Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

She made real friendship impossible, perhaps because she seemed to trust no one, love no one, remaining inaccessible deep in the malistic concept that rankled under her shield of opaque, steely self-assurance. Oddly, I was sorry for her, because I believe that despite the stunning and ineluctable procession of her triumphs, she was basically an unhappy woman, never satisfied, never content.… She parlayed a nimble, mousetrap mind, apodictic nerve, and a will as tough as lignum vitae beneath an exquisitely angelic façade into one of the most strategically calculated and fascinating success stories of the century. Her technique was simple: aim for the top.

  Lawrenson went on to summarize the major events of Clare’s life, accusing her of concealing sordid origins, being sexually manipulative, mendacious, intellectually pretentious, an insufferable monologist with “shocking” lapses of taste in oratory, cozying up to foreign dictators (such as the “unspeakable” Madame Nhu), and avid for awards and honors. Straining to be balanced, she conceded that Clare was courageous and had a “prodigious” capacity for work, quoting Winston Churchill’s comment, “She’s the tops!”

  Clare could only surmise that her old friend’s perennial financial problems had worsened. Long ago, she had helped Lawrenson when she lost her job at Vanity Fair, given comfort and hospitality when her husband was ill, and paid to put their daughter through high school. Just last year, when Helen asked for a $10,000 loan to hospitalize a depressive son, Clare had sent her a gift of $2,500 “for old times’ sake,” knowing that she would be unable to repay any amount. “As I so often must say,” she wrote Al Morano after the article appeared, “ ‘No good deed goes unpunished’!”86

  President Ford kept Clare on PFIAB, and she and eleven other members arrived for a two-day meeting in Room 340 of Washington’s Executive Office Building on October 3, 1974. Their quarters, though austere, were just yards from the West Wing of the White House, a proximity that emphasized PFIAB’s status as one of the most important boards in the United States government.87

  The Thursday session began at 9:00 A.M., with thirty minutes of “reading time,” a perusal of briefing papers and intelligence memoranda that the executive secretary, Wheaton Byers, had accumulated over the last two months.88 At 9:30, Leo Cherne presented an hour-long account of economic trends abroad. At 10:30, the Under Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs gave a briefing, and at 11:30 there was a report on special projects in the U.S. Navy. The board went to the Pentagon for lunch at 12:30 P.M. and at 2:30 was briefed on the latest status of SIOP (Single Integrated Operations Plan) and NICKELPLATE (a command and control exercise). Clare hated these acronyms, not to mention the hundreds of others that were routinely used by administration officials—COINS, CRITCOM, OXCART, IMINT, SIGINT, HUMINT, ACHDD, USCIB—and insisted on them being spelled out and spoken in full.89 The afternoon ended with tours of the National Military Command and Joint Intelligence Centers.

  Friday began with more reading, followed by highly classified briefings on Soviet antisubmarine technology and covert activities in Cyprus, Chile, and Portugal. The half day ended with lunch at Blair House, hosted by the President’s young Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld.

  Clare attended as many sessions of the board as possible over the next two and a half years, until President Carter disbanded PFIAB in May 1977. In a terse letter, he informed all members that reforms in the intelligence community, plus permanent oversight committees created by Congress, had made their advisory roles redundant.90

  By then, she had bought an apartment in the capital at 1106 Watergate South, expanding from that into a river-view penthouse in late 1978, and becoming a fixture of the more conservative circles of Washington society. Thanks to the generosity of Hank Luce and his new wife, Nancy Cassidy (introduced to each other by Clare in Hawaii), she also established two pieds-à-terre in New York—one in their Sutton Place duplex in Manhattan, and another at Wychwood, their country mansion on the Gold Coast of Long Island.91 While continuing in between times to live and entertain at Halenai’a, she grew more and more disillusioned with the insularity of Oahu, but felt she could not contemplate a full-time move to the mainland for as long as Carter remained in the White House.

  The former peanut farmer’s presence there profoundly irritated her, and she stepped up the number and asperity of her political articles and television rhetoric to point out what she saw as his multiple deficiencies. He struck her as “a carbon copy Woodrow Wilson, reading moral lessons to the whole world, and dumping on Intelligence and the military.” To Hank, a Carter supporter, she wrote, “Can the man really believe that love has anything to do with politics? What politics are about is power.” She felt more in tune with Kissinger’s “sophisticated defeatism” than Carter’s “naïve revivalism.”92

  No longer able to advise the President on matters of the highest secrecy, she relieved her frustration by sounding off in the press on such subjects as the world population explosion, crime on television, social welfare, détente, feminism, superpowerdom, and the rising political fortunes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. She also became a member of twenty-six boards, including the Committee on the Present Danger, the American Security Council Foundation, Accuracy in Media, the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, and Encyclopædia Britannica.

  After her seventy-sixth birthday in 1979, Clare began to complain about feeling the weight of years. “I am growing weary,” she told an acquaintance. “Everything has been written—nothing is new—everything has been read, but nothing makes a lasting impression and nothing changes as a result of what is written.”93

  By now so many close friends and lovers had died: Bernard Baruch, Charles Willoughby, Lucian Truscott, Ray Stecker, Bill Hale, Gerald Heard, George Waldo, Father Murray, and most recently Carlos Chávez. Continuing problems with servants exacerbated her malaise. She had long since lost the all-capable Arthur Little. There had been a nasty incident in which she slapped his wife, blaming her for his decision to retire and screaming that he would not get a cent of the $50,000 she had promised him in her will.94 Clare’s narcissism was on occasion so out of control that it led her to see every resignation, or even a request for a raise, as a betrayal.

  Feeling a need to do something drastic to allay her fears of decrepitude, she quit her half-century smoking habit, promising to give a friend $10,000 if she started again. No forfeit had to be paid.95

  She cheered up considerably in July, on hearing she was to be awarded West Point’s Sylvanus Thayer Award, presented annually “to an outstanding citizen whose service and accomplishments in the national interest exemplify the Military Academy motto, ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’ ” There had been twenty-one previous recipients, among them Generals Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Omar Bradley.96

  News of the award, the first ever to a woman, gave rise to several major interviews. One, entitled “Clare Boothe Luce at 76,” appeared in The New York Times on August 18. She spoke of the amazing breakthrough of women in jobs and careers, but lamented their economic inequality. “Though we have a woman Prime Minister in Britain, I think it will be a long time before we have a woman President in this country. There are no more women in Congress now than when I was a Congresswoman thirty-five years ago.” Asked which Republican candidate might have the best chance of defeating Carter in 1980, she said, “Ronald Reagan is able, but at 70, he may be too old. The presidency is a killer of a job.”97

  As it happened, she was about to entertain Reagan at Halenai’a. The former Governor was running ahead of Carter in the polls, and wrote to thank her afterward for her “most generous contribution” to his campaign.98

  On October 7, three days before the presentation of her Thayer Award, Clare appeared on 60 Minutes in a segment entitled “The Luckiest Woman.” The opening image was a mock-up of Time with her face on the cover. Morley Safer, the interviewer, explained that Mrs. Luce was being presented this way because her husband had never permitted it—“though few would doubt that she’d achieved
prominence enough in her lifetime to have been on half a dozen covers.”

  Clare was in a feisty mood, not letting Safer get away with the suggestion that she had been a ruthless careerist, isolationist, and scourge of FDR. Nor would she buy his claim that in the age of Prime Minister Thatcher, professional women were still “much bitchier about each other” than men.

  CBL: Oh, come off it! I’ve worked in the man’s world all my life. And I would sit there with men in an embassy, on the floor of Congress, in an editorial office. What are the men doing? Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak.

  SAFER: About each other.

  CBL: About everything, and each other. And then, the same man gets home at night, and there’s the poor little woman, who hasn’t been out of the house all day, and she opens her mouth, and he says, “Why do you women have to talk so much?”

  When Safer asked if she was disappointed being “born at the wrong time,” and therefore unable to contemplate ever being President of the United States, Clare said no. “I was young and at my peak and serving my country when my country was at its peak in the 1950s. Now, how can you say I was born at the wrong time? I’m the luckiest of women in the time I was born!”99

  She was not so lucky at West Point on the afternoon of October 10, when a blizzard caused the cancellation of a scheduled cadet review in her honor. “It snowed on my parade!” Clare exclaimed, but was reassured by the promise of a review at a later date. After being presented with a ceremonial saber in the officers’ mess, she was escorted by the superintendent of the Academy to dinner with the Corps of Cadets in Washington Hall. A great cheer of more than four thousand young voices resounded through the enormous room, as she stood to receive her scroll and medal.

  “I will thrive on this honor you have done me the rest of my days,” Clare said, adding, “I am a brave woman. But I’m no heroine.… I suspect that the fact that this is the first year that there are women in all four classes is not unrelated to my good fortune.”

  Although the bulk of her speech was a serious review of the current moral, economic, and political decline of the country, she kept her listeners laughing with wisecracks. “I have lived more than a third of all the years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence,” she told them. “It was the last third, in case you are wondering.” She ended by saying, “My only regret is that I will not live long enough to see much of you on the long gray line become the great soldier-statesmen, soldier-scholars, or soldier’s soldiers of tomorrow. Would you please remember me maybe once when you do?”

  She sat down to a standing ovation.100

  Clare receives the Thayer Award at West Point, October 10, 1980 (illustration credit 46.7)

  “Mrs. Luce is thinking of pulling up roots in Hawaii and moving to either New York or Washington permanently,” a secretary wrote to Clare’s money manager on April 1, 1980. “Her home is now on the market, with an asking price of $4,800,000.”101

  Nobody offered this record amount, and eventually Clare would settle for much less. But now that she was, as she put it “in my anecdotage,” she saw in the rise of Ronald Reagan an opportunity for rejuvenation on the mainland, as the grande dame of the Republican Party.102 President Carter’s chances of reelection in the fall had been damaged by the six-month incarceration of U.S. Embassy officials in Tehran, and Reagan had become the favorite for the GOP nomination. A failed attempt later that month to rescue the hostages by helicopter resulted in the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen, and virtually guaranteed Carter’s loss of a second term.

  “I hope that Ronnie will take you on for his Vice President,” Clare wrote George H. W. Bush, after the latter dropped out of the race at the end of May. “It would make a beautiful ticket. And a fine spot for you, as an extraordinary number of Vice Presidents have become Presidents!”103

  When Reagan’s campaign organization, Americans for Change, listed “Mr. Claire Booth Luce” of “Honalulu” as a supporter, she acidly wrote to correct all four orthographic mistakes, saying she hoped such sloppiness was not symptomatic of how the committee would be run.104

  Four days before the election, Clare again became the first woman to receive a major public honor. She flew to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver the annual Westminster College Lecture, commemorating Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech there thirty-four years before. Using the occasion to attack what she saw as Carter’s inept foreign policy, she said: “You are all aware of the increasing relative inferiority of the United States.… If we didn’t know it a year ago, we know it now, because no one can deny the attack on our embassy was an attack on our sovereignty and an act of war to which we were not able to respond with sufficient strength.”105

  On November 4, 1980, Reagan was elected President, carrying forty-four states to Carter’s six (plus the District of Columbia). He also received the highest number of electoral college votes ever accorded a nonincumbent candidate.106

  The following Sunday, Archibald and Selwa Roosevelt held a dinner party in their Georgetown house for the British military historian Alistair Horne. They placed Clare at his right. It was an ideal coupling, and the two talked nonstop throughout the evening. As so often in social situations, Clare, glancing around myopically, appeared to take no notice of members of her own sex. She had no idea that a young woman seated opposite at the same round table wanted to write a biography of her.

  At the end of the evening, when the time came for her exit, a few guests were standing at the top of the staircase. One of them was the young woman. In a surprise gesture, Clare put both hands on her shoulders, kissed her, and said, “Good night, you sweet thing.”

  A flash of red cape, and she was gone.107

  EPILOGUE

  I stood absolutely still. Was the kiss a benediction?

  Earlier that year, while looking through files I obsessively keep about characters who strike my fancy, I had come across Mrs. Luce’s 1973 autobiographical interview with Martha Weinman Lear in The New York Times. I read it with deepening fascination. Here was a child actress who understudied Mary Pickford, a teenage suffragette campaigning for equal rights, a managing editor at twenty-nine of the original Vanity Fair, the author of two books and four Broadway plays, a war correspondent, and a Congresswoman, all before she was forty.

  Most of this was fresh to me, a fairly recent immigrant from England. Before the article ended, I had learned about her conversion to Catholicism, her appointment as the first American female Ambassador to a major nation, and her 1960s experiments with LSD. I was enthralled, and the biographer in me especially reacted to her final words as quoted by Weinman: “I never thought of myself as really successful at anything.… I was thinking at one time of writing my memoirs and calling it: ‘Confessions of an Unsuccessful Woman.’ ”

  I decided then that I should like to research and record this extraordinary life, and expressed my interest to Daniel J. Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress. It so happened that he and his wife were friends of Mrs. Luce’s. They offered to put in a good word for me. By coincidence, Dr. Boorstin called the morning after the Roosevelt party to say he had just spoken to Mrs. Luce, and that she was “receptive” to the idea of a biography. Had she somehow sensed, the night before, that the person she embraced was the biographer who wanted to “embrace” her?

  Two days later, I made my first formal move by writing to Mrs. Luce at her Watergate apartment, enclosing a copy of my previous book, Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady. “Sooner or later,” I told her, “someone will embark on a major biography, and I should like it to be me.”

  The year 1980 came to an end. There was no reply. She had returned to Hawaii. I was afraid that she was no longer “receptive.” Seeing her in dazzling form on The Dick Cavett Show on the night of Reagan’s inauguration, wearing a peach-orange silk muumuu, only increased my desire to tell her astonishing story. Finally, in March, a letter postmarked Honolulu arrived. As I opened the pink envelope, I saw it was lined with seashells. A phrase written in
her forceful italic hand leaped out at me: disinclined towards working with a biographer. Desolate, I read on. “My private life—almost all 78 years of it—has been sad, unhappy, and sometimes tragic … an unwillingness to deal with these unhappy and sensitive areas of my life has kept me from writing my own autobiography.”

  Undeterred, I sent another imploring letter. “In some strange way, the project has taken me over. Every day I find myself in the Lincoln Center Theater Collection poring over crumbling news clippings.” On April 7, 1981, I heard again from Honolulu. Addressing me by my first name, Mrs. Luce wrote, “You are a very persistent—and persuasive young woman.” She promised “a conclusive conversation” on her return to Washington at the end of the month.

  It was the Boorstins who made that conversation possible, at a dinner in their Cleveland Park house on May 5. My husband, Edmund, and I got there first, and were waiting on the second floor when the guest of honor arrived. I heard her decline the elevator and slowly mount the stairs. Dr. Boorstin, wearing a red smoking jacket, crested the last step with Mrs. Luce on his arm. She was dressed in a sea-green silk caftan—“more Hawaiian than Halston,” I thought.

  Over dinner, Mrs. Luce did most of the talking. She paid little attention to the food. Her delivery was hypnotically slow as she reminisced. I noticed that whenever her monologues on politics and history were interrupted, her jaw protruded disagreeably. Sometimes she paused for a name or a date, which I could not help supplying. At one point she forgot which transatlantic liner she had taken to Europe in 1914. “The RMS Carmania,” I said. She hesitated over a London hotel she had stayed in after World War I. “The Victoria,” I said. Each time she looked at me quizzically. Our bizarre duet was interrupted by the appearance of orange blancmange. Dan said: “Well, it’s time to talk frankly about why we’re here tonight.”