A few days later, Chávez left for a professional engagement in Los Angeles. Clare telegraphed his train, slightly misquoting lines from Shelley: Music when soft voices die vibrates in the memory; / And odours when sweet violets sicken / Live within the sense they quicken.29
She followed up with a long love letter to “My darling Carlos.” He obsessed her like no one since Julian Simpson, perhaps because it was he and not she who was circumscribing their intimacy.
Well, if lovelessness is a foretaste of Hell, then surely being loved and loving (I speak of the heart, you understand?) is a foretaste of Heaven. I contemplate your gentleness, and tenderness, and goodness, and suddenly I am suffused with a desire to bring all that is real and good in me to your service, and all that, then, floods my being with sweetness I have never before needed to describe! For it is now the joy of loving that I have come to know. And that is something quite different (though not always unrelated!) to the pleasure of desiring or being desired! It is a blessed thing to have known you, Carlos. You are not really like any other man.… It is not that you are more intelligent, more candid, more sensitive, or more or less anything, than other men. It is simply that you are different.
With his mix of Spanish and Indian blood, he even looked unlike anyone she knew intimately. He seemed nearer to her “than anyone else in the world,” even though he was now far away.
I had thought I would be much more unhappy than I am when you left … I daresay that is because I have accepted in my will the fact that insofar as anything you or I can do, our problem is insoluble.… Shall I complain that I cannot have everything as I would wish, when I have so much more than I had dreamed of?30
To learn more of the classical repertory, Clare started attending musical events. One Carnegie Hall concert featured Toscanini conducting Debussy, and she shared the experience with Chávez.
I have always felt that one’s appreciation of art is inescapably tangled up with one’s appreciation of the prestige of the artist … so she [sic] is not sure whether it was good or not.… I awfully much wanted you to be there last night … conducting La Mer … because it was music that spoke to my deepest heart, and … how nice if you were speaking to that, in a manner at once so public and private—as thru a symphony orchestra!31
She dreamed of Carlos appearing with New York’s great Philharmonic Orchestra, gaining prestige for herself as his local patron. One day, perhaps, he would conduct “her” concerto for Ann in Carnegie Hall. To that end, she donated a large check to the New York Philharmonic Society. In consequence, she was unanimously elected to its board as a trustee and director. On April 5, hoping to secure Carlos a guest conductor post with the orchestra, she had a three-hour talk with its manager, Arthur Judson, ostensibly to find out “what the real problems of the Philharmonic are.”32
When she referred to Chávez as an underused performer, Judson agreed that he had great talent. But he had the reputation of never wanting to be away from Mexico for long. In fact, Carlos had once turned down the music directorship of the Houston Symphony. “He wants periodic engagements,” Judson said. The best musicians were always in demand, and those who were too “whimsical” about where and when they appeared were not so likely to be courted.33
This reminded Clare that when she had discussed more northern exposure with Carlos, he had been evasive, saying any offer must fit in with his Mexican commitments. But when he later announced that he was contemplating a European tour, she objected to the idea “just now!” If he was to travel anywhere, better for it to be in her orbit. Flattering herself that she was his creative equal, Clare added, “Artistic people (like you and me) … are sometimes more obscure and difficult than we think.”34
On April 26, she spent the whole afternoon with the producer and orchestra executive Bruno Zirato. Without any nudging, he said that Carlos Chávez was “one of the best conductors in the world,” and would be his choice for director of the Detroit Symphony. Reporting to Carlos, she wrote that a “Jewish” donor in Michigan was lobbying for Leonard Bernstein. “But Zirato and Luce, they want Chávez. And Chávez, I suppose, will do exactly as he pleases, no matter who wants what.”35
Clare’s meeting with Zirato was not entirely altruistic. In the excitement of having bewitched a composer, she had sent Carlos the synopsis of a ballet, Saint Francis in Manhattan, expressing the hope that he would collaborate with her on it. He had composed music for at least five ballets, including one for Martha Graham, but did not immediately reply. Now Zirato offered an avenue to the greatest ballet composer alive, his close friend Igor Stravinsky. The Russian had money worries, having spent two and a half years writing an opera, The Rake’s Progress, and failing to find anyone with the $100,000 needed to mount it. Clare volunteered to look for an investor. Zirato conveyed her offer to Stravinsky, who promptly appeared at her apartment.
“I absolutely adored him,” she wrote Carlos. “I know you do not like me to mention such matters. But it was wonderful and consoling to find that this great musician is also an exceedingly devout and prayin’ man. And very well read too. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, my favorite European prophets.” Pointedly, she let on that Stravinsky had asked to see Saint Francis and had recommended Vittorio Rieti, composer of scores for Le Bal (1929) and La Sonnambula (1946), to write the music.36
Rieti soon telephoned to say he would take a look at her synopsis. Clare informed Carlos that she guessed his silence meant that the ballet’s theme, the appearance of a saint in the fleshpot of Gotham, might have put him off, being more sacred than profane. But she hoped that his respect for her intellect would persuade him of its merits.37
In pursuit of her new identity as a patron of the arts, Clare had lunch on April 28 at Le Pavillon with Salvador Dalí. She wanted him to design a stained-glass window for a chapel she had decided to build in memory of Ann Brokaw. She was surprised to see that he had lost his upcurling, waxed mustache, which she had always disliked. He had once told her that if he ever converted to Catholicism, he intended to shave it off. Now, she wrote Carlos, the surrealist was transformed into “un trés beau garçon without that silly antennae.”
He insisted that he had worn it because it helped him to get ideas out of the air, as a butterfly does from its feelers! And that now he is a Catholic again, he no longer needs reach for ideas: he has enough for the rest of his lifetime.38
Stimulated, she began to buy art again, acquiring from the Knoedler gallery a “rather violent” painting of the ongoing eruption of the volcano Parícutin in Michoacán. It was the work of Rufino Tamayo, an esteemed Mexican Indian and friend of Chávez. “Did I ever tell you,” she wrote the latter, “that the only thing I ever really wanted to be besides a writer was a vulcanologist?”39
Trying to impress him with a list of other famous people she had seen recently, even though she knew he disliked name-dropping, she went on, “I realize how strange and remote and even distasteful many of my interests and preoccupations are to you.”40 But Carlos saw her incessant traveling, socializing, shopping, and starting new writing projects before finishing those under way as proof of a pathological need for change and stimulation. Clare’s fear of failing was in itself a failure, a reluctance to wrestle vestigial ideas into a coherent whole, and to concentrate on the fundamentals necessary for a satisfying existence. He voiced his polite disapproval of activities that sapped her essence and vitality. “I see from your letters how tremendously hectic schedules you impose on yourself. Please make stations; isolate yourself; contemplate. It is only this way how you can really live, and not feel yourself a stranger from me.”41
But she remained constitutionally unable to stay still for long. Thinking of ways to reunite with Carlos, she sent him details of her forthcoming speaking destinations, should he be in or near one of them. And he might keep in mind that Harry would soon leave for another lengthy business trip. “I wish you could be in New York at that time.… It’s very strange, you know, how much I miss you.”42
Clare�
�s relationship with Carlos seems to have given her a new sensitivity toward sound and lighting effects enhanced by music and dance. Her synopsis of Saint Francis in Manhattan begins promisingly, indicating that she still had enough imagination to embrace a fresh way of writing for the stage.
The opening scene is set just before dawn in the square opposite the front of the Plaza Hotel. A small group of young people emerge, from a debutante ball, and whistle for taxis.
A drunken bum lurches out of the black pool around the fountain, into the light. He collides with two young men in tails. They, too, are swizzled. But they are young and hard: they shove him so rudely he falls by a stone bench, rolls under it, and lies there still. A woman with a thin red scarf about her throat, and a ratty fox fur, whisks out of the dark and accosts the young men. But she is cut out by a debutante who is just as willing … much prettier, and costs nothing. They hail one of the old coachmen who sleep in their victorias at the entrance to the park, hoping to pick up romantic fares for the buggy rides from midnight to dawn.
The dance orchestra gives its final raucous blare, but in the ballroom, someone, who can’t bear for the party to be over, begins to play the piano with harsh frenzy. Alone now in the plaza, the woman with the red scarf goes to the bench, starts back in disgust as she stumbles over the fallen bum. He rolls out of the way.43
At this point Clare’s inspiration begins to flag. The prostitute, for no apparent reason, decides to commit suicide. Her initial impulse is to strangle herself with the red scarf, but then she whips out a pair of scissors “as though she would cut the throat she dares not choke.” Just as inexplicably, she loses her death wish. Dawn comes, illuminating “a slim, brown figure of a monk,” kneeling by the fountain. He rises with upreached arms to the sound of an offstage chorus singing “The Canticle of St. Francis.”
Praised be Thou, my Lord, with all Thy creatures,
Especially the honored Brother Sun.
Unintentionally hilarious episodes follow, as St. Francis levitates in his ecstasy to the third tier of the fountain and is distracted by the bum falling into the pool below. He descends, takes off his robe, wraps it around the shivering man, and makes him dance until he warms up. The monk then permits the prostitute to cry on his shoulder, and wipes her tears and nose with her red scarf. This makes all three of them laugh, and they join in singing along with the chorus.
By now, the suspicion that the author is not in her right mind is reinforced when the blonde star debutante emerges on the arm of her fiancé, and is identified as “Saint Clare.” They are taken aback by the sight of a half-naked man with a shaven head cavorting with “queer-looking characters.” A policeman finds the spectacle strange enough to charge onstage and attempt to club the trio with his nightstick.
Clare’s synopsis then becomes as crazy as a Marx Brothers farce.
St. Francis explains (to the cop) that while he was praising Brother Sun and Brother Wind, Brother Bum fell into Sister Water, and because Brother Fire was not there to dry him off, Brother Francis had to give him his cloak.
The debutante is, despite herself, attracted to St. Francis as she watches him feed scraps of bread to “Brothers Pigeons and Sparrows.” The stage then fills up with a cast of tormented characters—drunks, drug addicts, beggars, and “a young Negro, in a sweat shirt, with a bleeding bandaged head.” St. Francis, undulating back and forth, encourages them to join him in prayer. He is helped in his ministrations by St. Clare. Debutante and monk join in a joyful pas de deux. A frenzied riot of the entire ensemble ensues until, “to a wild shrieking of police and ambulance sirens,” cops and paramedics from Bellevue arrive to cart everybody off. But St. Francis calms them with comforting words: “They now go willingly with the police and the attendants to their alcoholic and insane wards.”44
As Clare feared, Chávez disliked her ballet’s religiosity. “Carlos is so bitterly against my beliefs how can he like me if he dislikes what I believe?” she complained to Maggie Case. “If I told him I hated music, it was nothing but sounds, would he be offended?” Maggie reported this remark to Chávez, warning him, “She is a child in many ways, certainly an endearing erratic brilliant hypnotic one!”45
Bruised and melancholy, Clare unburdened herself to Carlos in a poignant letter written on May 8 from a hotel in Detroit. She was there for a series of lectures in satellite towns, motoring long distances in weather that changed abruptly from heat and hurricanes to cold and damp. Between times, she researched the possibility of Chávez being appointed music director of the Detroit Symphony, a once great ensemble still struggling to restore itself after near collapse in the Depression.
But she soon concluded that the automobile capital was “a cultural desert” unlikely to welcome a Mexican modernist. Tycoons who might be tapped for financial support were bereft of artistic and aesthetic values, she wrote Carlos. As for local audiences, their favorite music was The Nutcracker Suite.
“I think you would loathe this city if you had to live in it,” she went on, noting significantly that the museum’s contemporary collection was poor, and its murals by Diego Rivera badly placed.46
If only he were doing her ballet, there would be a reason for him to come to New York “to see the choreographer and me!” She appealed to his sympathy.
Carlos you do not know how I have suffered because of you. Time and distance are very potent enemies.… But what is devastating is misunderstanding, or rather non-understanding. No doubt it is one of love’s saddest—and bravest—illusions that “two hearts can beat as one,” or that there are twined souls, and mated minds. Each of us, in the end, is so appallingly alone.… We attach quite different values to things, and that’s why I suspect we are strangers.47
He tried to be positive in his reply. “You make up ghosts and then you scare yourself with them. We are not negative, and that is where we find one another. There are problems, yes, but after all you and I do not like easy things.”
Hoping she might visit him again soon, he wrote that fall in Mexico was a beautiful season. He had ideas for the Ann Brokaw concerto, and planned to start composing it then. As for Detroit, he said that despite her dismissiveness, resurrecting a fine orchestra was exactly the kind of challenge he liked. If the directorship was offered, he would take it. “Good music and good work will do the rest.”48
The inability of Carlos to fill her romantic void elicited a cri de coeur in mid-June, after Harry had been away three weeks. “It matters so greatly that I should see you again, and when I do, you should be just as happy to see me as you were in spring.… As the poet says, ‘hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’ ”49
As summer approached, Clare thought of a chance to meet Carlos in Colorado, at the August gathering of the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. The theme was “Great Books, Great Men and Great Music,” and seemed a perfect one for a double appearance by Clare Boothe Luce as writer and Carlos Chávez as musician. To her disappointment he declined, saying he was not comfortable with “theoretical discussions” onstage. He would, however, be agreeable to appearing as a distinguished guest near the end of the month, when Stravinsky would be in residence, the Juilliard Quartet performing, and Clare speaking on St. Thomas Aquinas.50
Overjoyed, she booked spacious private quarters for them to share, and promised to join him afterward for a vacation in New Mexico. He had long wanted to attend the annual festival of Indian dances performed there by troupes from the reservations.
In the interim, Carlos accepted an invitation to conduct in Washington, D.C., in July, and Clare canceled a trip to Argentina to finally see him on the podium. But he then advised that due to bureaucratic bungling, the engagement in the capital was off. It occurred to her that he never put himself out to see her, unless he had professional reasons to be in her vicinity. As so often, when inconvenienced or rejected, she lashed out in a curt note.
I don’t think Aspen will work out too well, as Harry has become very interested and has secured himself an invitation to join in
one of the seminars. I had taken a pretty cottage with several guest rooms, but he now has decided to come along, so that is that.51
28
A RED VELVET TUFTED SOFA
Private faces in public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces in private places.
—W. H. AUDEN
Harry joined Clare in Aspen on August 16, 1950, in time to hear her engage in a middlebrow discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law” with the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. In the eleven days that followed, she also took part in panel debates on Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Henry David Thoreau’s essays “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”
Speaking to a reporter about the conflict that had broken out that spring in Korea, she said she saw no more than a fifty-fifty chance that the United States and the Soviet Union could resolve their differences in the region. “We may as well settle down on a total war footing now. We should build up our strength and force a backdown in Kremlin policy.”1
The week that Harry spent in Colorado was not the tranquil break he had hoped for. Clare was distant, still annoyed by the absence of Chávez. Her behavior was in contrast with that of Mary Bancroft, who had recently enjoyed a happy time with him in Munich. Mary had never seen Luce so unbuttoned. They had attended a carpenters’ ball in a biergarten, where he had quaffed copious steins of lager, and whirled around the floor with red-faced Frauen, pinching their bottoms and tickling them until they squealed.2
Price of Fame Page 30
