Once upon a time, the gods sculpted ice with lightning. So, at least, it must hayed seemed. Indeed, perhaps someone said as much of Clare Boothe Luce, in the first third of the century or so, when the eminent borrowed pagan varnishes to ennoble the achievements of their time. The world was overcapitalized then: the Dynamo moved great ships, and the Fates sunk them; Progress was the world’s fate; and, Man would get us there.
Before her life was half over, Clare Boothe Luce, who died recently at the age of 84, knew that and much else was a lot of buncombe.
In the first year of what would be called “The American Century,” Will Boothe, the blacksheep violinist son of a respected Baptist minister from Westchester, wrote his parents to say that he had divorced his first wife and planned shortly to marry again. He was playing the violin in the orchestra of a New York theater. The focus of his attentions sang and danced in the theater’s chorus. Ann Clare, the daughter of German-Catholic immigrants named Snyder (she “Americanized” her name when she joined the theater), bore her first child within a year, and her second a year later. The first was a boy named David; the second, Ann Clare Boothe, was named after the twenty -one year old mother.
Clare Boothe spent her early years in theatrical boarding houses and rooming houses, in New York and elsewhere—and occasionally in better “digs” when her family’s circumstances permitted. She received only occasional formal education, but was taught to read by her parents, and did so voraciously. With no schoolmates and few available playmates, she and her brother David played alone. When Clare was eight, her father left the family to take up with another woman. Clare and David were told that their father had died.
Yet it was the era of the Hippodrome in the city of Ripley: anything was possible!
So there was hope. Imagine also, if you will, that young mother’s terror.
Ann Clare worked a series of low-paying jobs by day. She had many beaux, her daughter told biographer Stephen Shadegg (Clare Boothe Luce, 1970). The daughter volunteered to Shadegg that she liked none of them.
Through her theater connections, Ann Clare arranged for her daughter to meet the Broadway producer David Belasco, which resulted in the youngster being cast as Mary Pickford’s understudy in The Good Little Devil. Another understudy assignment followed that one, and a walk-on part in a Biograph film, Over the Hill to the Poorhouse.
All the while, Mother Boothe searched out trails over the hill in the other direction. In various ways, likely including successful investment of a small bequest from her father’s will, Ann Clare amassed enough money to send David to boarding school, and take herself and her daughter to Europe. Mother and daughter spent two months in London, and then took up residence in Paris. Clare had a tutor, learned French, and regularly visited in the city’s museums and cathedrals—all this to the credit of her mother, who was determined that her children be educated.
They had planned to stay in Europe for a year, but left earlier than planned, owing to the rumbling of the Great War’s approach. Somehow Ann Clare scraped together enough money that her daughter could attend an Episcopal preparatory school, the Cathedral School of St. Mary in Garden City, New York.
Now, again, let fellow-feeling carry you along. You are a twelve year old girl, and you are twenty pounds overweight. You have never lived away from your mother, until now. You are surrounded by girls from fancy homes. Your last home was a rooming house (but that’s your secret, no one must know!). You are the smartest girl in your class, always placing first or second, but you are mature in ways they’re not, and they in ways you’re not. And you are shy, painfully shy, and you are not used to girls your age, and besides they don’t like you: they vote you the most conceited girl in the class.
Clare spent two years at St. Mary’s, then two much happier years at the prestigious Castle School in Tarrytown, New York, near the Rockefeller estates.
Years later people would speak of Clare Boothe Luce’s intellect. In June 1919, she graduated first in her class, the youngest student ever to complete the Castle School’s requirements. She was sixteen years and two months old, and at the end of her formal schooling.
Her mother by now had moved to a small cottage in a borough of Greenwich, Connecticut. There followed two appendectomies, first Clare’s, then her mother’s (ruptured, in fact). The mother’s doctor was a prominent physician, the head of the internal medicine department at Greenwich Hospital, well-respected in his field and his community, Dr. Albert Austin. Ann and Dr. Austin fell in love, and shortly married. The family’s circumstances changed dramatically.
People began talking about Clare Boothe’s sparkle, her charm, and—yes—her ambition. This description by Stephen Shadegg suggests this winning youngster’s powers of attraction. The family is returning from Europe; she is eighteen:
[O]n that trip the passenger list included some very notable people who were destined to play important roles in Clare s future. They were Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, one of the grandes dames of New York Society; Elsa Maxwell, society’s most famous party giver; Max Reinhardt, the Berlin theatrical producer; and the socialite James Stewart Cushmans. For an ambitious girl, the voyage offered rare opportunities. Before the Olympic docked in New York, all of these people [none of whom she had met ever before) had begun to include Clare in their future plans.
Mrs. Belmont, a leading feminist, whose daughter by Cornelius Vanderbilt had married the Duke of Marlborough, took Clare under her jeweled wing. Elsa Maxwell pledged to invite her to one of her parties, so “whatever happens, then, she’ll get a rich husband.” Reinhardt, then at the peak of his career, was coming to America to cast the part of the young angelic nun in his theatrical extravaganza, The Miracle. He announced in mid-Atlantic that he had found her in Clare.
After the voyage, she was salaried as Mrs. Belmont’s secretary and appeared at feminist rallies, attended Elsa Maxwell’s parties, declined Reinhardt’s Broadway offer, and kept up with the James Cush- mans.
During one of her visits to the Cushmans in New York, she and her hosts attended Sunday services. Next to her in the pew sat a 43-year-old millionaire bachelor, George Brokaw. He was bowled over. Within days, Brokaw sought the approval of Clare’s parents and his own mother, and within a year they married, in front of 2,500 wedding guests.
Years later, biographer Wilfred Sheed wrote in his 1982 book, the bride would describe the marriage as “arranged practically behind her back, like a baseball trade.” (Wilfred Sheed, Clare Boothe Luce, 1982.) The groom was 43; the bride, 20 years, four months.
Again, some fellow-feeling: . . .You are 20 years old. You are a brilliant, sparkling young lady; your husband, twice your age and more, a playboy whose married siblings have long-since been counting his ($12 million) inheritance among their own children’s future legacies. They despise him; for you they have less regard. All are Social Register, New York Society, Newport summer folk, on and on. They do not speak to you. Yet their circle is also your circle, inescapably; their friends, inescapable. You and your husband attend the big charity balls, and sift the Social Register for guests to invite to the small dinner parties you host at your home.
Now you are 21. …You too are summering in Newport: and that grinding sound isn’t crickets, sis, it’s the knives being sharpened. You try a concert on a Sunday; nobody comes.
You don’t quit, though. You are a fighter. (You are also seven, eight, nine months pregnant. Your baby, Ann, arrives August 24, 1924.)
At season’s end, “Cholly Knickerbocker” declares you the winner of the family war: “That loveliest of matrons, Mrs. George Tuttle Brokaw, can now sit back and fold her hands, happy in the knowledge that her first season at Newport was a howling success. . . .Clare has triumphed in the really bitter social feud that has existed in the Brokaw clan ever since George decided he was weary of bachelor days and took Clare for his bride.”
Congratulations! . . . Ah, that enviable, carefree, partydress life of yours!—except that it turns out George is alcoholic, and beats you up when he’s drunk. You have three, maybe four miscarriages.
It’s getting worse; you want out. Your mother says: stay, he can’t live much longer, and you’ll be rich and still young. You want out. You bundle Ann; “To Penn Station, driver”; ticket to Reno; George still begging forgiveness as the train pulls out. . . .You are 26 years old.
“When she comes into a room she attracts everybody’s attention by the glow that emanates from her,” remarked Bernard Baruch of his friend Clare Boothe Luce. “Her extraordinary spirit shines out of her eyes.”
Between 1929, when—uninvited—she plunked herself down at the caption desk at the editorial offices of Vogue, until she resigned her post as the United States Ambassador to Italy in 1957, Clare Boothe Luce’s extraordinary spirit scored enough triumphs to soothe the ambitions of a half dozen Horatio Algers. Within a few years of convincing Conde Nast that she was not simply another Society girl “lacking stamina,” she was running the most memorable magazine of the era, Vanity Fair.
A few years later, professional disappointment: she had originated the idea for Life, and expected to serve at or near its helm. Yet when it was brought into being as part of her new husband’s Time, Inc. empire, she was excluded from its councils.
One ambition thwarted, she resumed another, and wrote a play called The Women. A Broadway smash at the time, it has been playing somewhere in the world every day of the half century since it opened.
She traveled the war-ravaged globe in 1941 and 1942, writing numerous stirring on-the-scene reports for Life, by then America’s most popular magazine. When her report on North Africa was impounded by British customs officials, it was so impressive—and alarming—that the document shortly made its way to Churchill himself. Two months later, the British commander in North Africa, of whom she had been highly critical, was replaced by General Montgomery.
She was elected to Congress from Connecticut’s Fourth District in 1942, and shortly became a national political figure. She was keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention in 1944, and was reelected to Congress in 1944 against stiff opposition from inside and outside the district.
After a series of personal disappointments and misfortunes, she retired from public life for several years after World War II. She lost the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut in 1952.
A staunch Eisenhower supporter, she was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Italy, the first woman ambassador in American history. She served brilliantly in the post. When she accepted the position, the State Department listed thirteen issues requiring agreements, some of them excruciatingly thorny. By the end of her tenure, every goal had been achieved.
Her public demeanor combined femininity and a crisp, no-nonsense manner. When she meant business, there was no mistaking it. An anecdote from her 1942 campaign illustrates her public and private sides.
A Connecticut politician, Albert Morano, worked strenuously to draft her to run for Congress in 1942. Indeed, without Morano’s assistance it seems unlikely she would have been nominated, or even run for, the congressional seat.
No sooner had she won the nomination, however, than she appointed someone other than Morano her campaign chairman. Morano was stunned and hurt. Yet by appointing an Irish-American, William H. Brennan, to head her campaign, she cut into her opponent’s constituency and garnered herself hundreds, perhaps thousands, of votes. It was a canny political move, executed without sentimentality.
Morano continued to work on the campaign. Each night when she returned home from campaigning, Mrs. Luce would telephone Morano to report on the day’s activities. Invariably, he would respond to her concerns about the progress of the campaign with the phrase, “you can’t miss.”
Toward the end of the campaign, Morano was driving the candidate to one of her stops when she asked the time. Morano admitted that he didn’t own a watch.
The morning after the election, Morano received a call from the Congresswoman-elect. It began, “Good Morning, Mr. Secretary Morano!”—her way of saying that he would, as he had hoped, be appointed her administrative assistant in Washington. Later that day, she gave Morano a package: a wristwatch, on the back of which was engraved: “You can’t miss. Love, Sis.”
In later years, Mrs. Luce enjoyed piecing together intricate jigsaw puzzles, creating mosaics, oil painting, and scuba diving to explore coral reefs—all efforts requiring some form of observation. Yet in two other ways, her powers of recognition were especially praiseworthy.
Most important, she had a jeweler’s eye for greatness. She met Winston Churchill in 1933 (the trough of his career), and their friendship lasted until his death three decades later.
Four months before Pearl Harbor, she visited the Philippines to interview MacArthur for a Life article. Her conclusion, written in a letter to a Life editor: “The man is not a ‘phony.’” He “really is a bit of a swashbuckler and overwhelmingly ‘ambitious.’”
Yet it was not merely the greatness of the great that caught her eye. She searched out the Flying Tigers camp in Burma early in 1942, and found them “valiant, drunken, disorderly, rand] chivalrous.”
To know one, it helped being one: “When courage was given out,” Bernard Baruch said of her, “she was sitting on the front bench.” She talked her way onto the last flight out of Burma, an hour before the Japanese arrived. “You’ve just got seven shots,” said a general as he slipped an automatic pistol into her hand. “Save one for yourself, don’t use them all on the Japs. I’ve been out here a long time. When they get through with a woman prisoner of war. . .”
She had as well an eye for the comic, and a passion to amuse. She learned during one of her wartime assignments that her host, the American ambassador in Egypt, had a keen interest in architecture and a proclivity to lecture on the subject of the pyramids, which one could see from the balcony of the ambassador’s residence. Thus, when invited to a party at the residence, she anticipated the ambassador’s movements and positioned herself on the balcony. When the ambassador reached her, he was greeted with the question: “Mr. Ambassador, what are those strange-looking objects?”
The quickness of her mind, reflected in her marvelous wit as in other ways, helped her turn a potential diplomatic disaster to advantage while Ambassador to Italy. She had made an appointment with the Italian foreign minister to discuss the placement of atomic weapons on Italian soil. Before leaving the U.S. embassy, she asked the soldier-driver of her car, “Do you know where you’re going?” She received an affirmative reply, hopped in the back seat, and began rereading her notes for the meeting. She did not look up, until the driver pulled into the presidential residence, very much the wrong location. To call on a nation’s president, without an appointment, would be a monumental diplomatic breach, absent the most serious excuse. As the chief of protocol trotted down the palace steps, she decided she must bluff her way through.
“I have come on a matter of grave importance,” she began. “Will the President see me for a moment?”
Twenty minutes later, she was in the President’s office. What was the grave matter, he asked. She told him of her concern for the defense of Italy, which lacked artillery to guard the mountain passes from attack from the North. This dangerous situation would shortly grow worse, since the U.S. was bound by treaty to move its artillery division and “Long Tom” missiles out of Austria.
The President leapt for the bait: “Would the U.S. consider relocating the division in Italy?” Luce replied that it was possible, but an invitation from the Italian government would be required. The Italian President thanked her for her visit. The invitation was made forthwith, and the division was redeployed to Italy.
Finally, one brief anecdote to illustrate the quality and texture of Clare Boothe Luce’s intelligence. Her biographer Wilfred Sheed, when a teenager, spent a summer living at the Luce’s Ridgefield, Connecticut estate. After his happy summer there, however, he did not see Clare Boothe Luce again for many years.
When they met over lunch some two decades later, she asked him, What has surprised you about life?
It is hard to conceive a more thoughtful or evocative question to ask an adult one has not seen since his adolescence.
Clare Boothe Luce’s mother died in a train crash in 1938. By about 1940, the bloom had faded from her marriage to Henry Luce, though they would remain the Luces, devoted and ever allied. In January 1944, a horrible automobile accident cost the life of her daughter, Ann, a Stanford senior.
The day before Ann drove down to Stanford for the last time, Clare and Ann spent all day shopping and exploring in San Francisco. On their way down the steep hill from the St. Francis Hotel, they passed a Catholic Church. “Let’s go in!” Ann said. A Mass was in progress, and they stayed to hear it. By nine the next morning, Ann was dead.
Clare Boothe Luce’s retirement from public life was not immediate, nor was her conversion to Catholicism. Indeed, she took on evermore work in 1944, (and one senses perhaps an abandon in her rhetoric that was not there before). Yet following her 1944 reelection to Congress in a very close contest, the reckoning became harder to put off.
There is a misprint in Clare Boothe Luce’s apologia, “The ‘Real’ Reason,” her three-part 1947 McCall’s essay in which she explains her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Frank Sheed is described as the author of Theology and Sanctity, some editor having presumably thought that “sanctity” made more sense than the book’s true title, Theology and Sanity. Yet Luce’s essay lays bare the modern alternatives to traditional religion, and details their inadequacy before the question of whether human life has meaning and the cosmos is “sane.”
In “The ‘Real’ Reason,” a long excerpt from which is reprinted later in this issue, Clare Boothe Luce describes what were perhaps the most difficult hours of her life. Clare had been to the battlefields, interviewed tyrants, and been among the first to see the lime pits at the horrible concentration camps. Scenes from her life “converged in a vast sour tide within me.” She was overcome with something deeper than she had yet experienced:
I tasted at long last the real meaning of meaninglessness: it is to believe that one is crawling to extinction, unloved, unlovable and unloving in the same kind of world.
For months, Luce had been receiving letters from a Jesuit missionary, Father Wiatrak, whom she had met during one of her assignments for Life. She was tiring of his missives. Yet another of his letters lay on her hotel room desk, unopened. She opened the envelope, and read a message much shorter than his others. Had she read Augustine’s Confessions? Of how Augustine, filled with despair about the world’s vileness and his own, heard a child say, “Take and read. Take and read.”?
The hotel room contained a single book, the telephone book. She looked up the number of the Jesuit Mission House, where Father Wiatrak was staying.
“Father,” I said, “I am not in trouble. But my mind is in trouble.” He said, “We know. This is the call we have been praying for”.
Father Wiatrak “In the calm, practical voice of a doctor who recommends a patient suffering with unusual disorders to a specialist,” suggested she see Father Fulton Sheen, who at the time resided in Washington.
“I will have to make an appointment for you tomorrow. You don’t have to keep it if you think better of it. No one is obliged to come home. So have a good sleep—and God bless you.”
It seemed, in that strange moment, that I felt God do so. And I knelt again, “helpless, like a child before the Father.” And I thanked Him. For he had heard. So much was certain now and forever, Amen.
I met Clare Boothe Luce only once, in 1985, at one of the small friendly dinners she so enjoyed at the home of Michael and Karen Laub-Novak in Washington, D.C. She had moved to Washington a few years earlier, following two friends of long standing who had moved into the White House (her house in Arizona had adjoined Mrs. Reagan’s parents’ house). It was the close of day; the lights were lit brightly. Her stories of old friends kept us entertained.
From her unattached days in New York, the days of Vanity Fair in the 1930s, this story of Buckminster Fuller and Bernard Baruch:
Fuller was having a hard go of it. He had just come up with his idea for delivering utilities to houses. Everything would be brought up through a central core column, with the house—which would be cylindrical—built around the column. This would save developers bundles of money, so he reckoned, and it provided Clare with the opportunity to assist her pal by introducing him to Bernard Baruch and other wealthy businessmen at a small dinner party arranged for the purpose. The dinner went well, and afterward the men lit cigars as “Bucky” explained his notion. There was great enthusiasm for the new design. Then, after perhaps a half hour, Bucky uttered the fatal line: “Of course, it will make real estate prices plummet.” Out went the cigars. Thank you for a lovely evening. Good night.
From the 1940s, which began with her world-wide tour of battle zones for Life, and her elections to Congress in 1942 and 1944, a story of D-Day in the Halls of Congress.
From the 1950s, when as the first woman ambassador in American history, she enjoyed a superbly successful tenure as Ambassador to Italy, some keen advice. Politics was not a good calling for a woman, she offered; it was too harsh an environment. Diplomacy, on the other hand, was especially well-suited to women, and she heartily encouraged them to take it up. (Her daughter, Ann, had intended to do so.)
From the 1960s, when she lived in semi-retirement in Arizona with her husband, Henry Luce, a story of the Reagans. From the 1970s, another story of Buckminster Fuller, and on the 1980s and current affairs all manner of interesting comments.
And then, too, there was the question she asked all of us after dinner was over and the plates were cleared.
Someone, perhaps she herself, said the word “home.” In leaped a black dog. It grabbed and pulled.
“Do all of you have a home?” asked one of the most envied women of the century. “I have no home,” she said, “I have lived so many places, but there is none that is truly home.”
Then she yanked herself back, and the dog was gone.
Following Clare Boothe Luce’s passing, syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer wrote about an encounter with the celebrated lady. Geyer was driving Luce home from another dinner party.
It was on the way home that her “message” to me arrived in full force. Again, the moment we stepped into the car, she began focusing very deliberately upon me with pointed words, and there was no mistaking the fact that she wanted to tell me something that was important to her.
“You have done it the right way,” she said. “You concentrated on one thing, being a foreign correspondent.” She did not speak in such a way that you might think the ground was open for argument, but I did politely demur.
“Mrs. Luce, look at all you have done,” I protested. “You have been a playwright, journalist, politician, congresswoman, ambassador and also a wife and mother. . . All I have is a cat.”
She fixed those icy blue eyes on me, and even in the semi-darkness I could see her determination to make her point and not be contradicted. “You did it right,” she averred. And then her voice became noticeably sad. “I could have been a great playwright.”
. . . At least three more times on that short ride home, she repeated that small and wistful sentence: “I could have been a great playwright.”
The desire to have left behind more work singularly and indisputably her own, which I believe this anecdote truly reflects, is a mark of Clare Boothe Luce’s great nature. (To have written a single successful play would satisfy most people, but not the author of The Women.) Public affairs, to which Luce devoted the greatest part of her energies, rarely satisfies the desire for singular recognition in high-minded men and women of towering ambition.
Yet Samuel Johnson’s comment on self- judgment seems especially appropriate here. We never disappoint others so much as ourselves, he insisted, because only we know what we had planned. Self-appraisal, at least in the cases of gifted men and women of integrity, places the defendant in the courtroom of the harshest judge.
Johnson argued that those who have improved a single life, or deduced a single moral proposition, deserve at their departure our applause. It is a humane standard, and by its measure. Clare Boothe Luce is owed a thunderous ovation.
She was “the first” in many fields, but even more, she was among the best. One of nature’s aristocrats, decade after decade she used her great talents to public advantage.
It is not surprising, given her great spirit and the challenges that faced and still face her country, that so much of her life was spent on public concerns. America got Clare Boothe Luce instead of one more George Kaufman, Robert Sherwood, or Neil Simon. Is there any doubt whom it needed more?
Following the Reagan landslide of 1980, Luce moved to Washington. She resumed her work on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. She kept active socially, attending many public and private functions. And best of all, she developed a wide circle of young acquaintances, many with political interests, who were the last beneficiaries of her splendid mind and unrivaled experience.
Clare Boothe Luce received the Sylvanus Thayer Award, the U.S. Military Academy’s highest honor (never before given a woman) in 1979. The parade- ground honors, involving all the Academy’s cadets, however, had to be postponed due to inclement weather. In 1986, when the outdoor ceremonies in her honor were at last rescheduled, a contingent of a dozen old-time Greenwich politicos drove to West Point. They did not expect to visit with the honoree. They just wanted to see their friend, to come and admire one more time.
When Clare Boothe Luce spotted the group, one of them told me, she seemed filled with joy. She insisted that her old pals join her at a reception in her honor at the Superintendent’s Residence. It was a wonderfully happy day!
On the way to the party, Clare Boothe Luce pointed to a building in the distance, a mess hall. Once upon a time there, an aged general she had interviewed in the Philippines, a bit of a swashbuckler, in tones hardly above a whisper, bequeathed the code they lived by:
“Duty… Honor…Country.”