Price of Fame
Page 70
38. William Miller, Fishbait (New York, 1977), 67.
3. TURNING FORTY
1. John Billings diary, Feb. 12, 1943, JBP.
2. Ibid.
3. Pittsburgh Press, Mar. 2, 1943.
4. List compiled by Helena Hill Wood and presented to the House of Representatives by CBL on Feb. 15, 1943, CBLP.
5. Morris, Rage for Fame, chapter 10.
6. Ibid.
7. Emily D. Barringer, chairman of the Connecticut State Committee of the NWP, to CBL, Jan. 2, 1943. CBL replied, apologizing, on Jan. 4, 1943, CBLP.
8. Bridgeport Herald, Feb. 28, 1943, CBLP.
9. CBL to Emily D. Barringer, June 8, 1943, BLP. When CBL was asked by the Connecticut State Committee to speak in favor of the ERA, Al Morano advised against it, saying that it might be hard to arouse public interest when the legislature was in recess and people were heading for the seashore. Morano memo to CBL, June 1, 1943, CBLP.
10. CBL to FDR, ca. Mar. 4, 1943, quoted in Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 171.
11. Ibid.
12. Steve Early to CBL, Mar. 8, 1943, CBLP.
13. Washington Star, Mar. 11, 1943; Bridgeport Post, Mar. 11, 1943; The New York Times, Mar. 11, 1943. “The late President Roosevelt bothered actually to dislike few people, they lacked the capacity sufficiently to hit ‘home ground’ with him. Mrs. Luce he apparently disliked and feared.” Marjorie Hoagland, “Clare Boothe Luce,” Ave Maria, Nov. 7, 1953. In a People magazine interview, July 25, 1977, CBL said of FDR: “I was very critical of him at one time, but all his lies [about not sending Americans to war] were in the interest of the United States. I owe him an apology.”
14. CBL to Charles Willoughby, Mar. 15, 1943, CBLP.
15. Burns, Roosevelt, 363.
16. CBL, Klein Memorial speech, broadcast Apr. 17 and reported in the Bridgeport Herald, Apr. 18, 1943; Ansonia Sentinel (Conn.), Mar. 30, 1943.
17. Morris, Rage for Fame, 16. CBL not only continued to observe April 10 as her birthday, but had the false date engraved on her tombstone. To avoid confusion, textual references to CBL’s “birthday” in this book conform to the fictional date.
18. Washington Herald, Apr. 19, 1943.
4. THE MOST TALKED-ABOUT MEMBER
1. The Boston Globe, Apr. 27, 1943.
2. Ibid. Also see Faye Henle, Au Clare de Luce (New York, 1943), 195–99.
3. New York Mirror, May 16, 1943.
4. Joseph Lash, ed., From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter (New York, 1975), 240.
5. “What’s Mrs. Luce After?,” Bridgeport Post, July 18, 1943; Harold L. Ickes diary, May 23, 1943, LC.
6. CBL to Pearl Buck, July 20, 1959, CBLP.
7. Gretta Palmer, “The New Clare Luce,” Look, Apr. 15, 1947. House consideration of the Wayward Wives Bill took place in late Sept. 1943.
8. Congressman May was convicted after World War II of accepting bribes from military contractors. He served time in prison along with another of CBL’s committee colleagues, Parnell Thomas.
9. Newark Star Ledger, July 26, 1943.
10. Ibid.
11. Smith Dawless, “Elegy,” CBI Roundup ca. June 1943, http://cbi-theater-3.home.comcast.net/~cbi-theater-3/verses/dawless-09.html.
12. CBL to Charles Willoughby, Mar. 15, 1943, CBLP; Willoughby to CBL n.d., ca. Mar. 1943, CBLP.
13. William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964 (Boston, 1978), 357.
14. Ibid., 78; and Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War (New York, 1987), 330.
15. CBL, “What Is America’s Foreign Policy?,” Congressional Record 89, pt. 5, 6428ff.
16. Washington Times-Herald, June 27, 1943; Bridgeport Sunday Post, July 18, 1943.
17. CBL, “What Is America’s Foreign Policy?”; Bridgeport Sunday Post, July 18, 1943.
18. Washington Times-Herald, June 27, 1943.
19. Ronald Gary Willis, “The Persuasion of Clare Boothe Luce,” PhD dissertation, Indiana University (Bloomington, 1993), 88; Maria Braden, Women Politicians and the Media (Lexington, Ky., 1996), 43.
20. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 178.
21. Ibid.
22. John Billings diary, Apr. 19, 1943, JBP; Dan Longwell to Billings, Apr. 24, 1943, JBP.
23. John Billings diary, Feb. 18 and Apr. 19, 1943, JBP.
24. New York Mirror, July 9, 1943.
25. Quoted in Chamberlain CBL profile, JBP.
26. Philadelphia Enquirer, July 11, 1943.
27. Ibid.
5. SUMMER INTERLUDE
1. CBL’s headquarters were in the Salvatore Building on Greenwich Avenue.
2. Davis, “Clare Luce—What She Is and Why.”
3. CBL interview, Dec. 12, 1981. The complex relationship between CBL and DFB is fully discussed in Morris, Rage for Fame.
4. CBL interview, June 13, 1982.
5. CBL, “The Double-Bind,” unpublished autobiographical novel, 83, CBLP.
6. Nora Dawes’s list of items she wanted the Luces to pay for, dated July 14, 1940, CBLP. See Rage for Fame, 389–92, for DFB’s problems.
7. The amounts were meticulously compiled by Harry’s accountants. By his own reckoning, DFB had “borrowed” or outright stolen some $250,000 from CBL before her marriage to HRL, in the course of handling stock transactions for her over the years. The sum of $190,000 was in addition to that. Due to his mismanagement, her 1929 Brokaw alimony of $425,000 had been reduced by 1941 to just over $266,000. With gifts from Harry of Time Inc. stock totaling $58,000 and miscellaneous royalties from her writing, she had a gross income in 1941 of just over $73,000. After deducting business expenses and charity payments of $2,500, she had a net income of $40,290. In current dollars, this is approximately $500,000 for the year.
8. CBL to DFB, July 3, 1942, CBLP.
9. ACB diary, July 16, 1943, CBLP.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., July 17, 1943, CBLP.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., July 18, 1943, CBLP. CBL and Willoughby may have been sending ACB a signal in their play reading. Benavente’s play is the story of two frustrated royal lovers.
14. ACB diary, Aug. 2, 1942, CBLP. “Buckey Fuller—Mother told me that he and Nehru are the two greatest minds she has met. Buckey is terribly stimulating and I feel with him that here is a mind greater than mother’s.”
15. ACB diary, July 25, 1939, and Sept. 5, 1942, CBLP.
16. Walton Wickett to SJM, Nov. 15, 1983, SJMP.
17. Wickett to CBL, Mar. 6, 1986, CBLP; ACB diary, Jan. 17, 1940, CBLP.
18. Wickett to CBL, Mar. 31, 1943, WWP.
19. See Morris, Rage for Fame, chapters 1 and 2.
20. CBL on Ann’s voice, quoted in Frederick Van Ryan, “Dream Job,” Redbook, Nov. 1942.
21. ACB to James Rea, May 2, 1943, mentions the Sorbonne as first choice, CBLP.
22. ACB diary, Mar. 4, 1943, CBLP.
23. Ibid., May 27, 1942, CBLP.
24. Ibid., July 25, 1939, CBLP.
25. ACB to CBL, undated, and May 15, 1943, CBLP.
26. ACB to CBL, July 7, 1943, CBLP.
27. ACB diary, Jan. 26, 1940, CBLP. Other examples of ACB’s loneliness, ibid., Sept. 27, 1940, CBLP.
28. Ibid., Nov. 9, 1941, CBLP; ACB to Walton Wickett, Jan. n.d., 1942, WWP.
29. HRL to ACB, Nov. 24, 1943, said he was giving Ann a certificate for seventy shares of Time Inc. stock, “as much as was allowed under the tax laws,” CBLP. CBL told ACB that “if Mr. Roosevelt doesn’t spoil everything,” she would have an income of $35,000 annually at twenty-one. ACB diary, Sept. 9, 1940, CBLP.
30. Ibid., Apr. 18, 1942, CBLP.
31. Ibid., May 23, 1942, CBLP.
32. Ibid., June 27, 1943, CBLP.
33. Ibid., Dec. 28, 1942, CBLP.
34. CBL to Walton Wickett, Apr. 11, 1943, CBLP.
35. ACB had met Geza Korvin in the summer of 1942, when he was performing in her mother’s play Love Is a Verb in Abingdo
n, Virginia. Despite her hasty judgment of him, Geza, a graduate of the Sorbonne, was destined for starring roles opposite the likes of Merle Oberon as a contract player with Universal Studios.
36. ACB diary, Sept. 18, 1942, CBLP.
37. James Rea was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of MIT and pilot employed by Pan Am. James Rea to CBL, Feb. 26, 1944, CBLP.
38. Wickett to SJM, Nov. 12, 1983, SJMP.
39. ACB to James Rea, July 1, 1943, CBLP.
40. ACB diary, Oct. 26, 1943, CBLP.
41. Walton Wickett to Norman Ross, another friend of Ann Brokaw, Nov. 4, 1987, WWP.
42. ACB to Wickett, Feb. 9, 1942, WWP.
43. Charles Willoughby to ACB, July 21, 1945, CBLP.
44. ACB to CBL, Aug. 2, 1943, CBLP.
45. While on reconnaissance thirty-five yards from the enemy lines at Bataan on Jan. 24, 1942, Willoughby had rescued a wounded officer. “Without a helmet and in disregard of his personal safety,” the soldier afterward reported, “he made his way through the jungle to my position and assisted me to the rear through a concentration of hostile mortar fire.” HQ report, Feb. 23, 1942, sent by Willoughby to CBL, CBLP.
46. DFB to CBL, July 28, 1943, CBLP.
47. Helen Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party: A Memoir (New York, 1972), 122. Quotations taken from Lawrenson’s own summary of CBL’s letter. Efforts to trace the original have been unsuccessful.
48. Ibid. Lawrenson was now married to Jack Lawrenson, a founder of the National Maritime Union.
49. Helen Lawrenson to CBL, July 27, 1943, CBLP.
50. CBL 1935 manuscript, CBLP.
51. Bridgeport Herald, Aug. 15, 1943.
52. CBL speech, Aug. 9, 1943, CBLP.
53. CBL to Sir Archibald Clarke Kerr, Dec. 18, 1942, CBLP. Indira Gandhi agreed. “My father,” she said, “was the closest thing you could find to a saint in a normal man.” But “he wasn’t at all a politician.… He was sustained in his work only by a blind faith in India.” Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History (New York, 1976), 173–74.
54. CBL admitted to having fallen “a bit in love” with the elegant Brahmin and immediately began to correspond with him on the subject closest to his heart: Indian independence. CBL to Colonel Frank Roberts, June 28, 1942, CBLP.
55. Nehru to CBL, May 5, 1942, CBLP; Morris, Rage for Fame, 457.
56. CBL to Nehru, June 4, 1942, CBLP.
57. Nehru to CBL, Oct. 7, 1958, CBLP.
58. Charles Willoughby to CBL, Dec. 29, 1943, CBLP.
6. LUMINOUS LADY
1. Washington’s Stage Door Canteen opened on Oct. 4, 1942. It depended on donors for financing, and spent about $600 each night entertaining two thousand servicemen. Older women chaperoned the young hostesses, who wore red, white, and blue aprons and were forbidden to see the men when off duty. It closed on Jan. 23, 1946. General Eisenhower and his wife were the honored guests at the final party. By then, six thousand volunteers had entertained more than two million service personnel. Sarah Booth Conroy, “Revisiting the Stage Door Canteen,” The Washington Post, Jan. 31, 1991.
2. Washington Times Herald, Sept. 29, 1943.
3. CBL to HRL, “Sunday night,” ca. Oct. 3, 1943, CBLP.
4. CBL to HRL, n.d., ca. Sept. 1943, SJMP.
5. Ibid.
6. CBL to Alice Basim, Oct. 27, 1943, ABP.
7. Ibid., Oct. 12, 1943, ABP.
8. CBL to ACB, “Wednesday,” n.d. but possibly Oct. 20, 1943, CBLP.
9. John Billings diary, Dec. 20, 1943, JBP.
10. CBL to ACB, Oct. 29, 1943, CBLP.
11. Ibid. Love Is a Verb, a play about aphrodisiacs, was originally called The Yohimbe Tree. It was first performed under its new title at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, in Aug. 1942. To disguise her authorship, CBL mischievously adopted the pseudonym “Karl Weidenbach” for the Barter production. This was the name on Willoughby’s German birth certificate. Morris, Rage for Fame, 463. The New York production did not take place.
12. Eventually, the Red Army would bring about some 75 percent of all German losses in manpower and matériel. John and Carol Garrard, in a letter to The New York Times, May 7, 2006.
13. Charles Willoughby to CBL, n.d., 1943, told her that her letters to him were never censored if they carried an appropriately coded address. CBLP.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Willoughby to CBL, Oct. 11, 1943, CBLP; Time, July 3, 1943.
17. Willoughby to CBL, Oct. 11, 1943, CBLP.
18. Ibid., Oct. 22, 1943, CBLP.
19. CBL to ACB, Nov. 7 [misdated Nov. 5], 1943, CBLP.
20. Ibid.
21. Morris, Rage for Fame, 442–45; CBL to HRL, Jan. 1, 1942, CBLP.
22. Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (New York, 2001), 310–11; Caroline Moorehead, Freya Stark (New York, 1985), 86.
23. Ibid.
24. Faye Henle radio interview with Warren Bower, WNYC, Dec. 27, 1943, transcript in CBLP.
25. Harriman, “The Candor Kid.”
26. Henle, Au Clare de Luce, 2.
27. Ibid., 20. Henle’s biography was the first of an eventual eight biographies or book-length studies of CBL and her plays by 2014.
28. Faye Henle radio interview, CBLP.
29. John Billings diary, Aug. 28, 1943, JBP. When Billings first heard about the Henle book, he said he hoped it gave CBL “hell because she certainly has stuck her neck out and deserves it. Except I’m sorry for Harry. But then he chucked Lila and married Clare all of his own free will.” John Billings diary, Aug. 12, 1943, JBP.
30. Birmingham News, Nov. 21, 1943; Bridgeport Herald, Dec. 5, 1943; Chicago Sun, Nov. 21, 1943, Hartford Times, Nov. 1, 1943.
31. New York Post, Nov. 22, 1943.
32. CBL to SJM verbally on many occasions.
33. CBL to ACB, ca. Dec. 1943, CBLP; CBL interview, Mar. 15, 1982. CBL accused HRL of being parsimonious over presents. Yet he often gave her a leather purse with Time Inc. stock inside, along with extravagant “guilt” gifts of paintings and jewelry, usually when he was having an extramarital affair.
34. SJM notes on original tapestry, now privately owned. See also Joan Scobey and Lee Parr McGrath, Celebrity Needlepoint (New York, 1972), 75–77.
35. CBL to HRL, Nov. 23, 1943, CBLP.
36. CBL to SJM verbally on several occasions; CBL to ACB, Nov. 25, 1943, CBLP.
37. Burns, Roosevelt, 406–07.
38. Letters to CBL from Norman Stone of Maryland, Dec. 1, 1943; E. E. Evans of Kansas City, Dec. 4, 1943; and E. Willimon of Florida, Nov. 3, 1943, Congressional Correspondence for 1943, CBLP.
39. Julia McCarthy, “Capitol Pin-Up Girl,” New York Daily News, Dec. 2, 1943.
40. The New York Times, Dec. 24, 1943.
41. New York Daily News, Dec. 4, 1943.
42. Charleston Gazette (W.Va.), Dec. 16, 1943.
43. The New York Times, quoting Noël Coward, Dec. 10, 1943.
44. Coward had been in Portugal en route from the United States, where he had stayed at the White House and interviewed Franklin Roosevelt. Barry Day, ed., The Letters of Noël Coward (New York, 2007), 398. Clare knew nothing of Noël’s secret assignment in 1940, simply noting how pale and frightened he looked as he said that England would “never, never, surrender.” She tried to cheer him up by quoting Shakespeare’s “Once more unto the breach” soliloquy from Henry V. Morris, Rage for Fame, 86, 165, 386–87.
45. Graham Payne and Sheridan Morley, eds., Noël Coward’s Diaries (Boston, 1982), 23.
46. On Dec. 14, 1943, CBL aired her views about America’s postwar relations with China at the Wilson Auditorium in Cincinnati. On Dec. 15, she spoke in Fairmont, West Virginia, and derided FDR and the New Deal.
7. IMPACT
1. ACB to James Rea, Dec. 9, 1943, and July 1, 1943, CBLP.
2. ACB diary, Dec. 18 and Dec. 26, 1942, CBLP.
3. The Selznicks were occasional neighbors of the Luces at the Waldorf Towers. ACB considered the voluble and flamboyant produc
er of Gone With the Wind “revolting” and frowned on her parents’ friendship with him. ACB diary, Dec. 21, 1942, CBLP; Morris, Rage for Fame, 438.
4. Irene Selznick interviews, Feb. 1988.
5. Ibid.
6. ACB diary, Aug. 19, 1942, CBLP.
7. Ibid., Dec. 3 and 13, 1942, CBLP.
8. Ibid., Jan. 25, 1943, CBLP.
9. Walton Wickett to CBL, Mar. 31, 1943, CBLP.
10. ACB to Wickett, Dec. 2, 1942, WWP.
11. Walton Wickett interview, Nov. 12, 1983, SJMP. Wickett later switched to Pan Am’s engineering department. He was trained in rocketry, and in 1945 would move to the Manhattan Project and work on fitting atomic bombs into a modified B-29 as used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
12. Wickett to SJM, Nov. 6, 1983, SJMP.
13. In her diary on Dec. 28, 1942, ACB had written: “Well, here I am all but married to Mr. Wickett. I am so elated with the wonderful impression he has made on Mom and Pop and everyone … think I was a ‘bad reporter’ that he is quite handsome even, that he is charming, poised and intelligent. Wheeeeeee! Now all I have to do is let my heart go ahead, and fall in love with him all it wants!” The next day she wrote: “Doubt has once more crept back into my mind.” But later in the entry she said if, after graduating, she still liked “Walt and vice versa I will marry him.” ACB diary, Dec. 29, 1942, CBLP.
14. Wickett to SJM, Nov. 6, 1983, SJMP.
15. ACB diary, Jan. 4, 1943, CBLP. ACB described Frances de Villers Fonda as “making a home for her slouch backed stupid acting husband, the pink eyed Henry Fonda.” ACB diary, Jan. 4, 1943, and Nov. 22, 1941, CBLP. ACB’s animus vis-à-vis Fonda might have been instigated by CBL. Fonda reportedly “couldn’t stand Clare. He was not one for small talk, and she once said to him, ‘Hank, don’t you have anything to say for yourself?’ He didn’t care for her after that.” Frances Brokaw Corrias interview, Feb. 24, 1988. After Henry Fonda asked his wife for a divorce, she committed suicide in Apr. 1950, on her forty-second birthday, by slashing her throat.
16. ACB to Mr. and Mrs. Thornburg, Jan. 3, 1944, CBLP.
17. Samuel Marx interview, Aug. 20, 1987.
18. Spokane Spokesman, Jan. 12, 1944.
19. CBL to Irene Selznick, Mar. 9, 1944, ISP.
20. ACB to Wickett, Dec. 2, 1942, Nov. 3, 1943, and Oct. 25, 1943, WWP. Wickett suspected that ABC and he were dating again only because she had broken up with James Rea. ACB to Wickett, Oct. 25, 1943, WWP; Wickett to ACB, Nov. 1, 1943, WWP; Wickett to SJM, Nov. 6, 1943, SJMP.