On March 12, Harry received a curt reply to his invitation: “I simply cannot see my way clear to accepting it at this time.”71
He took the refusal with equanimity. When Clare asked him why he had not wanted to wait and celebrate the magazine’s semicentennial, he replied, “Because I won’t be here for the fiftieth.”72
At least Vice President Johnson attended, having qualified for the honored guest list of 284 former Time cover subjects. He joked that it was evident they were selected “on a basis other than beauty.” The Waldorf-Astoria ballroom was crowded with seventeen hundred VIPs, among them General MacArthur, Judge Thurgood Marshall, Bob Hope, John Dos Passos, Ginger Rogers, Gina Lollobrigida, Jack Dempsey, and Cardinal Spellman.
Clare, in a turquoise gown and Bulgari necklace of diamonds and emeralds, said to Elsa Maxwell, “You and I, we never made it, darling.” Harry tried to make amends for this when he addressed the crowd. “There is one in particular who has never been a cover subject, because she married the Editor-in-Chief. With great respect and all my love, may I introduce for a bow Clare Boothe Luce.”73
On the Fourth of July, Clare gave the keynote address at the annual convention of the Underwater Society of America in Philadelphia. She renewed her chiding of the Kennedy administration for its obsession with “outer” space—mocking the adjective Kennedy often used as redundantly absurd. She thought that taxpayer money would be better spent exploring the more fecund “inner space” of mare incognitum.
We have by no means outgrown the superstitious attitudes acquired in the age of mythology. For thousands of years, man has positioned his gods and his supermen in the skies. Up and Light and God and Heaven are ancient emotional correlations. Most men cannot still help feeling that it is somehow more “godlike” to send a man or two barreling around and around in the empty stratosphere than to send many men to explore the mysteries of the teeming ocean.74
She sent her speech to the President and he again responded appreciatively, calling it “inspiring,” while not mentioning her criticism of his space program. He assured her that he shared her interest in sea exploration, and had budgeted $156 million for oceanography in 1964, compared with Eisenhower’s $39 million in 1960. Enclosing a couple of reports by his scientific staff, he apologized for their dullness, saying that they lacked “the sparkle and enthusiasm that punctuate your paper.”
His final words were for her to share any further creative thoughts on the subject with him.75
Clare was flying from Phoenix to New York on Friday, November 22, when the captain announced that at 12:30 P.M. Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy had been shot by a sniper along his motorcade route. At 1:33 P.M., he had been pronounced dead in the emergency room of Parkland Hospital.
She was working on a speech, and found herself crying onto the pages in her lap. More than most people, Clare had reason to weep, remembering Jack as a young naval ensign—“such a bright clever boy”—escorting her daughter to New York parties, and sending her a heartfelt letter of sympathy after Ann’s death. In recent months, she had increased her public criticism of him, syndicating four articles attacking the Apollo moon program (“this prideful lunatic project”), blaming his administration for the assassination in South Vietnam of President Ngo Dinh Diem, and using the birth statistics of the Kennedy family to dramatize the overpopulation of the globe, predicting that by the fifth generation, “1,080 children could call Joseph Kennedy their great-great-grandfather.”76
The best she could do now was draft a speculative tribute to JFK. “The President’s death was not senseless. It contained the elements of both Greek tragedy and Christian tragedy.… His life may have been the price he paid for the Bay of Pigs.”77
45
TOGETHER AT THE END
After the first death, there is no other.
—DYLAN THOMAS
In the new year of 1964, with another presidential election looming, Clare put out a tongue-in-cheek statement of her own candidacy, accompanied by a series of paradoxical platform planks. “I am for lifting everyone off the social bottom,” she announced. “In fact, I am for doing away with the social bottom altogether. I am for victory in Viet Nam without any increase in U.S. casualties or expenditures.… I am for the sovereignty of Panama in the Canal Zone under the American flag. I am for the stabilizing of all governments of South America while allowing full scope for the natural revolutionary fervor of the people.… I am for putting men on Venus by 1975 or vice versa.… I am for a vigorous two-party system in which my party will control the White House, all the governorships and over 75 percent of Congress.”1
Simultaneously, she contracted to write a series of political columns for the New York Herald Tribune that appeared as often as once a week, and were widely syndicated. One of the earliest appeared after she met with President Johnson at the White House on February 4. Referring to LBJ’s biggest policy initiative, his war against poverty, she remarked that the last word should be understood relatively. “Regardless of how much we raise the living standards of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, they will still remain poor in relation to those in the middle and at the top.”2
In a profile of him on April 12, she noted that “Johnson has so far succeeded admirably in creating a public image of a sober, slow, and soft-spoken leader who can be relied upon to act with moderation, prudence and compassion.” She doubted that any Republican candidate could beat him in the fall. A recent, well-documented report that the President, drinking beer and “driving his own car at well over 80,” had nearly caused a triple collision in Texas bothered her. He was a man with a serious heart problem, she wrote, and had he been killed, “there is no Vice President to succeed him.” She felt he was capable “of becoming one of our greatest Presidents.” But the Texas highway incident showed that he might have trouble one day with hubris.
History has demonstrated time and again that a man will often beat himself, where no opponent can beat him. In a moment of impulsive action or speech he strips away what in modern political jargon we call the “image,” and what Dr. Karl Jung, the great Swiss psychologist, used to call “persona,” unexpectedly revealing “the person,” or “real man.” This revelation leads to his decline in popularity—sometimes even to his downfall.3
Clare turned sixty-one in Phoenix on April 10, and felt that it was the happiest birthday of her life.4 One of the reasons was relief. She had at last admitted to Simon Michael Bessie that she would never write her memoirs. Having read so many life stories that she knew to be full of omissions and distortions, if not outright lies, she had concluded that the art of autobiography might more appropriately be called “alibiography.”5
Bessie had once told her that the qualities he looked for in a writer were “a preference for solitude, vitality, and ego.”6 A problem for Clare was that she had the last two, but not the first. Also, exhuming the past did not suit her temperament. She was much more interested in the present and future. “Nothing I ever did, or felt, seems to me to be more useful or exciting than watching the scarlet cardinal who is eating sunflower seeds at this minute outside my window.”7
Besides, she now had Harry more to herself, since he had made the decision at sixty-six to retire from control of Time Inc. He would continue to serve as “Editorial Chairman,” but that was in effect an emeritus position, not requiring his daily presence at the office. He chose as his replacement Hedley Donovan, the forty-nine-year-old former managing editor of Fortune.8
Harry had suffered further heart trouble, and was so deaf that after much nagging from Clare, he had finally consented to wear a hearing aid concealed within the heavy sidebars of his spectacles.9 But she had failed to persuade him to quit his three-pack-a-day smoking habit. The leisurely life of the Biltmore Estates bored him after a while. Golf was a poor substitute for pontificating with his editors. He played mainly because Dr. Caldwell prescribed exercise, and his demeanor on the course, where he never broke 85, was dogged and often sullen.10
Clare, in contrast, loved her house, garden, and studio—a new one designed by architectural students of the late Frank Lloyd Wright. Unfortunately, the space was more beautiful than practical, with no ventilation and angled clerestory windows that could not be curtained. “Now I know,” she said, “why so many of his clients called him ‘Frank Lloyd Wrong.’ ”11
Her major mosaic that spring was a large, iron-framed golden tiger, a gift for Carlos Chávez that she shipped COD.12 In return, he dedicated a work for symphonic percussion to her called Tambuco.13
Her burgeoning career as a journalist kept Clare abreast of the latest issues, and gave the instant gratification of seeing her byline in print. In early May, Clare’s name was linked to that of Marilyn Monroe, in a Life cover story she wrote entitled “What Really Killed Marilyn.” She rejected the popular notion that Hollywood was to blame for the star’s apparent suicide, having treated her like “a piece of meat.” On the contrary, a career in pictures had saved Marilyn from poverty, made her a cinematic “Love Goddess,” and brought her two famous husbands, as well as millions of adoring fans. A dread of middle age, with its attendant loss of beauty and diminishing sex appeal, was a more likely cause of Monroe’s depression and overdose. “Breasts, belly, bottom must one day sag … her mirror had begun to warn her.”14
As the convention season approached, Clare’s rhetorical tone became more provocative. She gained headlines with a commencement address on June 14 at St. John’s University, Long Island. It was titled “The Crisis in Soviet-Chinese Relations.” Eleven months before, she reminded the students, the Communist monolith had split ideologically over the nuclear test ban treaty that Khrushchev had signed with Kennedy. Mao Tse-tung had angrily accused the Soviet leader of “prettifying American imperialism” and opting for “peaceful coexistence” with the West. His view was that Communism should be warlike and expansionist, aiming for world domination by any means, including preemptive nuclear war. To date, the United States had ignored this threat by continuing (with the approval of Henry Luce) to isolate Red China diplomatically, going so far as to boycott its entry into the United Nations.
Clare ignored orthodox Republican opinion, and proposed that Washington change its policy toward Peking, as London and Paris were trying to do. She said that the things the Chinese most wanted were economic and technical aid, and the nuclear bomb. Should they ever get the last, “your generation will know nothing but endless war in the Orient.” And that would moreover serve to reunite the Marxist/Leninist monolith. The answer was to deal with Mao’s seven hundred million people—many of them starving—more pragmatically and generously, by means of a wheat deal. “The ways of peace—aid and trade to the Chinese people—must be explored.”15
Walter Lippmann wrote to congratulate her on the speech, saying he had seen nothing so good on “the great schism,” and agreed with her “brilliant” analysis and “wise” conclusions.16
The surprising reversal of Clare’s militant anti-Communism was followed by an article in which she predicted defeat for Senator Goldwater, if he was chosen as the Republican candidate for the presidency in July. His nomination looked likely, despite accusations that he was a warmongering “extremist.” In National Review, she wrote, “Barry, caught with his Conservative pants down, all his Extremities showing, will be buried (beside Alf Landon) under the Johnson landslide in November.”17
This aroused the expectation that Clare would endorse the more liberal Nelson Rockefeller before the GOP convention opened at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on July 13. But she again surprised everyone by announcing that she was for her Arizonan neighbor, whatever his fate, and would co-chair the National Citizens’ Committee for Goldwater.
“I can truthfully tell you,” the Senator wrote her, “there have been few things that have so thrilled me in my life.… I am grateful to you beyond my ability to express it.” He added that he hoped to see her on the convention floor.18
The Luces arrived on the weekend before the opening ceremonies, and on Sunday Harry went alone to a lunch in the hotel suite of Senator Jacob Javits of New York. There, to his astonishment, sitting on the bed talking to John Oakes of The New York Times, was Lady Jeanne Campbell. She had divorced Norman Mailer the year before, and her grandfather had died the previous month, leaving her half a million in trust. They chatted for some ten minutes, after which Harry was so discombobulated that he tried to exit the room through a closet.19
On Thursday, July 16, Goldwater tearfully watched Clare second his nomination on television. But amid all the distractions of a raucous contest, with Governor Rockefeller of New York being booed to silence by contemptuous conservatives, her appearance attracted little media comment. Goldwater won with 883 votes, compared to 214 for Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania and 114 for Rockefeller. In his acceptance speech, the Senator caused a stir among moderates when he said, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” He was interrupted by a roar of approval that lasted forty seconds, but he was not finished. “And let me remind you also—that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Richard Nixon, trying to make the best of the controversial line, predicted that “Mr. Conservative” would be elected President, “after the greatest campaign in history.”20
Clare proved to be the more accurate forecaster.
Her willingness to acknowledge the validity of a Communist government on the Chinese mainland, coupled with her campaign activities on behalf of Goldwater, made Clare at once too liberal and too right-wing a conservative for Harry.21 He would not reveal whom he voted for in November, not even to his son Hank. But the latter felt that, along with the senior editors of Time and Life, his father favored Johnson.22
At one stage, when Harry was still Editor in Chief of his magazines, Clare’s heresy toward his venerated Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek might have caused a major blowup in their relationship. But he was frail now, and emotionally depleted by her series of victories in his attempts to divorce her. In retrospect, she had always gotten what she wanted, with the exception of a power stake in his company: luxury apartments in New York, a plantation in South Carolina, houses in Connecticut and Arizona, consort services in Rome, a large art collection, ample funds, and all the resources of Time Inc.’s travel and research departments when writing her articles and books. He was feeling his age too acutely to fight with her anymore, or match her freelance activities, while she, still churning out articles and making television and podium appearances, seemed, with surgical help, to be getting younger and more beautiful.23 Restless and acquisitive as ever, she pushed again for buying a house in Hawaii.
With that in mind, the Luces left on July 7 for a month in Honolulu. They checked into the Governor’s Suite in the Kahala Hilton Hotel on Waikiki Beach. Bougainvillea vines grew on their private terrace overlooking a lagoon where two big dolphins played. “And beyond,” Clare wrote Dorothy Farmer, “a vast sandy beach, edged with palms, and rolling breakers on the snorkel reef.”24
In the mornings, she swam with the dolphins and rhapsodized over them to Louisa Jenkins: “No dog, no horse, no animal communicates love and companionship, playfulness and gaiety as does a dolphin. He is simply incomparable.” At Sea Life Park and Whalers Cove, she swam with smaller, more agile porpoises. “They’re thoroughly elusive—much too fast for me.” But she delighted in their almost human intelligence, and got to know three by name—Haole, Lei, and Keiki. The last, a seagoing cetacean, was being trained at the oceanarium to help professional divers discover more about the submarine “inner space” around Oahu.25
Late that month, an old beachfront property at 4559 Kahala Avenue was put up for sale, consisting of just over two acres of palm-shaded land, 241 feet of shoreline, and a magnificent view across the bay to the volcanic cone of Diamond Head. A miscellany of undistinguished redwood buildings stood on it—house, servants’ quarters, laundry, garage, orchid shed, and pavilion—as well as a pool and tennis court. Clare knew that if she
and Harry bought the place, they would have to demolish and rebuild.26
Clare with a dolphin in Hawaii, July 1965 (illustration credit 45.1)
They made a quick decision, as they had in Phoenix eight years before, and by July 29 “Home Hanlani” was theirs for $250,000. Casting about for a new name for the mansion she envisaged, Clare chose Halenai’a, or “House of Dolphins.”27
At that moment, in the city of her birth, one of the most ideologically charged mayoral campaigns in New York history was being waged. William F. Buckley, Jr., was running on the Conservative ticket, mainly to get what he called an aggressive “campaign of ideas” under way against the Republican John V. Lindsay and the Democrat Abraham Beame. Buckley joked that he expected only one vote, but wanted to have serious attention paid to his anti-welfare, pro-law-and-order beliefs. Contrary to expectations, he proved to be such a knowledgeable, witty, and charming television debater that his opponents looked lackluster in comparison. Their desperate recourse was to accuse him of racism and anti-Semitism, charges that infuriated him so much that he felt he needed the support of a conservative who was as sophisticated and articulate as he was. The obvious choice was his fellow Catholic and Goldwater supporter Clare Boothe Luce.28
They had discovered they were political soul mates just before the South Vietnam coup d’état of November 1963, when Clare had published an article in National Review defending Madame Nhu, the Catholic, anti-Buddhist, de facto First Lady of President Diem’s nepotistic regime. Her piece, entitled “The Lady Is for Burning,” had brought publicity to the young magazine that might have been prolonged, but for the Kennedy assassination that same month.29
“I was tremendously struck by her,” Buckley said. “The idea that anyone ever condescended to women in a century in which she lived is preposterous.” Clare was enamored, too, and relished weekends with the Buckleys at their Connecticut house on Long Island Sound.30 What Bill admired about her was “her relentless curiosity,” along with a willingness to speak out on controversial subjects. She obliged by denouncing Lindsay’s insinuations that “any New Yorker who, like myself, favors a vote for Mr. William Buckley is a bigot, or a racist, or is trying to destroy the democratic process.” This was especially egregious, she said, “in a city that prides itself on its liberalism.”31
Price of Fame Page 60
