Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  66. CBL to JFK, Feb. 5, 1963, CBLP.

  67. Bundy to CBL, Feb. 12, 1963, CBLP; The New York Times, Feb. 15, 1963.

  68. JFK to CBL, Feb. 19, 1963, CBLP. Emphasis in original.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Ted Widmer, ed., Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy (New York, 2012), 80–81. Widmer labels this conversation as “date unknown,” but it clearly took place in the late winter of 1963, because JFK declined HRL’s invitation to the Time party on Mar. 12, 1963.

  71. JFK to HRL, Mar. 12, 1963, JFKP.

  72. Curtis Prendergast with Geoffrey Colvin, The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Changing Enterprise, vol. 3, 1960–1980 (New York, 1986), 115.

  73. Coverage in CBL scrapbook, CBLP; Swanberg, Luce, 432–33. By May 1963, there had been a total of two thousand Time cover subjects.

  74. CBL, “The Inner Space Proposition,” July 4, 1963, copy in JFKP. See Arizona Republic, July 5, 1963. On Aug. 18, 1963, CBL wrote to Senator Barry Goldwater, asking him to vocally support JFK’s “worthy” oceanographic research program, in order to start a Republican congressional movement in its favor, which would coax the administration to relinquish Project Apollo in favor of a “Project Neptune,” her own suggested name for the enterprise. CBLP. The name appealed to JFK but was not officially adopted.

  75. JFK to CBL, Aug. 23, 1963, JFKP.

  76. CBL quoted in Chicago Tribune, Nov. 27, 1963; Morris, Rage for Fame, 445; CBL articles for the North American Newspaper Alliance, Sept. 29 and 30, Oct. 1 and 2, 1963; New York Sunday Herald, Sept. 8, 1963. CBL made a further calculation that by the twenty-second century, JPK’s progeny would total 20,267,777.

  77. Typescript, Nov. 24, 1963, CBLP. CBL’s essay does not appear to have been published.

  Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with the assassination of President Kennedy, and two days later was shot dead by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. Back in Phoenix on the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 27, CBL received a telephone call from Justin McCarthy, public relations coordinator for the anti-Castro DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil), whose young members had run the “Flying Tigers” Cuba surveillance operation before the CIA discontinued it. It had been he, a devout Catholic, and Bill Pawley who originally involved CBL in supporting a motorboat run by three particularly idealistic youths. McCarthy, calling from Washington, was highly excited and said he was in a state of “despair.” According to notes that CBL took at the time, he gave her astonishing news. “ ‘My boys—the 3 young men who are the moving spirits of the DRE—know all about Mr. Oswald.’ He said that Oswald returned from Moscow and tried to infiltrate (in New Orleans? or Miami?) the DRE. They were right away suspicious of him. They said he was not a fanatic at all. He was highly intelligent and full of zeal. What they were suspicious of was that he spoke no Spanish. They could not understand why he would then want to join the DRE. They … did not take him … but they were so suspicious that they followed his movements.” The next thing they discovered was that Oswald, inexplicably, had started a chapter in New Orleans of the pro-Castro “Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” a national group providing grassroots support for the Cuban Revolution. Apparently he had boasted to chapter recruits that he had gone to Russia with the hope of becoming a Soviet citizen, and “after having spent a week with Mikoyan’s group in the south,” he had been told that he “could do more for Russia by going back to the United States.” He claimed that for a year he had trained in techniques of subversion and assassination. McCarthy said that he believed this story, since the authorities had subsequently allowed Oswald to leave with a Russian wife. The most dramatic information that the DRE boys had gathered during their counter-infiltration of his chapter consisted of tape recordings of an ideological debate in which Oswald had participated, and photographs of him passing out pro-Castro handbills on the streets of New Orleans. “They have the tapes and the handbills,” CBL noted. “After Oswald’s move to Texas, members of the Dallas DRE had warned the FBI about him. When the President was assassinated, [the DRE] began to track Oswald’s movements down, and [found] that he was in communication with Rubenstein [the birth name of Jack Ruby] and that undoubtedly he was silenced by Rubenstein. He was seen by the DRE boys in Rubenstein’s night club two nights before the assassination. McCarthy said that the GOP approached the DRE boys, asking them for their tapes and that then the FBI called on them last night to tell them that if they talked they would all be jailed, and that they musn’t tell what they know. He said that the FBI demanded the tapes, demanded the photostatic copies of the handbills, (which they had saved) and said that if they (the DRE) contacted anyone they would be put in jail. The DRE boys said that there was ‘a piece of paper’—a letter or document which showed that Oswald and Rubenstein had been in touch and that the police of Dallas has been told to pass this over to the FBI and to shut up about it!” CBL, “Memorandum of a telephone conversation with Justin McCarthy and Clare Boothe Luce—[Tuesday,] November 26, 1963,” CBLP.

  45. TOGETHER AT THE END

  1. The Washington Post, Feb. 5, 1964.

  2. New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 23, 1964.

  3. Ibid., Apr. 12, 1964.

  4. CBL to her lawyer Sol Rosenblatt, Apr. 13, 1964, CBLP.

  5. CBL in The New York Times, Aug. 18, 1979, and to SJM on numerous occasions.

  6. CBL to Sol Rosenblatt, Apr. 13, 1964, CBLP; CBL, “Psychology of Artists,” draft manuscript for McCall’s, 1966, copy in SJMP.

  7. CBL to Simon Michael Bessie, Feb. 28, 1964, CBLP.

  8. Had John Billings not retired, he would probably have succeeded HRL.

  9. Swanberg, Luce, 444.

  10. William J. Miller, “The Unforgettable Henry Luce,” Reader’s Digest, Nov. 1972.

  11. CBL to Simon Michael Bessie, ca. Oct. 1963, CBLP.

  12. Eileen Lindgren, CBL’s Phoenix secretary, to Carlos Chávez, Mar. 30, 1964, CCP.

  13. CBL attended the world premiere in Los Angeles on Oct. 11, 1965.

  14. The article was published in the Aug. 7, 1964, issue, marking the second anniversary of Monroe’s death.

  15. Transcript, June 14, 1964, SJMP; Swanberg, Luce, 450; Willis, “The Persuasion of CBL,” 178.

  16. Walter Lippmann to CBL, June 26, 1964, CBLP.

  17. CBL, “Tears for the Grand Old Party,” National Review, June 30, 1964.

  18. Barry Goldwater to CBL, July 5, 1964, CBLP.

  19. Jeanne Campbell interview, Apr. 18, 1988. Lord Beaverbrook died at age eighty-five, expecting Jeanne’s mother to pass on her inheritance to her daughter, but this did not happen. In the days after meeting Jeanne, HRL phoned her frequently, but thought better of trying to see her.

  20. See http://​www.​millercenter.​org/​president/​nixon.

  21. In Chicago on Dec. 10, 1964, CBL said that although she was personally opposed to the admission of Red China to the UN, she would accept it as inevitable, providing Taiwan’s security was never compromised. Later, appearing with HRL on a Californian television panel on China, she insisted, “We must soon find ways of living at peace with half the human race.” HRL made his standard praise of Taiwan, but was then challenged aggressively by another panelist, the British sinologist Felix Greene, for Time Inc.’s distortion of the truth about China. CBL defended her husband, but the audience loudly applauded Greene. Willis, “The Persuasion of CBL,” 15; Swanberg, Luce, 453.

  22. Henry Luce III interview, Aug. 9, 1984.

  23. Irene Selznick to SJM, Feb. 4, 1988, SJMP. Shirley Clurman also remarked that CBL had cosmetic surgery—performed by Dr. Thomas Rees.

  24. CBL to Dorothy Farmer, Aug. 8, 1965, CBLP.

  25. CBL to Louisa Jenkins, Aug. 24, 1965, CBLP; Phyllis Battelle in unidentified newspaper, dateline Honolulu, Aug. 18, 1965, SJMP.

  26. Gerald Heard to CBL, ca. spring 1965, CBLP; Luce real estate memo, ca. Aug. 1965, CBLP. Heard appears to have seen the property before the Luces, writing to tell them he felt sure they would �
��replace these haphazard housings with a structure that will fulfill Sir Henry Wotton’s three basic requirements of Architecture: ‘Commodity, Firmness and Delight.’ ”

  27. Honolulu Advertiser, July 29, 1965.

  28. John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York, 1988), 235–55; Marvin Liebman, Coming Out Conservative: An Autobiography (San Francisco, 1992), 200–02.

  29. William F. Buckley, Jr., interview, Sept. 8, 1983; CBL in National Review, Nov. 5, 1963.

  30. CBL to William F. Buckley, Jr., Sept. 17, 1969, CBLP.

  31. William F. Buckley, Jr., interview, Sept. 8, 1983; Liebman, Coming Out Conservative, 200–02.

  32. CBL at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, SJM notes, Mar. 2, 1983, SJMP. Around this time, CBL gave Reagan one of her paintings of a big cat, writing on the back, “The Democrats had better not awaken this sleeping tiger.” Gold Coast Skyliner (Honolulu), June 1983.

  33. Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (Boston, 1937); National Review, Nov. 30, 1965.

  34. See Stephen Siff, “Henry Luce’s Strange Trip: Coverage of LSD in Time and Life, 1954–68,” Journalism History 34, no. 3 (Fall 2008).

  35. CBL to Dr. Cohen, Dec. 2, 1965, SJMP.

  36. Dr. Cohen to CBL, Dec. 12, 1965, SJMP. Todd Gitlin, in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987, 1993), 202, expresses the escapist point of view of the drug-taking, baby boom counterculture of 1965. “On these luminous occasions, the tension of a political life dissolved; you could take refuge from the Vietnam war, from your own hope, terror, anguish.… Drugs planted utopia in your own mind.… Did anybody ever do this before? The straights talk about martinis, but they’re so uptight, they don’t know how to wonder, they don’t know what they’re missing.” In Mar. 1966, CBL’s article “The Answer to Youthful Drug Addiction” was published in McCall’s. She warned against legal barbiturates and amphetamines as well as illegal hallucinogens, neglecting to say how often she had taken them herself.

  37. CBL to Walton Wickett, Jan. 21, 1976, SJMP.

  38. Shadegg, “It Was Never Nothing,” 322; Shadegg to SJM, Aug. 30, 1989, SJMP. If the proceeds of the book exceeded $25,000, Shadegg was required to begin reimbursing CBL for the research expense advance. Copy of contract, SJMP.

  39. CBL, “Interview with President Johnson,” June 2, 1966, CBLP. Horace Busby, an aide to LBJ, claimed that LBJ had an affair with CBL when they were in the House together. Michael Beschloss to SJM, July 29, 1997, SJMP.

  40. Brinkley, The Publisher, 450.

  41. Swanberg, Luce, 478. CBL gave her 168 handmade Christmas ornaments to the Henri Bendel store in New York, to be sold at $10 each for charity.

  42. Boothe, The Women, 57–58; CBL to HRL, Oct. 3, 1965, CBLP.

  43. William F. Buckley, Jr., in World Journal Tribune, Mar. 12, 1967. Firing Line began broadcasting on Apr. 30, 1966, and CBL made the first of many appearances on the show on July 6, 1966.

  44. CBL to John Courtney Murray, ca. July 1962, CBLP; CBL interview, May 3, 1982; CBL to Dorothy Farmer, May 20, 1981, CBLP. Sheen was as enamored as ever of CBL, and after returning home wrote, “Years collapsed, months telescoped and time lost its horizon on the occasion of my visit. The same brilliance! The same charm! The same Clare! Dear Lord in heaven: I see many people but I come back to putting you at the head of the list.” Fulton J. Sheen to CBL, Jan. n.d., 1966, CBLP.

  45. The box was designed by William Comyns, London, 1897.

  46. Kobler, Luce, 283.

  47. Swanberg, Luce, 480; Jean Dalrymple interview, Feb. 6, 1988.

  48. Frank Sheed to CBL, Mar. 12, 1967, CBLP.

  49. CBL speech reprinted in The Commonwealth, Feb. 1967, 63–65; Swanberg, Luce, 481.

  50. Kobler, Luce, 286–87.

  51. Ibid., 288–89.

  52. Ibid., 289.

  53. Ibid., 289–90; Hayes Caldwell interview, July 26, 1987.

  54. Kobler, Luce, 290.

  55. Hayes Caldwell interview, July 26, 1987; Kobler, Luce, 290–91.

  46. A DELUXE LONELINESS

  1. CBL interview, January 8, 1962. HRL to CBL, Mar. 3, 1945, CBLP.

  2. Elisabeth Moore interview, Nov. 22, 1983.

  3. CBL interview, Jan. 8, 1982.

  4. John Jessup to Dan Longwell, Mar. 15, 1967, JBP.

  5. The New York Times, Mar. 4, 1967; Reverend David Read, Memorial Address transcript in SJMP.

  6. “Story of Our Lady of Mepkin,” vol. 2, 1965–1967, 10–11, CBLP.

  7. John Jessup to Dan Longwell, Mar. 15, 1967, JBP; Mary Longwell to John Billings, Mar. 30, 1967, JBP.

  8. HRL to CBL, Dec. 8, 1938, CBLP.

  9. Henry Luce III interview, Sept. 6, 1983; CBL to Laura Z. Hobson, Apr. 1967, LZHP; CBL to Dorothy Farmer, July 20, 1967, CBLP.

  10. Frank Sheed to CBL, Mar. 12, 1967, CBLP.

  11. “Estate of Henry R. Luce,” Mar. 6, 1967, CBLP.

  12. David Alevy, CPA, to Sol Rosenblatt, Jan. 19, 1968, CBLP.

  13. Alevy to Dorothy Farmer, Aug. 7, 1967, and CBL statement of net worth, Nov. 1, 1965, CBLP; Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce, 297; “Estate of Henry R. Luce,” Mar. 6, 1967, CBL to Alevy, May 20, 1967, and Alevy to CBL, June 27, 1969, CBLP.

  14. Louisa Jenkins to CBL, Feb. 28, 1967, CBLP; Lawrenson, “The Woman”; CBL to Chávez, Mar. 30, 1967, CCP. From 1974 to 1978, Chávez lived opposite Lincoln Center in New York. Poor health and finances had compelled him to sell his house in Lomas de Chapultepec. He saw CBL for the last time in May 1978 while in Washington, D.C., to conduct his Concerto for Trombone at the Kennedy Center. It turned out to be his final performance. That August, he died during a visit to Mexico to see his daughter, Juanita. Bard College in New York State planned a summer festival of his music for 2015.

  15. CBL to Richard L. Russell, May 10, 1967, CBLP.

  16. Dorothy Farmer to Ann Charnley, July 4, 1967, ACP.

  17. Ibid.

  18. William Benton to CBL, May 17, 1967, CBLP.

  19. CBL to Dorothy Farmer, July 20, 1967, CBLP.

  20. Dorothy Farmer to Ann Charnley, Sept. 26, 1967, ACP.

  21. Ossipoff was not amused by CBL’s wisecrack. While conceding her brilliance, he said she was a difficult client. “To hear her tell it later, the layout was all her doing. She never gave anybody credit.” David W. Eyre, Clare: The Honolulu Years (Honolulu, 2007), 35, 38, 42.

  22. CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” 98–99.

  23. Dorothy Farmer to Ann Charnley, Nov. 19, 1967, ACP.

  24. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston, 1979), 9; Kissinger interview, Oct. 19, 2013; CBL interview with Martha Weinman Lear, The New York Times Magazine, Apr. 22, 1973.

  25. CBL to Louisa Jenkins, Dec. 18, 1967; CBL to Helen Wrigley, Dec. 24, 1967, CBLP.

  26. Barry Goldwater to CBL, Apr. 4, 1968, CBLP.

  27. CBL to Al Morano, Jan. 29, 1968; CBL to Richard Nixon, n.d., CBLP. In July, CBL joined an action committee called “Ambassadors for Nixon.” Nixon to CBL, thanking her for the check, July 31, 1968, CBLP.

  28. CBL, “Eisenhower Administration,” 107–08.

  29. Nixon to CBL, Aug. 21, 1968, CBLP.

  30. CBL to Gerry Miller, Aug. 27, 1968, CBLP.

  31. Dorothy Farmer to Ann Charnley, Nov. 3, 1968, ACP; CBL to Helen Lawrenson, Sept. 11, 1968, CBLP.

  32. James H. R. Cromwell to CBL, Sept. 18, 1968, CBLP. “To me, you are the most desirable woman in the world.… I truly believe I could love you more than any other girl in my life.” CBL to “Mr. Purdy,” Shadegg’s editor, Dec. 16, 1968, CBLP.

  33. CBL to Chávez, ca. Dec. 31, 1968, CCP.

  34. CBL to Sheldon Severinghaus, Jan. 16, 1969, CBLP.

  35. CBL to Norman Chandler, Jan. 27, 1969, CBLP.

  36. For a detailed description of the architectural and design work that went into Halenai’a, see Eyre, Clare, chapters 4 and 5. Eyre quotes Jane Ashley, one of CBL’s decorators: “I felt sheer frustration because the architect had given her such a beautiful home … but it was prin
cipally a messy assemblage of things.” Ibid., 51.

  37. In 1987, Halenai’a was gutted by the Japanese financier who bought it from CBL. Only the footprint of Ossipoff’s design survived.

  38. CBL on Firing Line, Jan. 7, 1972. Recalling the same incident a year later, CBL quoted Nixon as saying, “We have to make progress there, but the time hasn’t come.” The New York Times Magazine, Apr. 22, 1973.

  39. Eyre, Clare, 71.

  40. John Richardson interview, December 6, 1991.

  41. The following anecdote comes from William Herbert Kennedy to SJM, June 10, 1997, SJMP.

  42. Some of CBL’s art had been sold a year earlier, in 1968. Those works included two Pissarros, two Giorgio Morandi still lifes, a Matisse, two Redons, a De Segonzac, an Alfred Sisley, a Fantin-Latour, and a Mary Cassatt. Paintings not sold by Kennedy were consigned to the dealer Danenberg/Beilin for a 1969 total of thirty-four. Among those were works by Chagall, Corot, Dufy, Goya, Renoir, Roualt, Utrillo, and Vuillard, as well as the Fragonard that Richardson admired, and Fiorentino’s Madonna of the Roses, CBL’s 51st birthday gift from Harry. Revenue from the three sales amounted to $1,342,000 before commissions, netting about triple the Luces’ original investment. Art sale memos, Feb. 23, 1968, and June 10, 1969, CBLP. CBL sold other items later, including HRL’s chinoiserie to his son Hank for $250,000. Artworks she still owned at her death included a number of portraits of herself: two caricatures by Covarrubias, a 1930s watercolor by Cecil Beaton, a marble bust by Noguchi, the aborted 1954 Boris Chaliapin Time cover, and a full-length oil rendering of her as Ambassador by René Bouché. There were also a Chaliapin portrait of Ann Brokaw and works by Frida Kahlo, Chagall, and Magritte.

  43. Eyre, Clare, 71.

  44. “Suzy Says,” Daily News, Mar. 24, 1971; master list of Halenai’a guests, 1967–1981, CBPL.

  45. Dorothy Farmer to Ann Charnley, Nov. 3, 1968, ACP; CBL to William P. Rogers, Aug. 19, 1969, CBLP; Washington Star, Sept. 17, 1969.

  46. In 1969, CBL’s furs and jewelry were assessed at $914,926, and her insurance premium was $21,092. Notes on CBL finances, CBLP.

  47. Eyre, Clare, 25–34. Eyre’s copiously illustrated book features fine reproductions of CBL’s paintings, as well as the other art and furnishings in Halenai’a.