Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Although Buckley did not win on November 2, his success in persuading the Eastern press that American post-Goldwater conservatism was no longer isolationist, reactionary, and unintellectual won him an unexpected 13.4 percent of the vote, depriving his Democratic rival of the margin needed to defeat Lindsay. Overnight he became a national celebrity, identified with the rising star of Ronald Reagan.

  Like Clare, Reagan had been recruited in the last weeks of the Goldwater campaign to make a nationally televised appeal for the Republican ticket. He had performed so persuasively as to be seen, even before the election, as Goldwater’s political heir apparent. His in-laws, Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis, happened to be neighbors of the Luces in Phoenix, and when Reagan visited them, he occasionally played golf with Henry Luce.

  “Ronnie is going to run for Governor of California,” Harry told Clare one day.

  “I always thought of him as a movie actor,” she said.

  “I think he’ll do all right.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “He does his homework.”32

  Clare and Reagan were both invited by Buckley to speak at National Review’s tenth-anniversary dinner in New York on November 11, 1965. In her remarks, she quoted a passage from Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society that uncannily predicted the kind of hands-off leadership that Reagan would one day personify.

  It is generally supposed that the increasing complexity of the social order requires an increasing direction from officials. My own view is, rather, as affairs become more intricate … overhead direction by officials of the state has to become simpler, less intensive, less direct, more general.… The complexity of policy … must be inversely proportionate to the complexity of affairs.33

  In the three years since her LSD-laced Majorca vacation, Clare had undergone no recorded experiences with the drug, except to monitor a session with Hank Luce and his second wife, Claire McGill, early in 1965. The former’s bad trip reduced him to sobs and befuddlement in front of his father. Perhaps not coincidentally, Time published an article a few weeks later on the “epidemic” of illicit LSD consumption sweeping the nation’s campuses and dropout communes.34 This had come about in the wake of Timothy Leary’s promulgation of psychedelic substances to students in his Harvard Psychology Department during the winter of 1962–1963. At times he had administered LSD to undergraduates while drugged himself. An alarmed Sidney Cohen had followed Time’s piece with one of his own in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, in which he deplored the black market availability of the most powerful psychotomimetics, and lamented the consequent discrediting of their use as a scientific tool.

  He shared his concern with Clare about the morality of drug-induced “escapism,” whether for professional or recreational purposes. Her reply and his response showed that both had moved from the empirical to the philosophical plane of dialogue. “It seems to me,” she wrote, “that it would take a moral sophist of the highest order to prove that LSD ‘escapism’ is more dangerous to the moral well-being of the individual and of society than, say, alcoholic escapism.” Yet society treated alcohol and nicotine, which were demonstrably dangerous to health, as acceptable stimulants that constituted an integral part of the economy. Was it not unjust to regard the LSD tripper as a criminal, and the alcoholic as merely sick?

  She doubted, though, that the law could handle a situation in which LSD had become easy and cheap to manufacture and distribute. “When you tell me one youth was caught with a million doses in his pocket, the difficulty and gravity of legal control becomes all too plain.” Besides, she regarded the phenomenon of recreational drug taking as part of the galloping tendency of American youth to evade responsibility. “What sort of society do we have that so many young people seem eager to take flight from?” Clare felt that God, “the Absolute Good,” was dying in America. “Consequently, all ethics, values, morals become increasingly relative and tend, at a certain point, to become meaningless.”

  It followed, she said, that fleeing from such a derelict society by way of LSD was “Escape from Escapism.” From her own experience, she could testify that taking the drug could be, for a short while, “salvific.” But she knew that Cohen, as an agnostic man of science, would not grant LSD any power of salvation. She could only question what standards the new generation aimed to establish in place of the old.

  For example, “Love” in our society is certainly an accepted value.… Ditto, art, beauty, music, nature. But what about work, especially business? What about war? What about politics? And above all, what about science and technology?…

  I think you would find that a surprising number of LSDers would look on science—especially in its technological applications—as the worst enemy to the happiness of man.35

  The doctor replied good-humoredly, willing to play the role of a scientific “strawman” for Clare to batter. He said the message of LSD was that “God is a neurochemical event.” As for what made a nation decadent, he cited “breakdown of discipline, hedonism, failure of purpose.”

  In every era we find the professional escapist—the men who will not play the game. They are of two sorts—one has retreated from life in fear of it, or beaten. The other retreats having encountered it fully but unwilling to continue even as a winner. What a profound difference between the two.… LSD is just right for the second, just wrong for the first.

  More about escapism.… I would agree with you that ours is a goalless, disbelieving, undisciplined way of life. There are countercurrents, but the old people-prods of making a living, religious faith, patriotism and the rest seem to be waning. Young people ask me: “What’s wrong with casual LSD taking, casual glue sniffing, casual copulation?” When I tell them they get what they pay for, they ask who keeps the book? I answer that they do. They go away, unconvinced.

  Cohen concluded, “It’s a bit of a shame that this most serious of drugs has been scrubbed by the escapists who want to escape.”36

  On that note, Clare’s six-year flirtation with LSD came to an end.

  By early 1966, Clare was determined to do something about her place in history. Years before, she had asked Harry to keep her letters in his vault, saying she would take her chance with posterity if he would take his. She did not want to romanticize her past, as Bernard Baruch had done in the quarter century before his recent death, “sucking on the memory of his triumphs the way a hungry baby falls to sleep sucking the nipple of an empty bottle.”37 Nor did she need an authorized biographer who might belittle her achievements. So she asked Stephen Shadegg, a good-looking, fifty-six-year-old political journalist and Phoenix resident, if he would undertake the task.

  Shadegg was a staunch Republican and author of several books, including What Happened to Goldwater? He eagerly accepted, on condition he could interview Clare extensively, and be free to print, after due consultation, whatever final text he chose. “Steve, that’s exactly what I want you to do,” she said, “because sometimes I can’t be objective about myself.”

  Knowing that Baruch had paid his biographer Margaret Coit $50,000, she offered Shadegg $25,000. He chose instead to negotiate a publishing contract, but did accept her offer of $10,000 to help with research expenses. “It seemed to me she was desperately seeking recognition,” he recalled years later.38

  Wanting to remain relevant in political circles, Clare sought an appointment with Lyndon Johnson. He agreed to see her in the White House on June 2. This time she was not honored with a private lunch overlooking the Jefferson Monument, but offered instead a Dr Pepper in Johnson’s cramped underground hideaway. She settled for a Coke, and while a photographer snapped pictures, she stared bemusedly at three Sony television sets hanging above the President’s head.

  To get the conversation going, Clare said how much she admired the way he had conducted the nation’s affairs so far. He said he was grateful to Time for the “sympathetic treatment” it gave his policies. From then on, it was difficult for her to hold Johnson’s attention, because his Press Secretary,
Bill Moyers, kept coming in with small strips of paper that LBJ read avidly in preparation for a press conference the next day. He instructed Moyers to be sure that the columnists James Reston and Walter Lippmann were given front-row seats. “I’ll face these intellectuals.”

  He said he wanted journalists to quiz him about Latin American affairs, and grumbled that newspapers had ignored Castro’s remark that there was no hope of furthering the revolution in the Southern Hemisphere while Johnson remained in office. He complained that Robert Kennedy had told a private group that the President was so hated “down there,” he would be shot if he ventured south of the border. To spite Bobby, he had done just that. “Did anyone shoot me? No. I was greeted by thousands of cheering people.”

  As the interview proceeded, Clare realized that although Johnson was, more than any other chief executive she had known, an enormously competent man in command of every issue, he was obsessed with his popularity, resentful of slights, and constantly looking for reassurance. This did not stop her from asking Johnson why New York liberals criticized him so much for not fulfilling “the Kennedy promise.” “Well, that’s a mystery to me, too,” he said. He asked what in fact Kennedy had done. “He passed the Test Ban Treaty—for whatever that was worth—he formed the Peace Corps, and that was it.” He enumerated some of his own achievements in domestic and foreign policy, and noted how little credit he had gotten for them. “Looking around America there isn’t much for people to complain about.”

  This was not a point of view shared by the hundreds of thousands of Vietnam War demonstrators currently marching in many cities, angry blacks protesting housing conditions in Mississippi, disillusioned farm-workers picketing in Sacramento, and race rioters wrecking property in Watts, Los Angeles. But LBJ focused on the small picture.

  “I’ll tell you what kind of a country we are living in. I got a note from my cook last night which said, ‘Mr. President, I wish you would stop complaining about my cooking. You don’t like what I give you, but you want to lose weight and eat at the same time. Now you eat what I give you and don’t complain.’ Now that’s the kind of a country we live in where the cook can bawl out the President.”

  Talking too fast for interruption, Johnson waxed querulous about his daughter Luci’s upcoming East Room wedding. “I hope they don’t say that everybody’s having a ball at the White House when there’s so much trouble in Vietnam.” He grew weepy, praising Defense Department personnel prosecuting the war as “the greatest bunch of guys I’ve ever seen,” and looked to Moyers for confirmation. “Aren’t you proud?”

  Before leaving, Clare mentioned she was building a house in Hawaii. Johnson recalled his return from the Pacific war and how, when they were in Congress, he had shown her a home movie of Honolulu. “I’ll come and stay with you,” he said. “I’d like to do that for old times’ sake.”

  She seized this opportunity to complain that his latest budget had canceled the Mohole oceanographic program in Hawaii.

  “Clare, I’ll put it back.”39

  The Luces spent most of that summer in a rented Honolulu house near their new estate, and chose Vladimir Ossipoff, architect of the Kahala Hilton and Honolulu International Airport, to design a suitable complex for them. It was to be a summer substitute for their Connecticut house, which they had finally sold for $332,000 after twenty years. Harry had always loved Sugar Hill, but Clare had come to associate the place with marital problems and illness, and was glad to be rid of it. Only the New York apartment remained of their loosening Northeast ties.

  That fall in Arizona, she continued her interviews with Stephen Shadegg, and Harry persevered with a “memoir” that was more about his work, ideas, and eminent people he had liked or disliked than a comprehensive account of his life. Having never written a book before, he found sequential narrative difficult, and after about six chapters the manuscript languished.40

  The couple celebrated their thirty-first wedding anniversary in Phoenix on November 23, and invited Gerald Heard, Michael Barrie, and Shirley Potash and her husband, Richard Clurman, Time’s chief of correspondents, to join them for Christmas. Clare had bedecked branches of the sitting room fir tree with ornaments that she had made by stippling dozens of white foam balls with imitation jewels, scraps of velvet, and ribbons. In stark contrast with the festive scene, the Clurmans found Harry looking shockingly older than his sixty-eight years, with deep wrinkles, his fringe of hair gray against his desert tan.41

  Clare and Harry in Phoenix, 1966 (illustration credit 45.2)

  Clare painted a portrait of her husband at this time, one of more than thirty artworks she had completed in the past two years. This study of Harry was to be reproduced in her January 1967 McCall’s article about famous “Sunday Painters.” It showed him unsmiling and jowly in an open-necked blue shirt, gazing vacantly into the distance against a background of fiery red, as if he were about to be immolated.

  By now a line in The Women had extra resonance for Clare: “It’s being together at the end that really matters.” During one of their now rare times apart, she added a postscript to a letter about her activities: “I do love you, and find life without you like being in a big, fine, interesting Italian palazzo in mid-December without any heat. The warmth, and sooner or later, the interest leaks out of everything when you are not there.”42

  Together that month, the Luces participated as usual in the Phoenix social season, hosting a Republican dinner for the William F. Buckleys. Harry expressed the hope that he might appear on Firing Line, Bill’s successful new television interview show. He was envious that his wife had been one of its earliest guests.43

  An exotic visitor from Clare’s past was the Venerable and Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen, now Bishop of Rochester and host of the nationally syndicated The Fulton Sheen Program, watched each week by an audience of some ten million. He was in town to address the Phoenix Executive Club, and Clare introduced him. Twenty years before, she had revered Sheen, and been impressed by his vow that if he ever became a bishop, he would be content to sleep in an iron cot in a mission basement. But now she realized he was “a ham at heart,” and something of a voluptuary, taking daily massages and preening in his lavish vestments, among which were a pectoral cross and emerald jade ring she had given him.44

  Harry went East in mid-February, leaving a gift for Clare of a Victorian silver-gilt, heart-shaped box engraved with her initials and inscribed, “St. Valentine’s Day 1967. To my darling ‘Wiff’ from Harry.”45

  In New York, he attended a Time Inc. directors’ meeting, where he learned that Life’s circulation was now 7.5 million and Time’s 3.5 million, making them still first and second among weekly magazines. His entire holdings, including Fortune, Sports Illustrated, five television and four radio stations, as well as a movie and book division, had a combined market value of $690 million.46

  At some point, Harry took a walk in Central Park. Mary Bancroft, his friend of over twenty years, caught sight of him at a distance and hardly recognized his haggard face and blank eyes. He looked so moribund that she could not bring herself to call out to him, and let him pass by. As was his custom on solitary visits to the city, Harry went to see Jean Dalrymple, who was now married to an army officer. Walking him to the elevator, she said, “It’s wonderful how you still come to see me.” He replied, “My dear, it’s always a joy to be with you.”47

  When he got back to Phoenix, Clare was entertaining Frank Sheed, who was surprised by how “mellow” Harry seemed. “There was a sort of sweetness in him that in all the years I had never seen before.”48

  On Friday, February 24, the Luces were in San Francisco, where Clare gave a lunchtime speech at the Commonwealth Club about the United Nations. She harshly called the organization “a dismal failure” in arms control, and “impotent” in peacekeeping. But her peroration, contributed by Harry, sounded a slightly more positive note: “The UN is still worth supporting—but not worth subsidizing.”49

  Before they returned to Phoenix, they asked
a local Time staffer to drive them through the drug-riddled hippie community of Haight-Ashbury. Their own sedate dabblings with LSD had not prepared them for the sight of lank-haired, burnt-out young addicts in dirty jeans, nodding on the stoops of derelict houses.

  “What are their goals? What are their motives?” Harry asked.50

  Clare’s address made headlines in the Arizona newspapers on Saturday. Reading them over breakfast, she complained, “I sweated over that speech for three weeks, and all they quoted was your upbeat ending.”51

  In the afternoon, Harry played nine holes of golf, riding the course with his favorite caddy. That evening, he and Clare joined friends at the Biltmore Hotel for a dinner given by a Phoenix oil millionaire. A pianist played the Yale “Whiffenpoof Song,” and Harry sang along. “We are poor little sheep who have lost their way, baa, baa, baa.…” He was too tired to read to Clare when they got home around midnight.52

  On Sunday morning, he ate breakfast and promptly vomited. “I have a headache,” he said, and went to lie down. Clare took his temperature and, finding it to be 102 degrees, called Dr. Caldwell. When he arrived Harry was coughing blood. But his pulse was normal, and the doctor prescribed home rest overnight. He showed no improvement on Monday morning, so Caldwell ordered an ambulance from St. Joseph’s Hospital. When it came, Harry brushed aside Clare’s attempt to help him, and walked to the vehicle carrying his shoes. She followed him by car with the books he had been reading—a detective story, a theological study, and his Bible.53