Not feeling much better six days later, she met with Amintore Fanfani, now General Secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, to discuss “the confusion on the Left caused by Stalin’s fall from grace.” This had revived the perennial question of whether Italian Socialists could be persuaded to split from their Communist partners. Fanfani was suspicious of the Kremlin’s latest offensive, a visit by Khrushchev and Bulganin to Great Britain. They would be the first Soviet leaders to tour a Western country, and he dreaded that accords might result that would strengthen rather than weaken Togliatti and Nenni in the coming municipal and provincial elections.90
On April 22, Clare’s staff surprised her with the presentation of a medallion commemorating her three years of service in Italy. She started crying at the ceremony, and tried without success to stop.91 Evidently, she was still at a low emotional and physical ebb. The reason she felt “so touched and so sad,” she confided to Gerry Miller, was that she had just made up her mind to go home yet again—this time for a drastic medical examination.92
Feeling too weak for immediate long-distance travel—“I’m tired Durby, I’m tired”—she went to the spa of Montecatini in Tuscany. Depressed as well as ailing, she spent a week there without beneficial result. During her stay, she heard that Father Thibodeau—whom she had stopped seeing for Confession and spiritual direction a year before becoming Ambassador—was leaving America for a post in the Pacific. She reacted to the news with morbid narcissism.
I think one of the hardest crosses I [have] had to bear was the fact that not even you could remember me after I was “out of sight.” These three years … have been cruel ones indeed in many ways. I had the illusion—for that is what it was, that among all my friends I could really count on two—you and Dorothy. But when the time comes, other obligations and duties intervene, and I am left to savour to the utmost my loneliness and aloneness. I suppose it would all have been a little easier to bear if my health had stayed good. But it’s been so bad—and getting so much worse that if you go to the Philippines or Australia—I’ll probably never see you again.93
Perhaps because of the potpourri of drugs she was taking, Clare showed signs of paranoia. “All telephone calls from me are monitored by the government,” she wrote Dorothy Farmer. “I just found out yesterday I have at all times 2 private dicks following me.” She said that if she called New York and began with the phrase “ ‘Please remember the Bishop’s birthday,’ you’ll know I am about to talk about matters I don’t want you to make clear for the people on the line, so let me do the talking.”94
On May 11, she checked into Doctors Hospital in Manhattan for a three-day series of tests. Her press office issued a statement that she was in “a run-down condition,” concealing the reality that Clare suspected cancer. A secretary was shocked at her gaunt appearance. “My God, she looks awful! She has lost about 25 pounds.”95
The tests showed no malignancy, but an alarming array of other ailments. “I have a bad anemia,” she wrote Gerry Miller, “not pernicious, but I’ll have to have blood transfusions for several weeks.… I have a gall bladder obstruction [and] a ‘white’ hepatitis, colitis and periodontitis (those abscesses—dormant for the moment on my teeth). All this nice little package of viruses, poisons and what-not mean, according to the doctors, at least two months of care and rest … (and every tooth must be lanced!)”96
Her gums were sliced and cauterized, and her mouth stuffed with plaster of paris packing for three months. Unable to bite properly, she continued to shed weight until bridgework replaced her upper incisors.97
Dr. Rosenbluth qualified the diagnosis of colitis, stating that Mrs. Luce was suffering from chronic enteritis, and that “further study was needed to establish the particular infecting agent, which might be in the category of hepatitis—inflammation of the liver.” After all this, he and other doctors informed Clare that her health problems derived from the “toxic encounter” in Rome. Enteritis was historically related to the ingestion of substances such as lead, mercury, and arsenic.98
In view of her long-term incapacitation, she again offered to resign. Dulles asked her to postpone a final decision until July, and she acquiesced, but insisted that she wanted to be “out of the trenches” by mid-November. Eisenhower wrote expressing concern for her health, and told Harry that Rome was considered “so delicate a post” that he did not want to risk a new appointment there in an election year.99
After numerous blood transfusions, Clare was cheered by news of the Italian local elections on May 27. The Communists, she crowed, had “lost about 15% of their voting strength.”100
Her illness led to a spate of sympathetic and laudatory press articles. One, a dispatch from Rome by the syndicated columnist Dickson Hartwell, pointed out that before her arrival Italy’s economy had been stagnant, the political outlook murky, anti-Americanism intense, and Communism riding high.
Into this mess stepped a new American ambassador [with] a cum laude mind larded with the analytical capacity of an IBM calculator and seasoned with a New Yorker wit. She also possesses an indefinable honey quality which has wilted a generation of strong men.…
Today this disarmingly fragile Mrs. Luce (here they say La Loo-chay) has emerged from a jungle of criticism, abuse and turmoil onto a quiet, almost beatific, plateau of accomplishment not outmatched in our foreign service.
Hartwell listed some positive achievements during her tenure. The economy had gone up 7 percent in 1954, and another 9 percent in 1955, “and is still climbing.” Italy had joined the United Nations, affirmed its loyalty to NATO, and ratified a new West European Union to replace the stillborn European Defense Community. The young Republic’s trade unions had 20 percent fewer Red shop stewards, it was at peace with neighbors, and its President had visited America for the first time.
He acknowledged that these major advances were not all due to Clare personally, but they were the result of sound and well-executed foreign policy. “Where Ike will next send La Loochay is pure speculation. Her health permitting, I suggest USSR. Our diplomatic successes there have not been notable.… It would certainly disgorge some of the stuffing out of Bulganin and Khrushchev.”101
Clare recovered enough by June 11 to have lunch in Manhattan with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany. They met at his request to discuss his country’s rearmament. He was frank in his admiration for her, telling an aide that she was “one of your greatest Ambassadors.” His “wish in life,” he said, would be to have Clare Boothe Luce in Bonn.102
At the end of June, Clare flew to Washington for State Department consultations. Wearing a suit that looked several sizes too big, and carrying a large briefcase, she was photographed waving happily as she arrived at National Airport. “Mrs. Luce is at last beginning to feel life’s worth living,” Dorothy Farmer reported.103
A few days later, Harry heard that a gossip magazine called People Today was about to reveal the still-classified story that Ambassador Luce had been poisoned with arsenic in Rome.104 He decided to counter this scoop by publishing an authoritative account of his wife’s illness in Time. The article appeared on Monday, July 16, and became an international sensation.105 It not only confirmed what doctors knew about Clare’s diseases, but documented other pathological symptoms, such as nervousness, nausea, and such numbness in her right foot that “she almost had to drag it in dancing.” Time also exposed the true identity of “Seaman Jones,” mentioned the CIA’s part in investigating the mystery, and detailed the toxic decor of her now infamous boudoir.
In conclusion the magazine announced, “Her general health is greatly improved, and she is scheduled to leave this week for a three-week Mediterranean cruise. Then she will return to Villa Taverna (the bedroom and its rosetted ceiling have been long since redone in nonleaded paint) and to the embassy duties that she has often described as ‘no bed of roses.’ ”106
39
THIS FRAGILE BLONDE
There is a time for departure, even when there is no certain place to go.
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Clare took her Mediterranean cruise aboard the Creole, a 190-foot, 433-ton three-masted schooner owned by the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. It was considered the most beautiful and well-appointed yacht afloat, with an impressive art collection. Niarchos, known as “the Golden Greek,” had heard of the Ambassador’s illness, and invited her to join him and a party of friends. She arrived in Lisbon on July 22, in time to sail for Spain.
Meanwhile, a full-blown controversy erupted on both sides of the Atlantic, questioning the plausibility of Time’s poisoning story and Harry’s motive for printing it. Some commentators accused him of wanting to increase circulation. The Italian magazine Il Ore said that the “otherwise moving story” of Clare’s long struggle with ill health was diluted by “flimsy” reportage. It saw a Hitchcock movie in the making, with the heavy tread of maids upstairs becoming the stomp of a murderous Communist. “Khrushchev? Maybe.…”1 Other European papers alleged that the Ambassador had “always taken a few grains of arsenic for cosmetic reasons,” and therefore poisoned herself.2
In New York, the president of the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association doubted that anyone could formulate, “deliberately or accidentally,” a pigment with enough arsenic to make Mrs. Luce sick. In Rome, a Signor Ambrosi, owner of one of the city’s oldest paint firms, said that arsenic had not been used in Italian emulsions for over thirty years, and that in any case “after a year … all toxic presence in paint has disappeared.” However, Paolo Danna, the architect who had redecorated the Villa Taverna before Clare moved in, testified that he had only redone its walls. “The ceilings, as far as I know, were painted in 1931, and since then have never had a new coat.” He also said it was not true that lead arsenic soon lost toxicity.3
Concerned for Italo-American relations, the State Department tried to dispel conspiracy theories by declaring that there was “absolutely no evidence” that anyone had plotted to kill Mrs. Luce.4
The Creole proceeded along the Guadalquivir River from Seville and across the Mediterranean to Clare’s “dream island” of Majorca, then to Ibiza, the Costa Brava, Sardinia, and Corsica, ending on the French Riviera.5 There were fifteen passengers aboard, many of them tanned, bejeweled European socialites. Clare felt little affinity for the latter, and spent most of her time on deck reading under a blue awning.6
After a few days of sea air, her appetite returned, and she grew stronger, waxing lyrical about “the tall masts swaying against the far stars … the lapis lazuli of the deep sea; the eerie emerald waters … and at all times, the musical accompaniment of the violin-taut sail ropes, the timpani of the sails, the music of the sea (the only restless thing in the world that brings peace!).”7
David Sulzberger, age seven, came aboard at one stop, and was agog at the spectacle of Clare being lowered into the water for a pre-lunch swim. He watched her doing the breaststroke in a white leotard and large-brimmed hat, and would never forget that “when she reappeared dripping wet, the leotard was transparent.”8
As she luxuriated aboard the Creole, Clare fantasized how delightful it would be for Harry to buy her “a ship of my own.” She hinted to him that “there is nothing in the whole world I like better than yachting. Always have. Always will.”9
On July 26, she was disturbed to hear on the radio of the coincidence of two big events: the sinking of the Andrea Doria, and the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal. The tragedy off Nantucket was a poignant reminder that she had embarked to take up her mission on that same Italian liner. Colonel Nasser’s shock action, in reprisal for the withdrawal of Western financing to build the Aswan Dam, portended trying days ahead for Anglo-American relations. “The real danger,” Clare wrote Harry, “is the example he will set to the Arabs about oil royalties.”10
One night at dinner, she had a conversation with Sir John Russel, a well-connected Londoner, and was flattered to hear that some diplomats in the British Foreign Office hoped she might replace Winthrop Aldrich at the Court of St. James’s. “I was known as Ike’s best Ambassador,” she wrote Harry. “Had great prestige now, and was considered a real ‘pro.’ ”11
Fresh from the cruise, she showed up at Èze-sur-Mer in early August to stay at the “villa” of her old friend Joseph P. Kennedy. It was actually a simple house along the railroad track, and trains kept waking her throughout the night. “Life with the Kennedys is so different,” she wrote Dorothy Farmer. “No champagne or caviar. Yogurt and boiled rice. And a nice priest.… He says Mass for the whole household at 6.45!”12
On Friday, the tenth, she called another friend, Somerset “Willie” Maugham, at Cap Ferrat and invited herself over. The visit brought back memories of twenty-one years before, when she had been at the novelist’s Villa Mauresque with Harry, who was then “madly courting me.”13
Maugham, now eighty-two, took elaborate pains to entertain her. His assistant, Alan Searle, estimated that he made a dozen trips to the kitchen that morning to consult with his chef over the menu.
Well, Clare came—so did the first course. Clare looked at it, made a dab at it, and passed it up. The second course came with the same result. I saw Willie’s expression and I felt nervous. I prayed that she would do better by the next course. She didn’t. “I see, Clare,” said Willie, in a quiet but dangerous tone, “that you don’t like my food.” “Oh, no,” she protested, “it’s just that I don’t eat at midday.” “If you don’t eat, why did you come to lunch?” said Willie. It was a very tense moment, I can tell you.14
Maugham must not have known that Clare was still having gastrointestinal problems, and had recently lost another three pounds.15 Alarmed by her appearance, he recovered from his pique, and wrote later, “I felt you had never looked more beautiful, but dreadfully frail, as though you were hanging on to life by a thread.”16
She spent another three days with the Kennedys, who were ambivalent at the prospect of their Senator son, John, being nominated for Vice President at the Democratic National Convention, just getting under way in Chicago. Clare and Joe agreed that it was a bad idea, because losing would spoil his chances of running for President in four years’ time, when the electorate might be more receptive to a Catholic candidate.17
Except for the simmering Suez crisis—which was primarily the problem of Britain and France—Clare had no large issues to contend with when she settled back to work at the Palazzo Margherita in mid-August. She was surrounded there by new faces, as Durbrow had moved on and the rest of the staff was going through a cyclical change.18 Her resignation lay on Eisenhower’s desk, but she knew it was unlikely to be accepted until after the election. Gerry Miller remained her chief confidant. At night in the Villa, she felt even more lonely, since Tish Baldrige had taken a job at Tiffany’s in New York. There was no one to “gab” with, she complained to Harry, who would not join her for another seven weeks. “I really feel like the Prisoner of Taverna.”19
She was irritated by not gaining an ounce, because she had to subsist on rice and tea to soothe her still-tempestuous stomach. “I just never will get well so long as I stay here, darling.… I’ve just never learned to enjoy this darn Italy!” Clare also fretted about Ike’s bland reelection campaign. “It is just stupid to go on telling people how well off they are, and how peaceful the world is.… You have to tell them it’s WAR if the other fellow gets in.”20
Compounding her misery, the villa had become so overrun with mice that the General Services Administration had contracted “to put two cats on the payroll.”21
As things turned out, Eisenhower was the best-equipped statesman in the world to handle the multiple strategic crises that exploded almost simultaneously in late October. On October 23, Hungarian students and workers, encouraged by Radio Free Europe’s habitual calls for liberation of Soviet-held territories, held a protest march in Budapest. It swelled to a demonstration of two hundred thousand, after their petition for reforms was rebuffed. The situation quickly turned to violence, when security fo
rces of Erno Gero’s hard-line Communist government fired into the crowd. At this point, soldiers of the Hungarian army amazed observers by joining the rebels, and handing out weapons. Rioters moved on to slice a sixty-foot bronze statue of Stalin off below the knees, leaving only his high boots. They spat on the falling colossus, then dismembered it and paraded parts through the streets.22
Battles continued the following day, until the Kremlin agreed to have Imre Nagy, a former, moderate Communist leader, reinstated as Prime Minister. An uneasy calm ensued for several days, as Nagy swore in a new, multiparty government, started releasing political prisoners, permitted a free press, and uncensored radio broadcasts. To everyone’s amazement, Russian forces stationed in the country began an exodus.
On October 27, Eisenhower, reassured by these unexpected developments, informed Moscow that the United States would not take advantage of the situation to recruit new allies in Eastern Europe. His attitude contrasted with that of Secretary Dulles and other American anti-Marxists, including Clare and Frank Wisner, the Deputy Director of the CIA, who was on an inspection tour of Western Europe.
Wisner happened to be staying with Clare the next day, Sunday, when, in a show of support for the Budapest rebels, she attended Mass at Rome’s only Hungarian Catholic Church. On her return to the Villa Taverna, she found her guest agitated and desperately drinking glass after glass of whiskey. As an OSS agent during World War II, Wisner had witnessed Red Army atrocities at first hand. Now in charge of all CIA covert operations, he was astounded to have had no inkling of the magnitude of desire for freedom in Hungary. His only officer in the country was as surprised at the uprising as everyone else.23
Price of Fame Page 47
