The Irregulars (15 page)

Rogers rarely stayed in one place for long and flitted between several grand residences, including a sumptuous town house on Manhattan’s East 66th Street. She spent much of her time in New York, where she chaired the Medical and Surgical Relief Committee, a relief organization she founded in 1940 to send medical supplies to England and the war zones of Allied nations. Beginning with six New York doctors, she raised over a million dollars and expanded her organization until it was nationwide, with more than four hundred volunteer doctors and two hundred nurses from hospitals and pharmaceutical companies all over the country, working to send drugs, vitamins, first aid kits, and surgical instruments to those in need all over the world. She also invited shell-shocked navy pilots to stay at her home in Virginia, inviting four at a time, believing that the beautiful surroundings would help with their rehabilitation. Although earnest about her work, she had a delicate constitution and a short attention span. She had no interest in marrying again but, spoiled and willful, demanded her lovers to be at her beck and call. It did not take long for Dahl to discover that she could be temperamental and controlling. She played musical chairs with men and seemed to have secret lovers tucked away in every European capital. An incorrigible flirt himself, Dahl was not particularly disturbed. He enjoyed being a part of her swell crowd and made the most of it.

When he had exhausted the city’s supply of heiresses, Dahl chased actresses. For a time, he dated the young English actress Leonora Corbett, who had made a name for herself on the London stage in such plays as
Lady in Waiting
with Robert Donat and
Other People’s Lives
with Maurice Evans. During the air raids in London in 1940, she had bravely stayed in the city to perform
Under Your Hat
and entertained the troops at British military camps. She was playing her first role in America, starring in a Broadway production of
Blithe Spirit
, and Dahl went to New York as often as he could to see her. Corbett was sensible enough to break it off with Dahl and soon thereafter became engaged to a vice president of NBC.

Dahl’s superiors watched his rake’s progress with grudging admiration. A certain amount of hanky-panky was condoned, especially when it was for a good cause. Down through the ages, royal courts had relied on pillow talk to discover which way the king was leaning, and the British Embassy was not above resorting to that time-honored tradition. At the next embassy dinner, Dahl was intentionally seated next to the glamorous blond Clare Boothe Luce, the new Republican congresswoman from Connecticut, who was married to Henry Luce, the powerful
Time
and
Life
publisher, though he was rarely seen at her side after she took office. They had been married almost ten years by then, at about the time indifference often sets in, and it was said that her Victorian-era husband preferred the quiet comforts of his country estate, while she liked to entertain company in her Washington hotel suite. As expected, she immediately latched onto Dahl and monopolized his attention throughout the evening and, from all reports, well beyond that. “She went for Roald because he was handsome, available, and a good dinner companion,” said Fath, who shrugged off the wartime fling as “just one of those things.”

There was nothing casual about the British authorities’ interest in Mrs. Luce, however. By 1943 both Luces were in disrepute for their antiempire attitudes and frequent attacks on Churchill and were on a list of “enemies” who were considered a threat to the British Empire. Their recent articles about British India, portraying the colonial record as one of brutal oppression, had only fueled the hostilities. As Rex Benson, Halifax’s confidential adviser, noted in his diary: “She is a clever hard-boiled ambitious young lady backed by a wrong-thinking husband for whom success as a big newspaper man & money has & probably is still the main object of living. The less these two practise the art of statesmanship the better.” According to Marsh, at a dinner given by Mrs. Ogden Reid some two years earlier, Mrs. Luce had voiced her violent opposition to Roosevelt, saying that she distrusted him so utterly that she could never be for anything he was for, no matter what it was, including Lend-Lease. Her position was so extreme that even Wendell Willkie had reproached her. Shocked that anyone so fragile and lovely looking could be so venomous, he had murmured, “Clare, you just can’t be that way.”

With an actress’s talent for publicity and playwright’s flair for polished invective, Mrs. Luce had been making a real nuisance of herself. She had toured Europe alone for five weeks in 1940 and written up her personal observations as a book entitled
Europe in Spring
—Dorothy Parker famously called her review “All Clare on the Western Front”—which immediately became a best seller and validated her as an expert on the war. Both she and her husband had campaigned vigorously for Willkie, the Indiana dark horse Republican candidate for president that year, and propelled by her acid tongue, Mrs. Luce had become a political force. Not only did she get herself elected to Congress in 1942, she had managed to snag a seat on the House Military Affairs Committee.

In her maiden speech on February 9, 1943, she attacked Vice President Wallace, who was advocating postwar freedom of the skies and coined an infamous put-down to dismiss his ideas: “But much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, globaloney. Mr. Wallace’s warp of sense and his woof of
non
sense is a very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a postwar world.”

She proceeded to ridicule an article Wallace had written in that month’s edition of
American Magazine
, entitled “What We Will Get Out of the War,” in which he called for the establishment of a United Nations authority to control “a network of globe-girdling airways,” and the internationalization of all airports. In the same way that the advent of railways had opened up the western frontier in America, Wallace believed the new age of air travel promised to unlock the vast resources of the undeveloped regions of the world, including Asia, Africa, and South America. Transatlantic air travel would open new outlets for trade and new opportunities for industry, and it would create an enormous market for aircraft manufacturing and air transport on a worldwide scale. For the sake of the advancement of aviation, and all that it could do for the world’s economies, he opposed carving up the skies into “spheres of influence,” as many private interests desired. “Freedom of the air,” he wrote, “means to the world of the future what freedom of the sea meant to the world of the past.”

In her thirty-minute address “America’s Destiny in the Air,” Mrs. Luce argued that Wallace’s acceptance of the doctrine of “freedom of the air” was as woolly headed as most of his philosophy and would mean surrendering strategic control of the skies to Britain in some misguided plea for “internationalization.” Practically speaking, it amounted to cutting the throat of America’s own air industry. Not only would it give the semi-government-owned British Imperial Airways free access to U.S. airports but also would Britain them to expand its air routes using the very Lend-Lease planes America had sent its ally in its hour of need. It was already clear to far-thinking people that as soon as the armistice came, there would be a race between the Americans and the British for control of the strategic air routes and bases of the world. Inevitably the victors of this war would divide the spoils, in this case the “new frontiers” opened up by the airplane. “The future of every nation in the air today is being given shape inexorably by military and civilian policies now being practiced in the very middle of a great war,” she declared theatrically. The best way to keep out of another war was to maintain the policy of “air sovereignty”—the system in place before the war, by which each nation denied the airplanes of other nations the right to fly over its airspace save by special permission or treaty—and to keep “America on wings all over the world.”

All the American press caught was the term “globaloney” being hurled at the vice president like a cream pie in the face. The speech created quite a stir. The House chamber was usually fairly empty in the late afternoon hour when she delivered her address, but curiosity about the ravishing blond legislator had brought the members out in force. When she drew blood with her opening remarks, the gentlewoman from Connecticut made herself infamous on the Hill. The Washington press had a field day, as did the cartoonists. Walter Lippmann advised Isaiah Berlin not to attach too much importance to Mrs. Luce’s speech, and said that the current joke in congressional circles was that there had been much “clarification of loose thinking.” At the same time Wallace’s lofty ideals and admirable intentions garnered worldwide attention, and he ultimately included the address in a collection, entitled
Democracy Reborn
.

This was not the first time Wallace and the Luces had crossed swords. Clare’s jealous nationalist position was perfectly in keeping with her husband’s dogma of postwar American hegemony first outlined in “The American Century,” a
Life
editorial published in 1941, in which he explained that intervention would allow America to wrest strategic control of the war from Britain and enable the nation “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit.” Luce was aiming at another American Manifest Destiny, in the form of postwar domination of the world by U.S. industry. Wallace had found the
Life
editorial’s tone objectionable and had delivered a strongly worded rebuttal: “Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,’” he wrote. “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come out of this war—can and must be the century of the common man.”

The British had also been deeply shocked by Henry Luce’s strident call upon the American people “to assume leadership of the world,” particularly as it implied the denouement of the British Empire. Now his wife’s shrill cry for “air imperialism” was cause for fresh alarm. They registered Mrs. Luce’s threatening tone, as they had for some time been pressing the United States for internationalization of air bases, some of which had become vital crossroads of the sky and were key to the future of their foreign trade. She was effectively resisting any of the proposed measures that might limit the possible future expansion of American airways.

Long before Congresswoman Luce panned the British air routes, the Air Ministry and Foreign Office had warned of a bleak future for British carriers. “All bets are off at the end of the war,” Harold Balfour, the British undersecretary for air, had told the House of Commons in December 1942. According to the existing agreements under which the Lend-Lease bases had been built on British territories—extending all the way from Newfoundland to Bermuda, across central Africa, as well as in the Pacific—six months after the war was over, they would be closed to British use. Pan Am was already flying to more than sixty countries, and the Americans would inevitably demand continued use of the bases they had constructed at great expense, estimated at roughly one billion dollars. The Americans had more money, and more modern aircraft. Making matters worse, in recent years the British had all but abandoned manufacturing transport planes in order to focus on the production of military machines, and at the end of the war they would not have a single modern passenger plane in production.

In her inimitable way, Clare Boothe Luce had touched a nerve. The British government urgently needed to negotiate an equitable settlement with the United States or else lose the lucrative new market in transatlantic trade and travel. If they did not act soon, the air controversy could become potentially explosive, even in a time of war. “Otherwise there will be friction,” predicted the Honorable W.R.D. Perkins, Conservative member of Parliament, during a speech in late 1942, “and we might even have
another Boston tea party
.”

Adding insult to injury, two days after the congresswoman’s fiery address, Drew Pearson reported in his “Merry-Go-Round” column that the State Department had cleared her speech and, while not objecting to any of her criticisms of the British, had blue-penciled some of her caustic remarks about Russia. Isaiah Berlin duly relayed Mrs. Luce’s remarks and the Pearson column to London in the “Weekly Political Summary,” his brilliant press and opinion surveys for the Foreign Office, which were a favorite of Churchill’s, even though they were always signed and sent out under Halifax’s name. Mrs. Luce had succeeded “in stirring up strife among the allies,” Berlin reported, adding as an aside that “globaloney” was “a catchword already being ridden to death by the isolationist press.” The air negotiations promised to be an ongoing source of turbulence and were something the War Cabinet would need to consider. In the meantime, young Dahl was instructed to romance Clare, who was thirteen years his senior, to see if, with the right kind of encouragement, she could warm to the British position.

Dahl complained to Fath that he had received some pretty steep orders in his time, but this topped them all. According to Fath, Dahl groaned: “I am all fucked out. That goddam woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to another for three goddam nights.” Dahl claimed he had gone back to the ambassador that morning and attempted to plead his case: “‘You know it’s a great assignment, but I just can’t go on…’ And the Ambassador said, ‘Roald, did you see the Charles Laughton movie of Henry VIII?’” When Dahl said yes, Halifax continued: “‘ Well, do you remember the scene with Henry going into the bedroom with Anne of Cleves, and he turns and says, “the things I’ve done for England”? Well, that’s what you’ve got to do.’”

“She was something else,” recalled Antoinette Marsh. “Roald would talk about her, but I think he was always careful not to say too much, at least not in front of me. But I knew he had slept with her, which interested me because she was much older than him.”