Spectator's Journal/The Lady Had Flair
Buckley, Priscilla L.
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THE LADY HAD FLAIR W hat is there to say about Clare Boothe Luce that hasn't been said better by Wilfrid Sheed in his sensitive, illuminating memoir of a few seasons back. Her...
...It lacked a certain precision, her usual bite...
...NR published it and published Clare Luce regularly from that time on...
...What fun she was...
...She unburdened herself in a letter to a friend in those last months when the cancer was sucking away her strength, a cri de coeur "There has been a revolution in the Catholic Church in the last twenty years that may destroy it as we have known it...
...An envelope for la signorina from the United States Embassy had been hand-delivered not ten minutes ago...
...She took her faith seriously and came near to despair at times at the changes she saw in her beloved Church, changes more far-reaching than the lost majesty and mystery of the Latin Mass...
...To a politician who sputtered during an election debate in 1942 that he bet she couldn't even cook, she had replied, "And I bet you can't drive a straight nail...
...Sometimes the initiative was hers, sometimes ours...
...But she was deeply compassionate and profound...
...An example...
...She is the only one who would forgive anything...
...And then unable, even in extremis, to restrain her impish wit she reported that one of the monks in the monastery she had founded, "the oldest one at age 63 bugged off and married...
...She was seated between the President and Bill Casey...
...She rapidly made clear that she knew far more than I about the subject and made it equally clear that she respected Roman Catholic bishops too much to take them 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 seriously when they talked nonsense...
...Driving down Fifth Avenue one evening many years later, she regaled a car full offriends with limericks, crafted on the spot, about the Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Belmonts whose stately mansions once lined that street...
...While Clare Luce would bow to the mandates of the Lord on High she was less reverential to his ministers on earth, as Cardinal John O'Connor noted at the Solemn Mass of the Resurrection in St...
...The older Clare was not ready to publish anything the younger Clare would have been less than proud of...
...Everything was sacred, and yet everything was subject to examination...
...But her timing was off...
...It was true, but long-time women friends like Tish, and so many others, remained her friends to the day she died...
...And this I think characterized her Catholicism...
...her critical faculties remained acute to the end of her days...
...The truth was the truth, and whoever spoke falsehood must be branded as speaking falsehood...
...She wrote the whole thing up in Coronet and the poor man was never heard from again...
...God rest her bright, mischievous, caring soul...
...He commented that her instant liking of him at their first meeting turned into dislike when she heard me speaking pompously about nuclear weapons...
...I thought that was cool...
...And I was amused, and touched, to note that Tish Baldrige—her secretary back in the halcyon Roman years, now a successful businesswoman and a guest at the affair—had fallen into the old routine and was handling the introductions lest it become apparent that Clare couldn't recognize an old friend ten feet off...
...Clare's sense of justice had been outraged...
...It was a very sound Catholicism, certainly in the mature years of her Catholicism...
...Her eyes sparkled...
...Like Noel Coward she had "a talent to amuse...
...In this she was rare...
...Pray for us all...
...The article arrived after the spotlight had moved from Hoover...
...Another occasion thirty years later...
...were fine lines at the corners of her eyes...
...She could be flighty—even bitchy atby Priscilla L. Buckley times...
...The engraved invitation to the evening's reception read: "The Ambassador" (centered on the first line, and, on the second and third lines) "and Mr...
...In the mid-seventies, a piece came in, a passionate defense of someone who couldn't defend himself, her friend the late J. Edgar Hoover whose name was being dragged in the mire during the Church investigations into CIA activities in Chile...
...She had little patience with dullards and bores...
...The setting was the White House...
...To list them thus baldly is to miss the flavor of the woman: her style, her warmth, above all her flair...
...Her accomplishments were many—editor, author, playwright, journalist, politician, diplomat, orator...
...so did Clare, an exquisitely tailored gray suit softened at throat and wrists by a trace of lace...
...I will pray to her to intercede for her dear orphaned brood, and for you, especially—and for me...
...It has been much repeated that when Monsignor Fulton Sheen, who had instructed her in the Catholic faith, asked whom she would like as a confessor she had responded: "Someone familiar with the rise and fall of empires...
...I wondered how many thousands of laughs it had taken to etch them in Clare's cheeks and how much joyful laughter they had evoked in others in the etching...
...You don't suppose, do you, that the seed was planted that night for Bill Casey's diabolically clever disinformation operation against the great Bob Woodward...
...I met her first at a reception at the American Embassy in Rome in 1954 when she was ambassador...
...They were having a whale of a time...
...Today President Reagan would present Clare and thirteen other distinguished Americans with the Medal of Freedom —the highest honor an American civilian can receive...
...Clare and I talked it over a dozen times or so...
...It was said that Clare preferred men to women...
...She wasn't happy with it and, in the end, it was left that if either she or I found a suitable peg we would take another look at it...
...I leave a Mass disedified by sermons and heartsick...
...On this occasion, as on so many, Clare refused to wear the thick glasses without which she could not see...
...It's still in our files...
...She would have liked it that at the last "Celebration of the Life of Clare Boothe Luce" (as the program read) the Agnus was sung in Latin...
...Professional she was, and professional she remained even in those weary years when eyes fail, energy flags, and the critical faculties grow lax...
...M y own relations with her were on two levels, social and professional...
...What can I do to change her back into the Church to which I was converted thirty years ago...
...The men who were to be honored that day—James Burnham, F. Buckminster Fuller, Jacob Javits among them—wore somber business suits...
...Her first piece for National Review was unsolicited, a passionate defense of Madame Nhu, "The Lady's Not for Burning...
...Her hair was white now, the figure as trim as ever, but there Priscilla L. Buckley is a senior editor of National Review...
...The stunning reception hall of the Residence, which the Luces had redecorated, was a sea of color: uniforms, clerical robes, dinner jackets, evening gowns...
...M y last vivid recollection of Clare is on the occasion of National Review's 30th Anniversary dinner...
...Five cardinals hovered around the Ambassador, slim and erect in a simple ankle-length dress of ivory-lace, brightened by a single touch of color, a broad sash that exactly matched the scarlet of a cardinal's robe...
...He would salute "the brilliance of her mind, [her] gracious warmth and great fortitude...
...Patrick's on October 13...
...It is the destruction of the illusion of childhood, because onepsychologically—remains a child at heart until mother is really gone...
...She and Casey had theirheads together for the longest time and occasionally Clare would chuckle and Casey would do that short amused snort of his...
...She would write my brother Bill when our mother died: "No matter what one's age, the death of one's mother is always traumatic...
...The concierge at the humble hotel at which I was staying—to be employed by United Press in Europe in those days, as I was, was to stay at humble hotels—was much excited...
Vol. 21 • January 1988 • No. 1
