Sylvia Jukes Morris: Price of Fame. The Honorable
Clare Boothe Luce, Random House, pagg. 735, dollari 35
Risvolto
“I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die,” Clare Boothe Luce told her biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris. Price of Fame, the
concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath,
chronicles Luce’s progress from the early months of World War II, when,
as an eye-catching Congresswoman and the only female member of the House
Military Affairs Committee, she toured the Western Front, captivating
generals and GIs. She even visited Buchenwald and other concentration
camps within days of their liberation. After a shattering personal
tragedy, she converted to Roman Catholicism, and became the first
American woman to be appointed ambassador to a major foreign power. “La Luce,”
as the Italians called her, was also a prolific journalist and magnetic
public speaker, as well as a playwright, screenwriter, pioneer scuba
diver, early experimenter in psychedelic drugs, and grande dame of
the GOP in the Reagan era. Tempestuously married to Henry Luce, the
powerful publisher of Time Inc., she endured his infidelities while
pursuing her own, and remained a practiced vamp well into old age.
Price of Fame begins
in January 1943 with Clare’s arrival on Capitol Hill as a newly elected
Republican from Connecticut. The thirty-nine-year-old beauty attracted
nationwide attention in a sensational maiden speech, attacking Vice
President Henry Wallace’s civil aviation proposals as “globaloney.”
Although she irked President Franklin D. Roosevelt by slanging his New
Deal as “a dictatorial Bumbledom,” she impressed his wife Eleanor.
Revealing liberal propensities, she lobbied for relaxed immigration
policies for Chinese, Indians, and displaced European Jews, as well as
equal rights for women and blacks. Following Hiroshima, the legislator
whom J. William Fulbright described as “the smartest colleague I ever
served with” became a passionate advocate of nuclear arms control. But
in 1946, she gave up her House seat, convinced that politics was “the
refuge of second-class minds.”
After a few seasons of
proselytizing on the Catholic lecture circuit, Clare emerged as a
formidable television personality, campaigning so spectacularly for the
victorious Republican presidential candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that
he rewarded her with the Rome embassy.
Ambassador Luce took
an uncompromising attitude toward Italy’s Communist Party, the world’s
second largest, and skillfully helped settle the fraught Trieste crisis
between Italy and Yugoslavia. She was then stricken by a mysterious case
of poisoning that the CIA kept secret, suspecting a Communist plot to
assassinate her. The full story, told here for the first time, reads
like a detective novel.
Price of Fame goes on to record
the crowded later years of the Honorable Clare Boothe Luce, during
which she strengthened her friendships with Winston Churchill, Somerset
Maugham, John F. Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh, Lyndon Johnson, Salvador Dalí,
Richard Nixon, William F. Buckley, the composer Carlos Chávez, Ronald
Reagan, and countless other celebrities who, after Henry Luce’s death,
visited her lavish Honolulu retreat. In 1973, she was appointed by Nixon
to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a position she
continued to hold in the Ford and Reagan administrations.
Sylvia Jukes Morris is the only writer to have had complete access to
Mrs. Luce’s prodigious collection of public and private papers. In
addition, she had unique access to her subject, whose death at
eighty-four ended a life that for variety of accomplishment qualifies
Clare Boothe Luce for the title of “Woman of the Century.”
Bella, mondana, scaltrissima e soprattutto anticomunista. Fra il '53 e il '56, in piena guerra fredda, fu il volto degli Stati Uniti in Italia. Il suo "interventismo" fu vincente
Francesco Perfetti - il Giornale Sab, 10/01/2015
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