The Publisher (38 page)

For four years she did editorial work on several magazines, most notably Condé Nast’s glamorous
Vanity Fair
, where Clare became managing editor in 1933. But a year later, bridling at the anonymity of editorial work, she left the magazine to become a playwright, an ambition shaped in part by her brief career as a child actress years before. Just as Joel Jacobs had smoothed her mother’s path to stability during Clare’s childhood, so she herself relied on Bernard Baruch—with whom she had a long-term and not wholly discreet affair—to help Clare along the path to her own career.
³⁴

Luce was certainly aware of Clare Brokaw for several years before he met her, both because of her social prominence and her somewhat anomalous success as a woman in publishing. Lila was aware of her too. (“Who should appear in our very hotel here—much to my amusement,” she wrote Harry’s mother and sisters from Salzburg in 1932, “—but one C. Brokaw! And what a stupid face she has got!”) Clare, of course, was very aware of Harry—as everyone in publishing was by then—and had even written a short tribute to him in
Vanity Fair
several years earlier, despite her private belief that he sounded like a “dreary man.” They met for the first time at a dinner party in 1934, when Luce sat down with her abruptly, talked shop briefly, and then stood up brusquely and left. They had a similarly brief encounter a few months later, which ended equally brusquely. Clare considered him “extremely rude.” “He picked my brains and left me flat,” she later recalled. But their third meeting was different.
³⁵

On December 9, 1934, the prominent hostess Elsa Maxwell invited Harry and Lila to a “Turkish ball” at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Starlight Roof Garden. It was in honor of the opening of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical
Anything Goes
and included a performance of songs from the
show. At one point in the evening, Clare noticed Harry walking across the room carrying two glasses of champagne back to his table. “Oh Mr. Luce,” she said flirtatiously as he passed, “you’re no doubt bringing me that champagne.” As the lights dimmed Harry sat down and began an intense conversation with Clare. When the lights came up, they were still talking. After a while he rejoined Lila briefly, told her cryptically that he had “been asked to stay,” and suggested that she go home without him. Always obliging, Lila agreed. He and Clare continued talking. When the party ended Harry asked her to come with him to the hotel lobby. According to Clare’s possibly embellished later accounts, he said to her: “I’ve read about it happening. But it has just happened to me. The French call it a
coup de foudre
. I think I must tell you—you are the one woman in my life.” Clare was stunned and somewhat incredulous (but also, certainly, intrigued), and they ended the evening by agreeing to meet at her apartment several days later—a meeting Clare must have imagined might never take place. But Harry remained besotted, and when he called on Clare again, he was if anything even more insistent in his declarations of love.
³⁶

Thus began the most agonizing period in Luce’s life. Since childhood he had struggled with the competing demands of ambition and virtue, a struggle rooted in his family, his education, and his faith. At every juncture—succeeding as a prep-school student, becoming a university leader, founding a company that in his view helped enlighten and enrich society—he believed he was reconciling these two goals. His passion for Clare was certainly compatible with ambition; she was, he realized, one of the most famous, glamorous, and accomplished women in New York and someone who would dramatically enhance his own celebrity. But leaving his wife and children was utterly incompatible with everything he had understood to be virtue throughout his life. At the same time that he was trying to persuade Clare to commit herself to him, a relatively easy task as it turned out, he was torturing himself with questions about the morality of his actions. Did he have the “Christian right” to take this step? What would his parents and his sisters think? How would this affect Lila and the boys? He took friends and colleagues aside and, uncharacteristically, poured out his anguish. “Harry … couldn’t work, had to walk around the block,” Billings commented. He had “been through hell for weeks.” Archibald MacLeish (one of his confidants) said that Luce was “shaken, overwhelmed, infatuated.” But in the end he returned to what he convinced himself was the decisive factor: his own sudden and largely unfamiliar passion. “Love is all there is,” MacLeish recalled his saying. “I haven’t any choice … because I
love
Clare.” Or as
Ralph Ingersoll more cynically observed years later, “Any other course was beyond his capacity. Thinking, as Harry always did, in the most grandiose of terms, his new emotion was one of the Great Loves of All Time—possibly
The
Greatest.”
³⁷

In the year between their fateful encounter at the Turkish ball and their quiet yet controversial wedding, Luce sought both to assure Clare of his all-encompassing love and to persuade Lila not to think ill of him. During their many separations, he wrote love letters to Clare that were almost uncannily similar in language and tone to the letters he had written to Lila during their courtship of more than a decade before. He created a pet name for Clare (“Mike”) just as he had for Lila (“Tod”). He revived the exaggerated language of love he had developed during his earlier courtship, perhaps because in both cases he was unable to express his emotions except by relying on conventional, and sometimes banal, description. “Enchantress of our Twenty Thousand Days,” he called Clare. “After so many years the big really incredible dream came true,” he wrote. He was “hopelessly in love.” He seemed in many of his letters more struck by her beauty than by anything else: “Darling, darling, I love you…. And no matter how often I may observe your face, I shall never catch the lighting trick by which it shifts from brilliant theatrical beauty to the heart-shattering beauty of tender and companionable affection.”

Clare, in contrast, wrote more provocatively, and presciently:

And unlike Harry, she was willing to analyze herself with at least some honesty:

While Harry was writing Clare, he was also writing to Lila insisting that she would remain an important, if absent, part of his life. “Darlingest,”
he wrote early in 1935, “(Because that word meant you and only you for so many years, let me keep it for you only.) They were years, too, which, in the short arc of life were, will always be, so important to us both…. Someday I shall try to put in writing what I have tried to tell you these weeks—my love and, weak though the work, my deep, my very deep appreciation for all that you have been willing to go through.” A few weeks later he wrote again:

At the same time he was trying to explain to his family the reasons for what he feared would be, to them, an unthinkable decision. As expected, his mother and sisters responded with shock and some horror to the news, not only because of the divorce itself but also because of their sense of Clare as an ambitious and immoral woman. They rallied around Lila and listened to her own embittered descriptions of Clare (“an opportunistic woman … hateful…. She blinded him with her glamor”). His sister Beth was similarly alarmed, disdainful of Clare (“a coarse and dishonest woman”). She even wrote Clare to warn of the “tragic” impact of a divorce on the family. His father, as usual, was more understanding, concerned primarily about what would happen if his son’s second marriage failed as well (something that Harry’s mother considered highly likely). “At times I’d find him listless or blue as if he were sick,” Billings wrote. He considered Clare “a yellow-headed bitch who is spending his money like water,” and he viewed the divorce as “a disgusting piece of business.” Harry continued bleakly on his chosen course, absorbing the blows, making no effort to counter them, and consoling himself with ever-increasing expectations of the happiness he would find with Clare.
³⁸

As they awaited his divorce and remarriage, both Harry and Clare alternated between striving to stay apart and contriving to find ways to meet. After Harry’s declaration of love, Clare began traveling frantically in an effort to avoid scandal and gossip: to Florida, Bermuda, Cuba, South Carolina, France, Germany. Harry—sometimes discreetly, sometimes
brazenly—followed her almost everywhere but stayed, usually, for only a few days. He was, of course, a busy man. But his reluctance to remain with Clare (and perhaps her reluctance to remain with him as well) was also a product of his guilt. Perhaps that was why his first sexual efforts with her were unsuccessful. (Clare, with characteristic indiscretion, told others of Harry’s insistence that he had rarely had a similar problem with Lila, that, as Clare described it, “he simply did it and then rolled over and thought about
Time.”
) During a brief, prewedding “honeymoon” in Charleston, South Carolina, in August 1935, they finally had their first successful sexual experience, and when they left Luce wrote her a somewhat stilted and slightly dolorous letter about their parting at the Washington, D.C., airport, from which they took separate planes back to New York:

After months of negotiations with Lila, alternately friendly and hostile, Luce finally agreed to a substantial settlement. Lila received the newly completed home in Gladstone, New Jersey; the contents of their rented home in New York; and two million dollars, roughly a third of Luce’s net wealth. Lila traveled to Reno, Nevada, to finalize the divorce. During those same weeks Clare hid away on the South Carolina estate of her former lover, Bernard Baruch, and wrote her first play. It was a devastating, perhaps even vindictive, portrait of a dysfunctional marriage, clearly based on her own years with George Brokaw.
Abide With Me
, as she titled it, opened on Broadway on November 21, 1935, received almost uniformly savage reviews (including a tortuously edited one in
Time
that managed only to be somewhat less hostile than the others), and closed after thirty-six performances. Harry and Clare were married, seemingly unpropitiously, two days after the disastrous opening, in a private service at the First Congregational Church in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. It was attended only by Clare’s immediate family and Harry’s younger brother, Sheldon.
⁴⁰

Luce’s marriage to Clare changed his life in many ways, but among the most important was a greatly increased visibility. After years of professional
fame but relatively personal obscurity, Luce became a bona fide celebrity—a man of certifiable power married to a woman of enormous public interest. Everywhere they went they were noticed and watched. Newspapers and magazines chronicled their social lives, their travels, their public statements, their homes, their clothes. (“Ma came down for me in the car and saw Henry and Clare Luce on 43d St,” Billings wrote about his mother-in-law in the spring of 1936, “a sight that thoroughly excited her.”) And now that Luce was a focus of public scrutiny, his chroniclers felt free to publicize their grievances toward him as well. Nowhere were the costs of celebrity more visible to Luce than in a famously withering profile of him in
The New Yorker
less than a year after his second marriage—a profile that emerged out of, and greatly inflamed, a long-running feud between the two publishing organizations.
⁴¹

Time Inc. and
The New Yorker
were in many ways fundamentally different.
Time
and
Fortune
were newsmagazines;
The New Yorker
’s sensibility was largely literary.
Time
aspired to reach a broad national audience;
The New Yorker
was self-consciously elite—not, it claimed, “for the old lady from Dubuque.” Luce prided himself on his magazines’ recognition of the importance, and even the virtues, of commerce (“Business is the focus of our national energies,” he had written in the prospectus for
Fortune
). The
New Yorker
staff was equally proud of its supposed isolation from the world of commerce, leaving business matters to professional managers whom the writers claimed to despise. But there were also striking similarities, which very likely accounted for much of the rivalry between the two organizations. Both were the products of the generation that came of age after World War I, and both were the creation of bright and ambitious young men (Hadden and Luce at Time Inc., Harold Ross at
The New Yorker
). Both magazines reflected the skeptical culture of the young writers and intellectuals of the 1920s and their Mencken-influenced iconoclasm. (“Everyone was in [the Mencken group’s] spell,” Roy Larsen later recalled of the early
Time;
the same was true of many
New Yorker
writers and editors.)