Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  They tried couch sessions for a while, and Clare responded ecstatically. “I feel … that I am the other half of you and you of me.… I love you because you treat me like—a man. (By which I mean, a person.)” Their conversations made her feel entirely feminine for the first time in her life. She told him she longed “to be his slave,” and please him without pleasing herself—“to serve for the joy of serving, to give without getting, to love without reward.”17

  Their mutual attraction was strong. “It would have been better for me if you had loved me sooner,” Clare wrote. “And yet. No. No. For I wouldn’t have believed in it, the way I do now, if it had happened in any other way.” Sounding like Sylvia Plath, she went on. “I had to go down down down in the dark all by myself in order to know what a miracle could befall me. What it meant to come up up up in the light with you.”18

  In another letter addressing him as “Dearest,” she admitted to exploding during an argument with Harry, because “for the last week I have been overwhelmed by the desire to be with you, to live with you, on the terra firma of real love.” A handicap was that Cohen was married. “Am I being stupid not to tear down the cage? But if I did … there’s the cruel problem of Ilse.… Sid, sit down right now and write me that you still love me.”19

  When apart, they set up weekly phone dates. There was much to tell him, she said, “even though all the important things have been said” about guilt in “sexual relations—in or out of marriage.”20

  Both finally realized the impossibility of a life together, given their respective marital and career commitments. When Cohen published his masterwork, The Beyond Within: The LSD Story, he sent her an inscribed copy.

  Clare, if “What is received is received according to the nature of the recipient”—I am both the finest and the worst of men—the finest for having known you—the worst for having lost that greatest of opportunities. It is to you—of course—to whom the book was written—a poor enough offering—but with it goes my love to the end.21

  Feeling serene after a post–Sunday Mass LSD session in Phoenix, Clare went East on January 18, 1961, to attend the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.22 On its eve, in bitterly cold weather, she and Harry attended Frank Sinatra’s fund-raising gala at the National Guard Armory in Washington. Some women were seen protecting their minks and gowns with blankets smuggled from local hotels as they entered the vast, only half-full space. By the next morning, a blizzard had deposited six inches of snow on the capital. Attendees at the swearing-in ceremony shivered as Kennedy, wearing no overcoat, and Eisenhower, balding and muffled up behind him, announced, “The torch has been passed to a new generation.”

  That night, Clare climbed into an Inaugural Ball bus in her white satin Lanvin gown, and found herself sitting next to Vice President Johnson. She reminded him that when they last met, just before the Democratic convention, he had been confident of getting the presidential nomination, and had profanely vowed that even if he lost, there was “no way” he would take the second spot under JFK.

  “Come clean, Lyndon,” she teased him.

  He leaned close and whispered, “Clare, I looked it up. One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man darlin’, and this is the only one chance I got.”23

  President Kennedy greets Clare at his inaugural ball, 1961 (illustration credit 44.1)

  After another spell in Arizona, taking LSD under Heard’s supervision and introducing her houseguest, Carlos Chávez, to the drug, Clare was back in New York by Monday, March 13. She was there ostensibly for an auction of furnishings in an eleventh-floor, twelve-room apartment that Harry had bought at 993 Fifth Avenue. Its purchase in both their names was apparently his way of fulfilling the promise he had made last June, to give her a $200,000 space of her own.24 The limestone building, designed by Emery Roth, was opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and only yards away from the Brokaw mansion, where she had lived during her first marriage.

  The more important reason for Clare’s return East was that she had become depressed yet again—“a cracking and breaking down interior feeling.” She sought comfort from Harry, but found him equally morose. It transpired that he had been seeing Jeanne Campbell for several weeks, having summoned her from Jamaica at the end of her Russian trip. But the reunion had gone badly. Jeanne, in spite of repeated rebuffs, was expecting a marriage proposal, and when it was not forthcoming, a “ghastly row” had ensued.25

  By Tuesday night, Harry’s mood had mellowed, and he treated Clare with more kindness and affection than she could remember in years. Yet inexplicably, while preparing for bed, she felt “a ping” in her head. This was followed by what she described as “a wild flood of tears, an impulse to gallop on the nightmare of my spirit down the slippery road of death.”26

  Dr. Michael Rosenbluth was summoned at 2:00 A.M., and found she had taken another overdose of sleeping pills, her third since discovering Harry’s affair. After the usual stomach pump, she woke next morning feeling so thirsty that a glass of cold water “tasted like ambrosia.” Her depression had lightened, but along with it came the conviction, expressed three days later to a New York psychiatrist, “that the roses and raptures of passion are gone forever for me.”27

  It would have been supremely ironic if Clare had died on the night of March 14. As she, Harry, and all Manhattan would soon find out, Jeanne Campbell was simultaneously attending a party given by Gore Vidal and meeting the novelist Norman Mailer. Their attraction was immediate, and within days they moved in together. By November, Jeanne would be pregnant with her long-desired first child, and would marry Mailer in due course.

  Untitled painting by Clare Boothe Luce (illustration credit 44.2)

  Harry’s reaction to her defection was to discontinue the private phone number she had used to call him.28 He took comfort as always in his role as America’s most powerful publisher, monologuing with senior staff, putting off the day for naming his successor, reveling in the easy access he had to foreign capitals, and the Biltmore golf course adjoining his backyard.

  Clare flew West to her toy poodle, her cactus garden, her heated swimming pool with its view of Camelback Mountain, her paintings and mosaics and bridge games, her socializing with wealthy, aging “Phoenicians,” and her LSD trips with the ubiquitous Gerald Heard and Michael Barrie—all conspiring to persuade her, as her fifty-eighth birthday approached, that she was heading toward retirement. This did not thrill her, as she wrote Sidney Cohen. “The snake is still hissing away under the rose bushes, but his name eludes me, except as one can call him by his family name, Despair.”29

  But her brain was too fertile and her interests too broad for her to allow herself to drop out of touch with the world of ideas and action. Aside from her monthly McCall’s columns, which would continue for six more years, she started to write political articles and give speeches on current issues, showing a steadily more conservative bias. She also took advantage of her friendship with JFK and LBJ, as well as continuing her contacts with Nixon and her neighbor Barry Goldwater, the junior Senator from Arizona.

  “The Kennedy administration looks like an exciting, vigorous and dynamic change,” Clare wrote Stan Swinton. She felt that the young President would do as well as Eisenhower, while doubting he could end the Cold War, or bring about “an economic Utopia” to match that of the 1950s. “Meanwhile, the Kennedy clan is fun to watch and very easy on the eyes. What more can we ask for in the White House just now.”30

  The rest of 1961 passed uneventfully, except that Clare had a long bout with pneumonia in early summer. She recuperated during a Mediterranean cruise with Harry on Bill Benton’s yacht, the Flying Clipper, and after Labor Day moved into the Fifth Avenue apartment.

  By December, she had begun to chafe over Harry’s failure to act on the disposition of assets they had discussed eighteen months earlier. She decided not to make a fuss over not having been given $200,000 to buy a place of her own, since they were now together, supposedly for life. Nor was she bot
hered about joint ownership of Sugar Hill, and even advised Harry to donate the property to Yale or Time Inc. one day and take a tax deduction. Her main concern was that he had promised her any artworks she wanted from their collection, but had not followed through with a document of transfer. Many of them surely belonged to her, since they had been gifts from him. He had already arbitrarily deeded two paintings to his alma mater and Mepkin, as if she had no rights to either.31

  The result was an acrimonious quarrel, in which Harry seemed puzzled and offended that she did not trust his word in financial matters. Clare wearily capitulated, feeling she was too old to strain their marriage again by making demands about anything. She tried to be philosophical, writing resignedly, “I am here. He is here. Here we both are.” Harry made amends by “stepping up to the counter” at Tiffany’s and buying his wife a double-strand, cultured pearl necklace for Christmas that cost some $250,000.32

  In her February 1962 column for McCall’s, Clare answered a reader’s question: “Do you think Mrs. Kennedy should be censured for buying some of her clothes from Paris?”

  Her reply began innocuously enough. “The personal activities of the President’s wife cannot be dissociated from her role as First Lady.” But then she could not resist parodying JFK’s inaugural rhetoric. “She must not ask herself, ‘What can these clothes do for me?’ but ‘What do these clothes I wear do for America?’ ”

  Her remarks caused a nationwide furor, with headlines such as CLARE BOOTHE LUCE DRESSES DOWN JACKIE KENNEDY and JACKIE CENSURED? LUCE FUR FLYING. The White House announced that the First Lady’s clothes were all American made, except for a Givenchy gown she had worn in Paris “as a tribute to the French people.”33

  Clare dismissed the uproar, saying, “Mrs. Kennedy would look gorgeous in a gunny sack.”34

  The President at any rate was not offended. He wrote in March to invite Clare to sit on his Advisory Committee on the Arts, whose job would be to constitute a National Cultural Center in Washington, adding that he hoped they would “meet soon.” Two weeks later, on her fifty-ninth birthday, Clare accepted the appointment.35

  She also heard from Nixon at this time. He was considering a run for the governorship of California, and sent her an inscribed copy of his new book, Six Crises.36

  That spring and summer saw the apogee of Clare’s quest to repeatedly attain the “higher register” of the LSD experience. More and more, she wanted to involve friends in her drug taking. Apart from Heard and Barrie (who tried without success to become permanent fixtures in her ménage), she encouraged Chávez to send a report of his Phoenix initiation to Dr. Cohen, and in early June had Father Murray watch and taperecord one of her trips in the birch grove at Sugar Hill.37

  He told her he felt privileged to have looked “into the depths of you … and to have found that all was lightsome there, and full of life, with nothing of gloom or doom. You were so happy.” The next day, however, there was a “switch” in Clare’s attitude. She became distant, almost hostile, toward him. It was not for the first time. They had squabbled before, after the priest chastised her for wasting her literary talent on stillborn detective stories, instead of focusing on what Carlos called “the book of yourself.”38 She never took adverse criticism well, but the fact was that he had outlived his mediatory usefulness, since she and Harry had reached a state of truce.

  Another reason for her estrangement from Murray was that she felt he patronized her, exemplifying a perceived bias in the Roman Catholic Church toward women as “an inferior sex.” She told him she could no longer go to Confession, because “it does me no good,” and felt herself in “deep rebellion” against the Vatican’s anti-feminist theology. Murray tried to defend himself and the Church against her accusations, but admitted he was not her equal in argument. “You are far and away the most intelligent woman I have ever met—and also far superior in intelligence to most of the men I have met”—unconsciously revealing the gender bias of which she accused him.39

  He was more effective in defining her fundamental psychological problem: “a felt incapacity to love and an equally felt unwillingness to be loved.” Unease about this explained Clare’s constant desire to punish herself with “the suicidal thing.” In recent months, Murray said, she seemed to have shed some feelings of culpability, and he advised her to try to deal with them in everyday life, as she did successfully under LSD. But he reminded her of Dr. Cohen’s warning that “the ancient emotional structures, which do indeed dissolve under LSD, tend to reconstitute themselves.”40

  Clare’s next psychedelic playmate in the birch grove was a former lover from the early 1930s, the Holiday magazine editor William Harlan Hale. Like Randolph Churchill, he was now a bulky man eight years her junior, who had once been lean and handsome as well as promising. At twenty-two, Hale had enjoyed an idyllic interlude with Clare on the appropriately named Crotch Island in Maine, and had never forgotten it. He had gone on to publish a well-received novel called Hannibal Hooker: His Death and Adventures, in which an entrancing woman invited the hero to an island where she was spending the summer alone.41

  By chance or design, Hale had met Clare again during Harry’s world tour in 1960, and at a series of lunches, dinners, and theater had made no attempt to conceal that he remained in thrall. Though married with three children, he longed to recapture their earlier closeness. “In you I have staked a still unmined claim to tenderness and friendship and, if you will, passion, that makes me feel rich.”42

  On what he described as “that transcendent Thursday,” they tripped on LSD, swam, photographed each other, and walked among the roses. “Dream-like as the day was,” he wrote her afterward, “I remain staggered at what came up from the depths when the wraps of restraint went off.… I haven’t known such joy except once before—on Crotch Island.”43

  On June 20, Clare left for Pollença, Majorca, where she had rented a villa for the summer. Since Harry would be joining her in July, she invited Hale, Chávez, Heard, Barrie, Tish Baldrige, and Sidney and Ilse Cohen for parts of August.

  Clare had fallen in love with the Balearic Islands in 1934, and had written a rhapsodic travel article about Majorca.44 Her house, C’an Cueg—“House of the Frog”—belonged to a Baroness von Ripper, and sat in hills above the fishing village of Puerto de Pollença. It was a ten-minute walk from the ocean, and had three bedrooms besides her own, whose jasmine-draped balcony overlooked a garden full of geraniums and white oleander blossoms. The property had a freshwater swimming pool, and was screened from the road and a farm opposite by a long white wall, a backdrop for orange, lemon, and almond groves. Five servants and a cook were included in the $5,000 rental.

  A highlight of Harry’s visit was a sixty-seventh birthday celebration for Robert Graves on July 24. The English poet had lived for more than thirty years in the mountain village of Deiá, and had written a play to entertain his guests. It was performed in moonlight at a tiny amphitheater deep in an ancient olive grove. The plot was simple. Three travelers, searching for love, ate a magic mushroom and found instant peace and beauty in Majorca.45

  But tranquillity once more eluded Clare, who was depressed for much of Harry’s stay. Where these periods of anxieties and fears—“the God-awful dismals”—came from, she could not fathom.46 But she was buoyed in early August by the arrival of Heard and Barrie, who brought LSD.47 Gerald’s wide range of acquaintance attracted interesting guests. Clare held court, alternating two $400 wigs from Helena Rubinstein that mitigated the effects of windy sailing on a fifty-eight-foot ketch, and swimming several miles daily. One was dark blonde for lunches and sightseeing in town, the other lighter for patio dinners at a square, stone table beneath a sky ablaze with stars.48

  Clare vacationing in Majorca, July 1962 (illustration credit 44.3)

  Letitia Baldrige arrived on August 12, accompanied by three young American men. Tish was much in demand since the Kennedys had hired her as White House social secretary. She did not much care for Heard, skinny and garrulous in an old gr
een shirt and slacks, or for Barrie with his extremely brief shorts and bright Hawaiian shirt. As a former CIA employee, she had made a pledge never to take mind-altering substances, so she declined to join LSD sessions. The sight of her former boss rhapsodizing about colors and imaginary music—not to mention trying to seduce her friends—repulsed her. But they did not share her scruples, and one youth had a bad trip that triggered violent, continuing nightmares. Tish remembered this druggy interlude as among the “most horrible” of her life.49

  But to Bill Hale, who appeared on the twenty-second, Pollença was paradise. “ ‘Et in Arcadia ego’—‘I too have been in Arcady,’ ” he wrote her afterward. “I am thinking of you constantly.… How far off Majorca seems now … that enchanted stillness of the flowers in the garden and of the shadows under the arches, interrupted only by a vulgar bleat from the bird-cage, or the splash of a middle-aged editor heaving himself into the swimming pool, or that wonderful bell-like call from the room upstairs, ‘Oh—Bill!’ ”50

  Clare had no more houseguests after Hale left, since Chávez canceled, and the Cohens were unable to travel from Germany, pleading a mysterious “predicament” on the part of Ilse.51

  Sidney had just published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “Complications Associated with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25).” It described the “serious complications” his researches were beginning to associate with acid. If Clare read it, she would have recognized many of them as pertaining to her own experiences under its influence and—more disturbingly—for months after taking it. Cohen listed “euphoriant abuse” (taking the drug recreationally instead of therapeutically); “multihabituation” (his own coinage, meaning simultaneous indulgence in other narcotics, stimulants, sedatives, and hallucinogens); “emotional instability”; “antisocial acting out behavior”; “dissolution of the ego” (feelings of unworthiness and a desire to be punished); and “prolonged psychotic reactions,” including depression and suicide.52