Half of them were World War II veterans, including a dentist, a tailor, a cook, and others with special skills. Until they could build a chapel and dormitories, they used the main house to dine and worship, and the cottages for sleeping.
On their first full day, they followed their Kentucky routine. At 2:00 A.M., after little more than five hours’ sleep, they rose from their straw mattresses and prayed for the first of seven times. Then, dressed in white tunics and black scapulars, with hoods over their shaved heads, they attended High Mass, meditated, and worked silently at indoor chores or outdoor laboring jobs. At noon, they ate a lunch of soup and vegetables in Clare’s former sitting room, with its huge window overlooking the river. After further menial duties, they attended Vespers and Compline, the last office of the day. Having no radio or television, they read before retiring.
Little was needed to improve the beauty of the formal gardens or wild surroundings. “If this place doesn’t lift a man to God,” the Superior said, “then he’s hopeless, because nothing will.”26
27
CARLOS AND CLARITA
The more human beings can learn about other human beings, this side of nausea, the better.
—T. S. MATTHEWS
As the new year began, Drew Pearson, in his widely syndicated column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” said that “the most significant political battle of 1950 will be fought in Connecticut.” The state GOP was desperate to find candidates to run against the formidable Democratic trio of Chester Bowles for the governorship, and William Benton and Brien McMahon for the United States Senate. Clare remained the party’s first choice to oppose McMahon, but she again declined and in a surprise move suggested her husband. She knew that Harry was bored with his job and talked with him about pursuing a new career in politics. He was guardedly agreeable, but only to run for Benton’s temporary seat. Before making any commitment, however, he and Clare paid their first visit to Mepkin monastery, marking the sixth anniversary of Ann’s death.
Harry was moved by the simplicity and dedication of the men from Gethsemani. “The happy ‘peace of soul’ or whatever of the monks,” he wrote his son Hank, “has to be seen to be believed.”1 Abruptly switching subjects, he asked Hank’s advice regarding the senatorial run. “Businessmen seem to think I am not the kind of fellow to get votes.”2 A college friend had warned him he would dislike working in the capital, and Tom Matthews, Time’s newly appointed editor, passionately insisted he could not be spared.3
For the rest of the month, Harry was undecided. “I shouldn’t have gotten into this,” he told Billings, “I feel miserable.” After a sample poll of voters confirmed he could not win, he let the politicos know he was not available.4
This redoubled the pressure on Clare, especially when Harry told Al Morano that if she won, he intended to take a house in Washington and spend half his time there so she would not feel lonely as she had as a Congresswoman. But on February 13, she gave “definite and final notice” that she would not run.5
That evening, Clare left for a vacation in Mexico in a heavy snowstorm. Since meeting Carlos Chávez in Florence last November, she found herself drawn to him intellectually and physically. In addition to his other distinctions, Carlos was founding director of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, and had sent her some handsome books on the modern Mexican art renaissance that affected her with a sense of a country “throbbing with artistic vitality and even genius.”6 She cabled coquettishly that she was “looking forward to art gallery visit with Uffizi guide.” He wired back that the guide would do more than that. He would be at the airport to greet her.7
Looking down as the plane approached the Central American isthmus, Clare made notes for a Vogue article about her travels. The topography of Mexico seemed to rise “tawny-flanked from the sea, like a vast sprawling lion, lying on a lush carpet of verdant banana and coconut palms and golden henequen, spread between the Pacific and the Gulf.” The hot winds of the Sierra Madre, a double mountain range stretching from the United States border to Guatemala, visibly kept the air dry and dusty, and sparse rains made the earth look “as if it had sweated.”8
Meeting her as promised, Carlos took Clare to the Hotel Del Prado in Mexico City. He had arranged a Valentine’s Day gathering of friends to welcome her that evening, at the house he shared with his wife of some twenty-eight years, Otilia Ortiz, a classical pianist, and their three children.9
At sunset Clare set off for the party. Her limousine cruised northwestward past elegant villas that reflected French and Spanish influences and concrete public buildings aping Mayan pyramids. Climbing the hills—lomas—that overlooked the capital, they entered the exclusive outreach of Chapultepec. Designed and landscaped by norteamericanos in the 1920s, it consisted of spacious houses and gardens and a large Olmsted-like park. Soon they arrived at Avenida Pirineos 775, the Chávez villa.
Carlos had assembled an impressive roster of guests, at least three of whom Clare already knew. Seeing the artist Miguel Covarrubias brought back memories of the marvelous caricatures he had done for her at Vanity Fair, including one of her as an angel hovering over FDR’s first inauguration. The others were the muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. In 1938, Clare had bought for $600 Between the Curtains, a Kahlo self-portrait depicting Frida in Spanish colonial dress, holding a piece of paper that dedicated the painting to her lover and fellow Communist, Leon Trotsky.10
Carlos Chávez, 1950 (illustration credit 27.1)
Carlos invited Clare to visit his Pacific retreat in Acapulco, after she completed a three-day sightseeing tour for her article. Wanting to absorb as much as possible of Mexico’s history, culture, and folklore, she traveled east to Chichén Itzá in Yucatán and noted the impressive size of the Mayan Temple of the Warriors, with its hundreds of headless columns, and the pyramid of Kukulcan, a profusion of opalescent blocks stretching up to the “burning turquoise sky.”11
In arid hamlets, she saw people stacking their dead on shelves to dry like prunes in the sun. Occasionally, Clare noted, they took them down to pat them affectionately. She interpreted the constant laughter of the villagers as a defense against “the underlying harshness and sombreness of life.”
On Saturday, February 18, Clare reunited with Carlos in what he called his “high mirador” with spectacular views of the Pacific.12 Over the next forty-eight hours, she learned more about him. Though his manner was quiet and dignified, he had a raw vitality and such an appetite for spending long hours writing music that he was known as a “work machine.” But he was also a bon vivant, with an appreciation for society, good food, wines, and beautiful women.13
As they talked of life and work, she sensed that Carlos was not entirely satisfied with his career. Two years before, he had quit as principal conductor of the Mexican Symphony, mostly because he wanted more time to compose and to perform with major American and European ensembles. But his other jobs as director of the National Conservatory of Music and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature took time from creative work. His compositions were respected by international peers such as Copland and Stravinsky, and his excellence as a conductor was universally acknowledged.
Clare, knowing little about his vocation, asked him how he composed. Without being too technical, Carlos said that he liked to use “a full palette” of orchestral sound.14 As he described and demonstrated his native sources of inspiration, she began to understand how ingeniously he allied ancient Mexican traditions with progressive musical modernism.
Impressed by his passionate artistic temperament, fluency in languages, frankness, and decency, Clare found herself falling in love. That Chávez was agnostic with no metaphysical philosophy, she saw as a challenge to her powers of persuasion. She was relieved to discover that though politically liberal, he was not a Communist like the Riveras.15
That night Carlos took “Clarita,” as he now affectionately addressed her, onto his rooftop, which seemed to touch the heavens. He turned oceanward, and she h
ad a chance to admire and later rhapsodize about his profile silhouetted against the dark sky and stars, “your black hair tangled in them, your solid shoulders wearing the midnight-blue like [a] royal mantle.…”16
As the hours slipped by, they fantasized about what could unite them, were they not tied to other people and places. This did not prevent them from talking, against sense, of running off together. But eventually Carlos the realist brushed aside such vain speculation. “We cannot marry. We cannot be lovers.”17
Clare the pragmatist proposed that they could at least continue seeing each other and bring into being a permanent musical creation that would bind them in perpetuity. She tore the end off a page of newspaper and scrawled in the margin: “I want to commission a piano concerto for Ann Clare Brokaw, the most beautiful and sad and gay thing you ever wrote that has her lovely face and my broken heart in it.” She dated it and signed it with her full name. In another margin, Chávez wrote, “Yes I would love to write a piano concerto for you,” and signed it, “Carlos.”18
No fee was discussed. He was too polite—or too infatuated—to raise the subject of money just yet.
Attending Sunday Eucharist in Acapulco’s ancient cathedral, Clare noticed how especially devout the packed congregation seemed to be, and wondered why the church hierarchy had not supported them in their revolution to overthrow the autocratic regime of Porfirio Díaz. “Had they come to the defense of the masses twenty years ago,” she wrote Father Thibodeau, “there would be no Communism [in Mexico] today.” Though the country’s extreme leftists were anti-clerical, they were “not essentially anti-religious.” She saw their politics as a justified reaction to American economic imperialism. “We talk high ideals about human rights coming before property rights, but our government backs, still, all the millionaires and exploiters of the Mexicans who bought their human rights from the 19th century dictators and imperialists. And the people resent that, properly, I think.”19
Clare commissions a musical memorial to her daughter, February 18, 1950 (illustration credit 27.2)
Summing up America’s southern neighbor for Vogue, she admitted being stimulated by the “exciting and challenging blend of Catholicism of the passionate Spanish variety, and Marxism, and Capitalism, and Indian mysticism.… Time and reflection will tell whether I like it better than Italy.”20
Bidding Carlos good-bye, she invited him to visit her in America soon. This prospect made parting less of a wrench. On February 20, she headed home, night-stopping in Mérida. The next morning was Shrove Tuesday, and Mardi Gras was under way in the small, hot town. Truckloads of painted children happily scattered confetti. Clare, in contrast, was in a tumult of emotions that precluded joy. How could she explain her latest moral lapse to Father Thibodeau?
Early on Ash Wednesday, she attended Mass and found herself passionately saying the liturgical words “Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam” (Save me, O God, for the waters have come in even unto my soul). She was humbled by a vision she sometimes had of the heart’s corruption. As the priest marked her forehead with the penitential ashes, he said, “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris” (Remember, man, that you are dust, and shall to dust return).21
Lingering in the church after Communion, Clare prayed before a black statue of Christ. “For you, my love, and for myself,” she wrote Carlos, “that you would be given the grace and the will to cut free from the tentacles of that modern monster, mediocrity, who comes so often these days, disfigured as some form of social service.…” She understood his frustration over extracurricular duties, and urged him to have the courage to “be what you are.” When he composed great music, he attacked “the disorder which afflicts us at the roots.” She advised him to leave organization to second-rate talents.
Writing from the Colonial Hotel in Miami, she lamented how fast their days together had gone. She consoled herself with the thought that “love’s intensity gives time some of the quality of eternity.” In vivid memory, she saw his gestures, heard the inflections in his voice, and brooded over everything he had said.
“We cannot marry. We cannot be lovers.” That is true. Not only do I agree I insist. It must be this way. There is peace, of course, in accepting what is right.… That’s the way it is, and unless God (who else?) wills it otherwise, it will, all our lives stay that way. And yet do I love thee. Je t’aime, tu sais.
You know how much I want to see you again. And yet, if, I never do—je t’aime!22
Harry, meanwhile, awaited Clare at Yeamans Hall Club in Charleston, where, as often when he felt solitary, he wrote to a woman his wife knew nothing of.
He had met Mary Bancroft four years before during a business trip to Europe. She was now forty-six, the twice-divorced Boston Brahmin daughter of the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Though she worked in Geneva for the CIA, she periodically visited New York, and always managed to spend some close but chaste time with Harry. Politically, she was far to the left of him, but they enjoyed arguing issues, and like Jean Dalrymple, she had become an indispensable confidante.
Harry’s twelve-page letter said that he was disappointed that after the conviction of Alger Hiss she had joined “the choir of sentimental unreason headed by Eleanor Roosevelt.” Why did she not get exercised instead by the brutalities of the Communist doctrine Hiss espoused?
Then, sounding lost, he asked Mary to tell him what to do with the rest of his life. She had scoffed at his flirtation with a senatorial run that he saw as his last chance to satisfy a craving for public office. He complained that she had also cruelly accused him of editorial bias in his magazines, but he still had warm feelings for her.23
When Clare joined him for a three-week vacation at the club, she wrote a letter to Father Thibodeau, bemoaning her lack of spiritual growth. She confessed that after all her aspirations to purity over the past four years, she had succumbed to a magnetic artist and free thinker, and was overcome with guilt. She lacked the evenness of temper that sanctity demanded. By not showing enough of either in Mexico, she said, she had failed to convert any skeptics and atheists, although she had made some impression on the iconoclastic Communist Diego Rivera, “and a great one” on Carlos. Everything had seemed to conspire “to make me feel very much like a woman, and not at all like an apostle. I was—and am—badly shaken.”
She dreaded having to start writing again, even though she had plenty of ideas. “Why I don’t just sit down and BEGIN I just do not know,” she wrote. “It is a major and painful mystery. I suspect it has something to do … with a lack of incentive … I am no longer interested in making money or achieving fame.” 24
Though often conflicted in choosing between seclusion and society, chastity and sexuality, faith and agnosticism, Clare had no lack of industry or vitality. To the contrary, she had an unquenchable desire to go everywhere, see everything and everyone of substance, probe the depth of psyches, and understand the consequences of choices and actions. Writing plays involved the re-creation of the milieus, motives, and emotions of imaginary characters. That meant limiting her own extramural activities. The isolation necessary to perfect her craft required a discipline she could no longer summon at will.
Even a recent glowing reappraisal of her talent as a playwright failed to break her block. It came in a book, The American Drama Since 1930, by Joseph Mersand, an academic critic. He allotted a chapter to Clare Boothe, giving her equal prominence with George S. Kaufman and Clifford Odets. Praising her wit, clarity, judgment, and brilliance, Mersand wrote that she was a social satirist fearless enough “to admit her hatreds.” This willingness to offend came from not having to depend on box office income “for her daily sustenance.”
He cited the critic Richard Lockridge’s ranking of Clare as one of eight leading contemporary playwrights, and quoted Burns Mantle’s praise of The Women: “the most brilliant social satire of its time.” Mersand went further, comparing the gossip of the bridge-playing socialites in the first scene of that p
lay to the village small talk in Jane Austen’s novels. Both writers “make the commonplace interesting.”25
At least Clare could still produce travel prose. When she delivered “Thoughts on Mexico” to Vogue for its August issue, Maggie Case said it was the best article the magazine had received in years.26
Carlos Chávez appeared in New York soon after the Luces returned from Charleston in mid-March. Clare took pains to treat him to the best of Manhattan. On Monday the twentieth she took him, Maggie, and Tiffany’s design director Van Day Truex to dinner at Le Pavillon, moving on to the latest Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, South Pacific. The following evening, Maggie held a cocktail party for Chávez, also inviting Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Rubinstein, Aaron Copland, Ezio Pinza, Rudolf Bing, Sol Hurok, and Gian Carlo Menotti, whose opera The Consul was playing to acclaim in New York. Harry and Clare honored Carlos further at a black-tie dinner in their Waldorf suite, to meet such friends as Irene Selznick and the former British spymaster Sir William Wiseman. On Wednesday night they attended Menotti’s opera, and the following day had lunch with Nelson Rockefeller at Louis XIV. That night they saw Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and on Friday afternoon Carlos and Clarita drove to Sugar Hill for the weekend.27
There, they walked around the still-wintry estate and had long talks in the plush sitting room, its mantelpiece still dominated by Gerald Brockhurst’s portrait of Clare in her green mandarin tunic. They again examined their relationship. Carlos said that before becoming inextricably linked, they must face the practical questions of their marriages and separate nationalities and occupations. “To act in time,” as Clare grandiloquently put it, “and to believe that the consequences will reverberate in eternity!”28 Whether only she would suffer from those cosmic shudderings went unsaid.
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