Bedazzled

Clare Boothe Luce was, by force of will though not necessarily by nature, a phenomenon. A beautiful, alluring woman, she was determined to make her mark on a man’s world when women were expected to be seen and not heard. She succeeded in her time, though without achieving any lasting influence or leaving much more than dazzle behind. She was already a prominent editor and journalist when she enchanted and married Henry Luce, founder of the Time empire, and went on to use her connections to make sure her name was widely known.

She started from the most inauspicious beginnings, the child of an unmarried abandoned, little-educated but socially ambitious mother who taught her to look for men to support her. She learned the lesson very well, adding her own talents to the search for fame and fortune. Sylvia Jukes Morris is fascinated with how she went about it, amassing great detail about the story of her climb, including the climbs in and out of beds, and trying to probe the feelings that drove her.

Morris quotes Lady Diana Cooper, wife of the British diplomat Alfred Duff Cooper, at one point, “I think I am the only woman in England and one of a very, very few in America who like Clare. The bother is that it’s impossible not to be jealous of her. She has too much, and much, much too much confidence--which is what I am jealous of. . . . No one likes it, if she concealed it, she’d be loved.”

Clearly, Morris doesn’t feel that generous. She is intrigued by Luce, sometimes amazed by how she always managed to get her way. But there is no sign of warm admiration, though she had long interviews with Luce in her late years and with many of her friends and acquaintances.

“Rage for Fame,” the first of two volumes on Luce, ends with her election to Congress in 1942. She went on to become ambassador to Italy at a critical time, when the country seemed to be moving to the right early in the Cold War, and later was behind the scenes in the Republican Party and in dealing with Vietnam to help Richard Nixon get elected president. She moved far to the right--a disdainful, autocratic right--before neoconservatism came into fashion. Some called her fascistic.

Unfortunately, the result of dividing the story of her life in this way leaves her sounding superficial, interesting only in her own terms, as a clever seductress who craved celebrity. The impression this first volume gives is of a woman who cared deeply about being somebody but not much about doing anything in particular. There isn’t much substance to her. It leaves one wondering whether she was really so shallow or whether that is the way the author chose to approach her. I suspect that there is some of both, because those were dramatic times, but the sense of lowering history doesn’t come through.

For example, Luce went off to Europe in the spring of 1939 to report on events that were leading to war and then to the Philippines to interview Gen. Douglas MacArthur not long before Pearl Harbor, maneuvering that trip mainly because she fancied a fling with a handsome colonel on the general’s staff, as Morris reports. Her work as a correspondent is presented more as another trick to attract attention than as a serious attempt to understand ominous events.

Henry Luce comes across as something of a dithering nerd, so entranced with his glamorous, glittering wife that he can scarcely concentrate on his own affairs. He was a powerful man with great influence not only on American taste but on American interest in foreign affairs. He was born in China and always paid close attention to that country and to American policy abroad.

A sense of historical setting is missing, so that Morris’ repeated references to the beauty of Clare Boothe Luce--her style, her irresistible charm for any man who attracted her, her pouting dismay at anything less than total approval--drown out the times and their dramatic context.

The title “Rage for Fame” is a perfectly accurate summation of what Morris sees in Clare Boothe Luce, a woman extraordinarily consumed by achieving recognition but not a particularly extraordinary woman. I met her briefly when she was in Congress; she made quite a smash with her “globaloney” speech attacking then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s internationalist ideas. I was not awed, but I did find her energy and intensity impressive. She had force and wit.

Though the author takes due note of the tremendous success of Luce’s corrosive play “The Women,” which was also made into a hit film, she is biting in her disdain for Luce’s otherwise failed attempt to make an additional career as a playwright. Morris’ critique reveals her assessment of her subject’s talent and even character. “Clare was by nature unable, or unwilling, to explore metaphor to its artistic limit,” Morris writes. “Her own life had amply furnished her with the stuff of pure comedy and tragedy, but she could draw from it only farce and melodrama.”

If that’s all there was to her, it’s a wonder Luce should merit a two-volume biography. But the parts that deal with her political life--and, presumably, describe a more serious side as she dealt with pains and disappointments--are still to come in the next book, which is to be titled “The Price of Fame.”

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There was a price, and perhaps it evokes a little more sympathy for the coldly calculating achiever portrayed in this first volume. Any hint that she had to pay for how she fought her way to the top is scarcely provided, although she did tell Morris, “Mother poisoned my life,” presumably a reference to those lessons she learned about catching men of wealth and position.

Luce was certainly not the first prominent American woman. But she was an extremely successful journalist and editor, a playwright, a congresswoman and an ambassador, as well as a cultivator of the role of celebrity. And she did push through the barriers when it was a lot more difficult than it is now and when it was considered to be somehow gender-traitorous. In an early 1920 diary entry, she wrote: “I was endowed with a masculine perception, a half-masculine mentality, and a thoroughly feminine method of living. . . . I shall make the world and his wife envy me! I shall be rich, loved, beautiful, and talented and have a title, and if with all that I am still unhappy . . . there’s no hope for such as I am on earth.”

This is, in no way, a start on what became the postwar women’s movement. Luce never showed the least concern for helping other women breach the barriers they all faced. “She never felt sorry for anyone else,” Morris notes, though in another context, with Luce trying to establish herself on Broadway. She was a self-promoter.

Nonetheless, she showed that it was possible for a woman to make herself be taken seriously in journalism, in politics and in public notice. That helped open the way for others. Her footsteps weren’t available for anyone to follow; she saw to that and, anyway, few had her combination of advantages. But her achievements did make a difference at a time when it was taken as simple common sense that achievements like hers were not what women should have--at least not pretty women. Women did work during World War II, of course, and all those Rosie the Riveters were glorified, but their emergence in the man’s world was rebuffed immediately after the war, and they were dispatched back to the kitchen and the boudoir when the men came home. That was the put-down that Betty Friedan described in her first angry book, “The Feminine Mystique.” Luce would not be put down.

And in her way, she did help a bit. She complained that women were jealous of her which, as Diana Cooper said, was often true; but she wasn’t jealous of other women. Katharine Graham, the mighty publisher of the Washington Post, recounts in her recent autobiography that when, with tremendous nervousness and a sense of inadequacy, she decided to take up the job of her husband, who had committed suicide, Luce called to give her advice on how to be a lady tycoon. “Although some of it was peculiar to her and some of it seems dated now, much of it being about a woman in a man’s world, I took to heart what she said,” Graham writes. It included not having fixed office hours in case sometimes you wanted to goof off and hiring a male secretary. Practical, not preachy.

But Graham also tells of her clash with Luce at the American Newspaper Publishers convention in 1973, where Luce had made a major speech. “Personally, I admired her,” she writes, “but I was not in accord with her extremely conservative views.” Luce said the spirit of her husband, Henry Luce, came to her in the night and told her to denounce the Post for its Watergate coverage, and Graham recounts her visit by the spirit of her late husband, Phil, who came to her in the night and told her to tell Clare to “shove it.”

Morris has done an enormous job of research and resisted any temptation to be spellbound by the aura of Clare Boothe Luce. I don’t doubt that the unpleasant stories are true. But she leans so far to show the warts beneath the lovely skin that it’s hard to see why she considered taking up this massive biography worth the trouble. The book is well written; there is no spite, which maybe would have made it more compelling, but neither is there much beyond bedding, decorating luxurious homes and competing for attention to make Luce seem memorable. For a blow-by-blow account of how lovely little Miss Rags made her way to Riches, it’s fine, but if you want to know whether Clare Boothe Luce deserves more than a gossip item in history, hope that the second volume will go more to the point.