With this second, and concluding, volume of her biography of Clare Boothe Luce, Sylvia Jukes Morris completes the tantalizing saga of a woman who helped define the “pushy broad” in a century when men made the rules and women made the coffee. The result is an impeccably researched and thoughtfully written epic that crackles with the energy that defined her subject.
The first volume, Rage for Fame (1997), focused on how the illegitimate child of a call girl evolved into the beautiful, intellectually dazzling author of The Women (1936) and the wife of media mogul Henry Luce, the enormously influential publisher of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines. Price of Fame opens in January 1943, with Clare (as she is called throughout) basking in the blazing spotlight of celebrity as “the smartest, most famous, and most glamorous member of the House of Representatives.”
Clare’s dance with fame fueled her life, leading her from one passion to another with careless abandon. She was inescapably molded—in later life she would say “poisoned”—by her mother, a character who seems directly drawn from George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894). For Clare’s mother, and subsequently for Clare, money was essential to life itself. As Mrs. Warren tells her daughter in Shaw’s play, “What else is there for me to do? The life suits me . . . and it brings in money; I like making money.”
At her mother’s knee, Clare also learned that power was entwined with beauty and brains. She would never out-vavoom Rita Hayworth, but she had a fresh-faced loveliness, and she was clever. She flaunted her intelligence and became known for a stinging wit. But above all, her character was defined by self-involvement. Her obsession to be the center of attention would keep her in the spotlight for decades, as she swooped from Broadway to Hollywood to politics and diplomacy.
Her early life was gutsy and ambitious in nontraditional ways. As a young woman, she worked side-by-side with suffragettes Alice Paul and Alva Belmont to lobby for women’s equality. Later, she worked at the highest levels of the magazine trade and wrote Broadway hits. But because “The American Century,” as her husband labeled it in 1941, remained male-dominated, Clare became supremely adept at using her charm as well as her intellect to get what she wanted.
In the first half of her life, looks, smarts, and brassiness marked her path to wealth and fame. According to Price of Fame, however, Clare’s Second Act was a much tougher performance. Aging was unstoppable, and while her beauty never disappeared, her ability to manipulate life sometimes failed altogether. The worst tragedy struck a year after she took her seat in Congress, when her only child, 19-year-old Ann, was killed in a car crash.
Despair aside, Clare traveled extensively to war zones as a member of the House Military Affairs Committee, developing important programs that assisted soldiers and, in the femme fatale mode that was part of her DNA, adding various star-struck generals to her string of male conquests.
At the end of the war, Clare was overcome by emptiness and insecurity. She had seen the camps at Buchenwald and Nordhausen, and was horrified by reports from Japan about survivors of the atomic blasts. Politics seemed irrelevant in such a world, and demons that she had once held at bay came to the forefront.
Morris writes that Clare’s remedy for depression had previously been “to pursue a career packed with incident. But now, her professional achievements seemed of slight import, in a bloody and violent universe.” Instead of playwriting or politics, she turned to religion and studied Roman Catholicism daily—and not with any local parish priest, but with Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, the well-known radio host of The Catholic Hour. Her conversion to Catholicism in 1946, in an era when antipopery was still rampant, was splashed across frontpages throughout the country.
At the same time, she announced that she would no longer run for elected office. During her two terms, she was recognized as “by far the most sought-after public lecturer in the House of Representatives,” and her overall congressional record was impressive: She was responsible for 18 major initiatives related to human rights, including equal pay for equal work, racial and sexual fairness, and rehabilitation of veterans.
Even as she was leaving Congress, she winked at rumors of a possible run for president in 1952, however improbable the idea of a woman president was in midcentury America. When Dwight D. Eisenhower announced his run for the presidency, Clare became one of his staunchest and most effective campaigners. After Ike won, he asked her what she wanted: “Naturally, what I can’t get. Rome.” But Eisenhower made it happen. On March 2, 1953, she was confirmed by the Senate as ambassador, and a month later, she sailed for Italy.
Overcoming Italy’s raised eyebrows at the United States sending a woman, “La Luce” emerged as a diplomat extraordinaire during her ambassadorship. She was deeply enmeshed in helping Italy become a major partner in NATO, and she also finessed settlement of the complicated Trieste problem, resolving in Italy’s favor the argument between Rome and Belgrade over the strategic port in the eastern Adriatic.
When Clare retired from her ambassadorship at the end of 1956, the Corriere della Sera wrote: “No one will ever know how much Italy owes to this fragile blonde.” Clare herself felt such relief at the release of the all-consuming stress of diplomacy that she admitted, “I seemed to fly apart, tangle and sprawl inside.” In this untethered mood, she traveled, worked on her memoirs, appeared at celebrity gatherings, experimented with LSD, and took up scuba diving.
As the significance of her activities on the world stage lessened, the importance of her relationship with Harry Luce grew. Much of Price of Fame is really a portrait of their marriage—the story of two complicated people who lived parallel lives that rarely connected. When she was younger, she had flings with whomever she wanted; so did Harry. But as she got older, she found Harry was more central to her life. A line she had written in The Women resonated: “It’s being together at the end that really matters.”
Henry Luce died in 1967, but Clare would live for another 20 years. In her late 70s, she met Sylvia Jukes Morris at a dinner party, embracing her as they left and saying, “Good night, you sweet thing.” Thus was launched a collaboration that would take up the next several decades of Morris’s life.
A quotation near the end of this biography seems apt: In a 1974 Esquire profile, Helen Lawrenson wrote of Clare Boothe Luce that “she made real friendship impossible, perhaps because she seemed to trust no one, love no one.” But with a will “as tough as lignum vitae beneath an exquisitely angelic façade,” she became one of the most “fascinating success stories of the century. Her technique was simple: aim for the top.”
Amy Henderson is a historian in Washington who writes about media and culture.
