Her Own Grand Creation

...Secretary Baruch might influence the President to appoint her to some government office...

...I began passionately to love the growing child...

...The pain incurred when her father left was increased when he reappeared briefly seven years later, showing no signs of remorse...

...She wed Brokaw in a state of grim resignation...

...This protected her, but it also constrained her, as an artist and as a human being, and it kept her in some ways from lasting achievement, making her a celebrity (like Baruch, famous mainly for being so) instead of a genuine star...

...Her shell had thoroughly hardened, conditioned by several blows...

...Sylvia Morris observes that Clare wrote reportage and farce, never tragedy...

...Said an acquaintance of hers, "She wants to be Franklin Roosevelt, Sinclair Lewis, Bernard Shaw, Mme...

...The tragedy Clare never wrote was in her life...

...He had witnessed its impact, which 'affected her for years.'" In March, while in Nice with her mother, she had met one Jack Tanner, a handsome divorce of 47, and become infatuated with him...

...Through all this, it is hard to locate the central thread of personality, or even to know if one existed, apart from ceaseless adaptation to circumstance...

...I do as I please...

...But the truly vacuous often don't know it: Pamela Har-riman thought she was fine...

...She shows us not only how Clare Boothe Luce made herself into a legend, but why she became the kind of legend she did...

...Yet a Karsh photo displayed near the end of the book shows a fragile, flower-like beauty, the sort of woman men long to protect...

...Fantasy built on fantasy: Bernie could then arrange to make her editor of the Washington Post...

...Clare Boothe Luce had no such illusions...

...She set her mind on forcing Baruch to take a place in the next administration," writes Morris...

...Clare duly took his job and consolidated her editorial power, but she already had her eye on something different—it was Baruch, the perennial macher and fixer-to-presidents, who focused her mind on a whole new political universe...

...She was a competent analyst of people and politics, a good writer, an amusing playwright, and, though lacking Garbo's austere beauty, an example of "It" in her time...

...After the election, she went abroad again, this time to report from the Far Eastern theater...

...Clare became acutely ill with what she would always describe as 'appendix' trouble," Morris relates...

...Under the name "Jacqueline Tanner," she took an assembly-line job in lower Manhattan...

...The men seemed to realize their place in her life...

...But Clare, who had married to get out of her family's household, now wanted to get out of her husband's...

...At 26, she divorced, latched on to the Conde Nast empire, and began her glittering ascent...

...Except for the Curie part—Clare never tried to discover an element—she succeeded to a remarkable degree...

...The effect was destructive: Clare and her brother grew up not only in disorder and occasional squalor, but entangled in their parents' many lies...

...Her work itself Noemie Emery is a writing living in Fairfax, Virginia...

...More than 40 years before Geraldine Fer-raro, she mused, not implausibly, of becoming vice president, or at least of holding a cabinet post...

...But when Clare did strike gold, it was in Manhattan, when she shared a pew with George Tuttle Brokaw at the First Presbyterian Church...

...She was, and she did...

...Back home in June, she suddenly left her mother's, took the train to New York, and appeared at Tanner's door...

...Though her emphases changed, she gravitated unerringly to the center of interest, where she managed to be the star attraction...

...Clare was "devastated by her once-beloved father's apparent lack of regret for the lost years, and indifference to her future," says Morris...

...She called her mother to come and get her, and on or about July 5 she underwent surgery at Greenwich Hospital...

...Fame was revenge...

...But early in 1940, when she insisted on being sent to Europe as a war correspondent, Luce did not refuse her...

...She accompanied him to the 1932 convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt and began to dream...

...I wanted my child, yet I knew I must not have it . . . because . . . an illegitimate child must not be born...

...Clare seems distant from her own experience and work...

...I could make history there.'" It was with the proposal from Henry Luce on December 9, 1934, that Clare's two worlds of political power and publishing met...

...Four men in sequence gilded her path: Brokaw, who gave her financial security and a place in the universe...

...It was also doubtless one reason for her lifelong spells of depression and restlessness, the impression, as one writer who knew her put it, that "some great sorrow or unresolved decision hung over her," something "unsmiling and sad...

...Weeks before her marriage to Brokaw, she was contemplating elopement with an English guards officer, which did not come off because neither had money...

...She specialized in the dazzling entrance (often at the expense of other women), received writers at Vanity Fair posed on a chaise like a Regency beauty, played out the part of antebellum lady in great sweeping dresses at the South Carolina plantation that Henry Luce bought for her...

...She quickly emerged as a first-rate campaigner, pressing the need for American action and attacking FDR on the grounds that he wasn't interventionist enough...

...To say that she "had it all" would be to put it lightly, but something appears to be missing...

...your progress to fame...

...Curie, and Greta Garbo," all together...

...Having failed to put her daughter on the stage—the beautiful Clare was a stiff, stilted actress—Ann began to groom her for a wealthy marriage...

...Her recruiter, who had met her before in her step-father's office, called her "100% politician, with all the instincts and wiles...

...Ann, frustrated in her dreams of artistic expression (Clare's father, similarly, was a frustrated musician), developed a hunger for luxury, which she passed on to her children...

...Her drive, brains, and talent commanded the awe of the most powerful men in the country...

...It is only human nature that I should be discarded...

...As Morris notes, though life had given Clare the raw stuff of tragedy, she expressed herself largely in farce...

...I am the mistress...

...She had the ability to reinvent herself endlessly: from illegitimate waif to New York society matron to power-player in the World War II era...

...Born in 1903, pre-liberation, Clare lusted from girlhood for fame...

...In the end, Clare's versatility—her "inconsistency," Henry Luce called it—contained one unwavering consistency: She was where the action and the limelight were...

...Relocated in the capital, with Mrs...

...If she had failed as an actress in many auditions and screen tests—she could never play (or write about) another person—she was brilliant at playing herself...

...Donald Freeman, her editor at Vanity Fair, who groomed her for publishing stardom...

...Wrote Freeman to her, as their affair was winding down, "In the first days, I told you that I would only too gladly step aside when my purpose had been served, when you were sure-footed, aware of your own ability and had carved a niche for yourself...

...Some women could make brittle fun of the rich and nasty, others could argue about Lend Lease and naval rearmament, but Clare could do both...

...Her collusion with Ann in capturing a naive millionaire made her feel contaminated," Morris writes...

...Poor Clare...

...As you proceed to greater things, it shall be my satisfaction that in the early days we shared many secrets, and my consolation shall be...

...Unlike many, she wanted to work...

...Her magnetic father was still married to his second wife when he met the teenaged Ann—Clare's mother—who bore him two illegitimate children...

...Under the name "C.J...

...She did many things well—perhaps too many—but the main point seemed to be that she be seen doing them...

...eep down, he's shallow," goes the old saying...

...Like her mother, and countless others, she used men to get what she wanted...

...Her dispatches, describing the last weeks of the Phony War and the Blitzkrieg that ended it, became the bestseller Europe in the Spring...

...The parts of her life do not hang together...

...Much of her life had the quality of a staged performance...

...She thought she had missed the best kinds of experience...

...Clare's first marriage was made under the previous order, governed by Edwardian mores of courtship and matrimony...

...As with her parents, those frustrated artists, Clare's world was all a stage...

...Then she took sick...

...But her real career was being Clare Boothe Luce, her self-creation...

...could appear superficial...

...Her brother, "many years later, said his sister had a 'shock' before her first marriage...

...By the time Morris's book ends in 1942 (it is the first of two volumes), Clare is a year shy of 40 and has just been elected to Congress, having been an editor, an essayist, a playwright, a lead campaigner for Wendell Willkie in 1940, and a war correspondent on the Chinese and European fronts...

...Clare is the bridge between the old and the new: between the kept woman (her mother) and the career powerbroker...

...She was asked to join debates on the war and the American role in it, and then to speak for Willkie in the closing weeks of the campaign...

...For a while, they chased around Europe after one Francis Burke-Roche (whose twin brother would become the grandfather of Diana Spencer...

...Baruch remaining in New York, she could privately enjoy full possession of Bernie, while publicly influencing political opinion...

...Roosevelt or a Dorothy Thompson, but sometimes instead they saw a blond vision from Vogue...

...Raymond Bret-Koch, a friend, called her "a beautiful, well-constructed fagade, without central heating...

...Traditionally, unhappy children dream of fame as escape and salvation...

...She was not allowed to come in...

...As she wrote to her mother on the unpleasant first night of her marriage to Brokaw, "I belong to myself always...

...People attending a campaign rally or a discussion of the war in Europe expected to see a Mrs...

...She was, he decided, "not real...

...It was a match made in Edith Wharton heaven...

...Though Clare would always claim that she had had the idea for Life magazine, she was turned back in her efforts to exercise power inside the Luce publishing empire...

...Bernard Baruch, who opened the doors to political power...

...In revenge, she wrote her play The Women in three days...

...She was happy to receive money and presents, but what she craved more deeply was training and mentoring...

...and Henry Luce, who proposed marriage to her after one hour of conversation and put the wide world at her feet...

...Brokaw was a lush and a layabout (also 23 years her senior), but he offered Clare two million dollars, and a place in society...

...Her second marriage, 12 years later, presaged the dual-celebrity marriage, the Power Couple, as later represented by the Clintons and Doles...

...Own Grand Creation The Self-Invention of Clare Boothe Luce By Noemie Emery Sylvia Jukes Morris, in her guarded new book, gives us the making of a legend, an opportunist, one of the great female careers of the 20th century...

...It would be three weeks before she could walk again, and three months before she could dance or swim...

...If she was not the greatest brain, the greatest beauty, the greatest wit or writer, she was the best brain among the beautiful women, the most concerned among society figures, the most beautiful writer and wit...

...She had been married, not happily, to two millionaires, given birth to one daughter, and enjoyed numerous lovers (the most famous of whom was Bernard Baruch...

...When the family dissolved when Clare was nine, Ann told people her "husband" had died...

...Later, her mother urged her to stay in the marriage until Brokaw killed himself drinking, because a widow's share would be larger than that of a divorced woman...

...When she was 18, Clare had been rocked by what Morris calls a "core trauma...

...Her behavior then became strange...

...She then worked as an escort—Morris says as a call girl—before being rescued by a rich admirer, who continued to support her even after she married someone else...

...Clare was no exception...

...Days later, he died in a car crash that some people thought had not been an accident...

...Later, it seemed only logical that she should be approached to run for Congress, as she was when a seat opened in 1942 in Fairfield County, Conn., a seat that had once been held by her mother's late husband...

...Perhaps Clare's "progress" had not been consolation enough...

...On money supplied by both husband and lover, she took Clare husband-hunting overseas...

...Small wonder she turned the lights out in that particular mansion and retreated into the calculation and "otherness" that many people remarked...

...So too, her many subjects became aspects of her own celebrity—"All Clare on the Western Front," Dorothy Parker quipped about Clare's war dispatches...

...An exquisite young thing, having given herself in love . . . having been in vulgar parlance 'betrayed,' found herself two months pregnant," Clare wrote in her diary, beginning in the third person and switching to the first...

...On the strength of this, she became known as an authority on foreign policy...

...Tanner," she took a room on West 72nd Street...

...Her feelings of loss and betrayal would sharpen over the years to sometimes suicidal fears of rejection, of being 'unwanted, unloved, unworthy of being loved.'" This wasn't the worst...

...If splitting her time and attention among so many interests weakened each of those interests, the range of them, and the incongruity of some of them, added to her impact as a personality...

...She later said that she wished he had forced her to marry him...

...It was all grist for the myth...

...Luce controlled both of them...

...She did not go home, but stayed on in Manhattan...

...Morris concludes that Clare was seduced and abandoned, and then had a devastating abortion that she referred to, in what was ostensibly the story of another woman, as the "ripping out" of her "soul...