Price of Fame

"I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die," Clare Boothe Luce told her biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris. Price of Fame, the concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath, chronicles Luce's progress from the early months of World War II, when, as an eye-catching Congresswoman and only female member of the House Military Affairs Committee, she toured both Eastern and Western Fronts, captivating generals and GIs. After a shattering personal tragedy, she converted to Roman Catholicism, and became the first American woman to be appointed ambassador to a major foreign power. "La Luce," as Italians dazzled by her luminous aura called her, was also a prolific journalist, formidable public speaker and television personality, as well as a playwright, screenwriter, pioneer scuba diver, early experimenter in psychedelic drugs, and grande dame of the GOP in the Reagan era. Tempestuously married to Henry Luce, the powerful publisher of Time...