Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Four days later, the most distinguished literary stylist to be published in Life arrived in New York, and was driven to the Plaza Hotel for dinner with the Luces. Clare had managed to enlist Evelyn Waugh to write an article on Catholicism.4 Waugh assessed the evening in a letter to his wife, Laura.

  It was not a great success; caviar, dover soles flown in that day from England etc., but neither aware of what they ate or drank. He handsome, well-mannered, well-dressed, densely stupid. She exquisitely elegant, clever as a monkey, self-centered. She came back with me and sat in my suite talking about religion for a long time but complained later that I had no heart.5

  Clare rumbled Waugh’s determination to exploit and intimidate Harry by ordering the most expensive items on the menu and wine list. “I ate very little,” she recalled of the four or five courses served, “to show up his vulgarity.”6

  Though keen to become a fixture on the Catholic lecture circuit, Clare hesitated to address the National Council of Catholic Women in New Orleans, when she heard that four Negro delegates had been denied seats on the grounds that it was state policy. “All I can say is—it’s a lousy law,” she told reporters.7

  Her speech sounded surprisingly anti-feminist. She warned that women who married for security without fulfilling the obligations of “motherhood, wifehood and domesticity … might pay the penalties of frustration, neurosis and physical disorders.” Those who went further, as she had, and pursued disparate careers that took them away from home should brace for “loneliness and fatigue.”8

  At her own local church, Saint Mary’s in Ridgefield, Connecticut, she gave a speech entitled “The Dramatic Perfection of the Mass,” a topic that suited her own theatricality. Appearing at Maryland’s College of Notre Dame, she was introduced by Monsignor Sheen. “Woman was just a side issue at the time of creation,” he joked. “Tonight she will be the whole show.” The speech that followed was a postconversion mix of religion and secular affairs, “Christianity in the Atomic Age.”9

  Clare again invoked the prime ritual of Catholicism on November 13, at Convent of the Sacred Heart in Overbrook, Pennsylvania, in an address entitled “The Playwright in the Pews.” As soon as the doors opened, an enthusiastic crowd stormed in and ticket sellers were overwhelmed. At 8:30 P.M., the stage curtains parted and Clare, in a dark blue dress, stepped forward to thunderous applause.

  In the audience was a forty-year-old lapsed Catholic named Constance O’Hara. A sometime playwright herself, she was curious to see how the author of The Women performed in her new role as inspirational orator. She was expecting to scoff but was disarmed by Clare’s seemingly surprised smile, as though the wild reception was unexpected. O’Hara’s next impression was of a “brittle blonde with a thousand-voltage charm,” yet the eyes in the exquisite face were sad.

  Clare spoke for two hours. O’Hara noticed how she moved about the platform with the ease of a dancer, gesturing gracefully. At times she resorted to humor, captivating the audience with charm and sincerity. She remarked on how rapt congregations were at Mass. This was especially true during Communion. But after the Benediction, the dramatist in her always felt a need for catharsis. “I want to hear the crash of cymbals.”

  The audience gave her a standing ovation. Nuns escorted Clare to a neighboring parlor for a reception. Schoolboys clamored for autographs, clergymen bowed over her hand, old ladies offered Saint Anthony’s medals. They had read about a $65,000 burglary in her apartment the week before and said the image would protect her remaining jewelry.

  Waiting in line, O’Hara noted that Clare’s forceful stage presence had disappeared. There were bruises of exhaustion under her eyes, and her extended hand looked frail. She spoke in a gentle voice, but her demeanor changed when O’Hara stood before her. Apparently, she sensed the proximity of an apostate as well as a disillusioned competitor.

  A look that was steel and flame bored into me.… This woman was capable of unleashed power and fury. I tried to stare her down, interested in what I had aroused. I sauntered from the room, feeling that stare going through to my spine.10

  In January 1949, Thomas Merton felt that Clare was struggling too hard to be a good Catholic. He suggested she try to do nothing for a while and learn “to submit completely to the idea of loving God.”11 An opportunity to follow the monk’s advice came when Lord Beaverbrook invited the Luces for an extended stay at Cromarty House, his winter mansion in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

  They arrived there on January 13, and Clare quickly established a vacation routine. She rose early and rode in Max’s car to daily Mass at a local church. Harry began to accompany her, and a fellow worshipper noticed that he made all the correct liturgical responses.12 For the next three weeks, husband and wife swam and walked on the beach, acquiring deep tans, something they had rarely done since their Cuban honeymoon in 1936. They also ate heartily, and Clare gained seven needed pounds.13

  Beaverbrook’s other guests included his twenty-year-old, peachy-complexioned granddaughter Lady Jeanne Campbell. At one dinner, attended by John B. McNair, the Prime Minister of New Brunswick, Clare monologued so relentlessly that Max was reminded of Ernest Bevin holding the floor at Churchill’s wartime cabinet meetings. McNair was nevertheless captivated and invited her to fish in his province, promising a guard of honor when she arrived.14

  Clare was disinclined to do any writing in Jamaica, having heard that Bethlehem, the screenplay left so confidently with Darryl Zanuck a year before, had been extensively restructured by Oscar Millard and others. It was now in production under a new title, Come to the Stable, and the only credit she could expect was for her original story.15

  More discouragement came in a cable, reporting that Fox had declined her latest script, Saint Anthony and the Gambler.16 It was a spiritual, antic melodrama about a New York gambler finding a sweepstakes ticket in front of a statue of Saint Anthony, tracking down the ticket’s owner, an Italian Countess, and being hired as her butler in reward. Among other improbable incidents, a young girl accidentally swallowed the ticket, and the gambler discovered he had a twin brother who was a Catholic priest.

  This farce demonstrated that Clare had lost her gift for plausible comedy. Sam Engel sent copies of the script to Fox colleagues, only to report that it had elicited “a unanimous and resounding NO from everyone.”17

  Back in New York, Clare took on a new confessor and spiritual adviser recommended by Monsignor Sheen. He was Wilfrid Thibodeau, a forty-five-year-old Frenchman and a member of the Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament, based at the fashionable church of St. Jean Baptiste on Lexington Avenue. With his wiry hair above a strong face, he looked like an ascetic. There was a sternness about him that signaled he had no time for nonsense.18 Yet his large eyes were full of compassion, and he proved to be so understanding and sympathetic in the confessional that Clare was soon baring her soul to him in letters as well.

  She wrote Thibodeau on February 16 to say she had experienced what she had prayed for since her conversion: a religious rapture. It had come the minute she opened her eyes that morning. As she lay in bed alone, enjoying the benign emotions enveloping her, life suddenly seemed as simple and pure as it had when she was eighteen. “I feel young in my soul, and eager to walk in the sunshine with my Beloved … if I should have the good fortune to meet Him.”19

  But the serenity was fleeting. By the end of the month, Clare was telling Father Thibodeau that the city looked bleak, its dark streets and unlit rooms conjuring “spoiled and wasted” days of her youth.

  Father Wilfrid Thibodeau, c. 1949 (illustration credit 25.1)

  Gazing west from her twenty-eighth-floor apartment at the neon glow of Broadway, she remembered the first night of The Women and felt wistful for “the lights of fame that no longer spell my name.” The only theater connection she had at the moment was an off-Broadway one-acter by Gertrude Stein called Yes Is for a Very Young Man. One of its central characters, a woman living in Vichy France, was said to be based on her.

  Depressive image
s proliferated in letters to Thibodeau. She told him that she felt alone as if in a jungle. Even familiar sounds such as laughter, the ring of a telephone, or the rattle of a cocktail shaker seemed as menacing “as the snarl of wild beasts.”20 A climax to her gloom came one day during Lent, as she knelt in church. Unholy thoughts buzzed in her head like wasps, leaving her confused and discouraged. She lit a candle for David and, emerging into daylight, wanted to cover her face. “It felt like a taut mask that didn’t quite fit around the eyes. I had been praying so hard my face felt naked!”

  Even in her despair, she had flashes of caustic humor. Reluctantly preparing an address to the National Conference of Christians and Jews in Washington, she groused to Thibodeau, “The whole thing is so phony. Some Christian always gets up and coos at the audience, ‘And after all, we must never forget Jesus was a Jew,’ and I think, rather rudely, ‘You might add, only on His mother’s side.’ ”21

  She returned to Sugar Hill before the onset of spring and found nothing in bloom. Wandering through the house, she no longer got pleasure from its jades, porcelains, silver ornaments, and rare books. There was a time, she wrote Father Thibodeau, when she had tried to compensate for the ebb of Harry’s desire by amassing objects, desperate to believe that “gleaming furniture or oriental splendor helped to prolong love.” Now, excess felt like a burden to be shed, in order to experience “the calm of surrender, and the passion of prayer.”22

  Her closeness to Thibodeau grew as a result of these confidences. Within weeks she was addressing him as “my darling Father T” and insisting he call her Clare, because “Mrs. Luce” reminded her “of most of the things that make me sad.”23

  No matter how nurturing her confessor was, he could not protect Clare from the sycophantic strangers whom she wowed in the briefest encounters. It took a fellow convert to point out that her compulsion to charm people indiscriminately was like “patting strange dogs on the head.” Before long they wanted to jump into her lap with muddy paws.24 But the art of seduction—called vamping in her mother’s time—was genetic, inherited from both parents. It was a drive more for devotion than sex. She wanted to conquer all comers, even though her interest in them could be short-lived.

  As her fame as a Catholic speaker grew, a number of women became acolytes, their admiration bordering on the erotic. A prospective devotee of this ilk was Constance O’Hara, who gushed over her as a personality and performer in a letter to their mutual friend Brock Pemberton. The producer forwarded it to Clare. Intrigued by its candor and perceptiveness, she invited O’Hara to meet her in Philadelphia, where she was to participate in a forum in late March.

  In advance, she read O’Hara’s play, Years of the Locusts, about nuns offering succor to the wounded during the Battle of Ypres in World War I. It had been produced in 1938 at the prestigious Birmingham Repertory Theatre and praised by its renowned director, Sir Barry Jackson, as “the most beautiful—and most satisfying” play he had ever put on. O’Hara had for a while thereafter been dubbed a “successor” to the author of The Women.25

  But then her career had stalled, leading to a suicide attempt. She had turned to journalism and lectures, yet continued to dream of wealth and fame as a playwright. Clare personified this ambition. “Mentally,” O’Hara wrote in her autobiography, Heaven Was Not Enough, “I had pitted myself against this woman who had everything I had ever wanted.”26 She felt they had similar gifts, but “she wants more from them than they are able to give. I have had less than they deserve.”27

  At 9:00 A.M. on March 24, she found Clare in a luxury suite at the Warwick Hotel, wearing an austere gray dress and smiling. The smile, she surmised, was that of a sophisticate trying to put an inferior at ease. Over a formal breakfast, Clare talked about being overextended. Constance had a twinge of sympathy for her as someone seeking her identity in too many disparate spheres.

  Clare, for her part, perceived O’Hara as a lapsed communicant, ripe for recapture, and hard up.28 “I know what you’re going to do,” she said. “You’re coming with me to Sheed & Ward.” She had just become an editorial board member of the London-based religious publishing house. It had been founded in 1926 by Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, a husband-and-wife team eminent on both sides of the Atlantic as proponents of progressive Catholicism. They had scored a public relations coup by adding Clare to their directorate, and while flattered by their desire to publish anything she cared to write, she did not want to be burdened with more work for them. She accordingly offered Constance $1,500 to dramatize the Catechism for an audiovisual project that she herself had no desire to tackle. The cash-strapped journalist was delighted.

  Breakfast over, she pushed me down in a big red chair by the fireplace, and curled up opposite like a college girl. The telephone shrilled. Bellboys knocked and handed in telegrams and letters. Flowers came. She glanced briefly at the cards, the floral tributes. I loved the symbols of success so intensely that my Achilles heel was throbbing.…

  She pushed me down in the chair each time I attempted to leave. We talked about many things, of dramatizing Bernanos’s Joy together, of her book Europe in the Spring, which she defended against my jeers.

  “Don’t make fun of that book. It’s as sound as the day I wrote it.”29

  Four hours passed, Clare confiding many of her life’s difficulties and disappointments. Constance, infatuated, was left with the impression the convert had discovered that “bitterness is based on nothing, sorrow on something.”30

  By her forty-sixth birthday, Clare noticed her hair was thinning at the temples. At that time she had a dream, in which all her teeth crumbled and fell out “like bits of corn.”31 Alarmed, and starved for companionship, she invited Constance O’Hara (already in New York, working on the audiovisual project for Sheed & Ward) to join her for Mass.

  Kneeling beside her, Constance felt the stares of fellow congregants.

  I realized that Clare Luce’s personality was dominant, dwarfing those around her. As a companion she was fascinating and exhausting. There was no peace with her, no quiet moment. And yet there was that sweetness in her nature that made it easy to become excessive, even to worship a little … out of her sight you missed her; granted that she was disturbing and possessive and impossible, you looked toward the silent telephone and wanted to hear that voice.32

  And hear it Constance did, most often around midnight. They talked into the small hours about the Council of Trent, St. John the Baptist, and the neglected Spanish dramatist Jacinto Benavente.33 During Holy Week, they attended daily Mass together. At breakfast one morning, Clare was withdrawn.

  “We will all die alone in hotel rooms in twenty years or so,” she said, “or in some hospital with a paid nurse beside us, because we have no children.”

  Constance tried to temper her morbidity. “You won’t get lost,” she said. “For the first time in your life you’ve found something big enough to hold you.”34

  On Maundy Thursday, Clare hired Constance as a temporary assistant to handle mail. While the younger woman drafted messages and telegrams and cables, she sat with her feet up, absorbed in Robert Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins.

  “You’d think from this book,” she said with some irritation, “Roosevelt won the war single-handed. I guess none of the rest of us ever did a thing.”

  Constance was soon exhausted, since Clare never let secretaries relax for a second. One night in her sparse hotel room, Father Sheen telephoned.

  “How do you like Clare?”

  “I like her very much, and it scares me to death.”

  Over the line, she sensed his embarrassment at her frankness.

  “Ah! She’s marvelous.”

  Constance felt duped, realizing that Clare was using Sheed & Ward, daily Masses, secretarial intimacy, and now Sheen in a concerted effort to round her up as a lost sheep. This was confirmed by a call from her ensnarer, saying that the Monsignor had reserved scarce places for them at the Good Friday service he would conduct in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
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br />   The following day, Constance was disconcerted to find herself seated some distance behind Clare, who was seated with Harry. Did Clare’s crusade now include her famously Presbyterian husband?

  Over the weekend, Clare kept up her inducements. On Easter eve, she gave Constance a luxurious traveling case and took her to meet Father Thibodeau in a fortresslike building attached to St. Jean Baptiste. When he appeared, she peremptorily ordered her, “Go to confession.”

  Constance was unprepared, but followed the priest. She had difficulty enumerating her sins, but he was so profound in advising her how to atone that she felt “as if the struggle for faith were over instead of just beginning.”35

  Clare rewarded her with an invitation to the seven o’clock low Mass conducted on Easter Day by Sheen in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s. Breakfast at the Waldorf with the Monsignor would follow. “I’m always alone on holidays. Harry goes to visit his children.… We’ll have some fun.”

  Thrilled, Constance sent Clare two of the most ostentatious orchids she could find. Next morning at the service, she decided to take Communion. Afterward, they joined worshippers flocking around Sheen, and Constance checked with Clare about their rendezvous at the Waldorf.

  “We’re not meeting,” Clare said airily. “Harry’s going with me to [High] Mass. Isn’t it terrific?”

  Overhearing, Sheen wheeled around. His face was taut with anger, and his eyes turned from blue to piercing coal black. Clare put on a naughty-girl pout, while Constance started for the door. A sympathetic Sheen called her back and proffered a card for the same service Clare and Harry would be attending. It was to be celebrated by Cardinal Spellman.

  Leaving the cathedral later, Constance caught sight of the Luces on the other side of Fiftieth Street with Elsa Maxwell between them. Clare wore a sable coat, and Elsa’s outfit was ornamented with a pair of orchids. Looking more closely, Constance recognized them as her Easter gift to Clare.36