24. CBL to Eisenhower, May 2, 1955, CBLP.
25. Churchill to CBL, Apr. 22, 1955, CBLP. CBL hung Moroccan Landscape by Churchill and a portrait of Lincoln by Eisenhower in the hall of the Villa Taverna. Hatch, Ambassador, 233.
26. Miss Pepper overpraised CBL’s skills when talking to the same reporter. “She has a definite Matisse quality, yet her composition is original. Most surprising for an amateur, she draws very well.” Undated newspaper clipping in CBL to Carlos Chávez, Sept. 1955, CCP.
27. Morris, Rage for Fame, 26.
28. Barzini, “Ambassador Luce.” In April 1983, Barzini recalled that Harper’s had wanted a derogatory piece on CBL. But he had seen no point in antagonizing the American Ambassador, at a time when Italy needed so much aid and support. Nan Talese interview, May 6, 1983.
29. Newsweek, Jan. 24, 1955. See also Ward Morehouse interview of CBL in the New York World Telegram, May 20, 1954.
30. CBL quoted by Cleveland Amory, Pittsburgh Press, Dec. 8, 1963.
31. Victor Sassoon to CBL, Jan. 2, 1954, CBLP; Barzini, “Ambassador Luce.”
32. Letitia Baldrige interview, Apr. 4, 1988.
33. Baldrige, Roman Candles, 200, 202, 292.
34. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 257–58.
35. Time, May 9, 1955; Kobler, Luce, 246. The final total for Gronchi’s election was 658 votes out of 883.
36. CBL memo of conversation with Count Vittorio Cini, May 25, 1955, CBLP-NA.
37. CBL secret memo to Durbrow and Miller, May 26, 1955, CBLP-NA.
38. CBL to Dorothy Farmer, June 20, 1955, CBLP.
39. Drew Pearson, “This Time She Intends to Start Early,” Mobile Register (Ala.), June 17, 1955.
40. Elbridge Durbrow interview, Dec. 12, 1983.
41. See Ilka Chase, Past Imperfect (New York, 1942),78, for further information about Maine Chance.
42. Eleanor Nangle to SJM, Dec. 22, 1981; UPI news report, Bridgeport Post, June 15, 1955.
43. Eleanor Nangle to SJM, Dec. 22, 1981, SJMP.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. XVIII (Washington, D.C., 1989), 276.
48. Fish, “After Stalin’s Death.” Before going to Geneva, Eisenhower had considerately written to assure the out-of-power Churchill that he and Dulles were continuing his quest for peace. Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York, 1963), 168.
49. CBL to HRL, July 20, 1955, CBLP.
50. Stassen to CBL, Aug. 1, 1955, CBLP.
51. Smith, Eisenhower, 670.
52. CBL to Eisenhower (fragment), Aug. 22, 1955. SJMP.
53. CBL told Art Buchwald in late Sept. 1955 that “in the last two months we’ve had 416 members of Congressional parties and sixty-nine official visitors, plus hundreds of unofficial visitors such as clubwomen, labor leaders, delegates of conferences, tourists and friends.” New York Herald Tribune, ca. Sept. 22, 1955.
54. Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug. 28, 1955.
55. Ibid. On Aug. 25, 1955, CBL went to the Venice Film Festival, where she caused a stir by declining to attend a showing of Blackboard Jungle, an MGM movie about hooliganism in an American school. When the movie was withdrawn from exhibition, she was accused of censorship. The State Department issued a denial, saying that Ambassador Luce “did not believe she should give official endorsement to Blackboard Jungle by her presence at the Festival when she believed that the film would create a seriously distorted impression of American youth and American public schools and, thus, abet the anti-U.S. propaganda of the Communists in Italy.” Department of State Bulletin, Oct. 3, 1955.
56. Baldrige, A Lady, 96. In the early 1950s, CBL was spending $20,000 a year on clothes, but in 1952, she—or HRL—cut her budget to $18,000. She gave discards to thrift shops, friends, and institutions such as the Chicago Historical Society. John Billings diary, Oct. 17, 1952, JBP. Also see McCall’s, Apr. 1961. Bill Blass remarked in Vogue in Aug. 1997 that CBL “had no sense of clothes at all.”
57. CBL to Richard Nixon, n.d., ca. Sept. 26, 1955, CBLP. In a telephone conversation on Nov. 26, 1957, Richard Nixon referred to this longhand letter and told CBL, “I’ll never forget it.” CBL transcript of their talk in CBLP.
58. CBL memo to herself, ca. mid-Oct. 1955, CBLP.
59. Letitia Baldrige to Dorothy Farmer, Oct. 11, 1955, CBLP.
60. CBL to HRL, Oct. 16, 1955, CBLP. See also HRL to CBL, Oct. 21 and 23, 1955, CBLP.
61. Baldrige, Roman Candles, 251; HRL to CBL, Oct. 23 and 27, 1955, CBLP.
62. CBL to HRL, Nov. 10, 1955, CBLP; Wharton Hubbard to Dorothy Farmer, Nov. 7, 1955, CBLP; Gretel Steinfadt to Dorothy Farmer, Nov. 8, 1955, CBLP.
63. Michael Davy, ed., The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (Boston, 1976), 746.
64. CBL memo, n.d., ca. Dec. 1955, CBLP.
65. Brownsville Herald, Jan. 12, 1956.
66. Middlesboro Daily News (Ky.), Jan. 16, 1956; New York Post, Jan. 16, 1956.
67. The New York Times, Jan 14, 1956.
68. Ibid., Jan. 21, 1956. The event was expected to raise $1 million.
69. Letitia Baldrige interview, Apr. 4, 1988. “Alden was in love with Clare.… She knew the biography would be a puff piece.”
70. National Catholic Weekly Review, Mar. 10, 1956; Marya Mannes, “The Remarkable Mrs. Luce,” The Reporter, Feb. 9, 1956; The Spectator, Oct. 26, 1956.
71. CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” 59; New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 27, 1956; CBL to Gerald Miller, Feb. 28, 1956, CBLP.
72. New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 27, 1956; CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” 59. On Jan. 22, Walter Winchell broadcast a report on WOR: “The resignation of Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce is now on the desk of Mr. Secretary of State Dulles, to be effective before the Italian spring election.”
73. CBL to Henry Graff, Aug. 10, 1967, SJMP.
74. New York Mirror, Jan. 26, 1956.
75. Guest list, CBLP.
76. The New York Times, Jan. 27, 1956.
77. In July 1955, CBL listened to a tape recording of the symphony, performed at the Festival of the Society of Contemporary Music in Baden-Baden on June 17, 1955. “I’ve heard the Symphony for Ann,” she wrote Chávez on Aug. 12, 1955. “Not as I would have liked to have heard it—with you conducting. But in a pleasant enough way … in my own salon here at the Villa, surrounded by friends.… Carlos it is very very fine. I liked it much better than I dared hope.” CCP.
78. Analysis based on the London Symphony Orchestra recording of Chávez’s Symphony No. 3, conducted by Eduardo Mata in 1981.
79. The New York Times, Jan. 27, 1956; Time, Feb. 6, 1956. Aaron Copland, writing in Tempo (Spring 1955), described the symphony as “very personal and uncompromising. Its four brief and connected movements have an almost sadistic force that compels attention. The symphony is powerful but not music that can be easily loved.” Quoted in Parker, Chávez, 76.
80. The New York Times, Feb. 3, 1956; CBL to Dorothy Farmer, Apr. 16, 1956, CBLP.
81. CBL to HRL, and Wharton Hubbard to Dorothy Farmer, Feb. 20, 1956, CBLP; CBL to Gerald Miller, Feb. 20, 1956, SJMP.
82. Eisenhower praised Gronchi as one of few foreign leaders “who came with a sense of determination and sacrifice rather than as a supplicant.” General J. H. Michaelis to CBL, Apr. 13, 1956, CBLP.
83. San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 9, 1956.
84. CBL to Gerald Miller, Feb. 28, 1956, CBLP.
85. Shirley Potash press release, Mar. 10, 1956, CBLP.
86. Edmund Stevens, Moscow correspondent of Look, published his interview with Gronchi in The Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 3, 1956.
87. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005), 108. Khrushchev’s speech had been delivered on Feb. 22, 1956, but was not released to the West until March 18.
88. Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (New York, 1968), 837.
89. Mary Nix cable to Dorothy Farmer, Apr. 5, 1956, asking
for more penicillin.
90. CBL secret memo to State Department, Apr. 12, 1956, CBLP-NA. Around this time, CBL declined an invitation to the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier on Apr. 19, citing pressure of diplomatic engagements.
91. Drew Pearson syndicated column, May 21, 1956, scrapbook clipping in CBLP.
92. CBL to Gerald Miller, May 15, 1956, CBLP.
93. CBL to Wilfrid J. Thibodeau, May 3, 1956, SJMP. On Aug. 23, 1965, the priest and CBL had a brief reunion in New York.
94. CBL to Dorothy Farmer, May 4, 1956, CBLP.
95. The New York Times, May 11, 1956; New York Daily News, May 11, 1956.
96. CBL to Gerald Miller, May 15, 1956, CBLP.
97. CBL, “A memo to Harry about Diminishments,” ca. Aug. 1960, CBLP.
98. The New York Times, May 18, 1956; CBL to Gerald Miller, May 15, 1956, CBLP. In a famous British case of Nov. 1921, a Mrs. Annie Black appeared to have died of gastroenteritis. But when a postmortem revealed arsenic in her tissues, her husband was convicted of murder.
99. CBL to Ruth and Wiley Buchanan, May 31, 1956, CBLP.
100. CBL to Joseph P. Kennedy, June 1, 1956, CBLP. The New York Times noted that Communists particularly lost ground in the South, where the government programs CBL had encouraged, particularly agrarian reform and public works, were cooling workers’ enthusiasm for extreme left politicians. June 1, 1956.
101. “Luce Vindicates Ike and State Department,” Spadea Syndicate release, May 23, 1956. In addition, Drew Pearson touted CBL for Secretary of State; Ruth Montgomery cited “three good reasons” why she should be Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; George E. Sokolsky praised her success in a “man-sized job.” New York Mirror, May 25, 1956; New York Daily News, May 26, 1956; New York Journal-American, May 28, 1956.
102. James Bell to CBL, May n.d., 1956; Raymond von Hofmannsthal to CBL, May n.d., 1956, CBLP.
103. Washington Evening Star, June 27, 1956; Dorothy Farmer to “Joan,” July 3, 1956, CBLP.
104. CBL suspected that Eisenhower might have been the innocent originator of the leak, by sharing her confidential arsenic story with his press secretary, James Hagerty, or someone else who “mentioned it in the press dining room.” CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” 60.
105. “Arsenic for the Ambassador,” Time. On successive days, The New York Times headlined CLARE BOOTHE LUCE’S ILLNESS IS TRACED TO ARSENIC DUST FROM CEILING OF VILLA and STORY OF MRS. LUCE’S POISONING IN ROME VILLA AMAZES ITALIANS.
106. “Arsenic for the Ambassador,” Time.
39. THIS FRAGILE BLONDE
1. Translation marked “New York, July” of undated Il Ore article, SJMP.
2. Mary Bancroft to W. S. Swanberg, May 1, 1971, MBP.
3. New York Daily News, July 18, 1956.
4. Washington Evening Star, July 19, 1956. Increasing the confusion of the debate that followed the Time article and was to last the rest of CBL’s life, the acting head of the Naval Medical School in Bethesda stated that it was “impossible” for his laboratory to have determined in early 1955 that “Mrs. Luce was suffering from arsenic poisoning.” The New York Times, July 22, 1956.
5. CBL to Dorothy Farmer, undated postcard from the Creole, July 1956, CBLP.
6. CBL to HRL, July 24 and 26, 1956, CBLP.
7. CBL to Stavros and Eugenie Niarchos, Aug. 8, 1956, CBLP.
8. David Sulzberger to SJM in an unrecorded conversation.
9. CBL to HRL, July 24, 1956, and HRL to CBL, July 28, 1956, CBLP. HRL was amenable, but when CBL realized that the work of owning a yacht would devolve on her, she gave up on the idea.
10. CBL to HRL, July 31, 1956, CBLP. The ship collided with a Swedish liner, and forty-six from the Andrea Doria died.
11. CBL to HRL, July 31, 1956, CBLP.
12. CBL interview, Jan. 9, 1982; CBL to Dorothy Farmer, Aug. 10, 1956, CBLP.
13. Ibid.
14. S. N. Behrman, People in a Diary: A Memoir (Boston, 1972), 289.
15. CBL to Dorothy Farmer, Aug. 10, 1956, CBLP. Her stomach was “consistently out of wack,” she wrote.
16. Somerset Maugham to CBL, Apr. 6, 1957, CBLP. Ruth Buchanan, who also saw CBL at this time, remembered that she “could barely get out of her chair she was so weak and thin.” Ruth Buchanan interview, Jan. 24, 1984.
17. David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York, 2012), 703. JFK came second to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee in a “free vote” for the number two spot on a ticket headed by Adlai E. Stevenson. Joseph Kennedy was not displeased, because he was sure Eisenhower would be reelected, and preferred his son to run for President in 1960.
18. Durbrow was soon to become Ambassador to South Vietnam. By now he had lost his early misgivings about CBL. “As an old careerist, I could ask for no better boss,” he told Alden Hatch. “One gets so used to laughing and smiling when one works for her.” Hatch interviews.
19. CBL to HRL, Sept. 16, 1956, CBLP.
20. Ibid.
21. Sept. 28, 1956, CBLP-NA.
22. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York, 2008), 150; Charles Gati in Council on Foreign Relations, “Hungary-Suez Crisis: Fifty Years On: Session 2,” transcript, Oct. 24, 2006; Timothy Foote, “But If Enough of Us Get Killed Something May Happen …” Smithsonian 17, no. 8 (Nov. 1986).
23. John Prados, Lost Crusader: the Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (New York, 2003), 61; “Little Outside Information,” http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB206/.
24. Gerald Miller to CBL, Dec. 14, 1969, CBLP. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 270; Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 153.
25. Many years later, declassified documents revealed that there was collusion among Israel, Great Britain, and France in timing the two invasions. At a secret meeting in Sèvres, France, on Oct. 22–24, 1956, representatives of the three powers approved a scheme of Prime Minister Anthony Eden that Israel should strike first, in order to give the others an excuse to intervene and “prevent” a war between nations. This would enable retaking the Suez Canal. The Sèvres Protocol was later destroyed on Eden’s orders. Bodleian Timeline, http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/projects/suez/suez/html.
26. CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” 84–85; Time, Dec. 3, 1956. The evacuation beginning on Oct. 30 was successfully completed by Nov. 5. The New York Times, Nov. 6, 1956.
27. Smith, Eisenhower, 694–95.
28. Ibid., 698–99; Bailey, Diplomatic History, 843.
29. CBL to Eisenhower, Nov. 4, 1956, CBLP-NA.
30. Attila J. Ürményházi, The Hungarian Revolution-Uprising, Budapest 1956 (Hobart, Tasmania, Feb. 2006), 15, http://www.americanhungarianfederation.org/docs/Urmenyhazi_HungarianRevolution_1956.pdf.
31. Gati, in Council on Foreign Relations, “Hungary-Suez Crisis.”
32. CBL to HRL, dated Nov. 5, 1956, but actually written at 2:00 A.M. on Nov. 6.
33. Bulganin to Eisenhower, Nov. 5, 1956, FRUS, July 26–Dec. 31, 1956, vol. XVI, Suez Crisis (Washington, D.C., 1990), document 505. The cable was received in Washington at 3:03 P.M.
34. Smith, Eisenhower, 702; The New York Times, Nov. 6, 1956.
35. Smith, Eisenhower, 703. France and Israel followed suit. In the aftermath of the Suez debacle, Anthony Eden resigned, his health and spirit broken. Harold Macmillan succeeded him on Jan. 10, 1957.
36. The Washington Post, Nov. 20, 1956.
37. New York Journal-American, Apr. 7, 1957.
38. CBL to Gerald Miller, Nov. 20, 1956, SJMP.
39. Ibid.
40. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 271; CBL speech file, Dec. 20, 1956, CBLP-NA; Il Tempo, Dec. 21, 1956.
41. Il Tempo, Dec. 21, 1956, translation in CBLP.
42. UPI dispatch, Tulsa Tribune, Dec. 27, 1956.
43. UPI dispatch, Indianapolis Star, Dec. 28, 1956.
44. Between 1952 and 1956, the MDAP had helped Italy increase it
s number of infantry and armored divisions from 9 to 13, its combat support units from 13 to 136, and its air force squadrons from 7 nonoperational to 18 combat-ready. Charles E. Rogers memo to CBL, n.d., 1956, CBLP.
45. Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, 1939–1960 (New York, 1997), Nov. 14, 1955; Time, Dec. 3, 1956. For two critical articles on CBL’s years in Rome, see Alessandro Brogi, “Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce and the Evolution of Psychological Warfare in Italy,” Cold War History 12, no. 2 (May 2012), and Mario del Pero, “American Pressures and Their Containment in Italy During the Ambassadorship of Clare Boothe Luce, 1953–1956,” Diplomatic History 28, no. 3 (June 2004).
40. LIQUID PARADISE
1. The New York Times, Dec. 21, 1956–Jan. 1, 1957.
2. CBL to Martin Luther King, Jr., Jan. 2, 1957, CBLP.
3. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York, 1988), 203. Morrow (1906–1994) was administrative officer for special projects.
4. CBL to Gerald Miller, Dec. 31, 1956, CBLP.
5. Ibid., and Jan. 3, 1957, SJMP. Miller had written to Allen Dulles on Dec. 13, 1956, suggesting CBL as Chief of Mission in Paris. Copy in SJMP.
6. CBL to Shadegg, Feb. 10, 1969, CBLP; CBL to Kay Brown, Mar. 29, 1957, CBLP (Brown was to become CBL’s new agent); The New York Times, Mar. 12, 1957; Elsa Maxwell in New York Journal-American, Apr. 6, 1957.
7. New York Journal-American, Apr. 7, 1957.
8. CBL to Guy Hannaford, Mar. 18, 1957, CBLP.
9. Ibid.
10. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 274; SJM notes on visit to Phoenix site, June 26, 1987, SJMP.
11. The New York Times, Apr. 9, 1957.
12. Ibid., and New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 9, 1957.
13. The New York Times, Apr. 9, 1957, New York Journal-American, Apr. 10, 1957.
14. CBL to Luigi Barzini, July 28, 1957, CBLP.
15. CBL to Dorothy Farmer, May 24, 1957. “Please note what I have become! Any surprise?”
16. CBL to John Foster Dulles, June 3, 1957, CBLP.
Price of Fame Page 79
