The Publisher (60 page)

As usual Luce kept up a grueling pace during his visit, moving from city to city and province to province gathering impressions that he eagerly and voluminously recorded and sent back to New York. Everywhere he went he found reasons for optimism. “Chiang Kai-shek, by a dramatically successful show of superior force, completed the political conquest of the vast hinterland of west China,” he wrote triumphantly from Yunnan early in his trip. When told by an American general that Chiang had unwisely ousted a provincial governor, Luce insisted that,
on the contrary, the “Gissimo did an important job very neatly.” Arriving in Chungking, he was showered with invitations from Kuomintang leaders, culminating in a dinner with Chiang and “a wonderful conversation … of a philosophical nature.” Late in the evening, after Chiang retired, Mme. Chiang continued the conversation, assuring Luce that “the Government now has a terrible responsibility not to disappoint the hopes of the people.” In Shanghai, later in the month, he wrote enthusiastically of the Kuomintang’s successes in restoring government authority. “This week,” he said, “the historically unparalleled drama of the reoccupation of East, South, and North China moved toward its climax.” He told Western journalists that he was “happily impressed,” and he praised Chiang’s “invincible effort.” The great question he had brought with him, Luce said, “was whether it would be reasonable to be optimistic about the future of China. So far it seems to me that the answer is definitely in the affirmative.”
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He was equally positive about the role U.S. forces were playing in China in helping the country recover from Japanese occupation. “American troops here have behaved excellently,” he wrote, and “should continue to be a credit to their country…. The Chinese … welcome the Americans as a sign of a new day and examples of a better way to live.” Other journalists wrote emphatically about the impatience of American soldiers to return home and the G.I.s’ lack of respect for or confidence in the Chinese forces. One of the American soldiers who traveled with Luce, he wrote, recited “facts unflattering to China.” Another “loudmouthed wise-cracker,” while passing a battalion of Chinese soldiers, shouted “the war’s over; so now you’re going to fight?” But Luce mostly ignored these comments. He continued to praise the high morale of the American troops and their commanders. “The desire of local Chinese officials to show their appreciation of Americans and to … make a good impression on them cannot be exaggerated,” he wrote from Tientsin.
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It seemed at times that Luce was almost willfully blind to the power of the Communist insurgency around him. Virtually none of his cables back to New York took notice of the growing strength of Mao’s forces in Manchuria and northern China; nor was there any significant mention of the corruption and bureaucratic incompetence of the Kuomintang that White had tried so adamantly to convey. And yet the Communists were far from invisible, even in Chungking. Luce attended a banquet there at which Mao himself was the guest of honor. The two men had a brief private conversation afterward. Luce wrote that Mao “was surprised to see me there and gazed at me with an intense but not unfriendly
curiosity. His remarks: polite grunts.” A few days later, after walking through “many a back-ally,” he met briefly with Zhou Enlai. “We had a nice talk—and completely frank.” But he drew no other conclusions from the meeting, and he expressed little interest in the hopeful but ultimately futile negotiations that were attempting to create a coalition government in which the Communists could participate. Nor did Luce express any doubts about the ability of Chiang and his government to prevail alone. “The biggest surprise, and the happiest,” he wrote to Mme. Chiang as he prepared to return to America, “was to find that the spirit of the people in North and East China is so strong and healthy. The people do not seem to be cowed or corrupted by eight years of life under enemy and puppet patrol. Their sense of patriotism is high and is closely related to their admiration for the Generalissimo.”
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Early in November, at a dinner Clare organized for his return to New York, Luce gave a long, rambling talk about his visit. He spoke hopefully about a new “understanding between the ‘West’ … and the ‘East,’” and about a strengthened relationship between the United States and China. He urged a “restoration of business activity,” and he spoke optimistically about the Kuomintang’s ability to fend off the challenge from the Communists. But to many in his audience, some of them followers of the much different assessments of the plight of China that were coming from the
New York Times
(and that had come recently from
Time
itself in Theodore White’s last dispatches), Luce’s optimism seemed unrealistic. “He seemed to be spending his time modifying his sentences to make sure that all of them contributed to the utmost to make the Generalissimo a hero,” Henry Wallace, one of the guests, recorded in his diary. Luce remained undeterred by the skeptics around him. He continued busily to press policy recommendations on officials in Washington. After a meeting with Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, he wrote smugly of the praise he had received from McCloy for a recent
Life
editorial lauding the progress of Chiang and his regime and encouraging continued American aid. China, he insisted, was now the test of the Truman administration’s ability to prove its strength and competence, “the opportunity for clear, forthright policy … and … for effective leadership at home.”
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The first years after the war were dark ones for Luce—and not just because of the great issues facing the world. It was also a time of turmoil in his marriage. In the aftermath of Ann Brokaw’s death, it was impossible for either Harry or Clare to live their once blithely separate lives,
maintaining a public relationship when useful while enjoying romantic escapes with others during their long periods apart. But Harry, who had never wholly reconciled himself to the end of his first marriage, also now found it difficult to end his second, despite its bleakness and despite his continuing relationship with Jean Dalrymple. Clare tried to bury herself in work—her reelection to Congress in 1944 and her busy life in Washington. But politics no longer interested her very much, and she found herself spending more and more time away from it, including an ill-fated stint as an actress in summer stock in Connecticut. Her aide, Albert Morano, took over the running of the office. (A local newspaper, noting Clare’s frequent absences from Washington, ran an acid story under a picture of Morano with a headline “Our Real Congressman,” which he eventually became.) Well before the expiration of her second term, she made it clear that she would not be a candidate again. But her departure from politics, combined with her continuing estrangement from Harry, drove her deeper into depression, what she described as a sense of worthlessness, mixed with a yearning for death. Twice, according to Harry, she attempted suicide—although he did not consider the attempts serious. As always, he was incapable of responding effectively to her obvious calls for attention and comfort. On some days she simply sat alone in a darkened room. On others she tried to resume her once-active social life, but never for very long. She referred to her depression as “Mr. Screwtape” (a demonic figure in a C. S. Lewis novel) with whom she was in continuous struggle.
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Clare’s depression and restlessness led her to a search for spiritual comfort—something else she realized she could not expect from Harry. Having tried and failed to right herself through intensive psychoanalysis, she turned instead to the Catholic Church and, at first unknown to her husband, began considering conversion. (She had previously been religiously inactive, although as a child she had occasionally been thrust into Episcopalian institutions.) She quickly attracted the attention of Monsignor Fulton Sheen, who had a renowned (and militantly conservative) radio program and who later became the archbishop of Rochester, New York. Sheen spent more time teaching Clare the precepts of the church than he had ever spent on any other convert, he later said. He stayed with her in part because she was an intelligent and inquisitive student, but also because he knew that capturing so eminent a woman for the church would enhance his own reputation. On February 16, 1946, before a handful of people (Harry not among them) at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she was baptized a Catholic. The editors at
Time
struggled to find a way to record the event—which was receiving wide attention across the country—and finally settled on a small political notice: “Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce’s ‘good and sufficient reason’ for deciding not to run for re-election in Connecticut suddenly became clear: she was received into the Roman Catholic Church.” Billings, who managed the sensitive story, wrote privately that the conversion was “logical for a half-crazy woman who must always be doing the bizarre to attract notice.” Harry, however, did not discourage her (despite his own lifelong commitment to the Presbyterian Church and despite his mother’s appalled reaction to Clare’s repudiation of the “glorious faith which is life to me”). On the contrary, he provided what Clare called the essential “aid and sympathy” that gave her the courage to take this step, and that “in the end … has saved my reason—and probably my life.”
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Clare’s conversion may have reduced her despair and what she called her intermittent “death wish.” But it did not bring her real peace. Looking back over her marriage, she began to see herself as the victim of Harry’s inability to express or even feel genuine love. “I have been cheated of my womanly inheritance, thru no fault of mine,” she wrote Harry in 1947. “The cheaters appear to me as a crew of selfish, cruel … usurpers, of whom you are seen to be the callous leader…. For it is not your desire to love any woman—least of all now, me, with your body, mind, and soul.” But Clare was less concerned about their shared past than about their cloudy future. She came to believe that Harry had supported her conversion because it would allow him to divorce her so that he could marry Jean Dalrymple. Clare wrote him: “You realized (I know now) that [the conversion] meant the end of any real husband and wife relationship…. You believed my conversion would mean
your
legal freedom…. You
assumed
a divorce would certainly follow … in a manner which left you on high moral grounds (‘Ah! The Catholic Church broke up our marriage!’).” Jean Dalrymple later recounted Harry’s claim to her that “in [Clare’s] religion, we are no longer married, because in her religion I’m still married to Lila. She cannot live with me as my wife.” But Clare’s lawyers, and the Catholic Church, argued otherwise—and Clare’s friends (most notably Bernard Baruch) urged her to fight Harry on the ground of what he cared about most, Time Inc. She demanded 51 percent of the company’s stock and $4 million. Harry unsurprisingly refused, and the prospect of a divorce—and remarriage—rapidly dimmed. The relationship with Jean sputtered along for a short while longer and then ended.
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For someone as remote and aloof as Harry, he was often surprisingly open about his marital problems in conversations with members of his senior staff, several of whom—eager to reveal their intimacy with Luce—promptly began circulating rumors about his private life, many of them false. Harry, they whispered, was considering suicide. He was being blackmailed by a woman. C. D. Jackson (the principal source of the rumors) claimed to have experienced a scene of “Clare on knees, holding Harry’s legs, big melodramatic tears and crying ‘It’s all because I couldn’t give you a baby that you don’t love me any more.’” (In reality it had been Harry who had not wanted her to have a baby.) Despite the falsehood of most of these rumors, Harry was almost as miserable as Clare. According to Billings, Luce wondered “why he doesn’t get any sympathy from his friends!” Billings was ready with his own answer:

And yet Billings also retained a shred of sympathy for his colleague of decades. “Poor lonely soul,” he wrote. “Unable to get any normal wholesome fun out of life and when he does try, it all goes rotten…. A tragic spectacle!”
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It was not just the legal and financial obstacles that kept Luce in his marriage. His bond with Clare—tattered and bruised as it was—remained significant even in the midst of some of their bitterest battles. Clare, at the end of a long, morose, and angry letter, nevertheless wrote that “I would with the utmost joy die for you this or any other night. For I never loved another, except my Ann, so deeply.” And Harry replied with, for him, remarkable warmth:

But these warm and loving sentiments seemed to be possible only in writing, and when they were apart. Harry was usually reserved and inarticulate in his actual conversations with his wife. And Clare wrote him that “I shall fail miserably, within a week if I permit myself any discussions with you on personal matters…. It is better, then, for quite a while … to confine ourselves to only such matters as interest you or me [except] our … ruined relations.” Their marriage continued—but for the most part because of a chilly loyalty, with occasional clumsy efforts at reconciliation, and with little warmth or intimacy. “With Clare no longer in Washington,” Billings wondered, “what does their private life together here become?” The answer was that they continued to remain apart more often than not; and that when they were together the only real passion came from Clare’s occasional eruptions of anger and misery. “Grover came in,” Billings wrote in the fall of 1947, “to confide that Clare was again on the rampage, and giving Harry hellish trouble.”
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