May there never be in my house a woman knowing more
than a woman ought to know. —EURIPIDES
Harry and Clare arrived in Cuba on Monday, December 2, to begin a two-month honeymoon. Grant Mason had offered them his staffed villa at Jaimanitas, so they took along little Ann and one of her friends. The girls would stay until school reopened early in the new year.
Low temperatures and persistent rain kept them indoors for most of the first three weeks. During the day they tried to keep warm by playing table tennis. In the evening they bundled up in the Masons’ projection room to watch silent movies or sat reading in the stone-tiled, sunken living room.1 At least there were plenty of books. Clare worked her way through “heavy stuff”—Cuban and Greek history, as well as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Voltaire, and Goethe. Despite the fact that she now had a permanent bedmate, she remained insomniac and wrote to thank Dr. Rosenbluth for his steady supply of “little pills.”2
As Christmas approached the weather improved. Sunlit palms outside lent incongruity to a fir tree in the living room, which Clare had hung with imitation snowballs. Feeling a need for exercise, the Luces patronized a nearby golf course, where Harry quickly learned that his wife had not spent five years married to an amateur champion for nothing. She soundly beat him on the links and discovered what his colleagues already knew: Henry Luce hated to lose. “His whole personality changed. He became angry.” In the interest of domestic harmony, she decided never to swing a club with him again.3
Mr. and Mrs. Henry Luce on honeymoon, Cuba, 1935–1936 (Illustration 23.1)
Instead they devoted most of their leisure time to the beach. But even in the sea, Clare’s effortless athleticism overshadowed Harry. He soon began to miss his publishing routine and welcomed a visit from Ralph Ingersoll, now Time Inc.’s general manager. Ingersoll was, in Harry’s opinion, the one man on the company payroll with “publisher potential,” and as such worth only five thousand dollars less than the fifty thousand he paid himself. The two men had more in common than journalism and hair loss: they shared a roving eye. Although Harry’s was temporarily fixed on Clare, Ralph, whose wife had tuberculosis, had recently started an affair with Lillian Hellman.4
Ingersoll wanted to discuss a project of momentous import. He said he and Dan Longwell had been exploring the feasibility of a magazine devoted almost entirely to pictures and felt the time had come to produce one.
The proposition was not novel to Harry—even less so to Clare, listening silently as the two men talked. In 1933 Luce had asked a senior Time editor, John Martin, to prepare dummies for a heavily illustrated, high-circulation “weekly or fortnightly current events magazine.” He explicitly wanted to aim it “at lowbrows.” None of Martin’s mock-ups had satisfied him, however, and the project was discontinued.5
Ingersoll proposed reviving it with himself as developer. He argued that improvements in coated stock had made a mass-market picture periodical commercially viable. He prophesied sales of as many as five million copies in three years.
Clare still said nothing. She was not sure how far she should insinuate her editorial expertise into Harry’s affairs. He paced back and forth, characteristically frowning and rubbing an ear in concentration, struggling with his traditional belief that news is copy. Photographs alone were not substantial enough to hold the average reader. “You can’t make them tell stories.” Ingersoll disagreed, pointing out that illustrations were doing just that in Fortune, albeit on a small scale. Finally Luce conceded that Time Inc. was sound enough to risk a succès d’estime. Starting something from scratch again “could be fun.”6
This was just the kind of creative challenge Clare lusted for. She felt she had priority on the idea. Five years before, in the spring of 1931, she had written a long memo to Condé Nast advising him to turn Vanity Fair into a picture weekly profuse with candid camera shots, patterned on the Parisian Vu. Alternatively, he could buy and adapt the old, ailing humor periodical Life.
It [the new magazine] would … contain some of the editorial elements of Time, Fortune, and even Vanity Fair, plus its own special angle, which would be reporting … the most interesting and exciting news, in photographs, and interpreting it editorially through accompanying articles by capable writers and journalists … For “timely” reasons, of course, it should remain mainly a picture book, but so edited as to give the impression that it contained a great deal more literary matter than it actually would.7
Nothing had come of these suggestions. Before her February 1934 departure as managing editor, Clare had submitted a list of “Last Thoughts,” raising the subject again. She tried to convince Nast that his corporate solvency could best be assured by a “90% pictorial weekly covering all phases of contemporary American life.” She had great faith “in the photographic formula” and warned that if he did not explore it, “somebody else will.”8
Her admonition was somewhat disingenuous. She must have known that John Martin, an occasional lunch companion whom she once called “the green-eyed boy wonder of the publishing world,” was working on pictorial dummies for Time Inc. Now, as 1935 gave way to 1936, Clare saw the initiative passing to Ingersoll. The most she could hope was that Harry would allow her to work in some capacity on his as yet untitled venture. Enviously, she began to hear reports that Ralph was optioning photographs from picture agencies and news organizations, recruiting star photographers, and predicting a revolution in “the journalistic machinery of the world.”9
Towards the end of January, the newlyweds rented a yacht for $2,500 and left Havana on a two-week Caribbean cruise. A storm blew up the first night out. Clare, unable to think of eating, lay on deck watching the stars lurch crazily. The cook was seasick too, but Harry, who seemed to have an iron stomach, insisted on being served a formal, three-course dinner.10
Before sailing, he had stocked up on European picture periodicals. Clare recovered quickly enough to help clip them and pin experimental layouts to the walls.11 It soon became obvious that she understood page design as well as, if not better than, he did. This, coupled with her superiority at golf and swimming, seems to have threatened his ego and affected his sexual prowess.
They were making love in calmer seas when he was overcome by what Clare later called “one of those curious failures of the flesh which … became (vis-à-vis me) a permanent condition.” Embarrassed and dismayed, he pointed at the waning, watery moon. “It’s a lousy moon. Maybe tomorrow night it will be clear, and I’ll do better.”
Too vain, even twenty-five years later, to accept her own possible share of the responsibility, Clare remembered the conflicted Harry as subject to lunar lapses—“a moon-minded man.”12
In early February the Luces stopped off in the low country of South Carolina on their way home. They had heard from a real estate agent that there was a large property for sale outside Charleston for $150,000. Clare anticipated something like Howard Coffin’s Sapelo, or Bernard Baruch’s Hobcaw, lush with semi-tropical flora overlooking water.
During a twenty-five-mile boat voyage along the west branch of the Cooper River, the agent told them it was a former colonial rice and indigo plantation. Henry Laurens, president of the First Provincial Congress, had owned it in the late eighteenth century and named it “Mepkin,” a local Indian word for “serene and lovely.”13
Neither adjective seemed appropriate as they neared the estate in a freak sleet storm. Landing at the foot of a bluff, they climbed to the top and found no house, no garden, no lawn, only a dilapidated shooting lodge. Too cold to explore the rest of the 7,200 acres, Clare was about to leave when she found herself transfixed by clumps of ancient live oaks soaring towards the overcast sky. Girlhood memories of the Deep South came flooding back. “This is it,” she said.14
On Monday, February 10, Harry returned to the Chrysler Building with forty-eight bottles of Cuban perfume for his female staff. John Billings, who had been in sole charge of Time for over two months, would have appreciated a bottle of something himself, but he received no more than a pat on the shoulder. Noting Harry’s tan and general good health, he wrote in his diary, “Evidently his new wife agrees with him.”15
Though the boss was in a carefree mood that first day, he soon annoyed the managing editor by scribbling on what had been considered finished copy. “Things went so pleasantly when Luce was away. Now that he is back, he feels he must complain and criticize.” Billings blamed Clare for making Harry “utterly cold and impersonal … She’s just a yellow-haired bitch who is spending his money like water.”16
The couple’s first Manhattan home could certainly be counted an extravagance at $7,300 a year. It was a fifteen-room duplex in the River House, at 435 East Fifty-second Street, furnished with French, English, and Italian antiques. At most Harry could use it three nights a week, since his tax situation still required that he maintain his principal residence in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Clare and Harry playing croquet
Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, spring 1936 (Illustration 23.2)
Clare was happy to accompany him out of town, since Greenwich was home territory to her. She was there one day when Harry called to say that Ingersoll and Longwell had invited them both to dinner at Voisin in the city. He suspected their purpose was to suggest offering her a place on the new magazine.
At the restaurant Clare quickly discovered that not only was Harry mistaken but their hosts had no intention of employing her in any capacity. On the contrary, they were determined she not get so much as her narrow foot in the door. Ingersoll made it clear over post-dinner drinks at the River House that something else was bothering him. “Harry, you have got to make up your mind whether you are going to go on being a great editor, or whether you are going to be on a perpetual honeymoon. When you edited Time you stayed in the office until ten and eleven o’clock every night. Now you catch the 5:10 back to the country … You cannot publish a great magazine with one hand tied behind your back.”17
Clare, pale and tight-lipped, saw that her husband was struck dumb, and that she must speak for him. “Harry can publish a better magazine with one hand tied behind his back than you can publish with both of yours free.” She then fled to her bedroom in tears. By the time Harry joined her, she had recovered her composure and objectivity. It would be better for everyone, she said, if she gave up all ambition for a job at Time Inc. and resumed her own career as a playwright.18
A few weeks later Clare left for the Greenbrier, where in three days she wrote the first draft of The Women.
If Harry had any remaining doubts about producing a pictorial magazine, they disappeared when he came upon a news photograph of twenty roasted elephants. It had been taken after a circus fire in Saratoga. This proved to his satisfaction that pictures can tell some stories better than words.19 Inspired, he wrote a prospectus.
To see life; to see the world, to eyewitness great events, to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work—his paintings, towers and discoveries, to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed …20
On reading it Ingersoll circled Harry’s third word and informed him, “That’s your name.”21
Unfortunately the title Life still belonged to the old humor magazine that Clare had urged Condé Nast to buy five years earlier. There was no danger of Nast doing so now. His financial problems had multiplied to such an extent that Vanity Fair had at last ceased publication and merged with Vogue.22
Henry Luce accordingly bought Life’s name and subscription list for $92,000. He put Ingersoll and Longwell in charge of designing a final dummy, authorized Laura Hobson to prepare a promotion campaign, and installed his brother Sheldon as business manager. But he made no immediate move to fill the post of managing editor. Deferential to the sensibilities of his senior staff, Harry could not bring himself to do what he secretly desired: appoint Clare. When Ingersoll and Longwell failed to suggest her name, he deduced their unwillingness to see a third member of his family on the masthead and chose the dependable John Billings.23
Sour as ever, Billings was reluctant to move from Time. He prided himself on its immense success and resented having to hand it over to hard-drinking John Martin. More disturbing still was Martin’s assessment that “the real boss of the new magazine” would be Clare Luce.24
As Harry’s real-life drama unfolded, Clare polished and repolished her imaginary one. The first idea for The Women had come from a conversation she overheard in the ladies’ room of the Morocco Club. Familiar voices at the washbasins were “dishing the dirt” about some married friends of hers. At the Greenbrier, venomous new lines took shape in her head. The lines grew into scenes, pouring out with phenomenal speed.25
One segment, at least, had a previous incarnation. In the fall of 1931, long before The Sacred Cow and Abide With Me, she had outlined a play for Gilbert Miller.
It is a sort of American Grand Hotel—the hotel however being the Riverside Hotel at Reno, Nevada, and the characters being about as baffled, noisy, worthless and drunken a lot as you ever saw disguised as ladies and gentlemen in an American play. Considering that it is all supposed to be quite tragic beneath the surface and is on top as superficial and rowdy as one can very well imagine, you can see that it is a topic which wants a great deal of writing.26
Clare broadened the scope of the embryonic hotel play and relocated most of the action. She experimented with several titles—“The Girls,” “The Ladies,” and “Park Avenue”—before deciding on The Women. In the final version gentlemen were eliminated, and the Reno episode became merely the last scene in the second act. The need for twelve sets and numerous costume changes for forty female characters meant that the script, if accepted, would be extremely costly to stage.
Bernard Baruch persuaded Max Gordon, a producer friend, to take a look at The Women, and Gordon was intrigued enough to ask George Kaufman for a second opinion. Kaufman expressed enthusiasm, whereupon Gordon cannily suggested a collaboration to Clare. He said he was going abroad for six weeks and would depend on her to see how far Kaufman would cooperate. Perhaps sensing her reluctance, he added that he was “determined to get the play on” after she had revised it.27
In June the Luces moved from Greenwich to a leased white clapboard house on Sky Meadow Drive in Stamford, Connecticut.28 Much of Clare’s reworking of The Women was done in its large garden. She did not ask Kaufman for help, but on his return Gordon bought the script anyway and on July 2 he announced plans for a fall production. His contract with Clare, drawn up by the Leland Hayward Agency, gave her only a $100 advance ($400 less than she had received for Abide With Me) but guaranteed 5 percent of the first $5,000 of gross weekly box-office receipts, rising to 10 percent of all grosses in excess of $7,000. The subsidiary rights clause secured her 60 percent of any motion picture rights or radio royalties, and 50 percent of amateur performances.29
Awareness of the play’s worth spread quickly through the Broadway community. An MGM script scout predicted that it would cause “a mad scramble” among picture companies. It was “flashy, hokey material and not too expertly written, but it is an unusually good set-up for the screen … The author, a New York society woman, has written of her sex with a knowing and cynical pen.”30
On July 10 Gordon received a telegram from Moss Hart, saying that he greatly admired Clare’s play. Not only that, “I would like to buy a piece of it.” He said he had discussed it with Kaufman, who agreed that only slight rewriting would be necessary. As far as he was concerned, it was the most promising Broadway property in years.31
Five days later a telegram arrived from Kaufman, asking to see the revised Boothe script. “Much interested.”32
Her creative urge temporarily satisfied, Clare turned her attention to a physical one. Since miscarrying in her first marriage, she had longed to have a son by a worthy father. At thirty-three she felt it was high time to conceive, but she seemed unable to do so. In early August a salpingogram test revealed that her fallopian tubes were closed—probably the result of a previous infection—and could not be reopened. Dr. Rosenbluth had the unenviable task of confirming that she could never again become pregnant.33
She appeared so saddened by this that the doctor suggested adopting a baby and told her how to go about it. Without even consulting Harry, she issued a peremptory order: “Proceed with the adoption business.” On hearing the news, however, Harry objected, saying, “We have enough children.” Clare gave way but did not put the idea entirely from her mind.34
Casting and rehearsals for The Women began in early fall. There were the usual frustrations inherent in any major Broadway production. But none seemed to faze Clare, who was generally willing to jettison her old lines for new ones. Soon everyone concerned with the play was in awe of her. She was always perfectly dressed, coiffed, manicured, ready to turn on her charm and show her cleverness. Moss Hart would never forget the sight of her revising her script in the most feminine of boudoirs, sporting a blue ribbon in her hair and an ermine bed jacket fastened with a diamond pin.35
Ilka Chase remembered her sweeping in late one night, when the cast, “in varying attitudes of despondency,” was sitting on the bare and grubby stage. She was “on her way to a satin soirée … gowned by Hattie Carnegie, sabled by Jaeckel, and from her finger flashed one of Flato’s larger ice cubes.”36
The first issue of Life appeared on Thursday, November 19, 1936, with Margaret Bourke-White’s monumental photograph of Fort Peck Dam on the cover. It was a strangely inert image for a magazine with such a title, but Harry had chosen it himself from the Time Inc. library. Within hours the first run of 466,000 copies sold out, and Billings had to go back to press. The creative staff was ecstatic, but Luce and his accountants turned somber. If future press runs were commensurate with this, production and distribution costs would soar while advertising rates, based on a projected 250,000 circulation, remained locked for a year. Paradoxically, Henry Luce had a financially threatening triumph on his hands.37
He later told his wife that Life “would not have happened” without the technical advice and inspirational ideas of “Clare-of-Cuba.” But Ingersoll saw himself as its prime initiator. Expecting to be treated like a hero, he was mortified when Luce announced that henceforth Life was to be the proprietor’s own “baby.”38
By the time out-of-town tryouts of The Women began at Philadelphia’s Forrest Theater on December 7, Max Gordon had wound himself up into a state of near hysteria over slow box-office sales. “The Goddamned show has ruined me; the bastards won’t come in.”39
Tepid initial reviews did not improve his mood. “All the faults of a première were apparent,” the Evening Public Ledger commented. “The editing was careless, the pace laggard and somewhere some one will have to lose a half hour of exposition.” Yet there was “a caustic quality” to much of Clare’s dialogue, and the cast was “top-notch.” The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin said the play’s fundamental weakness was that it did not create sympathy for any of the wronged women—“so catty, mean, selfish and despicable do they appear.”40
Harry expressed loyal certainty that The Women would be “a smash hit.” But Gordon felt there was crucial rewriting to be done. By good fortune Kaufman and Hart were in town with their own new play, You Can’t Take It with You. Since both had put money into The Women, they willingly heeded Gordon’s plea for assistance. Hart had seen as long ago as July that Clare had third act trouble—“the worst kind.” He and Kaufman recommended changes in curtain lines and thought she should keep an encounter in the Haineses’ kitchen that the producer wanted cut.41
The scene in question was a contrivance necessitated by Clare’s determination not to have any men appear onstage. Her script called for a maid to recount to the Haineses’ cook a conversation about divorce that she had overheard between her employers.
Gordon conceded that the scene, though awkward, served a necessary purpose, and it survived. But whispers had begun circulating that Kaufman and Hart were responsible for major adjustments. Margalo Gillmore saw them so frequently in the Philadelphia theater that she believed they were “writing a new last act every night.” Clare herself freely admitted that Kaufman and Hart had labored in her suite until two o’clock one morning. “They put on a performance the like of which I’ve never seen. ‘She should do this.’ ‘No she should do that.’ They demonstrated how they wrote a play. Acted it out till I was so confused. Then they said it was fine as it was, and ended up contributing nothing.”42
Nevertheless, Clare learned much about stagecraft from them and showed herself capable of working under pressure. At noon one day, after a late-night session, a haggard Kaufman was going down in his Philadelphia hotel elevator when Clare got on. Looking fresh in a beige dress and feathered hat, she smiled and waved her revised manuscript. “I’m just taking this to Max.”43
A typed list of fifteen suggested amendments from Kaufman substantiates Clare’s claim that his input was minor. Ten were of little consequence, but he elaborated on those he thought important.
The opening card scene, he wrote, “failed to climax.” Moss Hart thought it was the ending itself, but Kaufman found fault in the “content.” He suggested restaging it in such a way as to make the voices better heard. In the kitchen scene, he noted, only a couple of sentences needed reworking. And for the last scene he offered to write “a dummy,” leaving Clare to “put in the good lines.”44
The Women opened in New York on December 26 and was playing to capacity by the end of its fourth week. Gossip about it gained momentum in proportion to its success. George Jean Nathan, Vanity Fair’s former theater critic, hinted in print that certain “Rialto play-fixers” had inserted “several rather shabby Broadway wisecracks” during the tryouts.45
After Clare’s sale of her screen rights to Max Gordon Plays & Pictures Corporation for $125,000 (a decision she was to regret the rest of her life), skepticism became entrenched. In the fourth month the play broke attendance records for a non-musical Broadway production—over 162,000 seats sold for a take of $350,000. More printed copies of the text were bought than of any other show that season.46 Audiences and readers alike marveled that a woman so young and relatively inexperienced could have penned such a lucrative hit.
In early March 1937, Harry felt impelled to quash all doubts of his wife’s authorship by asking Walter Winchell to publish the facts. His letter to the columnist survives as the most immediate, and probably the most accurate summary of Kaufman and Hart’s involvement in The Women:
I was the first to see the first draft of the play … within three or four weeks of the time that Clare first outlined it to me … The first two acts of the play are substantially (and by substantially I mean almost line for line—and certainly scene for scene) as they were in the first draft. The third act was re-written once or twice before Mr. Kaufman saw any draft. And it was rewritten once or twice thereafter. But no one else ever touched typewriter on it—and the scheme of the last act, as well as all but perhaps two lines, were entirely hers. As a matter of fact, in the end, two out of the three scenes of the last act turned out to be substantially as they were in the first draft …
Hart and Kaufman were useful critics during rehearsals—Hart more than Kaufman I think. Characteristically, they would tell Clare that a certain curtain line was weak—and a day later she would come up with one that amused them. The total time they spent on the play outside of watching two or three rehearsals (and I think Kaufman only saw one) was perhaps four or six hours of general chatter. I do not believe that there are more than three lines in the whole play that either Hart or Kaufman would even admit indirect credit for in a court of law …
Why Hart and Kaufman don’t make more vigorous denials I don’t know. Perhaps they think they wouldn’t be believed. But you will be believed … Ask Hart and Kaufman … Ask Bob Sinclair, the director. Ask Max Gordon. Ask God.
“Obviously people envy Clare,” he concluded, “because she’s rich and good looking and—something else besides. Perhaps they dislike her for reasons good or bad. But it is certainly unfair to take from anyone the credit for work done.”47
Before mailing this to Winchell, Harry sent it to Clare. For some reason she objected and scrawled across the top “never sent.” Kaufman had the last word, saying that if he had written The Women, “Why should I sign it Clare Boothe?”48
When The Women broke its attendance record, Clare’s intimates celebrated in various ways. Condé Nast gave a party at his Park Avenue penthouse and invited his customary A list of actors, journalists, artists, and socialites. Bernard Baruch boasted about getting Max Gordon to produce the play and went to see it at least a dozen times. He bought scores of tickets to keep up the numbers, giving them away to everyone from politicians to elevator boys, and pointed out a tiny gold typewriter on his watch chain that Clare had given him. Ann Austin, an avid theatergoer, glowed with maternal pride, and David offered to be his sister’s agent.49
Controversy about the play’s unprincipled characters and brittle dialogue continued. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her syndicated column “My Day” that she left a performance “longing for a little honest clean talk without any sham or pretense.” John Billings reacted predictably. “I thought it was pretty unpleasant … Harry, I suspect, is very proud … If I were in his place I would be ashamed to have a wife who wrote so autobiographically.”50
Though Moss Hart was pleased with the play’s financial success, he expressed scant praise at the time. Thirteen years later, when The Women had become a perennial draw in theaters all over the world, he read it again, and wrote Clare a belated compliment.
I was filled with an admiration for it that I must confess I didn’t have at the time it was produced. It’s a first rate job, and to my mind a highly under-rated play. It’s a great deal more than just a slick, well-constructed play—it’s a highly civilized and biting comment on the social manners and morals of our society, and women’s place in it. I had no idea it was so good … I don’t think you ever got the credit you deserved for it, and I just thought I’d write and tell you so.51