The Life of Clare Boothe Luce

On one of the last nights that Clare Boothe Luce went out in her life, her friend Marvin Liebman took her to a fine Chinese restaurant in her beloved Washington. Mrs. Luce ordered velvet chicken, which she said reminded her of the hundreds of meals she had shared with the “Gimo,” as Time, one of her late husband’s many magazines, had so often styled its pet crusader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The “Gimo” was now long dead, and Clare Luce was eighty-four years old, weeks away from death, yet her appearance was remarkable. Her skin remained translucent as a pearl, her eyes, despite her near blindness, the cold blue of an aquamarine. She was dressed exquisitely in pastel silks. Though she could hardly walk and her legendary Great Lady brittleness and acuity—fodder for the four biographies already written about her—had been eroded by cancer and loneliness, that night she was “on,” talking constantly, telling stories of SALT and NATO, Burma and London, Joe McCarthy and Ike, the “Gimo” and his wife, the “Missimo,” with herself at the very center of each anecdote, dazzling for ever and absolutely a young man from the Federal Trade Commission whom Liebman had invited along to meet the legend before it was too late.

The stories were not new, and part of her mystique was her tireless and ruthless ability to perform them, no interruptions permitted. Her friends speculated that her incessant talking was a form of self-protection: See how smart I am. In public, she was indisputably actressy, a woman of theater, calling everyone “darling”; her voice was pure Bette Davis, husky and tough, with a few Connecticut-lady trills thrown in for effect: “tomahtoes,” “my deah gahdener.” But somewhere in the middle of dinner, she seemed to tire of talking of “darling Douglas—MacArthur, you know” and “Franklin and that dreadful Eleanor,” and her voice lost the toughness which had always marked her social persona. She retreated into the realm of the private Clare, a woman of considerable vulnerability, alone at the end of her life without a web of friends to buoy her spirit, without children, without her husband to enhance her Washington status. She was an angry woman with a brain tumor, powerless and near death, contemplating the end. “You know, I have had a terrible life,” she finally said. “I married two men I really didn’t like. My only daughter was killed in a car accident. My brother committed suicide. Has my life been a life for anyone to envy?”

Clare Boothe Luce invented herself completely and absolutely, as all Great Ladies who start with nothing but brains, ambition, and the required sublime looks inevitably do. Mrs. Luce, however, did it better and longer than her peers—if she had any—and created an image based on glamour, brains, flint, and the ability to make people believe that every word she said was true.

“You know,” she would tell friends, “once I was at the White House with Franklin—Roosevelt, you know—and he said to me, ‘Clare, if only I could think of a way to try to explain to our great country what I am doing, if only I could think of some phrase which would sum it all up!’ I said to Franklin, ‘My dear Mr. President, what about using the term “a new deal”?’ ” This anecdote had endless variations: “I was in London during the blitz with dear Winston—Churchill, you know—and the bombs started falling, and Winston and I were at the Savoy. Winston said, ‘The British people have such guts, Clare—if only I could think of a way to describe their struggle,’ and I said, ‘How about “blood, sweat, and tears”?’”

She would also tell friends that Jock Whitney, David Rockefeller, Averell Harriman, and George Bernard Shaw had wanted to marry her, and that Strom Thurmond had goosed her—all untrue. Once, when People magazine, part of her late husband’s Time-Life empire, was doing a profile of her, a researcher called Clare’s friend Shirley Clurman in a panic. “Mrs. Clurman,” the researcher said, “not one word that Mrs. Luce has told our reporter checks out!”

There was hardly need for her to make anything up. By the time she was thirty-four years old, she had been an understudy for Mary Pickford; a suffragette flying gliders for her patron, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont; a socialite married to a rich Newport dipsomaniac named George Brokaw, by whom she had one daughter; a divorcée with a ton of alimony at the beginning of the Depression; and, as Clare Boothe Brokaw, the cheeky managing editor of Vanity Fair. “I don’t think my position unusual for a woman. I’m following a perfectly natural urge to do what I like,” she disingenuously told a World-Telegram reporter in 1933, when she was thirty. She was rumored to have had affairs with Buckminster Fuller and Bernard Baruch, and had written a best-selling collection of satirical essays called Stuffed Shirts. After marrying Henry Luce, the publishing tycoon, in 1935, she wrote plays, including one Broadway classic, served as a correspondent during World War II, became a Republican congress woman, and in 1953 was the first woman to be made American ambassador to a major country. It was only at the end of her life, when she was stuck in an apartment at the Watergate and seemed hardly at peace, that some of her friends began to wonder if, for all her ambition and power, it might have occurred to Clare that she had got things slightly wrong.

When she died last October, Time,her late husband’s most influential magazine, called her “the pre-eminent Renaissance woman of the century.” There were memorial services in New York and Washington, attended by friends and associates that included Richard Nixon, Patrick Buchanan, former secretary of state William Rogers, Vernon Walters, and William Buckley, whom she had cajoled to prevail upon Cardinal O’Connor to allow her service to be held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

If, in her long and eventful life, Mrs. Luce had her share of detractors, and she did, even the most vehement of them, such as Helen Lawrenson and Dorothy Parker, always believed that their bête noire got everything she ever wanted.

‘Things happened to her that didn’t happen to other people,” a priest who was close to Clare Luce late in life said. But when she talked of her earliest years, she could never seem to recall the facts the same way twice. Her father was like a character in a dream. In her biographies, he is described variously as a fiddler, a Memphis Coca-Cola bottler, the proprietor of the Boothe Piano Company—sometimes the time frame is so distorted that he appears to have had all these professions simultaneously. There is no debate on one overwhelming fact: William Booth, a descendant of John Wilkes Booth, abandoned Clare and her brother in their early childhood. (The e was added to Booth—again sources differ—either by Clare’s grandfather, to distance his family from Lincoln’s assassin, or by Clare herself, for effect.) Clare’s mother, a woman of such beauty that her daughter was said to pale by comparison, was left to fend for herself, and the Booth family, without Mr. Booth, wound up in a boardinghouse. Anyway, that is what Clare Luce would tell interviewers. “Mother always cooked fried eggs by opening the gas jet over the radiator and keeping the window open so the landlord wouldn’t smell her cooking and throw us out,” she said. Mrs. Booth’s maternal efforts were focused completely on young Clare, perhaps because she realized that a blonde, curly-headed daughter could be peddled more successfully than a son. One probable reason why Clare as an adult rarely entertained any doubt about her self-worth was that she had had such unreserved mother love as a child. Much of Clare’s childhood frustration centered on her search for her father, and she later told friends that she once met him in a subway long after her mother had assured her he was dead. Although he had abandoned the family for a common showgirl, Clare’s mother informed her dramatically that he had left them for Mary Garden, a famous opera star of the era. “Keeping up the bella figura ran in Clare’s family,” a friend said.

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