Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  As the night wore on, Clare continued her search for existential answers. She circled the room, picking things up and laying them down in a panic of tearful indecision. She thought of the “isms” she had studied in her search for a pertinent creed—Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Freudianism, Isolationism, Interventionism. Not one had sufficed. Terrified she might be going mad, she knelt and recited the Lord’s Prayer. The familiar words, which she had seldom uttered in the long period of desolation following her daughter’s death, consoled her somewhat. She resumed pacing, then stopped at the sight of an unopened letter.

  It was from Father Edward Wiatrak, a Jesuit priest who a few years earlier had been impressed by an article she had written about war orphans and had become an intermittent correspondent.7 He had never tried to convert her to his faith or asked a favor of any kind. He merely expressed concern for the state of her soul and gave the impression that God was waiting to do her a favor.

  When she read the letter, it spoke directly to her current confusion. Wiatrak asked if she was familiar with the passage in the Confessions of Augustine that described the saint’s spiritual crisis in a Milanese garden at the age of thirty-two. Apparently, he had despaired over his own and the world’s “vileness.” Clare knew nothing of Augustine’s anguish, nor of his youthful reputation as a libertine, but she was experiencing such extreme torment herself—what Wiatrak called cruciatus miserabile, the agony of the cross—that she dialed the number of the New York mission where he lived.

  Somebody who picked up the phone offered in a sleepy voice to rouse him. As the sound of footsteps impacting on a bare floor grew louder, she realized that it was two o’clock in the morning and was about to hang up when Wiatrak came on the line. She blurted out, “Father, I am not in trouble, but my mind is in trouble.”

  “We know,” the priest replied, using the plural pronoun affected by Catholic clergy. “This is the call we have been praying for.” However, he said, he was too simple a cleric for her. “You think you have intellectual difficulties. They are spiritual, of course.” The man to deal with her malaise was Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, who lived in Washington. “No doubt you have heard him on the radio. I will make an appointment for you.”8

  17

  CONVERSION

  The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Clare had not heard the radio programs that gained Monsignor Sheen his reputation as an erudite, persuasive, and witty preacher. Nor did she know his academic credentials: a PhD in philosophy from Belgium’s University of Louvain, a professorship in theology at St. Edmund’s College in Britain, and currently the same position at Washington’s Catholic University. He had published such books as God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, The Divine Romance, and Victory over Vice, but it was his pioneer broadcast, The Catholic Hour—soon to have four million regular listeners—that prompted the thousands of letters he received daily. In 1940, Sheen had conducted the first religious service ever to be telecast, and the following year narrated a documentary for Henry Luce’s newsreel The March of Time, entitled “The Story of the Vatican.” Soon he would achieve even greater renown with a network television series, Life Is Worth Living.

  On hearing that Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce was in extremis, he telephoned and invited her to dinner.

  Clare had never dined with a priest, let alone a monsignor, and was not sure what to expect. As it turned out, she was agreeably surprised. The fifty-year-old Sheen and two other clerics shared a large, white brick house, with an impressive curved staircase, two studies, white lacquer furniture, and a private chapel.1 The first glimpse she had of her host was of a slender man of medium height, moving lithely toward her in an immaculate cassock and cummerbund. He had prominent blue eyes that glowed beneath thick eyebrows, and his long upper lip accentuated a warm smile.2 Sheen was “lace curtain” Irish out of Illinois farm country, but she got the impression that he was as comfortable in sophisticated society as in a pulpit. He loved creature comforts and dressed well on the grounds that “the ambassador of Christ should always present himself as a gentleman.”3

  Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, c. 1946 (illustration credit 17.1)

  After a few pleasantries, Sheen said that they would not discuss religion at the dining table. Instead, he launched into secular topics that demonstrated the depth and speed of his mind. He made graceful gestures as he spoke in a melodious baritone with a faint burr. An eight-thousand-book library embellished his formidable intellect, and he quoted readily from Roman poets, Thomas Aquinas, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Anatole France.

  After dinner, Sheen ushered Clare into his study and they sat down facing each other. “Do you know about the philosophy of Yin and Yang?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he replied, and explained it as the Chinese perception of the dual nature of things.

  Sensing that she was trying to intimidate him, and that she liked to hold the floor, the Monsignor laid ground rules for their discussion.4 He would speak for five minutes about God, and she would have an hour to state her views. But when, after about three minutes, he mentioned the goodness of God, Clare bounded out of her chair and shook her finger under his nose.

  “If God is good, why did he take my daughter?”

  Sheen tolerated the interruption. “Perhaps it was in order that you might believe. Maybe your daughter is buying your faith with her life.”5

  Reflecting on the moment later, Sheen felt that it was a turning point in her quest for religious enlightenment. She was clearly a candidate for conversion. In her heart, Clare realized this, too, and saw that he would be the ideal catechist for her. Yet she was loath to commit at once to an intellectually taxing process that would challenge all her preconceived ideas about God and morality, and also require many months of instruction and study. Her hesitancy was fine with Sheen. “We do not allow a leap of faith,” he said. “Before everything else there must be conviction.”6

  Visiting Roman Catholic cathedrals in Europe before and after her first marriage, Clare had felt no compunction to take part in the rituals. She aesthetically admired monumental architecture and sculpture, craftsmanship in stained-glass windows, lavish flower arrangements, and sonorous organ recitals. Only when witnessing the sacrament of the Mass had the playwright in her responded to its theatricality—the ceremonial robes, the clouds of incense, the ancient liturgy, the symbolism of wafer and wine. At the same time she had felt “an ineffable peace, that was also a Divine uneasiness. I had taken great art for the Great Artist.”7

  During World War II, Clare had occasionally dropped into New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and in the gloom her eyes had sought something “that hung like drapes of black over the dull golden glow of the high baldachin.” This was the altar canopy, acting as a kind of shroud for the host at Communion, and for some reason it fascinated her.8 Then had come that Christmas of 1944, when in Italy’s Futa Pass she had seen the congregation of soldiers at Mass, kneeling in deep snow. She thought often and with envy of the simple devotion of those worshippers and regretted her own religious vacuum.9

  Chronic guilt also plagued her. “I feel crumby every night of my life. It comes of falling short of my own ideal of conduct.”10 The prospect of her own death and whether she would merit an afterlife were other arguments for her to accept Sheen’s instruction, as was a desire to honor her marriage vows and “stick by Harry.”11 But ultimately she acknowledged that the chief reason was “to rid myself of my burden of sin.”12

  Maisie Ward, a Roman Catholic writer and publisher, described Clare’s spiritual state at this time as exemplifying “the sharp cry of hunger when a diet of stones is set upon the table.”13

  When Clare told Isabel Hill of her encounter with Sheen, the secretary was vehemently against the idea of her becoming a Roman Catholic.14 Most Americans at the time were similarly biased, unaware that the Anglican Creed included the line “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.�
�� Buff Cobb, her classmate from St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Garden City, remembered that Clare had been confirmed there in her early teens and also disapproved of the change. She came all the way down from New York to protest.15 Expecting equally strong objections from Harry, Clare postponed telling him until he returned from yet another trip to China.16

  Al Morano was puzzled when Clare invited him to supper at her apartment and in a tentative voice asked him, “How would you like to go with me to Mass tomorrow?”17

  By late September, Clare had committed to taking instruction from Sheen. His teaching tool was the Catechism, an interrogatory method established in the sixteenth century, whose chief purpose was to instill the two fundamentals of religious practice: faith and morals. She was also required to learn by heart statements of faith in the Apostolic Creed, of hope in the Lord’s Prayer, and of ethics in the Ten Commandments. As “homework,” Sheen recommended studying the New Testament, especially the 36,450 words of Christ.

  This assignment coincided with the arrival on Clare’s desk of a mound of briefing documents about atomic weaponry. Reading them, she saw the prospect of global obliteration. Religion was already impinging on her political thought, so her first reaction was to conclude that mankind’s ultimate hope of controlling the bomb was to obey “the law of our Lord, to love one another as He loved us.”18 But the realist, not to say the pessimist, in her impelled her to push in the House for legislation to create a nuclear arms control agency.19

  On November 14, Representative Luce presented a concurrent resolution, HR 101, proposing that Congress create appropriate machinery, within the framework of the United Nations, “for international control and reduction of armaments and weapons, especially those involving atomic power.”20

  A problem for Clare was when and how to tell Harry of her religious plans. When he came back from China, he was in an especially good mood, having been the only foreigner present at a dinner in Chungking for Mao Tse-tung, the denim-clad chairman of the burgeoning Communist Party.21 That her husband had been invited to such a momentous event reminded Clare of how much clout he had, and that the international journalism he financed had more resonance in the world than anything she did, in or out of politics.22

  As the autumn days shortened, both Luces craved sunshine, so they accepted an invitation from Bernard Baruch to spend Thanksgiving at Hobcaw Barony. The seventy-five-year-old financier still adored Clare. He marveled at the enduring beauty of her face, her Venus-like figure, her braininess, and caught himself beaming with pride. “If I were only sixty again I would swoop down on you and bear you away. Harry better keep a sharp look out or some gallant knight will snatch you.”23

  The Hobcaw estate was refreshingly peaceful, with no telephones and everybody in bed by ten o’clock. Harry shot quail and slept a lot, while Clare read and did congressional paperwork. On November 26, they visited nearby Mepkin, where they were met by their decorator friend Gladys Freeman. She agreed that the neglected plantation badly needed refurbishing, yet remained “the prettiest place in the Southland.”24

  Bernard Baruch shooting at Hobcaw Barony (illustration credit 17.2)

  That evening, Clare at last told Harry of her pending conversion. He was speechless. All his entrenched Presbyterian hostility to the Church of Rome surfaced. He was chagrined at not having been informed sooner, and went onto the terrace to unburden himself on Gladys.

  “Why didn’t she talk to me? Why did she go off and do this?”25

  Her husband’s disapproval notwithstanding, Clare resumed Catechism sessions with Sheen. Some lasted as long as three or four hours. She concluded that no matter how heavy her workload on the Hill, or how fraught her home life, soul-searching was more arduous and often more painful than either. To weigh the claims of comparative religions was purely an intellectual exercise and not difficult for her. But reconciling the history of an ancient church that she felt “had not always been marked by sanctity or unmarked by violence, prejudice and scandal” with its present calls for love and charity was a challenge. The most intractable question she asked herself was, “Can the existence of God be proved?” Gradually, she realized that no priest—even Sheen—had answers to all her doubts. He could only prepare her for conversion “as a farmer prepares soil for seeds.”26

  Digging up old beliefs for close inspection proved as demanding as her attempt to open like a bud to new ones. Another problem was accepting the divinity of Christ. If He was divine and eternally alive, why did He not perform miracles, so badly needed in a war-torn world? Sheen convinced her that God did use His power daily in man’s interest. The Sacraments were another enigma, even if she agreed that a degree of imagination was necessary to accept transubstantiation in the Eucharist. She took the priest’s word that to ingest the Body and Blood of Christ at Communion was to purify “the secret places of the heart.”27

  As their dialogue continued, Sheen marveled at Clare’s mastery of sorites, the Greek use of logic in extended argument, leading by polysyllogism to an inescapable conclusion. “Clare,” he said long afterward, “used sorites better than any other person I ever met.”28 At the same time, he marveled at her intuitiveness. “It has something to do with light.… She is scintillating. Her mind is like a rapier. It bursts foibles in a second.… She sees things all at once. It would take a man six or seven steps to arrive at the same conclusion.”29

  He also delighted in her humor. One day his St. Bernard jumped on her. Pushing the dog off, she said, “You remind me of someone. Who is it? Oh I know—my first husband.”30

  They talked one night about Hell. Clare sat on the floor and said she could not accept it. For the next hour, she argued that the mercy of God preempted such punishment. How could it be worse than the hell she had passed through on earth, after losing Ann?

  “Only those who walk in darkness,” Sheen said, “ever see the stars.”31

  He took equal time to argue the reason and logic of Hell, so persuasively that at last she leaped up and threw her arms in the air. “Oh God, what a protagonist You have in this man!”32

  The Monsignor’s apostolic zeal astonished her. Like an instrument conveying “the sudden and unfamiliar sight of Truth and Love and Life eternal,” he was also “at once so patient and so unyielding, so poetic and so practical, so inventive and so orthodox.”33

  Between sessions with her catechist, Clare read books by scientists, philosophers, and historians, seldom finding that their authors could accept the Divinity of Jesus. Yet they often told readers to hold on to Christian principles and virtues, while doing away with religious belief and practice. In her view, these thinkers might just as well advocate keeping “our streets and houses well lighted, but do away with power plants.”34

  The new year of 1946 presented Clare with the prospect of a visit to Washington by General Willoughby. He was now stationed in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, having gone from one shattered capital—Manila—to another, in order to help MacArthur begin the process of bringing democracy to Japan. A priority for the Supreme Commander was to oversee the prosecution of local war criminals. To assist him in this, he had made Willoughby his chief of counterintelligence, investigating some ninety-five thousand Japanese repatriates from Russian POW camps. The suspicion was that they might have been indoctrinated by the Soviets, in order to form the nucleus of a Communist Party in Japan.35

  Willoughby’s decision to remain in Asia had not sat well with Clare. On January 5, she wrote him to convey her feeling that their long-thwarted romance would not survive the peace. “So long as the battle was on, I had faith and patience. I no longer have either, for I think that what you do where you are is more clear and fruitful … than what you might be doing if you left.” She was deliberately vague about her own future. “I have begun to write new dramas of my own, and cannot indefinitely wait for leading men who are playing run-of-the-mill contracts elsewhere.”36

  Her warning was in vain, since Charles was already on his way. In a letter that crossed hers, he said th
at he planned an extensive stay. After tending to business at the Pentagon, “I shall be free to wait on you.… There is so much to tell, so much to do.”37

  Visiting Mepkin on the second anniversary of Ann’s death, Clare at last had the revelation for which the Catechism had prepared her. She described it as the “Coming of Faith,” a melting of the heart into love for God, elusive yet unmistakable as the moment when dawn breaks or ice thaws. She still had questions to ask Sheen. But this was undoubtedly an epiphany, forced upon her by the totality of her experience. “It finally took two world wars,” she wrote in an account of her conversion, “the overthrow of several dozen thrones and governments, the Russian revolution, the swift collapse, in our own time, of hundreds of thought-systems, a small number of which collapsed on me, the death of millions, as well as the death of my daughter, before I was willing to take a look at this extraordinary institution, the Catholic church.”38

  She was back in Washington by January 14 for the opening of the 79th Congress. Determined to stamp her ideas on it immediately, she introduced a resolution calling for research into profit sharing as a tool for American businesses, and for complementary legislation to give workers “the security of a vested interest in their corporate places of employment.”39 Once again, she revealed herself to be more left-of-center than most of her Republican colleagues.

  A week later, it was reported that Willoughby had reached San Francisco. Clare’s office promptly announced that the Congresswoman had influenza and was recuperating in Florida. To avoid publicity, she stayed at a friend’s house in Hobe Sound.40 This enabled her to invite two guests to stay with her separately, Father Sheen and Willoughby.