All he would admit to at the hospital was, “I’m tired.” Clare sat with him while he underwent tests, and stayed the remainder of the day. But he insisted that she keep a dinner date with the Loyal Davises. Feeling anxious about him, she left the party early, and called him from home. “I’m going to watch Perry Mason,” he said.
“So am I. Do you want me to come over?”
“No, everything is going to be all right.”54
Yet he slept fitfully that night, and kept getting up to pace the floor. At about 3:00 A.M. a nurse heard him go to the bathroom, and moments later he shrieked, “Oh Jesus!” A heavy thud brought her running, and she found him unconscious.
Clare was awakened by a phone call from the Mother Superior of St. Joseph’s. “You’d better come.”
When she reached the hospital, Dr. Caldwell met her and said, “Harry is dead.” He had suffered a coronary occlusion.55
46
A DELUXE LONELINESS
We no longer maintain that life consists in actions only or in works. It consists in personality.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
When Clare reached home at 4:00 A.M. on Tuesday, February 28, 1967, the telephone was ringing. It was President Johnson, saying, “All Washington is sad. He was one of the greats.” Vice President Hubert Humphrey followed with his own condolences, as did Father Murray, who said he would be with her throughout the obsequies—a memorial service at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York on Friday, and the interment on Saturday at Mepkin. Until Hank told her that his father’s will decreed this, Clare had not known that Harry had wanted to be buried beside her. He had meant it, apparently, when he wrote her twenty-two years before, “It’s you and you alone I’ll always be missing—and when my life has no room for missing it’s because you’re there, filling up all the room.”1
Tex and Elisabeth Moore came out to be with Clare, and found her outwardly calm, but with her face swollen from crying. A sign of her congenital insecurity was that she immediately asked them “where the next pay check was going to come from for the household staff.”2 Accountants at Time Inc. had always taken care of the Luces’ domestic expenses.
Next day, Clare went to New York with the Moores, leaving her husband’s body behind to undergo an autopsy, prior to being flown to South Carolina. The results showed advanced emphysema, chronic angina pectoris, diseased kidneys, and arthritic and urethral problems, all consistent with Harry’s history of an indifferent diet, chain smoking, and a steady consumption of hard liquor.3
At 3:00 P.M. on Friday, eight hundred family members and dignitaries congregated at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. They included Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers, Laurance and David, Mayor Lindsay, Senators Goldwater and Javits, Richard and Patricia Nixon, and many media magnates, among them David Sarnoff and Katharine Graham. With the family mourners was Harry’s former wife, Lila Tyng, and their younger son, Peter Paul. Simultaneously, on Sixth Avenue, twelve hundred employees assembled in the lobby and auditorium of the Time & Life Building, where an audio of the service was relayed.4
Clare, her face taut with grief and dark circles around her eyes, sat between Hank Luce and Father Murray. She wore a black coat, a black silk head scarf over her pale short hair, and pearl earrings. Three of Harry’s favorite hymns were sung, including “The Church’s One Foundation,” which she knew by heart. The eulogy by Harry’s pastor, the Reverend David H. C. Read, was full of conventional pieties. “There was in him a surprising amount of the ‘meekness’ of those who ‘inherit the earth.’ ” When, in his closing prayer, the clergyman said, “Thy servant Harry whom though hast now taken to Thyself,” Clare leaned forward and rested her head on the pew.5
Clare at Harry’s funeral in New York (illustration credit 46.1)
Arriving at Mepkin cemetery at 2:20 the following afternoon, she found fifty people seated on the lawn beneath an enormous live oak that shaded the tombs of her mother and daughter. Harry’s open grave was between them.6
The sun was shining on the banked camellias as the Trappist monks filed from the chapel with the coffin, singing Gregorian chants. The Abbot said a few words, Father Murray delivered a eulogy, and Harry’s layman brother-in-law, Les Severinghaus, read from the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship, after which the casket was lowered into the ground.7
Soon after buying the plantation, Harry had written Clare of his “eager always wanting-wanting-wanting-you-love.… A feeble love, but one that will grow and grow until it will be stronger than the greatest oak at Mepkin.”8
One of the first things Clare told Hank, who accompanied her back to Phoenix, was that Arizona was “meaningless” without his father. She planned to escape “that narrow circle of people on the golf links” by selling the Biltmore property as soon as possible. Although Waikiki’s current development boom bothered her, she was still inclined to build the Honolulu house as planned. Returning full-time to New York had no appeal. The Fifth Avenue apartment was now too big for her, and should be sold. She dreaded ending up somewhere like the Waldorf or the Sherry Netherland. “The thought of being … the dowager who eats at the corner table in a hotel restaurant every night disgusts me.”9
After Hank’s departure, Father Murray was on hand for a week to administer spiritual comfort to her, and conduct a local memorial Mass for Harry before he too returned East. Left alone with her secretary, she answered a mountain of sympathy letters and telegrams from monarchs, heads of state, politicians, publishers, movie stars, and hundreds of other correspondents around the world. One note, from Frank Sheed, was especially poignant. He wrote that during his February stay, he “had an overwhelming feeling” that Harry was ready for death. “I wonder if anyone has told you of his way of quoting you—‘Clare says,’ ‘Clare thinks’—with such appreciation of your mental powers.”10
Harry had left $109 million in Time Inc stock, yielding about $2.4 million in annual dividends. Of this, he willed in trust 180,000 shares to Clare, worth about $19.5 million. She also inherited their joint real estate, and all her husband’s tangible property, including art, furniture, books, cars, and jewelry. Shares worth some $14 million were to be divided between his two sons. The estate would have been twice as valuable if, in 1961, Harry had not given half his personal stock holdings to the Henry Luce Foundation Inc., a memorial to his father. Its mandate was to promote Christian values and scholarly exchanges between the United States and the Far East.11
Altogether Clare could count for the forseeable future on an annual after-tax income of $435,000, just from Harry’s bequests. In addition, she had continuing annual payments from her Brokaw and other personal trusts of about $75,000, plus various investment dividends, freelance fees from articles and lectures, and royalties from plays and books. Her projected income for 1968 was more than $750,000.12 Although she pleaded impoverishment to Shadegg and others, she was able to set aside $20,000 a month for living expenses, and within two years (following property sales) was flush enough to buy more than $2 million worth of Treasury bills.13
By the end of May, she had dealt with the immediate practical consequences of Harry’s death, and braced herself for the long-term prospect of widowhood. As Louisa Jenkins warned, “Your whole life will change now, rhythm and pattern.” More than that, Clare felt that “the scaffolding structure” of her whole existence had been pulled from under her. She wrote Helen Lawrenson that she found the sudden freedom to do as she wanted “ponderous and disturbing.” To Carlos Chávez, she explained that Harry had been “sometimes my love and sometimes my enemy,” but always her most loyal friend. “All passions spent, our last eight [sic] years were wonderfully serene and happy ones. I find myself now very much alone, and very lonely. And somewhat of a stranger to myself—and to others, too.”14
In early July, Clare left for Honolulu, her “last port of call,” as she resignedly termed it.15 She stopped off in Los Angeles for a two-hour visit with Lyndon Johnson. He was in an exuberant mood, having just completed a su
ccessful summit with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey. The leaders had agreed that no crisis between Moscow and Washington should ever be allowed to escalate into war.
She thanked the President for his solicitous call after Harry died, adding plaintively, “I have no one now.”
“You have me, honey,” he told her.
Seeing an opportunity, she said, “Well, I’d like to serve my country again—for you.”
Johnson did not rise to the bait.16
That night, the Norman Chandlers gave a dinner for Clare, and when the conversation became critical of LBJ, she protested, “He’s not perfect, but he’s always been good to me.”17
She had already asked her Democratic friend Bill Benton to find out if Wayne Morse would still oppose her should she be awarded another embassy. The Senator had been unequivocal. “I could not possibly support her nomination for many reasons.”18
After less than three weeks in her Diamond Head Road rental, Clare was struggling with her lack of purpose and company. She complained to Dorothy Farmer, “I’ve met no one exciting. [The] only men are dodderers, or pansy. Same here as everywhere.” She began having second thoughts about building in Hawaii, but recent race riots in mainland cities that had left 67 people dead, 3,500 injured, and 5,000 homeless scared her, and greatly modified her erstwhile liberalism. “I have so little desire to live anywhere that has a great Negro problem.”19
Uncertainty, as well as a sense of isolation, were exacerbated on August 16 by news of the death of Father Murray from a heart attack. Clare elected not to go to his funeral, telling her secretary that she did not feel emotionally strong enough to stand by his casket alone. Yet without his mediation her marriage might have foundered, and at least once he had rescued her from suicide. As Dorothy perceived, Murray had been for more than a decade “the Leveler” in her life.20
Discussing with Vladimir Ossipoff the design and landscaping of her future house somewhat alleviated Clare’s despondency. “Home is where you hang your architect,” she teased him.21 But it was not diverting enough to subdue her desire for a position in public life, even though with Democrats firmly in control of all branches of government, she knew it was unlikely.
In this, as things turned out, Clare was mistaken. Halenai’a would become her primary residence soon enough, although Ossipoff did not expect it to be ready much before early 1969. Once established there, she would be for a number of years Hawaii’s premier hostess, entertaining a succession of A-list visitors, many of them stopping over as they crossed the Pacific. But she could hardly foresee that America’s political fortunes, racked by Vietnam and social upheaval, would strengthen her involvement with the conservative wing of the GOP, and in time draw her more in the direction of Washington, D.C.
An early indication of this was an invitation from Johnson to attend a state dinner on September 29 for Giuseppe Saragat, now the President of Italy. Hearing that Dwight Eisenhower was staying in her hotel, Clare asked if she could stop by to see him on her way to the White House. She found Ike looking pale and shriveled, but the big grin was still there. He reminded her of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, “fading away all around that smile.”
She asked him what he thought about Johnson and Vietnam. He was critical, since the conflict, now degenerating into a bloody stalemate, had been waged by the executive branch without the consent of Congress. “The President must tell the people that this is going to be a long and nasty war, and that we have to stick the course.”
She asked why he did not make a statement to this effect.
“You can’t,” he said. “You have to support the President of the United States.”
“What would you do about these draft card burners?”
Eisenhower chuckled as he recalled an experience from World War II. Some soldiers under his command had been court-martialed for stealing gasoline. He had told the court, “Give them a chance to redeem themselves.” They should either accept the maximum sentence of five years in jail, or go to the front and fight. “Almost every one of them went to the front.” Johnson should say to the card burners that if their consciences bothered them, they could either enlist and go to war or spend five years in jail. “They’d all pick up their draft cards.”22
This was her last encounter with Ike. In eighteen months, he would be dead.
Clare was in New York for the Christmas season of 1967, having spent a month touring the Far East with Claire McGill Luce. On December 10, she gave a “Just Everybody” cocktail party at her Fifth Avenue apartment. “Politicos, Press, Publishers, Artists, Actors, Fags, of course,” Dorothy Farmer reported to her niece. “Clare is beginning to live it up.”23
The occasion turned out to be historic, because Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were there. They had not met before. As Clare was aware, Kissinger did not much care for the former Vice President. She suspected, however, that with their passion for foreign affairs, and belief in balance-of-power politics, they might get along if they spent time together. Afterward, Nixon gave Clare the impression that the encounter had gone well.24
She spent “the Christmas that I wish never was” with the Moores surrounded by her dead husband’s relatives. “I miss Harry more not less as the days go by,” she wrote Helen Wrigley, a Chicago friend.25
After trips to Nassau and Mexico in early 1968, Clare sold her Fifth Avenue cooperative for $300,000 and bought a much smaller one with services at the Sherry Netherland Hotel for $240,000. She also sold Phoenix fully furnished for $280,000.
Meanwhile, the Vietcong’s astonishingly brutal Tet offensive against South Vietnam, though not an ultimate victory, had shocked the American public, and almost overnight forced the administration to change its strategy to a search for an honorable disengagement. More than a year before, Clare had predicted that if Johnson could not “get on top of Vietnam and inflation … he won’t run again.”
Her prophesy proved accurate on March 31, when LBJ announced on television a partial suspension of the bombing of North Vietnam, and said that the United States was open to peace negotiations. He then made a personal announcement: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Barry Goldwater saw an opportunity for the GOP in Johnson’s virtual abdication. “Here we have a lame duck President, a lame duck Congress, and a lame duck General in Vietnam,” he wrote Clare. “The country is leaderless at the darkest hour of its history and about the only thing the Democrats can offer is a haystack in heat.” This was a reference to Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the candidate of his party almost certain to succeed Johnson.26
Having recently heard him make an impressive speech at the Women’s Republican Club, Clare already saw Nixon (improbably resurgent since his 1960 defeat and subsequent loss in the California gubernatorial race) as the GOP’s best chance for a winner that fall. “I am plunking for him now—and hard,” she wrote Al Morano, and sent Nixon a campaign check with a note expressing “my great admiration and affectionate regards.”27
Her chief reservation about Nixon as a candidate was that he was not empathetic. She explained her theory in an oral history for Columbia University at this time. “A President has to be the average man’s idea of his father, his uncle, his brother, or his son.” Ike could have been anybody’s father, Truman easy to imagine as an uncle from Missouri, Kennedy was like “your husband, your sweetheart, your son, your brother.” Dewey and Stevenson had been brother-in-law types, and both had been defeated. Nixon had the same liability—he was even cousinly: “My cousin Dick, he’s done awfully well in New York.”28
The assassinations that spring of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy—the latter dying on the same day as Randolph Churchill—cast a dark cloud over Clare that she sought to escape by booking a five-week summer vacation in the Mediterranean. It began glamorously with attendance at Prince Rainier’s Red Cross Ball in Monaco, but she found the oil-slicked, garbage-strewn Riviera
so crowded that she was back in New York by mid-August. She had missed Nixon’s nomination at the Republican convention, but found a triumphant note from the candidate awaiting her: “This year we are going to win!”29
Clare could believe this on the twenty-sixth, as she luxuriated in “quiet old, lovely, snobbish Newport” and watched on television the “horrid and frightening sight” of the Democratic convention opening amid violent street battles between Chicago police and antiwar protesters. The following day, chaos spread to the convention floor, as Humphrey was nominated in an atmosphere of intraparty squabbles.30
After Labor Day, Clare moved into her apartment at the Sherry Netherland, and found the hotel’s service and food so bad that she decided almost immediately to sell. She succumbed to one of her depressions. “I seem to have dried up in every way,” she wrote Helen Lawrenson, “creatively, physically and emotionally. I live in a sort of deluxe loneliness, lacking what we used to call motives, and now, for some reason, are called motivations.”31
A proposal from Jimmy Cromwell, a former boyfriend, and onetime husband of Doris Duke, failed to cheer her up. Nor was she enthused by a first reading of the manuscript of Stephen Shadegg’s biography of her. She wrote the editor, “I am curious to know on what evidence Mr. Shadegg, or anyone else but God himself, could base the assertion that ‘Clare has never had a satisfactory relationship with any human being in all her life.’ ”32
Just before Nixon’s election on November 5, she came down with Hong Kong flu, and remained sickly and downcast through another Christmas and New Year’s Eve with the Moores.33 Miserable though she was, Clare now clutched at the in-laws she had once disparaged as “City Hall”—moralistic Calvinists who had, in her opinion, always tried to prejudice Harry against her. They, however, whether out of duty or, in some cases, genuine affection, embraced her in her widowhood. Beth and Tex Moore, in particular, were grateful to her for refusing to divorce Harry. Hank, perpetually struggling in his father’s shadow, greatly admired his stepmother’s achievements and insights.
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