Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Evidently, she considered Harry to be as evil as Screwtape, in telling her periodically, “But I do love you,” only to prove that he did not. Time and again, she had been seduced by the magic of his words and rushed forward with open arms to find that “what was gone is still gone.” This left her with just one temptation, “the wish to die.”

  She saw that it was this suicidal desire that had taken her four times to war zones, each time after marital squabbles had made her suffer “the cruel drama of humiliation and frustration of senses and emotions.” As she had written him from Europe in 1940, “I just don’t want to live in a world where you are not.”17

  His continuing false claims of love had caused her much heartbreak. But none had been as dishonest and unforgivable as “the aid and ‘sympathy’ you showed towards my conversion!” At first this had saved her reason and probably her life. But after his and Bromley’s visit, she saw that in not trying to prevent her from becoming a Catholic, he had betrayed all the canons and mores of his own church and marriage vows.

  As an honest Presbyterian, you believe, I assume, that there is essential evil in Catholicism. And yet, you offered no arguments, made no efforts, brought no witnesses to prevent me from falling into what (I assume) you believe to be a false faith.… Secondly, you realized (I know now) that it meant the end of any real husband and wife relationship. You realized too, that I accepted that, not as a condition if I became a Catholic, but as a condition that was inherent in our, or rather, your disability [professed impotency], rather than confirmed disinclination. Thirdly, the “mores,” mere modern sportsmanship, required at that time that you lay the true facts of your non-celibacy before me, as I was laying the true fact of my intended celibacy before you.

  I know now why you failed your religious conscience, your marriage, and even the modern “code.” Partly because you figured Catholicism would bring me comfort and surcease.… But mostly you aided me into the church … because you believed my conversion would mean your legal freedom.

  Clare accused him of flagrant hypocrisy in conspiring to rid himself of her in a manner that left him standing on high moral ground. He wanted to be able to say, “Ah! The Catholic Church broke up our marriage! Nothing else could have parted me from her!” That was why he had let her proceed so unsuspectingly to her Baptism. “As you said, when Bromley was here, you assumed a divorce would certainly follow. I know now, that when you came to Tennessee that night, you intended to tell me just that, but lost your courage.”

  She called him “a moral leper” but acknowledged there was little she could do, except offer him friendship, sympathy, and freedom to “go where you will … lie where and with whom you can. That is the best way.… I would with the utmost joy die for you this or any other night. For I never loved another, except my Ann, so deeply.”18

  Harry saw the truth of Clare’s indictment of his behavior, and began to weigh the traumatic consequences of divorce. On the first Monday in August, gazing out of his office window, he told Billings he needed a vacation. “You know Clare isn’t too well and we’ve got this new house now and I don’t want to go too far off or for too long.” The editor thought, “There’s no place he really wants to go and nobody he really wants to go with. A strange lonely fellow who doesn’t know how to have fun.”19 For the next two days, Luce was remote and cranky. Something apart from publishing matters bothered him.20 Time Incers deduced further domestic discord, since Clare was in town. They guessed right.

  One morning that week at the Waldorf, Harry assumed Clare had gone to Mass, so he telephoned Jean Dalrymple. Being somewhat deaf, he tended to shout on the phone, especially when distraught. Clare, as it happened, had not yet left the building. Through the wall, she heard him say, “I tell you, I’ve done everything I can. She refuses to give me a divorce.”21

  Although she had given Harry permission to stray, Clare returned to confront him. He was mortified, then contrite, and finally begged forgiveness, confessing that he had been seeing Jean for the past four years. Staggering her further, he owned up to many one-night stands. As she listened to him almost brag about these, she saw a pathetic man with “excruciating emotional and mental misery,” who was tormented not only by having betrayed her, but by a perverted sense of moral obligation to his mistress, coupled with religious guilt.22

  Clare said again that she was ready to give him his freedom, knowing he would continue to be unhappy, whether he left her or not. Harry’s response was to go down on his knees and beg her forgiveness. He said he no longer wanted to marry Jean, but to stay with her, “the one great love of his life.” There would never be another, for only with her had he ever felt “like a whole man.”23

  Perplexed, she went to David for comfort and advice. He had never seen her at such a low ebb. She told him she was inclined to “chuck” her wrecked marriage and would need his support. “I can’t do this alone, you must promise to stick by me.”24

  David pledged to stay close, seeing himself as potentially the main male presence in his sister’s life.

  On August 11, C. D. Jackson found his boss “in a terrible maelstrom of trouble.” It transpired that he was being blackmailed by Jean Dalrymple.

  “The little bitch really has Harry by the short hairs,” Jackson told Billings, “and every time she pulls ’em, it costs Harry another $100,000.” Luce was calling him at all hours to unburden himself, saying that he felt like “a fool to get into this mess, but also like a heel.” His sister Elisabeth and her lawyer husband, Tex Moore, had been informed of Jean’s demand for money, and Bromley was doing damage control to prevent the scandal from leaking. “Now Clare has gotten wind of it—hence a fresh crisis.”25

  Billings, who had a love-hate relationship with Harry, was not sorry to see him suffer. “I hope his private dirt doesn’t splatter on the company and therefore on me.”26 When he told his wife that Harry was “deep in woman-trouble,” she laughed and said she was glad to see “his high and mightiness brought low.” Billings felt the same. “What a hypocrite he is—preaching great Christian virtues and then practicing just the opposite!”27

  Clare sought the seclusion of Sugar Hill to digest the reality of her fractured relationship with Harry. In mid-August, relishing the sound of robins in the apple trees, the sun shining on the pool, and a cool wind sweeping in from the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, she wrote him a querulous yet strangely optimistic note.

  I no longer hope that you will ever be in love with me again. Nor would such ardors be seemly at our advanced ages!… I expect that what depresses us, in one another’s presence, is that we see the dead body of our love lying between us, and we cannot decide whether we murdered it separately, together, or if, after all it did not die a natural death.

  And yet, somehow, I think it’s going to be alright, don’t you?28

  She had been attracted to Harry initially for conventional reasons: his good looks, editorial brilliance, power, and enduring interest in the world. But above all it had been “just something mysterious. I wished to confide in him.”29 In extremis, the need was as urgent as ever.

  Their apparent rapprochement left David Boothe feeling useless again, if not outright rejected. “Now that your marital difficulties have proven surmountable,” he wrote her, “it behooves me to start getting my own house in order.” He said he was going away for a couple of days, “for reflection, not devilment.”30

  Borrowing the Luces’ Chrysler, he drove to Massachusetts with the intention of stopping off in Boston, where Clare suggested he look over the house she owned on Beacon Street. She told him, “I bought it for you.” Skeptical, David did some local sleuthing and heard that she had acquired the property a couple of years before “in contemplation of a 3rd marital try.”31

  At work, a distracted Harry spent hours closeted with C. D. Jackson. After Clare returned to town, he started shuttling agitatedly between the office and the Waldorf. Finally, he declared himself incommunicado. Miss Thrasher said, “There’s something terribly wr
ong with Mr. Luce.… I’m afraid he’s going to turn Catholic.”32

  On August 17, Billings sensed the approach of “a climax of some sort.” Harry became incensed after discovering that Clare had asked Roman Catholic officials if there were grounds for annulling his first marriage, in order to validate hers in the eyes of the Church. Lila would be deeply hurt if she found out about this, not least by having Rome rule her two sons illegitimate. When Harry told Clare he resented being “closed in on,” she knelt and grabbed his legs, wailing, “It’s all because I couldn’t give you a baby that you don’t love me any more.” Embarrassed, he ordered her to “get up and stop that nonsense.”33 At this Clare said she wanted a divorce.

  Out of his depth with such histrionics and vacillations, Harry went to see his mother at the Cosmopolitan Club. He told her of Clare’s request and his own wish for “a bishop” to advise him. Elizabeth Root Luce, fanatical in her disdain for Catholicism, said, “No one can tell you what to do, you will have to decide it.”

  Harry sensed that his mother would not mind if Clare left him. “You don’t like her,” he said.34

  She did not deny this and reminded him that from the start she had deplored their union. After he left, she concluded that Clare brought her son only trouble. “I hope he will let her go!”35

  Thinking that distance might lend perspective, Harry set off on August 22 for a ten-day vacation in New Hampshire. While gone, he asked Clare to decide if she really wanted a divorce, and if so, on what terms. Jackson bet fifty-fifty on a permanent split and a big cash settlement for the wronged wife.36 Rumors flew around Manhattan: Clare had demanded $4 million and 51 percent of company stock. Harry had said no, and the result was a stalemate.37

  Incredible though such gossip was, Clare behaved during Harry’s absence as if she already had influence at Time Inc. She called Billings and asked why Eliot Janeway, a friend of her husband’s, was “representing himself as the mastermind of company policy.” Billings told her Janeway was not popular among the staff, but advised Harry on “high politics.” When Clare found out the man was paid $12,000 a year, she said she would like a “a snap job like that.”38

  “The damn bitch,” Jackson growled after hearing about the exchange. He then went on to provide salacious details of Harry’s infidelity. The boss’s relationship with “Mrs. X,” he said, had been platonic until Clare joined the Church. Only then had Harry “popped into bed” with her.39

  That night Billings was shaken by a call from Harry. “Did you tell Clare that I kept Janeway on against the advice and wishes of all my associates?” Billings could not believe that she had acted so quickly and exaggeratedly betrayed his confidences. “No,” he replied, “though she may have drawn that conclusion.”40

  Aware that Harry was in doubt about what she intended to do, Clare felt a twinge of sympathy for him. “I reached my wretchedly low point several years ago,” she wrote him, “when you perhaps were hardly aware of it. You reached yours in the recent past.… I fear one or the other of us has to try to be a saint.”41

  Harry, writing from his mountain retreat, took responsibility for their estrangement.

  I keep thinking of you wanting a window into my heart—and of how to give it to you … to me it seems that my heart and most of the rest of my innards are wide open to inspection.… You are the incomparable person in my life. I loved you without reservation and in the dearest hope of happiness for us both. I failed in my love for you and yet I deeply believe I would not fail again because if there is an “again,” it would be a most precious gift—and would be cherished more seriously and less selfishly. You ought to have perfect love because with perfect love you are, not perfect (no, that can’t be) but in your beauty and gaiety a very remarkable resemblance—and that near perfection I should certainly know is worth any kind of effort in “little things” and in great. It was a terrible thing that I should ever have lost the vision.42

  Back at work by September 2, Harry was no wiser about Clare’s intentions. Over lunch, he asked Billings what he knew about his “crisis with Clare.” To avoid implicating Jackson and Grover, the editor said, “Nothing.” Harry probed further. What were the survival prospects for his marriage? Billings said he doubted Clare would want to make a go of it.43

  During the afternoon, the pace of office gossip picked up. Al Grover inadvertently dropped the name of “Mrs. X” to Billings and Jackson, who, not to be outdone, let on that Eliot Janeway was a friend of Jean Dalrymple—hence Clare’s vindictive phone call. In a further revelation, C.D. said Luce was expecting his wife’s decision on divorce that day, but she still had not made up her mind.44

  “What a whirl of events, ideas and emotions,” Billings wrote in his diary. “Sex makes more damn fools out of more people than liquor.”45

  Grover announced the next day that there would be no divorce. Clare would soon leave for Hollywood, to write a movie script for Darryl Zanuck, and Harry would probably go with her.46

  Shortly afterward, Clare summoned Billings to the Waldorf for a late afternoon highball. He was surprised to find the front of her hair gray and her figure plumper. She said her screenplay was going to be an adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and suggested he assign a Life “close-up on the Devil.” As she rambled on about a group called Young Christian Workers, he was intrigued by her strange, ramrod-straight posture, as if she were making a speech. “She is clearly a woman under considerable stress, and religiously obsessed.”47

  These assumptions were confirmed when he heard from Grover that Clare was “again on the rampage, and giving Harry hellish trouble.” She was now at a Catholic retreat and had disposed of many worldly belongings. They included her collection of five thousand books on drama and theater, many of them rare, donated to Georgetown University.48

  For some time, David Boothe had sensed that he was outstaying his welcome with the Luces. Clare understood his dilemma. If he left their orbit for some unknown terrain, he would resume drifting, with slight chance of finding a decent job. She had reneged on her offer to set him up in business, promising instead an outright gift of $50,000. But when he announced his intention to leave soon, Clare again disappointed him. She knew that once on the road, he was bound to dissipate his cash on booze, betting, and women.49 During his last fruitless attempt “to find a spot,” he had spent all $3,000 of her gift money.50

  On the evening of Friday, October 3, the atmosphere at Sugar Hill curdled when David rejected her final entreaty to join the Church. At first she appeared hurt and disappointed, and then she accused him of being anti-God. “I don’t intend to do business with unbaptized people.”51

  Had he converted, she said, he could have stayed near her and looked for work in New York City. But he sensed her reluctance to support him if he had done that. In a letter to George Waldo, David showed how well he understood his sister. “When Clare is in trouble she is quite human, she’s a little girl and every man’s heart goes out to her. When she is out of trouble, it’s a different deal and I was getting conditioned for the end of our honeymoon.”52

  The significant word was honeymoon, indicating that David had felt virtually married while living with her for seven months. He had nurtured Clare when she was ill and commiserated during her bleak moments over Harry. Sensing, however subliminally, that his emotional as well as fiscal dependence on her had become unhealthy, he said he must leave, although he had no long-term plan in mind. She said that if he was determined, all she would give him was $2,800 and her Studebaker.53 On Monday, David packed his bags and used the car to drop her off in Manhattan.

  They drove there in a tense atmosphere. Clare resented the hours wasted on his instruction. For an intelligent man, she said, his rejection of Catholicism was incomprehensible. He agreed that he was beyond the spiritual pale, but asked, “Who is the Authority that determined whether my mind preferred evil to the Faith?”

  “I am,” Clare snapped.

  Smarting over the diminution of her financial assistanc
e, David reminded Clare of the night at the Waldorf when he had promised to stick with her should she divorce. He had also “performed a mission of service” after her hysterectomy and the painful encounter with Harry and Bromley that followed.

  Clare said that his objective had not been merely to help her survive those traumas.

  “What was it?”

  “Examine your conscience.”

  At this, they pulled up in front of the Waldorf. Clare stepped out.

  “Get in touch with me, when you get in trouble.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  It occurred to David, as he wound his way uptown through heavy traffic, “that all the swarming and teeming Jews crossing our path have loads in common with me, we all deny Christ.”54

  21

  HOLLYWOOD

  What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

  —WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

  Kay Brown of the Leland Hayward Agency negotiated a $75,000 contract with 20th Century-Fox for Clare’s Screwtape screenplay. It called for delivery of the script in thirteen weeks, including time for revisions, and promised payments in three installments: $25,000 each on signing, completion, and movie release. In addition, the studio promised a $10,000 accommodation allowance and two round-trip airline tickets to Los Angeles.

  With the arrival of the first check for Screwtape, Clare again became an active member of the show business community. As if to confirm this, she entertained Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence on October 6 (the night of David’s departure) for dinner and a private preview of John Ford’s The Fugitive. Adapted from Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, it starred Henry Fonda in the role of a whiskey priest. Coward panned it as a vehicle for “ardent Catholic propaganda.”1