Clare Boothe Luce

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Clare Boothe Luce

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Clare Boothe Luce. (credit: Camera Press)

(born March 10, 1903, New York, N.Y., U.S. — died Oct. 9, 1987, Washington, D.C.) U.S. politician, dramatist, and socialite. She was born into poverty to parents who never married. From 1930 to 1934 she worked as an editor at Vogue and Vanity Fair. In the latter she published short sketches satirizing New York society, some of which were collected as Stuffed Shirts (1931). In 1935 she married Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time and later Life magazine. Three of her witty plays were adapted into films: The Women (1936), Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), and Margin for Error (1939). From 1939 to 1940 she worked as a war correspondent for Life and recounted her experiences in Europe in the Spring (1940). As a member of the House of Representatives (1943 – 47), she became influential in Republican Party politics. She served as ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956, was a public supporter of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, and served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan in the 1970s and '80s. In 1983 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She is remembered for her fiesty demeanour and her acid wit, which she displayed in oft-quoted aphorisms such as, "No good deed goes unpunished."

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American Theater Guide: [Anna] Clare Boothe [Luce]

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Boothe [Luce], [Anna] Clare (1903–87), playwright. A New Yorker who was briefly a child actress, she turned to playwriting after successfully serving as managing editor of the magazine Vanity Fair and writing books. Her first play, O Pyramids (1933), never reached Broadway, and her second, Abide with Me (1935), a story of a cruel dipsomaniac, was a quick failure. But Boothe won success with The Women (1936), a witty, slashing comedy of female manners. A spoof of Hollywood's celebrated search for a Scarlett O'Hara, Kiss the Boys Good‐bye (1938), and Margin for Error (1939), in which a Jewish policeman is assigned to guard a Nazi diplomat, also won favor. The wife of publisher Henry Luce, she later became active in conservative politics and served a stint as United States ambassador to Italy. Biography: Rage for Fame, Sylvia Jukes Morris, 1997.

Biography: Clare Boothe Luce

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Playwright and U.S. congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) was hailed as one of the most able and outspoken women in public life. She became ambassador to Italy in 1953, the first American woman to represent her country to another major world power. Her marriage to publisher Henry Lucegave Clare Boothe an opportunity to compete also for journalistic acclaim.

Ann Clare Boothe was born on April 10, 1903, in New York City to Anna Snyder and William F. Boothe. Although her father, a violinist, deserted the family when Clare was nine, he instilled in his daughter a love of music and literature. In 1912 Clare became understudy to Mary Pickford in David Belasco's The Good Little Devil. She subsequently obtained similar understudy parts. In 1915 Clare entered St. Mary's, an Episcopal school on Long Island, where she met the daughter of journalist Irvin Cobb. A frequent visitor to the Cobb home, Clare was awed by such celebrities as Flo Ziegfeld, Kathleen Norris, and Richard Harding Davis.

A bright student, in 1917 Boothe enrolled in the Castle School at Tarrytown, New York, from which she graduated at the head of her class. After graduation in 1919 she went to New York City to find work.

Her mother had married physician Albert E. Austin of Greenwich, Connecticut, later a Republican Congressman from Fairfield County. Soon the three journeyed to Europe, where she met Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, the women's suffrage leader.

In New York Alva Belmont offered Clare a secretarial position. During her employment she was introduced to George T. Brokaw. At 43, Brokaw was a millionaire bachelor much sought after. Smitten, he courted Clare, and they were married on August 10, 1923, at a ceremony attended by 2,500 guests.

After a European honeymoon, the couple returned to a Fifth Avenue mansion where they lived with Brokaw's mother. Their daughter Ann was born in August 1924, and the family lived at the epicenter of society until Brokaw began to lose his long battle with alcoholism. Marriage became intolerable, and Clare divorced Brokaw on May 20, 1929.

Determined to apply her writing talents, Clare appealed to Conde Nast, owner of Vogue. After a brief trial she was hired, but soon went to Vanity Fair. By early 1930 Clare was hard at work, dazzling staff and readers of Vanity Fair with her sharp intelligence and barbed wit.

In 1934 Clare met Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Fortune. Although married, he soon divorced his wife and married Clare on November 23, 1935. About that time Clare produced a play, Abide with Me, which met mixed reviews. When Henry started Life magazine, Clare wrote another play, The Women, a biting satire on modern life. It opened in New York on December 26, 1936, to wide critical acclaim.

Clare dabbled in left-wing politics during the 1930s but was ultimately as repelled by Communism as she was by Fascism. In the face of war, in 1939 Clare left for Europe as a Life correspondent. She interviewed Winston Churchill and visited the doomed Maginot Line in France. She was in Brussels May 10, 1940, when the Germans crossed the border, an experience described in her book Europe in the Spring.

Clare's work as Life correspondent carried her to the Philippines, where she interviewed Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The resulting article was a Life cover story on December 8, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked in the Far East. Throughout World War II she produced many Life stories, often at peril to her safety.

Clare Boothe Luce ran for office in 1942, winning the same Republican congressional seat from Fairfield County, Connecticut, held by her step-father in 1938. Sadly, her daughter Ann Brokaw was killed in an auto accident in January 1944. This misfortune led her to take religious instruction from Rev. Fulton J. Sheen. Later that year Luce won reelection to her congressional seat, but a growing spiritual unease prompted by her daughter's death caused her to resign from politics in 1946. She at that time announced her conversion to the Roman Catholic faith.

Luce plunged into writing: screenplays, articles, a movie script, and a monthly column for McCall's. Drawn again to the political arena, she was a delegate to the Republican National Presidential Convention in 1952.

In 1953 President Eisenhower named her U.S. ambassador to Italy. Her well-known opposition to Communism and her relentless energy, as well as the rocky nature of Mediterranean diplomacy at that time, made her tenure a stormy one. But Luce was respected and admired, and at her departure in 1956 she was given the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

Clare and Henry Luce moved to Arizona where she took up painting. She also became absorbed with scuba diving and travelled to Bermuda, writing an article for Sports Illustrated. In 1957 she was awarded the Laertare Medal as an outstanding Catholic layperson. She also received honorary degrees from both Fordham and Temple universities.

In 1959 Clare Boothe Luce was considered for assignment as the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, but due to Senate debate over her outspoken views, she withdrew her name. She continued to speak out vehemently against Communism and joined the unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign to elect Barry Goldwater.

Henry Luce died on March 7, 1967, and Clare was left with a substantial income from $30 million worth of Time, Inc. stock. She settled in Honolulu, Hawaii, but in 1983 moved to Washington, D.C. Taking up residence at the Watergate apartments, she served for a time as a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and maintained a position in the capital's social scene until her death from cancer October 9, 1987.

Clare Boothe Luce
Clare Boothe Luce in 1932, photo by Carl Van Vechten
United States Ambassador to Italy
In office May 4, 1953 – April 27, 1956
President	Dwight D. Eisenhower
Preceded by	Ellsworth Bunker
Succeeded by	James David Zellerbach
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Connecticut's 4th district
In office January 3, 1943-January 3, 1947
Preceded by	Le Roy D. Downs
Succeeded by	John D. Lodge

Born	April 10, 1903 New York, New York
Died	October 9, 1987 (aged 84) Washington, D.C.
Political party	Republican
Spouse(s)	George Tuttle Brokaw (1923-1929, div.) Henry "Harry" Luce (1935-1967, his death)
Relations	Anne Clare & William Franklin Boothe (parents)
Children	Ann Clare Brokaw (1924-1944)
Occupation	Editor Playwright Social activist Journalist Diplomat
Religion	Roman Catholic

Early life

Clare Boothe Luce was born Ann Boothe, the second illegitimate child of dancer Anna Clara Schneider (aka Snyder, aka Anne Boothe) and William Franklin Boothe. Her father, a violinist and patent-medicine salesman who was married to another woman, instilled in his daughter a love of music and literature. Parts of her childhood were spent in Chicago, Illinois; Memphis, Tennessee (where the Boothe-Snyder family began using the surnames Murphy and Murfé); Union City, New Jersey; and New York City, New York. She had an elder brother, David Franklin. Clare's parents separated in 1912, with her mother thereafter publicly claiming to be a widow though telling her children that she and their father had divorced. To support herself and her young family, Ann Boothe worked as a "call girl" attached to a series of wealthy lovers.^[1]

Boothe attended schools in Garden City and Tarrytown, New York, graduating in 1919. Her original ambition was to become an actress. She understudied Mary Pickford on Broadway at age 10, then briefly attended a school of the theater in New York City. While on a European tour with her mother and stepfather, Dr. Albert E. Austin, whom her mother married in 1919, Boothe became interested in the Women's suffrage movement.

Boothe married George Tuttle Brokaw, heir to a New York clothing fortune, on August 10, 1923, at the age of 20. They had one daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw (April 25, 1924 - January 11, 1944). According to Boothe, Brokaw was an alcoholic, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1929. On November 23, 1935, Boothe married Henry Robinson Luce, the wealthy and influential publisher of Time, Fortune, and Life.

Luce was well-acquainted with other members of New York society and was a close friend of actress Dorothy Hale. After Hale's dramatic death by suicide in October 1938, Luce commissioned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who also had been a friend of Hale's, to do a portrait of the ill-fated thespian. Kahlo, in response, painted "El Suicidio de Dorothy Hale", a lurid depiction of Hale's death that reportedly shocked and horrified Luce.^[2]

On January 11, 1944, Luce's daughter Ann Clare Brokaw, while 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, ultimately becoming a Dame of Malta.

Writing career

As a writer for stage, film and magazines, Luce was known for her skill with satire and understatement, as well as her charm with people, which she displayed in oft-quoted aphorisms such as, "No good deed goes unpunished." After the end of her first marriage, Luce resumed her maiden name, and joined the staff of the fashion magazine Vogue, as an editorial assistant in 1930. In 1931, she became associate editor of Vanity Fair, and began writing short sketches satirizing New York society. In 1933, the same year she became managing editor of the magazine, her sketches were compiled and published under the title Stuffed Shirts. Boothe resigned from Vanity Fair in 1934 to pursue a career as a playwright.

In 1940, after World War II had begun, Luce took time away from her success as a playwright and traveled to Europe as a journalist for her husband's Life Magazine. During a four-month visit, she covered a wide range of battlefronts. Her observations of Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England in the midst of the German offensive were published as Europe in the Spring in 1940. This anecdotal account describes "... a world where men have decided to die together because they are unable to find a way to live together."

In 1941, Luce and her husband toured China and reported on the status of the country and its war with Japan. After the United States entered World War II, Luce toured Africa, India, China, and Burma, compiling reports for Life. Luce endured the frustrations and dangers familiar to most war correspondents, including bombing raids in Europe and the Far East. Luce's unsettling observations eventually led to changes in British military policy in the Middle East.^{[citation needed]}

During this tour, she published interviews with General Harold Alexander, commander of British troops in the Middle East; Chiang Kai-Shek; Jawaharlal Nehru; and General Joseph Warren Stilwell, commander of American troops in the China-Burma-India theater. While in Trinidad and Tobago, she faced house arrest by British Customs due to Allied discomfort over the contents of a draft article for Life magazine.

In 1947, after her second term in the US House expired, Luce wrote a series of articles describing her conversion to Roman Catholicism under the influence of Fulton J. Sheen. These were published in McCall's magazine. In 1949, she wrote the screenplay for the film Come to the Stable, about two nuns trying to raise money to build a children's hospital. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. Luce returned to writing for the stage in 1951 with Child of the Morning.

In 1952, she edited the book Saints for Now, a compilation of essays about various saints written by authors including Whittaker Chambers, Evelyn Waugh, Bruce Marshall, and Rebecca West. She wrote her final play, Slam the Door Softly, in 1970.

Political career

Clare Boothe Luce, ambassador to Italy, with husband Henry Luce (1954).

In 1942, Luce won a Republican seat in the United States House of Representatives representing Fairfield County, Connecticut, the 4th Congressional District. She filled the seat formerly held by her late stepfather, Dr. Austin. An outspoken critic of the Democratic President's foreign policy, Luce won the respect of the ultraconservative isolationists in Congress and received an appointment to the Military Affairs Committee.

However, her voting record was generally more moderate, siding with the administration on issues such as funding for American troops and aid to war victims. Recent scholarship indicates that this may have been a result of her amorous relationships with the "Baker Street Irregulars" - a group of culturally elite spies sent by Churchill to Washington to influence American political views.^{[citation needed]} Luce won a second term in the House in 1944 and was instrumental in the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission and began warning against the growing threat of international Communism.

Luce returned to politics during the 1952 presidential election, when she campaigned on behalf of Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower. Luce's support was rewarded with an appointment as ambassador to Italy, confirmed by the Senate in March 1953. Meeting Pope Pius XII, she allegedly instructed him to be tougher on communism in defense of the Church, prompting the Pontiff to a quiet reply, "You know, Mrs. Ambassador, I am a Catholic too."^{[citation needed]} As ambassador, Luce addressed the issue of anticommunism and the Italian labor movement and helped settle the dispute between Italy and what was then Yugoslavia over the United Nations territorial lines in Trieste. Not long afterward, Luce fell seriously ill with arsenic poisoning caused by paint chips falling from the stucco that decorated her bedroom ceiling, and was forced to resign in 1956.^[3]

Luce maintained her association with the conservative wing of the Republican party. She was well known for her anti-Communist views, as well as her advocacy of fiscal conservatism. In 1964, she supported Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican candidate for president, and considered a candidacy for the United States Senate from New York on the Conservative party ticket. However, also in 1964, her husband retired as editor-in-chief of Time, and Luce joined him by also retiring from public life. 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, newly inaugurated President Ronald Reagan appointed Luce to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. She served on the board until 1983, the year President Reagan awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Death

Clare 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, in South Carolina.

Legacies

Since its first grants in 1989 the Clare Boothe Luce Program has become the single most significant source of private support for women in science, mathematics and engineering. To date grants of more than $120 million have supported some 1,550 women. Grants are made to colleges and universities, not directly to individuals. (Clare Booth Luce Program website)

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

The CBLPI was founded in 1993 by Michelle Easton.^[4] The non-profit think tank seeks to advance American women through conservative ideas and espouses much the same philosophy as the late Clare Boothe Luce, both in terms of foreign policy and domestic policy.^[5] However, unlike suffragist and feminist Clare Boothe Luce, the organization often takes an anti-feminist stance, and has honored anti-feminists such as Phyllis Schlafly, and even anti-suffragists such as Ann Coulter, and opposes the Equal Rights Amendment, which Luce supported since it was written in 1921, until her death after it failed to be ratified.

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

Screenplays:

1949, Come to the Stable

Books:

1933, Stuffed Shirts
1940, Europe in the Spring
1952, Saints for Now (editor)

References

^ Sylvia Jukes Morris, Rage for Fame, Random House, 1997, pages 21-44
^ October Feature: Notorious Portraits
^ "Foreign Relations: Arsenic for the Ambassador", Time, 23 July 1956
^ Writer, Diplomat Clare Boothe Luce, cblpi.org
^ About the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

Sources

Shadegg, Stephen C., Clare Booth Luce: A biography, Simon & Shuster, New York: 1970 (ISBN 0-671-20672-9)

Sheed, Wilfred, Clare Boothe Luce, E.P. Dutton Publishers, New York: 1982

External links

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United States House of Representatives
Preceded by Le Roy D. Downs	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Connecticut's 4th congressional district 1943 – 1947	Succeeded by John D. Lodge
Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Ellsworth Bunker	United States Ambassador to Italy 1953 – 1956	Succeeded by James David Zellerbach

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1936	The Women. One of the biggest comedy hits of the decade concerns a group of wives who gather in Reno to gain divorces. Reviewer Brooks Atkinson calls the play "strikingly detailed pictures of some of the most odious harpies ever collected in one play." Luce was a former child actress who served as the managing editor of Vanity Fair. Her subsequent plays include Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938) and Margin for Error (1939).
1938	Kiss the Boys Goodbye. The playwright's successful comedy dramatizes the Hollywood search for an actress to play Velvet O'Toole in a Civil War film. Although playgoers enjoy the presumed spoof on Gone with the Wind, Luce claims that she intended the play as an attack on "Southernism"--the "inspiration or forerunner of Fascism."
1939	Margin for Error. The playwright's comedy about a Jewish American policeman assigned to protect the Nazi consul in New York is called, by critic Burns Mantle, "the first successful anti-Nazi play to reach the stage."