Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  She sent a transcript of her talk to Truscott, with a letter enclosed. “I wonder if you know what a joy it was to know you,” she wrote, “how proud I am we have generals like you running our show—and I wonder if you guessed the real regret with which I said goodbye to you … Or rather, let us call it, as the Ityies do, Arrivederci!” Flirtatiously, she added “La Belle” to her signature.74

  He replied that her speech had brought tears to his eyes, “hardened soldier that I am!” He said he had never expected a Congressman, let alone a woman, to capture the great spirit of his soldiers as she had done. “You are a wonder!”

  Mimicking her flirtatiousness, he added, “The war effort was greatly advanced when you were ‘fog bound,’ and suffered an ‘earache.’ ” By postponing her departure, she had given him “the nicest” of the three Christmases he had spent abroad.75

  Two days later, it was announced that Clare Boothe Luce had been elected Woman of the Year by an Associated Press poll of American newspaper editors. The margin was 98 to a crushing 18 for Eleanor Roosevelt. The Herald Tribune writer Dorothy Thompson, Clare’s former antagonist, came third. One voter said that the Congresswoman had been chosen because no legislator had won greater renown in a single term.76

  Back in New York on New Year’s Eve, Clare gave an interview to the Bridgeport Post. The unsung hero of the war, she said, was “the doughboy.” After five weeks in Europe she had changed in her attitude, and now had no criticism of the war’s conduct. American soldiers she had come to know in Italy were superb. The Fifth Army infantry had sustained 93 percent of peninsular casualties, and had fought long and hard “under the most appalling difficulties.”77

  She sounded as if she had adopted an army as well as a refugee.

  11

  WANING DAYS OF WAR

  Sorrow keeps breaking in.

  —SAMUEL BECKETT

  Wearing a black suit, white blouse, and trademark red flower, Representative Luce entered the House on January 3, 1945, a few minutes before the noon gavel signaled the convening of the 79th Congress. Some members applauded, and other onlookers nodded and smiled. Apparently, Clare had gained in popularity over the last two years. One Congressman had brought his two-and-a-half-year-old son to the opening ceremony. Clare bounced him on her knee, let him rummage in her bag, and playfully dabbed her lipstick on the end of his button nose.1

  Her seat was directly opposite the recently elected Democrat from California, Helen Gahagan Douglas.2 Reporters noted that the newcomer, wife of the movie star Melvyn Douglas, looked striking in a svelte black dress that contrasted starkly with her chalk-white face and crimsoned lips. But women in the galleries thought Clare “the snappiest looking” female on the floor.3

  The following day at the National Press Club, Mrs. Douglas decried the coverage given her debut, saying she resented the competitive position into which the press had “jockeyed” her and Mrs. Luce. Work was surely more worthy of comment than clothes, and she would not “put on a show, to vie with the gentlewoman of Connecticut.” At this, Clare, sitting one seat away, reached out and clasped Helen’s hand reassuringly. Ever since her public spats with Dorothy Thompson during Wendell Willkie’s 1940 campaign, she had avoided perceived “catfights” with other women.4

  One week later, a telegram arrived in Clare’s office from the United States War Department. It said that Second Lieutenant David Boothe had been seriously wounded in action on Morotai Island in the Pacific. There were no details yet of the injuries.5

  Al Morano saw his boss turn deathly white. She knew from childhood that David could be both brave and foolhardy. Just last summer in New Guinea, he had been awarded a Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster for “meritorious achievement” during reconnaissance missions in the Driniumor River Campaign, one of the bloodiest battles so far in the Pacific war. His citation mentioned flights “at low altitudes, often at night, in an unarmoured L-4 airplane, over territory where enemy fire was encountered.”6

  Clare had long seen complicated consequences from her brother’s military service, the only occupation that had ever suited him. He was bound to find a return to civilian life, with no opportunities for adventure, unbearably dull. From the tone of his recent letters, she had sensed that David neither expected nor wanted to survive the war. He had even sent her his medals for safekeeping, and expressed a desire to see her “once again,” a phrase that could be read in two ways. More strange, he had said he wanted to spend time with their mutual friend the decorator Gladys Freeman, “before my ultimate demise.”7

  David never begrudged his sister her success. He proudly wrote that no day went by when “some officer doesn’t show me your picture in some local US paper,” and noted with approval that her publicity was “veering from the Blonde Bombshell to dignified status.”8 She, in turn, loved him (though she wrote him infrequently) and, for his amoral tendencies, despised him in near equal measure.

  The distressing news about him came at a bad time. It was the eve of the first anniversary of Ann Brokaw’s death, and Clare was about to set off with Harry on a grim pilgrimage to her daughter’s grave site in South Carolina.

  Upon returning to Washington, she was confronted with a report in the Bridgeport Post that Democrats on the Military Affairs Committee were furious with her for having “staged a one-man show” during their trip to Europe, and had pressed for her ouster. But the ranking Republican, Joseph W. Martin, Jr., had blocked the move. He was friendly toward Clare and considered her too important a party spokeswoman to be purged.9 She was slated to reiterate her value to the GOP and the war effort in a speech to the House about her European trip.

  Clare entered the chamber on January 18 with a battle-green Fifth Army scarf around her neck. In the crowded gallery was the mother of the man who had given it to her, General Mark Clark.10

  She took pains not to sound naive about military tactics, or to misrepresent the aims of those commanders she had interviewed, but simply spoke of what she had learned firsthand at the battlefronts, aiming her remarks directly at War Department officials.11 In more than two and a half years, she said, American forces in Italy had suffered a colossal 98,366 casualties, 90 percent of those being infantrymen. Citing the four hundred consecutive days Truscott’s Thirty-fourth Division had spent in wretched conditions, holding down a far larger enemy, she urged yet again that combat ground troops be allotted the same recuperative leave that airmen enjoyed after a set number of flying missions. Currently, the only hope GIs under fire in the South had of being replaced was to be “killed or wounded.”12

  Few Democrats bothered to attend her forty-five-minute address, notably Helen Gahagan Douglas. Later, Vice President Truman objected to Clare’s plea for troop furloughs, saying war policy was “none of her business.”13

  David Boothe, recuperating from multiple shrapnel penetrations in his left leg, received such a depressed letter from Clare about the majority’s reaction to her speech that he responded with alarm. “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.”14 He suspected she was suffering from the cumulative effects of bereavement, marital spats, and her seemingly endless separation from Willoughby. Days spent “without the desire to love and be vital to someone,” he wrote, could turn everything “flat and sour.”15

  Actually, Clare’s present desires concerned another general, stationed antipodally from Willoughby. Lucian Truscott was suffering, too—or at least his men were, in health and spirits as they waited on “the Forgotten Front” for a spring offensive still more than two months away.16 She longed to see him again, and be back in Europe before the Red Army, sweeping west and south, met up with Eisenhower’s armies swinging east and north in the race to take Berlin.

  By late January, Warsaw had already fallen and the Battle of the Bulge was over, Allied troops having stopped Germany’s last desperate drive across the Ardennes, at a cost of ten thousand American lives.17 Events on both war fronts were speeding to a conclusion. For Clare to see any more European action, she needed to arrange
transport straightaway. Fortuitously, a flattering invitation came from the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Mediterranean Theater, Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, whom she had first met in Burma in 1942. He said that since her visit she had been doing “a superb job for the Fifth Army” vis-à-vis publicity, and he hoped that she might do the same for his Eighth.18 Clare accepted, and planned to leave as soon as President Roosevelt returned from his current meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta.

  Encouraging though war news from Europe sounded in February, that from the Far East was still grim, as was obvious in a letter from Charles Willoughby to Arthur Vandenberg. The Senator passed it on to Clare. Written on February 4—two weeks before seventy-five thousand marines would battle twenty-one thousand enemy holdouts on the island of Iwo Jima—it conveyed MacArthur’s determination to reassert himself in the Philippines:

  Today our leading columns are 15 miles from the northern suburbs of Manila. The arrogant conqueror of Singapore, General Yamashita, has been defeated from Leyte to Luzon. We have driven the Jap into the hills and utter confusion. The MacArthur cycle, Manila-Melbourne-Manila, is complete, and in comparison with the abattoir of Europe, at astonishingly little cost in human lives.19

  Willoughby went on to complain that he had recently submitted an account of MacArthur’s return for publication in the United States, only to have a chapter documenting Japanese barbarism censored by the War Department. The reason, he suspected, was the inclusion of gruesome photographs of the enemy beheading captured American aviators. “Apparently they still want to stifle the emotions of our people, and divert them from this theater of war, to the witches’ cauldron of Western Europe.”20

  In a later letter to Clare, Willoughby told her he was again quartered in the capital where they had become lovers. “Every street crossing spells death.” Eighty percent of the town’s buildings and infrastructure had been destroyed, and one hundred thousand Filipino civilians slaughtered by the Japanese in advance of MacArthur’s return.21

  Yesterday, as on other days, I flew into the smoky haze of the burning city. A Stalingrad, a blitzed London, like all the cities of this war, that are defended house by house by a desperate enemy.… All the bridges are out … the Cavalry and paratroopers are hacking their way up Dewey Boulevard, past the Polo Club (tiens—le revenant, in the midst of this depressing recital: the dance, in which I asked to accompany you back to your Hotel and paced wakefully through the night, in a nightmarish, fantastic hour of anguish that has left its mark).22

  On Thursday, March 1, 1945, Clare joined her colleagues in both houses of Congress to hear the President’s report on the Yalta summit. She shared the communal shock as the President rolled into the chamber in a wheelchair, instead of walking on the arm of one of his sons, as he usually did.23 Aides helped him onto a red plush chair at the center table.

  He began by asking members to excuse him for not standing. Only two days before, he had completed a fourteen-thousand-mile journey from the Crimea. “I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs.”24

  Congressmen sat in grim silence as the gaunt Commander in Chief proceeded with his speech. Once a powerful and assured orator, he now followed his script with a finger, stumbling over words. When he reached for a water glass, his hand shook. He outlined the Allies’ plan to divide Germany into four occupation zones once hostilities ended. Their agreed policy of unconditional surrender, he said, did not mean the “enslavement” of the defeated enemy, only the destruction of the Nazi Party and the militarism that had “shattered the peace of the world.” Ideally, what victory should bring in the postwar period was an end to unilateral action, exclusive alliances, spheres of influence, “and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.”25

  Representative Luce was unimpressed by this accommodating postwar vision. She complained to reporters that the President had mentioned nothing about war reparations. Granting that Germany’s bombed-out infrastructure would be unable to produce payment in kind, such as tractors or machinery, she said, “Why not ask for cash?”26

  12

  A GLORIOUS WOMAN

  Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are willing to take the consequences.

  —GEORGE ORWELL

  Two days later, Clare left Washington for her second tour of the European battlefronts, this time traveling as the guest of Field Marshal Alexander. A huge British flying boat, courtesy of his command, flew her to London via Bermuda, where the movie magnate Sir Alexander Korda came aboard.

  A wistful letter from Harry followed her.

  It’s been so long this war, five years that we have known that we each had to do our own job but tonight I know that it’s you and you alone I’ll always be missing—and that when my life has no room for missing it’s because you’re there filling up all the room.… I should always be telling you I love you. I try tonight to catch up with you across the waves to tell you now. God bless you my darling, Harry.1

  On her first evening in London, Clare dined with Max Beaverbrook, a gnomish-faced, permanently tanned widower in his mid-sixties. Clare quizzed him relentlessly about military and political matters and deduced that he disagreed with Churchill’s pessimism about the long-term intentions of the Soviets. But she was sure the Prime Minister was right.2

  Clare flew to Italy on Thursday, March 8, just as General Patton and his Third Army momentously reached the Rhine in Germany. Her seat was again secured on a British plane. In return for Alexander’s generosity, she knew he expected her to publicize the achievements of the British Eighth Army, just as she had Mark Clark’s 15th Army Group. She had accordingly contracted to write a series of syndicated articles for the New York World-Telegram.

  Upon arriving that afternoon in Naples, she found a note from the field marshal, assigning her his guest quarters in the Villa Content, and inviting her to dine with him in his hunting lodge, where they could “discuss what you would like to do and where you would like to go. I shall put everything at your disposal.”3

  Sir Harold was the epitome of an aristocratic British military commander, with his aquiline nose and clipped mustache, immaculate dress and highly polished riding boots. He was so well-practiced in the art of diplomacy as to conceal his military ineptitude and intellectual deficiencies.4 Fortunately, he had in his orbit the astute Harold Macmillan, Britain’s Minister Resident in the Mediterranean.

  “Alex” proved as susceptible to Clare’s charm as other men in uniform, and gave her a privileged identification badge to facilitate her movements.5

  She spent her first two days in Naples being briefed on military and intelligence operations by high-ranking officers and diplomats.6 En route north after the weekend, Clare stopped by Allied headquarters at Caserta, a palace as big as Versailles. Alexander had converted its huge glass orangerie, lush with palm and fruit trees, into his mess.7 About twelve hundred British and American uniformed men and women crisscrossed the courtyards daily. It was, she said, an “Italian Pentagon, a bewildering labyrinth of incomparable galleries and rooms,” most of them boxed in by beaverboard partitions to create countless offices and cubbyholes. At one end of the building she found groups of British officers with windows wide open, nursing cups of tea, and at the other, Americans drinking coffee, their windows tightly shut.8

  By Wednesday, March 14, Clare was at the Excelsior Hotel in Florence, her base for visiting three commands—Clark’s 15th Army Group, Truscott’s Fifth Army, and Sir Richard McCreery’s Eighth. Beginning with medical facilities for the first, she inspected penicillin laboratories, toured traction, amputee, and hepatitis wards, and sympathized with soldiers crippled with trench foot.9 It was a relief that evening to dine with the man she most wanted to see.

  Clare needed a drink, and Truscott’s mess had plenty of gin, brandy, Scotch, and rye whiskey—“medicine,” Truscott said, for his raspy throat. That n
ight, and over the course of several evenings they spent at his field quarters in the Po Valley, or his villas in Florence and Rome, the tough warrior exulted in what he afterward described as “golden hours” snatched between his military duties and her fact-finding mission. He invoked “blonde halos,” eyes as clear blue as the sky, and “loving fingers through soft and beautiful hair.” The Allies were about to begin their spring offensive, and he dreaded having to leave, even while insisting there could be “no separation from that which is in one’s soul.”10

  Enclosing a sprig of edelweiss in a note for Lucian, Clare set off for the headquarters of General McCreery on the Adriatic coast. Soon, she regretted making the long trip by road. “General Truscott’s chauffeur doesn’t drive a Jeep too fast,” she joked, “he flies it too low.” McCreery, a stiff and flinty knight, did not detain her long, and she continued to Cantoniera, where some young enlisted men let her fire on a German-occupied house eight hundred yards away.11

  Turning south, she had tea with a Jewish brigade, more proof of how polyglot the forces in northern Italy were. A blond, blue-eyed sergeant named Levi told her he had been born in Berlin and lived in Palestine before joining the British Army. Though German was his native tongue, he chose to speak only Hebrew or English now, and after the peace, he wanted to farm in Tel Aviv.12 He was one of many “displaced persons” Clare met in subsequent weeks, and made her see the dimensions of what Europe and the Middle East would face after the war, with millions more uprooted and facing relocation.

  At Castrocaro, she encountered a company of Poles in an old prison. They gave her flowers and serenaded her with national songs. Some, rendered homeless after the 1939 Hitler/Stalin pact sliced off east and west parts of Poland, expressed rancor over being “betrayed” by Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta.13