She sent floral tributes to herself at her office at Vanity Fair, where she wrote a favorable unsigned review of her first book, Stuffed Shirts. She boasted that she'd invented the term "a new deal" (she hadn't). A lukewarm feminist, she claimed to have been a vigorous supporter of women's rights, but she worked only very briefly for a National Woman's Party. Her five years at CondŽ Nast began in 1929 when she sat down at an empty desk at Vogue and started to work on assignments that arrived there; the publisher and the editor each assumed that the other had hired her.

 Clare Boothe had been teethed on deceit: she wrote that she was "surrounded by lies" in childhood -- when her unmarried mother pretended to be a widow. Boothe kept reinventing herself and her past, showing a contempt for facts long before she met Henry Luce, whose magazines were also often heedless about reality.

The legendary editor, playwright, war correspondent, and congresswoman even had a false birth date engraved on her tombstone. Born in Manhattan in 1903, the illegitimate child of a much-married traveling salesman (a promoter of pianos and patent medicines, an irregular violinist), she was raised in poverty, which was sometimes alleviated by her mother's openhanded lovers. The mother -- at times a call girl, eventually married to a doctor -- believed that a woman needed "big pearls and small hips," and she fanned Clare's determination to "marry for money -- lots of it."

 The daughter's first husband was millionaire George Tuttle Brokaw, a thundering lush. Divorced at twenty-six, Clare was soon a junior editor at Vanity Fair, which Time had characterized as "glossy smartchat" and "blithe monthly blurbs" aimed at cafŽ society. Vanity Fair had published such writers as Colette, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and AndrŽ Gide (though it appears that some celebrities submitted their minor work). Magnificent photographs by Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, and others were the magazine's most exciting feature.

Rage for Fame, Sylvia Jukes Morris's scrupulous biography of Clare Boothe Luce, shows that manipulating men, spending their money, and trying to share their power became a habit early in her life. An affair with Vanity Fair's managing editor as well as her own headlong energies swiftly advanced her career, and she wrote pieces and stories that jeered at the rich. Frank Crowninshield, the editor-in-chief, saw her as "a bibelot of the most enchanting order"; in her diary she referred to him "piddling, effusive, charming, ineffectual as usual."

 In 1930, considering his focus old-fashioned, she commissioned more articles on current events than the magazine had had before. Multimillionaire Bernard Baruch, adviser to presidents, became her foremost lover; married and thirty-two years older than she, he was a Democrat whose ideas resembled those of a conservative Republican. But when he finally supported Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, she followed. (Later she would despise and attack FDR.) The managing editor, who had promoted her and applauded her "progress to fame and fortune," was wretched with jealousy; he died in a car crash that some thought a suicide. Soon thereafter she moved into his job.

Her editorial style was both cogent and loquacious. To columnist Drew Pearson, who had been assigned to do a piece on Jack the Ripper, she wrote that she had "always" found the Ripper "the most exciting, thrilling, gruesome, spectacular, mysterious, and blood-curdling of murderers." But Pearson's piece left her "not the least bit frightened or appalled." She called for specifics: "For instance, you say 'her murder was indescribable in its savagery,' 'the operator must have been at least two hours over his hellish job.' Now, what was his hellish job; what did he do to his victims; how did he leave their remains . . . . I promise you that when you write about Jack the Ripper and don't describe his crime, it's like telling a ghost story and, at the last moment, omitting the ghost."

Meanwhile, her attraction to politics expanded: "What I could do in Washington is without end." Resigning from Vanity Fair, she began writing plays. Soon after encountering her, Henry Luce was besotted. Shortly before her wedding in 1935, Baruch ended their three-year affair -- "the eagle never shares his mate with another" -- but cheerfully paid all the bills for her Paris trousseau. As Clare made clear in interviews with her biographer, the Luces' sexual problems began well before they married -- with her, he was repeatedly impotent -- but on a rare vacation he wrote that laughter "tinkled in her heart . . . and her breasts were uproarious in their unsolemn love."

I thought it would be impossible to be sorry for Henry Luce. Although his empire was staffed with many gifted people, some of whom were contemptuous of its products, his omnipotence was undeniable -- Dwight Macdonald, employed by Fortune in the early 1930s, called him "Il Luce" -- and his Olympian self-assurance seemed unassailable. In 1938 he informed his executives, "Time is the most powerful publication in America." But Luce was as naive about women as he was about Mussolini (who was celebrated in the Lucepress in the 1930s). When Luce's impatient wife berated him for not "really" loving her, declaring her devotion to him and their "royal marriage" right before flying off to visit a potential lover, you can feel a twinge of sympathy for the ponderous tycoon.

As depicted in this book, Clare Boothe Luce was destructive, rapacious, clever without substantial intelligence, cruel to some who loved her. At the same time she dwelled in a world of ferocious misogyny. Any such enterprising woman would have been disliked or reviled at Time Inc., where the editors feared she might be influential. (She did help to develop the concept of Life, but its editors excluded her from an executive job.) We don't need to admire her in order to resent the way she was often treated -- especially by the men who regarded her as a "potent ogre."

Ridicule was her writer's instrument; she wasn't sufficiently witty to be a satirist. Of all her creations, The Women will endure as a classic ice-pick comedy. As the characters fling toxic darts at one another, at least five decades of spectators have called them foolish, greedy, and brutal, complaining that the play makes women per se look stupid. But it is still savagely amusing. There were rumors that George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (investors in The Women) had rewritten parts of it, followed by abundant denials -- which aren't fully convincing, since the play is far funnier than anything else she wrote.

Elsewhere Luce's prose was shot with gush, as when she was an occasional Life war correspondent portraying a Chinese peasant and his land: "The toiling son of Han plows his lovingly hoarded thin excrement back into the weakening soil. The rice, the millet, the soybean, even the peaches and persimmons he eats become compound of him, he of them most intimately . . . . Rising convulsively, the rivers drive the ravenous and surplus crop-man from it, or trap him under turgid waters by thousands, plowing him under, to fertilize the good and weary earth, with rich silt and slime, and with flesh and bones built of rice and peaches." As for the Sahara Desert: "Its vast, blind, dry demonic face, pocked with scabrous holes, pimpled with jagged rocks, wrinkled with barren waddies, bearded like the jowls of a lunatic with dirty tufts of scrub or camels'-thorn . . . ." It seems kinder not to complete the sentence.

How to weigh the assets of Clare Boothe Luce? She had a colossal talent for publicity and the brawniest kind of all-American drive. Her biographer calls her "a modestly gifted entertainer," and that seems fair. The book ends in 1942, when her career as a Republican member of Congress began, so we must wait for a second volume to hear about her conversion to Catholicism and the rabid red-baiting. The prose of the Lucepress would be altered over the decades and the right-wing politics would slowly yield in the mid-seventies to a quasi-liberalism -- which outraged Clare Boothe Luce throughout Watergate.

Luce chose Morris to be her biographer, and they spent lots of time together in Luce's last six years (she died in 1987). Propinquity can be perilous: now and then Morris's style seems infected by Luce's, and her editor should have caught some luscious phrases: "angel-faced Clare," "blonde and exquisite in eye-catching white velvet," "he happily surrendered to her charms." But Rage for Fame is meticulously researched and extremely tactful; you sense that Morris wanted to sympathize with her subject and hopes that we will. Yet Luce comes across as high trash -- not because she was "indulging sexual appetites unsatisfied by her marriage," but because many of her utterances and reflections were trivial.Or pretentious: "It's going to be a long war, and I want to keep track of the army."

There's also a credibility problem, since many passages depend on Luce's diaries, which she turned over to Morris and which reveal her feelings but can hardly be trusted as facts. The diaries are also a source of questionable dialogue: some exchanges sound like Lucean fiction. Yet there are flashes of self-knowledge: "My heart is heavy, and I know I am worthless, shallow, insincere with everyone -- and myself." That has the ring of authenticity.

But although she mainly appears to be so unpleasant that you can't imagine her having any friends, Wilfrid Sheed's robust and touching memoir, Clare Boothe Luce (1982), introduces us to a woman who was capable of compassion and generosity -- whom few others seem to have known. But in neither book can we quite discover the inner Luce, despite Morris's estimable efforts to explain her. In the meantime the biography is engrossing as a chronicle of dishonesties, a lifetime of fabrications.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe