Rage for Fame

...Her decision to run for Congress in 1942 won the approval of the man who disapproved of everything...

...That yellow-haired bitch is spending his money like water," raged Time's managing editor...

...She never slept where she could not do herself some good...

...She went for an interview with the managing editor, but he, too, was getting ready to sail for Europe and forgot to phone her as promised...

...It worked...

...Having just won the right to vote, they were now pushing for an Equal Rights Amendment, but 17-yearold Clare confessed that she "could not get greatly stirred up over the tragedies of the Double Standard," nor did she like the monotony of fundraising and canvassing...

...A really tremendous contrast, both in manner and appearance, to the average female politico," effused H.L...

...To others, such as French artist Raymond Bret-Koch, she was "a beautiful, well-constructed facade without central heating...

...Goldminer's Daughter Rage For Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce Sylvia Jukes Morris Random House /561 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Florence King F or years biographies of women hewed strictly to the feminist formula: "rediscover" an obscure female writer or artist, call her a genius, portray her as a helpless victim of misogynistic men, and blame phallocentric society for denying her the success she so clearly deserved...

...Pam, a full-time courtesan, did not want a career...

...The trip resulted in an anti78 October r99 7 ?The American Spectator Andre the Phony Giant fascist book, Europe in the Spring, that won her the approval of the intelligentsia for the first and only time in her life...

...Clare's Connecticut district included a horsey set who were in her pocket, but to get blue-collar votes she had to pretend to an interest in the underprivileged and display the union label in her clothes...

...When the choice came between self-cultivation and the cultivation of the rich, Clare usually opted for the latter," writes Morris...

...Learning that the Prince of Wales was stopping at White Sulphur Springs, Ann made reservations and dragged Clare down to West Virginia, but the Prince had already left...

...Ever the publisher, he gave her a deadline: she had a year to fall in love with him, at which time he would divorce his wife and marry her...

...daughter Ann, her only child, was born in 1926...

...of a German-American adventuress named Anna Clara Schneider who anglicized her name to Ann Snyder...

...One senses the codicil was Mother Ann's idea in view of the advice she gave Clare when George turned out to be an alcoholic: "Wait it out until he drinks himself to death...

...It's doubtful that Luce recognized this as overwritten prose...

...Money-mad to a pathological degree, she seems to have been a textbook case of the rarely seen "Pompadour complex": compulsive prostitution...

...There, amid the creme de la creme, Ann took up with a socially prominent WASP doctor, but incredibly, the adoring Jacobs continued to put his fortune at her disposal...

...She hit pay dirt in Joel Jacobs, a rich Jewish bachelor who kept her in grand style and wanted to marry her, but she turned him down for fear that having a Jewish stepfather would hurt her children's social chances...

...While in England she also won the approval of the American ambassador, who was languishing in bachelor solitude after shipping his huge family home...

...It was a smash hit...

...As the family moved around the country she may have worked in a Memphis brothel...

...The only tepid response came from China Boy, who by now was on the verge of a nervous breakdown...

...Her father, William Franklin Boothe, was still married to his first wife when he began living with Ann...

...In 1939 she went to Europe to test the winds of war...

...They also hated the New Deal social worker, Harry Hopkins...

...Both for women of my vintage who remember Clare and men who came of age in the feminist era, reading about a woman who never obsessed over sexual harassment and the "hostile workplace" is sheer, blessed relief...

...That settled, she concentrated on being Mrs...

...Clare had her mother's venality, but she tempered it with wit...

...Clare's mother was the strong one, a fact that seemed to drain William Boothe of the energy that had made him a prosperous salesman (Clare would have a similar effect on her future husband, Time publisher Henry Luce), until he slid into failure and became a free-lance violinist...

...What she wanted was the editorship of his new magazine, Life, which she had named, but his all-male staff rebelled and Luce gave in to them...

...The marriage lasted until 1929, when she divorced George ($30,000 annual alimony) and opted for a career in publishing...

...She spent less and less time in the office, preferring to work at home or in some fashionable retreat, until even the smitten Conde Nast complained of her absenteeism...

...at least he was good-natured, or as Clare put it: "He wouldn't hurt a fly unless he got so drunk he fell on it...

...Artistic what-might-have-beens were no longer an arena of subconscious conflict...

...Last year the Neo-Broad Biography Prize went to Sally Bedell Smith's Reflected Glory, an unflinching account of the none-toobright but horizontally unchallenged Pamela Churchill Harriman, who proved that the unexamined life is well worth living...

...T heir one bond was conservative politics...

...Her life's ambition, she frequently told her daughter, was "small hips, large pearls...

...Both women employed the same means to achieve different ends...

...Although she was a solid Republican who called Franklin D. Roosevelt "a regurgitator of the pabulum of nursery liberalism," she rejoiced when Baruch agreed to advise FDR in 1932, concocting a pipe dream wherein he would be named Secretary of the Treasury and persuade FDR to appoint her to some important government post so that she could take Washington by storm as she had New York...

...Years later she met the Duchess of Windsor, and though both disliked women, they clicked as only kindred spirits can...

...When they could not find enough black servants for their plantation, Luce wired FDR that his "relief legislation" was to blame...

...The wedding was set for August 10 but on July 7 George added a codicil to his Will stipulating that if he died before the wedding, Clare would inherit as if she were already his wife...

...But Baruch was not offered Treasury, and Roosevelt invariably referred to Clare, with a knowing male chuckle, as "Bamey's girl...

...Henry R. Luce...

...Endowed with a brain and drawn to books, she was torn between a life of the mind and the life of a social butterfly that her mother urged on her...

...A conventional politician never could have gotten away with it but the author of The Women could and did...

...Conde Nast, whom she met at a party, promised her a job at Vogue just before he sailed for Europe...

...Her scheme was less overreaching than it sounds...

...er mother brought H the same spirit to the task of finding Clare a rich husband...

...Widowed, myspirit commits suttee in the sky's pyre...

...when Nast and the managing editor returned and saw her, each thought the other had hired her...

...The first incident came about when, sick of mouthing banal clichés about democracy, she let loose with a trademark wisecrack: "Every citizen deserves a minimum wage, a minimum diet, and a minimum set of teeth to eat it with...

...It was her old conflict: being famous as the editor of Vanity Fair was more fun than editing Vanity Fair...

...Clare did, but in her rise from editor to playwright to congresswoman she never forgot that it was a man's world out there, and that some jobs were what she called "jungle jobs—the kind you hang on to with your tail...

...I wanted to be famous but I didn't want fn be a martyr...

...Said one: "Clare Brokaw has a room off her bedroom just filled with books, and she reads them...

...The unmarried Clare was free of the constitutional impediments that sank the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, so she could have become Queen...

...She enjoyed being a rich socialite, though other socialites found her a little odd...

...Her other lovers included Morrow editor Thayer Hobson, journalist Mark Sullivan, columnist Paul Gallico, and financier Bernard Baruch...

...She adored her "China Boy" (Luce, the son of Presbyterian missionaries, was born in Tengchow), writing to him on a plane at sunset: "The fiery clouds have turned the silver wings into sheets of red gold ...You are not here...

...Then 61, the still-virile Baruch also activated her political juices...

...She would savage such airhead females in her play, The Women, but meanwhile she was having fun—and a baby...

...Life with George wasn't all bad...

...Everyone expected a memorable campaign and she did not disappoint...

...At first, says Morris, her columns were models of the personal-essay form —arresting opening paragraphs, strict adherence to a single topic, closely reasoned arguments leading to neatly turned conclusions—but after a while she began resorting to lists, wordy padding, and long quotations to fill her space, "as if the idea itself, fully worked out in her own lightning-quick head, is intellectual satisfaction enough, executing it a chore...

...She bought an island off South Carolina and turned it into a Southern plantation, dressing in hoop skirts for her gala dinner parties...

...Mencken...

...to Irwin Shaw she was "as feminine as a meat ax," and to James Agee she was "a walking c--t with stockings by Van Raalte...

...Unknown to her, the man had had plastic surgery for facial burns suffered in World War I. She got out of it by ignoring all spin doctors save Immanuel Kant, whose maxim, "Never apologize, never explain," had proved useful many times...

...Yet as soon as she yielded, she disliked herself for doing so...

...It deserves high praise on literary and historical fronts, but perhaps its greatest value is psychological comfort...

...China Boy no likee...

...Rage for Fame is the first volume of the author's projected two-volume biography of Clare Boothe Luce...

...Martin's...

...The pair never married, but Ann Snyder Boothe had a knack for falsifying public documents...

...76 October /997 • The American Spectator In 1923 Clare married George Tuttle Brokaw, a 43-year-old New York bachelor with $2 million...

...One Suffragette ideal did impress her, however: their motto, "Failure is Impossible...

...A beautiful woman who was as dark and sultry as Clare was ethereal and blonde, Ann snagged a series of rich "protectors," 4,,,,,r7,7 one of whom took her and Clare to Europe in 1914...

...the editor-in-chief of Time was a tin-eared malapropist whose own letters contained such gems as: "Your breasts were uproarious in their unsolemn love...

...A new trend in distaff lives suggests that we are poised at the dawn of a Neo-Broad Age wherein biographers defy political correctness to celebrate a different kind of woman, the kind of woman who takes it for granted that the best guarantee of success is not a phallus but something rather more hollow, like a gold mine, and that she is sitting on one...

...It was a lesson in what a woman with "it" can pull off, and it did Clare no good...

...She soon tired of writing captions for Vogue and moved on to Vanity Fair, where she wrote brittle, urbane essays and had an affair with editor Donald Freeman, whose job she wanted...

...Their irregular arrangement also produced an illegitimate son, Clare's brother David, but it was a female-centered household...

...As editor of Vanity Fair she interviewed male writers while lying on her office chaise longue —a blonde, blue-eyed, all-American Odalisque to some...

...Here was a job Clare could apply herself to...

...he can't destroy mine...

...This year's prize will surely go to Rage for Fame by Sylvia Jukes Morris, a riveting biography of the brilliant and talented Clare Boothe Luce...

...The second incident arose when she called her opponent "one of the men in Washington without faces...

...she definitely was a call girl after she left William Boothe and moved back to New York in 1912...

...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...

...She worked for ten days at the Washington headquarters of the newly victorious Suffragettes...

...She waited for two months, then she simply went to the office, sat down at a desk, and began reading manuscripts...

...She quit and immediately got a syndicated newspaper column, but the same thing happened...

...Her silence stunted the growth of the faux pas and she won election by a narrow margin...

...Furious, Clare stormed off to her favorite five-star resort hotel and wrote The Women in three days...

...Meanwhile, her earlier dream came true when Donald Freeman died in a car wreck and she got his job...

...She was born in 19o3 in what is today Spanish Harlem, the illegitimate daughter FLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...

...The syndicate dropped her but it didn't matter: she had met Henry Robinson Luce and he had fallen in love with her at first sight...

...An unrelieved cat fight with an all-female cast (a gimmick that digs at Luce's all-male staff) and a limitless supply of facile wisecracks, the play and the movie that followed made Clare a household name and justified the compromise she had made with her talents...

...Though only 38, Luce had trouble consummating the marriage, but sex was not uppermost in Clare's mind...

...Knowing she felt this way, Jacobs still supported her, sent Clare and David to the best schools, and bought her a house in Greenwich, Connecticut...

...Clare, of course, came up with a much better jab: "Let Roosevelt destroy the American Constitution...

...a widow's portion is larger than alimony...

...JPK in bedroom all morning," reads her diary...

...she had proved that fingertip cleverness was the route to fame and fortune...

...As her Babylonian lifestyle ate into Luce's Calvinist soul and her stiletto wit went over his humorless head, what remained of his virility left him and he became completely impotent...

...There is reason to believe that these paranoid sagas are on the way out...

...She compromised by exchanging intellect for cleverness and began to do everything with her fingertips, never giving her all to any task lest hard work and dedication mar the feminine charms that opened social doors...

...The Time-Life staff also backed her candidacy as a way to get rid of her...

...Clare faulted Time for describing his dandruff—that, she said, was "hitting above the collar" —but she spoke for all conservatives when she asked: "What is it in this twisted humanitarian that holds such power over the President...