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##### October 10, 1987 OBITUARY ## Clare Boothe Luce Dies at 84: Playwright, Politician, Envoy ##### By ALBIN KREBS Clare Booth Luce, whose richly varied career encompassed the editorship of Vanity Fair magazine, the writing of hit Broadway plays and service in Congress and as Ambassador to Rome, died yesterday morning at her home in Washington. Mrs. Luce, who was 84 years old, had been gravely ill with cancer for some time. Clare Booth Luce, whose richly varied career encompassed the editorship of Vanity Fair magazine, the writing of hit Broadway plays and service in Congress and as Ambassador to Rome, died yesterday morning at her home in Washington. Mrs. Luce, who was 84 years old, had been gravely ill with cancer for some time. She was widely known as the sharp-tongued wife of one of the nation's most influential publishers, Henry R. Luce, whose magazines included Time, Life and Sports Illustrated. But she won fame on her own as magazine writer and editor, author of ''The Women'' and other hit plays, controversial Republican member of the House of Representatives from Connecticut, and, finally, in the Eisenhower Administration, a hardworking and often praised Ambassador to Italy. She had enough careers to satisfy the ambitions of several women, but none tied her down for long. She was often on lists of the world's 10 most admired women, but her glamorous existence and tart tongue drew criticism, sometimes partisan, sometimes envious. Clare Boothe was born in New York City on April 10, 1903, the daughter of William Franklin Boothe, a pit orchestra violinist and sometime businessman, and the former Anna Clara Snyder, who had been a chorus girl. The child was christened Ann Clare, but she never used the Ann. When Parents Separated Her parents separated when Clare was 8 years old. She was brought up in genteel poverty by her mother, who still managed to take her to France for a year and send her to the Cathedral School of St. Mary in Garden City, L.I., and the Castle School at Tarrytown-on-Hudson, N.Y. In 1919, her mother married Dr. Albert Elmer Austin, a prominent physician in Greenwich, Conn. On a trip to Europe in 1920, the 18-year-old Clare met Elsa Maxwell among other social figures. ''I'll have her to one of my parties,'' Miss Maxwell said. ''Whatever happens then, she'll get a rich husband.'' That happened, but not because of a Maxwell party. Clare Boothe met her future husband in church: George Tuttle Brokaw, millionaire-playboy son of a clothing manufacturer. They married in 1923 in a wedding called ''the most important social event of the season.'' It was not to last. Mr. Brokaw, 23 years older than his bride, was a heavy drinker, according to one of his biographers, and was prone to abuse his wife. After six years of marriage she won a divorce on grounds of mental cruelty and was awarded $425,000 plus education expenses for her daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw. The Job at Vanity Fair Declining to rest on her money, Clare Boothe importuned a society friend, Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair, for a job. After proving she was not another idle society matron whiling away her time between husbands, she did a stint writing photo captions for Vogue. Vanity Fair's editor, Frank Crowninshield, hired her after demanding that she draw up a list of 100 ideas. She rose quickly to assistant editor and wrote satirical pieces about society that were later collected in a book, ''Stuffed Shirts.'' Her penthouse apartment on East 57th Street, Manhattan, drew the social, artistic and political types who peopled Vanity Fair's pages. She became managing editor, injecting more political material in an effort to revive the magazine. She left in 1934. She had written three plays, none produced. She once said reading the plays of George Bernard Shaw was the impetus for her interest in the theater. Much later she met Shaw and is said to have gushed, ''Except for you, I wouldn't be here.'' Shaw supposedly replied, ''And now, let me see, dear child, what was your mother's name?'' Her first produced play, ''Abide with Me,'' in 1935, was unanimously deemed a disaster. It concerned a drunken, sadistic husband who is shot in the last act. Several critics commented on how quickly she responded to almost indiscernible cries of ''Author.'' She never went to another opening night. Sparks at First Sight of Luce Two days after the opening, the author became the wife of Henry R. Luce, publisher of Time and Fortune. The two independent personalities had struck sparks on their first meeting, when they were seated together at a dinner party and Mr. Luce ignored her. The next time they met, at a party at the Waldorf-Astoria, his future wife resolved to pay Mr. Luce back by asking rude questions. This time he was enthralled by her. He ordered her to accompany him to the Waldorf's lobby, where he said, ''You are the great love of my life, and some day I'm going to marry you.'' The marriage lasted, although there were rumored difficulties - perhaps inevitable in a marriage between two such strongminded personalities. She had her separate careers and Mr. Luce had his magazines - Life, the picture magazine, was reportedly her idea. The Successful Plays Mrs. Luce returned to writing plays and with ''The Women,'' in 1936, recovered admirably from her maiden flop on Broadway. The play was an apotheosis of feminine bitchiness, concerning a devoted wife, the only sympathetic character, trying to win back her husband, who had been poached by a saleswoman. It earned her $2 million. In 1938, Mrs. Luce was represented by ''Kiss the Boys Goodbye,'' a satire on the hoopla surrounding the search for the feminine lead in the movie of ''Gone With the Wind.'' It was a box-office success, as was her next play, ''Margin for Error,'' which purveyed a modish anti-Nazism. With World War II, Mrs. Luce sought to involve herself on a larger stage. In February 1940, she sailed for Europe as an accredited correspondent for Life for a firsthand look at the war. One result was a book, ''Europe in the Spring.'' Dorothy Parker called it ''All Clare on the Western Front.'' In 1943 Mrs. Luce decided to run for the House of Representatives from Fairfield County, Conn. Criticism of Roosevelt Despite her friendships with early New Dealers, she was by now a Republican and made speeches critical of the Roosevelt Administration's handling of the war effort. Riding an off-year tide of anti-Administration sentiment, she defeated a Democratic incumbent by 7,000 votes. In her first speech in the House, she attacked a proposal by Vice President Henry A. Wallace calling for postwar freedom of the air. Mrs. Luce wrapped up the Wallace proposal in a single word, ''globaloney.'' In Congress she frequently spoke out on foreign policy as well as for racial equality in the armed forces and war production. Despite her own brief infatuation with Communism in the 1930's, Mrs. Luce emerged as an early hardline anti-Communist (although as early as 1964 she was calling for more normal relations with China). She won re-election in 1944, campaigning with fire but concealing sorrow. Her 19-year-old daughter was killed in an automobile accident that year. A Jesuit priest put her in touch with the Rev. Fulton J. Sheen, who was becoming known for his broadcasts. Before Sheen had talked three minutes, she demanded, ''Listen, if God is good, why did He take my daughter?'' ''In order that you might be here in the faith,'' Sheen replied. Became a Catholic Their sessions, with Mrs. Luce arguing and Sheen explaining, resulted in her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1946. After that a friend noticed a gradual change in her: ''Twenty years ago she was like a diamond - beautiful, brilliant and cold. Now she is beautiful, brilliant and compassionate. She has become a kind and remarkably unselfish woman.'' Because of personal problems and long separations from her husband that her duties entailed, Mrs. Luce did not seek re-election in 1946. She remained politically active, in addition to writing a column for McCall's, and in 1952 she campaigned for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. He offered her the post of Secretary of Labor, but she demurred. He then named her Ambassador to Italy, stirring controversy because of Mrs. Luce's Catholicism, her lack of diplomatic experience and because she was a woman. But she waded into her job with customary energy and contempt for obstacles. She helped lay the diplomatic groundwork for an international conference that worked out a compromise on the status of Trieste, a dispute that threatened war between Yugoslavia and Italy. Effective Diplomacy She made strongly anti-Communist speeches and warned of cutoffs of American aid to Italian industry: Communists dominated the labor unions. She drew fire from leftists. Once her chauffeur misunderstood her directions and took her to the residence of President Giovanni Gronchi. Unable to back out, Mrs. Luce, whose relations with the President had been somewhat strained, took the occasion to persuade him to permit the stationing of American troops on Italian soil. In Italy she caught a mysterious illness finally diagnosed as arsenic poisoning. The Central Intelligence Agency was called in. The cause was paint dust from her bedroom ceiling. A Controversy Over Brazil In 1959 she was nominated Ambassador to Brazil. A determined one-man opposition to her appointment was mounted in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Mrs. Luce was confirmed both by the committee and the Senate, but she could not resist a final jab at Morse. ''My difficulties, of course, go back some years,'' she said, ''when Senator Morse was kicked in the head by a horse.'' (He was once kicked by a horse, but not in the head.) In the resultant furor, Eisenhower defended her while Mr. Luce publicly urged her to resign, which she did. In 1964 she announced that she was running for the Senate in New York State as a Conservative Party candidate and supporter of Senator Barry Goldwater, whose nomination for President she had seconded at the Republican convention. Under pressure from the party's liberal wing and finally Senator Goldwater himself, she withdrew from the race on the eve of the Conservative convention. Moved to Honolulu In later years she devoted herself to social life in Phoenix, where the Luces had a house - skindiving, doing mosaics and needlepoint, painting and writing. After Mr. Luce died in 1967, she moved to Honolulu, where she lived until 1983, when she moved into an apartment at the Watergate complex in Washington.''It's a city of human proportions,'' she said. In recent years Mrs. Luce served on President Reagan's unpaid Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Of her writing she once said, ''I have been too involved with living to write much - or well - about life.'' A biographer, Alden Hatch, summed her up this way: ''Brilliant, yet often foolish; idealistic, yet realistic to the verge of cynicism; tough as a Marine sergeant, but almost quixotically kind to unfortunates; with the mind and courage of a man and exceedingly feminine instincts; the complexities of her character are as numerous as the facets of her career. Probably the reason no one understands her completely is because she does not even understand herself.'' Mrs. Luce is survived by two stepsons, Henry Luce 3d and Peter Paul Luce. Interment will be private, A High Mass will be offered at noon Tuesday in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and a memorial service Wednesday at 11 A. M. at the Church of St. Stephen Martyr in Washington.
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