15. CBL in Catholic Action of the South, undated scrapbook clipping, CBLP.
16. CBL diary, Oct. 30, 1949, CBLP; CBL, “A Skull in the Catacombs,” The Pylon, July 1950.
17. Elisabeth Cobb Rogers diary, Nov. 2, 1949, CBLP.
18. By mid-Nov., Chávez was in Paris at the same time as CBL, staying at the Hotel Georges V. They possibly dined together on Nov. 15, 1949.
19. Elisabeth Cobb Rogers diary, Nov. 3, 1949, CBLP.
20. Ibid., Nov. 14, 1949. On that day, the first contingent of monks moved from Kentucky to Mepkin.
21. The Hyde Park Hotel is where Waugh usually stayed when in town.
22. Amory, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 315.
23. CBL to HRL, Nov. 28, 1949, CBLP.
24. CBL to Thomas Merton, “Feast Day of St. Clare,” Aug. 12, 1948; CBL to Abbot M. James Fox, Dec. 2, 1948, CBLP. The Vatican approved the transfer to Mepkin in late November 1948. At the time of the move, 186 monks remained at Gethsemani.
25. CBL to Father Fox, Jan. 18, 1949, CBLP.
26. Berkeley County Evening Post, Nov. 15, 1949; AP clipping, Nov. 16, 1949, CBLP.
27. CARLOS AND CLARITA
1. HRL to Henry Luce III, Jan. 14, 1950, CBLP.
2. Ibid.
3. John Billings diary, Jan. 20, 1950, JBP; Robert Elson to Billings, May 22, 1970, JBP.
4. The New York Times, Feb. 1, 1950. Years afterward, CBL claimed that HRL commissioned a Connecticut poll that showed he could not win a Senate seat, whereas she could have beaten either Benton or McMahon. CBL interview, Jan. 10, 1982.
5. Al Morano to CBL, Jan. 11, 1950, CBLP; Newport News, Feb. 13, 1950, CBLP.
6. CBL to Carlos Chávez, Jan. 5, 1950, CCP.
7. CBL to Chávez, Feb. 6, 1950, CCP; Chávez to CBL, Feb. 7, 1950, CCP.
8. CBL, “Thoughts on Mexico,” Vogue, Aug. 1950.
9. Carlos and Otilia Chávez had both been students of the eminent music teacher Luis Ogazon.
10. CBL eventually bequeathed Between the Curtains to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. In 1939, she commissioned Kahlo to paint a posthumous portrait of her friend, the suicidal actress Dorothy Hale. Kahlo, true to her own psychological makeup, depicted Hale jumping from a skyscraper, sequentially falling, and ending up splayed and bleeding on the sidewalk. Finding the painting too gruesome to live with, CBL left The Suicide of Dorothy Hale to the Phoenix Art Musem. For more on her relationship with Kahlo, see Morris, Rage for Fame, 326–32.
11. CBL, “Thoughts on Mexico.”
12. Chávez once lent this house to Aaron Copland, who complained that he had difficulty composing there because of the “sensational” panorama. Copland to Chávez, Feb. 13, 1959, CCPN.
13. Robert L. Parker, Carlos Chávez: Mexico’s Modern-Day Orpheus (Boston, 1983), 133–34.
14. CBL to Chávez, Apr. 1, 1950, CCP.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. CBL quoting Chávez, Ash Wednesday, Feb. 22, 1950, CCP.
18. Fragment, CCP. While professing to follow CBL’s thematic wishes, Chávez eventually wrote not a concerto but a four-movement symphony, his third.
19. CBL to Wilfrid J. Thibodeau, Mar. 1, 1950, SJMP.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.; CBL to Chávez, “Ash Wednesday,” Feb. 22, 1950, CCP.
22. Ibid.
23. W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York, 1972), 290.
24. CBL to Thibodeau, Mar. 1, 1950, SJMP.
25. Joseph Mersand, The American Drama Since 1930 (New York, 1949), quoted by Fearnow, Luce, 129–30.
26. CBL to Chávez, “Spring 1950,” CCP. At CBL’s prompting, Case sent a copy of the article to Chávez.
27. Schedule and guest list for Chávez’s March visit, CBLP; Alameda Times Star (Calif.), Apr. 5, 1950.
28. CBL to Chávez, Mar. 29, 1950, CCP.
29. Ibid., Mar. 30, 1950, CCP.
30. Ibid., Apr. 1, 1950, CCP.
31. Ibid., n.d., ca. early Apr. 1950, CCP.
32. Ibid.
33. In a letter to Chávez, ca. May 1950, Margaret Case said she would tell him sometime “how I managed to get Clare on to the boards of the Stadium and Philharmonic in record-breaking time.” CCP.
34. CBL to Chávez, “Spring 1950,” CCP.
35. Ibid., May 3, 1950, CCP.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid. Rieti avoided sentimentality and Germanic profundity in his scores, preferring the French neoclassical style adopted by Stravinsky in later life.
38. CBL to Chávez, May 3, 1950, CCP.
39. Ibid. Rufino Tamayo had shared a Greenwich Village apartment in New York with Chávez between 1926 and 1928. During those years, Chávez made friends with Aaron Copland, Edgard Varèse, and other North American composers.
40. CBL to Chávez, June 12, 1959, CCP.
41. Chávez to CBL, May 13, 1950, CCP.
42. CBL to Chávez, ca. Apr. 18, 1950, CCP.
43. CBL, “Saint Francis in Manhattan: A Synopsis for a Ballet,” Apr. 18, 1950, CBLP.
44. Ibid.
45. CBL to Case, ca. early May, 1950, CBLP; Case to Chávez, ca. early May 1950, CCP.
46. CBL to Chávez, May 8, 1950, CCP.
47. Ibid.
48. Chávez to CBL, May 13, 1950, CCP.
49. Ibid., June 8, 1950, CCP. CBL to Chávez, June 12, 1950, CCP.
50. Chávez to CBL, June 8, 1950, CCP.
51. CBL to Chávez, July 7, 1950, CCP.
28. A RED VELVET TUFTED SOFA
1. Swanberg, Luce, 293.
2. Mary Bancroft quoted in Swanberg, Luce, 292.
3. CBL to HRL, Aug. 25, 1950, CBLP.
4. CBL’s article appeared in Flair in Sept. 1950. This lavishly illustrated magazine was so expensive to produce that it ceased publication after only thirteen issues. Original copies have become collectors’ items. A bound selection entitled The Best of Flair, edited by Fleur Cowles with a foreword by Dominick Dunne, was published in the United Kingdom in 1999. For CBL’s essay, see 192–93.
5. Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin Remembers (New York, 1974) 163–67. The section describing his work with CBL is entitled “Paradise Lost.”
29. PILATE’S WIFE
1. CBL to Father Fox of Gethsemani, Jan. 4, 1951.
2. Ibid.
3. CBL to Sister Madeleva, Jan. 3, 1951.
4. Lanier, Hymns of the Marshes.
5. CBL to Thomas Merton, Aug. 12, 1949; James Dodge interview, Mar. 18, 1989. A Trappist monk, James (later Father Linus), was the brother of Arthur Dodge, the young officer who had escorted CBL to her plane in Italy in 1945. He and Brother Emmanuel reinterred the two Anns in the spring of 1950.
6. CBL to HRL, Apr. 11, 1965, SJMP.
7. Carlos Chávez to CBL, Feb. 28, 1951, CCP.
8. Daily Oklahoman, Feb. 25, 1951.
9. After Vandenberg’s interment, the officiating clergyman gave CBL a letter from the Senator that he had not had time to mail before dying. “They tell me, Clare, I am on my deathbed, but even if I am, if you decide to run for the Senate, I’ll do something I never wanted to do again—I’ll get up and campaign for you. We can win the next election with Eisenhower.” Quoted in Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 223.
10. CBL to Wilfrid J. Thibodeau, Apr. 17, 1951, SJMP.
11. Edwin Schallert, “Bible Movie to Fulfill Clare Luce Ambition,” article clipping, ca. May 1951; CBL/RKO Pictures Agreement, Mar. 23, 1951; Kay Brown to CBL, Apr. 2, 1951, CBLP.
12. Undated RKO memo with Pilate’s Wife material, CBLP.
13. CBL to Curt P. Freshel, June 22, 1951, CBLP.
14. Inez Wallace, “Clare Boothe Luce Chooses Screen to Explain Christianity,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sept. 30, 1951.
15. CBL to Chávez, Aug. 24, 1951, CCP.
16. Quoted in Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18, 1951.
17. Script in CBLP.
18. Dorothy Farmer interview, July 29, 1982; CBL interview, Oct. 15, 1982.
19. Bridgeport Post, Oct. 26, 1951.
20. I
bid., Oct. 19, 1951.
21. Box Office, Oct. 27, 1951.
22. Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sunday, Sept. 30, 1951.
23. CBL to Mary Benson, Jan. 4, 1951, CBLP.
24. Chávez to CBL, Apr. 24, 1951, CCP.
25. Chávez’s secretary, Josefina Napoles, to Dorothy Farmer, Oct. 1, 1951, CCP.
26. CBL’s first thought at Ann’s death in 1944 had been to have the university create a campus music room, which she would stock with audio equipment and records. But as time passed, her ambition for a more substantial monument grew, and she established the Ann Clare Brokaw Memorial Fund. The chapel site was the northwest corner of Cowper and Melville Streets, adjacent to the Newman House, a recreation center for Roman Catholic students. CBL estimated the cost of construction at $65,000, with an additional $5,000 for basic fixtures, and set aside approximately $20,000 in cash and Time stock from her currrent annual income of some $165,000. She continued this level of support for the next half decade or so. She also contributed $13,500 of the fee for her 1951 screenplay, Pilate’s Wife. HRL’s contribution was more than $55,000. Bernard Baruch gave $5,000, and George Waldo, $700. Ann’s stepsister, Frances Brokaw, declined to subscribe, saying that her income from Brokaw trust funds “is just sufficient for my needs.” Frances Brokaw to CBL, Jan. 1, 1951, CBLP. By Dec. 1954, the fund totaled $123,000. Chapel file, CBLP.
27. CBL to Kathleen Norris, Apr. 12, 1950, CBLP.
28. San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 12, 1998.
29. Evelyn Waugh to CBL, Oct. 28, 1951, CBLP. CBL was about to publish an essay by Waugh in her compendium, Saints for Now.
30. Scrapbook clipping, n.d., CBLP; copies of Child of the Morning typescript in CBLP and New York Public Library Theatre Collection.
31. List in CBLP.
32. Bridgeport Post, Nov. 18, 1951.
33. Springfield News, Nov. 17, 1951.
34. The Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 19, Boston Post, Nov. 20, and Boston Herald, Nov. 20, 1951.
35. Child of the Morning was revived unsuccessfully off Broadway by the Blackfriars’ Guild in Apr. 1958, and successfully for ten days at the Phoenix Little Theater in February 1959.
36. Charles Willoughby to CBL, Dec. 23, 1951, CBLP. Mrs. Pratt, a widow, was the former Marie Antoinette Becker. Willoughby’s collaboration with John Chamberlain was a success, but MacArthur forbade direct quotes of his words, saying he wanted to save them for his memoirs. Nevertheless, MacArthur 1941–1951 (New York, 1954) was reviewed favorably, The New York Times vaunting it as “the first comprehensive and authoritative account of MacArthur’s decade of glory.” Military historians, including D. Clayton James, MacArthur’s most thorough biographer, found it a valuable, if overly worshipful, source. But Willoughby never got over his disillusionment at having to paraphrase MacArthur, blaming this lack for the loss of wide readership and sales. Willoughby reportedly used a serialization advance from The Saturday Evening Post to build a retirement house on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. John Chamberlain, unpublished profile of CBL for Time, ca. 1946, CBLP. Willoughby published two other books about the Pacific war, Reports of General MacArthur (Washington, D.C., 1966) and The Guerilla Resistance Movement in the Philippines (New York, 1971).
37. Film Bulletin, Apr. 7, 1952, reported that RKO seemed to be “coasting on its backlog.”
38. Burlington News, Apr. 13, 1952; Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 227; Chicago Sun Times, Mar. 23, 1952; Philip Dunne to SJM, May 5, 1987, SJMP. CBL’s appearance at the Oscars coincided with the death in Sidney, Australia, of her first great love, Julian Simpson.
39. CBL to Dorothy Farmer, Apr. 24, 1952.
40. CBL interview, Jan. 8, 1982. Also see Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 227, and Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York, 2012), 525. Twelve days after his inauguration, Eisenhower joined his wife’s church.
41. Chávez to CBL, Sunday, May 25, 1952, CCP.
30. BACK TO THE HUSTINGS
1. New York Mirror, June 10, 1952; John Billings diary, June 27, 1952, JBP. Edgar Albert Guest (1881–1959) wrote some eleven thousand sentimental poems that were syndicated in newspapers and collected in more than twenty books. Typical lines are “Home ain’t a place that gold can buy or get up in a minute. / Afore it’s home there’s got t’ be a heap o’ living in it.”
2. Mary Bancroft to “JGR,” May 12, 1952, MBP; John Billings diary, June 4, 6, 19, and 23, 1952, JBP.
3. Swanberg, Luce, 326.
4. Perret, Old Soldiers Never Die, 575.
5. CBL interview, July 24, 1982.
6. Richard M. Nixon, Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern World (New York, 1982), 341. Nixon had no doubt that had Clare been selected, “she would have turned in a stellar performance.”
7. Vega interview, Aug. 17, 1988. Also see Swanberg, Luce, 326–27.
8. T. S. Matthews, Name and Address (New York, 1960), 271–74.
9. CBL interview, July 24, 1982. “I’d kicked in five months among these fearful people, and it had got nowhere.”
10. New York World-Telegram and Sun, July 29, 1952.
11. Hatch, Ambassador, 202.
12. The New York Times, Aug. 6, 1952.
13. CBL to John D. Lodge, Aug. 11, 1952, CBLP.
14. Des Moines Register, Aug. 19, 1952.
15. Bridgeport Post, Aug. 23, 1952, The New York Times, Aug. 26, 1952, New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 27, 1952.
16. Hartford Courant, Aug. 25, 1952.
17. Stamford Advocate, Aug. 29, 1952.
18. Bridgeport Telegram, Sept. 6, 1952.
19. Bridgeport Post, Sept. 6, 1952; The New York Times, Sept. 6, 1952; Bridgeport Telegram, Sept. 11, 1952. William Purtell had supported CBL to replace McMahon. A month after the convention, CBL wrote a friend that both Lodge and the GOP state chairman had told her she was “chiefly unacceptable” because she was a Catholic. But she continued to believe that the Governor had lured her into competing in the hope that in a deadlock he would be drafted. CBL to George Sokolsky, Oct. 8, 1952, CBLP.
20. Bridgeport Telegram, Sept. 6, 1952.
21. Beaverbrook to CBL, Sept. 20, 1952, CBLP; CBL to Beaverbrook, Oct. 8, 1952, BP. CBL’s quip “No good deed goes unpunished” was penned by her in Oct. 1952. Google cites Letitia Baldrige’s Roman Candles (Boston, 1956) as the first appearance in print of this now common saying. On p. 129 of this memoir, Baldrige wrote: “When I would entreat her to engage in resolving a specific case, she replied, ‘No good deed goes unpunished, Tish, remember that?’ ” Other sources, citing no evidence, attribute the epigram to Billy Wilder, Oscar Wilde, and Andrew W. Mellon. A similar version appears in Ego, the autobiography of James Agate. “Pavia was in great form today: [Jan. 25, 1938]: ‘Every good deed brings its own punishment.’ ” CBL remains the most frequently cited source, although Bartlett says its origin is unknown.
22. Carlos Chávez to CBL, Sept. 2, 1952, CCP.
23. Clare tried without success to recruit Ernest Hemingway, Grahame Greene, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Vincent Sheean, Walter Lippmann, Christopher Isherwood, and Edna O’Brien as contributors. Perhaps the publisher’s puny advance of $100 for four thousand to five thousand words (with a shared royalty of 15 percent on a print run of five thousand and over) had something to do with their refusal.
24. Clare Boothe Luce, ed., Saints for Now (New York, 1952).
25. New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 12, 1952; The Voice of Saint Jude, Dec. 1952.
26. George J. Marlin, The American Catholic Voter (South Bend, Ind., 2004), 231.
27. Ibid., 231–33; John Kenneth Galbraith, Life in Our Times (Boston, 1981), 297–98. Barnstorming for William Purtell against William Benton in Connecticut, Senator Joseph McCarthy made further inroads for the GOP among the state’s 37 percent of Catholic voters.
28. Transcript, Sept. 28, 1952, CBLP.
29. John Billings diary, Sept. 24, 1952, JBP.
30. Smith, Eisenhower, 534.
31. Ibid., 538–42.; John Bil
lings diary, Sept. 23, 1952, JBP.
32. Galbraith, Life, 298.
33. Dwight Eisenhower to CBL, Oct. 3, 1952, CBLP.
34. Chicago speech transcript, Oct. 24, 1952, SJMP. CBL’s rhetoric, and that of other speakers from both parties, demonstrated why the 1952 campaign would be judged one of the most virulent of the century. Although on the trail the principals kept mostly above the fray, others on their teams made unproven insinuations, such as the existence of a Communist conspiracy in the Truman administration, and the possibility that the divorced, mild-mannered, and professorial Adlai Stevenson was homosexual.
35. Longines Chronoscope, Oct. 24, 1952, National Archives Identifier 95791. The program can be seen online. Truman was furious that Ike had not been specific about what he would do in Korea. If the GOP candidate had a plan to extricate us from the battleground, he said, he should reveal it immediately and “save a lot of lives.” Smith, Eisenhower, 547.
36. CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” 15. In the waning days of the campaign, CBL would do two half-hour nationwide hookups that turned out to be so effective that Republican headquarters was flooded with compliments. “Everybody thought Ike was great and I was great,” she recalled. See also Time, Feb. 1, 1953.
37. For accounts of the 1952 campaign, see Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York, 1990), 268–87; Smith, Eisenhower, 544–49.
38. S. James to CBL, n.d. 1952, CBLP. Among a group of bettors, CBL was the only one to succeed in naming in advance six of the eight states lost by Eisenhower.
39. Marlin, American Catholic Voter, 234–37. Eisenhower also did well with ethnics (particularly German Americans), more than three million of whom switched their votes to him.
31. THE HEALING DRAUGHT
1. John Billings cable to HRL, Nov. 28, 1952, JBP.
2. CBL to HRL, Nov. 28, 1952, CBLP.
3. Steven F. White, “De Gasperi Through American Eyes: Media and Public Opinion, 1945–1953,” Review of the Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society, no. 61 (Fall–Winter 2005). Many Americans were furious over this grant by the Truman administration, pointing out that Italy had been an enemy of the Allies in World War II. HRL, nevertheless, featured De Gasperi on the cover of Time on Apr. 19, 1948, just before the Prime Minister’s historic reelection victory. The cover showed a red octopus trying to entwine itself around Italy, with the caption “Italian premier Alcide de Gasperi—can he cut the Red tentacles?”
Price of Fame Page 76
