Not even Harry’s close relatives were allowed to know the truth of his condition. Clare asked Laura to tell them only of his embolism.22 He remained in the hospital for the next three weeks, missing a visit to his house by the Nixons and Joe Martin, who were in town for a Republican rally.23
Harry left St. Joseph’s on February 23, and felt well enough in early March to attend a dinner party at Taliesin West, the architectural school run by Frank Lloyd Wright in Scottsdale. He appeared to have lost his former glum irritability, and tolerated a couple of feisty students who criticized Life magazine for “talking down to the American public.” At the other end of the room, Clare, in a silvery-blue gown, was surrounded by a multicultural group of young people. Olgivanna Wright heard her say, “Speaking frankly, Japan is the only important country right now.”24
“Important to whom?” an Egyptian youth asked, eyes flashing.
Mrs. Wright, knowing him to be a fiery devotee of Gamal Abdel Nasser, tried to head off an argument. “Everybody and everything is important,” she said, and the awkward moment passed.25
Clare’s directness had already caused a frisson with the octogenarian architect himself. He had spoken of his success in melding American Southwestern and Far Eastern aesthetics and technology to produce a new style. “He was a little miffed,” Clare wrote Ernest Hocking, “when I called his house Wigwam-Oriental.”26
The Luces closed the Phoenix house at the end of April and returned to New York. Three weeks later, Clare was photographed at Idlewild Airport looking remarkably unlined, with a row of sparkling new teeth. She was on her way to the Bahamas for more skin diving. “I am fatter, healthier and more calm than I have been for years,” she told Gerry Miller, “though I often feel somewhat useless.”27 The weather in Nassau was as bad as it had been in Bermuda, but she at least learned how to catch fish with her bare hands, spear a moray eel, and compile enough material for two more Sports Illustrated articles entitled “The Heaven Below.”28
Now that she had become proficient in the technique of “making like a fish,” Clare’s chronic need to conquer new disciplines impelled her into a summer of frenzied activity.29 She seemed apprehensive that she might never do better than she had already in politics and diplomacy. A friend remarked, “She would rather dominate another field than stay in one simply for the marginal pleasure of being able to play that arpeggio a little bit faster.”30
On June 17, she began with a course of twelve lessons at Manhattan’s Helen Worth Cooking School, which at various times graduated Betty Furness, Phyllis Cerf, Pamela Harriman, and Rosemary Harris. Not knowing even how to boil an egg, she needed to learn also how to broil and bake, before progressing to crêpes and court bouillon. She took extra instruction from the chef James Beard, but was repelled by his obesity and his use of the same knife to slice onions and chocolate.31
Next she registered with an art teacher in Connecticut, and halfway through July flew to Big Sur to study with the mosaicist Louisa Jenkins, who had helped decorate Saint Anne’s Chapel. Working with ceramics, Clare found, gave her an inner satisfaction unlike any she had experienced in public life. “I find it great therapy,” she wrote Carlos Chávez, “a sort of music making in glass. One brings design and order out of a chaos of unrelated bits of stone.”32
Later that summer, she took an advanced course in tile and pebble setting with Emmanuel Viviano at Columbia University,33 and played bridge with the master player Charles Goren, who said she was one of his three favorite “tablemates.”34
In September, she became a teacher herself, imparting some of her new skills to the children of her Ridgefield employees. She then returned to Arizona and worked on a 34-by-46-inch mosaic of the Virgin of Guadalupe for Scottsdale’s Miracle of Roses pageant.35
Mosaic by Clare Boothe Luce, c. 1958 (illustration credit 41.1)
In New York in early October, Clare fell into a week-long depression so severe that she felt “on the verge of insanity.” Her youthful bouts of melancholy had rarely lasted more than a day, but in early middle age they became deeper and more protracted. Any perceived rejection could set them off. Recently, on leaving an elevator full of young men, she felt her loss of physical appeal when “no one, but no one, had stared at me.”36 Her low spells were characterized by fits of wild sobbing, triggered by she knew not what, and an agonizing indecisiveness, to the point that she would stand in the middle of a room, unable to make up her mind “whether to go through one door or another.” Religion proved of little help when the darkness closed in. Prayer only worsened her feeling “that I had failed God, or that he had failed me.”37
Harry was scared enough by this latest slump to send for Dr. Rosenbluth. To Clare’s astonishment, he said he had been aware for years that she “needed mental treatment.” He muttered something about “schizophrenia,” and urged her to check into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in Manhattan.
Unable to accept that she might be going mad, Clare resisted this advice, but accepted a medication that served only to make her jittery and sleepless. Just as she conceded she might have to commit herself, salvation came in the form of a call from the White House. Pope Pius XII had died, and President Eisenhower asked her to be one of his three representatives at the obsequies in Italy. This made her feel useful again, and her depression lifted.38
Secretary Dulles headed the delegation, which arrived in Rome on the morning of October 18. He was chauffeured to the Villa Taverna, while Clare and John A. McCone, the Catholic chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, were shunted to the Grand Hotel. In a further reminder that she was no longer in the government, Clare was excluded from Ambassador Zellerbach’s all-male luncheon for Dulles, and even from one for McCone. She was expected instead to attend a ladies’ lunch at a restaurant, hosted by Mrs. Zellerbach. Regretting without regret, she claimed to have “private plans,” and later made a pointed gibe: “I belong to the Order of Displaced Diplomats.”39 Later, Dulles and Zellerbach called on President Gronchi at the Quirinal Palace, whose gilded halls were no longer open to her. By now Clare was feeling seriously de trop.40
For the solemn requiem Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica the next day, Sunday, male mourners were required to wear tailcoats, white ties, and top hats. Clare put on a heavy veil and floor-length black dress with flat, sling-back evening slippers. The last caused Italian outrage. WEARS SANDALS AT FUNERAL! a local headline screamed. She did not explain that she had foot trouble.
Two weeks later, she returned to Rome, this time as Eisenhower’s personal representative at the coronation of Pope John XXIII. For Clare, the most memorable part of the ceremony on November 4 was when the rotund Pontiff was carried down the nave of St. Peter’s on the sedia gestatoria. His progress was stopped three times as, in rapt silence, a monk set fire to a bundle of flax on a gilded staff. A voice intoned, “Pater Sancte, sic transit gloria mundi,” reminding the Holy Father of his renunciation of worldly things. “And then,” Clare told a journalist, “a hundred long silver trumpets cracked out from the balconies. It was joyful and magnificent.”41
She attended a group audience with the new Pontiff, before flying home and proceeding to Arizona for a nonliterary six months.
By now, the Luces’ Phoenix house had been redecorated and furnished. The overall impression inside was of soft whites, with splashes of red adobe, gold, and copper. Four amethyst crystal candelabra, somewhat jarring in a desert setting, served Clare as mementos of Italy. Ignoring Harry’s suggestion that she make a separate study off the hallway, she reverted to her lifelong habit of working in her bedroom. She placed a desk at one windowed end of the blue-and-white retreat, and on it two blue wicker baskets marked “In” and “Out.” A third, labeled “Things to Do,” overflowed with notes, letters, and manuscripts.42
Her current interests were reflected in a French provincial bookcase packed with cookbooks, and a green-and-blue mosaic of a four-eyed butterfish. In the studio beyond the pool, she completed her mosaic “The Virgin of Guadalupe” and pose
d beside it for the Phoenix Gazette. An interviewer from another newspaper found her carrying a miniature chocolate-colored poodle and “looking strikingly two decades younger than she must be.” In contrast, Harry was pale, thin, and frail.43
42
SERPENT’S TONGUE
Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward.
—SøREN KIERKEGAARD
Early in January 1959, an ailing John Foster Dulles telephoned Clare to offer her the ambassadorship to Brazil.1
The proposal was unexpected, since she had turned down two other appointments from Eisenhower: a place on the Civil Rights Commission, and directorship of his People to People Program.2 Although Rio was not London or Paris, it was a substantial post, and a chance to serve her country again. She asked for time to consider.
Running through her options, Clare acknowledged that she was enjoying life in Arizona, but often felt lonely for cosmopolitan experiences. She also had “a puritanical strain” that “creates a feeling of guilt if one is not working.” A possible downside to accepting was the likelihood of being recalled should a Democrat be elected to the presidency in 1960. There was also the question of her husband’s health. Since his heart attack, Dr. Caldwell had diagnosed not only angina, but urethral blockage, neither of which was conducive to long commutes to the Southern Hemisphere.3 When she talked it over with Harry, however, he was surprisingly eager for her to go, and that persuaded her to accept.4
On the morning of February 20, Clare heard a radio news leak that she had been chosen as envoy to Brazil, replacing Ellis O. Briggs, one of the ablest career diplomats in the Foreign Service. Four days later in Rio de Janeiro, President Juscelino Kubitschek formally approved of the appointment.5 Editorial reaction in Brazil, a Roman Catholic nation of sixty-seven million, was mostly positive.6
The official announcement in The New York Times noted that college girls in Italy had voted Clare their “ideal woman,” over the movie star Gina Lollobrigida. But it warned that “the Democratic-dominated Senate will have to overlook some of the rough things she has said about Democrats.” Alongside ran a profile titled “An Ambassador Again,” accompanied by a flattering photograph. After a sympathetic summary of her earlier life, the article characterized Clare as “a tiger with sharp claws” in the political arena. It quoted her in full rhetorical flood in 1948, saying that “a Democratic President is doomed to proceed to his goals like a squid, squirting darkness all about him.”
The Times made much of her conversion, alleging that religion had given her an “acquired warmth.” It resurrected the apocryphal story of her proselytizing Pope Pius XII until he protested, “But my dear Signora, I have to remind you. I am already a Catholic.”7
The CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid began his radio commentary on the nomination rather patronizingly.
Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, journalist, playwright, diplomat, skin diver and blonde, is about to make her entrance on the public scene again. And any other actors worried about being upstaged have had fair warning: the President has selected her to be the new Ambassador to Brazil, a country suffering a shortage of blondes, but an even greater shortage of new financing and technical know-how suitable to this economic age. Economics is not Mrs. Luce’s strong point, but she is a “quick study,” as they say in the theater, and knows how to organize a capable and loyal staff.
He went on to praise her as a “remarkable” woman, who “doesn’t fit any pattern or pre-conception and never has.” Sevareid was sure the Senate would confirm her “without much trouble—they just don’t have a yardstick for this lady.”8
Harry took prior endorsement by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for granted, and telegraphed “Congratulations and best wishes all the way” to Clare in Phoenix.9
At noon on Tuesday, March 3, the full committee met in executive session with Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) presiding. Among the other ten Democrats present were Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Mike Mansfield of Montana, Wayne L. Morse of Oregon, Frank Lausche of Ohio, and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. There were only six Republicans, including William Langer of North Dakota and George D. Aiken of Vermont.10
Fulbright, who had apparently forgiven Clare for correcting his confusion in the meaning of the verbs infer and imply on the floor of the House sixteen years before, asked whether Mrs. Luce’s nomination could be confirmed without her attendance at a hearing. Morse moved a favorable report at once to the Senate, and the committee agreed by voice vote.
Senator Langer, however, wished to be registered in the negative. This compelled Fulbright to invoke the customary rule of a six-day delay in further action. While doing so, he noted that Clare had a long record of public service, and that other nominees of her stature had been excused from testimony.11
At 2:40 P.M., the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee for American Republics Affairs, chaired by Senator Morse, met for a routine hearing on economic and other problems south of the border. An interminable report by Roy R. Rubottom, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, was interrupted by an urgent UPI message, which Morse read aloud. It stated that over the weekend there had been violent anti-American demonstrations in Bolivia, prompted by an article in the Latin American edition of Time magazine.
Rubottom confirmed that the piece had been “quite offensive.” It had quoted a U.S. Embassy official in La Paz as saying that $129 million in aid had been given to the Bolivian government, and “we don’t have a damn thing to show for it.” The only solution was to “abolish Bolivia and let its neighbors divide the country and its problems among themselves.”12
The remark had been made in jest, Rubottom said, and Time’s decision to publish it was “patently contrary to the national interests of the United States.” As a result, the situation in La Paz was grave and escalating. “Our Embassy yesterday afternoon was stoned, and a couple of cars were burned. The carabineros … apparently shot into the crowd and killed a fifteen-year-old boy, and further attacks [are] expected on the Embassy this afternoon.” Evacuation of American personnel was being considered. Meanwhile, they were in hiding. Copies of the offending magazine had been confiscated or burned, but the diplomatic damage remained.
“Mr. Secretary,” Wayne Morse said, “as the one who made the motion to expedite Mrs. Luce’s confirmation, I am not so sure that this incident is going to help her in Brazil.”13
The Senator sounded a further ominous note on March 10, when consideration of Clare’s appointment came up again in the Foreign Relations Committee. “I move we reconsider the Luce nomination without prejudice, so that we can have some executive discussion, possibly an executive hearing.… I think the dust ought to settle a bit before this appointment goes through.”14
Clare was informed that she would have to testify on Wednesday, April 15, after the Easter recess. That would be three months since Dulles had offered her the job. This was frustrating for her, and an embarrassment to Harry. As Editor in Chief of Time, he was responsible for the Bolivian episode, which had ended with two dead, thirty-eight policemen injured, and $70,000 worth of damage to American property. Maddened crowds had stormed the embassy, shouting, “Imperialismo Yanqui!” and, “Abajo Dõna Clara!”15 Harry issued a qualified statement of regret, but stood by his magazine’s story.16 This did little to assuage the outraged feelings of Bolivians, nor did it improve Clare’s prospects for an easy confirmation. As the columnist Drew Pearson warned, Time’s indiscretion would make it “extremely difficult” for Clare “to serve effectively in her new post,” given that Brazil shared a long border with Bolivia.17
Nobody got more glee out of the discomfiture of the Luces than their former whipping boy, Harry S. Truman. “What a nice thing,” he gloated, “to have Mr. Clare Boothe Luce in the grease in Bolivia. He spent a lot of time trying to put me in the grease, but never succeeded.”18
In Phoenix, Clare determinedly continued her preparations to sail for Rio. She hired a professor from Arizona’s Amer
ican Institute for Foreign Trade to teach her the language, history, and economics of Brazil. She took a Linguaphone course in Portuguese, and found it “pretty rough” going. She read six scholarly books sent her by Allen Dulles, including Hernane Tavares de Sá’s The Brazilians: People of Tomorrow and Gilberto Freyre’s just published New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil. She asked Nelson Rockefeller to write some of his Brazilian friends on her behalf. Using her connections at the State Department, she arranged for the transfer of eleven senior aides currently serving Ambassador Briggs to be replaced by career diplomats of her choosing.19
A problem Clare had to fix before appearing in Washington was to have an operation on a bursitic little toe, which prevented her from wearing high heels. On March 18, she underwent surgery, and with characteristic interest in every new experience, reported it in detail to Louisa Jenkins. “Two doctors latched onto my pinkie and split it from stem to stern, the way you slice a little sandwich pickle. Then they chiseled off a piece of protruding bone and yanked out the noisome bursa which had surrounded it like an octopus.… Seems I must stomp around on crutches for the next few weeks.”20
As Clare hobbled her way into the splendid new Foreign Relations Committee room on Capitol Hill at 10:30 A.M. on April 15, 1959, front-page headlines were reporting the resignation of John Foster Dulles, who was mortally ill with recurrent cancer. It made the occasion poignant for her, since one of the Secretary’s last official acts had been to put her name forward for Brazil.
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