Harry meanwhile was telling everybody who would listen, including thirty-three Senators and an uninterested President Truman, about his thirty-thousand-mile trip to Pacific battle stations. He spoke of a four-hour interview with MacArthur, his dislike of Admiral Chester Nimitz, the huge development of Guam, and how Japan’s surrender might be brought about politically, rather than by more fighting.14 Not knowing, or not caring, that such fulminations were tolerated because of his media power, he seemed unaware, until he saw Clare in mid-July, that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and in need of rest and recuperation. Congress had just adjourned, so he got his secretary to book rooms at an inn in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, starting the following Wednesday.15
Before committing to it, Clare sought the soothing company of George Waldo, her editor friend at the Bridgeport Post. He was fifty-seven, recently widowed, and shyly besotted with her. A perceptive man, he had been aware of strains in the Luce marriage ever since watching Harry proudly show Clare a new issue of Time, only to receive what amounted to an editorial kick in the teeth. Harry “just can’t take it from you above all others,” he had warned her.16 Luce struck him as a sensitive, humorless man, and she, right now, as a troubled woman, “hemmed in, bewildered and bitter.”17
Clare turned down Harry’s offer of a vacation—not altogether to his disappointment, since that week Truman, Churchill, and Stalin were discussing postwar policy at Potsdam, in the Russian sector of Berlin, and the news flowing daily into Time Inc. fed his addiction to world affairs. The main purpose of the summit was to discuss the future of Germany and Poland. But Stalin had plans for invading Manchuria and was angling to be part of peace negotiations in the Far East as well as in Europe. This alarmed American diplomats. GIs had, after all, done most of the fighting in the Pacific. Had Luce known what the President secretly knew—that scientists at Los Alamos, in the deserts of New Mexico, had just successfully tested a superdeadly nuclear fission bomb—he might have been too distracted to notice his wife’s bleak mood.18
In an attempt to humor her, he summoned Billings to say he wanted to end the ban on references to Clare in Time.19 She should be given the degree of attention she deserved as a public figure in her own right. The result was a staff memo that Billings complicitly wrote as if coming from himself and addressed to Luce. It stated that the moment was opportune “to straighten out Time’s treatment of Clare.” Any newsworthy things she did in Congress, or significant foreign trips she took, should be noted in appropriate sections of the magazine. Keeping in mind that readers knew she was married to the Editor in Chief, she should be treated fairly, with “no snide adjectives, no unnecessary puffs.” In a final line, Billings disingenuously asked for his boss’s “O.K.,” and Harry scrawled on the document, “Very okay, HRL.”20
As if on cue, “hot” news about Clare circulated through the office on July 23. She had accepted the leading role in a summer stock production of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. The general reaction of staff was, “My God, what next?”21
Her casting had come about by chance. She had been fretting in Greenwich that her literary talent was being harmed by having to draft too many political speeches. “Congressionalese will get me. And that’s death to a writer.” She had asked Al Morano and Isabel Hill to sit with her and read scenes from one of her unproduced plays, The Happy Marriage.22
Fortuitously, Gus Schirmer, Jr., manager of the Associates Theater Company, was in the neighborhood looking for material, so she offered her script to him. Schirmer rejected it as too technically demanding for the venue he had in mind, Stamford’s Strand Theatre. He suggested that she switch métiers and star in Shaw’s play. “The perfect Candida would be someone who looks and talks and acts as nearly as possible like yourself.” Clare had always loved the works of GBS, and Candida was her favorite. Although her last appearance as an actress had been in the late 1920s at an amateur comedy club in New York, she did not hesitate and said to Schirmer, “Why not?”23
The show was to run for just one week, opening on August 6, so Clare memorized her part in time for a rehearsal on her porch with the rest of the cast.
Her partiality notwithstanding, Candida is not considered one of Shaw’s best plays.24 Shorter and less preachy than much of his work, it has amusing, even iconoclastic, lines about love, marriage, domesticity, class, politics, shady business practices, artists, creativity, and religion. Set in northeast London in 1894, all three acts take place in the drawing room of a parsonage, where the Reverend James Morell improbably conducts all his business and interacts with seven other characters. The most important of these is his wife, Candida, a statuesque, even-tempered, but controlling woman of thirty-three. Morell is seven years older, a handsome, virile, and somewhat complacent Anglican cleric.25 Together they charitably “rescue” Eugene Marchbanks, a tormented eighteen-year-old poet whom they find sleeping on the Thames embankment. He turns out to be wellborn and affluent, but emotionally demanding. Soon, both priest and poet are vying for Candida’s affection. As a quintessential nurturer, she condescends to both males as if they were boys and feels an obligation to teach Eugene the value of the love “of a good woman” before he degrades himself with a bad one.26
Marchbanks, it transpires, is wise beyond his years. “We all go about longing for love,” he says to Prossy, Morell’s spinsterish assistant. “It is the first need of our natures.”27
That was a line with which Clare could identify, if not Shaw’s stage description of Candida as “like any other pretty woman who is just clever enough to make the most of her sexual attractions for trivially selfish ends.”28 Forced in the play’s final moments to choose between Marchbanks’s effeminate ardor and Morell’s pomposity (“I have nothing to offer you but … my authority and position for your dignity”), she elects to stay with her husband in a display of insufferable condescension, saying that he is “the weaker of the two,” because he would find his altruistic life empty without her beside him.29
Schirmer recruited a formidably experienced cast to support Clare. Morell was played by Paul McGrath, who had starred opposite Gertrude Lawrence on Broadway, Marchbanks by the movie actor Dean Harens, and Prossy by Brenda Forbes, who had once appeared with Katharine Cornell. Connecting the production to Clare’s best play was the director Robert Ross, who was married to Margalo Gillmore, originator of the role of Mary Haines in The Women.
Five days before opening night, the company arrived for a partial rehearsal at the Strand and was encouraged to hear of a great demand for tickets. Electricians were already putting up marquee lights as Clare stepped onto the stage in gray slacks and a shirt, her hair combed back in pompadour fashion, with a blue ribbon tucked in over tight ringlets. At forty-two, she was nine years older than Shaw’s heroine, but her scarcely lined face and lithe deportment enabled her to look the part.30
On Monday, August 6, a stylist arrived at 11:00 A.M. to fix Clare’s hair for opening night. At that precise moment, as heavy rain and high winds thrashed against the windows of Rockefeller Center, an AP flash came in to John Billings’s office. A United States Air Force B-29 had dropped the unheard-of “atomic bomb” from thirty-nine thousand feet on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Set to explode at two thousand feet, the weapon had created a mushroom-shaped blast that had devastated everything below across an area of four square miles.31
In spite of the appalling news, Billings managed to approve a Time item on Congresswoman Luce’s new venture, while at the Strand Theatre the Candida cast went ahead with a final three-hour afternoon rehearsal.32 Ross had allowed Clare to choose her own costumes. For the first two acts, she picked a green taffeta traveling dress with a tight bodice, leg-o’-mutton sleeves, and a full skirt. Her third act selection was an ice-blue crepe satin gown with a net jabot.
The rehearsal was followed by a two-hour rest at the nearby Roger Smith Hotel. Rain was still cascading down as the company returned to the theater to make up and get back into costume. Already the lobby entrance w
as mobbed with a mix of local patrons and New Yorkers, some in black tie and floor-length gowns, others in raincoats and galoshes. Flashbulbs popped. Bobby-soxers looking for autographs clustered around celebrities: the musical performer Mary Martin, the movie stars Jean Arthur, Margaret Sullavan, and Fredric March, the producers Lee Shubert, Gilbert Miller, and Max Gordon, the director/playwright Moss Hart, the superagent Leland Hayward, Governor Raymond Baldwin of Connecticut, House minority leader Joe Martin, Brigadier General Elliott Roosevelt, Clare’s ever-faithful Bernard Baruch, and Henry Luce.33
A group of political protesters added to the premiere’s publicity by mingling with the crowd and trying unsuccessfully to distribute pamphlets critical of Henry Luce, his magazines, and his wife. “Stop playing, Clare,” they shouted. “These are serious times.”34
By 8:40 P.M., all thirteen hundred seats in the narrow auditorium were occupied, and the late curtain rose to a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was underamplified to the point of being barely audible, which was just as well, as the words bombs bursting in air suddenly seemed inappropriate. Clare could not complain about the dialogue Shaw had written to prepare for her entrance fifteen minutes into the first act, a glowing speech by Morell touting his wife’s virtues and a jealous outburst from Prossy: “Candida here, and Candida there, and Candida everywhere! It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses to hear a woman raved about … merely because she’s got good hair and a tolerable figure.”
Clare as Candida, August 1945 (illustration credit 15.1)
When Clare at last appeared, clad in her green dress and a black chapeau trimmed with feathers, an outburst of applause stopped further action for almost a minute. She showed no signs of nervousness and managed to speak her first lines in a firm voice, while struggling without success to find a pin anchoring her headgear. It had to stay in place until the scene’s end.35 This made it difficult for her to display what Shaw prescribed as Candida’s characteristic expression, “an amused maternal indulgence.” But even with the hat off, as the play proceeded, Clare failed to persuade the acerbic New Yorker critic Wolcott Gibbs that she could convey any side of her stage personality at all.
“She moved,” he wrote afterward, “somehow as if she were on wires, like a marionette, as if at any moment she might sail up and away into the flies. Her delivery was tranquil and monotonous, the lines clear but not seeming to mean anything in particular.” Gibbs admitted that Clare looked beautiful, was “letter-perfect,” and so composed that she was able to glance sharply at Paul McGrath when he fumbled a line. But all in all, Representative Luce was seriously miscast, and he advised that in future “her country’s call must always take first place.”36
Clare needed all her aplomb to get through to the end, because Dean Arens did his best to upstage her, going so far as to wave a fire poker during one of her speeches.37 The final applause was, in the words of a Variety reporter, “distinctly mild.”38
George Frazier, who had the unenviable task of reviewing the production for Life, was one of the throng of critics awaiting the midnight train back to New York. He stood next to Jean Meegan of the Associated Press. She looked around the crowded platform and said, “Never have so many traveled so far for so little.”39
Preparing his notice, Frazier wondered how to be tactful “about a performance as dreadful as Mrs. Luce’s.”40 Billings tried to make it easier for him. “Clare wasn’t very good, and Life isn’t going to say she was.” Frazier’s solution was to quote as many other negative notices as possible, but the editor balked. “Good God. After all, Clare’s the boss’s wife!”
Billings suggested Frazier just report only that seasoned critics had found Mrs. Luce’s performance lacking in credibility. At the same time, Life would print high-quality photographs of scenes from the play and audience, to give the impression that the evening’s “glitter” was comparable to that of many a Broadway first night.41 At the bottom of the piece, he gave Clare space to exonerate herself.
“It took me a little while to get over the first stage fright,” she wrote. “But I had a lot of fun.” Any playwright could benefit from such an experience. But there was a touch of wounded pride in her subsequent announcement that “despite heavy demand for tickets,” she did not want a longer run.42
Her performances—another of which coincided with the August 9 dropping of a second A-bomb, this time on the town of Nagasaki—improved with repetition, and she never flubbed a line.43 Loyal friends came and dined with her afterward. They included Joseph and John F. Kennedy, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Buff Cobb Rogers, Mark Sullivan, some of the Luce family, and Gypsy Rose Lee, who said that Clare had done better by Shaw than his limited play had done by her.
The leading lady herself boasted, “We played to the very end to standing room only!” But by then the critics had had their say.44
On Sunday, August 12, the day after Candida closed, John Billings sat close to his home radio, waiting to hear Japan’s response to Allied calls for surrender. He was interrupted by a telephone call from his boss, who wanted to know if he had “checked” the text of Frazier’s article. Billings said he had, whereupon Harry angrily wondered why the reviewers hadn’t given Clare a break as an amateur. “What do they think she is—an actress?”45
That night at 7:00 P.M., President Truman announced that the Japanese had surrendered unconditionally.46
16
BLACK HOUR
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
—JOHN MILTON
The specter of civilization blotting itself out compounded Clare’s disenchantment with public life. She had been furious over Truman’s concessions to Stalin vis-à-vis the Poles at Potsdam, but these paled in light of reports from Japan that survivors of the atomic blasts were found to be suffering from exposure to massive amounts of radiation that winds might carry to other shores. This poisoning of the earth was further cause for her hopelessness.
Since the military committee Clare served on would be less relevant in peacetime, she was unlikely, as a junior member of the House minority, to influence a Democratic administration emboldened by its cache of nuclear weaponry—to use an adjective that had only just entered everyday speech. No matter how soaring her oratory, or far-seeing her essays on rebuilding countries in upheaval, her views were unlikely to impress the White House.1
In addition to her new sense of political irrelevance, compounded by the savage critiques of her Candida performance, was fear that her creative gifts had atrophied. She no longer felt able to write satirical and mordantly witty plays. Personal voids, too, proliferated in her life. She had no children, few close friends, and no religious faith. During her most ambitious years in the 1930s, Clare had often been accused of selfishness. Seeing this as a “cancer of the soul,” she had grown moody, fickle, and distracted.2 Now she felt adrift in her marriage and bereft of her relationships with Truscott, Willoughby, and Stecker, forcing her one bleak night in mid-September to admit that her life was closing down.
Alone in her Waldorf apartment, at a “black hour” sometime after midnight, Clare could no longer tolerate her feelings of emptiness and insecurity. Confronting these twin demons, she searched for clues in her past and recalled her mother’s constant plaint, “I live in my children.”3 This was not an option for her with Ann gone. Nor did she see, amid myriad dogmas and doctrines, any that enlightened her. She mistrusted all religious and scientific orthodoxies. Of the many left-leaning reporters, novelists, publishers, producers, directors, and actors she knew, few believed in God. The patron saint of this liberal elite was Sigmund Freud. They naively believed that through psychoanalysis, “the individual could achieve health, wealth, wisdom and of course popularity, by hauling away at his subconscious bootstraps.”4
After divorcing George Brokaw, she had undergone a few sessions of therapy with a Viennese analyst. He had diagnosed that she had a father complex, saying that the motivating force fo
r all her ambitions was that she “wanted to be ‘masculine’ in order to spite Papa.” The jargon of the couch had irritated her. Instead of using such simple words as sin, lust, hate, and laziness to acknowledge that most failings were moral, the doctor had spoken pseudoscientifically of inhibition, libido, superego, and id. She had decided he was a “soul quack” and walked out on him.5
Her subsequent remedy for psychological problems had been to pursue a career packed with incident. But now, her professional achievements seemed of slight import, in a bloody and violent universe. She was tormented by visions of catastrophes she had witnessed: the German bombing of Brussels in May 1940, the Japanese air attacks on Chungking, the horrific sight of dead babies “bobbing like apples” in a Mandalay moat, the head of an old Englishwoman protruding from a pile of V-2 wreckage, row after row of mutilated soldiers in Italy, the gruesome lime pits of Nordhausen, and skeletal figures wandering dazed and aimless about Buchenwald.
She also brooded on the prewar suicides of four talented friends: the beautiful actresses Rosamond Pinchot and Dorothy Hale, the artist Ralph Barton, and her lover and editor at Vanity Fair, Donald Freeman. All had sought solace in work and sex, until they realized that happiness was elusive. Before each death, Clare had noticed a desperate “smouldering in their eyes.” That look haunted her now that she herself was challenged by the enigma of existence. If she failed to cast off the pall of meaninglessness that enshrouded her, might she, too, be on a path to extinction? Echoing the anguish of Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s new novel, Brideshead Revisited, she deemed herself to be “unloved, unlovable and unloving.” This brought her to a spiritual nadir. She felt “a vast sour tide” sweep over her, leaving her stranded.6
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