Sylvia Jukes Morris Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce, Random House: NY, 1997, 562 pp.
Little Deceptions
[p. 16] William Franklin Boothe [April 10, 1862], Clare Boothe's father, was the first born son of Sarah Rebecca Deaver Boothe and The Reverend John William Thomas Booth in Poolesville MD., of six children.
William was gracious, charming, a genius by Dryden: ". . . a man so various that he seemed to be//Not one, but all mankind's epitome!'who entered Purdue University's preparatory academy for students of superior ability, in 1876 at age fourteen and a half. He excelled in music, languages, athletics, crochet, and in college excelled at history, languages, among others, and then in 1878, he enrolled in the Cincinnati College of Music where he studied the violin under Professor S.E. Jacobsohn. He did ranch work in the 1880s in Dakota Territory. He was outstanding at sports, he loved music. He could neither dance in step or hum a tune, he played the piano with verve and skill. By age 20 he had published two concert etudes. He went to Europe to study violin technique with Eugene Ysaye. Irresistible to the ladies, ending up with four wives, three legal and one common-law.
[p. 19] He married Isa Hill . . . and moved back East working as a piano salesman for the Philadelphia company of Heppe, Ramsdall and Dearborn, where he married Laura Olivia Brauss Nov. 7, 1886. They opened a piano and organ store.
[p. 19] "Piano sales had been soaring since the 1850s, and the instrument was now the most desired parlor status symbol." America's household God," in Charles Dickens's words. To promote his own merchandise in a highly competitive field, William invested in cooperative advertisement of coming attractions at the nearby Opera House and Theater, even brazenly adding his own logo to a silk picture of the actor Edward . . . ] or Edwin [p. 20) Booth (The latter was no relation, and his fame was a sore
[p. 20] "Sales flourished, and William won recognition as one of the most colorful and innovative figures in the piano world. He adopted new methods of manufacturing as well as distribution, and was a pioneer marketer of the four-foot-ten-inch baby grand . . ." He moved to New York where his marriage broke and "he began a documented relationship with the beautiful Teresa Carreno, one of the greatest pianists in history.
[p. 20] During the last decade of the nineteenth century, large piano factories in New York had begun to produce as many as five thousand pianos a year. Added to these were countless others made by "cottage" manufacturers working in lofts. The axis of the retail piano trade was Union Square, with Steinway Hall on Fourteenth Street and Chickering Hall on Eighteenth. Spurred by phenomenal demand, department stores started advertising pianos for "five down and five per month." Wanamaker's sold 265 instruments in a single day, and lured experienced salesmen with lucrative commissions. Impeccably dressed in long-tailed cutaways, these experts gave such gentlemanly imprimatur to the product that even the most reluctant customers were persuaded to buy. Other salesmen took to the road as piano "ambassadors," impressively dressed in bell-crowned silk hats and carrying silver-topped canes."
William Franklin Boothe was at first a beneficiary and then a casualty of this piano fever . . . In the spring of 1901 he met . . . Anna Clara Schneider [August 29, 1882- ]. Gorgeous, eighteen-years old . . . Clare's mother was eighteen years younger than William. William became a patent medicine salesman with Bromonia Company, married to both Ida and Anna . . .
Clare Boothe Luce [April 10, 1903- ]
Failure is impossible:
Coup de Foudre
[p. 249] Henry Robinson Luce had been conceived in the United States but was born in Tengchow, China, on April 3, 1893. His father, Henry Winters Luce of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a phenomenally energetic Yale graduate and Presbyterian missionary. He bequeathed to his son a strong constitution, brains, religious fervor, inflexibility, single-mindedness and pale red hair. The boy's mother, Elizabeth Middleton Boyd, gave him both curiosity adventurousness, patriotism, and poor hearing.
Sheltered by the walls of the missionary compound, little Harry only slowly became aware of the animosity with which the vast majority of Chinese regarded foreign churchmen. For all the efforts of his father and like-minded proselytizers over a hundred years, only a fraction of one percent of the native population was converted. The rest resisted Western influences. Blind as his father to this intransigence, Henry never ceased to believe that China would eventually yield to Christ and capitalism.
He was an attractive and precocious boy, with a marked didactic tendency. At five, his younger sister Elisabeth recalled, "he delivered his own sermons-to the neighbor's children, or anyone else who would listen." At six he informed his mother that his globe was always at hand, "to teach the history of George Washington. Already he had his own country ardently, and he once came to blows with a boy who insulted it.
Harry first saw America when he was eight. At his maternal grandparents's church in Utica, New York, he innocently thought the line, "I am the Vine and Ye are the Roots," imprinted on a stained-glass window referred to his ancestry and related him directly to God. It was a belief his future employees thought he held sincerely. While he was still in the United States, a surgeon, removing his tonsils, allowing him to come out of the anesthetic too soon. Upon recovery Harry was found to have acquired a stutter that afflicted him well into adulthood.
[p. 250] On his return to China he enrolled at Chefoo, a British boarding school in Shantung, where customs of fagging, flogging and toadying were entrenched. Despite these practices, he benefitted from the school's superior instruction and broad curriculum-as did his classmate Thornton Wilder, son of the American Counsel General at Shanghai. Harry learned French, Latin, Greek, history, and mathematics. Younger than average, he rose to third in a class of twenty and once scored 100 in algebra. His stammer notwithstanding, he joined the debating society and conquered shyness to become an expert reporter for the school's weekly journal. An innate journalistic gift soon propelled him to the position of editor in chief. Everything he excelled at as a man was in evidence long before he reached adolescence: preaching, reading, inquiring, editing, and managing.
At fourteen he went to England for a year at a school north of London, in the hope of being cured of his stutter. Then in the fall of 1913 he won a scholarship to Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. Again he rose to the top of his class, and he edited the school's literary magazine. His closest rival Briton Hadden, an extroverted sportsman and another aspiring journalist. Their dynamic competitiveness continued into the Ivy League, where they battled for control of the Yale Daily News. Hadden became the paper's chairman, while Luce held the post of managing editor. At graduation Harry was voted the most brilliant member of the class of 1920 and "Brit" the most likely to succeed.
During a vacation from postgraduate study at Oxford, the twenty-two year old Harry fell in love with Lila Ross Hotz, a tall, well-bred Chicago debutante. Wanting to keep close to her after her return to the States, he took a job on the Chicago Daily News as "legman" for Ben Hecht. Britton Hadden soon lured him back east with an arrangement for both of them to work at the Baltimore News. They stayed there for a spell, then, at the common age of twenty-five, embarked on the publishing venture that changed their lives.
Raising $86,000 from Yale classmates and other investors, they created a weekly magazine called Facts. This was immediately changed to Time-a name that Harry claimed had come to him while thinking how long it took to travel home every evening. With Stephen Vincent Benet and Archibald MacLeish as part-time writers, and, Ben Larsen as circulation manager, they published their first issue on March 3, 1923.
[p. 251] In a year they were confident enough of long-term success to raise their own salaries and issue an optimistic report to stockholders. Luce triumphantly married Lila. A son, Henry Luce III, was born on April 25, 1925, and another, Peter Paul, on May 18, 1929. By then Harry was already a millionaire.
Suddenly and shockingly in February 1929, Hadden died of septicemia. Harry contrived to buy his shares, giving himself sole command of Time. Immediately he went ahead with the founding of a business monthly entitled Fortune. In 1932 he bought Architectural Forum. When he met Clare, he was running all three magazines, exploring the possibility of creating a fourth, and finalizing plans for a newsreel, The March of Time.
"Sir Charles"
. . .
[p. 430] [1941] "Clare continued her education in tactics and strategy during a dinner at USAFFE headquarters. It was built on top of Fort Santiago, and as rain drummed down on the tin roof she asked Willoughby where the Japanese might strike if they invaded the Philippines. He drew a map on the tablecloth and pointed to Luzon's Lingayen Gulf in the west and Polillo Bight in the East.
"Ye old pincer movement," he said.
"You are not giving away military secrets?"
Charles laughed. "No, just quoting military gospel-according to Homer Lea."
Clare had never heard the name. Willoughby explained that Lea, who had died in 1912 at the age of thirty-six, had been a Colorado-born hunchback with a passion for all things military. Too crippled to enter the U.S. Army, he had studied the maneuvers of the great commanders from Hannibal to Napoleon. Then, moving to China, he had become strategic advisor to Sun Yat-sen, leader of the revolution that overthrew the Manchu monarchy. In two brilliant books, The Valor of Ignorance [p. 431] (1909) and Day of the Saxon (1912), he had predicted not only the rise of Japan and Germany but the exact methods both powers would employ to attack the British and American empires. Long before the construction of the Maginot, he had warned of the vulnerability of permanent fortification warfare, she was captivated. This smart cripple was worth a biography, and she resolved to find out more about him.
. . .ns, describing them as nothing more than "dream castles" of a nation's vanity. When Clare discovered that Hitler himself had read Lea on the supreme value of mobility i
Bombed Into Greatness
. . .
[p. 440] The brazen suddenness of the Japanese assault, and the realization that the American mainland was now vulnerable, changed popular complacency overnight. Even Charles Lindbergh renounced isolationism on December 11, when Germany, honoring a pact with Japan, declared [p. 441] war on the United States. Clare's own immediate reaction was to make herself an oracle of the master strategist Homer Lea.
Inspired by her talks with Willoughby about the tiny, forgotten hunchback, she spent several weeks in the New York Public Library researching Lea's life and completed a thirty-page outline by the end of the year. She then invited Noel Busch to Mepkin to look it over. Billings rightly surmised that Busch would be expected to "pay" for her hospitality by recommending she submit the fruits of her scholarship to Life. When Clare telephoned to offer a two-part profile "at her usual rates," the editor rejected it, saying Lea was merely "a footnote to history."
He should have known that Clare was a force not to be deterred. She sold the piece to Life's nearest rival in circulation, The Saturday Evening Post. The hundred-dollar fee did not matter, she told Ann, since scholarly work gave her more pleasure than the most lucrative Hollywood scripts.
Lavishly illustrated, Ever Hear of Homer Lea? appeared in two separate issues [March 7, 14, 1942] later that winter. With perfect timing, Clare simultaneously published an introduction to a reissue of Lea's The Valor of Ignorance, elevating him to the rank of prophet.
"Here was the prediction that Manila would be forced to surrender in three weeks. It was occupied by the Japs twenty-six days after the opening of hostilities. Here was the very picture of the convergent attack at right angles-the pincer movement-from Lingayen Gulf and Polillo Bight before which MacArthur's troops fell back to entrench themselves on Bataan Peninsula . . . Here, above all, was a solemn warning against puting undue faith in "impregnable forts" in Manila Harbor (Corregidor, Il Caballo, El Fraile), unless they formed a base of a great fleet, equal to Japan's, or were defended by a great mobile army."
Not even this quadruple coup quelled Clare's biographical ardor. She tried to interest both Irene Selznick's father, Louis B. Mayer, and her husband in adapting Lea's life to the screen, but without success. "