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Clare Booth Luce: 2

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Although she is seldom recalled today, Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) was easily among the best-known, most powerful, and most influential women of the 20th Century. She was also an extremely, extremely divisive figure: those who loved her were devoted in their affection; those who hated her were devoted in their ire.

By some accounts an illegitimate child (something that Sheed does not note in his work), Clare had an impoverished childhood with an absentee father--a fact that did not prevent her mother, Anna Snyder, from promoting Clare into a wealthy marriage to Geogre Brokaw, a wealthy man whose social position seemed likely to open still further doors. The marriage was a disaster and ended in divorce in 1929, but it did have the effect of leaving Clare financially comfortable.

Following the divorce, Clare entered the magazine publishing industry. Her critics often claimed that she got her foot in door by virtue of her good looks; there may be some truth to this, but there is no denying the fact that she was both talented and driven, and by the early 1930s she was a force with which to be reckoned at such notable magazines as VOGUE and VANITY FAIR, venues in which her combination of personal glamour, way with a quip, and steel-trap intelligence sparkled wickedly. In 1935 she married Harry Luce, owner of such magazines as TIME, and brought with her to the marriage the idea for LIFE MAGAZINE, which in many ways was "the" American magazine for some four decades.

In 1936 she also debuted on Broadway as the author of the legendary comedy THE WOMEN, a poison-pen letter to her own gender which proved a massive smash and continues to enjoy tremendous fame to this day; she was also among the savvy backers of such stage smashes as LIFE WITH FATHER and OKLAHOMA. But her marriage to Luce gradually pulled Clare away from both the theatre and her own literary ambitions; although she would write several more plays, a few books, and numerous articles, she began to drift into politics, becoming a two-term congresswoman during the height of World War II, the ambassador to Italy during the touchy 1950s, and one of the most implacable foes of Soviet-era communism imaginable.

Through it all she retained her sense of personal glamour, and it was this fact more than other that seemed to outrage her foes. To many on the left, she was everything bad about the right, a rich woman who slept her way to the top, whose politics were founded more on her husband's hard-edged business sense than her own independent thought, her from-the-lecturn quips more a matter of personal emnity than intellectual depth. But say what you like about Clare Boothe Luce, she was never, ever dull.

Wilfrid Sheed, an "uptown" author in the same sense as Tom Wolf and Dominick Dunne, first met Clare Boothe Luce in 1949 and maintained a running friendship with her over the course of the next forty years. Sheed is clearly among those who loved her with devotion, and CLARE BOOTHE LUCE comes from that standpoint; at the same time, however, he is hardly blind to the foibles that made the lady so fascinating, and his book--which he freely describes as less biography than personal impression--presents her in all her contradictions.

From Sheed's point of view, Clare Boothe Luce was alternately a glamour queen and a hardnosed pragmatist; a brilliant author who ultimately wasted her talents; a noted political thinker whose private life seldom reflected the extremes of her speeches; and above all a witty and highly intelligent creature who found herself trapped in what was then a man's world and struggled to find a balance between social roles and her own ambitions, blazing a trail for the feminists who came afterward. It is a vivid portrait, and Sheed writes of his subject in an arresting manner.

At the same time, however, there's no getting around the fact that Sheed is biased in favor of his subject and her politics, the latter of which becomes increasingly clear as the book progresses. He is also a rather sloppy writer with a gift for turning an awkward phrase that forces you to occasionally re-read a phrase or sentence in order to make sense of its structure. It is perhaps typical of the book that Sheed refers to the central character of THE WOMEN as "Mary Haynes" when the character is in fact named "Mary Haines." It may seem a very slight point, but given the play's central position in Clare Boothe Luce's life and career it is an error that hardly inspires confidence in the author's claims of factual account--and it is therefore fortunate that Sheed goes out of his way to eshew any idea that this is indeed a factual account.

When all is said and done, CLARE BOOTHE LUCE is a rather loosely written portrait of the woman that Sheed himself knew rather than a balanced look at the woman in all her dimensions. But although limited in scope, it is an intriguing portrait. Recommended, but perhaps best taken with several grains of salt.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer