It was the hottest summer in the City of Brotherly Love since the Constitutional Convention of 1787. But this did not stop young people from jitterbugging in the streets, while inside the Convention Hall their elders were fanning themselves and sucking on elephant-shaped Popsicles. Sixty large fans, and ice hauled six flights up onto the roof, made little difference to the temperature in the baking Art Deco auditorium. Immense television lights beaming down on the proceedings intensified the heat.12
It was the first time a national political convention had ever been broadcast visually. An estimated ten million viewers watched in thirteen Eastern states. NBC, the biggest and richest network, had done something unheard of in awarding a single sponsor, Life magazine, broadcast rights to all three presidential conventions—Republican, Democratic, and Progressive. This meant that the year’s most important journalistic undertaking was controlled by Henry Luce. All commercials at each gathering would advertise Time Inc. products, and every display feature—down to reporters’ badges and door signs—was labeled “LIFE-NBC.” The coverage included everything from press conferences with the eventual nominees to interviews with delegates in barbershop chairs and a segment on hats worn by women on the floor. For all this Harry paid a bargain $250,000.13
It was unfortunate that he consequently financed the airing of an event that caught his wife looking so unprepossessing, and making a speech so overwrought, that Brock Pemberton wondered if she had lost her mind.14 The columnist H. L. Mencken observed that “La Luce had not bothered to take lessons in television makeup.” As a result, the harsh lights made her look ghostly, and the humidity flattened her hair.15 Clare’s choice of outfit was a disaster: a steel-gray taffeta dress with a sweat-inducing tight bodice and an ankle-length tiered skirt, unbecoming with low-heeled shoes.16
She followed the keynote speaker, Governor Dwight H. Green of Illinois, to the podium and berated Truman as a man “of phlegm not of fire,” whose party was held hostage by the “lynch-loving Bourbons” on its right wing. Democrats as a whole were “less a party than a podge” and “a mish-mash of die-hard warring factions.”17
Clare went on too long, and her alliterative invective distracted from valid political points. FDR and Truman were castigated as “troubadours of trouble, crooners of catastrophe,” who could not win elections except “in a climate of crisis.” It followed that they had “a vested interest in depression at home and war abroad.”
What particularly exercised her was their capitulation to Stalin at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. To show how much they liked “old Joe,” she said, they had given him “all Eastern Europe, Manchuria, the Kuriles, North China, [and] coalitions in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.” For this dereliction alone, voters must render President Truman “a gone goose.”
Pre-nomination speeches traditionally expressed no direct support for any candidate. When Clare, to the ire of GOP officials, praised Vandenberg’s work in creating a bipartisan approach to the new threat of Soviet Communism, pandemonium broke loose. The Michigan delegation, seizing on her remarks as an endorsement for their man, crowded the aisles, cheering and converging in a wild demonstration in front of the platform.18
She went on to throw barbs at Jim Crow Southerners who would shrink from going to heaven because it “isn’t 100 per cent American,” and at the “buckle-brained fringe” led by Henry Wallace, consisting of “economic spoonies and political bubbleheads.” Even they were harmless compared with “labor racketeers, native and imported Communists, and foreign agents of the Kremlin.” Her final tirade was hurled at the Democratic Party’s “Pendergast wing run by the same city bosses who gave us Harry Truman in one of their more pixilated moments.” How, she asked, could the President “rule with, and in, such political bedlam?”19
Clare soon discovered that a penalty of television exposure was a mound of abusive letters. She was accused of using “the expressions of a gutter woman,” thereby letting the world know “how deadly the female of the species can be.” One anonymous writer recommended that she be investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for deriding Henry Wallace and “promoting a war between this country and Russia for the benefit of the Pope.”20
Others were favorably impressed. William F. Buckley, Jr., a Yale undergraduate and member of the university’s Political Union, was struck by her “marvelously animated” performance. Lord Beaverbrook cabled from aboard the Queen Mary: “Your speech in Philadelphia is a fine piece of oratory. You have spoken wonderfully well in and out of Congress but this is the high water mark.”21
Governor Dewey of New York, the party’s candidate in 1944, unanimously won renomination over Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. The most votes Vandenberg managed to attract were 62 on the second ballot. Earl Warren, Governor of California, was nominated for Vice President.
The whole extravaganza filled John Billings with mixed emotions. He acknowledged that it was television’s year as far as politics was concerned, just as 1924 had been radio’s transforming moment. Awed by the immediacy of NBC’s camera coverage and commentary, he felt pessimistic about the new medium’s effect on print and picture journalism.22
Clare was interviewed in Ridgefield on July 1 and said again she was through as a politician. The Dewey-Warren ticket was “as good as elected” and did not need her help. Instead, she would go back to Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention later that month, as a reporter for the United Features Syndicate.23
But she could not entirely forsake the limelight nor resist issuing another statement that made headlines and infuriated Truman. Knowing that he and Eleanor Roosevelt did not get along, Clare mischievously suggested he campaign for reelection with the former First Lady as his running mate. It would be highly practical politics, she said, because Mrs. Roosevelt was not only the best-known and -loved woman in the world, but the only Democrat “who could take back from Wallace the Negro vote, the labor vote, the underdog minority vote, and, as a mother of four boys in the service, the pacifist vote.” It was essential for such a ticket to succeed, because its defeat would set back for a hundred years the chance for women “to be truly equal with men in politics.”24
Newsweek quoted this on Monday, July 12, the day the Democrats convened. Philadelphia was still in the throes of a heat wave when Clare checked into her hotel. She occupied a deluxe air-conditioned suite, and for an extra $22 a day got a television set. It would spare her having to go to the stifling Convention Hall to hear the opening night speeches. She invited some friends to watch with her, including Randolph Churchill, who was covering the event for a British periodical, the journalists Stewart and Joseph Alsop, and Laura Z. Hobson.
Laura was now famous for having written the novel Gentleman’s Agreement, the source for last year’s Oscar-winning movie of the same name, starring Gregory Peck. The flickering screen afflicted her with a headache, and she went to the bathroom to look for an aspirin. On her way back, she caught sight of two crystal flasks beside Clare’s bed. They were respectively filled with bright blue capsules of sodium amytal and red Seconals. Laura deduced that religion had not brought her friend peace.25
The chief reason for Clare’s dependency on barbiturates was the febrile nature of her constitution. She had always had abundant physical and mental energy and wanted to keep both working at full capacity. As an overworked editor at Vanity Fair, she had depended on large quantities of cigarettes and brandy. People often commented on the dark semicircles under her eyes and the overall appearance of frailty. She was aware now of some midlife attrition in body and mind and sometimes overdid consumption of alcohol and tobacco, after which she needed sleeping pills. She knew this seesawing was bad, but the illusion of herself as a superwoman had to be fed one way or another.
The Democratic National Convention lacked drama for Clare, since the renomination of Truman was a foregone conclusion. One line that caught press attention was delivered by the Mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Horatio Humphrey. He urged his party to “get out
of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” This reference to Negro emancipation drove furious Southern delegates to the exits. They subsequently chose Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as presidential nominee of a States’ Rights Party known as “the Dixiecrats.”
On July 14, Truman and Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky became their party’s nominees.26
While Clare was in Philadelphia, Harry spent time with his mother at her home in nearby Haverford. Elizabeth Root Luce had liver cancer and shortly after the visit sent her son a nine-page letter inscribed Swan Song.27
“There is some unfinished business between you & me,” it began, “and though it will hurt you to read it & me to write it, yet I must clear it up while I may, for I think the time is short.” She followed with a series of grievances that showed her and her daughter-in-law to be antagonists from the day Clare married Harry and failed to invite her to the wedding.
At their first meeting, she had been in awe of Clare’s braininess and sophistication. But the elegance and hauteur of the younger woman had made her ill at ease in her plain black suit. “She froze the very marrow of my bones.” She was further repelled by Clare’s courtship of reporters and photographers. “Every one who could wield a pen … sprung up to write about her—her beauty, her wit, her brilliance.… They never seemed real to me.” In her opinion, the “lurid and vulgar publicity” surrounding The Women, and press coverage of Clare’s run for Congress, had demeaned Harry’s image as a media giant. Pictures of him dunking doughnuts on the campaign trail had appalled her. “Must the good name of Luce be dragged around like this?”
Recently, she had been bewildered to receive a marital advisory from Clare: I have had such happiness as has been given to few. But now a cloud has arisen no bigger than a woman’s hand. The implication of adultery was plain. “A chill of foreboding came over me. ‘Whose hand?’ I thought. ‘What woman’s hand save your own?’ My son—my son, would that I had died for thee—my son—my son!”
Mrs. Luce could not comprehend Harry as a philanderer, but even this incident had been of slight import compared with the “stunning blow” of Clare’s conversion. She was glad her missionary husband had not lived to see it. Her worst fear was that Harry was doomed to live in “a Roman Catholic atmosphere … open to every art of persuasion and flattery” that such clerics as Fulton J. Sheen might apply. “They will leave not one stone unturned to capture your famous self, or to weaken your own Faith, for which they have not an iota of respect, contemptuously counting it as rank heresy.”28
That summer Clare, along with two other eminent converts, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, was asked by the publisher Harcourt Brace to read and comment on galley proofs of a spiritual autobiography by Thomas Merton, due out that fall. She read it with special interest because Merton was a monk at the Gethsemani monastery, now taking over Mepkin. He was thirty-two, a poet and scholar. His book, The Seven Storey Mountain, gave an astonishingly frank account of his youth in prewar France and England, where, as a student at Cambridge, he had joined in drunken brawls, performed a mock crucifixion, and fathered an illegitimate child. After continuing to carouse for some years at Columbia University, he had begun attending Catholic Mass and was transformed by the peace it brought. In 1938, he had been baptized into the Catholic Church and then entered Gethsemani.29 He now combined monasticism with literary work, dealing with the alienation of contemporary man and the need for a visceral relationship with God.
All three reviewers responded enthusiastically to the memoir. Waugh said it “may well prove of permanent interest in the history of religious experience.” He remarked that Merton’s colloquial style “should prove popular with readers who are repelled by formal theological language.” Greene wrote that it had “pattern and meaning valid for us all.” Clare predicted that readers would turn to The Seven Storey Mountain “a hundred years from now to find out what went on in the heart of man in this cruel century.”30 Sooner than that, the book would sell more than three million copies worldwide. In the words of Time, it “redefined the image of monasticism and made the concept of saintliness accessible to moderns.”31
Intrigued by Merton’s spiritual journey, Clare sent the monk a letter on August 12, the Feast Day of Saint Clare. As if in the confessional, she wrote, “I am in the world more deeply embroiled and entangled with these living dead who hold my wrists, and pour flattery into my still greedy ear, and puff up cushions for me to sit upon.” She also described Mepkin and its “long green enchantment” in winter, acres of azaleas in spring, and “summer’s drugged damp heat … enormous woods whirring with mosquitoes where snakes slip through to the black ooze of the river.” These last two were discouraging enough to potential inhabitants, but another sentence would have repercussions: “Berkeley County, SC is the most illiterate, most disease-ridden county in the USA.”32
As her admiration for Merton increased, she sent him gifts, replacing his old typewriter, and gratifying his thirst for music with a recording of Handel’s Messiah. She envied the dedication and discipline that he had for his double vocations, the cloister and the pen. Though she was free to implement the numerous ideas for articles and books that she claimed to have, her mind went blank whenever she sat at her desk.
Her fears of a permanent block had increased when the Catholic publisher Frank Sheed told her that a number of his authors complained of a creative blackout following conversion. She asked Sister Madeleva, a poet at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana, to pray that she might again write “with the bounce and joy that I once knew.”33
As she settled in for what remained of summer at Sugar Hill, nagging worries about David plagued her. She had not seen him since their frosty parting at the Waldorf curbside the previous fall, but she heard from George Waldo that he had been roving about the South and Southwest. Having let him go with just a car and a token amount of money, she felt uneasy and was now in the middle of a thirty-six-day novena for him, asking God to let her bear all the evils David might have to endure, so he could have a new chance in life.34
Hope of that was interrupted on Tuesday, August 31, by a telephone call from her brother that disturbed and irritated her. He asked for money to pay a life insurance premium, making his Phoenix girlfriend, Mary Jane, the beneficiary. When Clare refused, he asked her to say a prayer for him and hung up.
Later that day, he wrote his “Dear Sister” a note so awkward and truncated as to indicate extreme stress.
It was nice speaking with you this evening even tho you declined to advance the twenty-one [dollar] insurance premium.
During the war years the beneficiary was you.… In good time we shall me [sic] of that I am sure. Love David.
In a strange postscript, he said that he was enclosing a two-page letter to Regina Foote, a flight instructor with whom he had been living for about a month in Burbank, California. The tone of the note was recriminatory, and he asked Clare to use her judgment about forwarding it. Apparently he owed the woman $55 in rent and $75 for a personal loan. Before decamping, he had left her a typewriter in settlement, but she was insisting on cash and had asked a credit agency to collect from him.35
Clare knew her brother hoped she would pay these debts. His letter was postmarked Los Angeles, September 1. Four days later, just as her novena for him ended, word came that Mr. David Franklin Boothe had been reported missing on the West Coast, and was presumed dead.36
23
OUTSIDE THE PALE
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.
—ANDRÉ MALRAUX
After leaving Clare in Manhattan nine months before, David had driven north and checked into the Smith Hotel in White Plains, New York. That night, October 7, 1947, he had written a summary of his recent experiences for George Waldo, with a copy for Clare, “while details are fresh of mind.” He said it was not “a gripe nor crying letter,” but an assessment of why his reunion with the Luces had gone so awry. He felt his sister�
�s mercurial personality had something to do with it, so he began by analyzing her character, abilities, current situation, and prospects.
To me, Clare is a tragic figure. She is not a genius; a clever writer, brilliant & smart, yes, otherwise typed as having intellectual power.… Reading press notices and hearing the plaudits of secondary & fawning characters has taken toll. You realize, George that in this temporal world she has but two and a quarter friends, you, self, & [Isabel] Hill. A husband that hates her & in addition is probably the most disliked (among her acquaintances) female in the USA. Currently is approaching the convent door and glancing heavenward, for a sign not to enter. Here is a life that could produce much & today is motivated by indecision and uncertainty. Why? Simple. Because she can’t make a louse come to heel.1
David’s hatred of Harry had been palpable ever since the divorce lawyer had shown up after Clare’s hysterectomy. He went on to cite the times he had vainly solicited help from her, and quoted one of her excuses: “I have no rich men that love me any more, & besides when you got through with me there was nothing left.”
This last was a reference to his disastrous prewar attempt to be a Wall Street stockbroker, resulting in heavy losses from her Brokaw alimony portfolio. Moving on, David did not excuse his own inadequacies. “I am not productive, not creative, am devoid of friends and most of all my sister regards me as an expatriate.” As he once said of himself, he was a man outside the pale. His hope of starting a business with Clare’s financial help had been “shot to hell” when he quit the conversion program she mapped out for him.
He feigned optimism about his prospects, saying that he had “tried a bit of psychiatry” on himself and concluded that he was still mentally sharp, “despite association with psychopathics the past seven months.”
Price of Fame Page 24
