The chief of these was “a big balance sheet staring me smack in the face, no net worth & all on the debit side.”34 He accepted her terms for his visit to the plantation, assuring her he would not arrive “cloaked in a pall of gloom nor as a martyr. I shall be as I am.”35
“I have not done one blessed thing since I have been down here,” Clare wrote her literary agent, George Bye, from the plantation on February 4. One excuse for her lack of productivity was that she was entertaining numerous guests. Another distraction was her seventy-two-hundred-acre estate, where she had not spent any length of time since 1941. The main house, aptly named “Claremont,” and cottages of whitewashed brick in the Modernist style (for which Edward Durrell Stone had won the 1937 Silver Medal for Architectural Excellence) had been extensively refurbished by Gladys Freeman.36 But circumnavigation of the grounds, which took four hours in a buggy, revealed many signs of neglect, and frost had killed the budding camellias. Then, on Sunday, February 9, her brother arrived.37
Her welcome to him was warm, given their recent acrimonious correspondence. “There is nothing to worry about,” she said. “Stay here the rest of your life.”
David was not deluded into thinking he was suddenly the beloved prodigal. But Clare could be beguiling, and when he learned that he was to have her to himself for a few days before Harry came, he was as agreeable as he could be. Clare described him to Maggie Case as “the handsome Captain Boothe, who is in great form and, as the French say, en grande beauté.”38 At the same time, she had long realized that his flawed nature was incurable. Though he could be ingratiatingly genial, his mood was capable of sudden change, and a “fleeting saturnine expression” that she found particularly disturbing would signal that Jekyll was about to become Hyde.39
Harry’s arrival on St. Valentine’s Day was ironic—had Clare but known it—because his intent was to ask her for a divorce. He had been encouraged to make this drastic move by C. D. Jackson and even had a lawyer lined up in New York to handle the details of separation.40 But once he was ensconced at Mepkin, something dissuaded him. Whether it was for lack of an opportune moment, or David’s dark presence, the potentially wrenching confrontation did not take place.
For the next five days, he had to share Clare with an emotionally starved soldier who was possessive of her to an almost pathological degree. David’s envy of her husband’s professional success was exacerbated by disappointment in himself.41 At times Harry felt that the misfit might be mad. One day, the two men were duck shooting and David, gun at the ready, trailed him along a rice bank. He seemed to exude such venom that Harry feared for his life.42
David left for Florida in early March to complete paperwork for his departure from the military, leaving Clare with the quiet she claimed to crave for literary projects.
On the twelfth, the President went before both houses of Congress to announce a foreign policy initiative—soon to be known as the Truman Doctrine—in response to Soviet penetration of Greece, Asia Minor, Africa, and Western Europe. “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure.” To that end, he asked for financial aid to Greece and Turkey, moving closer to what Clare had advocated in the House: a plan to prevent Russian aggression, and another to rescue Europe from insolvency and joblessness. The new doctrine, aimed at containing Soviet expansion by means other than armed conflict, marked the onset of what would become known as “the Cold War.”
Harry, probably annoyed with himself for failing to ask for a divorce, took his frustration out by grumbling about his wife’s extravagance. Clare was now running three households, including a new property in Ridgefield, Connecticut, that Al Grover had found. She had already spent some $64,000 of Harry’s money renovating it, but kept the figure from him when he started complaining that Mepkin cost $40,000 a year to maintain, much more than before the war. He suggested they economize by not using the estate next season, and she reluctantly agreed. Then he switched his attack to her current lack of employment, asking what her “real ambition” was.43
She replied that she still wanted “to write books and plays.” As for domestic costs, she offered to take a smaller apartment at the Waldorf. The discussion ended inconclusively, and Harry asked himself what he, “a missionary’s son, was doing with a plantation, horses and guns when all I should be doing is work.”44
His mood was not improved by a facetious letter from Clare, offering to cancel magazine subscriptions, forgo flower arrangements, eat homegrown vegetables, and give up shooting. “You’ll drop dead when you see the bill for bamming away at skeet.”45
David returned to the plantation with an honorable discharge in time to celebrate his forty-fifth birthday on March 30. It at once became clear that Clare had an agenda other than pampering him.
“I have a secret for you, I really shouldn’t tell you but I must,” she said. “Do you know that when Father Whitey’s mother died last week, her dying words were a prayer for your conversion?”46
It dawned on David that Monsignor Sheen’s purring phone call of a few weeks earlier had been a precursor to Clare’s plan to lure him into her church. But he knew he must humor his sister, on whom he would soon again be financially dependent. Even though he felt he was watching the approach of a “buzz saw,” he agreed to read two preparatory books, Pierre Lecomte du Noüy’s Human Destiny and A. Cressy Morrison’s Man Does Not Stand Alone. In dialectical sessions with Clare, he showed signs of susceptibility to her theological arguments. But she was unable to satisfy him on all of the moral questions he had mailed her in January, particularly his last conundrum: “What crime or series of crimes could a person commit that renders him throughout Eternity beyond recall or redemption?”47
In spite of all her efforts, David was slow to commit. Showing signs of self-delusion, he protested, “I am no psycho, or possess a mind degraded by alcohol or drugs or a body weakened by sexual excesses.… The answer for me is not to be found by embracing a Faith nor a wife, it must come from within.”48
The April issue of Look featured a laudatory cover story entitled “The New Clare Luce.” The author, a Roman Catholic named Gretta Palmer, noted that in a recent poll of American women, Clare came second behind Eleanor Roosevelt as the woman they most admired. Unlike any other finalist, she also made the “Ten Best-Dressed” list.49 The latter accolade was belied by an airbrushed full-color photograph of Clare in a green silk brocade Chinese blouse with mandarin collar, over which hung a double strand of pearls and fob. Oversize gold rings ornamented each hand, and her right wrist sported a jumble of clunky gold bracelets. Around her curly, gold-tinted hair was a narrow white scarf studded with gold clips near the ears, anchored on top by a bow and two red flowers with five leaves. Her gaze was as direct as in person, but she seemed ill at ease and less confident than in portraits taken by great photographers during her Vogue and Vanity Fair years.
Helen Lawrenson recognized Clare’s lack of chic, unless dressed by designers or fashion magazine editors. Left to her own devices, “she was always too fond of ruffles, bows, frills, dowdy hats, too many jewels at one time.”50
Clare had a contract with the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf for a memoir of her congressional experiences. Unable or unwilling to bestir herself to do this, she offered instead a compilation of already written essays and speeches. “The material is interesting,” Blanche Knopf wrote her, “but I do not believe that it adds up to a book that would do you any good now.”51 Clare then suggested an expanded version of “The Real Reason,” whose last installment had just appeared in McCall’s, but Knopf also rejected that.52
Due to various factors, including her disparagement of psychoanalysts, scientists, and literati in the articles, as well as anti-Catholic sentiment in the country at large, Clare’s stirring account of her depression, instruction, and conversion would never appear in book form. The Catholic house of Sheed & Ward later expressed interest, but by then she did
not want to see the account of her spiritual crisis between hard covers.53 This was unfortunate, since Maisie Ward drafted a penetrating foreword.
There is in her an almost miraculous clarity—few people are named with such precision.… Externally she had all the means of happiness. But a mind of that clarity could not be happy in meaningless activity. Happiness is complexion, not cosmetic: it cannot be laid on from outside, it must start at the center of one’s being: and she had only darkness at the center.54
Before leaving for New York in the last week of April, Clare asked David to stay on at Mepkin until Gladys Freeman arrived to close the house and cottages for the summer.55 His nomadic impulse was stirring again, and he was notoriously light-fingered, so the decorator had to make sure he did not take off with silver, or guns, or anything else portable. As it was, when he left the plantation in early May, he got away with a typewriter and eight bottles of liquor.56
20
A TERRIBLE MAELSTROM OF TROUBLE
The abandoned becomes the abandoner.
—CLIFFORD ODETS
In the early spring of 1947, the Luces moved into Sugar Hill, a twenty-room, redbrick Georgian-style house on Limestone Road in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Its servants’ wing had space for a butler, chauffeur, cook, and maids. Elsewhere on the estate was a guest cottage and a superintendent’s quarters. They had paid $220,000 for it, the same amount realized from selling their place in Greenwich. Clare hired landscapers to improve the hundred acres of gardens, lawns sloping down to a grove of silver birches, and woodland overlooking Fox Hill Lake. Builders added a pool, tennis court, and outdoor terraces.
Gladys Freeman decorated the large formal rooms and bedrooms. A small white foyer with an alabaster bust of Clare gave on the right to a drawing room with dark green walls, rug, and couches. Over the mantelpiece hung Gerald Brockhurst’s portrait of Clare in her green mandarin tunic. Chinoiserie, extending even to bamboo curtain rods, filled the room: tables and chairs in Chinese Chippendale style, Asian bride chests, a rare Tang camel, Manchu quartz, a collection of blue-and-yellow porcelain, and a life-size figure of the Goddess of Plenty.
The Oriental theme continued in the dining room. Against a cream wall stood intricately carved cabinets and cloisonné vases, and around the teak dining table were arrayed high-backed, lacquered chairs with yellow cushions. The library had parchment-colored walls, beige curtains, a yellow Chinese rug, curving coral sofas, and a Segonzac landscape. French bow windows, facing south, overlooked flowering dogwoods and roses.1
After a week or two Clare heard from David, who was now traveling in the Deep South looking for an outdoor job and staying, wherever possible, in accommodations his sister had arranged for him. Some of his stops were with Roman Catholic clerics. He wrote to say that he preferred their company to that of “insipid and watery Protestants,” but felt obliged to tell them that “I am violently anti-Communistic, dislike Jews which is most unChristianlike, am a heretic … and never enter a Church.”2
On June 12, Clare checked into Doctors Hospital in New York to prepare for a hysterectomy. Her decision to do this was so sudden that Harry had to curtail a business trip in Latin America to be at her bedside. Her recovery was slow, and she remained incapacitated for two weeks. At age forty-four, she had to accept that youth and motherhood were at an end, leaving her “psychologically and physically deeply diminished.”3
Harry dropped in rarely and struck Clare as being “in a strange, unhappy mood.”4 At the office he was noticeably tense and miserable.5 Learning the reason for her indisposition, Billings said, “Boy, that’s not going to make Luce’s life any easier.”6
As Clare recuperated at Sugar Hill, David reappeared to keep her company. He had found no work in the South. One reason for his return was that he hoped Clare would honor a recent promise to launch him in business with $5,000, followed by a $100,000 operational bank credit. But she failed to follow up, burying herself in C. S. Lewis’s polemical book The Screwtape Letters.
This pithy work of fiction, written at the war’s onset, consists of thirty-one letters from an elderly devil, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood. The one-sided correspondence contains profound theological argument and witty analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of Christianity, as well as showing how easily even regular churchgoers might be won over to the side of evil.
In the insidious corrupting of human beings by a pair of devils, Clare saw passages of relevance to her brother, who at times seemed under satanic influence. She worried that by indulging him, she abetted his curse, noting how Screwtape tutored the inexperienced yet malevolent Wormwood in how to seduce a recent convert. These tactics were instructive for Clare, still a novice in her struggles with daily temptations. Screwtape also gave tips on how to ensnare those who denied the existence of Satan as well as God.
She also found parallels in the book to herself and Harry, as Screwtape gleefully explained how dullness and despair might lead to “a permanent condition” of melancholy. In this state, believers or atheists often sought numbness in alcohol and extramarital sex, especially if they inclined, as she did, to pessimism.7
Screwtape pointed out that a persistent longing for change, often characteristic of the rich and feckless, conflicted with the natural desire of men and women for permanence. “Horror of the Same Old Thing,” he observed, “is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart.” It often led to a craving for novelty—excessive spending on personal adornment, overindulgence in food, drink, sex, and consorting with lowlifes. God, whom Screwtape always referred to as “the Enemy,” countered by offering people variety as well as stability in everyday life. “The rhythms of the seasons, the church calendar and its feasts, and domestic routine” replaced the arrhythmia of restlessness and lack of discipline.8
Screwtape made at least one observation relevant to both Luces. “Wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.”9
Clare was beginning to regain strength when one day in mid-July an attorney representing Harry arrived at Sugar Hill on an astonishing errand.10 The lawyer, Bruce Bromley, told her that she “owed it” to Roman Catholicism to divorce her husband. He argued that their marital situation could be interpreted in only two ways. Either she was deceiving her church by sleeping with the previously married Mr. Luce, or she was holding on to him while “denying him the rights of a normal man.”11
Still physically and emotionally frail, Clare was outraged by the cruelty, cowardice, and mendacity of this approach. The truth was that for some eight years, Harry had denied her sexual rights. His excuse for his impotence, oft repeated, was that she had long ago “deeply wounded his masculine pride.” He cited two ludicrous examples as reasons for having cooled on her. The first was that on one of their initial nights together, when he had boasted of earning $1 million a year, she had said, unimpressed, “That’s fine.” The second occurred when she had been dismissive of his membership in Yale’s secret society, Skull and Bones, which he considered one of the most important achievements of his life.12
Clare insisted that her husband drive out at once and join them. He did, and admitted to wanting an end to their marriage. A stormy scene ensued as he tried to put the responsibility for its failure on her. After she converted, Harry said, he had assumed a breakup “would certainly follow,” because in the eyes of her new faith, he remained pledged to Lila.13 Bromley backed this up, contending that as a Catholic she was now in an invalid and sinful relationship, which she mitigated by denying Mr. Luce sex. At a minimum, this gave his client grounds for an annulment.
Clare, determined to enlighten the lawyer, said Harry had been impotent with her for many years, so she was “not denying him anything.” If, on the other hand, he had been lying and was in fact capable of sex with “some other woman,” he should simply ask for a divorce rather than threaten one. At this, Harry crumbled, stuttered, and pace
d around the room. He said he and Bromley would have to talk more, and the two men returned to New York.14
Left alone, Clare mulled over Harry’s specious logic. “If I had not been a Catholic,” she wrote in a memo of their confrontation, “I would probably have committed suicide because of the ‘double-header’ loss of my female capacities … and loss of the love of the only man who was in any human sense responsible for my security and well-being.”15 She realized that he had been cynically supportive of her conversion, seeing that it could invalidate their marriage vows. Still reeling, she turned to her brother for consolation.
“Now I really will kill him,” David said.16
When Clare committed her thoughts to paper in times of crisis, she did so with lawyerly logic. On July 26, the Feast of Our Lady of Mercy, she wrote a summary of events for Harry that showed him not only how well she understood his predicament, but how much more lucidly she could express it than he, in spite of his boast that he was always the smartest person in any room. She exposed how hypocritical, ungallant, and shameful his behavior had been, without even hinting at how often she had betrayed him.
Her handwritten, ten-page letter began with a one-line paragraph: “The storm is passed.” She meant that she had been in a suicidal state of mind.
My fierce bout with Mr. Screwtape—for that is what it was—is over. And I’m limp but still alive. And once again I have seen the last terrible shape [devilish] temptation always takes: the death urge. It always begins in the same way. First there comes the appeal to my feminine pride, and vanity. Then all the pleasures and tendernesses and indulgences that I think ought to be mine, simply because I am a normally attractive and loving woman, are dangled before my eyes like a lovely lost empire.
Price of Fame Page 21
