Clare Boothe Luce - Writing Career

Writing Career

A writer with considerable powers of invention and wit, Luce published Stuffed Shirts, a promising volume of short stories, in 1931. Scribner's magazine compared the latter work to Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies for its bitter humor. The New York Times found it socially superficial, but praised its "lovely festoons of epigrams" and beguiling stylishness: "What malice there may be in these pages has a felinity that is the purest Angoran." The book's device of characters interlinked from story to story was borrowed from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), but it impressed Andre Maurois, who asked Luce's permission to imitate it. Luce also published many magazine articles. Her real talent, however, was as a playwright. After the failure of her initial stage effort, the marital melodrama "Abide With Me" (1935), she rapidly followed up with a satirical comedy, The Women. Deploying a cast of no fewer than forty actresses who discussed men in often scorching language, it became a Broadway smash in 1936 and, three years later, a successful Hollywood movie. Toward the end of her life, Luce claimed that for half a century she had steadily received royalties from productions of The Women all around the world. Later in the 1930s, she wrote two more successful, but less durable plays, also both made into movies: Kiss the Boys Goodbye and Margin for Error. The latter work courageously, but ineffectively, tried to make fun of Nazism. Its opening night in Princeton, N.J., on October 14, 1939, was attended by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. Otto Preminger directed and starred in both the Broadway production and screen adaptation.

Much of Luce's famously acid wit ("No good deed goes unpunished" "Widowhood is a fringe benefit of marriage" "A hospital is no place to be sick") can be traced back to the days when, as a wealthy young divorcee in the early 1930s, she became a caption writer at Vogue and then, associate editor and managing editor of Vanity Fair. She not only edited the works of such great humorists as P. G. Wodehouse and Corey Ford, but contributed many comic pieces of her own, signed and unsigned. Her humor, which she retained into old age, was a saving grace that ameliorated the ruthlessness with which she pursued publicity and power.

The obsessiveness of Luce's "rage for fame" (a phrase by John Wolcot that she applied to herself as a schoolgirl) did not allow her the time and solitude she needed to mature as a writer, and her literary precocity soon lost its bloom. When she published her second book, Europe in the Spring (1940), an acutely observed report on the "phony war" preceding the conquest of France, her first-person style caused Dorothy Parker to dub it "All Clare on the Western Front." After the war, Luce's conversion to Catholicism made her for some years a religious proselytizer, and she later mourned that theological writing had killed her creative originality. It could be argued that her increasing tendency to orate on political platforms, where rhetoric was cheap, was a contributing factor. Nevertheless, she had some success in 1949 with her scenario for Come to the Stable, a popular 20th Century Fox movie about Benedictine nuns establishing a monastery in Connecticut. Luce's plot was nominated for an Academy Award that year in the Best Story category. Several other ambitious Hollywood scripts, including a big-budget project for Howard Hughes at RKO entitled "Pilate's Wife", came to nothing. Luce's play Child of the Morning, about the murder of a saintly girl (1951), received mixed reviews in its Massachusetts tryouts and never made it to Broadway. In 1952 she edited a volume of divine lives, Saints for Now, recruiting as contributors such distinguished authors as Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton, Whittaker Chambers, and Rebecca West. She wrote her final play, Slam the Door Softly, in 1970.

Another branch of Luce's literary career was that of war journalism. From her first teenage encounter with the battlefields of World War I, she had always been drawn to matters military—not to mention military officers, with whom she had many affairs. Europe in the Spring was the result of a four-month tour of Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and France in 1939-1940 as a correspondent for her husband's Life magazine. She described the widening battleground of World War II as "a world where men have decided to die together because they are unable to find a way to live together." In 1941, Luce and her husband toured China and reported on the status of the country and its war with Japan. Her profile of General Douglas Macarthur appeared on the cover of "Life" on the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. After the United States entered the war, Luce toured military installations in Africa, India, China, and Burma, compiling a further series of reports for Life. She published interviews with General Harold Alexander, commander of British troops in the Middle East, Chiang Kai-Shek, Jawaharlal Nehru, and General Stilwell, commander of American troops in the China-Burma-India theater. Her lifelong instinct for being in the right place at the right time, and easy access to key commanders made Clare Boothe Luce an influential figure on both sides of the Atlantic. Courageous by nature, she endured bombing raids and other dangers in Europe and the Far East. She did not hesitate to criticize the unwarlike lifestyle of General Sir Claude Auchinleck's Middle East Command in language that recalled the barbs of her best playwriting. One draft article for Life, noting that the general lived far from the Egyptian front in a houseboat, and mocking RAF pilots as "flying fairies", was discovered by British Customs when she passed through Trinidad in April, 1942. It caused such Allied consternation that she briefly faced house arrest. Coincidentally or not, Auchinleck was fired a few months later by Winston Churchill. Her varied experiences in all the major war theaters qualified her for a seat the following year on the House Military Affairs Committee.

Luce never wrote her autobiography despite a contract to do so. She did, however, select a posthumous biographer, and willed her enormous archive of personal papers to the Library of Congress.