TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87mil.lce

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                                                                                October 19, 1987

America's First Renaissance Woman

Clare Boothe Luce:  1903-1987


"A great man is one sentence," Clare Boothe Luce was fond of
pronouncing. "History has no time for more than one sentence,
and it is always a sentence that has an active verb."  In her
own life, however, Luce insistently defied her own prescription,
as she did so many assumptions. Too successful and too driven
ever to confine herself to a single sentence, she completed an
entire paragraph, baroque with ornamental periods, bristling
with active verbs and packed with household names.

For more than a half-century, Luce was on whispering terms with
history, the friend of Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek,
the wife of America's most prominent publishing tycoon, the
acquaintance of every President from Herbert Hoover to Ronald
Reagan. Yet even as she was winning over great men, she was
overturning the very notion of the "great man" by storming all
the old boys' clubs of power without ever relinquishing her
femininity. In the space of 20 years, while presiding as the
darling of the society columns, she was managing editor of a
national magazine, successful Broadway playwright, war
correspondent, Congresswoman and ambassador.

In a sense, the only thing against Luce was her ability to play
many roles and break all the rules, as a woman conquering what
was primarily a man's world. As one of the first great career
women in American history, Luce found herself alternately
patronized by those who saw her only as a woman and
anathematized by those who saw only her career. For some, she
was too elegant to be intelligent, for others too sharp-witted
to be ladylike. An early feminist whose most famous play showed
women at their cattiest, a formidable grande dame of high
society who was one of its most caustic satirists, Luce made a
career of eluding categories.

And of cultivating enemies. Because she switched hats so often,
she was accused of changing her tastes with the seasons.
Because she was so tireless and acid-tongued an evangelist for
her opinions, and because her opinions were so
fierce--especially a longtime hatred of Communism and an
unswerving devotion to the Catholicism to which she converted
in mid-life--she presented an irresistible target to her
adversaries. And because she had the misfortune of being on
easy terms with glamour as well as with success, she was
sometimes accused of manipulating men, sometimes of being
manipulated by them. While admirers gushed over her rare blend
of cleverness and charm, detractors focused only on her
deployment of those strengths. The ambiguous effect of being
accosted by the demure whirlwind was, said one newspaper, like
"being dynamited by angel cake."

When Clare Boothe Luce died last week in Washington at the age
of 84, the country lost the pre-eminent Renaissance woman of the
century, a pioneer who had shown once and for all that
"self-made woman" need not be a contradiction in terms. If
greatness, as she once said to Churchill, means "to see, to say,
to serve," some measure of it surely belonged to so shrewd an
observer, so pungent a speaker and so versatile a public
servant.

The trajectory of Luce's career was especially dramatic given
the modesty of her origins. Her mother was a former chorus
girl, her father a violinist who deserted his family when his
daughter was nine. Before long, however, Clare Boothe was
decorating her resume. In 1913 she was Mary Pickford's
understudy in a play titled A Good Little Devil; by eleven she
had written a play of her own; and at 16 she had run away from
home to work in a factory making paper favors. When her mother
remarried, she began to enjoy her first taste of society and was
soon zestfully embracing all the paradoxes of getting ahead as
a woman:  at 18 she was working for the feminist cause,
including distributing pamphlets urging women to "make
themselves heard," while just two years later she was accepting
a convenient marriage to George Tuttle Brokaw, an unstable
millionaire 23 years her senior who was, by her own
characteristic admission, a "bore."

By the time she divorced Brokaw, after six years of marriage,
she was assured of a handsome settlement to help her take on the
world. That she promptly did. At a dinner party in 1929, she
asked her host, Publishing Magnate Conde Nast, for a job. He,
taking her for a social butterfly, refused. She, unwilling to
take no for an answer, simply went to the offices of his main
magazine, Vogue, sat down at an unoccupied desk and announced
that she was ready to start work writing captions. Within four
years she was managing editor of Nast's Vanity Fair, a magazine
that she shaped in her own smart and irreverent image, at once
reveling in the emperor's latest fashions and revealing them for
what they really were.

Having mastered that world, she turned her attentions to
another. In 1934 she was introduced to Henry Luce, a
missionary's son who was the co-founder and editor in chief of
Time Inc. She introduced him to an idea she had dreamed up, a
glossy picture magazine to be known as LIFE. Just two days
before their wedding, in November 1935, her first play, Abide
with Me, opened on Broadway. In a review rewritten by the
editor-in-chief and the playwright herself, the play was panned
in TIME for its "tedious psychiatry."  It closed after only 36
performances.

Her next play fared better:  The Women, a pitiless satire
featuring 35 characters, all of them women and most of them
harpies, sniping, gossiping and philandering their way through
the beauty salons and the drawing rooms of Park Avenue. A
showcase for its author's diamond-sharp barbs and her wicked wit
("a frozen asset" is how a virgin describes herself in the
play), it opened in December 1936, ran for more than 600
performances and was soon turned into a popular movie. Having
proved herself on that front, Luce took off again, this time to
tour the world and cover the war for LIFE.

Sometime during those turbulent years, it occurred to Luce that
her gift for strong opinions and withering bons mots might
actually be best suited to another stage, and in 1942 she was
elected Connecticut's first Congresswoman. Inevitably, those
last two syllables dogged her in the largely all-male preserve
of Washington, and her attempts to be taken seriously were not
assisted by a typical poll that crowned her "the second best
pair of legs in the country."

Luce was not one to take such condescension calmly. Immovable
in her beliefs and intrepid in expressing them, she quickly
established herself as one of the most implacable foes of the
New Deal and especially of any and all appeasement of the Soviet
Union. When Vice President Henry Wallace suggested a postwar
policy of opening the skies to every plane, Luce dubbed his
brainchild "globaloney."  As for F.D.R., she said, he had "lied
us into a war into which he should have led us."  Small wonder,
then, that hers was one of the most hotly contested seats in the
country when she sought, and won, reelection in 1944.

In part because of the death in a car accident of her only child
Ann at the age of 19, she turned toward Catholicism and decided
in 1946 not to run for re-election. Needless to say, a Luce
retirement was hardly a rest:  the years that followed found her
explaining her conversion in a series of articles titled "The
Real Reason"; memorably denouncing the Democrats as a speaker
at the 1948 Republican national Convention; receiving an Oscar
nomination in 1949 for her original story for the gentle comedy
Come to the Stable, about two nuns setting up a hospital for
children; and, in 1952, making 47 separate radio and TV
appearances on behalf of Dwight Eisenhower. A 1953 Gallup poll
showed that she was, after Eleanor Roosevelt, Queen Elizabeth
II and Mamie Eisenhower, the most admired woman in the world.

That same year, she returned to the public stage as
Washington's emissary to Italy, the first American woman to be
named ambassador to a major power. As usual, Luce made a
spectacular entrance and exit: in her first major speech, just
a couple of weeks before the Italian general election, she broke
nearly every unwritten rule by eschewing diplomatic platitudes
in favor of a pointed warning about the "grave consequences" for
voters if they became "unhappy victims of totalitarianism of the
right or of the left."  Four years later, she resigned for
reasons of health:  dust laced with lead arsenate had been
flaking off the painted ceiling of her bedroom, gradually
poisoning her.

As usual, the dramatic gestures and splashy headlines (ARSENIC
AND OLD LUCE) obscured many of her more significant achievements
in Rome. By the time she left, Luce had played an important role
in persuading Italian businessmen to fight Communist labor
domination; had helped resolve a decades-old dispute with the
signing by Italy and Yugoslavia of the Trieste settlement in
1954; and had seen Italy join the United Nations. Luce's
predecessor had been recognized by exactly 2% of the Italian
population; "La Luce" was known to 50%.

Although her departure from Rome marked the end of Luce's
official roles, she was not offstage for long. In the years
that followed, the irrepressible campaigner mastered scuba
diving, took up painting and constantly peppered the press with
salty jeremiads. After her husband died in 1967, she pursued
her interests as energetically as ever. In 1971 she dusted off
a couple of past incarnations with a new play, Slam the Door
Softly, that was characteristically full of tart one-liners ("I
don't want alimony; I want severance pay"). A year later she
held a reception for President Richard Nixon at her oceanfront
estate in Honolulu before he met with Prime Minister Kakuei
Tanaka of Japan. Luce held no position, official or otherwise,
with the magazines her late husband founded, but she did not
hesitate to let their editors know when she disagreed with
them. In 1974, rallying behind an embattled Nixon, she
castigated TIME in an unusually stinging letter that denounced
its "editorial overinvestment in the destruction of the
President."

When the Republicans returned to Washington in 1981 after a
four-year hiatus, so too did Luce, resuming her position on the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Throughout her
last years, the elder stateswoman held court among young
Republicans as a kind of inspirational eminence, an unmistakable
figure at every conservative function, silver-haired,
bright-eyed, dripping pearls and epigrams. Of all the laurels
bestowed upon her in recent years, perhaps the most fitting was
the Sylvanus Thayer Award, West Point's highest civilian honor,
given to those who best embody the academy's motto of "Duty,
Honor, Country."

In her final years, Luce often seemed to miss the battles that
had engaged her for so long, and she frequently bemoaned the
fact that she had outlived all her "warm personal enemies."  In
a sense, what she was really lamenting was that she had, in the
end, outlasted controversy. By the time of her death last week,
it no longer seemed quite so remarkable that one woman could
occupy so many and such different seats of power. That,
perhaps, was the greatest of all the sentences that Clare Boothe
Luce left to history.

--By Pico Iyer