17. The New York Times, June 17, 18, 1957; CBL memo of conversation with Sherman Adams, June 18, 1957, CBLP.
18. Ibid.
19. CBL’s disillusionment with the Eisenhower administration became public on Sept. 8, when the Stamford Sunday Herald published a report that she was “seriously considering” running in 1958 as an independent for the Connecticut seat of Senator William Purtell (R). The paper said that she particularly disapproved of the way Ike’s “palace guard” was influencing foreign policy and slowing the pace of Southern integration.
20. CBL to André Girard, June 22, 1957, CBLP.
21. Richard Park Breck to SJM, Mar. 14, 1988, SJMP.
22. “Notes from Park Breck,” ca. Feb. 10, 1988, SJMP.
23. CBL, “God’s Little Underwater Acre,” part 1, Sports Illustrated, Sept. 9, 1957.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. “Notes from Park Breck,” ca. Feb. 10, 1988, SJMP.
28. CBL, “God’s Little Underwater Acre,” part 1.
29. Ibid.
30. When CBL admitted to taking Miltown, a drug whose popularity would reach epidemic proportions in the early 1960s, Jeanne Breck told her that she and Park used them to cut down on smoking. “Notes from Jeanne Breck,” ca. Feb. 10, 1988, SJMP.
31. CBL, “God’s Little Underwater Acre,” part 1.
32. Ibid.; CBL, “God’s Little Underwater Acre,” part 2, Sports Illustrated, Sept. 16, 1957.
33. Ibid.
34. “Notes from Park Breck,” ca. Feb. 10, 1988, SJMP.
35. Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, July 17, 1957; unidentified Italian newspaper clippings, SJMP.
36. CBL to Luigi Barzini, July 28, 1957, CBLP; CBL to Gaetano Martino, July 28, 1957, CBLP.
37. CBL to Ernest Hocking, July 25, 1957, CBLP; Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, “The First Century” (London, 1908), section 29.
38. CBL to Mortimer J. Adler, July 26, 1957, CBLP.
39. Somerset Maugham to CBL, Aug. 15, 1957, CBLP.
40. CBL to Luigi Barzini, July 28, 1957, CBLP.
41. Simon Michael Bessie interview, Nov. 21, 1983; Mina Shaughnessy to CBL, Sept. 18, 1957, CBLP.
42. CBL to Luigi Barzini, July 28, 1957, CBLP; CBL to Clarita de Forceville, July 27, 1957, CBLP.
43. New York Journal-American, Aug. 30, 1957.
44. Walter Guzzardi to CBL, Apr. 29, 1957, CBLP; Count Dino Grandi to CBL, Aug. 8, 1957, CBLP.
45. CBL to Nellie Lante, ca. early Sept. 1957, CBLP; CBL to HRL, Sept. 12, 1957, CBLP.
46. Morris, Rage for Fame, 103–05; Heinz Dielke, “She Is an ‘Old’ Berliner,” Berliner Zeitung, Sept. 20, 1957, translation in CBLP.
47. CBL Berlin speech, Sept. 19, 1957, copy in SJMP. Secretary Dulles’s sister Eleanor was the inspiration behind the building of Congress Hall, now known as Haus der Kulturen der Velt (“House of the Cultures of the World”). See http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/congress/.
48. New York Post, Oct. 9, 1957; CBL in McCall’s, July 1961.
49. CBL interview, Apr. 3, 1982.
50. CBL to Henry Graff, Aug. 10, 1967, SJMP.
51. CBL, “Little Rock and the Muscovite Moon,” speech transcript, Oct. 17, 1957, SJMP.
52. Irving R. Kaufmann to CBL, and to Spellman, Oct. 18, 1957, CBLP.
41. NO ONE STARED
1. Hobson, Laura Z, 180.
2. CBL to HRL, Oct. 28, 1957, CBLP.
3. Book contract for diving book, Oct. 14, 1957, copy in CBLP. The book, to have an introduction by Park Breck, was not written.
4. Sister Madeleva to CBL, Oct. 22, 1957, CBLP.
5. Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 276. “Arthur” or “Art” Little’s real name was Artemis.
6. CBL to Peter Grimm, Nov. 23, 1957, CBLP.
7. The Soviets launched a second Sputnik on Nov. 3, 1957, this time with a dog inside. Twelve days later, Khrushchev tauntingly challenged the United States to a “rocket-range shooting match.” On Dec. 6, the United States was further humiliated when its first satellite rocket rose only four feet before toppling and exploding at Cape Canaveral, Florida. On Dec. 17, however, the United States successfully launched an Atlas ICBM.
8. George H. Dunne, King’s Pawn: The Memoirs of George H. Dunne (Los Angeles, 1990), 189.
9. Ibid. CBL’s secretary typed a memo of her conversation with Nixon, which apparently had been taped. He wanted to bolster his prestige by going to the Paris mid-December NATO meeting of heads of state in the ailing Eisenhower’s stead. He asked CBL four times to press Dulles in favor of this plan. She was as evasive as he was persistent. In the end Ike made the trip, and it was a great personal success. CBL, memorandum of conversation, Nov. 26, 1957, and follow-up memo, Nov. 27, 1957, CBLP.
10. “Notes from Park Breck,” ca. Feb. 10, 1988, SJMP; CBL to Lillian Gish, Nov. 20, 1957, CBLP.
11. CBL, outline of an autobiography (fragment, ca. 1957), CBLP.
12. CBL to [illegible], Jan. 17, 1958, CBLP.
13. CBL to Nelson A. Rockefeller, Jan. 9, 1958, NRP.
14. Dunne, King’s Pawn, 192–93. Probably unbeknown to both CBL and Dunne, Frank Brophy’s wife, Anna, was Jewish. See Brophy obituary in Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, Sept. 10, 2004.
15. Hobson, Laura Z, 180–82.
16. Elson, The World of Time Inc., 428. Elson’s and Hobson’s accounts of HRL’s medical crisis of Feb. 1–5, 1958, are somewhat confused as to chronology. This account is based on the records of the attending physician, Dr. Hayes Caldwell, as cited in an interview with the author on June 26, 1987, SJMP.
17. Hobson, Laura Z, 183.
18. Ibid., 183.
19. Hayes Caldwell interview, June 26, 1987.
20. Ibid.
21. Hobson, Laura Z, 183–84.
22. Ibid., 184.
23. Tucson Daily Citizen, Feb. 14, 1958.
24. Arizona Republic, Feb. 23 and Mar. 21, 1958.
25. Ibid., Mar. 21, 1958.
26. CBL to Ernest Hocking, Jan. 17, 1957, SJMP. On Apr. 13, CBL was a guest of honor at a Screen Producers Guild dinner for Spyros Skouras in Hollywood. Nunnally Johnson was no more impressed with her than he had been at the 1952 Academy Awards. “Somebody once told Clare that she looked like a pale goddess and clearly she has never got over this.… She is the phoniest snob I have ever come up against.” Unidentified scrapbook clipping, ca. Apr. 14, 1958, CBLP; Dorris Johnson and Ellen Leventhal, The Letters of Nunnally Johnson (New York, 1981), 166. Johnson had been seated next to CBL at a dinner the night before, and said, “As nearly as I could get it, she was doing her best to be gracious among colored folks.” Ibid., 165–67. Later Skouras asked CBL to write the story line and dialogue for a 20th Century-Fox Bible epic even more ambitious than Pilate’s Wife. It was to be called The Greatest Story Ever Told. She turned down the offer. CBL to Gerald Miller, May 18, 1958, SJMP; CBL to Ned Brown, May 27, 1960, CBLP. The four-hour-twenty-minute movie, released seven years later, was a critical and box office disaster.
27. CBL to Gerald Miller, May 18, 1958, SJMP.
28. Miami Herald, June 8, 1958; New York Mirror, Aug. 8, 1958; CBL, “The Heaven Below,” Sports Illustrated, Aug. 11 and 18, 1958.
29. CBL to Somerset Maugham, July 28, 1957, CBLP.
30. William F. Buckley, Jr., interview, Sept. 8, 1983.
31. CBL told Worth, “I have been relying on others to feed me all my life.” Helen Worth interview, May 9, 1988; Helen Worth to SJM, May 11, 1988; CBL in Catholic Transcript, Sept. 18, 1958; Mae Talley interview, Apr. 15, 1988.
32. CBL to Chávez, ca. mid-Dec. 1958, CCP.
33. Joseph. A. Owens, “Renewing Self in Simple Ways, Says Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce,” Catholic Transcript, Sept. 18, 1958.
34. CBL became so enthusiastic about bridge that she persuaded Harry to employ Charles Goren as a regular columnist in Sports Illustrated. Goren quoted in Chicago Tribune Magazine, Aug. 1, 1965.
35. Owens, “Renewing Self.”
36. CBL to
Gerald Heard, Nov. 20, 1959, copy in SJMP; CBL, “The Double-Bind,” 73, CBLP.
37. CBL to Gerald Heard, Nov. 20, 1959, copy in SJMP.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.; Arizona Republic, Nov. 24, 1958.
40. “Schedule for Secretary’s Visit to Rome, October 18–19, 1958,” CBLP.
41. Maggie Savoy, “L’Ambasciatrice at Home Here,” Arizona Republic, Nov. 24, 1958.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.; Phoenix Gazette, Dec. 8, 1958.
42. SERPENT’S TONGUE
1. CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” 60ff.; Shadegg, Luce, 278–79. On Jan. 12, 1959, HRL called John Foster Dulles to tell him that CBL “would be inclined to take on Cuba.” Senior State Department officials ruled that “she is not the one for Cuba,” whereupon Dulles offered her Brazil. FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. VI, Cuba (Washington, D.C., 1991), document 223.
2. CBL to Henry Graff, Aug. 10, 1967, SJMP.
3. CBL to Guy Hannaford, Mar. 24, 1959, CBLP; Dr. Hayes Caldwell interview, June 26, 1987; CBL interview, July 24, 1982.
4. Ibid.; CBL to Guy Hannaford, Mar. 24, 1959, CBLP.
5. CBL to Stan Swinton, Feb. 28, 1959, CBLP; The New York Times, Jan. 27, 1959; Shadegg, Luce, 279.
6. The New York Times, Feb. 27, 1959.
7. Ibid. Stan Swinton of the Associated Press wrote CBL on Mar. 5, 1959, “There was hell to pay at the Times over their profile on you. I gather from someone who was there that [Arthur Ochs] Sulzberger thought that use of the old saw about trying to convert the Pope was in poor taste and that heads fell as a result.” CBLP.
8. Eric Sevareid, “Radio News Analysis,” transcript, Feb. 26, 1959, SJMP.
9. HRL to CBL, Feb. 26, 1959, CBLP.
10. Other senators on the Foreign Relations Committee were Theodore F. Green (D-RI), John Sparkman (D-AL), Russell B. Long (D-LA), Albert Gore, Sr. (D-TN), Frank Church (D-ID), Alexander Wiley (R-WI), Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-IA), Homer E. Capehart (R-IN), and Frank Carlson (R-KS).
11. Eighty-sixth Congress, First Session, 1959, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Historical Series, vol. XI (Washington, D.C., 1982), 186–87. Hereafter Executive Sessions.
12. Ibid., 201.
13. Ibid., 202–06.
14. Ibid., 241.
15. Beverly Smith, Jr., “Things They Wish They Hadn’t Said,” The Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 19, 1959; Ellis O. Briggs, Farewell to Foggy Bottom: The Recollections of a Career Diplomat (New York, 1968), 145.
16. AP report, Mar. 4, 1959.
17. The Washington Post, Mar. 6, 1959.
18. Cincinnati Post, Mar. 5, 1959. CBL called Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter and offered to withdraw her nomination, if it became an embarrassment to the administration. He declined her offer. New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 29, 1929.
19. Arizona Republic, Mar. 3, 1959; CBL to Elisabeth Cobb Rogers, Mar. 3, 1959, CBLP; CBL to Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mar. 14, 1959, NRP; Briggs, Farewell to Foggy Bottom, 125.
20. CBL to Louisa Jenkins, Mar. 19, 1959, CBLP.
21. “Nomination of Clare Boothe Luce. Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Eighty-sixth Congress, First Session, April 15, 1959” (Washington, D.C., 1959), 2. Hereafter “Nomination of CBL.”
22. Ibid., 2–8.
23. National Review, June 2, 1962.
24. “Nomination of CBL,” 8. The rest of Morse’s interrogation is from ibid., 8–17.
25. Willis, “The Persuasion of Clare Boothe Luce,” 142, points out that in 1944 Thomas E. Dewey was privy to information leaked from the White House that the Roosevelt administration had suppressed Japanese code breaks presaging an attack on Pearl Harbor. “Given [CBL’s] involvement in the Dewey campaign, he may have told Luce what he discovered.”
26. “Nomination of CBL,” 11.
27. Ibid., 11–17.
28. Jack H. Pollack, “JFK Considered a Woman Veep,” Washington Weekly, Sept. 10, 1984. Pollack reported that in early Apr. 1959, JFK said that when “someday” a woman ran for the presidency, she would need “the political sagacity of Clare Boothe Luce.”
29. “Nomination of CBL,” 17.
30. Mrs. John Hill interview, Mar. 1988.
31. “Nomination of CBL,” 18. Senator Lausche said he had been reading a book called The Ugly American and wondered how much American envoys were able to mix with ordinary people. CBL said it was not easy, given the frequency of meetings with officials, but “one tries to do as well as one can.”
32. “Nomination of CBL,” 18–26.
33. Ibid., 247.
34. Executive Sessions, 247–54; Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1957.
35. The New York Times, Apr. 16 and 17, 1959; Bridgeport Post, Apr. 21, 1959.
36. Washington Evening Star, Apr. 10, 1959; unidentified scrapbook clipping, CBLP.
37. James P. Philbin, “Charles Austin Beard: Liberal Foe of American Internationalism,” Humanitas 8, no. 2 (2000); Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York, 1948), 274, 299. It should be noted that Sherwood approvingly quoted Beard on the subject of “binding agreements,” as well as the latter’s opinion that FDR deserved to be impeached for his dealings with Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Beard’s revisionist book was savagely attacked by the academic establishment, and his reputation plummeted. In recent years, a new revisionism has substantially confirmed his charges against FDR, in particular his warnings that the postwar United States was committed to “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” See, for example, John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (New York, 1982), and Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York, 2000).
38. UPI report, Apr. 27, 1959; New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 28, 1959; The New York Times, Apr. 28, 1959.
39. Time, May 11, 1959.
40. “Got up early and dictated a speech for Wayne Morse on Clare Luce.” Tyler Abell, ed., Drew Pearson: Diaries 1949–1959 (New York, 1974), 517, 519. On the floor of the Senate, Fulbright voted in favor of CBL’s nomination.
41. Ibid., 520.
42. Shirley Clurman memo, n.d., CBLP; Stan Swinton interview, Apr. 12, 1982; CBL interview, July 24, 1982.
43. Undated memo to CBL, CBLP; Mary Lois Purdy Vega interview, Aug. 17, 1988.
44. Stan Swinton interview, Apr. 12, 1982; Shirley Clurman memo, n.d., CBLP.
45. AP release, Milwaukee Journal, Apr. 28, 1959.
46. New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 29, 1959; Time, May 11, 1959.
47. New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 29, 1959.
48. Ibid.; The New York Times, Apr. 30, 1959.
49. CBL to Gerald Heard, Nov. 20, 1959, copy in SJMP; CBL interview, July 24, 1982. Years later a perceptive friend of CBL’s remarked, “I don’t think Harry was ever totally sure of what she’d do. That’s one of the holds she had on him. She was so unpredictable.” Simon Michael Bessie interview, Nov. 21, 1983.
50. New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 29, 1959.
51. Ibid., Apr. 30, 1957.
52. Última Hora, May 4, 1959; Tribuna do Ceará, Apr. 24, 1959.
53. The New York Times, Apr. 30, 1959; William Watson, New Poems (Cambridge, Mass., 1909), 32–33.
54. Transcript in SJMP.
55. CBL to Gerald Heard, Nov. 20, 1959; CBL interview notes for Carole Hyatt and Linda Gottlieb’s When Smart People Fail: Rebuilding Yourself for Success (New York, 1987), 5, CBLP.
56. New York Journal-American, May 1, 1959.
43. AN UNSHARED LIFE
1. Quoted in Time, May 11, 1959, and Elson, The World of Time Inc., 450.
2. CBL to Jack Shea, Aug. 22, 1960, CBLP; Sharon Herald (Pa.), May 9, 1959.
3. New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 30, 1959.
4. The New York Times, Apr. 30, 1959.
5. Washington Evening Star, May 6, 1959. CBL’s successor in Brazil was John Moors Cabot.
6. Ibid.; Lawrenson, Stranger, 128; CBL to Claire Luce, July 22, 1959, CBLP; Ruth Montgomery, “Clare Finds Change of
Mind a Costly Deal,” San Francisco Examiner, May 8, 1959.
7. Edna Ferber to CBL, May 11, 1959, CBLP.
8. CBL to Allen Dulles, July 22, 1959, CBLP.
9. Notes taken of CBL’s LSD session by J. Michael Barrie, May 16, 1959, CBLP.
10. Ibid.
11. CBL interview, Feb. 10, 1987.
12. Heard may be watched in conversational action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pI5XZxpQaI.
13. Ibid. See also Gerald Heard, The Five Ages of Man (New York, 1963), 332. For a recent reassessment of Heard, see Alison Falby, Between the Pigeonholes: Gerald Heard, 1889–1971 (Newcastle, UK, 2008).
14. Sidney Cohen, “Complications Associated with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25),” Journal of the American Medical Association 181, no. 2 (July 14, 1962).
15. Gerald Heard to CBL, Dec. 15, 1959, CBLP.
16. Notes taken of CBL’s LSD session by J. Michael Barrie, Mar. 11, 1959, SJMP. During her second session at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, CBL said she never saw the architectural and geometric figures that Aldous Huxley saw on his trips, but did experience a heightened sensitivity to the smell of violets, and perceived that everything at the center of a camellia “composes.” She rambled about keeping a parakeet, but not in captivity because “I’m in a cage.” Ibid., Apr. 4, 1959, SJMP.
17. CBL to Dr. Cohen, n.d., ca. 1963, CBLP. CBL thanked LSD for the serenity she professedly felt during her Senate hearings, and for “the burst of creative vitality which took me, a month later, to Caneel Bay, to write my first book after ten noncreative years.” But the book, a detective novel, was never completed.
18. “CBL Literary Notes,” CBLP. In the early 1960s, CBL tried to recast her memoir as a roman à clef entitled “The Double-Bind.” She offered it to Simon Michael Bessie in 1963, but abandoned it after one hundred pages. The manuscript survives in CBLP, and is remarkable for its descriptions of adult suicide attempts and childhood sexual traumas. See Simon Michael Bessie to CBL, Mar. 29, 1963, CBLP; Morris, Rage for Fame, chapters 1 and 2.
19. CBL to Gerald Heard, Nov. 20, 1959, CBLP; CBL to Dorothy Farmer, June 26, 1959, CBLP.
20. Dr. Hayes Caldwell of Phoenix reported in the spring of 1959 that despite an earlier finding of residuals in HRL’s bladder, he saw “none of the usual symptoms of prostatism.” HRL, however, complained of “some loss of potentia and libido.” Caldwell suspected that his current urethral obstruction might be “on a neurogenic basis and that possibility should be eliminated before surgical interference is considered.” Caldwell, “To Whom It May Concern” memo, Apr. 1, 1959, SJMP.
Price of Fame Page 80
