CLARE BOOTHE LUCE by Wilfrid Sheed; Dutton; 183 pages; $12.95
She was a famous beauty, an even more celebrated playwright, a magazine editor, an actress. She was the wife of Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time Inc. She had been a Congresswoman and was on her way to becoming an Ambassador. It was small wonder that when 18-year-old Wilfrid Sheed met her he was awestruck. Her intimidating husband, the novelist-critic recalls, "summed me up with brutal accuracy as someone he didn't have much to learn from, certainly not enough to crank up his famous stammer for." But Clare Boothe Luce was something else. At 46, she remained "drenchingly beautiful" and "slightly coquettish." Wilfrid was the son of Roman Catholic publishers, and Clare had become a famous convert to the Catholic Church. Religion was their touchstone, and at the Luce house in Ridgefield, Conn., she made him feel at home. After dinner with "Harry's power people," they would retire to his room for conversation. They talked about Robert Benchley and Noël Coward and the Catholic Church.
Clare was like "a very understanding nun" to the "tongue-tied Oscar Wilde," as Sheed remembers himself. On one occasion the understanding nun reclined uneventfully on the Sheed bed. When the summer came to an end, she gave her young friend a new Oldsmobile.
What 18-year-old would ever recover? Not Sheed; not quite, though he makes a heroic effort to reach back through the charm to the exemplary life. Clare Boothe Luce's legend, he reports, "could be studied like a Grecian urn, with her forever reaching or being reached for, depending on one's angle of vision." As for her admirers, "They were happy to celebrate her conversion, or her achievements as a Woman, or her spunky duels with F.D.R. in perpetuity. If she had gone out of existence like St. Christopher, they'd have kept her on their dashboards."
With good reason. A generation before the movement, Clare Boothe Luce displayed more ambition than Gloria Steinem put together. She led more serial lives and enjoyed more careers than an amalgam of Jane Fonda, Betty Friedan and Sandra Day O'Connor.
There is, for example, Clare the child actress, understudying Mary Pickford in a play called A Good Little Devil.
And Clare the young bride, brokered into marriage by her mother, growing up fast as the battered wife of alcoholic Millionaire George Brokaw.
And Clare the journalist, rising to the top of the masthead at Vanity Fair from 1931 to 1934.
And Clare the dramatist, author of The Women (1936), a Broadway comedy that still can bite.
And Clare the Congresswoman from Connecticut (1943-47) and the Ambassador to Italy (1953-56): "A celebrity ambassador can draw more attention than a diplomat should, but she can also publicize certain national interests better than a faceless functionary. Clare seems to have got this just about right and she made a noise only about the few things that mattered."