, “an atmosphere of intensity—electrical discharge and excitement pervades our lives.”42

  After Ann, David, and Willoughby had gone their separate ways, Clare arrived back East in a low frame of mind. Alone again in her big country house, she dwelt on the often tedious first months in Congress, her deteriorated marriage, and the irresolution of her affair with Willoughby. She had hoped in San Francisco to make sense of her complex feelings for the general, and whether after the war she could make a life with him. Willoughby seemed a more substantial figure now than the officer she had met in Manila, if only because of his greatly increased responsibilities as intelligence chief for the whole Pacific theater.

  What Clare had not anticipated was that Charles would be so taken with her daughter. Ann had apparently already heard from him that he had enjoyed dancing with her at the Saint Francis Hotel. She rapturously quoted his words: “I have found you most charming, and good looking and, of course, I liked you being tall.”43

  Emboldened by this, Ann felt free to write reprovingly to her mother:

  The General is a far better correspondent than you. I had a letter from him the other day from Hawaii. He and Uncle David had a quiet trip that far together and the General says he intends to keep an eye on him for our sakes. I still think the General is the most romantic guy I ever met—don’t you?

  P.P.P.S. I’m mad as an old wet hen that you went off with the General’s stars. Now you hang on to them for me won’t you?44

  The allusion was to combat medals that Charles had won in the Philippines, and had casually given to Ann as souvenirs. Clare had sneakily taken them back to Connecticut.45

  David could hardly believe his luck in having been taken under Willoughby’s wing. A letter telling Clare of his safe arrival in Brisbane in late July was written on notepaper from the Supreme Commander’s headquarters. “Thru the courtesy of Gen’l Sir Charles, from his office, a line … I’m delighted to be here and have an opportunity of serving in this particular section of the world. The men are mature, in direct contrast with my USA companions … The Gen’l is a great and good guy.”46

  Mindful of her brother’s short attention span, his lack of self-esteem, and his weakness for women and drink, Clare was not sanguine about his long-term commitment once he reached the steamy, sparsely populated Pacific Islands.

  When intimates retreated from her into their own lives, Clare had a narcissistic tendency to feel abandoned. Even Harry’s commutes seemed like desertions. As her depression worsened, she tried to work through it by committing her thoughts to paper. They tumbled out in a bilious ten-page letter to Helen Lawrenson, a Vanity Fair colleague from the early 1930s.

  Sounding a little unhinged, Clare wrote that Washington was a cancerous place, and compared men there to cockroaches and ants. Her own “bird-dropping liberalism” revolted her. It signified nothing in a meaningless world. All human effort for social change was a wasted attempt to resuscitate “an already dead body.” Her work on the Military Affairs Committee convinced her that Allied soldiers did not know what they were being asked to die for. The letter degenerated into gruesome images of corpses caked with blood, and eyeless beggars oozing pus. Finally, she advised Lawrenson to warn her own daughter—a child of four—that life was nothing but “struggle, struggle, struggle.”47

  Lawrenson saw this “weird paean of disgust” as proof of inner hopelessness and “something akin to loathing” for mankind. A left-wing, even radical, thinker herself, she was not convinced that Clare had a social conscience.48 She wrote back as tactfully as possible, disagreeing that humanism was a dead cause, and praising Congresswoman Luce’s efforts in that direction. “You’ve voted correctly, and you’ve spoken out with courage and spoken the truth. Your speech about Roosevelt’s lack of foreign policy was brilliant and true. He has no foreign policy … and therefore he has adopted the British one.”49

  Eight years before her current midsummer doldrums, a more optimistic Clare had written an article suggesting that there was nothing “untoward or illogical, or subversive of masculine supremacy” in the idea of a female President of the United States.50 When the women’s division of the Republican National Committee announced in August that she would make a four-week speaking tour of twenty states that fall, speculation grew that it would inevitably whip up a “Luce for Vice President” boom—perhaps for a ticket headed by General MacArthur.51 But Clare postponed the tour until the new year, giving as her reason that important bills were up for consideration in the next session of Congress.

  This did not stop talk of her political potential. If anything, it intensified after a foreign policy address she wrote for the August 9 gathering of the India League of America at New York’s Town Hall. The speech was read for her, because she claimed to be ill.

  It began with an attack on Roosevelt and Churchill for regarding freedom as “the white man’s monopoly,” and went on to demand the release of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, who were in prison for their efforts to end the British Raj. Clare called for all colonies to be given independence after the war, and urged Americans not to “lift a finger to help the British defeat the Indians in their fight for freedom.”52

  Her sympathy for subjected peoples was largely the result of meeting Nehru while covering the Far East for Life at the start of the war. She had been “utterly captivated” by him, as she confided at the time:

  It wasn’t the dusky sweep of his eyelashes nor his poetic face; nor yet the fact that he smoked rose-petal cigarettes, nor even that he gave me a golden sari. It’s just that I thought him one of the most brilliant and certainly “the goodest” man I have ever met, in a lifetime spent meeting great and, I regret to say, not very good men.53

  She saw the Harrow- and Cambri
dge-educated Nehru as a liberated India’s best prospect in the postwar world.54 In a grateful letter to her, he predicted the ultimate defeat of the Axis powers, but not until “their empires are ended.” The same applied to the Allies. He said that Stafford Cripps, the leader of the British House of Commons, talked to Indians as if it were still the nineteenth century. “Burma and Malaya show up the rottenness of the British Empire.”55

  Clare had suggested that Nehru travel to America to discuss “the Indian question” with President Roosevelt.56 But before he could act on her proposal, he had been arrested. Among the few papers he managed to take with him was a letter from her, which he read repeatedly during his captivity in Ahmednagar Fort. It ensured that he would never forget her.57

  Neither would Charles Willoughby, who wrote awkwardly of their recent trysts: “Remember how quickly we defeat time and absence and separation. Remember the few days that were natural, because we were free, how wonderful they were; how much of a forecast, and an accurate blue print of living.”58

  6

  LUMINOUS LADY

  If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy. But we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.

  —CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU

  After Ann Brokaw finished her summer classes at Stanford, she traveled East for a short stay with Clare in Washington before the fall semester began. Congress had reconvened by the time she arrived in mid-September. She was able to watch Representative Luce participate in a “Wake Up America” forum, hear her on the radio show Information Please, and even accompany her to the famous Stage Door Canteen.

  This facility for servicemen in Lafayette Square was one of the few spots where socialites and politicians could carouse in the war-dreary capital.1 Clare as usual captured most of the attention. Besieged by servicemen from all sides of the dance floor, she twirled nonstop for the best part of an hour. Ann was photographed behind the counter, ladling food.2

  She was accustomed by now to fielding questions about her famous mother’s beauty and activities. But a young man she met took her aback when he asked why Time magazine was forever taking cracks at Congresswoman Luce.

  “What should I have answered?” Ann said on returning to the Wardman Park apartment.

  Clare was tempted to reply acidly, “Well, the truth I suppose.”3

  Ann Brokaw at the Stage Door Canteen, September 1943 (illustration credit 6.1)

  Harry’s editors still tended to belittle her political doings, as if they feared being accused of favoring the boss’s wife. The remark passed on by Ann stayed with her overnight, and by the next evening, October 3, Clare was so upset that she typed a long plaint to Harry. It began philosophically, but soon became an almost masochistic mea culpa, indicating that her recent depression had not altogether lifted:

  Please do not be unhappy or disturbed at the irritation I sometimes show with Time, or its text. Knowing that Time is objective, that its opinions are reached by a magnificently informed group of men … doesn’t exactly set me up, however, when they take (over a period of so many years) such a consistently dim view of me.…

  That is as much a matter of pain to me, as it is embarrassment to you. All the more so, as I know they are right: I’m not a particularly admirable person, fundamentally.… I am a kind of pretty phenomenon.… I have failed perhaps in everything—in being a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, a good artist. To the list of long failures I now add that I have not been a good, or constructive public servant, and I know I never shall be.…

  But all that is neither here nor there: the salient fact, the indisputable evidence is that you are, unhappily, married to a woman your own editors simply cannot like (because they should not). And that is a great hardship for you, and a constant cause for pain and uneasiness. What is indicated is not that you should change either your policy or your editors, but that you should change your wife, or that she should change her ways, her convictions, or her character.… I can, of course, get out of politics, and will, when the time comes. I could not … get far in them anyway, married to you, because too many people down here think of me first as your wife (and blame me for everything they don’t like that Time says about them) or, when they find out that I really have no “power,” which they do find out after a while, the wise ones—check me off the list.…

  Anyway, the net of it is that I have to stand and do stand pretty much on my own feet, without any support in the public prints.… There ISN’T anything you can or should do about it. God’s designs for a man’s working and living can often be at variance with his own designs for loving. I have contributed nothing to the scope or purpose of your work, little to the comfort of your living, and only spasmodically and that a long time ago, to your joy of loving. The fault is largely mine, I am bitterly aware of it. I curse myself these days, every time I hang up the phone after having talked to you. I never seem able even conversationally to contribute anything of comfort or inspiration or interest.… What should I say that would please you? That I miss you? I do of course, but I never expect you to come back to me anyway, there is some dark, immutable barrier between us that I am quite powerless to conquer, and talking about it does nothing but make you miserable or angry.4

  Clare ended by wishing Harry joy in something or somebody, if not her. After her political career was over, she wrote, she would be gone from any scene that might cause him difficulty. “Okay darling?”5

  Harry did not reply at once. Clare sensed that he was angered by having to come up with an editorial policy that would be fair to both her and himself. She shared her malaise with Ann and, after the girl left, tried to distract herself with work.

  Her priorities for this session of Congress, she informed The Washington Post, were a tax bill to help pay for the war, a bipartisan resolution to cooperate in the immediate postwar period, and another to straighten the critical “manpower tangle.” She proposed the creation of an Army-Navy Maintenance Corps to enlist men physically disqualified from fighting for jobs in essential industries. She said this would postpone the dreaded further drafting of fathers.6 Encouragingly, there was movement on another of her causes: President Roosevelt had agreed to back repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act.7

  Harry remained silent. “I expect, in a little while, I’ll call up and apologize,” Clare wrote Ann.8 Whether it was he or she who eventually telephoned, a truce of sorts was worked out between them by October 22. On that day, John Billings bemusedly noted in his diary, “Luce orders that the name of Clare Boothe Luce be not mentioned in any of the magazines until further notice. O.K.—but why? Because Luce thinks his wife is regularly misinterpreted and put in a bad light in Time.”

  It was a Pyrrhic victory for Clare, who now found herself honor-bound to kill a flattering profile of her written by Noel Busch for Life. She did so in a call to Billings, her voice sounding to him like “icy poison.”9 The editor presumed that Harry would moderate the ban as soon as his writers showed a willingness to treat Clare fairly.

  “Dad is in a better than average mood,” Clare told Ann at the end of the month. “Like a lamb he bought me the big Segonzac painting from Frank Crowninshield’s art sale. $7,500 wheeeeee. It was a ‘peace offering’ for certain, and so I am being peaceful too.”10

  Adding to her own improved mood was news from New York that Moss Hart might direct a revival of her 1942 comedy, Love Is a Verb, with Myrna Loy set to star.11

  Infinitely larger theaters—the European and Pacific wars—absorbed Clare when she returned to her seat on the House Military Affairs Committee. The spring and early summer of 1943 had brought significant Allied victories in Europe, North Africa, and the Soviet Union. American and British divisions had forced Field Marshal Rommel’s once invincible desert corps to surrender in Tunisia while he was on leave, freeing the Mediterranean for Allied shipping and an invasion of Sicily. There, Generals Patton and Montgomery, attacking from different points on the island, had routed t
he Axis in thirty-eight days. Mussolini had fallen at the end of July, Naples was taken by the Fifth Army, and Roosevelt’s demand for “unconditional surrender” had been yielded to by the Italians on September 8. Even more dramatically on the Eastern Front, the Red Army had defeated the Germans at Stalingrad and at Kursk, and pushed them into retreat mode across the Dnieper River.12

  Fewer victories were reported, as yet, from the other side of the world. But the Japanese were now driven from Guadalcanal and Tarawa, and more islands would soon fall to the Americans. Clare was particularly well briefed on what General Willoughby called “the War of Distances,” because he used his connections to get uncensored mail to her.13 He reported that U.S. troops were already halfway along the north coast of New Guinea, where David Boothe was flying transport planes. Others were set to attack New Britain, a springboard for the recapture of the Philippines.14

  The campaign that MacArthur’s army and Admiral William Halsey’s navy were now embarked on covered an area equal in size to that between England and Iran. Island-hopping, meticulously planned by the Supreme Commander, would require eighty-seven amphibious landings on malarial terrain where temperatures sometimes rose to over 115 degrees in the shade, and rain fell at the rate of up to sixteen inches a day. Snakes, crocodiles, and head-hunting cannibals hardly made the campaign easier, but Willoughby proudly reported that his fellow soldiers had already immobilized a quarter of a million Japanese in jungle fighting, and had done it with fewer deaths than even the U.S. Marines had incurred in capturing Saipan.15