Clare Luce's Legend
WOLFE, ANN F.
Clare Luce's Legend Ambassador Extraordinary. By Alden Hatch. Holt. 254 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Of all prominent American career women, Clare Boothe Luce is surely the most...
...It took the death of her daughter to show her the answer to life for which she had been searching...
...Luce is tough enough and big enough to survive the raptures of her admirers and the attacks of her many detractors...
...Thanks to her integrity, she has proved a zealous public servant, a leader with a social conscience and a friend of her fellow men...
...This is the woman, one concludes, and not Mr...
...At 3, she was thrown into the water by her father and ordered to swim back to shore...
...Two Avilan characteristics thrust up like granite through the biographical mousse—integrity and searching spirituality...
...But Mrs...
...He gushes over into italics at the thought that she and Henry Luce "fell so unpremeditatively, so romantically, so vernally in love...
...Hatch's fair changeling child, who has been pulling her weight in the human stream...
...This is particularly true of her approach to life, which, for all her spirituality, is realistic and practical...
...As 10-year-old understudy to Mary Pickford, she supported her family...
...Together they have invested Mrs...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Of all prominent American career women, Clare Boothe Luce is surely the most Teresian...
...If Alden Hatch were taken strictly at his word, however, the lady would go down in history as an airy, fairy Lilian...
...Thanks to intelligence, ability, industry—and a genius for pat contacts—the ambitious young woman won quick success as playwright, Congresswoman and diplomat...
...Somehow she made it and, literally and figuratively, she's been a strong swimmer ever since...
...A wealthy divorcee at 26, she refused to be kept off the staff of Vogue and was soon on her way to editorship of Vanity Fair...
...Luce's career with significance...
...She has worked earnestly to understand the issues involved in her country's relations with the rest of the world and striven to improve them...
...As for the spirituality, the same inner restlessness that once led her toward Karl Marx brought her in the end to Catholicism...
...He has her "float into the room looking enchantingly fragile...
...He rhapsodizes over her "silvery snow-princess look...
Vol. 39 • October 1956 • No. 40
