Clare Boothe Luce
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For the Broadway and movie actress, see Claire Luce.
| Hon. Clare Boothe Luce |
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| Clare Boothe Luce in 1932, photo by Carl Van Vechten | |
| United States Ambassador to Italy | |
| In office May 4, 1953 – April 27, 1956 |
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| President | Dwight D. Eisenhower |
| Preceded by | Ellsworth Bunker |
| Succeeded by | James David Zellerbach |
| United States Ambassador to Brazil | |
| In office April 28, 1959 – May 1, 1959 |
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| President | Dwight D. Eisenhower |
| Preceded by | Ellis O. Briggs |
| Succeeded by | John M. Cabot |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Connecticut's 4th district |
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| In office January 3, 1943 – January 3, 1947 |
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| Preceded by | Le Roy D. Downs |
| Succeeded by | John D. Lodge |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Ann Clare Boothe March 10, 1903 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | October 9, 1987 (aged 84) Washington, D.C. |
| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse(s) | George Tuttle Brokaw (1923–1929, divorced); 1 child Henry "Harry" Robinson Luce (1935–1967, his death) |
| Relations | Anna Clara Schneider & William Franklin Boothe (parents); David Franklin Boothe (brother) |
| Children | Ann Clare Brokaw (1924–1944) |
| Occupation | Editor, playwright, politician, journalist, diplomat |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
Politically, Luce was a Republican who became steadily more conservative in later life. In her youth however, she flirted briefly with the Democratic liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a protege of Bernard Baruch.[2] During her two terms as a Congresswoman from Connecticut in the early 1940s, her moderate views, especially toward blacks, immigrants, and women denied professional careers, contrasted with those of most of men in her party. Although she was a strong supporter of the Anglo-American alliance in World War II, she remained outspokenly critical of the British presence in India.[3] A charismatic and forceful public speaker, especially after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1946, she campaigned for every Republican presidential candidate from Wendell Willkie to Ronald Reagan.
Contents
Early life
Luce was born Ann Clare Boothe in New York City on March 10, 1903, the second child of Anna Clara Schneider (aka Ann Snyder Murphy; aka Ann Boothe, aka Ann Clare Austin) and William Franklin Boothe (aka "John J. Murphy"; aka "Jord Murfe").[4] Her parents were not married and would separate in 1912. Her father, a sophisticated man and a brilliant violinist,[5] instilled in his daughter a love of literature, if not of music. But William Boothe had trouble holding down any job, and spent years as a travelling salesman. Parts of young Clare's childhood were spent in Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, Chicago, Illinois, and Union City, New Jersey as well as New York City.[6] Clare Boothe had an elder brother, David Franklin Boothe. As adults, they were both plagued by suspicions that they had been born illegitimate, a fact that Clare had difficulty admitting to all her life.[7]She attended schools in Garden City and Tarrytown, New York, graduating in 1919. Her ambitious mother's initial plan for her was to become an actress. Clare understudied Mary Pickford on Broadway at age 10, and had a small part in Thomas Edison's 1915 movie, The Heart of a Waif.[8] After a tour of Europe with her mother and stepfather, Dr. Albert E. Austin, whom Ann Boothe married in 1919, she became interested in the women's suffrage movement, and was hired by Alva Belmont to work for the National Woman's Party in Washington, D.C. and Seneca Falls, N.Y.[9]
Highly intelligent, ambitious, and blessed with a deceptively fragile blonde beauty, the young Clare Boothe soon abandoned ideological feminism for the safer advancement offered by marrying money. She wed George Tuttle Brokaw, millionaire heir to a New York clothing fortune, on August 10, 1923, at the age of 20. They had one daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw (August 22, 1924 – January 11, 1944). According to Boothe, Brokaw was a hopeless alcoholic, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1929.[10]
On November 23, 1935, Clare Boothe married Henry Robinson Luce, the publisher of Time, Life and Fortune. She thereafter called herself Clare Boothe Luce, a frequently-misspelled name that was often confused with that of her exact contemporary Claire Luce, a stage and film actress. As a professional writer, Luce continued to use her maiden name.
On January 11, 1944, her daughter and only child Ann Clare Brokaw, a senior at Stanford University, was killed in an automobile accident. As a result of this tragedy, Luce explored psychotherapy and religion, joining the Roman Catholic Church in 1946.[11] She became an ardent essayist and lecturer in celebration of her faith, and was ultimately honored by being named a Dame of Malta.
Marriage to Henry Luce
The early months of the Luces' marriage—a second for both—were happy. Soon, however, temperamental and sexual incompatibilities inflicted painful strains upon the couple.[12] Henry Luce was by any standards an extremely successful man, but his physical awkwardness, lack of humor, and newsman's discomfort with any conversation that was not strictly factual put him in awe of his beautiful wife's social poise, wit, and fertile imagination.[13] Only at work, where he reigned supreme as publisher and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., was he able to escape nagging feelings of inferiority to her. His exclusively male coterie of editors resented what they believed to be Clare Luce's desire to gain a niche for herself in the boss's empire. Their dread was not unfounded, because her years as managing editor of "Vanity Fair" had left her with an avid interest in journalism (she claimed, with some reason, to have suggested the idea of "Life" magazine to her husband before it was developed internally).[14] Henry Luce himself was generous in encouraging her to write for "Life," but the question of how much coverage she should be accorded in "Time," as she grew more famous, was a perennial problem to him, since he did not want to be accused of nepotism.For her part, Clare Boothe Luce was touched by, but slightly contemptuous of her husband's tendency to put her on a pedestal. It affected his virility, and when, after ten years of marriage, she found out that he was seeing another woman, her reaction was to threaten suicide.[15] Ironically, she herself had several affairs during World War II—notably with General Charles A. Willoughby, Douglas Macarthur's intelligence chief.[16] Sexually, she had always been adventurous, but the art of seduction, which she learned from her equally promiscuous mother, interested her more than the physical act itself. She retained into extreme old age the power to bewitch men in any company, while paying less attention to women.
An inveterate adventurer in numerous of life's dimensions, in the early 1960s Clare was near the forefront of laymen's LSD experimentation, sometimes taking trips with Henry—one of Clare's biographers opined that it could almost be said the experience saved the Luce's marriage.[17] Both she and Henry were friends of philosopher, author, and LSD advocate Gerald Heard.[18]
The Luces regularly, but half-heartedly, talked of divorce, yet an exhausted sort of love held them together until Henry's death from a heart attack in 1967. As one of the great "power couples" in American history, they were more or less welded by their mutual interests and complementary, if contrasting characters. They treated each other with unfailing respect in public, never more so than when Henry Luce willingly acted as his wife's consort during her years as Ambassador to Italy. She was never able to convert him to Catholicism—he was the son of a Presbyterian missionary—but he did not question the sincerity of her faith, often attended Mass with her, and defended her whenever she was criticized by his fellow Protestants.
In the early years of her widowhood, Clare Boothe Luce retired to the luxurious beach house she and her husband had planned in Honolulu. But boredom with life in what she called "this fur-lined rut"[19] brought her back to Washington D.C. for increasingly long periods, and she made her final home there in 1983.
Writing career
Much of Luce's famously acid wit ("No good deed goes unpunished"[23] "Widowhood is a fringe benefit of marriage" "A hospital is no place to be sick") can be traced back to the days when, as a wealthy young divorcee in the early 1930s, she became a caption writer at Vogue and then, associate editor and managing editor of Vanity Fair. She not only edited the works of such great humorists as P. G. Wodehouse and Corey Ford, but contributed many comic pieces of her own, signed and unsigned. Her humor, which she retained into old age, was a saving grace that ameliorated the ruthlessness with which she pursued publicity and power.
The obsessiveness of Luce's "rage for fame" (a phrase by John Wolcot that she applied to herself as a schoolgirl[24]) did not allow her the time and solitude she needed to mature as a writer, and her literary precocity soon lost its bloom. When she published her second book, Europe in the Spring (1940), an acutely observed report on the "phony war" preceding the conquest of France, her first-person style caused Dorothy Parker to dub it "All Clare on the Western Front."[25] After the war, Luce's conversion to Catholicism made her for some years a religious proselytizer, and she later mourned that theological writing had killed her creative originality. It could be argued that her increasing tendency to orate on political platforms, where rhetoric was cheap, was a contributing factor. Nevertheless, she had some success in 1949 with her scenario for Come to the Stable, a popular 20th Century Fox movie about Benedictine nuns establishing a monastery in Connecticut. Luce's plot was nominated for an Academy Award that year in the Best Story category. Several other ambitious Hollywood scripts, including a big-budget project for Howard Hughes at RKO entitled "Pilate's Wife", came to nothing. Luce's play Child of the Morning, about the murder of a saintly girl (1951), received mixed reviews in its Massachusetts tryouts and never made it to Broadway.[26] In 1952 she edited a volume of divine lives, Saints for Now, recruiting as contributors such distinguished authors as Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton, Whittaker Chambers, and Rebecca West. She wrote her final play, Slam the Door Softly, in 1970.
Luce never wrote her autobiography despite a contract to do so. She did, however, select a posthumous biographer, and willed her enormous archive of personal papers to the Library of Congress.
Political career
House of Representatives
In 1942, Luce won a Republican seat in the United States House of Representatives representing Fairfield County, Connecticut, the 4th Congressional District. She based her platform on three goals: "One, to win the war. Two, to prosecute that war as loyally and effectively as we can as Republicans. Three, to bring about a better world and a durable peace, with special attention to post-war security and employment here at home."[29] She took up the seat formerly held by her late stepfather, Dr. Albert Austin. An outspoken critic of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's foreign policy,[29] Luce was supported by isolationists and conservatives in Congress, and was appointed early to the prestigious House Military Affairs Committee. Although she was by no means the only female representative on the floor, her beauty, wealth, and penchant for slashing witticisms caused her to be treated patronizingly by colleagues of both sexes.[30] She made a sensational debut in her maiden speech, coining the phrase "globaloney" to disparage Vice President Henry Wallace's recommendation that airlines of the world be given free access to U.S. airports.[31] Her voting record was generally more moderate than was expected by her GOP backers. To help the nation meet its rising war costs, she advocated "taxing the rich almost to the point of constitutional confiscation."[32] She called for repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, comparing its "doctrine of race theology" to Adolf Hitler's,[33] advocated aid for war victims abroad, and sided with the administration on issues such as infant-care and maternity appropriations for the wives of enlisted men. Nevertheless, President Roosevelt took a dislike to Representative Luce, and campaigned in 1944 to prevent her reelection, publicly calling her "a sharp-tongued glamor girl of forty." [34] She gave as good as she got, accusing Roosevelt of being "the only American president who ever lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it."[35]During her second term, Luce was instrumental in the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission[36] and, during the course of two tours of Allied battlefronts in Europe, a campaigner for more support of what she considered to be America's forgotten army in Italy. She was present at the liberation of several Nazi concentration camps in April, 1945, and after V-E Day began warning against the rise of international Communism as another form of totalitarianism, likely to lead to World War III.[29] In 1946 she was the co-author of the Luce-Celler Act of 1946, which increased the numbers of Indians and Filipinos permitted to immigrate to the US (previously limited to only 100 per year), and allowed them ultimately to become naturalized citizens.
Wearied by four years of failure to be treated more seriously by her colleagues, Representative Luce chose not to run for re-election that fall. She retired from Congress in January 1947.[29]
Republican National Conventions
Clare Boothe Luce's emergence as a formidable political orator in Congress made her a candidate to deliver the keynote speech at the 1944 Republican National Convention. She did not, however, win that honor, as many reports erroneously state. (Nor was she the first woman to address a national political convention: Corinne Roosevelt Robinson did so in 1920.) Governor Earl Warren of California was ultimately selected as keynote speaker, and Representative Luce was asked to introduce former President Herbert Hoover. After seeing a draft of her proposed remarks, Hoover suggested that he introduce her.[37] Luce's subsequent address invoked an allegorical figure, "G.I. Jim," as "G.I. Joe's" less celebrated comrade-in-arms, a victim of the Roosevelt Administration's tardy preparation for World War II. She reproved President Roosevelt for practicing one-man diplomacy, and claimed that American democracy was "becoming a dictatorial bumbledom". She was rewarded with a vast ovation.[38] The convention nominated Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York for the presidency.At the Republican National Convention in 1948, Luce delivered a similarly scathing speech, castigating President Harry S. Truman and his administration. [Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, June 22, 1948] E[39] Again the applause was great, but most press comments afterwards were negative. As a passionate convert to Roman Catholicism and dedicated Cold Warrior, Luce was by now moving toward the extreme right of the GOP. Ignoring Luce's clear preference for Senator Arthur Vandenberg as a candidate, the convention renominated Thomas E. Dewey to run against Truman.
Ambassador to Italy
Italians reacted doubtfully at first to the arrival of a female ambassador in Rome, but Luce soon convinced those of moderate and conservative temper that she favored their civilization and religion. The country's large Communist minority, however, regarded her as a foreign meddler in Italian affairs. She was no stranger to Pope Pius XII, who welcomed her as a friend and faithful acolyte.[40] Over the course of several audiences since 1940, Luce had impressed Pius XII as one of the most effective secular preachers of Catholicism in America.[41]
Her principal achievement as ambassador was to play a vital role in negotiating a peaceful solution to the Trieste Crisis of 1953–1954, a border dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia that she saw as potentially escalating into a war between East and West. Her sympathies throughout were with the Christian Democratic government of Giuseppe Pella, and influential on the Mediterranean policy of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, another religiously driven anticommunist. Although Luce regarded the abatement of the acute phase of the crisis in December, 1953 as a triumph for herself, the main work of settlement, finalized in October 1954, was undertaken by professional representatives of the five concerned powers (Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Yugoslavia) meeting in London.[42]
As ambassador, Luce consistently overestimated the possibility that the Italian left would mount a governmental coup and restore totalitarian rule, unless the democratic center was buttressed with generous American aid. Nurturing an image of her own country as a haven of social peace and prosperity, she threatened to boycott the 1955 Venice Film Festival if the juvenile delinquent film Blackboard Jungle was shown.[43] Around the same time she fell seriously ill with arsenic poisoning. Sensational rumors circulated that the ambassador was the target of extermination by agents of the Soviet Union. Medical analysis eventually determined that the poisoning was caused by arsenate of lead in paint dust falling from the stucco that decorated her bedroom ceiling. The episode debilitated Luce physically and mentally, and she resigned her post in December, 1956.[44]
Ambassador to Brazil
In 1959 President Eisenhower nominated a recovered Luce to be the US Ambassador to Brazil. She began to learn Portuguese in preparation for the job, but she was by now so conservative that her appointment met with strong opposition from a small number of Democratic Senators. Leading the charge was Oregon Senator Wayne Morse. Despite his opposition Luce was confirmed by a 79 to 11 vote. Responding to Morse's criticisms, Luce insinuated that his opposition to her appointment, along with his switch from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party a few years earlier, was caused by diminished mental capacity after sustaining injuries from being kicked in the head by a horse. Her husband urged her to decline the appointment, noting that it would be difficult for her to work with Morse, who chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Latin American Affairs.[45] This, coupled with her public remark that riots in Bolivia might be dealt with by dividing the country up among its neighbors,[46] a major gaffe for a representative of U.S. interests in the region, led her to quickly resign. She had served only four days, from April 28 to May 1, 1959,[47] and never left American soil.Political life after office
After Fidel Castro led a revolution in Cuba in 1959, Luce and her husband began to sponsor anti-Castro groups. This support included funding exiles in commando speedboat raids against Cuba in the early 1960s.[48][49] Luce 's continuing anti-Communist views, as well as her advocacy of fiscal conservatism, led her to support Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona as the Republican candidate for president in 1964. She also considered, but rejected, a candidacy for the United States Senate from New York on the Conservative party ticket. That same year, which also saw the political emergence of her future friend Ronald Reagan, marked the voluntary end of Henry Luce's tenure as editor-in-chief of Time. The Luces retired together, establishing a winter home in Arizona and planning a final move to Hawaii. Henry Luce died in 1967 before that dream could be realized. But his widow went ahead with construction of a luxurious beach house in Honolulu, and for some years led an active life in Hawaiian society.In 1973, Richard Nixon named Clare Boothe Luce to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). She remained on the board until President Jimmy Carter succeeded President Gerald Ford in 1977. By then she had put down roots in Washington, D.C. that would become permanent in her last years. In 1979 she was the first female to be awarded the Sylvanus Thayer Award by the United States Military Academy at West Point.
In 1981, the newly inaugurated President Ronald Reagan reappointed Luce to PFIAB. She served on the board until 1983.
Presidential Medal of Freedom
President Reagan awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom[50] in 1983. She was the first woman member of Congress to receive this award.[51]Upon presenting her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, President Reagan said this of Luce:
A novelist, playwright, politician, diplomat, and advisor to Presidents, Clare Boothe Luce has served and enriched her country in many fields. Her brilliance of mind, gracious warmth and great fortitude have propelled her to exceptional heights of accomplishment. As a Congresswoman, Ambassador, and Member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Clare Boothe Luce has been a persistent and effective advocate of freedom, both at home and abroad. She has earned the respect of people from all over the world, and the love of her fellow Americans.[52]
Death
Luce died of brain cancer on October 9, 1987, aged 84, at her Watergate apartment in Washington, D.C. She is buried at Mepkin Abbey, South Carolina, a plantation that she and Henry Luce had once owned and given to a community of Trappist monks. She lies in a grave adjoining those of her mother, her daughter, and her husband.Legacy
Feminism
Revered in her later years as a heroine of the feminist movement, Luce had mixed feelings about the role of women in society. This ambivalence showed early in her willingness, as a teenager, to abandon a job with the National Women's Party and obey her mother's urgings to find a rich husband. As a Congresswoman in 1943 she was invited to co-sponsor a submission of the Equal Rights Amendment, offered by Representative Louis Ludlow of Indiana, but claimed that the invitation got lost in her mail.[53] Both her marriages were strained, but she never ceased to advise women to marry and provide supportive homes for their husbands. (During her ambassadorial years, at a dinner in Luxembourg attended by many European dignitaries, Luce was heard declaiming that all women wanted from men was "babies and security."[54]) Yet her own professional career as a successful editor, writer, playwright, reporter, legislator, and diplomat remarkably showed how a woman of humble origins and no college education could raise herself to an escalating series of public heights. Luce bequeathed a large part of her personal fortune of some $50 million to an academic program designed to encourage the entry of women into technological fields traditionally dominated by men (see below).Clare Boothe Luce Program
Since 1989 the Clare Boothe Luce Program (CBL) has become a significant source of private funding support for women in science, mathematics and engineering. All awards must be used exclusively in the United States (not applicable for travel or study abroad). Student recipients must be U.S. citizens and faculty recipients must be citizens or permanent residents. Thus far, the program has supported more than 1500 women.The terms of the bequest require the following criteria: 1) at least fifty percent of the awards go to Roman Catholic colleges or universities, 2) grants are made only to four-year degree-granting institutions, not directly to individuals.
The program is divided into three distinct categories: 1) undergraduate scholarships and research awards, 2) graduate and post-doctoral fellowships, and 3) term support for tenure-track appointments at the assistant or associate professorship level.[36]
Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute
The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute was founded in 1993 by Michelle Easton.[55] The non-profit think tank seeks to advance American women through conservative ideas and espouses much the same philosophy as Clare Boothe Luce, both in terms of foreign policy and domestic policy.[56]Clare Boothe Luce Heritage Foundation Award
The Clare Boothe Luce Award, established in 1991 in memory of Luce, is the Heritage Foundation's highest award for distinguished contributions to the conservative movement. Prominent recipients include Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and William F. Buckley Jr.[57][58][59]Publications
- Plays
- 1935 Abide with Me
- 1936 The Women
- 1938 Kiss the Boys Goodbye
- 1939 Margin for Error
- 1951 Child of the Morning
- 1970 Slam the Door Softly
- Screen Stories
- 1949 Come to the Stable
- Books
- 1931 Stuffed Shirts
- 1940 Europe in the Spring
- 1952 Saints for Now (editor)
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