Curioso, fui ler agora, o que só vai ser publicado no NYTimes de domingo, uma longa resenha dessa extraordinária mulher, famosa por suas frases cortantes, a primeira embaixadora dos EUA, primeiro na Itália, e quase no Brasil, e que deixou um legado inesquecível, para o bem ou para o mal, para todos os que com ela conviveram.
Em todo caso, a resenha está muito bem feita, mas não pretendo comprar o livro, sequer folhear em livraria. A única coisa sobre o Brasil é a perspectiva de ter quase ido. Não sei do que escapamos, mas teria sido uma sensação.
O Brasil dos anos 1950 já tinha tantos problemas de instabilidade política e militar, que ela certamente seria mais uma fonte de instabilidade diplomática...
Enfim, leiam pelo menos a resenha que está muito boa. Vou tentar achar a resenha do primeiro volume. Essa mulher realmente fez história, mas apenas petite histoire...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
The Woman
‘Price of
Fame,’ by Sylvia Jukes Morris
By MAUREEN DOWDJULY
17, 2014
PRICE OF FAME
The
Honorable Clare Boothe Luce
By Sylvia Jukes Morris
Illustrated. 735 pp. Random House.
$35.
All Clare on the Western Front: With Fifth Army Group troops,
1945. Credit Courtesy of Sylvia Jukes Morris
Clare Boothe Luce has a lot to
answer for.
As the grande dame of the Republican
Party, she introduced Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger at her 1967 Christmas
cocktail party. As la belle dame sans merci of Manhattan’s smart set,
she took whatever she wanted from life without regard to moral consequences,
even after showily converting to Catholicism. As a glamorous World War II
correspondent, she wrote a book so self-regarding that Dorothy Parker titled
her review “All Clare on the Western Front.”
Her colleague at Vanity Fair in the
1930s, Helen Lawrenson, wrote about the author of the venomous 1936 play “The
Women”: “I can think of no one who aroused so much venom in members of her own
sex.”
“Throughout her life she had aimed
for the best of everything and usually gotten it,” Sylvia Jukes Morris writes
in the second volume of her exhaustive biography of the relentless enchantress
who had more hyphens in her résumé than Barbra Streisand. Clare Boothe Luce was
an actress-editrix-playwright-screenwriter-congresswoman-ambassador-presidential
adviser. And as the wife of Henry Luce, father of the Time empire, she was the
clever half of the predominant power couple of the mid-20th century, even
giving Luce many ideas for Life magazine, though she was barred from its
masthead.
She was “an accomplished seductress”
who married once, if not twice, for money and position, Morris writes. Yet Luce
always asserted that “in every marriage there are two marriages. His and hers.
His is better. . . . What man now calls woman’s natural feminine mentality is
the unnatural slave mentality he forced on her.”
In Morris’s first volume, “Rage for
Fame,” Luce — the illegitimate daughter of a violet-eyed, conniving Upper West
Side beauty who urged her daughter to use her blue eyes, blond hair and
luminous skin to ensnare wealthy men — is on the ascent, driven by “her
perpetual hunger for power in yet more spheres.”
She had few real friends, as
Lawrenson wrote, because “she seemed to trust no one, love no one.” Yet,
Lawrenson said, Luce “could enter a room where there were other women, more
beautiful, better dressed with better figures, and they faded into the
background, foils for her radiance.”
Luce flourished as a coquette and
courtesan in bows and ruffles, but she once told male diplomats at a
well-lubricated dinner: “Women are not interested in sex. All they want is
babies and security from men. Men are just too stupid to know it.” Her sometime
escort, the French artist Raymond Bret-Koch, appraised her this way: “It’s a
beautiful, well-constructed facade but without central heating.”
As “Price of Fame” begins, it’s 1943
and the diaphanous, carnivorous 39-year-old Luce is still on the rise. The
woman Morris calls “by far the smartest, most famous and most glamorous member
of the House of Representatives” is eluding clamoring reporters as she arrives
at Union Station to begin her term as a Connecticut Republican. She is also
growing more pompous, becoming the target of contemporaries like Dawn Powell,
who wrote “A Time to Be Born,” a piercing satire about the chilly blond climber
Amanda Keeler, who was “too successful, too arrogantly on top, to even need
good taste.”
Yet as the onetime Democrat became a
Republican star — called “Blondilocks” by The Bridgeport Herald — Luce retained
her talent to startle. Speaking to bejeweled Republican supporters at a dinner,
in the low, melodious pitch she diligently rehearsed, Luce observed, “One of
the troubles with the Republican Party is that it contains too many prehistoric
millionaires who wear too many orchids.” Luce preferred to wear a rose in a
small vial of water on the lapel of her custom-made suits.
When the Democratic representative J.
William Fulbright lectured her on the House floor about her views on national
security, she lectured him right back that he mixed up “infer” and “imply.” She
attacked Senator Harry Truman’s wife as “Payroll Bess” for taking a salary of
$4,500 a year to do her husband’s mail and edit committee reports. As
president, Truman banned “that woman,” as he called her, from the White House.
Luce accused Vice President Henry Wallace of “globaloney” and President
Roosevelt of lying his way into World War II. Roosevelt riposted that Luce was
a “sharp-tongued glamour girl of 40.”
After winning re-election, Luce went
on a newfangled foreign junket with a delegation from the military affairs
committee to visit the battlefields of Western Europe and collect some souvenirs:
the hearts of romance-starved military men. Just before photographers snapped
their shots, she would reverse her camouflage jacket to show the white lining,
looking, as one Army public relations officer recalled, like “a gorgeous
laughing snow bunny.”
She ensorcelled the married Lieut.
Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., in command of the Fifth Army in Italy. Soon she
was in a black silk suit on the front, having dinner before a roaring fire with
the handsome Truscott in his tent. As they sat on his regulation cot, he
grabbed her and importuned, “The most beautiful thing in this world is an
American division!”
As their romance blossomed, Truscott
wrote poetry to her — “I’m troubled by the ghosts that haunt this place / They
mock the skull beneath your lovely face” — and confessed, “I was drawn to you
as iron is drawn by a magnet and was almost as helpless.” When she went off
incommunicado with her general, the Pentagon dispatched a lieutenant to collect
her from a villa in Rome and return her to the Z.I. (Zone of the Interior,
i.e., the United States).
The ensuing decades, scarred by
family tragedy; marital trauma; bouts with “the dismals,” as she called her bad
mood swings; drug dependency; a hysterectomy at 44; arsenic poisoning; suicide
attempts; a brain tumor and her horror at her fading beauty; a dwindling pool
of male admirers and servant problems, make for fascinating but melancholy
reading.
Over the years, Morris pursued Luce,
who finally gave in and provided access to 460,000 items in the Library of
Congress, more than many presidents save. With her husband, the fellow
biographer Edmund Morris, Morris spent time with Luce at her home in Honolulu,
which the renowned hostess called her “fur-lined rut,” and once ingratiated
herself by filling in when Luce was lacking a full-time maid. “I don’t see much
hope for a country where you can’t get live-in servants,” Luce, who was very
hard on the servants — even once slapping the wife of one — grumpily told
Morris.
She had no small talk, just
pontification and a jutting jaw if anyone interrupted her monologues. And, when
Luce poured herself a big Scotch despite her ulcers, nicknamed Qaddafi and
Begin, Morris writes, “it seldom occurred to her to offer drinks to others.”
Morris is not great at stepping back
and analyzing. She just methodically piles up the facts. Two volumes would seem
excessive, but Luce’s pathological need to invent and reinvent herself, her
restless, acquisitive drive to conquer new worlds and her cascading calamities
end up providing plenty of vivid material.
Luce was not enamored of Congress.
Her combination of femininity and forcefulness — which Vogue called “analogous
to being dynamited by angel cake” — unnerved some colleagues, who ostracized
her. She complained to Pearl Buck about “myriad little snubs and discriminations”
dished out to “the girls.” (Her husband’s top editors also belittled her, and
curtailed coverage of her, despite his importunings. She had to settle for the
cover of Newsweek.) When a colleague in Congress tried to flatter Luce by
saying she had “a masculine mind,” she demurred: “Thought has no sex.” She was
touted as a possible vice-presidential candidate in 1944, but said: “Politics
is the refuge of second-class minds.”
Although called “The Woman Who Has
Everything,” she was lonely, and her marriage was ragged. Morris chronicles the
“heart trouble” of both Luces, to use the euphemism Time editors employed for
their boss’s infatuations. While she was recovering from her hysterectomy, Luce
got a visit from a lawyer sent by Harry, as her husband was known, telling her
that she “owed it” to Roman Catholicism to divorce him. But she clung to the
marriage, even though he had refused to have sex with her for eight years,
citing two events early in their relationship that he said made him impotent:
when she had not been impressed enough that he made $1 million a year, and when
she had been dismissive of his cherished membership in Yale’s Skull and Bones.
Although Luce had not been the most
nurturing mother (Harry said she had treated her daughter, Ann, “abysmally”
when the girl was growing up) she was shattered when the 19-year-old Stanford
student died in 1944 in a car accident in Palo Alto. She wandered into a
Catholic church in a haze of bitterness. It was the beginning of an intense
spiritual odyssey that would end with her conversion to Catholicism — her
instructor was Fulton J. Sheen, the monsignor with the piercing eyes who became
a television star in the 1950s. It was a move that alienated her from Harry’s
anti-Catholic Presbyterian missionary mother, who would have been appalled to
know that Luce asked Pope Pius XII to help persuade Harry to convert. It didn’t
work.
Collecting charismatic priests the
way she had once collected charismatic generals, Luce wrote religious
screenplays and pointed out that Hollywood “means Holy rood — the wood of the
Cross.” But she blamed the conversion for her inability to write with bite.
She moved on to fighting Communism.
She conjured the dangerous idea of “preventive war” long before Dick Cheney,
urging America to go to war with Russia. After she helped him in his campaign,
President Eisenhower made her the ambassador to Italy (the first woman to hold
the post). Despite some initial misogyny among Italian politicians and in the
newspapers — the leader of the Communist Party described her as “an aging
witch” — and a blunder when she urged Italians to vote against Communist pols,
she did well in the job, and Harry enjoyed being the “consort.” She became
known as “Machiavelli in a Schiaparelli.” But she was descending further into
the Valley of the Dolls, not realizing that some of her ailments might be
traced to the lead paint fragments in rosettes above her bed in the American
embassy residence in Rome that were dropping into her morning coffee and
possibly poisoning her.
Back in America, Harry tried to
leave her for Lady Jeanne Campbell, the granddaughter of the British press
titan Lord Beaverbrook. But she attempted suicide and he stayed, even though he
could not bear even to cuddle her anymore, and she called him “a moral leper.”
In an unsent letter to the younger Campbell, whom she referred to as “Baby,”
Luce summed it up this way: “Big Mama won’t let Big Poppa go.” (Campbell
married Norman Mailer instead.) In her “anecdotage,” as she termed it, Luce had
a six-year “flirtation” with LSD, and said one trip made her realize that God
didn’t like to be flirted with.
She agreed to be Eisenhower’s
ambassador to Brazil. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon fought the nomination,
arguing that she was qualified to be only a “political hatchet man.” One Ohio
senator even read into the record a poem by Sir William Watson entitled “The
Woman With the Serpent’s Tongue.” Luce was confirmed but then proved Morse’s
point when she made a crack, culled from Time researchers, about how her
tormentor had once been kicked in the head by a horse. In the ensuing furor,
Luce decided to drop out.
She proceeded to a new “enthusiasm,”
Henry Kissinger, even though she was known to tell people that “there existed a
relatively small group of wealthy Jews who met once a year in the greatest
secrecy and planned the strategy of world Jewry for the future.” (The one time
I met her, at a Time party in the ’80s, her opening gambit was: “Did you know
all the mischief in the world was caused by five Jewish men?”)
Harry, a heavy smoker and drinker,
died of a heart attack in 1967. Clare had once remarked that “widowhood is one
of the fringe benefits of marriage,” but hers, she said, was “a sort of deluxe
loneliness.”
Once, not long before she died in
1987 at age 84, felled by a brain tumor, Luce called Morris from her apartment
at the Watergate, sad because it was Saturday night and she had no “beaus.”
Morris asked her what kind of escort she would like. “A homosexual admiral
would be good,” Luce replied, “because at the end of the evening I wouldn’t
have to put out.”
Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed columnist
for The Times.
A version of this review appears in
print on July 20, 2014, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the
headline: The Woman
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