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His personal life was far more difficult to balance. Luce had grown up in a kind of genteel poverty--a scholarship student working at menial jobs and pinching pennies among boys and young men of great wealth. Once he had a fortune, he lived in high style. He bought or built great houses, collected art, stayed only in the best suites in the best hotels. In 1935 he divorced his wife of 12 years (and the mother of his two sons) to marry one of the most glamorous women in America--the already acclaimed editor and playwright, later Congresswoman and ambassador, Clare Boothe. Their marriage was a troubled one from the start, a union of two ambitious, image-conscious people who did not always like each other very much and who were often apart. But they played their public roles as a dazzling and powerful couple to the hilt--entertaining lavishly (and deadly seriously), moving easily among the great and powerful, achieving celebrity and influence of a sort few publishers or journalists had ever known. To Harry, living an opulent and glamorous life was never satisfying in itself. At times, he confided to close friends, he considered it almost sinful.
As he neared the end of his career in the mid-1960s and began restlessly preparing for retirement, the great achievements of his life--of which he was deeply proud--still seemed not wholly to satisfy him. He spent his last years in a search for the spiritual and emotional fulfillment he felt he had never fully achieved--a search so intense that he and Clare reportedly experimented occasionally with LSD, on the advice of friends who described it as a vehicle of awakening. At the end, in February 1967, when he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 68, he remained above all a missionary's son, still seeking the mission that would somehow fulfill and justify his rich, full, successful but never quite complete life.