Knowing how much stress she was under, he had already bought a special gift for April 10, and arranged with Tish to surprise his wife with it during his absence. In her mail that morning, Clare found a cable from him: “Happy birthday to my Madonna of the Roses.” It puzzled her, because there appeared to be no accompanying present.
“If you come downstairs,” Tish said, “you’ll see what he means.”
Descending the staircase in her robe, Clare was overwhelmed by a Renaissance portrait of the Madonna and Child in the Piccolo Salon. Mary’s gold halo glimmered in contrast with the pearly skin of the baby Jesus, against a background of trellised dark red roses.52
“She is hanging now where the Delacroix was, the two Fantin La Tours on either side … and how extraordinarily well they go,” she wrote Harry, saying she had never liked a picture better.53
She continued to feel jittery, cranky, and miserable about her press image, and doubled her previous order of Benzedrine and Dexedrine to two hundred tablets of each. These, combined with other prescriptions for Edrisal (a concoction of Benzedrine, aspirin, and phenacetin for headaches and cramps), Carbatral (a sedative-hypnotic bromide), and two drugs identified only as “#254763” for nervousness and “#254764” for insomnia, indicated a potentially lethal drug dependency.54 On top of them, she was taking the antacid pills Spasmalgan and Syntrogel, plus Trasentine tablets and weekly injections of Theelin hormone replacement.
Clare relied on at least three physicians for her supplies. Dr. Milton Rosenbluth wrote, “I send these [Benzedrines] to you with misgivings, because your need for them means to me that you are working at a pace beyond your physical capacity. If you keep this up, I greatly fear that you will reach a point at which even this stimulation will prove inadequate.”55
Aware that the first anniversary of her arrival in Rome was coming soon, and that mischief-makers in the Italian Parliament might well begin to debate her recall that day, Clare sent a cri de coeur to her best friend in Congress, Speaker Joseph Martin.
My press clippings from home are beginning to show that the Democrats have started to pick up the Commie charge of “intervention” in Italy’s affairs, without either giving the source or basis of the charges. A visiting fireman coming thru said the other day that they are beginning to mutter in his State (where there is a large foreign language vote) “Everything began to go sour in Italy the minute she got there.…”
Fact is, we now have here a government that has introduced EDC, and proposed and taken more anti-Communist measures and economic reform measures than any government Italy has had so far. And … I haven’t had a single billion—not even fifty million with which to get this effect! IF IF IF we could get a Trieste solution for Italy, things would really begin to roll our way, over here, and we could probably chalk up for GOP foreign policy one of its first political victories in Europe!
She asked Martin if he could get Senator Homer S. Ferguson (R-MI) “or some other big shot name in the Congress” to enter this defense into the Congressional Record in such a way that it did not seem to emanate from her.56
Ferguson agreed, but was unable to get an immediate speech slot. Fortunately, on April 22, the dreaded debate on Clare’s recall did not take place in the Chamber of Deputies. Foreign Minister Attilio Piccioni declared Ambassador Luce “not only persona grata, but gratissima, to the Italian government.”57 Giuseppe Pella called on her privately to say that the L’Europeo article had actually generated support for her, and Togliatti’s attacks had “backfired.”58
An anniversary telegram that day from Elbridge Durbrow cheered her further: “I want to express to you on my behalf and on the behalf of the rest of the staff how pleased we are to be on board with you as our skipper.”59
But insecurity about keeping her post had taken its toll. In an interview at the Villa Taverna with William Attwood of Look magazine, Clare sipped vermouth and smoked incessantly, giving guarded answers to his questions. “She strikes you as fragile on the outside but flinty on the inside,” Attwood noted. “Her inner tension is contagious; you don’t relax easily with her.” On the whole, he was impressed, although “as a diplomat, Clare Luce tries too hard and talks too much.” It was time, he felt, “for her to stay out of the headlines—if she can—and let the Italians put their own house in order without too much gratuitous advice.”60
On May 3, Senator Ferguson addressed his colleagues on the subject of “a rather astounding incident that has recently taken place in Italy.” He said the demand of Palmiro Togliatti that Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce be recalled had been expressed in language “unparalleled in its viciousness, untruthfulness, and lack of parliamentary courtesy.” In particular, he cited the phrase aging witch, as well as almost daily references in the Red press to the Ambassador’s appearance, sex, and motives for allegedly interfering in the internal affairs of Italy. “The fact that Mrs. Luce was merely enunciating the United States foreign policy, as repeatedly laid down by the White House, the State Department, the Congress, and every responsible public-opinion medium in America was naturally ignored by the Communists.”
The Senator added to the Congressional Record a pair of New York Herald Tribune articles supportive of Clare, one of which, by the syndicated columnist Roscoe Drummond, stated “from first-hand knowledge” that L’Europeo’s account of her Mayflower Hotel lunch was false “in substance and spirit.”61
Even as the Senator spoke, Clare had the satisfaction of hearing Secretary Dulles, who was passing through Italy on his way back from a conference in Geneva, reiterate to Scelba’s face everything she had said about the linking of American aid to anti-Communist action. Changing the subject, Scelba fell back on the Italian mantra that if the question of Trieste could be settled along the lines of the Allied Declaration of October 8, 1953, ratification of the EDC treaty would follow.
Irritated, Dulles said that if European military unity was not attained soon, “the Trieste question would disappear in the wake of far more serious international developments.”
Foreign Minister Attilio Piccioni, sitting in, insisted that such unity must recognize “national claims” of member states.
Dulles came back even more forcefully. “If Western European countries continue to advance the satisfaction of individual claims ahead of the supreme need for unification to preserve the freedom of all, the price of such disunity will be either a) another war among European states, or b) their piecemeal conquest—by internal or external means or both—by the Soviet Union.”62
Clare was further buoyed that month by having Harry back in Rome, and by the publication of a respectful but clear-eyed essay about her in a book by Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena A. Hickok entitled Ladies of Courage.
She has many advantages. She can always get publicity, she has a way of speaking and writing that is easily understandable to the American people, and as a writer she has developed powers of observation and analysis which should be helpful.… Whether or not she has a basic understanding and sympathy with all people, she has keen intelligence.…
One thing she may have to guard against: that well-developed, but at times caustic, sense of humor, as indicated in some of the widely quoted reports of her brushes with other women. In diplomacy, it is better to trust to kindliness and beware the witty but cutting phrase.63
On May 31, top-secret news reached Clare from London. Velebit had agreed to a Trieste proposal that the Allies considered fair and were determined Italy should accept. To an impartial eye, the proposal amounted to acceptance of the October 8 Declaration, with some minor territorial adjustments, reparation of transferable assets, and guaranteed protection of minorities in both zones.64
But when Clare met with Scelba on June 3, the Prime Minister was furious. He had seen the text of the proposal and was inclined to reject it outright. It was, he said, “a slash in the face of Italy.” By implicitly condoning Yugoslavia’s demands, the United States showed it was not on Italy’s side, so she could forget about speedy ratification of the
EDC, or his signature on military facility agreements.65
Subtle signals of a willingness to proceed anyway with negotiations soon emanated from the Italian Foreign Office. Ambassador Brosio was instructed to concentrate on improving the territorial concessions when he began his round of meetings with Harrison and Thompson in London.66 From now until whenever he fulfilled his brief, Clare knew she would inevitably be drawn back into the Trieste entanglement.
Harry left for New York on June 5. “I really did feel sorry for CBL when the car drove off,” Dorothy Farmer wrote Dorothea Philp. “How quickly loneliness descends—and how visibly. She walked into the drawing room with me and said ever so quietly: ‘It’s so awful to see him leave.’ ”67
37
END OF THE DRAMA
The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.
—HENRY L. STIMSON
Two days later, suffering from what she thought was an attack of rheumatism, Clare arrived at the Hôtel Splendide-Royal et Excelsior in Aix-les-Bains for a week of spa pampering. She found herself in the same suite overlooking Lac du Bourget that she had shared with Harry fifteen years before.
Benefiting somewhat from daily massages and a low-calorie diet, she managed eight hours of unsedated sleep for the first time in months. Between treatments, she followed press accounts of the Army-McCarthy hearings being held in Washington and televised live to huge audiences. After seven weeks of contentious questioning, Senator McCarthy’s reputation as a principled anti-Communist was ruined. Clare was disgusted by what she considered a domestic sideshow to the “Orwellian” threat of Communism in Europe and Asia, as well as by Eisenhower’s reluctance to denounce the Senator publicly. She wrote an angry letter to Harry.
How in the name of God and country can responsible men, American men, in the year 1954, spend their time, energy, and vitality fighting the “menace of McCarthyism,” when all they have of all three should be turned to the menace of Malenkov? That a whole nation, and its journalists, and politicians, and president and educators should be [so] absorbed for weeks and weeks … is in itself a national scandal in which all sides, those for and against this petty tyrant, are equally blind, equally lacking in patriotism, equally foolish, equally treasonable, so far as I am concerned. Let the president … offer Joe [McCarthy] a fighting commission against the foe he claims to despise, and thus call his bluff—let [Ike] play the role of a fearless and honest patriot and a good soldier, which is what we elected him to be … and you would soon see what stuff America was made of.1
In spite of rest and therapy, her constitution remained far from robust. “If I can get my health ironed out,” she wrote Dorothy Farmer, “I can mebbe get around to ironing out my ‘spiritual life,’ and get to Mass a couple of mornings a week.”2
On July 9, Clare was in Washington for four days of meetings with the President and State Department officials. She reported that Ambassador Brosio was being flexible on some minor points of the Yugoslav Trieste proposal, though not yet moving on the more intractable issue of territorial distribution. She told newsmen that she expected an agreement “in the not too distant future,” prompting Paolo Taviani, the Italian Defense Minister, to write in his diary, “Clare Luce … is working for us.”3
Three days later, The New York Times carried a special Rome dispatch by Arnaldo Cortesi (her dinner guest at the Villa with Sulzberger the previous March) headlined BASIS FOR ACCORD ON TRIESTE IS SET. He wrote that a “provisional” agreement had been reached, “with Zone A and the city of Trieste going to Italy and Zone B to Yugoslavia.” This did not sound like news to the average reader, but to diplomatic experts, the words that followed were significant: “Some territorial adjustments of secondary importance will take place along the present line of demarcation between the two zones.”
Each side, Cortesi reported, would insist on maintaining an ethnic foothold in the other’s land. He identified these as the village of Crevatini in Zone A to go to Yugoslavia, and a strip of Zone B hinterland south of San Cervolo to Italy. If this exchange was agreed on, he predicted that the United States would reap an additional benefit from a grateful Italy: prompt ratification of the EDC.
Especially pleasing to Clare was a subsequent paragraph.
The Trieste agreement is a victory for Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, who floated the problem off the reef on which it had foundered some years before her arrival in Italy as United States envoy and headed it toward a solution. Her achievement is the more remarkable because the agreement is, in effect, a carbon copy, with a few embellishments, of the United States–British declaration of Oct. 8, 1953. This declaration … was originally suggested by Mrs. Luce and was made as a result of her insistence.4
In a follow-up dispatch on July 17, Cortesi noted that there had been “some eleventh-hour hitches in the negotiations.” But he was confident they could be ironed out.
Clare and her Washington superiors were not so sanguine. She wrote a forceful letter to Dr. Grillo at the American desk in the Chigi Palace, warning that if Italy continued to be obstructionist on Trieste and the EDC, the United States would have to make, in Secretary Dulles’s words, an “agonizing reappraisal” of its Mediterranean policy, specifically in regard to defense and aid programs.5
Having felt under par for several months, Clare entered New York Hospital on July 20 for what she insisted was a routine checkup. Aware that this would become a news story in Italy, she wrote Dr. Grillo that her physician was curious as to how, with so little sleep, she had so much vitality. “It must be either pathology or pasta—I sho’ do miss the latter.”
As she well knew, Dr. Rosenbluth was less curious than concerned about her chemical dependencies, and was especially alarmed by her frequent attacks of bronchitis, sinusitis, colitis, rheumatism, and bouts of fever, not to mention gingivitis and ulcers between the teeth.6
On August 4, Dr. Rosenbluth reported that he had found alarming evidence of “heavy metal poisoning” in her system. This perplexing diagnosis coincided with a demonstration of Clare’s Red menace phobia. In Washington on August 10, she startled the White House Press Secretary, James C. Hagerty, by declaring that America needed to “do something fast” to arrest the world’s drift toward Communism, by gaining either a political advantage, or “if necessary … a military victory.”
Hagerty asked if she was suggesting an armed attack, and if so, where. Clare staggered him by saying, “Yes.” She thought that the Chinese mainland opposite Formosa was the most likely spot, and offered to send him a written outline of her thoughts to give to the President. He reluctantly agreed to pass it on.7
Before she could complete follow-up forensic tests in New York, word came from Italy that Alcide De Gasperi had died. Clare flew to Rome with Harry on August 22 for the funeral, discomfiting other ambassadors reluctant to leave vacation resorts. After the ceremony, she made an eloquently simple statement: “All countries must have a past, a present and a future. Democratic Italy had no past. Now the memory of her late Prime Minister is her past.”8
Maddening news awaited her at the Palazzo Margherita. During a conference of potential member nations of the European Defense Community in Brussels, the dynamic new French Premier, Pierre Mendès France, had scuttled its formative treaty. His reasoning, logical but frustrating to America, was that West Germany was no longer a threat to the rest of Europe, and that the nuclear capability of the United States coupled with NATO was formidable enough to repel any potential enemy, including the Soviets.
At least Clare no longer had to listen to Scelba link the EDC to a pro-Italian Trieste settlement. But he did startle her at a postfuneral meeting, saying that in spite of Mendès France’s “act of mayhem,” Italy would give “wholehearted support to any alternative American project for German rearmament.” Otherwise, he feared that the idea of an integrated Europe was dead. “We can then be certain of only one thing: Russian divisions will not invade Italian soil. They will not need to, because our own Communists will ring down the Iron Curta
in on Italy in the next election.”
In her report to Eisenhower on this disturbing interview, Clare predicted that Scelba’s government would “not last the winter … unless we can produce a settlement of the Trieste question—and immediately.” She hoped that would be before October 8, the anniversary of last year’s Declaration.9 A catalyst was urgently needed to break the latest deadlock in London.
Just at this juncture, as she was dressing for dinner one night, Dorothy Farmer came in. “There is a man called Robert Low on the telephone.”
The name meant nothing to Clare. Dorothy said that he claimed to have once worked for Harry. “He says he has to see you. He won’t talk to anyone else.”
Clare told her to hold the call while she asked Harry if he knew Low.
“Yes,” he said. “Bob Low was a very smart lad who worked for us.… See him, find out what he has to say.”
When the mysterious visitor arrived, Clare was reassured by his good looks and confident demeanor. “I have been doing some work for the CIA in Yugoslavia,” he told her. “Their man in London is giving our people trouble, and I know why.”10
At this, he took a map of the Istrian peninsula from his pocket, and showed her a red-penciled area of disputed territory. He predicted Velebit would settle for this, were it not for the chief cause of the stalemate in London—money for infrastructure reparations in Zone A that Yugoslavia was demanding and Italy reluctant to pay. “You give them that … you’re in.”11
Clare learned next day that the two sides were $30 million apart, and neither disposed to budge. She asked Chigi officials if a substantial cash contribution from the United States might make Italy willing to offer more—on condition Yugoslavia settled for less. The result was a beaming assent.12
Price of Fame Page 43
