A WOMAN OF MEANS

By John Elson

She may be only one of history's footnotes now, but in her heyday Clare Boothe Luce was, after Eleanor Roosevelt, the most talked-about woman in America. She seemingly had it all: she was married to two men of wealth; she was a headlining journalist (for LIFE and the original Vanity Fair); a successful playwright (The Women); a two-term Congresswoman from Connecticut; and later U.S. ambassador to Italy. She had a merciless wit and stunning looks to go with her smarts. Drawing on interviews with family, friends and Luce herself, as well as her papers in the Library of Congress, Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce by Sylvia Jukes Morris (Random House; 562 pages; $30) is the first part of what will almost certainly be the definitive biography of Luce.

Despite her lady-of-the-manor ways, Luce's beginnings were anything but grand. She was born in Manhattan in 1903, the illegitimate daughter of William Franklin Boothe, an itinerant salesman and would-be concert violinist. Clare and her older brother David were raised by their mother Anna, who, Morris tells us, supported them by part-time work as a call girl and believed that Clare's surest way to escape from poverty was by marrying money. They found a supposedly suitable husband in George Tuttle Brokaw, an heir to a clothing fortune but also a drunkard and a brute. The marriage lasted six years and produced Clare's only child.

Thanks in part to Brokaw's generous alimony, Clare emerged as Manhattan's most glitteringly gay divorce. She also found work with the publisher Conde Nast, initially at Vogue but more brilliantly at Vanity Fair, where she became managing editor. One of her first contributions to the magazine was a flip little profile of TIME's co-founder Henry R. Luce. They married in 1935. His magazines prospered, including LIFE, which she virtually invented, but, to her bitter disappointment, was not allowed to edit. And despite mixed reviews, her plays were popular successes. But as Rage for Fame ends, with Clare's election to Congress in 1942, the Luces are visibly at odds--and clearly not for the last time.

Morris struggles for fairness but portrays Luce as a calculating, self-indulgent user whose fixed eye on the main chance rendered her oblivious to the concerns of others. Considering the trials that lay ahead for Luce, it's a safe bet that Morris' second volume will be just as compelling as the first.

--By John Elson