Beauty was her masquerade

Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce. By Sylvia Jukes Morris.Random House; 735 pages; $35. Buy fromAmazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
BEAUTY was an asset Clare Boothe Luce used to her political (and financial) advantage. But so, too, were the other characteristics summed up by Sylvia Jukes Morris in this second and final part of her exhaustive biography of one of the most remarkable women of 20th-century America: “charm, humour, coquetry, intellect, ambition”. These brought her marriages to two wealthy men, two outspoken terms in the House of Representatives, an ambassadorship in Rome and an array of honours that culminated in the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not bad for a woman born illegitimate in an unpromising part of New York.
Ms Morris’s first volume of Luce’s biography, published in 1997, was called “Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce”. This concluding volume is just as pointedly titled. Luce’s first husband was an alcoholic, but he did at least give her money and father Ann, her only daughter. Her second marriage was to Henry Luce, the fabulously wealthy founder and owner of the Time-Life stable of magazines. Henry, who was already married with two young sons when he met Clare, admitted to a coup de foudre—a fate that befell an amazing number of men who came into her orbit. But Ann died in a car crash, her dissolute brother killed himself flying into the sea and the marriage to Henry, though it endured affairs on both sides, became a sexless ordeal of scant compatibility. In short, Luce’s political and social success came at a price: several suicide attempts (some probably genuine) and a reliance on sleeping pills and painkillers.But the package of characteristics, to which should be added a ferocious capacity for hard work, also brought much more: a career in journalism, complete with forays as a war correspondent in Europe in the 1940s; plays that were hits on Broadway; screenplays for Hollywood; and even, at the age of 54, the discovery of the joys of scuba-diving. Small wonder that in 1944, in her first term in Congress, the 41-year-old Luce was elected “Woman of the Year” by a poll of American newspaper editors, pushing Eleanor Roosevelt into a distant second place.
Fortunately, Ms Morris is not overwhelmed by the melodrama of Luce’s life. She had unparalleled access to her subject before Luce’s death in 1987 and to her papers (all 460,000 of them) in the Library of Congress. The result is a portrait of a woman gifted with intelligence and drive, but marred by narcissism and scarred by a constant sense of loneliness. There is a moving account of Luce’s conversion to Catholicism and a persuasive analysis of her role as ambassador to Rome in resolving the post-war status of Trieste.
As a Republican politician Luce was surely a forerunner of today’s “neocons”, a hawk in foreign policy and military affairs, but socially liberal (she was adamantly opposed to segregation). She enraged Democrats with her denunciation of Roosevelt’s New Deal and even accused the president of lying in order to take America into the second world war. Yet with her seductive beauty and charm she could count the Democrats’ Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as friends, adding them to a list that ran from Chiang Kai-shek and Winston Churchill to Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham.
As a female politician in the 1940s Luce was a rarity. Asked in her old age whether being a woman had disadvantaged her, she quipped, “I couldn’t possibly tell you. I have never been a man.” That question is less likely to be put to Hillary Clinton or other female stars of the modern American political scene. Nor, of course, is Mrs Clinton likely to have a Harper’scover story blaring: “Clare Boothe Luce: from Courtesan to Career Woman”. Luce’s characteristically witty reaction was that she would have preferred “from career woman to courtesan”.