Clare Boothe Luce - Marriage To Henry Luce

Marriage To Henry Luce

The early months of the Luces' marriage—a second for both—was happy. Soon, however, temperamental and sexual incompatibilities inflicted painful strains upon the couple. Henry Luce was by any standards an extremely successful man, but his physical awkwardness, lack of humor, and newsman's discomfort with any conversation that was not strictly factual put him in awe of his beautiful wife's social poise, wit, and fertile imagination. Only at work, where he reigned supreme as publisher and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., was he able to escape nagging feelings of inferiority to her. His exclusively male coterie of editors resented what they believed to be Clare Luce's desire to gain a niche for herself in the boss's empire. Their dread was not unfounded, because her years as managing editor of "Vanity Fair" had left her with an avid interest in journalism (she claimed, with some reason, to have suggested the idea of "Life" magazine to her husband before it was developed internally. Henry Luce himself was generous in encouraging her to write for "Life," but the question of how much coverage she should be accorded in "Time," as she grew more famous, was a perennial problem to him, since he did not want to be accused of nepotism.

For her part, Clare Boothe Luce was touched by, but slightly contemptuous of her husband's tendency to put her on a pedestal. It affected his virility, and when, after ten years of marriage, she found out that he was seeing another woman, her reaction was to threaten suicide. Ironically, she herself had several affairs during World War II—notably with General Charles Willoughby, Douglas Macarthur's intelligence chief. (Roald Dahl, an air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, boasted to Creekmore Fath that Luce "had screwed from one end of the room to the other for three straight nights." ) Sexually, she had always been adventurous, but the art of seduction, which she learned from her equally promiscuous mother, interested her more than the physical act itself. She retained into extreme old age the power to bewitch men in any company, while paying less attention to women.

The Luces regularly, but half-heartedly, talked of divorce, yet an exhausted sort of love held them together until Henry's death from a heart attack in 1967. As one of the great "power couples" in American history, they were more or less welded by their mutual interests and complementary, if contrasting characters. They treated each other with unfailing respect in public, never more so than when Henry Luce willingly acted as his wife's consort during her years as Ambassador to Italy. She was never able to convert him to Catholicism—he was the son of a Presbyterian missionary—but he did not question the sincerity of her faith, often attended Mass with her, and defended her whenever she was criticized by his fellow Protestants.

In the early years of her widowhood, Clare Boothe Luce retired to the luxurious beach house she and her husband had planned in Honolulu. But boredom with life in what she called "this fur-lined rut" brought her back to Washington D.C. for increasingly long periods, and she made her final home there in 1983.