If we must suffer it is better to create the world in which
we suffer. —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
A decade had passed since Mrs. Alva Belmont forecast a bright future for Clare Boothe. Following the young woman’s progress since, she could hardly have approved of her quick abandonment of the National Woman’s Party or of her opportunistic marriage. Yet there was little a feminist could fault in Clare’s more recent career. After all, she had transformed herself in three and a half years from society divorcée to managing editor of one of the nation’s most admired periodicals.
Now, in mid-January 1933, news came that the eighty-year-old party leader had died in France. The body was shipped home for burial, and on February 11 Clare joined a crowd of NWP mourners at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. Throughout the service the picketing flag she had seen fluttering over so many equal rights demonstrations was held aloft in still and reverent homage. She would always try to live by its legend: Failure Is Impossible.1
Soon after the funeral, Bernard Baruch invited her to visit his Southern plantation. She hesitated, for fear of being compromised by the presence of Mrs. Baruch. Mark Sullivan persuaded her to put aside bourgeois scruples in favor of a change of scene. He felt that she was overworked and becoming dependent on cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol. That winter he had noticed her filling, then refilling, her brandy glass after dinner. “You are too fragile for that,” he warned. Fewer parties and more country air were what she needed.2
Clare arrived in Georgetown, South Carolina, by overnight train. Bernie’s estate was six miles to the northeast by car on Pawleys Island, a neck of land twenty miles long and fifteen wide between the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic Ocean. In the late nineteenth century its fertile soil had produced gargantuan crops of rice, but the fields now lay fallow, and the great houses had vanished or decayed. One was no more than a row of skeletal columns.3
Baruch had bought up seven of the original ten plantations, totaling some seventeen thousand acres. In 1928 he had built himself a ten-bedroom, antebellum-style mansion and called it “Hobcaw”—a local Indian word for “between the waters.” The house made up in remoteness what it lacked in architectural distinction. West of its white-columned portico and sloping lawn flowed the black, slow-moving Waccamaw. Along the reedy waterline, myriad oysters glistened in strong sunlight. Deer, fox, feral pigs, egrets, bald eagles, wild turkeys, and bull alligators populated the surrounding woods and swamps. Cypresses and live oaks festooned with Spanish moss towered over myrtle, yucca, and magnolia trees. Flourishing in the warm, moist air were head-high camellia and oleander bushes, blazing azaleas, blue water hyacinths, yellow jonquils, lilies, and gold jessamine.4
This was the most beautiful place in the world to Baruch. Not that he had much aesthetic sense. His “barony” was a banker’s idea of a winter retreat, furnished in dull greens and browns, and decorated with golf and hunting prints. But Clare was pleased to find it run like a luxury hotel, with freshly laid fires in every room and bars of French soap replaced daily. There were also plenty of black servants to wash and press her clothes or polish her shoes and riding boots the moment she took them off.5
The plantation’s languorous, sweet-scented atmosphere evoked memories of her Memphis childhood. “Its allure is that of the senses rather than the spirit,” she wrote Mark Sullivan in a letter absent-mindedly dated February 31. She began to sleep nine hours a night and felt her health and spirits reviving. Mischievously she told Paul Gallico that she dreamed of marrying “the Baron,” if something would only “happen to his wife.” During her waking hours she admitted to a “Napoleon complex” about developing the place and restoring the splendors of its past. The prospect made her feel stronger and more content.6
Bernie sought her company infrequently. He was out after quail most of the day and at night had Annie Baruch to consider. Clare managed to ensnare him for the occasional late-afternoon ride, a sunset walk along the riverbank, and Sunday service in a tiny Negro church. Seeing her lover for the first time away from the metropolitan North, she fancied she detected an inherent nobility in his character. “His barony becomes him,” she informed Mark Sullivan. “He looks like a lord in the saddle with a gun at his shoulder.”7
Clare and Bernard Baruch at Hobcaw, 1933 (Illustration 19.1)
Among her fellow guests was Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas. As well as being one of Baruch’s closest friends, he was, in Clare’s own admiring phrase, “a dead shot in a duck-blind.” The Senator’s exceptional marksmanship was hardly needed around the old rice paddies: wild fowl were so prodigious they obscured the sky. Clare rapidly recaptured the stalking skills she had learned over twenty years before in the Wisconsin woods and became a crack shot too.8
Visiting hunters and anglers provided most of the dishes served at Baruch’s round dining table—crab, clams, mullet, shad, bass, and partridge, supplemented by baked hams and homemade fruitcake. Replete and mellow with Baruch’s fine wines, guests would move after dinner to the sitting room for bridge and backgammon. Between hands they would indulge, to Clare’s enjoyment, in “the drone of political chitchat.” She asked Senator Robinson to send her copies of the Congressional Record, so that she could follow national debates more closely.9
All too quickly the country idyll was over. “I shall never be quite happy,” she admitted to Mark Sullivan, “until New York becomes a place to which I go often, rather than leave seldom.”10
On the evening of Friday, March 3, Clare departed with her host for Washington, D.C. The following morning, under overcast skies, they checked into the Carlton Hotel, where Bernie had a permanent suite. After breakfast and a change of clothes, they set off for their next destination, the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.11
Propriety would not permit Baruch to be seen at the inaugural with a woman not his wife. Clare had to be content to view the swearing in of Vice President Garner in the Senate Chamber. She took a seat in the front row of the gallery, a short way from the President-elect’s mother. Beneath them FDR discreetly looked up and smiled, whereupon Mrs. Roosevelt’s lips quivered, and a tear splashed onto her purple gown.12
Before going south, Clare had asked Miguel Covarrubias to do a cartoon of the event. It appeared somewhat prematurely, in the current issue of Vanity Fair. The double-page spread portrayed the new President standing in front of the Capitol, receiving a crown of laurels from Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Immediately behind towered a sulky-looking Eleanor Roosevelt. Elsewhere in the crowd clustered dozens of recognizable figures, among them outgoing Secretary of State Henry Stimson, incoming chief aide Louis Howe, General John Pershing, Walter Lippmann, J. P. Morgan, and, prominent in owlish spectacles, Bernard Baruch. High above, on either side of the dome, hovered two angels blowing trumpets. The face of the one to the left was unmistakably that of Clare Boothe Brokaw.
As a loving token and souvenir of the event, she presented Covarrubias’s original (purchased from the reluctant artist for three hundred dollars) to Baruch. Then, while he proceeded to ingratiate himself with the new administration, she looked to other men for companionship. These included Frank Altschul, a Wall Street financier, Sir William Wiseman, a member of British Intelligence, René de Chambrun, a New York lawyer, and Pare Lorentz, Vanity Fair’s movie critic. Lorentz, enthralled, wrote her that when he told her he loved her, “it is not in words but in every cell, every nerve.”13
Clare’s most serious affair in 1933 appears to have been with Paul Gallico. It had begun after, rather than during, their playwriting collaboration. She asked why he had not loved her “when I was there for you to take.” He said that as a married man of thirty-five he was at a loss to explain the mystery that transforms a professional associate into someone “so beloved that the world suddenly revolves around her.”14
The huge, bull-necked sportswriter became so obsessed with her that a call canceling just one lunch date was enough to throw him into a rage. Gallico said that he would like to sink his nails into her neck and “shred” her. But then he admitted to being disarmed by the thought of her “soft, lovely mouth … so touching, so kindling.”15
Gallico was not so carried away as to lose his acuity altogether. After an intense few weeks, he wrote to say he had noticed a curious rhythm to their romance. Whenever he professed love for Clare, her sexual feelings became blocked. There was too much masculinity in her and too much femininity in him, he said. It was the male element that prevented her from “surrendering to or enjoying purely emotional moments. You distrust … the sweetness.”16
Like Donald Freeman before him, Gallico discovered that Clare was disdainful of any man who made himself too easily available. Baruch was canny enough to stay somewhat aloof. That was reason enough for Clare to remain devoted. Unrequited love, in her case, was the kind most likely to last.
Clare Brokaw’s fourth issue as managing editor carried Vanity Fair’s first photoengraved color cover. It anticipated the end of Prohibition nine months hence and, in its exuberant vulgarity, announced the age of the Common Man. Pretzels spelling the magazine’s logo floated above a row of foaming beer mugs on a red and white check tablecloth.17
“The ‘beer’ cover,” gushed one reader, “has caused more comment and elicited more praise than any … I ever heard of.” Condé Nast went further, declaring the March number altogether “grand.”18 But its success was immediately followed by a slump in Vanity Fair’s advertising, which had dropped to its lowest level since 1919. For the frustrated publisher, this decline in revenue coincided with an impoverishment of his emotional life. Having recently divorced the sapphic Leslie, Nast was now a single man, and he resented Clare’s indifference to his sexual overtures. Perhaps as a result, he became less tolerant of her unorthodox work habits and management style. “I do not think you can do your job effectively with such a combined absence and lateness record as the sheets show for you during the past three months,” he wrote on March 27, adding drily, “I am not asking you to observe the established nine o’clock arrival hour, but an hour … between quarter of ten and ten.”19
He conceded that she might more effectively develop ideas and edit manuscripts at home. But her job also required teamwork, staff supervision, and consultations with authors and artists—not to mention a fair quotient of material from her own pen.
In the old days you were not only here regularly in the morning, but much more regularly in the afternoon, and at that time you were a fairly regular contributor of articles … For the past three or four months, you have contributed no articles … with all your talent, I don’t think you can be an editor, write books and become a playwright all at one time. One or another of these will fail.20
Irking Nast even more was Clare’s unconcealed contempt for his creative opinions and her dislike of taking orders. It was clear to him that she wanted absolute command of the magazine. He reminded her that she had only three years’ experience in publishing compared with his thirty. Besides, he had not always found her judgment “on specific material and broad editorial policies … entirely seasoned or dependable.”21
Clare confessed to being “impetuous and self-willed” but said that she was also a perfectionist. Nast should therefore make his objections before the magazine went to press, rather than afterwards.22 Another altercation followed when she revealed summer plans to attend an economic conference in Europe. She would go primarily as a reporter for Vanity Fair, then spend vacation time traveling and researching articles for syndication. This meant a combined absence of seven weeks. Nast forbade it, saying that the magazine’s financial position was too precarious. He requested that she take no more than twenty-one days and stay close to the city, so that he could consult her about the fall issues.23
From this moment Clare’s commitment to Vanity Fair started to evaporate. As usual when planning a change, she moved to a new apartment—this time in the Waldorf Towers. Then she rented a vacation cottage on Long Island, sent her daughter to camp at Lake Placid, and began plotting her future.24 Bill Hale left the magazine in August and took a job, as she had wanted to do, at The Washington Post.
By September she was ready to inform Nast of her desire for “an independent career.” To that end she requested a three-month leave of absence, beginning in November. She intended to spend most of it at The Cloister, a new resort at Sea Island, Georgia, where she hoped to develop her talent for writing plays.25
Clare arrived at the hotel in heavy rain on Monday morning, November 6. Her room was disappointingly small, with a damp smell of sea salt in the bedcovers. At once her depression of the previous winter returned. Feeling lonely and anxious about her forestalled career, she started to cry. Not until noon, when the sun emerged from rolling fog to reveal roses, palmettos, butterflies, and a crescent of golden sand, did her mood improve. Finding no congenial guests at the hotel, she looked elsewhere for company.26
As it happened, Eugene and Carlotta O’Neill lived quite close by, in a large beachfront hacienda called “Casa Genotta.” Clare had run a Steichen portrait of the playwright in the October issue of Vanity Fair and corresponded with him about it. They shared a mutual friend in George Jean Nathan. With such credits, she felt no compunction in sending word of her arrival at The Cloister. Carlotta’s diary entry showed little enthusiasm. “Claire [sic] Boothe Brokaw writes and asks if she can’t come to dinner!!? We politely say ‘Next Wednesday’!”27
Mrs. O’Neill, a fading beauty, was particularly wary of intrusions by attractive, younger women upon her husband’s daily regimen of work and exercise. “We are very simple people,” she wrote Clare disingenuously. “Wear a comfy frock.” Sensing reverse snobbism, Clare determined to “utterly confound them with my simplicity and amiability.”28
The O’Neills sent their driver to pick her up. She saw at once that building and furnishing their twenty-two-room mansion had left them short of cash. Eugene, dour and inscrutable, looked drained from rewriting, for the seventh time, the script of Days Without End, which he hoped would refill his depleted coffers. Clare sensed an “intangible walled inwardness” in the couple. But she took advantage of their reluctant hospitality to gauge the creative intelligence of the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Did he have more brains than she, or just greater powers of concentration? Might she at his age—forty-five—be equally successful and famous?29
It was encouraging for Clare to hear O’Neill frankly acknowledge that only half of the full-length plays he had shown to producers had been accepted, and quite a few of those optioned had not been staged. Before leaving she exercised her penchant for snooping in other people’s closets and found satin ribbons round the linens. Casa Genotta, she decided, was too meticulous an environment for a genius.30
For their part, her hosts thought Clare “dull” company. They knew none of the café society names she dropped and were glad to see her go. “She is pretty, well dressed, very New York,” Carlotta wrote afterwards, “ambitious, never loses a chance to get further on!”31
Back at The Cloister, Clare tried to match what O’Neill had told her of his disciplined workday, but her boundless energy prevented her. Instead of writing dialogue all morning, she scanned newspapers and composed lengthy letters to male admirers. One, to “Willie” Wiseman, invited him to join her for a few days, to see if “by some alchemy of love” he could “coordinate my scattered emotions and focus the tangent-flying lines of my mind.”32 In the afternoon, she played golf with the club pro, walked the beach, and swam.
Only after dinner did she bring a tired body and intellect to the creative task in hand. It was a play script called “The Wealth of Nations,” from a line by Richard Hovey:
The wealth of nations is men, not silk and cotton and gold.33
Her ambitious intent was to use the lives of an artist, a capitalist, and a worker to illustrate a paradoxical theme: that social progress is achieved more through misunderstandings than by intent to do good. Complete understanding between the classes stultifies action, kills cooperation, and deadens ambition. The idea was promising, but she could not focus enough to execute it. Dissatisfied and bored, she added “The Wealth of Nations” to her growing pile of incomplete manuscripts.34
While Hobcaw had whetted Clare’s appetite for the South, Sea Island gave her premonitions of being buried there. Exploring, she came upon an old graveyard that so captured her imagination she dreamed of lying in it one day. It was surrounded by a low spike fence and shrunken, silvery bushes. Sloping and fallen tombstones were sheltered by live oaks, whose dripping strands of moss reminded her of “witches’ hair.” She liked the idea of being memorialized by some such stone rather than ending up on a mausoleum shelf like “a jar of pickled peaches.” When she gave advance notice of her interment to the hotel deskman, he said, “Everybody says who sees it, but we ain’t had anybody coming back … yet.”35
Towards the end of her stay, Clare arranged an introduction to Sea Island’s developer, Howard Coffin. A widower of sixty, he had previously made a fortune in automobiles as well as cotton, and enjoyed entertaining the likes of Herbert Hoover and Charles Lindbergh at his mansion on neighboring Sapelo Island. Coffin was charmed enough to invite her for Christmas and New Year. Seeing, perhaps, yet another opportunity to capture an aging multimillionaire, Clare sought to create an instant family by getting her daughter and brother to join them.
One afternoon David went hunting, and she seized the opportunity to spend time alone with Coffin. Roaming the eleven-mile length of his domain, they passed rice and rye fields, palm and pecan groves, pine barrens, ponds, and herds of black cattle, before reaching the picturesque ruins of Château de Montillet, once home to Bonapartist refugees. Again Clare felt her “Napoleonic” complex surging. Here was another potential kingdom for her queenly hopes. But by nightfall it was clear that Coffin had no more than platonic interest in her.36
Clare returned to New York loveless and play less, to find that a new magazine called Esquire was seriously challenging Vanity Fair. It already had eight times more color pages and was seducing fiction writers with larger fees. She at once tendered her resignation, effective February 15, 1934. Nast was sorry to lose her, in spite of their differences, and asked if she might still be available as an advisory and contributing editor. To humor him she agreed, but in her own mind the break was final.
“I shall always feel about Vanity Fair the way a child might feel about an amiable, gifted but somewhat tipsy papa,” she wrote Miguel Covarrubias. It was possible to love it, but unwise to follow where it led. She must now apply herself with real dedication to that “independent career.”37