What a girl I am! I’d bear writing in a book someday,
I think. —CLARE BOOTHE
On top of all the entanglements and disappointments of the first nine months of 1921, Clare was cast further into gloom by the marriage that fall of Lieutenant Lloyd Miller. He had been her first love, she told Ruth Balsam, and his choice now of a rich, older woman proved that man was “only a sublimated anthropoid ape.” That she had long ago lost interest in him was irrelevant. From her narcissistic viewpoint, he should have stayed loyal forever. In revenge she vowed to find a husband as soon as possible. “I’ll marry for money—lots of it. Damned if I’ll be a burden to my family much longer, and doubly damned if I’ll ever love any mere man. Money! I need it and the power it brings, and someday you shall hear my name spoken of as—famous.”1
The question remained as to what kind of career would expose her to the largest possible number of eligible men. At her mother’s suggestion, she turned again to the theater, this time opting for professional training at Clare Tree Major’s drama school in Manhattan.
To begin with, the freshman student was enthusiastic: “I have already been Henry V and Juliet, besides becoming a past master of the foils,” she wrote Major Kerry Skerrett, her latest Army officer, early in the new year. But her thespian ability was no better at nineteen than it had been at nine. She was an unconvincing geisha girl, even with a short black wig pulled over her long fair hair, and her grunting portrayal of a cave man, arms akimbo, elicited more laughter than applause.2
Ann begged Clare to persevere, while David mockingly assured her that she would never be an actress. By early May she had quit the school and was back in the “bromidic precincts” of Sound Beach. Yet her training was not entirely wasted. She learned enough about dialogue and production techniques to dash off six single-act plays, one of which was accepted by an amateur dramatic society.3
Ann Snyder, meanwhile, had her own future to think about. Dr. Austin, divorced now for over two years, had at last proposed, but she hesitated to accept. Though she liked the security he offered, she hated to give up what Clare called “the roving life she had been used to for so long.”4 Besides, marriage was bound to complicate her already strained relations with Joel Jacobs.
After much vacillation, she set May 17 as her wedding date. The ceremony was performed by a Presbyterian minister from Greenwich, in a hotel in Washington, D.C., far away from anyone who might know of the existence of William Boothe. On the marriage certificate, Ann described herself as a thirty-eight-year-old widow—a triple lie in that she was about to turn forty and had neither lost a husband nor indeed ever had one.5 To the end of his days, Dr. Austin would remain ignorant of Billy Boothe’s reappearance at Sound Beach in the spring of 1919.
Clare and David added an even more bizarre twist to the proceedings by acquiescing, as witnesses, in the fiction that their father was dead. They apparently did not question that he had once been married to and divorced from Ann. But David, his suspicions fueled by the furtiveness of the Washington ceremony, came to wonder, at least, about the divorce part. Some two decades later he would suggest to his sister that their mother’s union with Dr. Austin was “bigamously contracted.”6
In the years that followed the wedding, both children agreed that Ann got a little “cracked,” as she struggled to keep track of the multiple stories she had invented. Clare paid lip service to honesty as the greatest virtue while privately worrying that she had inherited Ann’s mendacity. “All my life I have been surrounded by lies, subterfuge, petty and gross deceptions,” she wrote. “I am completely trapped and can never free myself from all the traditional lies of my childhood. One lie leads to another necessary to support the first, the lies about me grow in multitude, but one thing I can do. I can tell no more! I can correct what lies now exist to the best of my ability: and in all new relations be truthful with everyone, and firstly myself.”7
Dr. and Mrs. Austin took a two-week honeymoon at the Greenbrier in West Virginia before returning to the house in Sound Beach (still partly owned by Riggie) and the modest life for which Ann had now settled. “She always told me to marry for money,” Clare mused, “but she didn’t do it herself.”8
In late fall Greenwich newspapers announced that the doctor would leave his practice for several months to study medical procedures abroad, and that his wife and “daughter” would accompany him. As far as the two last were concerned, the main purpose of the trip was to find a wealthy, perhaps even aristocratic European husband for Clare.
They embarked on the SS Majestic in mid-December with over a thousand other passengers. Among them were Pearl White, the silent screen star, and the Irish tenor John McCormack. Miss Boothe’s celebrity as former winner of a Riviera “beauty contest” could hardly compare with theirs. Yet she managed to attract the attention of shipboard reporters with a daily exhibition of her young swimsuited body in the Pompeian pool. By the end of the voyage Clare was playing to “a big gallery” of admiring fellow passengers.9
The travelers arrived in London on December 22, and Ann promptly set to work on two matrimonial prospects. They were the wealthy identical twins Maurice and Francis Burke-Roche, thirty-seven-year-old sons of the late Lord Fermoy and his divorced American wife, whom Ann had once met in Newport. Maurice, the elder and inheritor of the Fermoy title, was to become the grandfather of Diana, Princess of Wales.10 He showed no interest in Clare, but “Frank” sent her violets and promised to take her hunting when she returned from the Continent in three months’ time. Just before her departure, he presented her with an exquisite lace fan and a red, leather-bound diary. She wrote her first entry on January 1, 1923:
Had no difficulty whatsoever in landing Frank Roche! He told me right away that he loved me and wanted to marry me. Only the difference in our ages! As if that mattered … I shall think it over carefully, carefully, find out more, and in the spring perhaps I shall say “yes” and then—well Mrs. Francis Burke-Roche, or perhaps Lady Clare Fermoy. One can never know these things!
Already imagining herself in a tiara, she listed what she wanted to do before she was thirty-five.
1. Own one or several show horses, and show them, winning prizes!
2. Ride to hunt, sidesaddle with British aristocracy.
3. Have an ermine evening wrap, and a few fine jewels.
4. Weigh 120 pounds … 115 pounds.
5. Have long hair to my waist.
6. Own a yacht.
7. Own a fine roadster.
8. Have a maid.
9. Hear Riggie say he is proud of me, and loves me best in the world.
10. See Brother with a seat on the Exchange.
11. Tour the world on my honeymoon.
Realizing that most of these sounded materialistic, she appended a few “worth while things” to achieve by the same deadline:
1. Speak, read and write French, German, Spanish, Italian fluently.
2. Have written a book on the drama.
3. Have written several successful plays and novels, and translated modern French, German, Spanish or Italian ones.
4. Have written political articles and earned $10,000 on my own!!11
Nearly half of these wishes were to be fulfilled. Through marriage, Clare would indeed acquire ermine, jewels, a yacht, fine automobiles, and many servants. But she would not honeymoon around the globe or become fluent in foreign languages. Independently, she would write Broadway hits (though no work of dramaturgy) and articles without number, earning considerably more than ten thousand dollars over the next fifteen years. She would not win show horse prizes or hunt with the aristocracy. Her weight only once dropped below 120 pounds, and her hair never grew to her waist. David, far from shining on Wall Street, would become a spectacular failure. And her mother, not she, would always be Riggie’s chief love.
On January 2, 1923, Clare left England’s marrow-chilling damp for Paris and the first-class comforts of the Hôtel Meurice. The multifaceted city kindled her “fires of passion and evil and craving for luxury.”12 But she had little time to indulge them, because Dr. Austin was in a hurry to reach Germany.
In Berlin by the ninth, they took advantage of the Weimar Republic’s devalued currency and checked into regal accommodations, first at the Hotel Adlon on the fashionable Unter den Linden, then into a large apartment at 188 Kurfürstendamm.13
While Dr. Austin spent his days at the university studying new radiological and plastic-surgery techniques, Ann optimistically began to assemble a trousseau for the future Lady Clare. Her daughter, meanwhile, started riding instruction at the famed Tattersal’s stables. She wanted to be able to hunt at Frank’s side in March and to be admired one day as the best horsewoman on either side of the Atlantic.14
As the short winter days wore on, tensions between Dr. Austin and Clare began to show. Ever curious, she liked to linger over exhibits in museum galleries, while he kept up a steady pace. When he remonstrated, she complained that he was cold and selfish. More seriously, he objected to her eager participation in the libidinous low-life that made Berlin currently the most decadent capital in Europe. By Dr. Austin’s small-town New England standards, Clare stayed out too late with too many young men. Ann, in her turn, objected as bouquet after bouquet arrived at the apartment with cards for “Fräulein Boothe.”
There was a family confrontation, which ended in Clare going to bed “heartsick.” She declared in her diary that her mother did nothing for her, spiritually, mentally, or socially. She must look to her own welfare, acknowledging that she was more complicated than most women. “I was endowed with a masculine perception, a half-masculine mentality, and a thoroughly feminine method of living.” During bouts of insomnia, she schemed and planned her future success. “I shall make the world and his wife envy me! I shall be rich, loved, beautiful, and talented and have a title, and if with all that I am still unhappy … there’s no hope for such as I am on earth.”15
At other times she indulged in depressions and self-doubt. Watching her stepfather’s uninhibited clapping at a modern dance performance, Clare judged herself incapable of such direct emotion. Sometimes she feigned enthusiasm and optimism. She felt solitary, even amidst the attentions of countless companions. When a young German offered her presents in exchange for kisses, she reacted indignantly: “I give them. They can’t be bought!!!” A rebuffed suitor from the American Embassy told her that it was not right to play with men’s souls. Her conduct was “no better than that of a chorus girl who uses a man for a meal ticket!” Again she was outraged, but she admitted to herself that there was “a gleam of truth” in the comparison.16
Berlin in 1923 was Europe’s most avant-garde showcase of visual arts, opera, music, film, and drama. The sometime understudy to Mary Pickford had her theatrical eyes opened by an expressionistic production of Goethe’s Savonarola complete with skeleton sets and psychosuggestive costumes. She was further shocked by Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, in which Jack the Ripper cut out the womb of the prostitute Lulu and carried it across the stage in a basin.17
With growing political awareness, Clare saw that the creative fertility of Berlin’s artistic élite concealed a virulent new brand of nationalism, festering among ordinary Volk. In demonstration after demonstration that winter, huge crowds expressed hateful resentment of the reparations forced upon Germany by the Versailles Treaty signatories, and anger over France’s recent occupation of the Ruhr. The collapsing mark fueled a general hysteria. One mob on the steps of the Reichstag got so out of control that Clare was imprisoned in her nearby hotel.
She prophesied accurately that if the Germans ever managed to match their prewar number of men and resources, they would turn them on the French again. But she was less aware of the implications of Jews coming into Berlin “like locusts buying things,” and provoking “much feeling of anti-Semitism.” Hitler’s Munich putsch would occur in just eight months. Feverish and frightening though Berlin was, she loved the crisis atmosphere, and found that it suited her cool temperament. Politics was more fun than gambling. “I wouldn’t go to the Riviera now,” she wrote Kerry.18
On March 6, Dr. Austin left Berlin with his wife and stepdaughter for further research at the University of Vienna. As the train sped south, Clare’s thoughts drifted northward to Frank Burke-Roche, “my ladder to power, position, all those things.”19 She looked forward to a Paris rendezvous with him in a little over ten days, since he now had an executive position there with Morgan Guaranty. Meanwhile the Austrian capital, with its famous Spanish Riding School of Lippizaner horses, would enable her to continue her equestrian training.
To fill her time profitably, she duly practiced jumping, and found she preferred the graceful, if more dangerous, sidesaddle to riding astride. Invigorated by gravity-defying conquests of fences and hedges, she saw herself “climbing high, high in the world of men.” On March 14 she wrote confidently in her diary, “In one week, if things go as I plan them, I shall be Mrs. Francis Burke-Roche.”20
Next day her mother and the doctor set off for Italy, and Clare, making her first independent excursion as an adult, headed for France. Crossing the Tyrolean Alps, she was intoxicated by the sight of shimmering snow on the mountaintops, and recorded her tearful rapture “when out of the infinite twilight blue gleamed the first evening star.” She was rudely brought down to earth in Paris, when the room she had reserved at the Meurice turned out to be the hotel’s cheapest and most miserable. “Foolish me to do this silly, expensive, vain thing!!!” More distressing still, she could not find Frank anywhere. Someone told her that he traveled frequently on bank business. Perhaps, as a busy homme d’affaires, he had lost interest in her, a girl with neither dowry nor title. Clare chastised herself for not having thrown her arms around him when he first proposed.21
Clare Boothe at about twenty, 1923 (Illustration 9.1)
Through a week of mounting suspense, she distracted herself by shopping, sightseeing, and getting “an edge on” with a boozy, young crowd at the Café de Paris. Finally she received a wire from Frank, telling her to come on to London. Confidence restored, she set off at once. “If he doesn’t love me, he will be the first man who hasn’t … in many moons.”22
Clare checked into Claridges on the night of Monday, March 26, only to discover Frank was once more unavailable. Worried about her rapidly depleting funds, and desperate for reassuring companionship, she contacted Vernon Blunt, her Cambridge beau of two summers ago. He met her for tea at the Royal Air Force Club, and they went on to The Beggar’s Opera. When Frank finally caught up with her, two nights later, Clare’s doubts about him were devastatingly confirmed. “The one man I want will not fall in love with me.” They agreed to meet again, but she was not optimistic. “I know him for what he is—a conceited, spoiled, selfish young man, handsome, charming, but very, very stupid!”23
On the rebound next day, March 29, she unexpectedly met a heroic figure who was to obsess her romantic imagination and longing for the rest of her life. They saw each other at the Air Force Club, where she had gone again with Vernon. As he stood beside a fireplace in the club’s only room open to women, Clare was “smitten” by a combination of height, extraordinary good looks, and quiet presence. He wore an Army officer’s uniform with combat ribbons, leather boots, and gleaming belt. His wavy brown hair was parted on one side, and his mustache framed a strong, serious mouth.24
He was Julian Hamilton Cassan Simpson, a twenty-nine-year-old captain in Britain’s most exclusive regiment, the Grenadier Guards. Although Clare did not know it, he had heard about the scintillating Miss Boothe and asked Vernon to introduce him. Much to Blunt’s annoyance, he charmed her over tea and escorted her back to Claridges, on the pretext that it was right next to the Guards Club.
Physically drawn as she was to Julian, Clare’s mercenary instincts urged her not to give up entirely on Frank. In fact, Burke-Roche appeared that night at her hotel with a married friend, the Hon. Mary Craig Stopford. They arranged for Clare, who was now practically penniless, to move to the Stopfords’ house for Britain’s four-day Easter holiday. Frank promptly left again for Paris, and Julian also disappeared, leaving the faithful Blunt to entertain Clare.
For lack of competition Vernon was thus granted a few hours of intimacy, which warmed him still at the age of eighty-five, ailing in a Herefordshire cottage. “Our dalliance was short and sweet … Clare did say she had been made love to by Germans, French, Italians and Americans but my efforts were sweetest of all … If only I had dared to accept the promise of those lips!”25
Frank returned on Thursday, April 5, coincidentally on the same boat as the Austins. Clare was appalled by his indifference the following night when both Roche twins, along with Vernon and Lord Porchester, dined and danced with her at the 400 Club. Here, at the near pinnacle of London society, she made her move. “I threw myself at his head, and he turned me down with a bang. So that’s the end of that, I’m not as clever as I thought I was.”26
Captain Julian Simpson, c. 1923 (Illustration 9.2)
She was saved from total despair by Julian Simpson, who, clearly enraptured, kept her company as the time for departure drew near. On April 11, the day after celebrating her twentieth birthday, he drove her to Southampton. Their relationship had deepened. He talked of visiting her in Sound Beach soon. She rested her head on his shoulder, while he recited the whole of Francis Thompson’s long poem “The Hound of Heaven,” occasionally kissing her brow.
I fled Him down the nights and down the days
I fled Him, down the arches of the years
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind …27
The usual gaggle of society and celebrity reporters awaited the docking of the SS Majestic in New York on April 17, 1923. “Miss Boothe” tried to convince them of her seriousness by pretending that she planned a career in journalism. Still rankling over Frank’s rejection, she was well prepared when pressed on the subject of matrimony. “I don’t intend to marry a foreign nobleman, but will probably select a red-blooded American. Even though prices are low in Europe, I can’t afford a duke!”28