Clare Boothe Luce (; March 10, 1903Clare Boothe Luce's authorized biographer has corrected the misperception, encouraged by Luce herself, that she was born a month later: "I tracked down her New York birth certificate and found that she was born not on April 10, 1903 but on March 10—and not on Riverside Drive but in the less genteel environs of West 125th Street. I told her about the dates and she stared at me. 'Mother always said I was born at Easter. Anyway ... people born under the Aries sign are much more lighthearted and gay than those born under Pisces.'" Sylvia Jukes Morris, "In Search of Clare Boothe Luce", The New York Times Magazine, January 31, 1988 – October 9, 1987) was an American writer, politician, diplomat, and public intellectual. A versatile author, she is best known for her 1936 hit play The Women, which had an all-female cast. Her writings extended from drama and screen scenarios to fiction, journalism, and war reportage. She served as a U.S. representative from Connecticut's 4th congressional district from 1943 to 1947, and as U.S. Ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956. She was married to Henry Luce, publisher of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. She converted to Catholicism in 1946.
Politically, Luce was a leading conservative in later life and was well known for her anti-communism. In her youth, she briefly aligned herself with the liberalism of President Franklin Roosevelt as a protégé of Bernard Baruch but later became an outspoken critic of Roosevelt.Morris 1997, pp. 191–98. Although she was a strong supporter of the Anglo-American alliance in World War II, she remained outspokenly critical of British colonialism in India.Clare Boothe Luce, Address to the India League of America, August 9, 1943, Clare Boothe Luce Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter CBLP-LC).
Luce campaigned for every Republican presidential nominee from Wendell Willkie to Ronald Reagan.
Early life Luce was born Ann Clare Boothe in New York City on March 10, 1903, the second child of Anna Clara Schneider (also known as Ann Snyder Murphy, Ann Boothe, and Ann Clare Austin) and William Franklin Boothe (also known as "John J. Murphy" and "Jord Murfe").Morris 1997, pp. 15–32. Her parents were not married and would separate in 1912. Her father, a sophisticated man and a brilliant violinist,Morris 1997, pp. 17–18, 152–53. instilled in his daughter a love of literature, if not of music, but had trouble holding a job and spent years as a traveling 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.Morris 1997, pp. 29–42. Clare Boothe had an elder brother, David Franklin Boothe.
She attended the cathedral schools in Garden City and Tarrytown, New York, graduating first in her class in 1919 at 16. Her ambitious mother's initial plan for her was to become an actress. Clare understudied Mary Pickford on Broadway at age 10, and had her Broadway debut in Mrs. Henry B. Harris' production of "The Dummy" in 1914, a detective comedy. She then had a small part in Thomas Edison's 1915 movie, The Heart of a Waif.Morris 1997, pp. 49–52. 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 she was hired by Alva Belmont to work for the National Woman's Party in Washington, D.C. and Seneca Falls, New York.Morris 1997, pp. 110–14, 120–21.
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 (1924–1944) who was killed in a car accident. According to Boothe, Brokaw was a hopeless alcoholic, and the marriage ended in divorce on May 20, 1929.Morris 1997, pp. 130–31, 146–48.
On November 23, 1935, she married Henry 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.
In 1939 she commissioned Frida Kahlo to paint a portrait of the late Dorothy Hale. Kahlo produced The Suicide Of Dorothy Hale. Luce was appalled and almost destroyed it; however, Isamu Noguchi dissuaded her. Luce later anonymously donated the painting to the Phoenix Art Museum.
On January 11, 1944, her only child, Ann Clare Brokaw, a 19-year-old senior at Stanford University, was killed in an automobile accident."Ann Brokaw Dies in Auto Collision", The New York Times, January 12, 1944. Accessed August 2, 2009. As a result of the tragedy, Luce explored psychotherapy and religion. After grief counseling with Bishop Fulton Sheen, she was received into the Catholic Church in 1946.The New York Times, February 17, 1946. She became an ardent essayist and lecturer in celebration of her faith, and she was ultimately honored by being named a Dame of Malta. As a memorial to her daughter, beginning in 1949 she funded the construction of a Catholic church in Palo Alto for use by the Stanford campus ministry. The new Saint Ann Chapel was dedicated in 1951. It was sold by the diocese in 1998 and in 2003 became a church of the Anglican Province of Christ the King."A Spiritual Home Finds Salvation" , Stanford Magazine, July/August 2006. Accessed August 2, 2009. Ann Brokaw graduated cum laude from Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia at the age of 17 and went to Stanford University as a way to see the western United States. While at Stanford she was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.
Marriage to Henry Luce The marriage between Clare and Henry was difficult. Henry was by any standard extremely successful, 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.Morris 1997, pp. 284–85, 306–08, 357–64. Clare's years as managing editor of Vanity Fair left her with an avid interest in journalism (she suggested the idea of Life magazine to her husband before it was developed internally).Morris 1997, pp. 283–84, 291. Henry 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 always a careful balancing act for Henry since he did not want to be accused of nepotism.
It has been reported that their marriage was sexually "open".Nasah, David 2012 Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy Penguin Clare Luce's lovers included Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, CIA Director Allen Dulles, Randolph Churchill, General Lucian Truscott, General Charles Willoughby,Morris, Sylvia Jukes 2014 Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce Random House and Roald Dahl.
Joseph P. Kennedy was the father of several United States politicians. Clare Luce at times provided advice to the campaigns of John F. Kennedy, who became the 35th U.S. president.
Dahl, who became a very successful author after the war, was at the time a young RAF fighter pilot, temporarily assigned to Washington. He was part of a plan developed by spymaster Sir William Stephenson (code name "Intrepid"), intended to weaken American isolationist thinking by influencing, among others, American journalists and politicians. Dahl was
The very tall (6'6") and athletic Dahl later claimed he found his affair with Clare to be so physically demanding that he had begged the British ambassador to relieve him of the task, but the ambassador told him he must continue.Jennet Conant. The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. Simon & Schuster. New York. 2008. pp. 120–121
In the early 1960s, both Luces were friends of philosopher, author, and LSD advocate Gerald Heard. They tried LSD one time under his careful supervision. Although taking LSD never turned into a habit for either of the Luces, a friend (and biographer of Clare), Wilfred Sheed, wrote that Clare made use of it at least several times.Sheed, Wilfred 1982 Clare Boothe Luce. Berkley: New York, p. 125
The Luces stayed together until Henry's death from a heart attack in 1967. As one of the great "power couples" in American history, they were bonded by their mutual interests and complementary, if contrasting, characters. They treated each other with respect in public, never more so than when he 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 when she was criticized by his fellow Protestants.
In the early years of her widowhood, she retired to the luxurious beach house that she and her husband had planned in Honolulu, but boredom with life in what she called "this fur-lined rut"Sylvia Jukes Morris, "In Search of Clare Boothe Luce", The New York Times Magazine, January 31, 1988. brought her back to Washington, D.C. for increasingly long periods. She made her final home there in 1983.
Writing career
Luce published Stuffed Shirts, a volume of short stories, in 1931. Scribner's Magazine compared the work to Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies for its bitter humor. The New York Times found it socially superficial, but praised its "lovely festoons of epigrams" and beguiling stylishness: "What malice there may be in these pages has a felinity that is the purest Angoran."Morris 1997, pp. 188–89. The book's device of characters interlinked from story to story was borrowed from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), but it impressed Andre Maurois, who asked Luce's permission to imitate it.Morris 1997, p. 182. Luce also published many magazine articles. She was also a playwright.
After the failure of her initial stage effort, the marital melodrama Abide With Me (1935), she rapidly followed up with a satirical comedy, The Women. Deploying a cast of no fewer than 40 actresses who discussed men in often scorching language, it became a Broadway smash in 1936 and, three years later, a successful Hollywood movie known for its exclusively female cast. Toward the end of her life, Luce claimed that for half a century, she had steadily received royalties from productions of The Women all around the world. Later in the 1930s, she wrote two more successful, but less durable plays, also both made into movies: Kiss the Boys Goodbye and Margin for Error. The latter work "presented an all-out attack on the Nazis' racist philosophy".Lyons (1989), Clare Boothe Luce, Author and Diplomat, p. 61. Its opening night in Princeton, New Jersey, on October 14, 1939, was attended by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. Otto Preminger directed and starred in both the Broadway production and screen adaptation.Morris 1997, pp. 351–55, 368.
Much of Luce's famously acid wit ("No good deed goes unpunished",The famous quip was first quoted in print by Luce's social secretary Letitia Baldrige in Roman Candle (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1956), 129: "When I would entreat her to engage in resolving a specific case, she replied, 'No good deed goes unpunished, Tish, remember that. Oscar Wilde, Billy Wilder, and Andrew W. Mellon have also been cited as sources, but without written evidence. "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 humorists as P. G. Wodehouse and Corey Ford but also contributed many comic pieces of her own, signed and unsigned.