Too Many Bras (and Other ‘Unnecessaries’)?

For all of my adult life, I admit, I have liked my “stuff” and attached great importance to it. I have spent a lot of time accumulating my possessions and my clothes and my belongings, and I have throughly enjoyed and found joy and comfort in all of my beautiful things. Now, based upon my current situation, I am re-thinking it all and wondering, in effect, what is really and truly valuable.

Perhaps, in previous phases of my life, I have concentrated on the “gathering.” It makes sense, somehow, that when you are young(er) and/or starting out in your “newly-married” life or your “first home” life or whatever, that dishes and clothes and furniture and such plays a vital role; they did in mine, for sure. I am especially sensitive, during this season of weddings of many marvelous young couples I am lucky enough to know, of the “stuff” they think they need (as indicated on their webpages and wedding registry sites, and of the similarities of their requests and the stores they choose to patronize), and I completely understand it all. Building a new family and a new life does mandate, I guess, wanting all new beginnings, and most of the young couples probably don’t want the hand-me-downs from their families, preferring (proudly) to start their own life with their own needs and desires. Again, I can remember these feelings, needs and desires, and I have cartons and furniture in storage to testify to it all.

When I came to Italy in September for my “senior year abroad,” I brought a large suitcase and a medium-sized one, both full of items I thought were absolutely vital for my every-day life. I had carefully (at least until I ran out of time) combed through my wardrobe (pretty extensive, apparently, since I always managed to fill every closet in every house or condo or apartment) and decided that I did need all of my “favorite” items — who knew how many fancy parties and dinners I might be attending and who knew how many different shoes and purses I might need? I had to be prepared for everything!

And my toiletries were important, too, of course. I was convinced that I probably couldn’t survive without my favorite shampoo or toothpaste or whatever, and I had to be sure to have enough of everything, including extras, since I couldn’t imagine how I could survive if I ran out of my favorites. I had absolutely no comprehension of the possibility of replacing my ‘familiar’ with anything new or different.

And books, which have always been important to me, also found their way into my suitcases, not only filling them up but also, of course, weighing them down. I needed every guidebook I owned or had been given and every Italian language book I owned or had been given. What if I missed something?

In retrospect, I must have convinced myself that I was heading to some kind of alternative universe or third world country, where the natives just didn’t use shampoo or toothpaste, didn’t read and didn’t know how to shop.

And now, after lugging my suitcases, bags and totes up many stairs and through many small doors and hallways, I am tired of the burden. I have slowly sent many of my belongings back to the States, imposing on good friends and good relatives to store them for me (I hope I remember where everything is!). I have gradually replaced most of my clothes with Italian goods, finding that not only are they different and more stylish, but also that they are more unique and more fitting in many ways. The jeans here are fabulous and fit me well, the tops are made of beautiful cotton and the designs are classic and flattering; I am happy. And the Italian lingerie is really fabulous — gorgeous and sexy and stylish; Italian women, after all, come in all sizes, and most of them are not afraid to show a bit (or a lot) of skin, of cleavage, of underwear! My old bras and such just don’t compare, somehow, and I have gotten used to the “new”; thus, my previously wonderful American-bought underwear is now languishing in a suitcase somewhere in the States, along with so many other items I had adored (and had found flattering) in my former life. Perhaps this is an indication that, once again, I had too much, too many pieces of lingerie or sweaters or shoes (and the shoes and bags here are, of course, just so outstanding — that’s a whole other topic, that’s for sure!).

And I have still been traveling around Italy with too much — too many books, shoes, shampoos, etc. Every time I move or even go away for a few days, the packing up process is challenging and time-consuming and I have to make some (supposedly) important choices — which sweaters do I really need, for example? I am still committed to my large suitcase and my medium-sized one, and they each seem to fill up very quickly. Embarrassingly, I have had to call on my friends and neighbors to help; Giuseppina even had to help me stand on my suitcase in order to zip it closed, and getting my big suitcase down the stairs or into the waiting taxi has been really really hard. Perhaps I should learn from these exhausting and sweaty experiences?

When I left Florence with the intention of flying to Ortigia for a three week stay, I crammed my large suitcase with all kinds of stuff — “necessaries” as well as extras, and decided to take only my smaller suitcase with me, filled with what would fit and thereby imposing limits on myself. I arranged to have my large suitcase put into storage (thank you, Riccardo!) in Florence (especially since he would come to pick it up and carry it down those terrible stairs for me), choosing to travel with one suitcase and a carry-on bag. My thinking was that, for a “short” three week stay I would only need the “basics,” which somehow still were numerous. I have been living with two of almost everything — jeans, sweaters, casual dresses, etc; I also have one skirt, one jacket and a number of various tops and lingerie, and I still find I have “enough” and wear the same things almost every day. I always have a washing machine available (no dryer, of course) so keeping my clothes clean isn’t a big deal, and I wear my “favorites” over and over and over; to date, only I seem to have noticed, and I have received no negative feed-back at all (and why, honestly, did I expect anyone would notice?). And, surprisingly, what I do miss I can usually find — at a farmacia or a book store or a clothing shop… amazing.

So, today I had yet another epiphany and realized that, for the remaining 2 1/2 months I have here in Italy, I could keep traveling lightly and somewhat simply, and I could relinquish everything that is now in storage. The big suitcase is full, I am sure, of wonderful things, but I can’t even remember what they are, so I can’t even remember what I am missing — that must be the lesson! I have never before been able to pack lightly and don’t even understand the concept of minimalism, but somehow this now feels just right. After all, how many of my beautiful bras or sweaters or shoes do I really need for a couple of months in the medieval mountain town of Spoleto? Maybe this is just one more example of how I can, even without wanting or knowing how to, adapt and evolve; after all, if I can sleep in a small bed and take a shower in a small space and cook in a small kitchen, perhaps my requirements are becoming flexible? I’m just not sure and am certainly not guaranteeing anything.

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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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