Title

Rage for fame : the ascent of Clare Boothe Luce

Description

Born illegitimate on New York's Upper West Side, with nothing to recommend her but blonde good looks and a ferocious intelligence, she used sex, street smarts, acid humor, and money to plot a career more improbable than anything in her own fiction and drama.

At ten, Clare Boothe understudied Mary Pickford on Broadway. At twenty, she was both a suffragette and a siren to well-placed men on both sides of the Atlantic. She spurned the handsomest to marry the richest: George Tuttle Brokaw, an alcoholic Fifth Avenue millionaire more than twice her age. At twenty-six, she was free of him, financially secure, in the full flower of her beauty, and ambitious enough to scorch silk.

Clare Boothe set about transforming herself into a caption writer at Vogue, staff writer and managing editor of Vanity Fair (glossiest of the Deco-era magazines), and author of Stuffed Shirts, a satiric short-story collection brilliant enough to arouse the envy of Andre Maurois. Then, in three days at age thirty-three, she wrote The Women, the hit play whose dry-martini dialogue ("I'm a virgin - a frozen asset") still elicits gasps from audiences around the world.

By then Clare Boothe was married again, this time to a man who was her equal in force of character: Henry Luce, the youthful publisher of Time and Fortune. On their honeymoon, she helped plant the seed of his greatest success, Life. For Luce, meeting Clare was a "coup de foudre," a lightning stroke that transformed him overnight into the most ardent and generous of lovers. To Clare, whom a French artist once described as "a beautiful facade without central heating," Henry was only the latest, and by no means the last, of the men she cruelly disillusioned. Although the marriage endured, this clear-eyed biography chronicles its deterioration from passion to partnerships.

Other admirers, including Max Reinhardt, Conde Nast, Joseph P. Kennedy, Randolph Churchill, Noel Coward, Bernard Baruch, Paul Gallico, Isamu Noguchi, and Jawaharlal Nehru, crowd the pages of Rage for Fame - even Gertrude Stein, in one hilarious episode. All testify to Clare Boothe Luce's extraordinary charm and guile. However, she had powerful detractors, notably Franklin D. Roosevelt, David O. Selznick, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothy Parker. Copious quotations from her own diaries, as well as from those of her daughter, Ann, and the letters of her doomed literary mentor Donald Freeman, reveal dark undercurrents of deceit, ruthlessness, and narcissism in her personality.

Behind the blue eyes and flirtatious manner, she was, in Irwin Shaw's words, "feminine as a meat axe." By the time she was thirty-seven, Clare Boothe Luce had written two more Broadway hits (the opening of her anti-Nazi play Margin for Error attracted not only Albert Einstein but Thomas Mann), a bestselling book on the 1940 fall of France, and numerous articles for Life, which employed her as a roving correspondent in the early days of World War II. Always fascinated with military strategy and intelligence, she was an ardent advocate of U.S. intervention in both hemispheres. After Pearl Harbor, her rage for fame became a rage for power that only politics would satisfy.

Identifier

620956

394575555

Creator

Morris, Sylvia Jukes

Format

1st ed.

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

1997

Program air date: July 27, 1997.

Publisher

Random House

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations

Notes on front endpapers: b. 1903, d. 1987. Graduated 'Castle' 1919. Henry Luce b. April 3, 1898 Tengchow, China, America at 8, sutter-tonsil operation. CBL manuscripts p. 489 Library of Congress. Daniel Boorstin p 479. Pix of CBL 472. Illegitimate. Vanity Fair. Life--invented it. Lover of Bernard Baruch.
The Play--The Women. Congresswoman 1942. Nose job 1934. Kiss the Boys Good-Bye. Dr. Rosenbluth, Randolph Churchill, William Harlan Hale (p 201), Barney Baruch, p (193), Colonel Charles Andrew Willoughby (Sir Charles) p 421. Donald Freeman, David Sarnoff, Conde Nast (his wife Leslie), Bill Gaston. 72 illustrations. Paid by Harry not to smoke $5000. Impotent. Relationship with Joe Kennedy. Her book--Europe in the Spring. Joe Stillwill on the road to Mandalay. Notes on front fly sheet: Claire's Napoleon Complex. Mephis. Harry-eye on W.H. run, young, anti-feminist, Yale. Where is Hank Luce III today, Peter/Paul. Mother's killed in Fla. Jan 3, 1938. Brother David Booth--his drinking problem. Who was Dorothy Thompson. Conn. House, Waldorf Towers, Mepkin. Underlinings/Notes: Underlinings: details on Clare's family, early life, education, sex, affairs, writings. connections, politics. Notes: "Vanity Fair," "Life," "New National Party," "Baruch platform," "trip back to N.Y.C. with Baruch," "to Maine," "appealed to both sexes," "she voted for FDR," "Sept 30, Daniel Freeman accident, died," "Oct 7, 1932," "Hoover," "CBL's statement about herself," "Longworth and Cissy Patterson," "Feb 15, 1934 resign from Vanity Fair," "Hearst cancels column," "morning after," "Dec 9, 1934," "Henry Luce falls in love," "Harry's concern for secrecy," "June 2, 1935," "letter from Harry," "Ann Austin killed," "Dorothy Hall and Harry Hopkins," "Clare to Harry Hopkins," "May 30, 1939," "Lord Beaverbrook, Joe Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw 83,""payed not smoke," "Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas," "making fun of Harry and Clare," "Ann on the trip," "Time cover, Winston Churchill on cover," "Harry's libido," "Maginot line trip," "July 7, 1940," "CBL's brother David Franklin Boothe," "venereal disease, Nora's gonorrhea," "July 24, 1940 trip to FDR W.H.," "book published," "Wendell Willkie," "Nov 5, 1940 election," "Claire's lectures," "lend-lease," "20 years ahead," "May 9, 1941," "spark of passion," "JFK," "MacArthur manuscript," "Selznick," "Pearl Harbor dEC. 7, 1941," "Homer Lea," "Germany, Japan, China," "15 speeches," "Joe Stillwell," "Fairfield county," "poll of T-L employees," "wins on 1st ballot," "$9,267 campaign," "116 speeches," "Downs without faces," "election day, victory margin 6,745," "buried," "Daniel Boorstin," "Lucky Roosevelt," "Library of Congress."

Subject

"Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987."

"Ambassadors--United States--Biography."

"Legislators--United States--Biography."

"Dramatists, American--20th century--Biography."

"Journalists--United States--Biography."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

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