Starred review from April 28, 1997
In many ways the regal Clare Boothe Luce was an American parallel to Pamela Ashby Churchill Harriman, a beauty relentlessly on the make for men, money and power. Yet Luce was more brainy and better educated, and perhaps more hungry for celebrity because she came from far lower circumstances. Her father was a violinist who was seldom able to make his living by his bow. Her mother, who never married William Boothe, was a call girl and kept woman. In the first half of what will be a two-volume life, Morris (Edith Kermit Roosevelt) describes how the future congresswoman and second wife of Time magazine founder Henry Luce, bedded her way upward while career-climbing in New York journalism and writing a stage mega-hit, The Women, which was made into a popular film in 1939. By 1942--at age 39--she turned to politics and was elected a Republican representative from Connecticut. Granted exclusive access to Luce's papers--460,000 items--in the Library of Congress before her subject's death in 1987, Morris has mined them for Luce's self-absorbed appetites. Unbewitched by her subject's aura, she describes "the corrosion of a personality denied the power that she felt born, if not qualified, to exercise." In a foreshadowing of the next volume, the author reveals that in later years, Luce's closest soul mate is to be Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. Photos not seen by PW.