Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  The year 1972 was a momentous and triumphant one for Richard Nixon. In February, he made his world-changing state visit to the People’s Republic of China—an event that answered Clare’s question to him of three years before, and which she rather skeptically marked during a discussion at Honolulu’s East-West Center the following month.

  Hewing to her late husband’s line, Clare told the president of the University of Hawaii and two local Asian experts that she hoped a consequence of the China initiative would not be a rupture in America’s defense treaty with Taiwan.58

  Nixon’s prospects for reelection were enhanced, in her view, by the nomination in mid-August of Senator George McGovern as the Democratic candidate for the presidency. “How did this prissy-mouthed, middle-aged, street-corner preacher from political Dullsville ever make it?” she teased Bill Benton. What particularly bothered her about “McGovernment” was its philosophy of “I’ll take it from them as has, and give it to them as hasn’t.”59

  Recuperation from a second cataract operation did not prevent her from attending the GOP convention in Miami, beginning on Monday, August 21. Dressed in a jade-green shirtwaist, she rode the down elevator of the Eden Roc Hotel on Tuesday afternoon, and found that her fellow passenger was the hippie leader Abbie Hoffman. They got into conversation in the lobby, and it was overheard by a New York Times reporter.

  “Hey, have you ever dropped acid?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Have you ever taken LSD?”

  “Oh, LSD. Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I have. But I must tell you, it was only once and quite some time ago. And it was under very controlled circumstances.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Well, yes, I did. Oh, it didn’t change my life or anything dramatic like that, but it was a good experience. I must say, though, I never was tempted to do it again.”

  “Maybe you didn’t have the right setting.”

  “Oh, no. The setting was marvelous. It’s just that I think once was enough. And of course it was only a hundred milligrams, and I understand people are taking something like a thousand.”

  “Too much,” Hoffman said, shaking his head and laughing. Clare smiled back at him.

  “Good-bye. It was delightful to have met you.”

  “So long. See you in Nirvana.”60

  Eight days later, Clare held “a whopping big party” for the Nixons at Halenai’a. Helicopters hovered as some six hundred of Honolulu’s civic and social leaders thronged the giant lawn. Press photographers snapped the hostess and her guests of honor receiving in lavish leis beneath a monkeypod tree for ninety minutes, in extremely humid heat. From there Nixon went on to meet with Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka of Japan, with the intent of launching a “new Pacifc era.”61

  Observing Clare standing next to the President of the United States that afternoon, a bystander might have thought she had happily reached the peak of her retirement in Honolulu. But the truth was that when not entertaining, or flying to the mainland for public appearances, she was frequently depressed. “What are you doing these days?” a female acquaintance asked her.

  President and Mrs. Nixon visit Halenai’a, August 29, 1972 (illustration credit 46.4)

  “Preparing my corpse.”62

  Although Clare’s body remained strong—she was still capable of swimming in heavy surf, and executing a perfect pike from the springboard of her pool—her eyesight continued to fade, and she braced for a third cataract operation in October. “Hard to get my thoughts in order when I can’t see.” Estrellita Karsh detected “a great September song sadness about her—elemental.” Clare complained of old age, loneliness, and servant problems.63

  She thought she had solved the last before leaving Phoenix, having sent ahead of her, as overseers of the Halenai’a construction project, the most improbable domestic couple ever seen in Hawaii: the self-styled Prince John and Princess Jean of Liechtenstein. John may not have been a genuine aristocrat, but he was cultivated, charming, a competent accountant, and a good bridge player. His wife, however, was so bossy that Clare had been forced to dismiss them both. Their substitutes, a Chinese couple, lasted only six weeks before decamping for a better offer in San Francisco. Luckily, the faithful Arthur Little had been willing to come from Phoenix, but Clare dreaded the arrival of his boozy wife, Winnie. At least she could count on the round-the-clock service of her Pennsylvania Dutch maid, Louise Siegfried, a good Asian cook, and Ann Pearce, a devoted secretary.64

  Clare unburdened herself to her artist friend Nesta Obermer, ten years her senior and until recently a veteran of widowhood in Hawaii. Nesta was now a contented recluse in Switzerland, and had just finished reading Shadegg’s biography. “I can understand even more now,” she replied, “your feeling of disenchantment, the hollowness of life, though you held it in the hollow of your hand as very few women have ever held it, grasped entirely through your own magic. You took the blows and you took the acclaim and never showed the bewilderment that must have been always with you, deep down.”65

  With decrepitude so much on her mind, Clare welcomed an assignment from Bill Buckley to critique Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age in National Review. She found it brilliant, except for the author’s Marxist claim that socialist societies treated their elderly citizens better than capitalist ones did. “Mao Tse-tung’s Red Guard,” Clare wrote, “are said to have murdered thousands of ‘gray heads’ in the name of the Cultural Revolution.”

  Her last paragraph read:

  To remain intellectually involved and curious, and if the gift be given, creative, is the best way to hold senile boredom and melancholia at bay. If continuously and courageously exercised, the muscles of the mind and the sinews of the spirit are the last to decay.… Mme. de Beauvoir [at sixty-four] has magnificently proved her point about the durability of a well-exercised mind and spirit: she has written a masterwork in the springtime of her senility.66

  Clare was so pleased with her last phrase that in future speeches she used it as a rueful reference to herself. Another favorite was “Widowhood is one of the fringe benefits of marriage.”67

  Clare and William F. Buckley, Jr., on Firing Line (illustration credit 46.5)

  She was cheered in November by Nixon’s landslide victory over McGovern—forty-nine states to one—and by the announcement that The Women was to be revived in Washington, D.C., on December 28—thirty-six years to the day after its Broadway premiere. Its stellar cast would feature Myrna Loy, Alexis Smith, Tammy Grimes, and Rosemary Harris. If the tryout was successful, it would transfer to Philadelphia, and on to New York sometime in 1973.

  As it happened, the play did not go into rehearsals in Manhattan until April, conveniently coinciding with Clare’s seventieth birthday. The result was a flurry of pre-opening publicity, including a long interview in The New York Times and parties in her honor, climaxing in a lavish black-tie dinner for sixty-two people thrown by Hank Luce and the Clurmans at “21.”68 Wearing a blue sheik’s robe shot through with gold threads and “sapphires at every pulse point,” she listened while Ilka Chase, a star of the original production of The Women, toasted her for “the best eighteen months of my life.” Brooke Astor recited an ode, and Theodore White, Harry’s former Far East correspondent, incomprehensibly compared the celebration to the Chinese Tang dynasty ritual of floating candles and wine cups downstream to denote the passage of time. “Clare,” he gushed, “is past and future.”69

  In response, she quoted Somerset Maugham’s answer to friends who asked what he wanted for his own seventieth birthday. “Tell them it’s too late for fruit, and too early for flowers.”70

  The Women opened on April 25 at the 46th Street Theatre, with two cast replacements, Kim Hunter and Rhonda Fleming, playing Mary and Miriam. As in 1936, Clare did not attend the first night. She explained to a reporter that she had been booed at the premiere of her first play, Abide With Me—“It abode with nobody,” she quipped—and vowed never to suffer such humiliation again.71 Instead, she ga
thered with a group of friends at the Waldorf, sipping a drink, nervously twirling her pearls, and chain-smoking Kent cigarettes. Hearing that Tennessee Williams was at her play, she said, “I’d love to see him laugh—do you suppose he ever does?”

  Later, Teddy White burst in with a group of fellow theatergoers. “Clare, baby, it was delightful, the first play I’ve seen about real people all year.” There were cheers and shouts of “Bravo!” and Clare, looking relieved, smiled radiantly.72

  Most reviews praised the cast, but it was generally agreed that after thirty-seven years, her dialogue had dated. The Village Voice called the production “good animal fun,” and John Simon wrote in New York magazine that The Women, though “still mischievous and zestful … remains, at the onset of middle age, somewhat immature. The wit sparkles like ginger ale rather than champagne.”73

  Audiences seemed to agree, and the revival closed in mid-June, after sixty-three performances.

  The satire in The Women may have lost some bite, but there was nothing milquetoast about Clare’s language in an essay on feminism she contributed to the 1973 Encyclopædia Britannica Yearbook.

  In every marriage there are two marriages. His and hers. His is better.… What man now calls woman’s natural feminine mentality is the unnatural slave mentality he forced on her, just as he forced it on the blacks. He made her the “house nigger.” (Many Women’s Liberationists see women as “nigger.”) In the end, man dropped the shackles from woman’s body only because he had succeeded in fastening them on her mind.…

  While whole psychologies have been written about the desire of one sex to possess the genital organs of the other (womb envy, penis envy), each sex is inescapably stuck with its own biological functions and cannot transfer them to the other. But roles (the parts people choose or are given to play in life) are both assignable and transferable. Generally, they are assigned—or reassigned—according to the preferences or prejudices of those who dominate the society.…

  The Equality Revolution is not inevitable. The environment includes nuclear weapons and also man’s capacity to use them. The massive reduction of the population by nuclear war would once again require wide pelvises to repopulate the earth and broad backs to cart away the ruins of our civilization. Even the deepest-dyed “male chauvinist pig” must prefer the equality of the sexes to this way of reducing women to submissiveness, passivity, and dependence.74

  As for her views on abortion, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Roe v. Wade, Clare was, despite her faith, pragmatic. Responding to an appeal from James P. McFadden of National Review to lend her name to the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life, she wrote, “It is impossible to enforce any law, especially at the national level, which is not rooted in a public consensus.”75

  In early June, she read The American Republic by Orestes Brownson, and told Hank that it and De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America had taught her “more about my country, and my countrymen than any others I have ever read.”76 The input was timely, since on June 28, 1973, her seventeen-and-a-half-year hiatus from government came to an end with a prestigious appointment to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), pronounced “pifiab.” Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, stressed that they wanted her to serve.77 Clare accepted, even though the position would necessitate an almost ten-thousand-mile round-trip commute between Hawaii and Washington six times a year, for a $100 per diem plus travel expenses.

  The board had been instituted under a slightly different name in 1956 by Dwight Eisenhower, who needed an outside, nonpartisan body of eminent Americans to assess the information he was fed by Washington’s myriad spy agencies. Its current duties were fourfold: first, to determine the impact of new technologies—particularly computer operations—upon the collection and analysis of intelligence; second, to scrutinize foreign political trends; third, to advise on crisis management; fourth, to provide the President with a “yearly, independent assessment of the nuclear threat.”78 The chairman was Admiral George Whelan Anderson, Jr., and other members included former Governors Nelson A. Rockefeller and John B. Connally, Leo Cherne, an economist, John S. Foster, a veteran of the Department of Defense, George P. Shultz, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Edward Teller, the atomic physicist.

  Clare and Henry Kissinger, 1980 (illustration credit 46.6)

  On August 3, Clare attended her first PFIAB meeting aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia, as it sailed down the Potomac River. Kissinger, soon to become Secretary of State, was unusually somber as he briefed the group on the Watergate scandal’s effect on American foreign policy. What had seemed, early that spring, to have been a bungled 1972 CIA break-in to offices of the Democratic National Committee had since exploded into a political catastrophe, involving top White House aides and Nixon, too.

  “I think what is going on,” Kissinger said over lunch, “is an unmitigated disaster in foreign policy.” He explained that after the Paris Peace Accords of late January had brought the long agony of the Vietnam War to an end, American global relations had been in excellent shape. “Everyone wanted to be associated with us.” But in April had come evidence of the President’s direct involvement in Watergate. “Now people are holding off,” Kissinger said. He was particularly worried about the effect on Nixon’s rapprochement with Mao. “Let’s not kid ourselves: China wants us as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.… But if they think we are going through our cultural revolution, they won’t even run the ideological risk of being tied up with us. They are not sentimental.”79

  The only female member of PFIAB heard on her return to Halenai’a that she had impressed her fellow appointees. An aide to Chairman Anderson phoned to say they had been “absolutely overwhelmed by your beauty, charm, wit and intelligence.” What was more, Admiral Noel A. M. Gayler, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor, wanted to have her at the naval base “at least once a week, for a two or three hour briefing.”80

  By the beginning of 1974, it became clear that the Nixon presidency was doomed. Vice President Spiro Agnew, tarnished by evidence of corruption, had been succeeded by Congressman Gerald R. Ford. On television, the President had claimed he was “not a crook,” as more and more of his aides resigned or were found guilty on criminal charges.

  “Thank God for Watergate!” Clare said to Shana Alexander of Newsweek. “Watergate has caused a great questioning among the people of this country. It has made them ask—‘How come the President has all that power?’ ” A free fourth estate, she went on, was all that stood between a dictator and the people. But as a result of the current scandal, it had “become full of hubris, and is capable of outrageous acts like demanding the President’s resignation. If he has broken the law, he should be impeached as the Constitution provides, not tried and judged in the press.”

  Alexander was struck by her demeanor, “at once fierce and Madonnalike, vivid and pastel.”

  Clare said, “The moral consensus in this country has collapsed.” Worse still, the decline of religion had created “a moral power vacuum,” with nothing commensurate to fill it. Solid-state circuitry was no substitute for God. “Technological man can’t believe in anything that can’t be measured, taped, put in a computer. So the press, like it or not, in part inherits this moral responsibility. Newspapers and magazines have become the pulpit of the United States.”81

  Through the spring and early summer, Clare continued to propound these views, while making no secret of her compassion for Nixon. She angrily upbraided Time for its “overinvestment in the destruction of the President,” and for “phobic Watergate reporting.”82 She published a Shakespearean op-ed in The New York Times entitled “Hamlet in Congress: A Soliloquy,” on the satirical theme of “To impeach, or not to impeach.” She fired off nine letters to the editors of the Honolulu Advertiser, criticizing liberal media for their vendetta against Nixon. She sent Senator Goldwater a long and learned briefing paper on the pros and cons of a Supr
eme Court review of the President’s possible impeachment.83

  Urging Nixon to reject the Senate Judiciary Committee’s demand for his Oval Office tape recordings, she tried to rally his flagging spirits by sending him Sir Andrew Barton’s self-exhortation, “I am hurt, but I am not slain.”84

  After the President’s impeachment on July 27, and his resignation thirteen days later, Clare remained outspokenly loyal, telling a Hawaiian columnist that Nixon should take his pension “and run.” Yet she felt that it would be “a gross injustice if he was pardoned,” writing Goldwater that the only way President Ford could honorably do that was also to absolve all draft dodgers, “thus putting in one stroke of the pen both Vietnam and Watergate behind us!” Ford thought otherwise, and pardoned only Nixon on September 8.85

  Fortunately for Clare, the presidential saga distracted public attention from a brutal indictment of her: a cover story in the August issue of Esquire entitled “The Almighty Clare Boothe Luce.” A diagonal yellow banner heralded her further as “Woman of the Century.” The profile was written by her old Vanity Fair colleague Helen Lawrenson, and came with an air of authenticity, since the author had witnessed or been part of some of the incidents described. She had also been intimate with a number of their mutual acquaintances, especially Condé Nast and Bernard Baruch, who was portrayed as a soft touch for Clare’s neediness. “Poor little kid, it’s hard to refuse her anything.”

  The opening paragraphs set the tone for much of the piece.

  When I first knew her I didn’t like her. Few women do. I can think of no one who has aroused so much venom in members of her own sex. Much of it is envy. But not all. Other more talented and successful women have disliked her intensely.…