That evening, Drew Pearson, who liked to manipulate the levers of power and had actually written much of Morse’s floor speech, called Senator Fulbright. Knowing that he had an aversion to unqualified political appointees, Pearson said, “Why don’t you take on someone your size, such as Mrs. Luce.”
Fulbright answered frankly, “I couldn’t defeat her. Look at the speeches made for her by Kennedy, Dodd and Lausche.”
“You know why. It’s a matter of religion.”
“Yes, but I can’t say that publicly.”40
Pearson then called Hubert Humphrey and warned him that if he supported Clare, it “might cause him trouble in the future.” Humphrey said he would “abstain from voting for the lady.”41
Back in New York, Clare smoldered over her humiliations at Morse’s hand. The East Fifty-second Street apartment had been put on the market, and her baggage for Brazil was already at the docks. She brooded about the wisdom of agreeing to serve in South America. Through no fault of her own, the Bolivia affair had made her a controversial figure there. And Rio was not Rome. She suspected she might find it “an isolated, dull post.” Brazil’s economic situation was shaky, so she would probably be blamed for not getting its government the enormous amount of aid it needed.42
Then there was Harry. Morse seemed fixated on her relationship with him, and kept insinuating that their combined influence on the administration’s foreign policy reflected the larger interests of Time Inc. She yearned for revenge on the hostile Senator, and decided to make use of a piece of biographical information that Time’s research department had dug up for her. It read that in August 1951 he had been “walking through a stable when a scared mare let fly with both hind feet. Morse got the full blow on the right side of his face; his jaw was broken in four places and thirteen teeth knocked out.”43
The following morning, before the Senate reconvened, Clare called Stan Swinton, her newspaper friend from Rome, now working for the Associated Press. She asked him to take down a statement and hold it until after the vote on her nomination. There was no doubt that she would be approved by a large majority, but she wanted to make it clear whom she blamed for persecuting her.44
“I am grateful,” she dictated, “for the overwhelming vote of confidence in the Senate. We must now wait until the dirt settles. My difficulties, of course, go some years back and began when Senator Wayne Morse was kicked in the head by a horse.”45
The final roll call on her nomination did not take place until after 2:00 P.M., due to further delay tactics by Senator Morse. The folksy minority leader, Everett Dirksen (R-IL), became so irritable that he railed, “Why thresh old straw? Why beat an old bag of bones?”
The chamber resounded with laughter, and Dirksen lamely explained that he had misused an old colloquialism. Senator Mansfield made a final plea for Clare and then, as majority whip, called for the vote. The result, tabulated at 2:15 P.M., was 79 in favor and 11 against, with 45 Democrats supporting her.
Within half an hour, Clare’s wisecrack spilled out of the Senate news ticker and was delivered to Senator Morse. He rose on a point of personal privilege to read it into the record, adding that he had not expected such prompt evidence of the “emotional instability on the part of this slanderer.”46 Several of Clare’s Democratic supporters declared that if they could recall their votes, they would. But she was now officially the United States Ambassador to Brazil.
Morse affected good humor at the fait accompli and said, “I wish her well.”47 Meanwhile, Dirksen alerted the White House to Clare’s remark and the outrage it had caused. He also informed the New York Herald Tribune that Morse had gone so far as to call Mrs. Luce’s physician “to see if she was under the care of a psychiatrist.” The doctor had said he had “no knowledge” of this. Two more calls to the White House convinced Dirksen that the President was sympathetic to Clare. He got the feeling that she and Eisenhower had already spoken.48
Determined now to extricate herself from an assignment that had become distasteful to her, and feeling entirely confident in the correctness of her judgment, Clare cajoled Harry into issuing a statement that would facilitate her exit.49 He grumpily consented, and issued it at 5:39 P.M.
For twenty-five years, in the course of her public life, my wife has taken not only the criticisms provoked by her own views and actions but also many punches which were really intended for me or for the publications of which I am editor-in-chief. The attack of Sen. Wayne Morse is perhaps the most vitriolic example of this.
Harry went on to say that her ambassadorship “has now been profoundly compromised.” It was a question of “whether she can now hope to accomplish the delicate mission assigned to her by the President in a climate of uneasiness which the smears and suspicions aired on the Senate floor have naturally created in Brazil.” He revealed that Clare had already offered in vain to withdraw her nomination over the Bolivian incident. Then came his most trenchant point.
Sen. Morse happens to be the chairman of the Foreign Relations subcommittee which has cognizance of small inter-American affairs and Brazil. As an Ambassador she will not be able to defend herself from vendetta politics at home which makes common cause with anti-Americanism in South America. Therefore I have asked my wife to offer her resignation again.50
At a news conference the next day, the President defended Clare. He said her comment on Morse had been “ill-advised” but “perfectly human, although she probably wished it had never been published.” Reporters laughed at this. Mrs. Luce, Eisenhower added, had done “brilliant” work in Italy bringing about the Trieste settlement. Sources in Brazil had assured him that she was still welcome in the post, and despite her husband’s statement, he had received no indication that she intended to resign.51
In fact, Brazilian reactions to her confirmation were divided along political lines. Conservatives and moderates approved it, while leftists and nationalists believed she was being sent to interfere in their domestic affairs. São Paulo’s Úlstima Hora accused Clare of being a “figurehead of oil trusts,” and saluted “the vigilant Mr. Morse.” Tribuna do Ceará said that “the loser is Brazil.”52
Recriminatory debate raged on that afternoon in the Senate, reaching an extreme of anti-feminist vituperation when Senator Stephen M. Young (D-OH) read into the record a poem by Sir William Watson (1858–1935) entitled “The Woman with the Serpent’s Tongue.”
Ambitious from her natal hour,
And scheming all her life for power;
With little left of seemly pride;
With venomed fangs she cannot hide; …
Burnt up within by that strange soul
She cannot slake, or yet control:
Malignant-lipp’d, unkind, unsweet;
Past all example indiscreet;
Hectic, and always overstrung,—
The Woman with the Serpent’s Tongue.53
The following evening on CBS, Eric Sevareid observed that most men did not like women in public life. “Particularly they dislike aggressive women, and when they must deal with a woman whose very appearance requires that she be treated as fragile femininity, but whose combative nature alternately requires that she be treated as a man—then, they are truly unhappy.”54
Clare arrived at the White House at 10:45 A.M. on Friday, May 1, amid expectation that she was about to be sworn in as Ambassador to Brazil. Instead, she presented a letter of resignation to the President, saying, “It is no longer possible for me to accomplish the mission which you have entrusted to me.” She cited the “thousands of words of extraordinary charges against my person” made by a Senator who was chairman of a subcommittee that handled Latin American affairs. “A continuing harassment of my mission, with a view to making his own charges stick, is the natural course the chairman would follow. And the sad fact is not that I, but Brazilian-American policy would be the victim.”
Eisenhower urged her not to quit. “You can’t do that. A soldier fights where his commander sends him.” But Clare would not be swayed. “You nee
d an able-bodied soldier, and I’ve had both my legs shot out from under me.”55
As Press Secretary Hagerty announced her decision, she stood beside him solemn-faced in a black faille coat. Declining comment, she then left in a limousine, blowing a kiss from her white-gloved hand to the group of reporters.56
Clare announces her resignation as Ambassador to Brazil (illustration credit 42.1)
43
AN UNSHARED LIFE
Adultery is a most convenient way to rise above the conventional.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Many Brazilian and American newspapers expressed sympathy for Clare in the days after her resignation. “The predominant opinion, now that we will not have her here with us, is deep disappointment,” the Jornal do Brasil commented. The Atlanta Constitution said it was difficult to understand why she should have chosen to renew the row after it had been settled in her favor, yet thought her wise to resign. The New York Times accused her nemesis of vindictiveness. “The tactics pursued by Senator Morse of Oregon in this whole affair seem to us to have been beneath contempt.” Even the Portland Oregonian felt that Morse had “won what may seem to him a victory over his chosen enemy, President Eisenhower. But many of his constituents are ashamed.”1
Clare claimed that 90 percent of the editorials in a survey of 350 American newspapers were “unequivocally against the Senator.” Yet a reporter from Pennsylvania’s Sharon Herald saw two unequal stacks of mail in Morse’s office and was told that seventeen hundred of them praised the Senator’s performance and only eight hundred disapproved. Clare’s equestrian image recurred on both sides. “If being kicked by a horse gave you your courage,” one letter read, “then I’d like to see a buckin’ bronc turned lose in the Senate chamber.” A Luce supporter wrote, “Too bad the horse didn’t finish you off.” Another derided Morse as a “mental dwarf.”2
Morse’s moment of triumph: May 1, 1959 (illustration credit 43.1)
He was far from that. Much of the opprobrium directed at him was based on the revelation that he had telephoned Clare’s doctor to question her psychiatric health. In fact, Morse had correctly intuited something pathological in her behavior while testifying.3 He had therefore telephoned Milton Rosenbluth’s office, only to find that the doctor had recently died. The physician expressing “no knowledge” of Mrs. Luce’s psychiatric history was Dr. Michael Rosenbluth, the dead man’s son, who had not been party to the suggestion that Clare enter Payne Whitney in October 1958.4
Before she left Washington, Wiley Buchanan, Ike’s Chief of Protocol, hosted what was to have been a bon voyage party for the new Ambassador. Clare made such an impressive entrance in a black lace dress, diamond necklace, and white mink wrap that a guest remarked, “No matter what, she is one of the most beautiful women in the United States.” Dulles’s successor as Secretary of State, Christian Herter, toasted her after dinner and said pointedly that he hoped “the private life of the charming lady on my left will remain private.” Clare assured Alice Roosevelt Longworth, “I haven’t felt so relaxed in a long time.”5
But once she was back in New York, the enormity of the decision to forgo Brazil confronted her. She had not only put the Fifty-second Street apartment up for sale, but had reinstalled Harry at the Waldorf Towers, closed the houses in Phoenix and Ridgefield, and dismissed nine servants. Copious numbers of crates full of new outfits and personal furnishings, right down to stationery engraved with her diplomatic crest, had to be retrieved from the docks. She had even bought an air-conditioned limousine as well as cooling units for the embassy, after learning that Rio was as humid for seven months of the year as New York in August.6
Clare told a reporter that she was set “to resume work” on her autobiography. The novelist Edna Ferber suspected otherwise, telling her teasingly that since she was “the Woman who Has Everything,” her memoir—“the book you never will write”—was bound to be important.7
At Sugar Hill on May 16 at 11:25 A.M., Clare took 100 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide. Two friends from California, the writer-philosopher Gerald Heard, and his musician partner, Jay Michael Barrie, supervised the dose. It was her third experience in three months with “LSD,” as the new hallucinatory drug was known. The first had been in Phoenix on March 11, and the second in San Francisco on April 4, only eleven days before her Senate committee hearing—which, given LSD’s known propensity to linger in the brain, might have sent an extra message to the psychologically astute Senator from Oregon. Indeed, there was something psychedelic about Clare’s memory of him staring at her: “old oyster-eyed, coffin-headed Wayne Morse.”8
By 11:55, she was gazing out of the window “with great stillness and intensity,” Barrie noted as recorder. They had been listening to Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, and when it ended, Clare said, still staring at her lawns and flowering dogwood trees, “It’s hard to tell whether the music was accompanying that out there, or that out there was accompanying the music.”
Clearly the drug was taking effect. At 12:10 P.M., she protested that Stravinsky’s suite Renard, now playing, was “a vast intrusion” on her contemplation, and should be turned off. “The trees, if they knew what they were doing, would be making their own music.… The colors are beginning to separate themselves into all their exquisite subtleties.”
Half an hour later, she closed her eyes and said, “What a silence—but so full of noise—a paradox—an immense silence filled with a soundless music.” This remark was akin to George Eliot’s observation that an artist in the rapture of creation was aware of “the roar that lies on the other side of silence.” The difference was that Clare’s ecstasy was chemically induced.
At 12:35, her mood changed, and she spoke of her recent tormentor. “If Senator Morse should come into this room at this moment—he in full possession of his faculties and I in partial possession—the thing that would surprise him would be his complete irrelevance to me. But do you think I could look at him as a brother, Gerald?”
“Perhaps not yet,” Heard replied. Using one of the jargon words he favored in his philosophical talks, he added, “But in an hour, he would ‘compose.’ ”
Clare, laughing, said, “I’m still in the state that I want him to decompose.”
Her mood changed again, and she requested that a bowl of lilacs be brought to her. “What is this great abyss between what is alive and what is dead?” She focused closely on the blossoms. “Now I’m beginning to see the flowers breathe.… It makes one yearn to see God.”
Feeling chilly, she called for a heavy coat and said she wanted to go outside. Heard and Barrie watched her inspect a bed of vividly colored flowers, then walk into a birch grove. When she returned, she asked for another 25 micrograms. “I have one more jump to make.”
Even colder after ingesting it, Clare asked for blankets. Soon she became less coherent. “Things are falling at the base of my brain. There is a blue unbending light.” She closed her eyes. “I can see my own eye, even to the small blood vessels.” After some moments, she said, “You’re not alive, you’re not dead, you’re not dreaming, you’re not awake.”
It was now almost one o’clock, and she wrapped herself in another blanket. “I think there is only one thing God doesn’t really like—and that is being flirted with.… Theo logos—does that mean the word of God or the word about God?”
The sound of an automobile horn outside announced the arrival of Harry for lunch. “I shall leave you three to wrestle with the spaghetti,” Clare said. “Imagine adding all his strings to mine—it’s a wonder the whole of 450 doesn’t blow up!” The number apparently referred to the apartment the Luces had just sold to Drue Heinz for $175,000.
While the men ate, Clare remained on the porch, drinking a cup of broth. Then she went out, spread a blanket on the lawn, and lay down. Harry joined her at 2:45, and sat with her for the next three-quarters of an hour.9
By 6:15 P.M., after Clare had taken a long walk, the effects of her trip wore off. She joined her husband and houseguests for
dinner, and the kind of conversation with Gerald that she relished.10
She had first met him in 1947, while working in Hollywood on The Screwtape Letters, and had been captivated by his Anglo-Irish charm, erudition, and spirituality. He was now in his seventieth year, and with his bony, bearded appearance, vegetarianism, and other asceticisms reminded her of George Bernard Shaw. But in Heard’s case the beard was a scraggy red Vandyke, and when light shone through it Clare noticed that he seemed to have no chin.11 His mustache did not quite conceal the contortions of his thin-lipped mouth when he spoke in a strangely accented, hybrid voice. Yet there was something so compelling about his elocution, his haunting blue eyes under wreathing brows, and the way he repeatedly tilted his head against one long, effeminate hand that hypnotized all listeners, including such varied eminences as H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky, Kenneth Clark, Dave Brubeck, Christopher Isherwood—and now the Luces.12
Wellborn and Cambridge-educated, a former lecturer at Oxford and BBC broadcaster in the 1930s, Heard was the author of more than thirty books on science, religion, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism, including Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes, The Ascent of Humanity, and Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man. He had immigrated to America with Huxley in 1937, and had encouraged Auden and Isherwood to follow them and settle in Southern California. Since then he had become a devotee of the Hindu guru Swami Prabhavananda, and a promoter of the cult of Vedanta, whose three main tenets were that man’s real nature was divine, the aim of life was to realize this, and all religions were essentially in agreement.
Gerald Heard (illustration credit 43.2)
Price of Fame Page 53
