America’s First Renaissance Woman : Clare Boothe Luce: 1903-1987

“A great man is one sentence,” Clare Boothe Luce was fond of pronouncing. “History has no time for more than one sentence, and it is always a sentence that has an active verb.” In her own life, however, Luce insistently defied her own prescription, as she did so many assumptions. Too successful and too driven ever to confine herself to a single sentence, she completed an entire paragraph, baroque with ornamental periods, bristling with active verbs and packed with household names.

For more than a half-century, Luce was on whispering terms with history, the friend of Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, the wife of America’s most prominent publishing tycoon, the acquaintance of every President from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan. Yet even as she was winning over great men, she was overturning the very notion of the “great man” by storming all the old boys’ clubs of power without ever relinquishing her femininity. In the space of 20 years, while presiding as the darling of the society columns, she was managing editor of a national magazine, successful Broadway playwright, war correspondent, Congresswoman and ambassador.

In a sense, the only thing against Luce was her ability to play many roles and break all the rules, as a woman conquering what was primarily a man’s world. As one of the first great career women in American history, Luce found herself alternately patronized by those who saw her only as a woman and anathematized by those who saw only her career. For some, she was too elegant to be intelligent, for others too sharp-witted to be ladylike. An early feminist whose most famous play showed women at their cattiest, a formidable grande dame of high society who was one of its most caustic satirists, Luce made a career of eluding categories.

And of cultivating enemies. Because she switched hats so often, she was accused of changing her tastes with the seasons. Because she was so tireless and acid-tongued an evangelist for her opinions, and because her opinions were so fierce — especially a longtime hatred of Communism and an unswerving devotion to the Catholicism to which she converted in mid-life — she presented an irresistible target to her adversaries. And because she had the misfortune of being on easy terms with glamour as well as with success, she was sometimes accused of manipulating men, sometimes of being manipulated by them. While admirers gushed over her rare blend of cleverness and charm, detractors focused only on her deployment of those strengths. The ambiguous effect of being accosted by the demure whirlwind was, said one newspaper, like “being dynamited by angel cake.”

When Clare Boothe Luce died last week in Washington at the age of 84, the country lost the pre-eminent Renaissance woman of the century, a pioneer who had shown once and for all that “self-made woman” need not be a contradiction in terms. If greatness, as she once said to Churchill, means “to see, to say, to serve,” some measure of it surely belonged to so shrewd an observer, so pungent a speaker and so versatile a public servant.

The trajectory of Luce’s career was especially dramatic given the modesty of her origins. Her mother was a former chorus girl, her father a violinist who . deserted his family when his daughter was nine. Before long, however, Clare Boothe was decorating her resume. In 1913 she was Mary Pickford’s understudy in a play titled A Good Little Devil; by eleven she had written a play of her own; and at 16 she had run away from home to work in a factory making paper favors. When her mother remarried, she began to enjoy her first taste of society and was soon zestfully embracing all the paradoxes of getting ahead as a woman: at 18 she was working for the feminist cause, including distributing pamphlets urging women to “make themselves heard,” while just two years later she was accepting a convenient marriage to George Tuttle Brokaw, an unstable millionaire 23 years her senior who was, by her own characteristic admission, a ” bore.”

By the time she divorced Brokaw, after six years of marriage, she was assured of a handsome settlement to help her take on the world. That she promptly did. At a dinner party in 1929, she asked her host, Publishing Magnate Conde Nast, for a job. He, taking her for a social butterfly, refused. She, unwilling to take no for an answer, simply went to the offices of his main magazine, Vogue, sat down at an unoccupied desk and announced that she was ready to start work writing captions. Within four years she was managing editor of Nast’s Vanity Fair, a magazine that she shaped in her own smart and irreverent image, at once reveling in the emperor’s latest fashions and revealing them for what they really were.

Having mastered that world, she turned her attentions to another. In 1934 she was introduced to Henry Luce, a missionary’s son who was the co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc. She introduced him to an idea she had dreamed up, a glossy picture magazine to be known as LIFE. Just two days before their wedding, in November 1935, her first play, Abide with Me, opened on Broadway. In a review rewritten by the editor in chief and the playwright herself, the play was panned in TIME for its “tedious psychiatry.” It closed after only 36 performances.

Her next play fared better: The Women, a pitiless satire featuring 35 characters, all of them women and most of them harpies, sniping, gossiping and philandering their way through the beauty salons and the drawing rooms of Park Avenue. A showcase for its author’s diamond-sharp barbs and her wicked wit (“a frozen asset” is how a virgin describes herself in the play), it opened in December 1936, ran for more than 600 performances and was soon turned into a popular movie. Having proved herself on that front, Luce took off again, this time to tour the world and cover the war for LIFE.

Sometime during those turbulent years, it occurred to Luce that her gift for strong opinions and withering bons mots might actually be best suited to another stage, and in 1942 she was elected Connecticut’s first Congresswoman. Inevitably, those last two syllables dogged her in the largely all-male preserve of Washington, and her attempts to be taken seriously were not assisted by a typical poll that crowned her “the second best pair of legs in the country.”

Luce was not one to take such condescension calmly. Immovable in her beliefs and intrepid in expressing them, she quickly established herself as one of the most implacable foes of the New Deal and especially of any and all appeasement of the Soviet Union. When Vice President Henry Wallace suggested a postwar policy of opening the skies to every plane, Luce dubbed his brainchild “globaloney.” As for F.D.R., she said, he had “lied us into a war into which he should have led us.” Small wonder, then, that hers was one of the most hotly contested seats in the country when she sought, and won, re- election in 1944.

In part because of the death in a car accident of her only child Ann at the age of 19, she turned toward Catholicism and decided in 1946 not to run for re-election. Needless to say, a Luce retirement was hardly a rest: the years that followed found her explaining her conversion in a series of articles titled “The Real Reason”; memorably denouncing the Democrats as a speaker at the 1948 Republican National Convention; receiving an Oscar nomination in 1949 for her original story for the gentle comedy Come to the Stable, about two nuns setting up a hospital for children; and, in 1952, making 47 separate radio and TV appearances on behalf of Dwight Eisenhower. A 1953 Gallup poll showed that she was, after Eleanor Roosevelt, Queen Elizabeth II and Mamie Eisenhower, the most admired woman in the world.

That same year, she returned to the public stage as Washington’s emissary to Italy, the first American woman to be named ambassador to a major power. As usual, Luce made a spectacular entrance and exit: in her first major speech, just a couple of weeks before the Italian general election, she broke nearly every unwritten rule by eschewing diplomatic platitudes in favor of a pointed warning about the “grave consequences” for voters if they became “unhappy victims of totalitarianism of the right or of the left.” Four years later, she resigned for reasons of health: dust laced with lead arsenate had been flaking off the painted ceiling of her bedroom, gradually poisoning her.

As usual, the dramatic gestures and splashy headlines (ARSENIC AND OLD LUCE) obscured many of her more significant achievements in Rome. By the time she left, Luce had played an important role in persuading Italian businessmen to fight Communist labor domination; had helped resolve a decades-old dispute with the signing by Italy and Yugoslavia of the Trieste settlement in 1954; and had seen Italy join the United Nations. Luce’s predecessor had been recognized by exactly 2% of the Italian population; “La Luce” was known to 50%.

Although her departure from Rome marked the end of Luce’s official roles, she was not offstage for long. In the years that followed, the irrepressible campaigner mastered scuba diving, took up painting and constantly peppered the press with salty jeremiads. After her husband died in 1967, she pursued her interests as energetically as ever. In 1971 she dusted off a couple of past incarnations with a new play, Slam the Door Softly, that was characteristically full of tart one-liners (“I don’t want alimony; I want severance pay”). A year later she held a reception for President Richard Nixon at her oceanfront estate in Honolulu before he met with Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka of Japan. Luce held no position, official or otherwise, with the magazines her late husband founded, but she did not hesitate to let their editors know when she disagreed with them. In 1974, rallying behind an embattled Nixon, she castigated TIME in an unusually stinging letter that denounced its “editorial overinvestment in the destruction of the President.”

When the Republicans returned to Washington in 1981 after a four-year hiatus, so too did Luce, resuming her position on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Throughout her last years, the elder stateswoman held court among young Republicans as a kind of inspirational eminence, an unmistakable figure at every conservative function, silver-haired, bright- eyed, dripping pearls and epigrams. Of all the laurels bestowed upon her in recent years, perhaps the most fitting was the Sylvanus Thayer Award, West Point’s highest civilian honor, given to those who best embody the academy’s motto of “Duty, Honor, Country.”

In her final years Luce often seemed to miss the battles that had engaged her for so long, and she frequently bemoaned the fact that she had outlived all her “warm personal enemies.” In a sense, what she was really lamenting was that she had, in the end, outlasted controversy. By the time of her death last week, it no longer seemed quite so remarkable that one woman could occupy so many and such different seats of power. That, perhaps, was the greatest of all the sentences that Clare Boothe Luce left to history.