In Manhattan on March 31, Clare received an award from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Eight days later, she became the first recipient of the Mary MacArthur Memorial Fund Award at a thousand-plate benefit for a polio fund established by the actress Helen Hayes. It was held at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Starlight Roof, and despite its philanthropic purpose, the evening was a celebration for the returning diplomat and playwright. The attendees, apart from Miss Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur, included Moss Hart, Raymond Massey, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.11
The Duke of Windsor congratulates Clare on her MacArthur Award, April 8, 1957 (illustration credit 40.1)
Shimmering in a gold satin beaded dress and diamond necklace, Clare also wore her Grand Cross of the Italian Republic and her insignia of a Dame of Malta. The producer Gilbert Miller presented her with an engraved scroll in honor of her “outstanding contributions to the theater as well as selfless devotion to humanitarian efforts at home and abroad.”12
In her acceptance speech, Clare joked that it was “premature” to welcome her back to the theater. “No playwright can ever be said to have come back, until after those first night notices.” But clearly she rejoiced at being again in the company of show business people. Moss Hart recognized the symptom, and remarked, “She’s like an old alcoholic sniffing gin through the tavern door.”13
These spring honors were but two of a year-long succession of awards, testimonial dinners, and honorary degrees showered on Clare by various institutions. “Fame is a mayfly here,” she wrote Luigi Barzini, “and dances for you only a day!”14 With this in mind, she accepted the Gimbel “Bright Star” Award for service to humanity, Notre Dame University’s Laetare Medal, Detroit’s Cor Jesu Award, the Cordell Hull Award from the Committee on Foreign Trade Education, New York City’s Heart of America Award, doctorates from Fordham and Temple Universities, the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences, the International Rescue Committee’s first Freedom Award “for distinguished leadership in combating Communism,” and the Great Living American Award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, shared with nine other honorees, including Cecil B. DeMille and the breeder of a champion hen.
She also became the first woman to address New York’s Union League Club, and expanded beyond her political and Catholic oratory by delivering pronouncements on such diverse subjects as problems confronting the state of Israel and peanut farming. She orated on foreign service to the Bureau of Advertising, and on international trade to executives of the Fiat Company of America. It was only a matter of time before she received a postcard addressed to “Clare Boothe Luce Foundation, Inc.”15
From now on she would settle for celebrity rather than stardom, and pay the price in a steady loss of self-esteem.
In late May, Secretary Dulles offered Clare not the major posting she had hoped for, but a temporary appointment as one of a team of delegates to the September session of the United Nations General Assembly, headed by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. She considered this an indignity, having long complained to Dulles about “the inefficacy” of the world organization, and declined the offer. “The more I weigh the question the more certain it seems that I must either exclude this assignment, or exclude the book project I have so long cherished.”16
Deeply disillusioned in mid-June by two Supreme Court decisions releasing a number of convicted Communists, Clare telephoned Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, and harangued him on what she perceived as the deficiencies of current administration policies. Adams listened with annoyance as she successively criticized the President’s budget, his “confusion” on China, and his choice of Harold Stassen as disarmament negotiator. She even blamed Ike, illogically, for the Court’s liberal bias.17
Adams asked why she was telling him “this tale of woe.” Clare said she was saying it privately before speaking or writing about it. He asked if her husband was as riled as she was. When she said yes, he condescendingly told her to get Harry to come and see him.18
After hanging up, Clare felt that as long as Adams stayed in the White House, her views would be unwelcome there.19
Although Harry had spent a considerable sum refurbishing Sugar Hill, Clare seemed reluctant to spend the whole summer in Connecticut struggling with “the servant problem.” Instead, on July 1, she went to Bermuda to satisfy an “overwhelming desire” to learn the new technology of aqualunging, and explore the Atlantic coral reefs off the island’s north shore. She was inspired by seeing Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s documentary movie The Silent World, after which she had yearned to plunge thirty feet down to experience his “subworld of mysterious beauty.”20
She stayed at the Mid-Ocean Club in Tucker’s Town. Her instructors for the next two weeks were Park and Jeanne Breck, who ran a local company called Undersea Sports. Park, handsome and deeply tanned, was a Philadelphia Main Liner and a college swimming champion turned pioneer diver. Like Cousteau, he had been exploring the depths since the early 1940s. His blonde wife was a native Bermudian.21
Breck first took Clare to the local aquarium and identified all the sea creatures she could expect to see around the reefs. She seemed unresponsive, so he moved on to give her two preliminary lessons in the use of Scott Hydro-Pak diving equipment.22
To her consternation, this training was not in the sea, but in a cement-lined tank near the harbor. In the backwash of Hurricane Audrey, the island’s weather was windy, cold, and rainy. The Hydro-Pak was so heavy that she had trouble standing. It consisted of a thirty-pound steel air tank on her back, a full-face glass mask with a buttoncontrolled airflow valve against her right ear, and a belt of lead weights around her waist. Beneath it all she wore a clammy black rubber frogman’s tunic and tights. Once in the chilly pool, she pulled on a pair of flippers, and learned how to breathe underwater, finding that she and her equipment now weighed only one pound.23
“There I was,” she wrote later, in the first of two articles for Sports Illustrated, “slithering along the bottom of the pool like an eel whose head was imprisoned in a rubber-sealed pickle jar, from which little bubbles noisily escaped, while a quiet trickle of water stole in.”24 Breck signaled her to emulate him in a series of rolling, tumbling, and jackknifing movements.
Suddenly I was quite out of breath. I gulped for air, and swallowed water. I breathed through my nose. Water came that way too. I snorted and spat, held my breath, and sought to surface. Instead, I sank fast, arms up, legs sprawled, in a sitting position. The bottom of my tank hit the metal drain on the bottom of the pool. There was a resounding clang. It echoed through the pool like the bells on the lost island of Atlantis. It knelled doom. I sat there, not breathing, frozen with fear. Now I will drown.
[Breck’s] finger was pointing to the button on the side of my mask. I pressed it hard. Air hissed sharply into the mask, cleared out the water and escaped: gurgle, gurgle, gurgle! All around my head bubbles panicked to the top to join their own element. And mine. I gulped air deeply and found myself shooting up in the bubbles’ wake.25
As the morning lesson progressed, Clare felt all of her fifty-four years. She trembled with cold, and something like an icicle seemed to be stabbing her eardrums, until she learned how to adjust her air pressure.26 Later, she told Breck that she had endured bombing in London and China, and had never been more frightened than while lying on a hard cement floor in Bermuda, shivering in ten feet of water. But then she added, “I like fear.”27
Ghastly as the initiation had been, Clare’s attempt to get warm in her hotel afterward stimulated one of her funniest prose passages.
I turned on the hot water tap in the bathroom. I bent over to peel off my frogman’s shirt. It had been a struggle in the first place to get it on. It was too tight at the hips. I don’t have the hips of a frogman. I rolled it up. It coiled like an enraged garden hose below my breast, which also is not the breast of a frogman. I fought it up and over, as far as my neck. I tried to pull my arms out of the sleeves. They came out of the sleeves and almost out
of their sockets. I pulled it over my head. The thing turned into a devilfish. It almost smothered me before, panting, I beat it off and hurled it to the bathroom floor. It slobbered across the tiles and lay limp, like a dead man-ray. During my struggle the hot water had reached the rim of the tub. In the nick, I turned it off. I tried the water with a tentative toe. It seemed boiling hot. But I consigned myself to it like a lobster seeking heaven in the martyrdom of the pot. I lolled like a pink jellyfish in the tub. I floated my red, unflippered toes to the top, admiring them extravagantly. “How beautiful are thy feet, without flippers, O King’s daughter.”28
Dreading the afternoon session, she wondered why she had signed up for anything so tiring and frightening, and acknowledged that she had been bewitched by photographic images of a “liquid paradise.” Her ambition was modest: “to see an angelfish face to face at his own level.”29
A hot lunch fortified her, and with the help of a Miltown tranquilizer she found her next plunge in the tank less arduous and painful.30 Gradually, she became more adept at handling the gear. But her sleep that night was marred by a terrifying dream during which her live but severed head, “entrapped in its gurgling and roaring mask, was rolled by hidden currents on all the floors of the seven seas.”31
A phone call from Breck woke her the next morning. He said diving was impossible because there was a sou’wester bringing high surf and sheets of rain. Clare breathed a sigh of relief. For eleven more days, the weather remained inclement. She managed only a few dives in sheltered coves, and in shallow harbor water polluted with trash. Breck taught her how to clear her mask underwater, make intelligible signals, and adjust weights for buoyancy at various depths, or for rising to the surface.32
Finally, forty-eight hours before Clare was due to fly home, the skies cleared, and he and Jeanne took her in a fisherman’s boat to the barrier reefs, six miles out the first day and seven the second. There she made four major dives so ecstatic that in her mind they merged into one.
Dropping into a tranquil world of madrepores, polyps, rose and star corals, anemones, and sponges, she could see a hundred feet in every direction. The colors surrounding her were those of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Seurat, while others in the dark blue-green distance reminded her of Dufy and Chagall. At thirty feet, her flipper tips touched the shining ocean floor. She felt “like a bird lighting on a bough.” The bubbles rising from her exhale tube no longer looked panicky, but like “little pearly parachutes seeking the far sun.” A crenellated cave beckoned. She glided under a ledge, careful to skirt outcrops of poisonous ginger coral, and found herself inside an “enchanted” spot, inhabited by the myriad species she had seen in the Bermuda Aquarium. Contrary to Breck’s impression at the time, Clare had registered every one, and was able to identify them now: a rainbow parrot fish whose white beak she tried to scratch, gold-and-black-striped sergeant majors, mauve sea fans, giant sea urchins, waving gorgonians, starfish, a bonito almost a quarter her size, two sharp-toothed barracudas, a gray squaloid shark, a shimmering cloud of small fry, silver breams, navy blue doctorfish, a speckled red hind, lolling pipefish with seahorse heads, and if not her angelfish, something even more exquisite, a jewel fish.
Clare scuba diving off Bermuda, summer 1957 (illustration credit 40.2)
He is as large as two of my fingers. His body is all lapis lazuli; his brow is sprinkled with turquoise. He glows all over. I don’t move, for I know now that a teasing movement will drive him away. Oh, to be a Saint Francis of Assisi among the Fish! Poor St. Francis, born out of time, never to have met Brother Jewel Fish and Sister Sea Fan at their own level! What canticles you would have sung to them! What holy converse held with them about their Maker!33
This may have been the moment when Breck saw Clare take out a lead figure of Christ, kneel on the seabed, and pray. He felt it was “a moment of privacy” and did not photograph her. “I always regretted that.”34
In New York on July 16, Clare was hailed by one newspaper as U.S. AMBASSADOR TO NEPTUNE. Other headlines read, THE AMAZING MRS. LUCE ADDS SKIN DIVING TO HER REPERTOIRE, and SHE SWAM WITH THE BARRACUDAS. Even an Italian broadsheet noted her “appassionati subacquei.”35
The long-term benefit of Bermuda to Clare was that she regained her health.36 In the short term, she recaptured her desire to write, so much so that she could not help spilling out her impressions of deep-sea diving in lengthy letters to two philosophers and a novelist. She wrote Ernest Hocking of feeling much closer to God in the depths than thirty-five thousand feet up in an airplane. “It is a Cistercian world. All perspectives change. Your body—no longer a body, is slim, your hands attenuated, all is elongated and enlarged without losing its essential grace or form.” She quoted Thomas Traherne’s line “You never enjoy the world aright, ’til the Sea itself floweth in your veins.”37 For Mortimer Adler, she described the weightlessness of the depths. “It is the closest thing to disembodiment I’ve ever known.”38
But it was to Somerset Maugham that Clare waxed most lyrical about “living in a new dimension.” She described being able to move up the side of a cave at the flick of a little finger, and spin her whole body with the slightest movement of her chin. “You can shoot forwards, right, left, up and down with the expenditure of less effort than it takes to deal a card. You shed the terrible burden of gravity, which grows so much more painful with the passage of the years. The heaviness of head and limb, which one feels, even in bed, no longer even exists. You become almost a spirit.”
She had found it impossible in the aftermath of her conversion, she wrote, to attain the degree of self-abnegation to which she aspired. Deep in the ocean she had experienced “ecstasy” for the first time, in the Greek sense of escape from the body.
Three immaterial things tie you to life. Keep you feeling (alas) still human—air, or need of it, cold, and—terror. How can one be so fearful, and at the same time so ecstatic, I do not know, for every second one wonders “Will this be the last? Will something go wrong with my air supply?” And in the same breath you think, but this is what death must really be like (as it is coming) and it is wonderful!
In his reply, Maugham seemed unimpressed by her metaphysics. “What is all this underwater capering of yours? I should have thought it very unwise.”39
Simon Michael Bessie, a top editor at Harper & Brothers, spent the last weekend of July 1957 with Clare at Sugar Hill.40 A forty-one-year-old Harvard graduate and decorated war veteran, Bessie had approached her after she got back from Italy, proposing that he publish her memoirs. Clare had agreed, since “Mike” was the kind of charming and erudite cosmopolitan she sought to cultivate now that she was reentering the literary world. He wanted to discuss the project, but found that she had done little more than jot down a rough outline. At least she could tell him that she had hired a professional researcher to make a survey of the scope and content of the enormous Clare Boothe Luce archive, already deposited at the Library of Congress, minus numerous intimate and sensitive files.41
After Bessie left, Clare wrote Luigi Barzini. “I have begun to think about a book.” Telling him she would soon be arriving in Europe to start researching it, she went on, “I am not one of those fortunate writers who can dash off a volume without a good deal of agonizing first. A lot of it will be about Italy—another reason I want to see Rome … through eyes that are not jaundiced with fatigue.” She told a French friend, Countess Clarita de Forceville, that the book would take several years, and she must shut herself off from “contacts of all kinds until it is done.”42
In August, finding she needed extra material for her diving articles, Clare returned to Bermuda for six more days of aqualunging. Increasingly confident underwater, she dove off southwest reefs to three sunken wrecks, but recouped little treasure except a hoard of five-and-ten-cent-store dishes.43
“God’s Little Underwater Acre,” her first Sports Illustrated essay, appeared on September 9, the same day that President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act, touching off white racist outrage in t
he Deep South. That evening, Clare left for Rome. She was curious to see what sort of reception she would receive from old friends and associates, having left in triumph a mere nine months before. Her successor was James D. Zellerbach, a California paper tycoon, whom she had briefed in Washington. She had since heard from Italian friends that the Villa Taverna was “a gloomy place these days,” and that Zellerbach was “extraordinarily dull,” as well as lacking in political insight. “Before everything,” Count Dino Grandi wrote her, “you are a Poet, and that’s also why you have been much perfect Ambassador in this country of ‘camailles and Gods.’ That’s also why Italians laugh now of poor Zellerbach, and call his wife il secchio pappagallo [the dried-up parrot].”44
Reluctant to ask for a room at the Villa, Clare reserved a suite in the Grand Hotel. At the airport, remnants of her old staff greeted her, but to her disappointment no Italians. Nor, with the exception of Barzini, did any visit her or send flowers. “It is almost as if I had never been to Italy,” she wrote Harry, sinking into despondency. “I would not be l’ambasciatrice again here for all the jewels in Bulgari.”45
After six disillusioning days, she flew on to West Berlin, where she was to represent an ailing John Foster Dulles at the dedication of Benjamin-Franklin-Halle, a cultural memorial to free speech partly financed by the United States. She stayed with David Bruce, now Ambassador to West Germany, and on her first afternoon took a nostalgic walk along Kurfürstendamm, the once elegant street where she had lived in 1923, while her stepfather studied plastic surgery at the university. She also walked through the Tiergarten, where at nineteen she had strolled daily with her mother, and was distressed to see how its former magnificence had been destroyed by war. Even more shocking was her first sight of the Communist world in the city’s bleak Soviet sector. “I never realized so much what a tragedy the division of Germany is,” she told a reporter for the Berliner Zeitung. “Those people over there, poor, sad, hopeless—I was profoundly moved.”46
Price of Fame Page 49
