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Sheed, bemused, recalls his father's suggested opening for this book: "She was the best of dames, she was the worst of dames." But, the son concludes, that summary is inaccurate: "She was good at just about everything." Yet this, too, is insufficient. He seeks further definition in 1977, when he journeys to Hawaii to replay house guest to Clare, now half-blinded by cataracts, living in "a fur-lined rut" but still capable of casting her spell.
He concludes that his witty, zealous subject is a pioneer, "the first" cutting her way through a man's world that most women were scared even to enter." As to what she is not—including the "bitch" her enemies accused her of being—Sheed is less sure. She is not "a heartless schemer," she is not a "cold climber." Certainly she is not just "Luce's woman." In the end, all he can do is shrug and quote his subject: " 'Do not defend me' is almost her heraldic motto, and I'll do my best not to."
Thus the Clare Boothe Luce who emerges in this lively, shrewd, indulgent book is, sui generis, a complicated and brilliant woman who has more or less equally enjoyed LSD and scuba diving and her honorary status as general in the U.S. Army. Sheed's book is complicated too. It is not, he ultimately concedes, a biography at all. Maybe, he suggests, "Notes on a Career" will do.
So it will. Sheed is one of the wittiest novelists, capable of turning out presumptive romans à clef like Office Politics (about a certain liberal magazine or magazines) and Max Jamison (about a certain theater critic or critics). In the new book he mixes the storyteller's phrase with the historian's acuity: "The '20s did not entirely take place in the '20s"; President Ford is "like a relative you have to visit now and then, with nothing much to report. You know, he's still working at Prudential or Tool & Dye"; William F. Buckley's "more right-wing pieces tend to remind me of someone talking extra-loud to a rich relative who must be kept in a good humor. 'Big Government. I said, Big Government!' "
As for the subject, if she emerges as less than an enigma she remains just as much of a wonder. The writer of great gifts who does not quite know what he wants his book to be circles a lady of great gifts who has not never quite known what she wanted her life to be. "Entertaining," she once said about herself. It still applies, to the achiever and her admirer. —By Melvin Maddocks