Woman of Serial Lives

By Melvin Maddocks

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE by Wilfrid Sheed; Dutton; 183 pages; $12.95

She was a famous beauty, an even more celebrated playwright, a magazine editor, an actress. She was the wife of Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time Inc. She had been a Congresswoman and was on her way to becoming an Ambassador. It was small wonder that when 18-year-old Wilfrid Sheed met her he was awestruck. Her intimidating husband, the novelist-critic recalls, "summed me up with brutal accuracy as someone he didn't have much to learn from, certainly not enough to crank up his famous stammer for." But Clare Boothe Luce was something else. At 46, she remained "drenchingly beautiful" and "slightly coquettish." Wilfrid was the son of Roman Catholic publishers, and Clare had become a famous convert to the Catholic Church. Religion was their touchstone, and at the Luce house in Ridgefield, Conn., she made him feel at home. After dinner with "Harry's power people," they would retire to his room for conversation. They talked about Robert Benchley and Noel Coward and the Catholic Church.

Clare was like "a very understanding nun" to the "tongue-tied Oscar Wilde," as Sheed remembers himself. On one occasion the understanding nun reclined uneventfully on the Sheed bed. When the summer came to an end, she gave her young friend a new Oldsmobile.

What 18-year-old would ever recover? Not Sheed; not quite, though he makes a heroic effort to reach back through the charm to the exemplary life. Clare Boothe Luce's legend, he reports, "could be studied like a Grecian urn, with her forever reaching or being reached for, depending on one's angle of vision." As for her admirers, "They were happy to celebrate her conversion, or her achievements as a Woman, or her spunky duels with F.D.R. in perpetuity. If she had gone out of existence like St. Christopher, they'd have kept her on their dashboards."

With good reason. A generation before the movement, Clare Boothe Luce displayed more ambition than Gloria Steinem put together. She led more serial lives and enjoyed more careers than an amalgam of Jane Fonda, Betty Friedan and Sandra Day O'Connor.

There is, for example, Clare the child actress, understudying Mary Pickford in a play called A Good Little Devil.

And Clare the young bride, brokered into marriage by her mother, growing up fast as the battered wife of alcoholic Millionaire George Brokaw.

And Clare the journalist, rising to the top of the masthead at Vanity Fair from 1931 to 1934.

And Clare the dramatist, author of The Women (1936), a Broadway comedy that still can bite.

And Clare the Congresswoman from Connecticut (1943-47) and the Ambassador to Italy (1953-56): "A celebrity ambassador can draw more attention than a diplomat should, but she can also publicize certain national interests better than a faceless functionary. Clare seems to have got this just about right and she made a noise only about the few things that mattered."

Sheed, bemused, recalls his father's suggested opening for this book: "She was the best of dames, she was the worst of dames." But, the son concludes, that summary is inaccurate: "She was good at just about everything." Yet this, too, is insufficient. He seeks further definition in 1977, when he journeys to Hawaii to replay house guest to Clare, now half-blinded by cataracts, living in "a fur-lined rut" but still capable of casting her spell.

He concludes that his witty, zealous subject is a pioneer, "the first" cutting her way through a man's world that most women were scared even to enter." As to what she is not--including the "bitch" her enemies accused her of being--Sheed is less sure. She is not "a heartless schemer," she is not a "cold climber." Certainly she is not just "Luce's woman." In the end, all he can do is shrug and quote his subject: " 'Do not defend me' is almost her heraldic motto, and I'll do my best not to."

Thus the Clare Boothe Luce who emerges in this lively, shrewd, indulgent book is, sui generis, a complicated and brilliant woman who has more or less equally enjoyed LSD and scuba diving and her honorary status as general in the U.S. Army. Sheed's book is complicated too. It is not, he ultimately concedes, a biography at all. Maybe, he suggests, "Notes on a Career" will do.

So it will. Sheed is one of the wittiest novelists, capable of turning out presumptive romans `a clef like Office Politics (about a certain liberal magazine or magazines) and Max Jamison (about a certain theater critic or critics). In the new book he mixes the storyteller's phrase with the historian's acuity: "The '20s did not entirely take place in the '20s"; President Ford is "like a relative you have to visit now and then, with nothing much to report. You know, he's still working at Prudential or Tool & Dye"; William F. Buckley's "more right-wing pieces tend to remind me of someone talking extra-loud to a rich relative who must be kept in a good humor. 'Big Government. I said, Big Government!'

As for the subject, if she emerges as less than an enigma she remains just as much of a wonder. The writer of great gifts who does not quite know what he wants his book to be circles a lady of great gifts who has not never quite known what she wanted her life to be. "Entertaining," she once said about herself. It still applies, to the achiever and her admirer. --By Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.