For consistency, the name of the subject of this book is abbreviated throughout the notes as CBL, even though at earlier stages of her life she carried the initials ACB, CB, and CBB. Other names cited frequently will be abbreviated as follows:
| ACA | Ann Clare (Schneider/Snyder/Franklin/Murphy/Boothe) Austin |
| ACB | Ann Clare Brokaw |
| AEA | Albert Elmer Austin |
| BMB | Bernard Mannes Baruch |
| DFB | David Franklin Boothe |
| HRL | Henry Robinson Luce |
| WFB | William Franklin Boothe |
Additional abbreviations are “int.” (interviewed by), “qu.” (quoting or quoted by), “ts.” (typescript).
1. New York Sun, New York Evening Journal, Dec. 28, 1936. Hart and Kaufman’s few contributions to The Women are discussed in New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 25, 1936, and New York Times, Dec. 26, 1936. See also Ch. 23.
2. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 10, 1982; Wilfrid Sheed, Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1982), 128.
3. Richard Watts, New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 24, 1935; CBL int. Richard Watts, New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 6, 1940; Margaret Case Harriman, “The Candor Kid II,” New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1941.
4. New York Evening Journal, Dec. 28, 1936; CBL birth certificate, CBLP (see Ch. 1); U.S. Census, 1900.
5. “The truth is, my private life [has] been sad, unhappy, and sometimes tragic.” CBL to SJM from Hawaii, Mar. 9, 1981; CBL at Daniel and Ruth Boorstin dinner, May 5, 1981.
6. CBL qu. Sheed, CBL, 128.
7. ACA to CBL, n.d. Apr. 1935, CBLP.
8. CBL qu. New York Times Book Review, Oct. 13, 1940.
9. “The Sacred Cow,” ts. in CBLP. See Ch. 18.
10. See Ch. 23.
11. CBL at Tarrytown Conference Center, N.Y., San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 21, 1971; CBL qu. New York Times Book Review, Oct. 13, 1940.
12. See Ch. 23.
13. CBL had warned an Esquire reporter, “There isn’t a line in it about Communism.” Doris Kinney to CBL, n.d. Mar. 1964, CBLP. But see n. 18.
14. New York Daily News listings, Dec. 28, 1936.
15. New York Times, Dec. 27, 1936.
16. New York Daily News, “Betty’s Bath,” Feb. 28, 1937; New York Sun, Jan. 28, 1938; New York World-Telegram, Sept. 30, 1939; New York Sunday News clip, n.d., Museum of the City of New York Theater Collection.
17. Brooks Atkinson in New York Times, Dec. 27, 1936.
18. All quotations from the director’s working script of The Women (1936), BRTC. CBL revised the published text of her play several times to make it more topical. For example, wisecracks about “Commyanists” and “Townsendites” appear in the 1937 Random House edition, p. 198. This was dedicated to her school friend, Buff Cobb.
19. John Mason Brown wrote in the New York Post, December 27, 1936, “It is doubtful if a nastier group of women has ever been assembled on one stage. They may wrap themselves in sables, but, with one or two exceptions, they are skunks.”
20. Cleveland Press, n.d., c. Dec. 1936, qu. Doris Kinney to CBL, Mar. 1964, CBLP.
21. Working script, The Women.
22. CBL int. SJM, Aug. 3, 1985.
23. Richard Lockridge, “Defense of Women,” New York Sun, Jan. 2, 1937.
24. Ibid.; Mark Sullivan to CBL, Dec. 28, 1936, CBLP.
25. Ibid.
26. Moss Hart to Max Gordon, July 10, 1936, and to CBL, n.d. 1949, CBLP. Also see Ch. 23.
27. New York Daily News, Feb. 28, 1937. When fatuously asked by an English reporter why she had not written an all-male play, CBL replied, “Because I doubt that anybody would want to look at even Noel Coward in a bathtub.” Qu. Lucius Beebe in New York Herald Tribune, c. Apr. 1937, CBL Scrapbooks, CBLP.
28. Mark Sullivan to CBL, Dec. 28, 1936.
29. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 10, 1982; Margalo Gillmore in Playbill, Dec. 1966.
30. New York World-Telegram, Dec. 28, 1936.
31. Ibid.
32. All datelines Dec. 28, 1936.
33. Qu. Louis Sobol in New York Evening Journal, Dec. 29, 1936.
1. WFB actually turned forty-one four days after the certificate was signed on April 6, 1903. CBLP.
2. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982. CBL remained so sensitive on the subject of her birth date, not to mention her illegitimacy, that the author was never able to get a satisfactory reason for the subterfuge.
3. Boothe family Bible, CBLP.
4. Maryland Baptist Union Association, Minutes of the Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Meetings of the M.B.U. (Baltimore, Md., 1861, 1862), passim; Edward Milton Boothe to CBL, n.d., c. Jan. 1931, CBLP.
5. Ibid.; John W. T. Boothe Diary, Apr. 10, 1862, CBLP.
6. E. M. Boothe, “Memorabilia of W.F.B.,” ts., n.d. c. 1932, in CBLP; Minutes of the Twenty-seventh Meeting of the M.B.U., 7.
7. E. M. Boothe to CBL, c. January 1931; “Memorabilia of W.F.B.” Except where otherwise stated, the following information about WFB comes from one or other of these documents, written by his brother to CBL when she was gathering information about her ancestry.
8. Purdue University Catalogue, 1876–77, 5–6; June E. Williamson to SJM, Nov. 27, 1990, SJMP.
9. E. M. Boothe to CBL, c. Jan. 1931; Grace Quinn to CBL, Oct. 23, 1974, CBLP.
10. E. M. Boothe to CBL, c. Oct. 1930 and c. Jan. 1931, CBLP.
11. W. F. Boothe, Two Concert Etudes, No. 1: Octaves, No. 2, Sixths, Philadelphia: Wm. H. Boner & Co., 1881; copy in Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; E. M. Boothe, “Memorabilia of W.F.B.”; E. M. Boothe to CBL, c. Oct. 1932, CBLP. WFB claimed to have written the octave étude during an orchestral concert, to win a bet that he could compose while listening to other music. Ruth Paddock, WFB pupil, to CBL, Jan. 15, 1929, CBLP.
12. E. M. Boothe, “Memorabilia of W.F.B.”
13. Marriage certificate of WFB and Laura O. Brauss, State of New Jersey, Nov. 7, 1886 (the couple’s subsequent divorce papers in the New York State Supreme Court, New York, N.Y., erroneously state that they were married in 1888); Philadelphia City Directory, 1889. William and Laura lived at 310 North Thirty-third Street.
14. Philip K. Eberly, “A Classic in American Culture,” Washington Post, Nov. 22, 1990; advertisements in CBLP; Margaret Case Harriman, “The Candor Kid II,” New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1941. E. M. Boothe denied the legend in a letter to CBL, Jan. 12, 1941, CBLP.
15. E. M. Boothe to CBL, Feb. 13, 1941, CBLP. According to Edward, Carreño’s biographer Marta Melinowski wanted to use “correspondence between my brother Will and Carreño, 1890–1891,” for a second edition of her book. “But I may kill it: I know he would want me to, I know.” Efforts by the author to trace the Melinowski papers have proved unsuccessful. For a descriptive portrait of Carreño, see Harold Schonberg, The Great Pianists (New York, 1963), 328–332.
16. Eberly, “Classic.”
17. Charles Boothe to CBL, May 9, 1949, CBLP.
18. Ibid. Not to be confused with the giant American Piano Company (Ampico), which flourished from 1907.
19. WFB to CBL, n.d. Oct. 1928, CBLP. Anna’s father was the same age as WFB.
20. Ibid.; Michael and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York (New York, 1973), 22.
21. Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (New York, 1949), 63–65, 77–78, 112–184.
22. New York City directory, 1882; ACA birth certificate, SJMP. Before escaping to New Jersey at the turn of the century, the Schneiders would live in at least five such places. Ibid. and Weehawken City directories, 1883–1913.
23. Charles of pulmonary tuberculosis, Louisa of pneumonia and pleurisy, and Arthur of traumatic meningitis. Schneider family death certificates, SJMP.
24. U.S. Census, 1900.
25. CBL, “The Double-Bind,” 60, 66. See bibliography.
26. Ibid., 72.
27. The following account is based on evidence in the divorce papers of William and Laura Boothe.
28. DFB birth certificate, copy in SJMP. WFB’s name is given as “William Franklin,” ACA’s as “Anna C. Franklin,” née “Anna C. Smith.” WFB’s birthplace is “Chicago,” and ACA’s “Savannah, Ga.” Her age is listed as “18,” although she was nearly twenty. See also Ch. 6.
29. New York City directory, 1903.
30. CBL address to Foothill Community College, Los Altos Hills, Calif., Oct. 12, 1984.
31. Boothe divorce papers.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid. Laura went on to become a successful writer for the New York Sunday World.
34. H. G. Wells, The Future in America: A Search After Realities (New York, 1906, 1969), 41. Boothe divorce papers.
35. E. M. Boothe, “Memorabilia of W.F.B.”
36. CBL, qu. Bridgeport Post, Nov. 21, 1950. “Her face had scratched against the sand, the green water had rushed into her mouth, and there was a great ringing of bells under the green waters.” CBL, “This My Hand,” CBLP. See bibliography.
37. Harriman, “Candor Kid II.”
38. Private collection Ann Charnley, ACP.
39. CBL, “Without Portfolio,” McCall’s, June 1963.
40. CBL, “The Double-Bind,” 78–81. A possible interpretation, of course, is that CBL may have been romanticizing the even worse trauma of being molested by WFB. Earlier in the same ms. (69–70) she wrote: “Her earliest memory of anything which a Freudian would call sexual was being in bed with her father … at the age of four … I remember I felt happy. Warm. Safe, I suppose.” Elsewhere in the ts. (81–82), there is this passage: “When he [her father] took her to the toilet, he said, pointing to her little sex: ‘Never, never let a man touch you there. Never, never touch yourself there, so long as you are a little girl. It is wicked, very wicked.’ ”
1. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 23, 1985.
2. CBL pamphlet, “Saving the White Man’s Soul,” 1949, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, Oct. 14, 1986; “Dreams and Nightmares,” memoir file, CBLP.
3. CBL, “The Double-Bind,” 61, CBLP.
4. Ibid., 91; CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985.
5. CBL to AEA, Jan. 20, 1942, CBLP.
6. Nashville city scrapbook, Tennessee State Archive, Nashville, Tenn. The house no longer stands, but 101 Church St., where CBL also lived, survives.
7. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 23, 1985; WFB advertising handbill in CBLP.
8. CBL int. SJM, Oct. 11, 1985, Jan. 9, 1982.
9. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985. WFB to CBL, c. Oct. 1928, CBLP, says that Ann Snyder told his sister, Ida Keables, that she “hated the very sight of a fiddle … that you wouldn’t listen to a Kreisler—that because of me musics [sic] world of pleasure was entirely taboo with you.”
10. WFB to CBL, c. mid-Nov. 1928, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985.
11. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985.
12. CBL int. Nashville Tennessean, Dec. 24, 1937, coincident with the local opening of The Women.
13. Ivar Lou Myhr Duncan, A History of Belmont College, Belmont College booklet (Nashville, Tenn., 1974), 3; Forty-sixth Annual Announcement of Ward Seminary, 1910–1911, SJMP.
14. Nashville Banner, Sept. 23, 1909; Nashville Tennessean, Sept. 24, 1909.
15. CBL school reports, BCA.
16. WFB to CBL, Nov. 7, 1928. CBLP.
17. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985. Instant coffee became popular when U.S. soldiers acquired a taste for it during World War II.
18. CBL, “Saving the White Man’s Soul.”
19. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985.
20. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (Champaign, III., 1988), 25.
21. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985; DFB to CBL, June 20, 1944, CBLP.
22. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982.
23. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 20, 1982. Mary Garden admits, in her memoirs, to an affair with a “rich” Chicago businessman at this time. The adjective would appear to disqualify WFB. Mary Garden’s Story (New York, 1951), 194–208.
24. DFB was confirmed at Racine in 1912.
25. CBL int. SJM, June 14, 1982, Jan. 23, Feb. 12, 1985.
26. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985.
27. CBL to Dr. Sidney Cohen, n.d. 1962, CBLP.
28. CBL int. SJM, Mar. 31, 1985; Look, Jan. 25, 1934; CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 20, 1930, CBLP.
29. CBL, “Double-Bind,” 60–61.
30. Whether Ann thought him a certifiable alcoholic or not, her lawyers would later allege that he had “for fifteen years drunk a gallon of whiskey daily.” WFB vehemently denied this improbable accusation, saying, “Any doctor or intelligent layman knows that such could not be true.” WFB to CBL, c. Oct. 1928, CBLP.
31. CBL int. SJM, June 23, 1982.
32. WFB to CBL, Dec. 4, 1928, CBLP.
33. Ts. CBLP.
34. CBL int. SJM, June 23, 1984; “The Return” ms., CBLP.
35. CBL to Rev. W. Thibodeau, Feb. 16, 1949, SJMP.
36. CBL int. SJM, June 12, 1982, and Apr. 2, 1982.
37. “You, you remain in my heart, / You, you remain in my mind, / You, you make me so sad, / You don’t know how good I am to you!” Ibid.
38. Louise Dreher to CBL, Aug. 6, 1945, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, July 11, 1987.
39. CBL int. SJM, Apr. 2, 1982.
40. Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York, 1984), 137.
41. CBL int. SJM, June 11, 1982; John Schneider death certificate, Apr. 14, 1913, SJMP.
1. CBL int. SJM, June 11, 1982; CBL, “The Double-Bind,” 76; CBL int. SJM, Feb. 20, 1985.
2. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982.
3. CBL int. SJM, June 20, 1985.
4. Perle Mesta to CBL, Dec. 20, 1953, CBLP; CBL, “Double-Bind,” 100, CBLP.
5. Ibid.
6. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 20, 1985.
7. CBL, “Double-Bind,” 87.
8. CBL, “Double-Bind,” 76, CBLP. In old age CBL had nightmares of her mother falling down, her breasts exposed. “Memoirs” folder, CBLP. An enigmatic passage in Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, Aug. 1974, refers to a wealthy Manhattan party-giver named Yves de Villers, who met Ann Snyder in “circumstances … [that] must remain vague.” Apparently at some later stage in their relationship, Ann “woke him in the middle of the night and asked him to marry Clare because she was worried about her.” When Lawrenson asked the middle-aged CBL about de Villers, she “looked me straight in the eye and said calmly, ‘Do you feel like going for a swim?’ ” The author, asking a similar question in the 1980s, received a similar response.
9. Marguerite Tyson qu. Helen Lawrenson to SJM, Mar. 3, 1982.
10. CBL int. SJM, June 12, 1982; CBL, “Double-Bind,” 64, CBLP.
11. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 20, 1985, June 23, 1984; CBL, “Double-Bind,” 64–65, CBLP.
12. CBL, “Double-Bind,” 95, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, July 16, 1985.
13. CBL, “Double-Bind,” 59, 84.
14. CBL int. SJM, Nov. 19, 1986.
15. CBL int. SJM, June 23, 1984.
16. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 20, 1985.
17. CBL, “Double-Bind,” 87. CBL int. SJM, June 6, 1982.
18. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982. In the spring of 1921 CBL wrote, “I have cultivated the chess habit, and am getting to be quite a shark.” CBL to Alexis Aladin, c. May 16, 1921, AAP. Captain’s letter and menu, CBLP.
19. CBL int. SJM, June 23, 1985.
20. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982, CBLP. Ship’s menu, CBLP.
1. New York Times, Apr. 14, 1914.
2. Ibid.
3. CBL, “Without Portfolio,” McCall’s, Aug. 1960, June 1964.
4. CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982.
5. CBL, “The Double-Bind,” 64, CBLP. On p. 74 CBL’s alter ego narrator writes: “She never remembers masturbating.”
6. Margaret Case Harriman, “Candor Kid I,” The New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1941.
7. Edith P. Lank to CBL, Dec. 12, 1979, CBLP, and to SJM, Apr. 21, 1985, SJMP.
8. Ibid.
9. CBL, “Double-Bind,” 94.
10. CBL int. SJM, Mar. 31, 1985.
11. CBL, “Double-Bind,” 88.
12. Ibid., 89.
13. Ibid., 90; CBL int. SJM, June 12, 1982.
14. CBL int. SJM, June 23, 1984.
15. CBL int. SJM, June 12, 1982.
16. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982.
17. CBL to Alexis Aladin, Feb. 3, 1921, AAP; CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982.
18. CBLP.
19. CBL, “Double Bind,” 96–99; CBL int. SJM, June 12, 1982.
20. Ibid.
21. CBL int. SJM, June 12, 1982.
22. Dorothy Reid Kittell to SJM, June 1984, SJMP.
23. Kate Ludlum Cort to SJM, June 28, 1984, SJMP; CBL, President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Papers, CBLP.
24. Alden Hatch, Ambassador Extraordinary: Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1955), 36.
25. Anita Lawson, Irvin S. Cobb (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1984), passim.
26. Hatch, Ambassador, 38.
27. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 19, 1930, CBLP.
28. Cathedral School of St. Mary Yearbook, 1915–16, CBLP. CBL is quoting the English satirist John Wolcot, alias “Peter Pindar” (1738–1819), “What rage for fame attends both great and small! /Better be d—n’d than not be nam’d at all!” (From The Works of Peter Pindar, Esqur. [London, 1974], Vol. I, “Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1783,” Ode IX, p. 76.)
1. CBL, “Without Portfolio,” McCall’s, Oct. 1964.
2. Castle School prospectus, qu. New York Times obituary of Miss Mason, Aug. 25, 1933. CBL’s annual tuition, paid by the ever-generous Joel Jacobs, was a steep $1,500. Dorothy Burns Holloran, CBL Castle School classmate, int. Alden Hatch, n.d. c. 1954, AHP.
3. CBL, “Lights on the Jersey Shore,” The Drawbridge 1919, Castle School Yearbook, CBLP.
4. CBL address to Princeton senior class, May 6, 1958; CBL Commencement Address, Briarcliff, June 7, 1964, CBLP.
5. Ruth Balsam Morton memo, Oct. 1941, CBLP; Althya Clark Youngman to SJM, Oct. 11, 1984, SJMP.
6. CBL Castle School Reports, 1917–1919; CBL Diary, Jan. 17 and Aug. 23, 1919, CBLP. Clare’s lowest mark in her first year was 80 for science and physics. See “College Memorabilia Book,” CBLP.
7. CBL Diary, Dec. 17, Jan. 29, May 9, 1919.
8. Ibid., Feb. 2, 1919.
9. Dorothy Burns Holloran, qu. Alden Hatch, Ambassador Extraordinary: Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1955), 42.
10. CBL Diary, Feb. 5, 1919.
11. Lorna Simpson Kooi to SJM, June 1, 1989, SJMP; CBL Diary, Apr. 8, 1919.
12. CBL Diary, Apr. 29, Feb. 14 and 6, 1919.
13. CBL Diary, Feb. 6, 1919.
14. CBL Diary, Mar. 4, 1919. Ambition sometimes ran counter to religious aspirations. After months of chapel attendance, Clare confessed in her diary that she could not “make Christ seem real.” She wanted Him as her “companion” but was scared that if she submitted her soul completely, He might monopolize her time and prevent her being “a world success.” Apr. 13, 1919.
15. CBL Castle School Scrapbook, CBLP.
16. Morton memo, Oct. 1941; CBL, “My School Days,” 66–67, CBLP.
17. Ray Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll (New York, 1985), 28.
18. CBL int. SJM, Apr. 16, 1982; CBL Diary, Sept. 11, 1919.
19. CBL int. SJM, Aug. 19, 1982.
20. CBL Diary, Feb. 19, Mar. 14, 1919, and passim.
21. Ibid., Mar. 11, 1919.
22. Ibid., Dec. 20, 1919.
23. Althya Clark Youngman essay, “In the Dazzle of Her Brilliance,” SJMC; Greenwich Time, June 25, 1942; CBL scrapbook no. 123, CBLP.
24. CBL Diary, Nov. 7, 1918; Stanley Weintraub, A Stillness Heard Round the World: The End of the Great War, November 1918 (New York, 1985), 29.
25. CBL, “My School Days,” 61 [sic]. Alsace-Lorraine was actually annexed by Bismarck’s Germany in 1871. One of CBL’s lifelong intellectual quirks was to be cavalier about dates.
26. Mss. in CBLP.
27. Marjory Wolff to SJM, n.d. Dec. 1983, SJMP.
28. CBL, “My School Days,” 130.
29. The Drawbridge 1919, CBLP.
30. Ellide D. Rea to CBL, May 8, 1970; CBL to Ruth B. Morton, Mar. 16, 1922, CBLP. A clergyman urged the Class of 1919 to “go to the heart of a few things” rather than “skim the surface of many.” Miss Mason added that they must “cultivate sleepless energy” as they went through life. CBL was receptive to at least the latter advice. CBL, “My School Days,” 130.
1. CBL Diary, Mar. 2, 1919. The asking price for Driftway was $27,000, but DFB to CBL, n.d. c. 1935 says that Jacobs paid $22,000. ACA later took a $17,000 mortgage to make improvements, paying monthly interest only. CBLP.
2. CBL Diary, May 29, 1919.
3. Ibid., June 1919.
4. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982.
5. CBL Diary, Feb. 6, Mar. 22, 1919.
6. CBL Diary, May 30, 1919.
7. Ibid.
8. Los Angeles Times, Feb. 7, 1926; Musical Courier, Jan. 3., 1929, obituary of WFB.
9. CBL Diary, May 31, 1919.
10. Ibid., June 1, 1919. The word hate is lightly crossed out.
11. Ibid., June 2, 1919.
12. Ibid., June 4, 1919.
13. Ibid.; WFB to CBL, c. Oct. 1928, CBLP.
14. WFB to CBL, c. Oct. 1928, CBLP. A persistent story, recounted in various biographies and articles, has CBL meeting WFB in a commuter train between Connecticut and New York. It lacks validation. Although the story seems to have originated with herself, CBL was always evasive when questioned about it by interviewers. See, e.g., The Dick Cavett Show, PBS, Jan. 20, 1981. Since her diary for 1919 details the most trivial occurrences yet mentions no such meeting, we can only conclude that the story is a romantic invention, typical of abandoned children in later life. For some of the legal complications arising out of WFB’s return to his family, see Ch. 9.
15. CBL Diary, May 1919, passim.
16. Ibid., June 5, 1919; CBL to HRL, Feb. 29, 1960, CBLP.
1. Stamford Advocate, Jan. 27, 1942, obituary of AEA, CBLP.
2. CBL Diary, Apr. 20, 1919.
3. Ibid.
4. Information about AEA comes from the following sources: Margaret Emerson memo, “Dr. Austin,” n.d., c. 1992, SJMP; John and Lillian Moore to SJM, n.d., May 1984, SJMP; Harry Mortimer oral history int., April 14, 1976, Old Greenwich Library, Greenwich, Conn.; AEA scrapbooks and photographs, AEAP; Albert P. Morano int. SJM, October 6, 1981; CBL int. SJM, January 8, 1982.
5. CBL Diary, June 12, Aug. 5, 1919, CBLP.
6. Ibid., June 13, 1919, CBLP.
7. Ibid.
8. CBL Diary, Jan. 4, 1919. On the other hand, ACA found the street-smart Joel Jacobs boring, with his constant talk of stocks and shares, compared to the dignified, well-read doctor. Ibid., Jan. 5, June 8, 1919. CBL wrote that Firestone Tire and Rubber Company’s capital would amount to $1 million “in the next few years. Riggie will be a multimillionaire. Oh God! What will Mother do? If only she would make up her mind and carry it out.” Ibid., Jan. 19, 1919.
9. Ibid., July 6, 8, 15, 19, June 12, July 6, 1919.
10. Ibid., July 9, 1919.
11. Ibid., July 13, 1919.
12. Ibid. See also Ann Clare Booth [sic], “The New Era: On Seeing Miss Mary Mason’s Statue,” frontispiece to National Magazine, May 1919. Also see “To Marshal Foch” and “Up Stamford Way,” two poems of the same period published in the Greenwich Time and signed “D.I.A.” (David Ivor Austin, first of CBL’s several male noms de plume). News clips, n.d., CBLP.
13. CBL Diary, July 17 and Nov. 11, 1919.
14. CBL Diary, year-end summary, 1919.
15. Ibid.; CBL to Ruth B. Morton, n.d. 1919, CBLP.
16. CBL Diary, Sept. 2, 1919.
17. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 9, 1982.
18. CBL Diary, Nov. 15, 1919.
19. CBL int. SJM, Apr. 15, 1984.
20. CBL Diary, Nov. 17, 1919.
21. Ibid., Nov. 20 and 21, 1919.
22. Ibid., Nov. 25 and 23, 1919.
23. Ibid., Nov. 27 and 28, 1919.
24. Ibid., Dec. 3 and 4, 1919.
25. Ibid., Dec. 2 and 9, 1919.
26. Ibid., Dec. 13, 1919.
27. Ibid., Dec. 14 and 26, 1919.
28. Ibid., Dec. 31, 1919.
1. Stephen Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1970), 23.
2. CBL poetry, CBLP.
3. CBL address, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 1983. Author’s notes, SJMP.
4. CBL Diary, Feb. 16, 1919, CBLP.
5. CBL to Mildred Price, c. Nov. 1920, CBLP.
6. Noel Coward, Present Indicative (New York, 1937), 110–111, 118. Coward said, “I played that poor apprentice with a stubborn Mayfair distinction, which threw the whole thing out of key.” Lesley Cole, Remembered Laughter (New York, 1976), 47; CBL int. SJM, Apr. 29, 1986.
7. CBL to Florence Martin, c. Dec. 1920, CBLP. Clare told Florence that Main Street was, in her opinion, the best novel of the year. Indeed, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
8. CBL to Mildred Price, Feb. 17, 1921, CBLP. Aladin was a major, but Clare called him “Colonel.” In Mayfair circles he allowed himself to be addressed as “General.”
9. CBL int. SJM, Dec. 18, 1986; R. F. Christian, “Alexis Aladin, Trudovik Leader in the First Russian Duma, Part I, 1873–1920,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, Vol. XXI (1988), 141; CBL, “Without Portfolio,” McCall’s, June 1960; see also New York Times, Mar. 6, 1907. Aladin’s Russian name was Alexsey Fedorovich Alad’n.
10. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 5, 1982.
11. Alexis Aladin wire to Hugh Fisel, c. Nov. 1919, Public Record Office, London. “See Sir William and ask him to assure Lady Plymouth that personally I supervised the measures taken in the savety [sic] of our Dowager Empress.” Sir William Tyrell thought Aladin “disreputable,” according to a PRO document.
12. CBL, “Without Portfolio,” McCall’s, June 1960.
13. Christian, “Alexis Aladin,” passim.
14. CBL to Mildred Price, Feb. 17, 1921; Alexis Aladin to CBL, May 16, 1921, AAP; Alexis Aladin to Sir David Russell, Feb. 18, April 9, 1921, DRP.
15. CBL to Alexis Aladin, Jan. 17, 1921, AAP.
16. CBL to Alexis Aladin, Jan. 22, 1921, AAP. She swore never to go to another boxing match, but subsequently became an avid fight fan, attending the great Dempsey, Carpentier, and Tunney championship bouts, and becoming friends with Tunney.
17. CBL to Mildred Price, Feb. 17, 1921, CBLP.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid. CBL wrote Aladin on Feb. 21, 1921, “All my beautiful frocks and hats are here … and such a robe ravissante! … cut low, but not too low … ‘Show all you can, and what you can’t—suggest!’ ” AAP.
21. SJM notes on visit to Negresco Hotel, Nice, May 1985; Jean Negulesco, Things I Did … and Things I Think I Did (New York, 1984), 64; CBL to Alexis Aladin, Feb. 25, 1921. “Gambling blood runs strong in my veins,” she wrote Aladin on Feb. 21, “and has been carefully nurtured by circumstances since childhood.” AAP.
22. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982; CBL to Ruth B. Morton, Mar. 21, 1921.
23. Ibid.
24. Alexis Aladin to David Russell, Mar. 28, 1921, DRP. For Aladin’s later career, see Christian, “Alexis Aladin.”
25. CBL to Alexis Aladin, Apr. 29, 1921, AAP.
26. CBL to Mildred Price, c. May 1921, CBLP.
27. CBL to Dr. Thompkins, Mar. 17, 1961, CBLP. Sensing the girl’s unrest, Joel Jacobs gave her a new Hudson roadster. CBL to Alexis Aladin, May 16, 1921, AAP.
28. CBL to “Middie Lamb,” c. May 1921, CBLP.
29. CBL to Alexis Aladin, June 21, 1921, AAP.
30. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982; Schuyler Van Ness to CBL, Jan. 9, 1941, CBLP. On June 21 CBL wrote to Alexis Aladin from New York, “I have my books, my work and my ambitions, but I’m a wee bit lonesome.” The position she applied for was that of “traveling saleswoman,” on the understanding that a preliminary period of training would be necessary. “They want me to open a branch office … in Paris!!” she wrote excitedly. AAP.
31. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982, June 23, 1984.
32. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982.
33. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982; CBL to Alexis Aladin, July 19, 1921, AAP.
34. DFB to Isabel Hill, c. 1944, CBLP.
35. CBL Diary, c. Jan. 1926. Dr. Ivan Jacobson int. SJM, Aug. 13, 1992, stated that the abortion details seem to reflect firsthand experience.
36. Vernon Blunt memo, 1983, SJMP; CBL int. SJM, Feb. 18, 1985.
37. Vernon Blunt audiotape memo to SJM, 1983.
38. CBL to “Middie Lamb,” c. May 1921, CBLP.
39. Vernon Blunt memo, 1983, SJMP.
40. Poem by Vernon Blunt, ms., n.d., SJMP.
1. CBL to Ruth B. Morton, Nov. 18, 1921, CBLP.
2. CBL to Kerry Skerrett, Jan. 3, 1922, CBLP; Margaret Case Harriman, “The Candor Kid I” New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1941.
3. CBL to Ruth B. Morton, c. Apr. 1922, CBLP.
4. CBL to Ruth B. Morton, Mar. 16, 1922, CBLP.
5. ACA-AEA marriage certificate, Marriage Records Bureau, Washington, D.C.
6. DFB to CBL, n.d. Apr. 1938, CBLP. Among the welter of half facts and nonfacts that complicate the issue of CBL’s and DFB’s parentage, the following stand clear: (1) Both children discovered in late May 1919 that WFB was alive. (2) Both children knowingly colluded in a lie to the contrary when ACA married AEA. By doing so they thought they were sparing her the embarrassment of telling her groom that she was not, after all, a widow. However, this played directly to her bluff, because she was thereby saved from having to produce divorce papers as an alternative ticket to matrimony. The irony was that ACA was perfectly free to marry anyone she chose, except this would disclose the illegitimacy of her children. (3) WFB went to his grave pretending, for their sake, that they were legitimate. (4) DFB remained convinced as late as April 1938 that his father and mother had been married at some point, or he would not have used the word bigamous in describing the Austin alliance. (5) Although proof is lacking, CBL seems to have shared this belief in her parents’ marriage until late in her life. In an undated letter to HRL in 1960 she said that she was “probably illegitimate.” CBLP.
7. CBL Diary, Feb. 2, 1923, CBLP.
8. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 20, 1985.
9. CBL Scrapbook, 1923, CBLP.
10. Ibid. Fermoy’s daughter, Frances, married Earl Spencer, father of Princess Diana. They were divorced in 1969.
11. CBL Diary, 1923, back page.
12. Ibid., Jan. 3, 1923.
13. CBL to Florence Martin, Jan. 14, 1923, CBLP.
14. CBL Diary, Feb. 17, 25, 1923.
15. Ibid., Mar. 14, 12, 1, 1923.
16. Ibid., Jan. 24, 25, Feb. 19, Mar. 5, 1923.
17. Ibid., Jan. 23, 1923; CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985.
18. CBL to Kerry Skerrett, Jan. 22, 1923, CBLP.
19. CBL Diary, Mar. 7, 1923.
20. Ibid., Mar. 9, 10, 13, 14, 1923.
21. Ibid., Mar. 16, 1923.
22. Ibid., Mar. 23, 25, 1923.
23. Ibid., Mar. 28, 29, 1923.
24. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 23, 1982; Vernon Blunt audiotape memo, 1983, SJMP.
25. Vernon Blunt to SJM, June 11, 1983, SJMP.
26. CBL Diary, Apr. 6, 1923.
27. “The Hound of Heaven” was CBL’s “favorite poem in the English language.” CBL to Eugene J. Woods, May 7, 1945, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985.
28. Unidentified news clip, n.d., AEA Scrapbook, AEAP.
1. Gottfried Reinhardt, The Genius: A Memoir of Max Reinhardt (New York, 1979), 17; Josephine Baker in “Chasing the Rainbow,” PBS TV documentary, Jan. 17, 1990.
2. Elsa Maxwell, RSVP: Elsa Maxwell’s Own Story (Boston, 1954), 106.
3. Frederick Platt, “I Am the Woman of the Future,” L’Officiel/USA, Fall 1977; CBL int. SJM, Jan. 20, 1982; CBL, “Without Portfolio,” McCall’s, Apr. 1961.
4. L’Officiel/USA, Fall 1977.
5. Phyllis Forbes to CBL, Apr. 29, 1976, CBL to Amelia Fry, Nov. 1, 1979, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, Jan. 21, 1982.
6. CBL address, “Friend or Foe of Women?” Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Nov. 11, 1981, CBLP.
7. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 20, 1982.
8. CBL to Kerry Skerrett, Apr. 28, 1923, CBLP.
9. The Sewall-Belmont House, at Constitution Ave. and Second St., NE, is now a museum of the National Woman’s Party.
10. Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (Fairfax, Va., 1964), 11.
11. CBL to Fry, Nov. 1, 1979; Irwin, Alice Paul, 239.
12. CBL Diary, May 11, 1923, CBLP.
13. Ibid.
1. Stephen Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1970), 38; CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985. According to George Brokaw’s daughter Frances de Villers Brokaw Corrias, the family fortune derived from government contracts for military uniforms, awarded during the Civil War. The proceeds were invested in real estate. Int. SJM, May 7, 1996.
2. CBL, “This My Hand,” 24, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, Dec. 10, 1981.
3. Unidentified news clip, n.d., CBLP.
4. George Brokaw to CBL, June 6, 1923, CBLP.
5. His maternal grandfather, Sir Julian Salomons, had briefly been Chief Justice of New South Wales. Who Is [sic] Who in Australasia; Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 6, 1851–1890.
6. London Gazette, Jan. 11, 1919, 643; Clare McMillan to SJM, July 18, 1990, SJMP.
7. Julian Simpson to CBL, July 22, 1930, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, June 28, 1982.
8. Julian Simpson to CBL, July 22, 1930, CBLP.
9. Julian Simpson to ACA, June 9, 1923, CBLP.
10. Julian Simpson to CBL, July 22, 1930; CBL int. SJM, June 28, 1982, Dec. 8, 1981, May 3, 1982.
11. CBL to Julian Simpson, June 18, 1923, CBLP.
12. Simpson’s mother, Lilian Thompson, to ACA, June 21, 1923, CBLP.
13. CBL, “This My Hand,” 7.
14. CBLP.
15. CBL int. SJM, Apr. 29, 1986.
16. George Brokaw to CBL, July 20, 1923, CBLP.
17. New York Times, July 22, 1923.
18. George Brokaw to CBL, n.d. July 1923, CBLP.
19. Lilian Thompson to CBL, July 29, 1923, CBLP.
20. Ms., n.d. summer 1923, CBLP.
21. CBL to Mrs. Jones, July 30, 1923, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, June 14, 1982, June 23, 1985; CBL to ACA, Apr. 3, 1929, CBLP.
22. CBL, “This My Hand,” 53.
23. Marjorie Wolff Kittleman to SJM, June 1983, SJMP.
24. New York Times and Greenwich News, Aug. 11 and 13, 1923.
25. Greenwich News, Aug. 13, 1923.
26. CBL, “This My Hand,” 57, 69, 73.
27. CBLP.
28. Howard Brokaw to ACA, Aug. 8, 1923, CBLP.
29. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985, June 23, 1987.
30. CBL to ACA, Aug. 10, 1923, CBLP.
1. CBL int. SJM, Feb. 12, 1985; CBL, qu. Shirley Clurman int. SJM, Feb. 10, 1988; CBL int. SJM, Apr. 11, 1982.
2. CBL, “This My Hand,” 74–79, CBLP.
3. CBL to ACA, Aug. 13, 17, 22, 1923, CBLP.
4. CBL to ACA, Aug. 22, 1923.
5. CBL to ACA, Aug. 26, 29, 1923, CBLP. Biarritz Sept.-Oct. 1923 calendar, CBLP.
6. CBL to ACA, Aug. 29, 1923.
7. Julian Simpson to CBL, Sept. 13, 1923, CBLP.
8. CBL to ACA, Sept. 10, 1923, CBLP.
9. Ibid.; George Brokaw to ACA, Sept. 5, 1923, CBLP.
10. Ibid.; Joel Jacobs to CBL, Aug. 24, 1923, CBLP.
11. Joseph Madigan to DFB, Oct. 30, 1923, CBLP.
12. CBL int. SJM, June 20, 1982.
13. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 21, 1930, CBLP; Charles Frederick Rose, Era of Elegance (New York, 1947), 92–103; David Selznick, “The Wreck of the Brokaw Mansions,” New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 11, 1965.
14. CBL to Freeman, Aug. 21, 1930, CBLP.
15. CBL int. SJM, Dec. 10, 1981, and Apr. 26, 1982.
16. Clurman int. SJM, Feb. 10, 1988; CBL int. SJM, Dec. 15, 1981, Apr. 26, 1982.
17. CBL int. SJM, July 16, 1985; George Brokaw to CBL, c. Feb. 1924, CBLP.
18. CBL scrapbooks, CBLP; CBL int. SJM, Sept. 26, 1984.
19. CBL Diary, Feb. 27, 1925, CBLP.
20. Julian Simpson to CBL, May 9, 1930, CBLP.
21. CBL Diary summary, Jan. 1926, CBLP. When Miss Mackay later married Irving Berlin, Clare mocked him as a Jewish “King of Jazz and son of the gutter.” She also gloated over the Catholic Clarence MacKay disinheriting his daughter.
22. Malcolm Lovell, qu. his parents (friends of the Brokaws), int. SJM, May 18, 1988. Customers in speakeasies were urged to talk softly so as not to attract police—hence the name.
23. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 21, 1982.
24. New York Post, Apr. 9, 1925.
25. CBL Diary, Feb. 8, 1925.
26. Ibid., Feb. 8, Apr. 10, 1925.
27. Ibid.
28. ACA Diary fragment, 1925, CBLP.
29. George Brokaw petition, New York Times, Dec. 6, 1925.
30. New York Sun, Dec. 4, 1925, reported that CBL’s “merits … on the amateur stage have been demonstrated.” CBL Diary, Jan. 5, 1926.
31. CBL Diary, Jan. 17, 1926.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., Jan. 24, 1926.
34. Ibid., Jan. 25, 1926.
35. Ibid., Jan. 29, 1926.
36. Ibid., Jan. 31, 1926.
37. Ibid., Feb. 15, 1926.
1. Town Topics, Mar. 11, 1926.
2. Baptism announcement, unidentified newsclip, CBLP.
3. Ernest H. Rice to CBL, June 8, 1976, CBLP.
4. New York American, June 19, 1926.
5. CBL scrapbooks, CBLP; Bea Grover to Alden Hatch, Oct. 29, 1954, AHP; Sands Point house sold for $300,000, New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 30, 1926.
6. CBL scrapbooks, CBLP; Town Topics, Dec., Nov. 1926.
7. CBL to ACA, n.d. 1927, CBLP.
8. Ibid.
9. Nesta Obermer to SJM, Apr. 25, 1984, SJMP.
10. Ts. CBLP.
11. “Fiona Macleod” (William Sharp), “The Lordly Ones,” reprinted in Ethel Fowler, The Second Daffodil Poetry Book (London, 1931), 29.
12. Nesta Obermer to CBL, Dec. 6, c. Mar. 1929, CBLP; Nesta Obermer to SJM, Apr. 25, 1984, SJMP.
13. Town Topics, Sept. 1927; CBL Scrapbooks, CBLP.
14. CBL, Stuffed Shirts (New York, 1931), 268.
15. CBL to Vernon Blunt, Oct. 14, 1927, CBLP.
16. Town Topics, Nov. 1927, CBL scrapbook, CBLP.
17. CBL int. SJM, July 11, 1987.
18. New York Appellate Court ruling, New York Times, Feb. 5, 1927.
19. CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982: “He managed to rob poor old Riggie of about $15,000 … He borrowed some stocks and bonds without mentioning it and put them up as collateral and he bought out margins when the depression hit.”
20. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982.
21. DFB to CBL, Mar. 28, Apr. 29, 1928, CBLP.
22. DFB to CBL, Apr. 28, 1928, CBLP.
23. Vernon Blunt int. SJM, June 10, 1985; Vernon Blunt to SJM, Aug. 26, 1985, SJMP. Blunt was on the verge of bankruptcy at this time, and seems to have come to Paris hoping that CBL would lend him money. It is evident from her letter inviting him that she really wanted to hear the latest news about Julian Simpson. CBL to Vernon Blunt, Sept. 12, 1927, CBLP.
24. CBL to ACA, June 26, 1928, CBLP.
25. Ibid. CBL was unsure of her taste. “If only me little goil friend were here,” she wrote. “I should have so much more confidence in what I bought.”
26. CBL to ACA, July 19, 22, 27, 1928, CBLP. Long letters from Jean, a young New York investor with whom CBL had become mildly enamored a year or two back, were all that kept her buoyant. “His only crime, the poor lamb, is being poor,” she wrote Ann Austin on July 27, 1928.
27. CBL int. SJM, Apr. 26, 1982; CBL to ACA, c. August 7, 1928, CBLP.
28. CBL to ACA, Oct. 28, 1929; DFB to CBL, Mar. 26, 1929, CBLP.
29. George Brokaw to CBL, Nov. 1928, CBLP.
30. Ibid. CBL int. SJM, Dec 10, 1981.
31. ACA to CBL, c. Oct. 1927, CBLP.
32. Letter and enclosed news clip, WFB to CBL, c. Oct. 1928, CBLP.
33. WFB qu. CBL to CBL, c. Nov. 1928, CBLP.
34. WFB to CBL, Nov. 7, 1928, CBLP.
35. WFB qu. CBL to CBL, c. Nov. 1928, CBLP.
36. WFB to CBL, c. Nov. 1928, CBLP. WFB said he carried miniatures of both children in his watch fob, and had kept scrapbooks about Clare’s life as a Brokaw.
37. Ibid., Dec. 4, 1928, CBLP.
38. WFB death certificate, State of California, copy in SJMP.
39. Anniversary Boothe to CBL, Jan. 23, 1929; Ruth Paddock to CBL, Jan. 15, 1929, CBLP.
40. Ruth Paddock to CBL, Dec. 19, 1928, Jan. 15, 1929, CBLP; W. Franklyn Boothe [sic], “Fingered Octaves and Primary Extension Exercises,” edited by Ruth Paddock, unpublished ms., Music Division, Library of Congress; Josef Gingold to SJM, Mar 13, 1991, SJMP. “As to Mr. Boothe’s playing fingered tenths, I have my doubts, because had he done it, he would not have lived to a ripe old age, nor during his lifetime had any tendons in working order.”
41. John Boothe to CBL, Apr. 2, 1937, CBLP.
42. Copy in CBLP.
43. CBL to ACA, Feb. 7, 1929. “They put new locks on the front door because they know you have a key.”
1. CBL legal memo, June 1931, CBLP; Dorothy Burns Holloran int. Alden Hatch, n.d., AHP.
2. CBL to ACA, Feb. 7, 1929, CBLP. Some incidental details for this chapter come from CBL, “Reno,” an unfinished autobiographical ts. in CBLP.
3. CBL to ACA, Feb. 7, 1929.
4. CBL to ACA, Feb. 13, 1929, CBLP.
5. Ibid.
6. State laws required potential divorcées to stay in Reno for ninety consecutive days. But a local airline had a discreet arrangement with the District Judge that women who wanted to take short breaks in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or San Francisco would not have time counted against them. Roscoe Turner to CBL, Apr. 23, 1957, CBLP.
7. CBL to ACA, Feb. 7 and c. 20, 1929, CBLP.
8. “Julian Jerome” (CBL pseudonym), “Where Bonds Are Broken,” Vanity Fair, Jan. 1931; CBL, “This World of Ours,” 31, SJMP.
9. A Miss Minerva Sherman. CBL to ACA, c. Mar. 7, 1929, CBLP.
10. CBL to ACA, Feb. 7, 1929. On Feb. 13 CBL wrote ACA vowing not to accept a proposal from Jean “unless he has the right to ask.” That “right” meant success in his profession. CBLP.
11. CBL to ACA, n.d. “Wednesday, 3,” 1929, from Reno, CBLP.
12. ACA to CBL, Mar. 29, 1929, CBLP.
13. ACA to CBL, n.d., c. Mar. 1929, CBLP.
14. CBL to ACA, “Wednesday, 3,” 1929; ACA to CBL, Feb. 17, 1929; CBL to ACA, c. Mar. 7, 1929, CBLP.
15. ACA to CBL, Mar. 23, 1929, CBLP.
16. ACA to CBL, Mar. 11, 1929, CBLP.
17. ACA to CBL, Mar. 18, 1929, DFB to Margaret Beamish, Apr. 7, 1929, ACA to CBL c. Apr 7, 1929, CBLP.
18. ACA to CBL, c. Mar. 1929, CBLP.
19. DFB to CBL, Mar. 26, 1929, Feb. 26, Apr. 23, 1929, CBLP.
20. CBL to ACA, Feb. 7, 1929, CBLP.
21. Findings and Decree of Divorce, May 20, 1929, CBLP.
22. CBL to ACA, “Wednesday, 3,” 1929, CBLP.
23. CBL, “The Real Reason,” McCall’s, Feb., Mar., Apr., 1947; CBL qu. Liberty, June 14, 1941.
1. CBL int. SJM, June 11, 1982.
2. CBL int. Margaret Altschul, n.d. 1938, CBL scrapbooks, CBLP.
3. David resented her absence and fired off a letter complaining that she had left household bills in arrears, even though their mother had given her a large sum of cash to pay them. He sarcastically hoped that she would at any rate “go to plenty of parties” and have many proposals of marriage. DFB to CBL, n.d. summer 1929, CBLP.
4. Sumner Gerard to CBL, Aug. 28, 1929, CBLP.
5. CBL qu. Edna Woolman Chase and Ilka Chase, Always in Vogue (New York, 1954), 230; CBL int. Altschul.
6. Jeanne B. Winham to CBL, Jan. 29, 1959, CBLP; Chase, Always, 231; CBL, “Chic for the Newly Arrived,” Vogue, February 1, 1930.
7. CBL int. W. W. Lundell, May 17, 1933, NBC transcript in CBLP.
8. Chase, Always, 231.
9. CBL int. SJM, Sept. 26, 1984.
10. CBL int. SJM, Sept. 26, 1984, July 18, 1985; Chase, Always, 226–228; Irene Selznick int. SJM, Feb. 8, 1988; Jean Dalrymple int. SJM, Feb. 5, 1988.
11. Time, Mar. 3, 1930.
12. Sarah L. Burt, “L’Automne du Monde: The Last Eight Years of Vanity Fair,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Kansas, 1984; Jeanne B. Winham, “Very Innocent Bystander,” Vanity Fair, Dec. 1983; Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1975), 39.
13. Frank Crowninshield, “In the Cubs’ Den III,” Vogue, Mar. 15, 1945.
14. CBL int. Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9, 1980.
15. Donald Freeman to CBL, Oct. 30, 1929, CBLP; Gladys Freeman int. SJM, Nov. 10, 1982; Jeanne B. Winham to CBL, Jan. 29, 1959, CBLP.
16. Dr. Mehemed Agha, Vanity Fair’s art director, said many years later that Mrs. Chase was happy to let CBL go because she lacked fashion sense. “From the Vogue viewpoint, she was an unbeliever. The same thing happened to Dorothy Parker.” Int. Hubert Kay, Oct. 7, 1958, CBLP.
17. Condé Nast, Inc., felt the chill of changing times acutely. Its stock plummeted from $93.00 a share to $4.50 when banks drew on company holdings to cover a personal loan Nast had taken to invest in Goldman, Sachs. In the long term, this was a catastrophe from which Vanity Fair would not recover. For details of Nast’s finances, see Caroline Seebohm, The Man Who Was Vogue (New York, 1982), 305–317.
18. Margaret Case Harriman, Blessed Are the Debonair (New York, 1956), 158; Donald Freeman to CBL, Mar. 10, Feb. 25, 1930, CBLP. He would pay her $120, the equivalent of about $1,200 today, for editing a short piece in French and writing an article on divorce.
19. CBL int. SJM, June 24, 1982.
20. Donald Freeman to CBL, c. Aug. 21, 1930, CBLP.
21. CBL qu. Helen Lawrenson, Whistling Girl (New York, 1978), 62; Grand Duke Alexander to CBL, Feb. 15, 1930, CBLP.
22. Donald Freeman to CBL, July 24, 1930, CBLP. About this time, CBL became involved in a mysterious adventure possibly involving illicit drugs, abduction, and medical malpractice. The known facts are too sketchy to be completely reconstructed, but they may be cited here. It appears that in 1930 she struck up a friendship with the notorious George Gordon Moore, a wealthy, Indian-looking Midwesterner who haunted prizefights and society parties on both sides of the Atlantic. (Some fifteen years before, in London, Moore had been an unlikely escort-about-town to Lady Diana Manners, the future Diana Cooper, who was both fascinated and repelled by him, and may possibly have acquired her wartime morphine habit in his company.) It is not certain when CBL began to suspect, or indeed know, that Moore was a drug dealer, but in old age she would hint that she had nearly become one of his customers.
She said (CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982) that they were attending a prizefight together when she suddenly developed such a sharp abdominal pain, “I thought I was going to die.” The next thing she knew, she had been injected with a sedative and transferred to a private clinic at 591 Park Avenue. It was run by Dr. Edward Cowles, a specialist in nervous disorders and drug addiction who was much patronized by show business people. CBL was vaguely puzzled by the clinic’s lack of admission formalities but soon fell into a deep sleep.
On waking some hours later, she found herself in a fourth-floor room overlooking a garden. The agonizing stabs had gone, and she assumed she had passed a kidney stone. A nurse came in with needle poised, but CBL, growing suspicious, sent her away. Then a woman wearing a kimono sauntered in and remarked that the film star Jeanne Eagels, a frequently hospitalized heroin and morphine abuser, occupied the room below and was “in a bad way.”
Scared, CBL looked around for her clothes. Two “doctors” arrived, forestalling her escape, prodded her, and diagnosed an “inflamed ovary.” They prescribed another shot. CBL insisted on calling her stepfather. When Dr. Austin heard where she was, he reportedly said, “Oh my God, I’ll be right over.”
Eagels died some time later in the clinic, after going into drug-induced convulsions. That, and a mysterious suicide there, prompted New York State authorities to begin an investigation into Dr. Cowles’s practice. He was suspected, but never indicted, of prescribing excessive narcotics for routine ailments. As for George Moore, he continued to be seen around talented and attractive young people.
CBL’s story is lent partial credence by a letter from Donald Freeman to her, Aug. 21, 1930, CBLP: “Dr. Cowles is in pretty deep … Dr. Evan Evans and his other consultants will have to go before the grand jury to explain the connection … If I were you … I would not mention your visit there as, along with his other patients, you will be suspected of being a dope, as all the tabloids openly accuse him of catering to wealthy addicts.” For the Moore/Cooper relationship, see Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (Boston, 1958), 91, 141–142, Trumpets from the Steep (Boston, 1960), 17, and Philip Ziegler, Diana Cooper (London, 1981), 55, 62–63.
23. Aldous Huxley, “Progress—How the Achievements of Civilization Will Eventually Bankrupt the Entire World,” Vanity Fair, Jan. 1928.
24. CBL qu. “Only Human,” syndicated column by “Candide,” n.d. CBL scrapbooks, CBLP.
25. Seebohm, The Man, 320. Harriman, Debonair, 158, says it was her idea to feature Macfadden. “That picture cost me exactly fifty thousand dollars,” Nast complained. Ibid.
26. Vanity Fair, Oct. 1930, Feb. 1931, Sept. 1931, June 1932.
27. CBL int. Lundell.
28. Qu. Crowninshield, “In the Cubs’ Den III.” Gallico cited “We Nominate for Oblivion” as “perhaps the most venomous and courageous feature ever published by a magazine.” Ibid. Vanity Fair office memo, Oct. 11, 1933, CBLP; Mehemed Agha int. Hubert Kay, Oct. 7, 1958, CBLP; Vanity Fair editorial meeting minutes, June 18, 1934, CBLP.
29. Donald Freeman to CBL, Aug. 25, 1930, CBLP.
30. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 27, 1930, CBLP.
31. Milton MacKaye, “Clare Boothe,” Scribner’s Magazine, Mar. 1939.
32. In 1945 Paul Gallico said of Vanity Fair that “it paid off in the lowest fees and the highest prestige of any periodical ever published.” Qu. Crowninshield, “In the Cubs’ Den III.”
33. CBL, Stuffed Shirts (New York, 1931), passim, and 111, 120.
34. Ibid., 75–83. In one version of The Women Clare has Mary Haines return from Reno and become an interior decorator.
35. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 27, 28, 1930, CBLP; Julian Jerome, “The Perfect Backgammoner,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 1930, and “The Official Laws of Backgammon,” ibid., Dec. 1930.
36. Harriman, Debonair, 158–159.
37. Ibid., 159.
1. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 19, 1930, CBLP.
2. Ibid.
3. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 28, 1930, CBLP. A month earlier CBL had written Julian Simpson, asking if he would be glad to see her again. He replied that he certainly would. Again, neither of them made a move. Julian Simpson to CBL, July 22, 1930, CBLP.
4. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 21, 1930, CBLP.
5. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 22, 1930, CBLP.
6. Donald Freeman to CBL, Aug. 25, 1930, CBLP.
7. Ibid.
8. Donald Freeman to CBL, Aug. 28, 1930, CBLP.
9. CBL to Freeman, Aug. 29, 1930, CBLP.
10. CBL to Donald Freeman, Oct. 29, 1930, CBLP.
11. CBL, “The Hanging Gardens of Gotham,” in “This World of Ours,” 32, SJMP.
12. Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, Aug. 1974; CBL int. “Modern Women Need Masters,” Seattle Sunday Times, Jan. 24, 1932; Althya Clark Youngman to SJM, Oct. 11, 1984, SJMP.
13. CBL Diary, January 2, 1931, CBLP. Agha’s first impression of CBL, recalled years later, bore out her suspicions. “Nice shoes and a mink coat.” But of her abilities as an editor he grudgingly admitted, “She displayed amazing brilliance in a woman, a real gift for Swiftian phrases and ideas.” Mehemed Agha int. Hubert Kay, Oct. 7, 1958, CBLP.
14. Donald Freeman to CBL, Aug. 28, 1930, CBLP; CBL, “This World of Ours,” 25; Lawrenson, “Woman.”
15. Jeanne B. Winham, “Bystander,” Vanity Fair, Dec. 1983.
16. Margaret Case Harriman, “The Candor Kid II,” New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1941; AEA to CBL, Dec. 13, 1932, CBLP.
17. Donald Freeman to CBL, Sept. 13, 1932. For Nast’s finances, see Caroline Seebohm, The Man Who Was Vogue (New York, 1982), 305–317.
18. CBL Diary, Jan. 3, 1931.
19. Helen Lawrenson, “A Farewell to Yesterday, When You Couldn’t Care Less,” Esquire, July 1961.
20. Jay Franklin, “The Next War,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 1930; Corey Ford qu. Vanity Fair, May 1930.
21. Vanity Fair, Oct. 1930.
22. Margaret Case Harriman, Blessed Are the Debonair (New York, 1956). Mrs. Harriman, in 1930, was the Margaret Case Morgan referred to in the text (her father was Frank Case, owner of the Algonquin Hotel). She left Vanity Fair for The New Yorker in 1931, and later wrote the two-part profile of CBL cited in the Bibliography. For examples of the kind of serious political articles Harriman objected to, see two pieces by Maurice Hindus, “Red Bread” (Stalin’s oppression of the kulaks) and “Red Love” (emancipation of women in the USSR), Vanity Fair, Apr., Oct. 1931. By August 1933 an internal Vanity Fair memo pointed out that the first seven issues that year had 59 articles and pictures on politics and economics. In June alone there were 6 such articles prominently placed, while fiction and humor had been relegated way back.
23. Reproduced in Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradley, Cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s: Selections from America’s Most Memorable Magazine: “Vanity Fair” (London, 1960), 190. CBL was also a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair’s popular feature “Impossible Interview,” featuring imaginary confrontations between, for example, John D. Rockefeller and Josef Stalin, or Calvin Coolidge and Greta Garbo.
24. CBL Diary, Jan. 2, 1931. The form of interrelated short stories had actually been pioneered by Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio (1919).
25. CBL Diary, Jan. 2, 1931.
26. Gus Hall qu. John Chamberlain, A Life with the Printed Word (Chicago, 1982), 52. According to Hall, there were ten “state-of-mind” Communists for every CPUSA card carrier in the 1930s.
27. CBL Diary, Jan. 5, 1931.
28. CBL Diary, Jan. 10, 1931.
29. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 10, 1931, June 24, 1932, CBLP; CBL Diary, Jan. 2 and 3, 1931; Donald Freeman to CBL, n.d. c. summer 1930, CBLP.
30. CBL to Donald Freeman, n.d., c. summer 1931, CBLP.
31. Donald Freeman to CBL, n.d., c. summer 1931, CBLP.
32. CBL to Donald Freeman, n.d., c. summer 1931, CBLP.
33. Donald Freeman to CBL, n.d., c. summer 1931, CBLP.
34. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug., 10, 1931, CBLP.
35. Donald Freeman to CBL, Aug., 10, 1931, CBLP.
36. Ibid.
37. Edward Steichen, Steichen (New York, 1963), Ch. 8, “The Theater”; CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 11, 1931, CBLP.
38. Ibid.
39. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 10, 1931.
40. CBL to Arthur Krock, July 7, 1931, CBLP; CBL to Tom Smith of H. Liveright, Inc., July 16, 1931, CBLP.
41. Books, Mar. 20, 1932.
42. New York Mirror, n.d. c. Nov. 1931, news clip in CBLP; Milton MacKaye, “Clare Boothe,” Scribner’s Magazine, Mar. 1939; Galveston Tribune, Nov. 21, 1931.
43. Vanity Fair, Nov. 1931.
44. Donald Freeman to CBL, Aug. 13, 1931; P. G. Wodehouse to CBL, Feb. 8, 1932. CBLP.
45. CBL to Merritt Hulburd, Dec. 1, 1931, CBLP; CBL Diary, Oct. 21, 1932, SJMP. According to the novelist Dawn Powell, CBL enlisted a young publicist, Selma Robinson, to promote her book. Miss Robinson was flattered to be lunched and treated as an equal by the dazzling Mrs. Brokaw, and was particularly beguiled by what seemed to be CBL’s healthy contempt for social snobbery. CBL suggested they go together to a party for “that old bitch” Grand Duchess Marie of Romania, then flabbergasted the young woman by curtsying to the guest of honor along with everybody else. The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, ed. Tim Page (South Royalton, Vt., 1995), 175.
46. CBL to Donald Freeman, June 24, 1932, CBLP; CBL Diary, June 23, 1932, SJMP. Forty-six years later Stuffed Shirts was reprinted, but it brought CBL only about another $100. CBL to Nesta Obermer, Aug. 10, 1977, CBLP.
47. CBL to Donald Freeman, June 24, 1932, CBLP.
48. Donald Freeman to CBL, n.d. “Tuesday,” 1931, CBLP.
49. Montage in CBLP.
1. CBL to Donald Freeman, June 24, 1932, CBLP; CBL Diary, June 24, 1932, SJMP; CBL, “For Release On Receipt,” ts., June 25, 1948, CBLP.
2. John Billings Diary, May 13, 1933, JBP; CBL Diary, June 17, 1932, SJMP. CBL had met BMB earlier in the year when they were dinner-table companions at Condé Nast’s apartment. He had invited her to lunch the next day and gallantly driven her home afterwards. CBL int. SJM, June 11, 1985. She first mentions him in her diary on May 25, 1932, SJMP.
3. CBL Diary, June 23, 1932.
4. Ibid., June 25, 1932.
5. Ibid., July 15, 1932.
6. BMB to CBL, Aug. 29, 1935, CBLP, recalling his first impression of her.
7. Frank Crowninshield, “In the Cubs’ Den III,” Vogue, Mar. 15, 1945.
8. CBL Diary, June 25, 1932.
9. Vanity Fair, Apr. 1932.
10. Margaret Case Harriman, Blessed Are the Debonair (New York, 1956), 163–64.
11. CBL to Donald Freeman, June 24, 1932, CBLP; CBL, “Without Portfolio,” McCall’s, July 1964.
12. NNP Prospectus, CBLP.
13. Vanity Fair, June 1932.
14. Jordan A. Schwartz, The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 267; Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York, 1990), 54.
15. Schwartz, Speculator, 267.
16. John F. Carter to CBL, June 30, 1932, CBLP.
17. Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1932.
18. CBL Diary, June 25–29, 1932; CBL to Mark Sullivan, July 6, 1932, CBLP.
19. Ibid., July 1, 1932 [sic]. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Fred I. Israel, History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968 (New York, 1971), III, 2723, puts the start-ballot time at 4:28 A.M.
20. CBL Diary, July 1, 1932; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York, 1965), 948.
21. CBL Diary, July 1 and 19, 1932.
22. Ibid., July 2, 1932.
23. Ibid., July 3, 4, 26, 1932.
24. CBL to Donald Freeman, July 4, 1932, CBLP.
25. Mark Sullivan qu. CBL Diary, July 5, 1932.
26. Ibid., July 12, 1932. The first successful test of RCA’s new Empire State Building television mast had occurred on May 17, 1932. New York Times, May 18, 1932.
27. CBL Diary, July 13, 1932; Schwartz, Speculator, 172; CBL to BMB, c. July 27, 1932, CBLP; CBL Diary, June 17 and July 26, 1932.
28. CBL Diary, July 12, 1932; Julian Simpson to CBL, Sept. 29, 1930, CBLP; CBL Diary, July 29, 1932.
29. CBL to BMB, Aug. 2, 1932, CBLP; CBL Diary, July 30, Aug. 8, 1932; CBL to BMB, late July and Aug. 6, 1932, CBLP.
30. CBL Diary, July 31, 1932.
31. Ibid., July 30–31, 1932; CBL to Mark Sullivan, Aug. 1, 1932, CBLP.
32. CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982.
33. William Harlan Hale to Katherine Anne Porter, May 25, 1932, KAPP; Porter to Hale, Sept. 13, 1932, KAPP.
34. CBL Diary, Aug. 2, 1932; CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982.
35. William Harlan Hale to CBL, July 3, 1962, CBLP, recalled the hair-dyeing incident. William Harlan Hale to Hubert Kay, Oct. 23, 1958, CBLP.
36. CBL Diary, Aug. 5, 1932.
37. CBL Diary, Aug. 6–9, 1932.
38. Ibid.
39. Leslie F. Nast to CBL, n.d. 1931, CBLP. CBL, int. SJM, Dec. 10, 1981, recalled that around this time, at a Long Island house party, Leslie Nast came into her bedroom and made direct sexual overtures. At first CBL submitted (whether out of desire or curiosity, she did not say), but she soon found out that their intimacies were rendered painful by Leslie’s “very long nails.” She was reminded, she said, “of Wedekind’s play about the man who discovered his wife’s lesbianism and took her viscera to the lover.”
40. CBL Diary, July 26, 1832.37. Ms. in CBLP. The A. D. Peters literary agency rejected “This My Hand” for serialization, saying that it was “in its very essence subjective, a little inclined to morbidity.” Carol Hill to Thayer Hobson, Aug. 19, 1932, CBLP.
41. Ms. in CBLP.
42. CBL Diary, Aug. 14, 1932.
43. Mark Sullivan to CBL, c. May 1933, CBLP; CBL Diary, August 18, 1932, SJMP. Despite CBL’s protestations, some sexual intimacy does seem to have existed between them. Eight months later Sullivan would write: “If you say again that I ‘have a unique place in your cosmos,’ I’ll do one of two things … either beat you up, or reduce you to physical exhaustion the other way.” Mark Sullivan to CBL, c. Apr. 1933, CBLP.
44. In SJMP.
45. CBL to BMB, c. July 27, 1932.
46. CBL Diary, July 28, 1932; CBL to BMB, Aug. 2, 1932, CBLP.
47. CBL Diary, July 22, 1932; BMB to CBL, passim, CBLP.
48. CBL Diary, Aug. 24, 25, 27, 1932.
49. CBL to Donald Freeman, July 4, 1932, CBLP; Freeman to CBL, Aug. 11, 1932, CBLP.
50. Donald Freeman to CBL, Aug. 29, 30, 1932, CBLP.
51. CBL Diary, Sept. 2, 1932.
52. CBL to BMB, Aug. 6, 1932, CBLP.
53. CBL Diary, Sept. 10 and Oct. 9, 1932.
54. Ibid., Sept. 8, 1932.
55. Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, August 1974; CBL Diary, Sept. 14, 1932, SJMP. According to Lawrenson, BMB used to bring back from Europe antique gold snuffboxes for his women friends. CBL had first choice. “She wants them all,” he said. “Poor little kid, it’s hard to refuse her anything.” She ended up with about two dozen.
56. CBL to Mark Sullivan, Sept. 17, 1932, CBLP; CBL Diary, Sept. 20, 23, Oct. 10, Sept. 22, 1932.
57. Lawrenson, “Woman”; CBL Diary, Sept. 21, 1932. Two months before, Nast had told CBL that he and Leslie were divorcing and that he wanted to marry her. “But that doesn’t interest me, my dear!” she wrote. Ibid., July 25, 1932.
58. Donald Freeman to CBL, n.d., c. Sept. 24, 1932, CBLP.
59. CBL Diary, Oct. 1, 1932.
60. Ibid. CBL to Paul [Gallico?], n.d. Nov. 1933, CBLP.
61. CBL Diary, Oct. 1, 1932.
62. CBL Diary, Oct. 16 and 2, 1932. A legal memorandum, “Re: Estate Donald Freeman deceased,” Dec. 30, 1933, reveals that Freeman was in an extreme financial crisis at the time of his death, with $9,833 in debts and only $599 in assets. Copy in CBLP. He had borrowed $500 from CBL only a few days before his death. CBL Diary, Sept. 26, 1932.
63. CBLP.
64. CBL Diary, Oct. 22, 1932, qu. George Jean Nathan.
65. CBL Diary, Oct. 3, 1932.
66. CBL Diary, Oct. 4, 1932.
1. CBL Diary, Oct. 4 and 5, 1932, SJMP.
2. Ibid., Oct. 7. For a time, between Nast’s marriages, the two men had shared an apartment.
3. Ibid.
4. Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, Aug. 1974; CBL Diary, Oct. 8, 1932.
5. Ibid., Sept. 26 and 28, Nov. 18, 1932.
6. Frank Crowninshield, “In the Cubs’ Den III,” Vogue, Mar. 15, 1945; Mehemed Agha to Hubert Kay, Oct. 7, 1958, CBLP. Crowninshield also wrote that in “fifty troubled years of editing, I have never encountered a Managing Editor so able, so daring, or so resourceful.”
7. Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton: The Authorized Biography (London, 1985), 206; CBL to literary agent Carol Hill, July 11, 1932, CBLP.
8. CBL to Drew Pearson, Feb. 6, 1933, CBLP.
9. CBL int. W. W. Lundell, May 17, 1933, NBC transcript in CBLP.
10. New York World-Telegram, Feb. 6, 1933.
11. Henry Morton Robinson to Hubert Kay, Nov. 1, 1958, CBLP.
12. Helen Lawrenson, “Woman”; Lawrenson to SJM, Mar. 10, 1982, SJMP.
13. Lawrenson, “Woman.”
14. Ibid.; CBL Diary, Nov. 30, 1932, records Genthe’s comment.
15. Ibid., Oct. 26, 1932.
16. Ibid., Oct. 28, 1932.
17. Ibid., Oct. 29, 1932.
18. Ibid., Oct. 30, 1932.
19. Ibid.; CBL to Mark Sullivan, Nov. 6, 1932, CBLP.
20. CBL Diary, Oct. 31, 1932.
21. Crowninshield, “Cubs’ Den III.”
22. CBL Diary, Oct. 16, Nov. 28, Oct. 23, 1932.
23. CBL to Mark Sullivan, Aug. 23, 1932, CBLP; Diary, Nov. 8, 1932.
24. Ibid., Dec. 2, Nov. 1, 1932. In old age CBL complained, “Bernie spent more time in bed with the gout than with me.” CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982.
25. CBL Diary, Oct. 14, 1932.
26. CBL Diary, passim; CBL to Kitty Miller, Dec. 15, 1932, CBLP; John Golden to CBL, Nov. 6, 1933; Leland Hayward Agency to CBL, relinquishing play, having submitted it to 33 producers, Mar. 3, 1934, CBLP; CBL Diary, Dec. 17, 1932, qu. Rudolf Kommer (“too farcical”).
27. CBL Diary, Dec. 13, 1932.
28. Greenwich News, c. Mar. 16, 1932, AEAP; CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 27, 1932; AEA to CBL, n.d. c. 1932, CBLP.
29. ACA to CBL, “Friday a.m.” 1932, CBLP.
30. CBL Diary, Dec. 7, 1932.
31. Ibid., Dec. 4, 1932.
32. Ibid., Dec. 21, 1932.
33. Ibid., Dec. 25, 1932.
34. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1932.
35. Ibid., Dec. 28, 30, 1932.
36. Ibid., Dec. 31, 1932.
1. New York Times, Feb. 12, 1933. Alva Belmont is buried in St. Hubert’s Chapel, Woodlawn Cemetery.
2. Mark Sullivan to CBL, n.d. c. Jan. 1933, CBLP.
3. Margaret L. Coit, Mr. Baruch (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 316.
4. SJM notes from 1984 visit, SJMP; CBL to Paul Gallico, Feb. 31 [sic], 1933, CBLP.
5. Coit, Mr. Baruch, 317; Laura Z. Hobson, Laura Z: A Life (New York, 1983), 150.
6. CBL to Sullivan and Paul Gallico, both letters dated Feb. 31 [sic], 1933, CBLP.
7. CBL to Sullivan, Feb. 31 [sic], 1933, CBLP.
8. Vanity Fair, Mar. 1933; Lawrenson, “Woman.” In 1941 The New Yorker reported that CBL baited wildfowl blinds in South Carolina, and a friend, Daniel Longwell, wrote a letter to the editor in her defense. “She doesn’t have to bait game to hold her own. I have seen her knock down her limit of doves neatly, and … have applauded a half-dozen of her shots that brought high, fast-flying ducks down dead … She [once] shot her limit of ten ducks within an hour, using only thirty-odd shells.” Gratefully replying, CBL admitted to Longwell that she had just shot two turkeys almost simultaneously, with alternate barrels. “I had indeed broken the law … but I pulled that second barrel automatically.” Longwell to New Yorker, Jan. 15, 1941, CBL to Longwell, Feb. 7, 1941, DLP.
9. CBL to Sullivan, Feb. 31 [sic], 1933; CBL to Joseph Robinson, Apr. 14, 1933, CBLP.
10. CBL to Sullivan, Feb. 31 [sic], 1933.
11. Ibid.
12. CBL, “The President’s Widow,” n.d. 1934, “This World of Ours,” 40.
13. CBL Diary, Dec. 21, 1932, SJMP; Pare Lorentz to CBL, Apr. 27, 1934, CBLP.
14. CBL qu. Paul Gallico to CBL, n.d. 1933, CBLP.
15. Ibid.
16. Paul Gallico to CBL, Aug. 27, 1933, CBLP.
17. Vanity Fair, Mar. 1933. Vogue’s first color cover was almost a year earlier, in Apr. 1932. Garetto’s cover of Adolf Hitler as a swastika in November 1932 had also caused a stir.
18. Letter qu. Vanity Fair, May 1933; Condé Nast to CBL, Feb. 19, 1933, CBLP.
19. Advertising revenue in May 1933 was $210,213. Sarah L. Burt, “L’Automne du Monde: The Last Eight Years of Vanity Fair,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Kansas, 1984, 154; Nast to CBL, Mar. 27, 1933, CBLP.
20. Nast to CBL, Mar. 27, 1933. CBL’s last article (Dec. 1932) had been on Al Smith. Her next would be in June 1933.
21. Nast to CBL, Mar. 27, 1933. Nast’s criticisms notwithstanding, John Franklin Carter said a quarter of a century later that CBL was “the best magazine editor to deal with I’ve ever known.” Int. Hubert Kay, Oct. 1958, CBLP.
22. CBL to Condé Nast, Mar. 27, 1933, CBLP.
23. Condé Nast to CBL, May 22, 1933, CBLP. Mark Sullivan told CBL that Nast’s picking at her was the result of “his being in love with you—whether he knows it or not, You have a strong conquering streak in you, and you are determined to run V.F. even if your way of running it is contrary to the owner’s way. It’s merely a case of you instinctively following the law of your nature.” To CBL, c. Apr. 1933, CBLP.
24. CBL rented Time employee John Martin’s house, “Fox Hollow,” in Brookville for $501 a month. She seems to have been unaccountably short of cash, because she deducted $54 from her last payment for “objets domestiques,” telling Martin not to cash her check before October 17. To sweeten the pill, she sent him a watercolor of his house. CBL to John Martin, Oct. 16, 1933, CBLP.
25. CBL to “Paul,” Nov. 7, 1933; to Frank Altschul, Nov. 9, 1933; to William Wiseman, Nov. 12, 1933, CBLP. It would appear that politics figured, if only briefly, in CBL’s plans for her future that fall. BMB’s friend Gen. Hugh Johnson had been appointed head of the National Recovery Administration to revitalize industry. Through his influence, in Oct. 1933, CBL was given seats on the Legitimate Theater and Motion Picture Code Authorities. Her mandate was to persuade industry executives to adopt and then abide by codes of business practice consistent with New Deal policies. Her initial enthusiasm for the assignment waned when she realized that the NRA had more in common with the right-wing socialism of Mussolini’s Italy than its purported model, the World War I War Industries Board. She decided that government control of free markets and free expression could only be done “with bayonets,” and resigned her position after eight months or so. In 1934 she began a play about government interference in labor relations called “O, Pyramids!” She was still tinkering with it in 1937, but the play was never produced. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 8, 1982; Stephen Shadegg, Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1970), 69; CBL to Sol A. Rosenblatt of the NRA, July 1, 1934, CBLP; CBL qu. New York Times Magazine, Apr. 22, 1973; Mark Fearnow, Clare Boothe Luce: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Westport, Conn., 1995).
26. CBL to “Paul,” Nov. 7, 1933, CBLP; CBL to Frank Altschul, Nov. 9, 1933, CBLP; CBL to William Wiseman, Nov. 12, 1933, CBLP.
27. Carlotta O’Neill Diary, Nov. 6, 1933, YCAL.
28. Carlotta O’Neill to CBL, Nov. 6, 1933, CBLP; CBL to “Paul,” Nov. 7, 1933, CBLP.
29. CBL int. SJM, Sept. 9, 1986; CBL to Wiseman, Nov. 12, 1933; CBL to BMB, Nov. 7, 1933, CBLP.
30. CBL to DFB, Nov. 9, 1933, CBLP; CBL to Frank Altschul, Nov. 9, 1933.
31. Carlotta O’Neill Diary, Nov. 8, 1933. Notwithstanding the O’Neills’ distaste for CBL, she managed to arrange a second invitation to “Casa Genotta.” O’Neill recorded only “C. Brokaw to dine,” without further comment. Eugene O’Neill Diary, Nov. 10, 1933, YCAL.
32. CBL to William Wiseman, Nov. 12, 1933.
33. Hovey quotation (1892), unidentified, Macmillan Book of Business and Economic Quotations (New York, 1984), 117.
34. CBL to “Paul,” Nov. 7, 1933, CBLP.
35. CBL to Frank Altschul, Nov. 17, 1933, CBLP.
36. Ibid., Jan. 1, 1934, CBLP; Howard Coffin’s guest book, Cloister Hotel archives, Sea Island, Ga. Howard Earle Coffin, an Ohio farm boy, founded the Detroit Hudson Motor Company. During World War I he served on the Aircraft Production Board. In the 1920s he moved south and became a leading textile manufacturer. His first wife died in 1931. He married Miss Gladys Baker of New York in June 1937, and died the following November—the eve of hunting season—from an accidental or suicidal gunshot wound. New York Times, Nov. 23, 1937.
37. CBL to Miguel Covarrubias, Feb. 5, 1934, CBLP. She gave another reason for leaving. “I am very ambitious, and like to work very much—but for myself.” Ibid.
1. CBL to Eugene R. Gaddis, Nov. 18, 1985, CBLP.
2. Virgil Thomson, An Autobiography (New York, 1966), 232–242; James Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (Boston, 1974), 368–369.
3. Elisabeth Sussman and Barbara J. Bloemik, Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica, Whitney Museum of American Art catalogue (New York, 1995), 52–55.
4. CBL to Donald Freeman, Aug. 21, 1930, CBLP.
5. Ts. in CBLP.
6. John Golden to CBL, June 6, 1934, CBLP.
7. Jean Dalrymple int. SJM, Feb. 5, 1988, SJMP.
8. Mark Sullivan to CBL, n.d. 1934, CBLP.
9. Milton Rosenbluth to CBL, n.d. c. 1934, CBLP.
10. Jeanne B. Winham int. SJM, Nov. 13, 1984, SJMP.
11. Unidentified news clip in “This World of Ours,” SJMP.
12. “This World of Ours,” 1, SJMP.
13. Ibid., 24.
14. Ibid., 28.
15. The complete text of one of CBL’s best columns, “The Perfect Panhandler,” is reprinted in the appendix. It not only demonstrates her newspaper prose at its best, but offers documentary proof that New York’s begging techniques have changed little over the years.
16. CBL, “Man with a Telescope,” in “This World of Ours,” 19.
17. CBL, “Bonanza Lament,” in “This World of Ours,” 31.
18. CBL, “Bureaucrats Are Beasts,” in “This World of Ours,” 33.
19. DFB to CBL, Aug. 1934, CBLP.
20. Washington Herald, Aug. 31, 1934; John Golden to CBL, n.d. c. Aug. 1934, BRTC; Miriam Howell to CBL, Aug. 7, 1934, CBLP.
21. CBL, “Brussels Again,” in “This World of Ours,” 52; “A Balearic Breakfast,” ibid. 57; “A Lovers’ Retreat,” ibid. 53, SJMP.
22. Mae McGinnis of the Block agency informed CBL of the cancellation on Aug. 9, 1943. CBLP.
23. Pamela Harriman to SJM, Apr. 16, 1983; Noel Coward qu. Wilfrid Sheed, Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1982), 23.
24. CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982. Winston Churchill was impressed with CBL, telling Baruch, “She’s the tops.” Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, Aug. 1974.
25. Jeanne Campbell int. SJM, Apr. 13, 1982.
26. Randolph Churchill to CBL, Aug. 17, 1934, CBLP.
27. Randolph Churchill to CBL, Oct. 11, 1934, CBLP.
28. CBL, “Hanging Gardens of Gotham,” in “This World of Ours,” 93, SJMP. A few months later she wrote, “I see a vista of lofty towers and skyscrapers that shatter the winter sun into splendid splinters of shadow and light. Anyone who lives in New York City and does not continue to live high up misses the greatest sight that modern life has to offer.” Ms. fragment, “As Manhattan goes so goes the nation,” c. 1935, CBLP.
29. CBL to Dr. Milton Rosenbluth, Dec. 27, 1934, CBLP.
30. Lawrenson, “Woman”; Frank Crowninshield to CBL, Nov. 30, 1934, CBLP.
31. Laura Z. Hobson, Laura Z: A Life (New York, 1983), 138–139.
32. Ibid., 137.
33. Ibid. CBL’s first impression of HRL was that he was “nice-looking … but not handsome. He had seemed strangely ill at ease, and his humorlessness had made him look dull, and his eyes which peeped out from under his lashes had seemed hard.” CBL memo on HRL, 1960, CBLP.
34. CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982.
1. New York Sun, Dec. 10, 1934; Reading Times (Pa.), Aug. 1, 1942.
2. The following account is primarily based on CBL int. SJM, June 13, 1982, SJMP. Supplementary details from Elsa Maxwell int. Alden Hatch, c. 1954, AHP; Robert T. Elson notes, TIA; and Helen Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party: A Memoir (New York, 1975), 115.
3. Lawrenson, Stranger, 115.
4. W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York, 1972), 114.
5. Roy Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll (New York, 1985), 120.
6. Ibid., 120–121.
7. CBL int. SJM, Oct. 30, 1981, and June 13, 1982; CBL to HRL, Apr. 2, 1935, CBLP.
8. Ibid.
9. HRL to CBL, Dec. 22, 1934, CBLP.
10. CBL to HRL, Dec. 23, 1934, CBLP.
11. CBL to Milton Rosenbluth, Dec. 27, 1934, CBLP.
12. HRL to CBL, Dec. 26, 1934, CBLP; CBL to HRL, Dec. 28, 1934, CBLP.
13. CBL int. SJM, June 12, 1982; Paul Johnson, “Portrait of the Artist as an Intellectual,” Commentary, Feb. 1989.
14. HRL to CBL, Dec. 28, 1934, CBLP.
15. CBL to Dorothy B. Holloran, Dec. 15, 1931, CBLP; CBL, “The Great Garbo,” Vanity Fair, Feb. 1932.
16. John Billings Diary, Dec. 31, 1934, JBP.
17. Laura Z. Hobson int. SJM, Oct. 19, 1983. See Hobson’s Laura Z: A Life (New York, 1983), 131–156, for an account of her divorce and relationship with the Luces.
18. Laura Z. Hobson Diary, Jan. 2, 1935, LZHP.
19. The following biographical portrait is based on SJM interviews with Henry Luce III and Elisabeth Luce Moore, plus accounts of HRL’s life in Swanberg, Luce, and Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–1941 (New York, 1968). References to HRL’s relationship with Briton Hadden are taken from Noel F. Busch, Briton Hadden: A Biography of the Co-Founder of Time (New York, 1949).
20. A century later, however, China’s Christian population is growing.
21. John Billings Diary, Jan. 4, 1935; Ann Brokaw Diary, Jan. 11, 1935, CBLP.
22. Elson notes, Oct. 9, 1967, TIA; CBL int. SJM, June 20, 1982, SJMP.
23. CBL int. SJM, Oct. 15, 1982, SJMP. She added, “Why couldn’t he be like that with me?”
24. CBL qu. HRL in a letter to him, Jan. 10, 1935, CBLP. In old age CBL would tell an interviewer, “His love was like a sunburst. Mine was based on slow acceptance.” Qu. Marian Christy, Port Chester Daily Item (N.Y.), July 25, 1972.
25. Hotel bill in CBLP; HRL to CBL, Mar. 7, 1935, CBLP.
26. HRL ms., Mar. 7, 1935, CBLP.
27. Ann Brokaw Diary, Jan. 20, 1935, CBLP; Hobson, A Life, 148.
28. Hobson, A Life, 148.
29. HRL to CBL, Jan. 27, 1935, CBLP.
30. HRL to CBL, Jan. 29, 1935, CBLP.
31. HRL to CBL, Jan. 30, 1935, CBLP.
32. HRL to CBL, Jan. 27, 1935.
33. CBL to HRL, c. Jan. 27, 1935, CBLP.
34. CBL to HRL, Jan. 28, 1935 (misdated “Feb. 1”); HRL to CBL, Feb. 5, 1935, CBLP.
35. CBL to HRL, Jan. 30, 1935, CBLP.
36. HRL to CBL, Feb. 7, 1935, CBLP.
37. CBL to HRL, Feb. 4, 1935, CBLP.
38. Questionnaire, c. Feb. 1935, CBLP.
39. Margaret Case Harriman, Blessed Are the Debonair (New York, 1956), 160–162.
40. CBL to HRL, Feb. 2, 1935, CBLP.
41. CBL to HRL, Feb. 4, 1935, qu. Laura Hobson and giving her own opinions.
42. HRL to CBL, Feb. 2, 1935; CBL to HRL, Feb. 4, 1935, CBLP.
43. Laura Z. Hobson to CBL, Feb. 11, 1935.
44. Ms. in CBLP. See Mark Fearnow, Clare Boothe Luce: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Westport, Conn., 1995), for alternative summaries of this and all other CBL plays, produced and unproduced.
45. Hobson, A Life, 150–152. On Jan. 30, 1935, CBL wrote Dr. Milton Rosenbluth: “My Pygmalion, I expect you, while I am away, to make great research into the matter of how I may yet become a beautiful woman. (Wouldn’t it be odd if I were to become a beautiful woman in my thirty-second year?)” CBLP. Honeymoon snapshots, however, show CBL with droopy breasts.
46. DFB to CBL, Feb. 13, 1935, CBLP.
47. Ann Brokaw Diary, Feb. 22, Mar. 1, 3, 24, 1935.
48. HRL to CBL, Mar. 7, 1935, CBLP.
49. Laura Hobson to CBL, Feb. 16, 1935, CBLP.
50. CBL to HRL, Jan. 30, 1935, CBLP.
51. Hoopes, Ingersoll, 121.
52. HRL to CBL, Apr. 21, 1935, CBLP.
53. CBL to HRL, Mar. 29, 1935, CBLP. While at the Greenbrier, CBL also wrote HRL, “Only a love like yours can redeem the sorrows and sins of all my other days.” Apr. 3, 1935, CBLP.
54. CBL to HRL, Apr. 2, 1935, CBLP.
55. John Billings Diary, Apr. 22, 1935, JBP.
56. CBL to HRL, Apr. 22, 1935, CBLP.
57. HRL to CBL, Apr. 23, 1935, CBLP, repeating Longwell. CBL in turn repeated to HRL what Longwell told her: that everyone at Time Inc. considered Henry Luce to be “the most impossible, the most brilliant, the most tireless, and the most lovable of men.” He further said that he had always known his boss to be unhappy, and wondered if Harry would ever discover it himself. CBL to HRL, Apr. 23, 1935, CBLP.
58. CBL to HRL, Apr. 27, 1935, CBLP.
59. CBL to HRL, 1935, CBLP.
60. New York Daily Mirror, Apr. 29, 1935, CBL scrapbooks, CBLP.
61. HRL to CBL, May 1, 1935, CBLP.
62. CBL to HRL, May 12, 1935, CBLP. Helen Lawrenson wrote that Pare Lorentz, hearing that CLB was thinking of marrying Luce and would sail that day to Europe, “was so upset that he wanted to rush to the boat and stop her. I had all I could do to dissuade him.” Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, Aug. 1974.
63. CBL to HRL, May 12, 1935, CBLP.
64. HRL to CBL, May 14, 1935, CBLP.
1. CBL to Milton Rosenbluth, May 13, 1935, CBLP; Elsa Maxwell, “Party Line,” New York Post, Sept. 8, 1942. Maxwell took the piglet to her farm in Provence, “where it grew up to be a huge, ferocious boar.” The animal had to be destroyed when it began killing poultry. CBL got her friend to admit that it had “probably” ended up as pork, and subsequently punned, “It was the only time I have ever known Elsa to have a bore for dinner.” Elsa Maxwell int. Alden Hatch, AHR.
2. CBL to HRL, May 12, 1935, CBLP, qu. Maxwell.
3. CBL to HRL, May 12, 1935, CBLP, qu. Mrs. Moore.
4. CBL to HRL, May 12, 1935.
5. CBL in “Remembering Mr. Maugham,” Univ. of Southern California broadcast, Apr. 18, 1966, transcript in CBLP.
6. Ibid.; CBL int. Gary Lautens, unidentified Canadian news clip, 1971, CBLP.
7. CBL to HRL, May 22, 1935, CBLP.
8. HRL to CBL, May 30, 1935, CBLP.
9. DFB to CBL, early June 1935, CBLP.
10. DFB to CBL, c. late June 1935; CBL to Milton Rosenbluth, July 28, 1935, CBLP.
11. Ibid., Dec. 27, 1934, CBLP; Dr. Michael Rosenbluth int. SJM, May 7, 1984, SJMP.
12. DFB to CBL, n.d. early June 1935, CBLP. CBL told Alexis Aladin that she “loved her brother more deeply and truly than I thought it possible to love any human being,” and felt “such sympathy and peace” in his presence. Letter, c. May 16, 1921, AAP.
13. HRL to CBL, c. May 18, 1935, CBLP.
14. HRL to CBL, June 6, 1935, CBLP, anticipating the news break.
15. John Billings to H. J. Hammond, June 11, 1935, JBP; John Billings Diary, June 6, 1935, JBP; James Agee to Dwight MacDonald, July 1, 1935, JAP.
16. CBL to Mark Sullivan, July 10, 1935, CBLP.
17. Ibid.
18. CBL to HRL, c. June 26, 1935, CBLP.
19. CBL to HRL, July 26, 1935, CBLP.
20. HRL to CBL, July 7, 1935, CBLP; CBL to George Freulinghuysen, Nov. 7, 1983, CBLP.
21. HRL to CBL, July 7, 1935.
22. Recalled by CBL to HRL, May 10, 1960, CBLP.
23. HRL to CBL, July 7, 1935, CBL, “Aide-Memoire,” July 9, 1935, CBLP.
24. CBL to HRL, July 15, 1935, CBLP. CBL was particularly insensitive in abandoning ACB just after the death of George Brokaw. The girl was having to adjust not only to the recent loss of her father but also to her mother’s transferrai of affections to a new lover. A letter received by CBL later that year from the owner of San Gustin reported some apparently pathological destruction of books in the villa library. Many leather-bound volumes had been mutilated or lost. Six backs had been ripped from a set of Dickens, and a valuable history was found coverless “on the rocks.” Lillian Broadhurst to CBL, Oct. 18, 1935, CBLP.
25. CBL to HRL, July 15, 1935, CBLP; ACB to HRL, July 22, 1935, CBLP.
26. CBL int. SJM, Oct. 30, 1981; CBL to HRL, July 15, 1935, CBLP.
27. Ibid.
28. CBL to HRL, July 29, 1935, CBLP.
29. Ibid.
30. BMB to CBL, July 26, 1935, CBLP.
31. CBL to HRL, July 27, Aug. 1, 3, 1935, CBLP.
32. HRL to CBL, July 25, 1935, CBLP; CBL to HRL, Aug. 5, 1935, CBLP.
33. Ibid. CBL was a critic of pictures as well as text, telling HRL, e.g., that an industrial article illustrated with overdramatic photographs looked like “unpalatable spinach.” Ibid.
34. CBL to HRL, Aug. 1, 1935.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.; CBL to HRL, Aug. 5, 1935.
37. CBL to HRL, Aug. 1, 1935.
38. John Billings Diary, July 22, 1935; HRL to CBL, July 22, 1935, CBLP.
39. ACA to CBL, July 15, 1935, CBLP.
40. CBL to HRL, Aug. 16, 1935, CBLP.
41. CBL to HRL, Aug. 15, 1935, CBLP.
42. CBL to HRL, Aug. 30, 1935, CBLP.
43. CBL to HRL, Aug. 29, 1935, CBLP.
44. Receipts, Sept. 1935, in CBLP.
45. CBL telephoned Randolph Churchill and asked if he, too, would consider coming to Paris. She apparently had to be sure of at least one last fling, in case Baruch failed to show. Thrilled at the sound of her voice, Churchill waited to be summoned—in vain. Randolph Churchill to CBL, Sept. 8, 1935, CBLP.
46. BMB to CBL, Aug. 29, 1935, CBLP; CBL to BMB, July 21, 1934, CBLP.
47. BMB to CBL, Aug. 29, CBLP.
48. BMB to CBL, Sept. 11, 1935, CBLP.
49. Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, Aug. 1974. HRL’s divorce became final on Oct. 5, 1935.
50. Clifford Odets to CBL, Nov. 12, 1935, CBLP.
51. Frank Gilmore to CBL, June 27, 1934, CBLP.
52. CBL, Abide With Me, ms., CBLP.
53. Carol Hyatt and Linda Gottlieb, When Smart People Fail (New York, 1987), 43; CBL int. Richard Watts, New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 6, 1940; Margaret Case Harriman, “The Candor Kid II,” New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1941.
54. All newspapers Nov. 22, 1935.
55. John Billings Diary, Nov. 24, 25, 1935, JBP.
56. Ibid.
57. Time, Nov. 25, 1935.
58. DFB to CBL, Dec. 21, 1935, CBLP.
59. Alexander King, “Clare Doesn’t Care,” unpublished essay for Vogue, 1940, CBLP.
60. CBL int. Watts, Oct. 6, 1940. See also CBL, Europe in the Spring (New York, 1940), 57.
61. Bernard and Annie Baruch to CBL, Nov. 28, 1935, CBLP; William Hale to CBL, n.d., CBLP; AEA to HRL, Nov. 26, 1935, CBLP. “I did feel hurt,” CBL wrote Sullivan, “that you were so very silent during an event that had some importance to me.” CBL to Mark Sullivan, c. Dec. 26, 1935, CBLP.
62. John Billings Diary, Nov. 25, 1935.
63. Ibid., Nov. 29, 1935.
1. Anthony Mason int. SJM assistant, Mar. 30, 1994.
2. CBL to Milton Rosenbluth, Dec. 26, 1935, CBLP.
3. Ibid.; CBL int. SJM, Dec. 20, 1981.
4. Roy Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll (New York, 1985), 128, 130, 127. Asked by one of his young editors why he paid such high salaries, HRL replied, “I was poor once and I didn’t like it. Why should you?”; John Kobler, Luce, His Time, Life and Fortune (New York, 1968), 188.
5. HRL to John Billings, Nov. 1, 1933, JBP; John Billings Diary, Nov. 11, 1933, JBP; Hoopes, Ingersoll, 134–135.
6. Hoopes, Ingersoll, 140–141.
7. CBL to Condé Nast, May 9, 1931, CBLP.
8. CBL memo to Donald Freeman, Dec. 9, 1931; CBL to Condé Nast, Jan. 10, 1934, CBLP. In her memo to Freeman, CBL anticipated by some four decades the highly visual, celebrity-oriented, minimal-text format that would characterize American popular media in the television age. She advocated, for example, a subjective lead article written in “short paragraphs of pungent comment,” a no-carry-over policy, and “two portfolios of pictures … like those of Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable,” or other current celebrities. The cost of such extra artwork would be offset by savings of “some thousands of dollars in manuscripts.”
At least two of these documents were resurrected in the summer of 1942, when HRL was sued by two artists claiming that he had appropriated their “new, novel, original and unique plan” for a picture magazine similar to Life. The judge, finding against the plaintiffs, cited CBL’s memos, plus her own “uncontradicted testimony,” as proof that she had preempted their ideas by at least a year. Judgment, June 26, 1946, in Corcoran, et al. v. Time, Inc., 1445–1466, copy in CBLP.
9. CBL to John Martin, Feb. 20, 1933, CBLP; Roy Hoopes, “The Agony of Ecstasy,” Regardie’s Magazine, Oct. 1985.
10. John Billings to H. J. Hammond, Jan. 28, 1936, JBP; CBL int. SJM, Dec. 20, 1981.
11. Kobler, Luce, 99.
12. CBL to Dr. Thompkins, Mar. 17, 1961, CBLP.
13. “Mepkin,” visitor’s leaflet, Mepkin Abbey, S.C.
14. CBL int. SJM at Mepkin, May 18, 1984.
15. John Billings Diary, Feb. 15 and 10, 1936, JBP.
16. Ibid., Feb. 20, 14, June 26, 1936, JBP.
17. Laura Z. Hobson, Laura Z: A Life (New York, 1983), 233; Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–1941 (New York, 1968), 289–290; Elson notes, TIA.
18. Elson, Time, 289–290; Elson notes, TIA.
19. Mehemed Agha to Hubert Kay, Oct. 7, 1958, CBLP.
20. June 8, 1936, copy in TIA.
21. Hoopes, Ingersoll, 144, and Hoopes in Regardie’s.
22. Sarah L. Burt, “L’Automne du Monde: The Last Eight Years of Vanity Fair,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Kansas, 1984, 173–174.
23. John Billings Diary, Oct. 23, 1936, JBP. By December HRL was leaving the editorship increasingly to Billings. Ibid., Dec. 8, 1936.
24. Elson, Time, 291; John Billings Diary, Aug. 24, 1936.
25. CBL at Tarrytown Conference Center, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 21, 1971.
26. CBL to Gilbert Miller, Jan. 18, 1932, CBLP.
27. Max Gordon to CBL, May 12, 1936, CBLP; Max Gordon, Max Gordon Presents (New York, 1963), 205.
28. The house belonged to the Untermeyers.
29. Contract for The Women, July 2, 1936, CBLP.
30. The Women production file, MGM.
31. Moss Hart to Max Gordon, July 10, 1936, copy in CBLP.
32. George Kaufman to Max Gordon, July 15, 1936, copy in CBLP.
33. The salpingogram was performed c. August 10, 1936. Dr. Michael Rosenbluth (son of Milton) int. SJM, May 7, 1984. CBL said that she had three miscarriages while married to George Brokaw. CBL to ACA, Feb. 27, 1929, CBLP.
34. CBL to Milton Rosenbluth, “Monday,” c. late Aug. 1936; CBLP; CBL int. SJM, Mar. 19, 1985.
35. Kitty Carlisle Hart telephone int. SJM, May 6, 1984.
36. Ilka Chase, Past Imperfect (New York, 1941), 185.
37. John Billings Diary, Nov. 6, 1936; Hoopes, Ingersoll, 152; Billings Diary, May 11, 1938.
38. Ingersoll was instead given the tough task of raising Time’s circulation to subsidize the printing of 2 million copies of the new magazine each week—the minimum required for solvency. Hoopes, Ingersoll, 152. He subsequently left to start P.M. newspaper.
39. Chase, Past Imperfect, 188.
40. Both reviews Dec. 8, 1936.
41. HRL to CBL, Dec. 8, 1936, CBLP; Moss Hart, Act One (New York, 1959), 389.
42. Gillmore qu. Malcolm Goldstein, George S. Kaufman (New York, 1979), 279; CBL int. SJM, Feb. 10, 1985.
43. Margaret Case Harriman, “The Candor Kid II,” New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1941.
44. George Kaufman memo to CBL, n.d., CBLP.
45. Midweek Pictorial, n.d., CBL scrapbook, CBLP. Time printed a 500-word review, glowingly rewritten by HRL. “The Women is calculated to give The Men two of the most shockingly informative hours of their lives and is so clever that few women would willingly miss it.” Life gave the play a three-page feature, illustrated in color. W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York, 1972), 135.
46. New York Times, Jan. 28, 1937; Hollywood Reporter, Apr. 26, 1937. The Times-Union, Apr. 29, 1937, reported that the published script of The Women had sold more copies than any other play in “the last ten years.”
47. HRL to Walter Winchell, Mar. 6, 1937, CBLP.
48. George Kaufman qu. Time researcher Doris Kinney, memo to CBL, n.d. Feb. 1964, CBLP.
49. Nast’s party was held Apr. 27, 1937. Helen Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party (New York, 1975), 137. ACA Diary, Apr. 13, 1937, CBLP; DFB to CBL, Dec. 17, 1935, CBLP.
50. New York World-Telegram, May 13, 1937; John Billings Diary, Jan. 26, 1937.
51. Moss Hart to CBL, n.d. 1949, CBLP.
1. CBL int. SJM at Mepkin, May 18, 1984; Isabel Hill to CBL, Dec. 28, 1949, CBLP.
2. CBL, “The Victorious South,” Vogue, June 1, 1937; Charleston (S.C.) News & Courier, Apr. 12, 1936; New York Sun, Jan. 9, 1940; Noland Gumbrill to CBL, Aug. 7, 1987.
3. New York Sun, Jan. 9, 1940; Charleston (S.C.) News & Courier, Apr. 12, 1936; Gretta Palmer, “The New Clare Luce,” Look, Apr. 15, 1947, for colored pictures of Mepkin.
4. John Chamberlain memo, c. Jan. 1946, TIA; Milton MacKaye, “Clare Boothe,” Scribner’s Magazine, Mar. 1939, New York Post, May 2, 1937.
5. Mepkin Guest Book, CBLP; Elisabeth Moore int. SJM, Nov. 22, 1983. Mrs. Moore said, “There were so many people around who were frightened of him, that didn’t dare speak up.”
6. John Billings Diary, Jan. 10, 1937, JBP; CBL to FDR, Jan. 9, 1937, CBLP.
7. Martha Blair, “These Charming People,” unidentified clipping; Republic, 1939, unidentified clipping, CBLP.
8. Palmer, “The New”; “Only Human,” syndicated column by “Candide,” n.d. CBL scrapbooks, CBLP.
9. CBL int. Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette, Jan. 22, 1942; CBL to George Abbot, Nov. 17, 1939, CBLP.
10. Wolcott Gibbs, “Time … Fortune … Life … Luce,” New Yorker, Nov. 28, 1936.
11. Qu. Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–1941 (New York, 1968), 266; Elson notes, TIA.
12. Henry Luce III int. SJM, March 1, 1989.
13. Ibid. Mah-jongg is a complicated Chinese game played with 136 or 144 dominolike “tiles.”
14. Ibid.
15. Henry Luce III int. SJM, Mar. 1, 1989; Mepkin Guest Book.
16. ACA to CBL from Miami, n.d., c. Mar. 1935, CBLP.
17. ACA to CBL from Miami, n.d., c. Mar. 1936, CBLP.
18. ACA to CBL, n.d. c. Apr. 1936, CBLP.
19. Ibid.
20. ACA Diary, Mar. 22 and Apr. 17, 1937, CBLP.
21. Nashville Tennessean, Dec. 24, 1937; John Billings Diary, Jan. 10, 1937; Lucius Beebe, “Stage Asides,” New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 25, 1937.
22. Qu. Gibbs, “Time … Fortune.”
23. HRL to CBL, Nov. 23, 1937, CBLP.
24. Henry Luce III int. SJM, July 24, 1984. “If you didn’t know who he was,” Hank Luce said of his father, “you would say ‘That is a pretty withdrawn man.’ ” One of HRL’s employees described his “plodding-through-snowdrifts gait.” Eric Hodgins, A Trolley to the Moon (New York, 1973), 339.
25. W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York, 1972), 133. CBL, whose departure from Vogue in 1930 was unopposed because of her lack of fashion sense (see Ch. 15), was, in the words of Vanity Fair art director Mehemed Agha, “never a clothes-horse … To meet important people she used to think that she had to dress like a Southern belle—beige, rose, organdie—things that really weren’t in character for her.” Int. Hubert Kay, Oct. 7, 1958, CBLP.
26. New York Evening Post, May 8, 1937; Brooklyn Times, May 19, 1937; New York American, May 14, 1937; CBL to Norman Krasna, Apr. 27, 1937, CBLP.
27. CBL int. Nashville Tennessean, Dec. 24, 1937; HRL to CBL, May 20, 1937, CBLP.
28. HRL to CBL, May 18, 1937; CBL qu. HRL to CBL, May 17, 1937; HRL to CBL, May 17, 1937, CBLP.
29. Qu. Roy Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll (New York, 1985), 159–161.
30. CBL to Norman Krasna, May 22, 1937, CBLP.
31. Norman Krasna to CBL, May 24, 1937, CBLP.
32. HRL to CBL, Jan. 27, 1935, CBLP; CBL to Max Beaverbrook, June 7, 1949, Max Beaverbrook Papers, House of Lords Record Office, London.
33. DFB to CBL (also quoting BMB), n.d. summer 1937, CBLP; Hoopes, Ingersoll, 166. Having failed to find his total salvation in Clare, Harry was no longer satisfied with routine work. John Billings found him at the office in early August, trying to assemble a new spread for Life called “People.” This idea would eventually prove to be the seed of one of his company’s most successful future ventures, but it failed to germinate then. After “tossing everything up in the air like a juggler,” he left the hapless Billings “to catch the pieces as they came down.” John Billings Diary, Aug. 6, 11, 1937.
34. Ann Brokaw Diary, Jan. 17, 1940, and May 27, 1942, CBLP.
35. HRL to CBL, Nov. 22, 1937, CBLP.
36. The following account of ACA’s death is based on Sarah B. Kurtz to CBL, July 7, 1951, CBLP, supplemented by Greenwich Time, Jan. 1–7, 1938; Miami Herald, Jan. 2–3, 1938; New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 2, 1938; Boston Post, Jan. 3, 1938.
37. Miscellaneous clippings, AEAP.
38. CBL int. SJM, July 11, 1987; Margaret Beamish to CBL, Jan. 19, 1938, CBLP; Ann Brokaw Diary, Jan. 22, 1939.
39. CBL int. SJM, June 23, 1984; CBL to ACA, c. Feb. 1929, CBLP; CBL to Ann Charnley, Mar. 5, 1985, Ann Charnley private collection, Washington, D.C.
40. William Hirschberg (lawyer) to Alexander Hehmeyer (Time employee), Mar. 5, 1942; ACA to CBL, Nov. 6, 1937; CBLP.
41. Joel Jacobs Will, May 7, 1936, New York Surrogate Court, New York, N.Y., copy in SJMP.
42. Greenwich Time, Jan. 4–5, 1938.
43. ACA int. an unidentified Miami newspaper, n.d., CBLP.
1. CBL to HRL, c. Jan. 7, 1938, CBLP.
2. CBL qu. Charleston Gazette (W.Va.), Jan. 22, 1942.
3. CBL, Kiss the Boys Good-bye (New York, 1939), 13.
4. CBL int. New York Times, Jan. 27, 1939; CBL int. Brooklyn Eagle, Nov. 27, 1938.
5. CBL, Kiss, 247.
6. Ibid., 57. The critic Heywood Broun had disliked The Women, but wrote a flattering preface to Kiss the Boys Good-bye.
7. Qu. Helen Lawrenson, “The Woman,” Esquire, Aug. 1974. Clare apparently warned Shaw that Helen was “an old man’s darling.” He, in turn, told Helen that Clare was “no friend of yours.” Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Wilfrid Sheed, Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1982), 108; Lawrenson, “Woman.”
10. HRL to CBL, Jan. 17, 1938, CBLP.
11. HRL to CBL, “Thanksgiving” 1938, CBLP.
12. John Billings Diary, Dec. 4, 1937, and May 11, 1938, JBP.
13. John Jessup, The Ideas of Henry Luce (New York, 1969), 24–25.
14. Donovan qu. Jessup, Ideas, 29; CBL to Dan Longwell, c. May 12, 1938, DLP.
15. List in TIA.
16. CBL to Longwell, c. May 12, 1938, DLP; London Daily Telegraph, May 17, 1938.
17. Lawrenson, “Woman”; Max Gordon to CBL, May 17, 1938, CBLP.
18. CBL int. Daily News-Chronicle (U.K.), May 21, 1938.
19. Ibid.
20. CBL int. Daily Express (U.K.), May 21, 1938.
21. W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York, 1972), 154; Richard de Rochemont memo to HRL, May 20, 1938, CBLP.
22. Except where otherwise cited, the following account of HRL’s 1938 European trip quotes from his official memo to his editors, June 22, 1938, TIA.
23. CBL, Introduction to Kiss, xi.
24. CBL offered the script to Max Gordon first. When he did not respond as promptly as she now expected, she turned to Pemberton.
25. HRL to Allen Grover, Aug. 3, 1939, CBLP.
26. CBL to ACB, n.d., c. Oct. 1938; “The House of a Distinguished Couple,” Vogue, Feb. 15, 1942; House & Garden, June 1940.
27. HRL to Allen Grover, Feb. 12, 1940, and to CBL, Aug. 7, 1941, CBLP.
28. Isabel Hill to Corinne Thrasher (HRL’s secretary), Sept. 21, 1938, CBLP. Brock Pemberton was as impressed as Mrs. Hill. He knew of few writers, he said, who were as willing and able to make last-minute changes. Pemberton qu. Philadelphia Bulletin, Oct. 24, 1949.
29. John Anderson in New York Evening Journal, Sept. 29, 1938.
30. All newspapers, Sept. 29, 1938.
31. Oct. 9, 1938.
32. New York Times, Sept. 29, 1938; Time, Oct. 10, 1938; Life, Oct. 28, 1938.
33. By January 1939, three companies would be playing Kiss the Boys Good-Bye simultaneously nationwide, and five The Women. CBL to ACB, c, Jan. 18, 1939, CBLP.
34. Except in Paris, where the play opened in November 1938 at the Pigalle Theater before a glittering audience including Marlene Dietrich, Schiaparelli, and Baron Henri de Rothschild. “In many instances,” according to The New York Times, Nov. 5, 1938, “the intensely American humor failed to carry.”
35. Harold Nicolson, Diaries, 1930–1939 (New York, 1966), 370.
36. John Billings Diary, Sept. 29, 1938, JBP.
37. Margaret L. Coit, Mr. Baruch (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 467.
38. Ibid., 467–468. Nevertheless, Roosevelt would call for exactly that number of aircraft nineteen months later, when America’s need to rearm could no longer be denied.
39. Ibid., 469.
1. Pittsburgh Press, Oct. 22, 1938. Dorothy was not related to William Harlan Hale.
2. Rosamond Pinchot killed herself with carbon monoxide fumes on Jan. 24, 1938, after an unhappy love affair with the producer Jed Harris. New York Daily News, Jan. 25, 1938; Martin Gottfried, Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius (Boston, 1984), 166. William Harlan Hale said the two suicides “seemed to have everything. And yet there was some horrible interior gap that made them want to die.” Int. Hubert Kay, Oct. 23, 1958, CBLP.
3. Pittsburgh Press, Oct. 22, 1938; CBL Diary, Sept. 24, 1932, SJMP.
4. “She is a clever woman to keep it so dark,” CBL wrote of Dorothy’s secret lover (probably George Blumenthal) on Nov. 11, 1932. CBL Diary.
5. Dorothy Hale to CBL, Dec. 14, 1937; Isabel Hill to Dorothy Hale, Dec. 15, 1937, CBLP.
6. BMB had given Dorothy a thousand dollars and told her to buy a dress glamorous enough to capture a husband. CBL int. SJM, June 20, 1982.
7. CBL to James Harithas, Curator, Corcoran Galley of Art, Oct. 24, 1966, CBLP; Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York, 1983), 290–293, qu. CBL on Dorothy Hale’s death. Elisabeth Cobb Rogers to CBL, n.d. 1938, CBLP.
8. CBL to James Harithas, Oct. 24, 1966, CBLP; Herrera, Frida, 678.
9. Pittsburgh Press, Oct. 22, 1938. Ann Brokaw Diary, Sept. 12, 1939, quotes CBL to the effect that Noguchi was a lover of Dorothy Hale.
10. CBL ts. “White House,” July 1940, CBLP.
11. At another gallery a few days before, she had lost a Dufy to Diana Vreeland and hoped to find a substitute. CBL to Carl Van Vechten, Nov. 3, 1938, CVVP.
12. Qu. Bertram Wolfe, “Rise of Another Rivera,” Vogue, Nov. 1938.
13. Herrera, Frida, 229.
14. New York Times, Nov. 6, 1938; Herrera, Frida, 231.
15. Allene Talmey, “Clare Boothe … in a Velvet Glove,” Vogue, Dec. 15, 1940.
16. Four of them belonged to the actor Edward G. Robinson.
17. The picture (now in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.) may be seen in the background of Karsh’s portrait of CBL, reproduced at the end of Chapter 38. Soon after Trotsky had arrived in Mexico in January 1937, he and Frida, an ardent Communist, had become lovers. That fall, in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, she had done the portrait, framed it in pink and green velvet, and hung it in Trotsky’s studio, where it was admired by André Breton. Herrera, Frida, 213–214.
18. Ibid., 234.
19. CBL to Harithas, Oct. 24, 1966; Herrera, Frida, 229, 226. CBL paid twice as much as Edward G. Robinson had paid for his Kahlo paintings. Ibid.
20. Qu. Herrera, Frida, 229; Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life (New York, 1960), 223–224.
21. Frida Kahlo to Nikolas Muray, June 13, 1939, qu. Hayden Herrera to CBL, Feb. 11, 1981, CBLP.
22. CBL qu. Herrera, Frida, 292–293.
23. Now in the Phoenix Art Museum (“gift of an anonymous donor”). Reproduced in Martha Zamora, Frida Kahlo: The Brush of Anguish (San Francisco, 1990), 60.
24. Like all Kahlo’s art, the work had its ultimate inspiration in her own life and feelings. Sickly and conscious of mortality, Frida had also been depressed, while painting the retablo, over Diego Rivera’s blatant marital infidelities. In fact, soon after its completion their nine-year marriage ended in a divorce that was to last two years. The surreal symbolic interpretation of Hale’s suicide therefore reflected not only the artist’s apprehension of death but also her trauma of loss and abandonment.
25. CBL to Nikolas Muray, Aug. 18, 1939, CBLP.
26. Frida Kahlo to CBL, Sept. 5, 1938, CBLP.
27. Stage, Nov. 1938.
28. Carl Van Vechten to CBL, Nov. 8, 1938, CBLP.
29. George Ross, “So This Is Broadway,” unidentified news clip in HRL to CBL, Dec. 1, 1938, CBLP.
30. In her unfinished autobiographical novel “This My Hand,” CBL tellingly describes the protagonist as being “shy and cold and infinitely fastidious … she knew that she could not sing or write. If she could, she supposed she would have felt within her that glow of genius which burns like a little, uncomfortable, un-extinguishable spirit lamp in the breast of the true creative artist.” CBLP.
31. AEA to CBL, Aug. 24, 1933, CBLP. The piece with grammatical faults was “The Birthday of Barge, the Banker,” published in Vanity Fair, Sept. 1933. Mark Sullivan thought it “in most respects the best thing of yours I have ever read.” Sullivan to CBL, Aug. 18, 1933, CBLP.
32. CBL to AEA, Aug. 30, 1933, CBLP.
33. Mepkin Guest Book, CBLP; Helen Lawrenson to CBL, c. Mar. 1939, CBLP.
34. New York Times, Apr. 20, 1939, reported that Rodgers and Hart were conferring with CBL about “The Wedding Day.” The ms. is in CBLP.
35. Eleanor Roosevelt in “My Day,” Washington Daily News, Dec. 21, 1938; CBL to Eleanor Roosevelt, Jan. 10, 1939, ERP; Eleanor Roosevelt to CBL, Jan. 19, 1939, CBLP. The two women had met some time before at a fair in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and had together bought the President a cake.
36. CBL int. New York Daily News, Feb. 14, 1939.
37. Harry Evans in Family Circle, Apr. 21, 1939; Russell Aitken to CBL, Apr. 10, 1953, CBLP.
38. Julia McCarthy in New York Daily News, Feb. 14, 1939; CBL int. Dick Cavett Show, PBS, Jan. 20, 1981; CBL int. SJM, June 20, 1982.
39. Paul Lewis Clemens to CBL, Jan. 24, 1939, CBLP.
40. Jo Davidson, Between Sittings (New York, 1951), 117; CBL to Elisabeth Moore, Apr. 9, 1964, CBLP. The Davidson busts are now in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. In 1933 Miguel Covarrubias had done two caricatures of CBL. They were sold at auction after her death. In 1942 Gerald Brockhurst, a British Royal Academician, would paint an oil portrait of her wearing a green silk Chinese tunic. She, or HRL, paid an extravagant $5,000 (c. $50,000 in current values). The picture is now in the Phoenix Art Museum.
41. Nancy Grove, Isamu Noguchi: Portrait Sculpture (Washington, D.C., 1989), 80–81. Bust now in Henry Luce Foundation, New York, N.Y.
42. Ann Brokaw Diary, Sept, 12, 1939, CBLP.
43. Grove, Noguchi, 80.
44. CBL to Hayden Herrera, Feb. 11, 1981, CBLP.
1. Sunday Times (U.K.), Apr. 23, 1939.
2. CBL to Joseph P. Kennedy, May 26, 1939; CBL to HRL, June 3, 1939, CBLP.
3. CBLP.
4. CBL Diary, June 25, June 14, 1939; CBL int. SJM, Apr. 29, 1986.
5. CBL memo, Aug. 15, 1939, TIA.
6. CBL to ACB, Oct. 11, 1940, CBLP; Blanche Patch (GBS secretary) to CBL, June 10, 1939, CBLP.
7. CBL int. SJM, Aug. 2, 1985.
8. CBL qu. Evening Standard (U.K.), June 20, 1939.
9. George Bernard Shaw to CBL, June 16, 1939, CBLP.
10. HRL to CBL, June 2, 1939, CBLP; DFB to CBL, July 21, 1939, CBLP.
11. CBL int. Charles Graves, Daily Mail (U.K.), June 22, 1939. CBL had smoked what she hoped was “my last cigarette for a year” on Nov. 22, 1938. CBL to HRL, Nov. 22, 1939, CBLP. Whether or not she kept this resolve is unknown, but soon she began smoking again, and continued to do so off and on into her seventies.
12. CBL to Kate Bergeda, Apr. 25, 1939, CBLP.
13. Lilian Thompson to CBL, Apr. 23, 1939, CBLP.
14. John Gunther to CBL, Mar. 10, 1967, CBLP.
15. Ann Brokaw Diary, July 28, 1939, CBLP; Washington Times-Herald, Sept. 11, 1939.
16. CBL Diary, passim.
17. According to Gilbert A. Harrison, The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (New York, 1983), 140, Wilder believed Stein and Freud to be the world’s two greatest living human beings.
18. Samuel Steward, ed., Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1977), 32.
19. Except where otherwise stated, the following account is based on a CBL Diary fragment, July 12–14, 1939.
20. Alice B. Toklas qu. New York Post, Apr. 14, 1963.
21. Harrison, Enthusiast, 178; CBL address, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 1983, author’s notes, SJMP.
22. For the following account of CBL’s relations with Stein, the author is indebted to Mr. Steward’s excellent firsthand narrative.
23. Steward, Dear Sammy, 31–32.
24. Ibid., 37, 39.
25. Ibid., 39–46.
26. CBL Diary, July 14, 1939.
27. HRL European trip memo to Time-Life staff, 1939, TIA.
28. CBL (signed “A.C.B.”), “An American Letter—Europe,” Fortune, Oct. 1939.
29. Ann Brokaw Diary, July 23, 10, 16, 1939.
30. Ibid., July 24, 1939.
31. CBL, “American Letter.”
32. Ibid. In 1939, Poland was the fifth-greatest military power in the world, capable of mobilizing an army larger than that of France. British forces were small in comparison. Tom Shachtman, The Phony War, 1939–1940 (New York, 1982), 25.
33. CBL to Gertrude Stein, Aug. 16, 1939, YCAL.
34. Ibid.
35. Ann Brokaw Diary, Aug. 14, 1939, CBLP; John Billings Diary, Aug. 14, 1939, JBP.
36. CBL, “American Letter.”
37. Ann Brokaw Diary, Aug. 29, 1939, CBLP.
38. John Billings Diary, Aug. 28, 29, 30, 1939, JBP.
39. Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–1941 (New York, 1968), 408.
40. CBL, Margin for Error (New York, 1940), 28, 31. In an unpublished introduction to the play, CBL cited TR as inspiration. Ts., n.d., c. 1939, CBLP.
41. CBL, Margin for Error, 4.
42. Horst P. Horst, the photographer, objected to CBL’s use of his name for “a nasty Nazi.” Horst to CBL, Oct. 4., 1939, CBLP.
43. CBL, Margin for Error, 24, 91.
44. Ibid., 31.
45. Ibid., 33.
46. George Kaufman to CBL, n.d., CBLP.
47. Max Gordon to CBL, n.d., CBLP.
48. The program stated that “no actual person, living or dead” was depicted in the play.
49. Photograph in CBLP. The Princeton Packet reported that Margin for Error “breaks all theatrical records for speed of production.” Richard Aldrich and Richard Myers had accepted it the day they read it. Contracts were signed at 10 A.M. the following morning, casting took place in a matter of hours, and rehearsals began four days later. Packet, Oct. 5, 1939. For a local rave review, see Daily Princetonian, Oct. 16, 1939.
50. CBL, Margin, 84.
51. Isabel Hill to CBL, n.d. 1939, CBLP; Time, Nov. 13, 1939.
52. Alexander King, Mine Enemy Grows Older (New York, 1958), 318.
53. Both newspapers, Nov. 4, 1939.
54. Ibid.
55. Newsweek, Nov. 20, 1939. Perhaps the most surprising criticism of Margin for Error was that of Henry Luce. He agreed to write, or put his name to, a shrewd thirteen-page introduction to the official text published by Random House in 1940. The piece begins by challenging a syndicated article which claimed that “next to the British blockade … the cause of the Nazi Reich has not sustained as great a disaster as Clare Boothe’s new play … launched at the Plymouth Theater to the huzzahs and plaudits of a highly enthusiastic initial audience.” Margin for Error was indeed wittily satiric of National Socialism, HRL conceded, but it had two serious flaws: a villain deficient in Fascist ferocity, and a press protagonist who was too flabby-minded and platitudinous to be freedom’s champion. “The defense of democracy ought not to be left to the unsupported efforts of one Jewish policeman.” No other contemporary playwright had produced an entirely successful anti-Nazi work. Even Broadway’s liberal conscience, Clifford Odets, offered no effective counter to brutality in his Till the Day I Die. “There were no Christs on his barricades … no redemption in the blood he spilled.” What the stage urgently needed was a writer capable of creating an Average Man “without any particular ax to grind,” who could speak out fearlessly on behalf of truth and justice. “That dramatist,” HRL regretted to say, “is not, at the moment, my dear wife, Miss Boothe.” The fact that CBL countenanced this extraordinarily candid essay speaks volumes for her shrewd sense of publicity. The style is less that of HRL than of a Time-Life wordsmith (probably Noel Busch) rephrasing his boss’s views. A few of the sentences read like CBL herself.
56. King, Mine Enemy, 318, 319.
1. John Billings Diary, Sept. 6, 1939, JBP.
2. Washington Evening Times-Herald, Sept. 11, 1939.
3. CBL to HRL, qu. him, May 10, 1960, CBLP.
4. Ibid., qu. Dr. Milton Rosenbluth.
5. Ibid.; CBL to Dr. Thompkins, Mar. 17, 1961 (unmailed?), CBLP.
6. CBL to Dr. Rosenbluth, Oct. 20, 1939, CBLP.
7. John Billings Diary, Dec. 11, 1939.
8. CBL to HRL, Dec. 13, 1939, CBLP.
9. HRL to CBL, n.d. c. Dec. 18, 1939, SJMP.
10. CBL and Alexander King, “The Yohimbe Tree,” ts. in CBLP.
11. Dan Longwell to CBL, Feb. 3, 1938, CBLP.
12. Alexander King, Mine Enemy Grows Older (New York, 1958), 196, 267.
13. King qu. John Billings Diary, Dec. 29, 1939.
14. King, Mine Enemy, 268, 267–269.
15. CBL int. SJM, Jan. 6, 1982; HRL to CBL, c. Jan. 1940, CBLP.
16. King ts. in CBLP,
17. HRL to CBL, n.d. c. Feb. 1940, CBLP.
18. CBL to HRL, fragment, n.d. c. Feb. 1935, CBLP.
19. Ann Brokaw Diary, Feb. 4, 1940.
20. John Billings Diary, Feb. 16, 1940.
21. Ann Brokaw Diary, Feb. 18, 1940, CBLP; Walton Wickett to SJM, Nov. 15, 1983, SJMP; John Billings Diary, Mar. 29, 1941, qu. C. D. Jackson’s memory of the previous year.
22. HRL to CBL, n.d. c. Feb. 1940.
23. Mark Sullivan to CBL, May 30, 1934, CBLP.
24. HRL to CBL, qu. her, c. mid-Apr. 1940, CBLP.
25. Ibid.