Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  21. Sidney L. James, Press Pass: The Journalist’s Tale (Walnut Creek, Calif., 1944), 171.

  22. Report of Officer Ben Hickey, Jan. 12, 1944, CBLP.

  23. Ibid. Dr. Anna F. Barnett declared Ann dead, and Dr. Blake C. Wilbur peformed the hospital examination.

  24. San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 12, 1943.

  25. List of contents of ACB’s briefcase, CBLP.

  26. CBL quoted in Isabel Hill to ACB, Nov. 22, 1943, CBLP.

  27. Virginia L. Blood report on the events of the day, “Midnight, Jan. 11,” CBLP.

  28. CBL to SJM verbally on numerous occasions.

  29. Rosalie Noland Gumbrill to SJM, Aug. 8, 1987, SJMP.

  30. CBL to ACB, n.d., ca. 1943, CBLP.

  31. Walton Wickett interview, Nov. 12, 1983. Ewell Sale told Wickett that she was asked “to knot Ann’s hair, filament by filament, across the gash of the wound.”

  32. Colonel William Cobb to CBL, Jan. 11, 1944, CBLP.

  33. Charles Hobbs to CBL, Nov. 21, 1942, CBLP; CBL to Hobbs, Nov. 29, 1942, CBLP.

  34. Virginia Blood report, “Midnight, Jan. 11,” 1944, CBLP.

  35. James, Press Pass, 171; CBL to Irene Selznick, Mar. 9, 1944, ISP.

  36. The New York Times, Jan. 12, 1944, reported HRL’s arrival by train.

  37. John Billings diary, Jan. 11, 1944, JBP.

  38. Jean Dalrymple interview, Feb. 6, 1988. In Dalrymple’s opinion, CBL had kept Ann in the background, because she herself looked young and “didn’t want people to know she had a daughter that old.” In fact, CBL never lied about her own age, and the more mature Ann became, the more she tried to include her in gatherings of her friends, eminent or not.

  39. HRL wire to CBL, Jan. 11, 1944, CBLP.

  40. Ibid.

  41. John Billings diary, Jan. 11, 1944, JBP; HRL to CBL, Jan. 12, 1944, CBLP.

  42. Virginia Blood report, “Midnight, Jan. 11,” CBLP.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Walton Wickett interview, Nov. 13, 1983. It was clear, almost forty years later, that the wound of ACB’s death was still raw for Wickett. As for the likelihood in 1944 of a rosy future with her, he remarked, “Happiness is determined by how well a man can deceive himself.”

  45. James, Press Pass, 171.

  46. Norman Ross interview, Oct. 2, 1989.

  47. Isabel Hill to DFB, Jan. 12, 1944, CBLP.

  48. William B. Cobb to CBL, May 13, 1979, CBLP. Though Cobb’s time with CBL was brief, he developed a tremendous respect for her, and in a letter to her thirty-five years later, he said that he never forgot her bravery and forbearance on the day of Ann’s death. James, Press Pass, 173.

  49. Kurt Bergel wire to CBL, 10:39 P.M., Sept. 11, 1944, CBLP.

  50. Chief of Police H. A. Zinc of Palo Alto, reporting to HRL after “a careful investigation.” Detailed notes written by Virginia Blood, “Thursday morning,” Jan. 13, 1944, CBLP.

  51. Report by Chief of Police H. A. Zink, on file at Palo Alto Police Department, as recorded by Virginia Blood, Sept. 13, 1944, CBLP. Also Officer Ben Hickey’s reports dated Jan. 11 and 12, 1944, CBLP.

  52. M. T. Moore memo to HRL, Feb. 3, 1944, CBLP. Lawyers advised HRL that none of Bergel’s derelictions warranted civil or criminal action. Unless CBL elected to press charges, California authorities were unlikely to proceed, since proving negligence beyond a reasonable doubt would be next to impossible.

  53. An undated draft of HRL’s letter to Kurt Bergel, CBLP. Bergel was a married multilingual German-Jewish refugee who had tried unsuccessfully to enter the U.S Armed Forces. Memo to HRL from Henry G. Hayes, CBLP.

  54. HRL to Charles Hobbs, Jan. 15, 1944, CBLP.

  55. Walton Wickett interview, Nov. 12, 1983.

  56. Ibid. The seals may have been those that appear on rocks near the Golden Gate Bridge.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Ibid. CBL pitied the young men who had loved her daughter. James Rea recalled a letter from her so warm and sympathetic that it brought tears to his eyes. James Rea to CBL, Feb. 6, 1944, CBLP.

  59. Walton Wickett interview, Nov. 12, 1983.

  60. Funeral arrangements and program, CBLP.

  61. ACB thesis, CBLP.

  8. AFTERMATH

  1. Norman Ross interview, Oct. 2, 1989.

  2. Al Morano interview, Oct. 6, 1981.

  3. The Reverend Wallace Martin conducted Ann’s service. CBLP has several pages of notes and memos on the funeral plans. The Luces and their guests spent Tuesday night at Yeamans Hall Club in Charleston. HRL was reimbursed $4,069.68 for ACB’s funeral expenses by her estate.

  4. John Billings diary, Feb. 26, 1944, JBP.

  5. CBL cable to HRL, Jan. 27, 1944, CBLP.

  6. John Billings diary, Jan. 28, 1943, JBP.

  7. Ibid., Jan. 28 and 22, 1944, JBP.

  8. Davis, “Clare Luce—What She Is and Why.”

  9. CBL to ER, Feb. 4, 1944, FDRL.

  10. CBL to Laura Hobson, Feb. 1, 1944, LZHP.

  11. JFK to CBL, Jan. 11, 1944, CBLP. CBL had recently given JFK an old gold coin that had belonged to her mother. He reciprocated by sending her a letter opener, the handle of which was made from a machine-gun shell, and the blade from a part of the PT boat that he was skippering in the Pacific when a Japanese destroyer cut it in two. He and his crew of ten survivors were missing for a week, and rescued after they sent an SOS on a coconut. The opener was inscribed, “PT-109 New Georgia, 8-2-43.” Also see Morris, Rage for Fame, 436, 445.

  12. DFB to CBL, Jan. 21, 1944, CBLP.

  13. CBL’s graying hair was mentioned in Davis, “Clare Luce—What She Is and Why.”

  14. The New York Times, Feb. 17, 1944.

  15. Ibid., Apr. 16, 1943.

  16. CBL to John Elson, June 13, 1968, TIA. CBL said that she “wanted to bow out” of her second campaign, but HRL “insisted she go forward.”

  17. Olive Clapper quoted by Alden Hatch in a series of interviews for his biography of CBL. Hereafter “Hatch interviews,” AHP.

  18. For new perspectives on the Italian campaign, see Matthew Parker, Monte Cassino: The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II (New York, 1904), and Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (New York, 2007).

  19. The New York Times, Mar. 22, 25, 1944.

  20. Mark Clark, Calculated Risk (New York, 1950), 310; Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 192. U.S. military strength had been on a par with Portugal in Dec. 1941.

  21. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 192.

  22. CBL to Gerald Heard, Nov. 20, 1959, copy in SJMP.

  23. CBL to Irene Selznick, Mar. 9, 1944, ISP.

  24. Ibid.

  25. In a letter of Oct. 20, ca. 1943, CBL thanked her personal physician, Dr. Milton Rosenbluth, for his help over the last ten years. “It’s not the pills, or the diet lists or the injections … it’s knowing always there’s someone I can really talk to.” CBLP.

  26. Al Grover told Billings in 1948 that CBL “had been drunk for six months after her daughter’s death.” John Billings diary, Feb. 25, 1948, JBP. If true, this marked the resumption of CBL’s tendency, dating back to Vanity Fair days, to use alcohol as a stimulant during late-night stints of writing and editing. At parties in the early 1930s, she had often drunk so much brandy that friends warned that she was becoming dependent on it. See Morris, Rage for Fame, 90, 132, 181, 199, 223, 254.

  27. CBL to Alice Basim, Apr. 12, 1944, ABP.

  9. CAMPAIGN ’44

  1. Geoffrey Perret, Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur (Holbrook, Mass., 1996), 386; D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur: 1941–1945, vol. 2 (Boston, 1975), 432, gives MacArthur fifteen delegates.

  2. John Billings diary, Apr. 5, 1944, JBP.

  3. J. Kenneth Bradley, Republican National Committee member from Connecticut, quoted in The New York Times, Apr. 16, 1944.

  4. Erroneous impressions persist that CBL made the keynote speech at either the 1944 or 1948 Republican National Conventions.

  5. Rafael Medoff, “Clare Boothe Luce a
nd the Holocaust: A CT Congresswoman’s Fight for Justice,” http://​www.​jewishledger.​com/​2012/​04/​clare-​boothe-​luce-​and-​the-​holocaust-​a-​ct-​congresswomans-​fight-​for-​justice/.

  6. Ibid. Benzion Netanyahu was the father of the future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

  7. Ibid. On Oct. 5, 1945, CBL took up the Zionist cause again. Addressing a delegation of Zionists in Fairfield County, she lamented the large number of displaced Jews living in European camps, and cited the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which recognized the aspirations of Jews for a country of their own. She told the group that it was imperative the United States support the British government in its attempts to admit one hundred thousand immigrants from these temporary shelters into Palestine. If force was needed to overcome local Arab resistance, she recommended the use of American battleships and machine guns. It was cowardly, she said, for idealists to speak of the need for a Jewish homeland, while doing nothing to provide one. Some of the Zionists were astonished, saying that Mrs. Luce had gone beyond anything they had sought from her. Bridgeport Telegram, Oct. 6, 1945. For more on Anglo-American efforts to deal with the problem of displaced Jews, see Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt and the Birth of the Pax Americana (New York, 2008), 386–91, 460–63. Great Britain’s Labor Party Zionist plank said there was no point in establishing a homeland for Jews unless they were allowed into it in sufficient numbers to be a majority. Clarke points out that the use of the word holocaust was not adopted almost exclusively to describe Nazi ill-treatment of Jews until July 1946. In fact, between 1942 and 1946 it had been used by The New York Times to emphasize other horrors, such as the siege of Stalingrad, the bombing of Berlin, and nuclear warfare. See Clarke, The Last Thousand Days, 387, 460–463, 456; The New York Times, Oct. 19, 1982.

  8. ACB’s estate was settled in Mar. 1945. One of the houses from which she had received rental income was the moated Brokaw mansion at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street, where CBL had lived during her first marriage. The other was at Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, New York. CBL sued in Nov. 1945 to get ACB’s trust funds and real estate assets. She lost the case and was advised by her lawyers not to appeal. A surrogate court had ruled some months before that the Brokaw trust fund set up for CBL by George Brokaw as part of her divorce settlement was exempt from taxes. Due to DFB’s mishandling, its original worth of $425,000 was now reduced to $266,000. Details in CBLP.

  9. Walton Wickett to SJM, Nov. 18, 1983, SJMP; James Rea to CBL, Feb. 26, 1944, CBLP; Norman Ross to SJM, July 1983, SJMP. Valuation certificate for Ann’s violin, CBLP. The violin cost $1,700 in 1935. The piano was valued at $900. List in CBLP, dated Oct. 1944.

  10. ACB’s tempera watercolor portrait by Boris Chaliapin cost CBL $400 in 1945 and was appraised at $2,000 in 1967. An oil portrait of ACB by Paul Clemens, painted just before she died, cost $500. Memo, n.d., CBLP.

  11. Walton Wickett to Stanford University, June 6, 1944, WWP. He gave the sum of $100 for five years.

  12. List of speeches and articles in an office memo, June 4, 1944, CBLP; PM, June 4, 1944.

  13. List of articles written between Apr. 28 and May 22, 1944, CBLP.

  14. The sitting took place on May 16, 1944. Yousuf Karsh interview, Sept. 1989.

  15. DFB to Isabel Hill, June 12, 1944, CBLP.

  16. Charles Willoughby to CBL, May 4, and Jan. 13, 1944, CBLP.

  17. Ibid.

  18. DFB to CBL, Mar. 2, 1944, CBLP.

  19. The GI Bill changed the lives of some 8 million veterans through advanced education. By 1947, half of all students on government grants were former servicemen or -women. Colleges turned out 360,000 teachers, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 180,000 doctors or nurses, and 150,000 scientists. The United States was thus transformed from a nation of mostly blue-collar urban renters into one dominated by middle-class professionals, owning their own homes in fast-growing suburbs. The New York Times, June 22, 1994.

  20. CBL to Herbert Hoover, n.d., June 1944, CBLP.

  21. Hoover to CBL, June 19, 1944, HHP.

  22. CBL to Hoover, June 20, 1944, CBLP.

  23. Morris, Rage for Fame, 195–98.

  24. The New York Times, June 28, 1944.

  25. PM, Aug. 1, 1944.

  26. CBL, “A Greater and Freer America: GI Joe’s Future,” delivered at the Republican National Convention June 27, 1944, and reprinted in Vital Speeches of the Day (New York, 1944).

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid. See also Chicago Daily News, June 28, 1944.

  29. CBL said she was “almost prostrate” after leaving the Chicago Stadium podium. McCall’s, July 1964.

  30. Allene Talmey, “Clare Boothe … in a Velvet Glove,” Vogue, Dec. 15, 1940; Morris, Rage for Fame, 329. The New York Times reported on June 28, 1944, that CBL’s “ringing speech” was “undeniably the peak of the program” that night.

  31. John Billings diary, June 27, 1944, JBP.

  32. National Review, Apr. 30, 1982.

  33. Russell Maloney, “Comment,” The New Yorker, July 8, 1944, 13; Time, July 3, 1944, reported that CBL “gave the convention a new word for New Deal bureaucracy—bumbledom.”

  34. Photograph in the Chicago Daily Tribune, June 29, 1944.

  35. Sunday Worker, Aug. 13, 1944; Max Spelke and J. Kenneth Bradley, Connecticut radio debate on CBL’s voting record, Aug. 20, 1944, transcript in CBLP; Philadelphia Record, Sept. 1, 1944; Reader’s Scope, Nov. 1945.

  36. Obituary of Billings, The New York Times, Aug. 27, 1975. He was seventy-seven.

  37. HRL office memo, Aug. 12, 1944, copy in JBP. Eric Hodgins, replying to HRL on behalf of Time’s public relations committee, suggested that much of the current prejudice against CBL among the magazine’s editors related to Republican campaign strategy. “So long as the wife of Publisher Luce is also Congresswoman Luce … the opposition will always have a handy weapon with which to make effective attack on CBL.” Aug. 15, 1944, CBLP.

  38. Neal, Dark Horse, 313–14.

  39. James, MacArthur, 533; Burns, Roosevelt, 448–50.

  40. Burns, Roosevelt, 424–25.

  41. John Colville, Winston Churchill and His Inner Circle (New York, 1981), 126–27.

  42. Carl M. Cannon, “Untruth and Consequences,” Atlantic, Jan.–Feb. 2007. Truman’s lunch with FDR was Aug. 18, 1944. The New York Times, July 14, 1998, said that FDR’s blood pressure in 1944 rose from 180/90 to 240/130. Doctors told him to give up swimming, the only effective exercise for his wasted legs.

  43. HRL office memo, Aug. 12, 1944, JBP.

  44. Ibid., Aug. 9, 1944, JBP; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 14, 1944; The Boston Globe, Aug. 9, 1944.

  45. The New Yorker, Aug. 26, 1944.

  46. John Billings diary, Aug. 25, 1944, JBP.

  47. Beaverbrook displayed no feelings of guilt in having multiple affairs, a characteristic Harry envied. CBL to SJM verbally on numerous occasions.

  48. CBL cable to HRL, ca. Sept. 7, 1944, CBLP.

  49. Stephen Mellnik to CBL, Sept. 20, 1944, CBLP.

  50. CBL to SJM, verbally, Jan. 16, 1982.

  51. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 195.

  52. Al Morano memo to CBL, 1944, CBLP. The phrase political action committee, now applicable to countless campaign organizations, related specifically to Hillman’s group in 1944.

  53. New York Sun, Nov. 8, 1944.

  54. Chamberlain CBL profile, JBP.

  55. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 195–97.

  56. Bridgeport World Telegram, Nov. 3, 1944.

  57. Ibid.

  58. “Meet ‘Big Bill’ Brennan, an Honest Politician,” Bridgeport Sunday Post, Aug. 18, 1946.

  59. Al Morano interview, Oct. 6, 1981; CBL to John Elson, Oct. 9, 1967, TIA. CBL said that HRL sometimes helped with the content, if not the composition, of her speeches. CBL to John Elson, June 13, 1968, TIA.

  60. The Boston Globe, Apr. 11, 1943.

  61. Time, Nov. 20, 1944, analyzing C
BL’s victory.

  62. The New York Times, Oct. 14, 1944.

  63. Braden, Women Politicians, 44.

  64. The Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 30, 1944.

  65. CBL made more than one hundred speeches during the 1944 campaign. Twelve, on national or international issues, lasting thirty to forty-five minutes, were documented extensively and released to the press in advance of delivery. The rest were extemporaneous, “more or less reverberations or rewrites of the carefully prepared speeches to which I had added new facts and comments according to the news events of the day.” David Hyatt, ed., “So You Have to Make a Speech by Heart,” June 1961 scrapbook cutting, CBLP.

  66. CBL to Charles Boothe, Oct. 19, 1944, CBLP.

  67. CBL to HRL, Oct. 30, 1944, CBLP.

  68. Bridgeport Post, Nov. 1, 1944; Margaret Case Harriman, “Or Would You Rather Be Clare Boothe?,” Reader’s Scope, 1945. Harriman wrote of CBL’s record in Congress that in 1943, her first year, she had “been absent for 21 roll-call votes on legislation, out of a total of 71; in her first fifteen months she was listed as ‘not voting’ on four separate war appropriations bills … she also declined to vote on three labor bills—the President’s veto of the Smith-Connally Bill, the Hobbs anti-racketeering bill, and a third bill granting overtime to 1.5 million federal workers.” CBL had supported the GI Bill, but was on a speaking tour for the GOP at the time of its unanimous passage.

  69. CBL to Bernard Baruch, Nov. 3, 1944, CBLP.

  70. New York Sun, Nov. 8, 1944.

  71. New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 9, 1944.

  72. Connors spent $22,000 on her campaign and CBL $13,000, not counting Wes Bailey’s salary, paid by Time Inc. HRL contributed $1,000 in cash to CBL’s campaign and some $8,500 to various Republican groups, including $2,000 to the Fairfield County Republican Association. He also gave about $9,600 to various Republican causes that year, including $3,000 to the National Republican Club and $1,000 to the CBL for Congress Committee. List in CBLP.

  73. New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 9, 1944. See Geoffrey C. Ward, Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (Boston, 1995), 340–41, for FDR remarks about CBL on Election Day 1944.