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Review by Marsha Vande Berg
Quite often the value of a biography is the peek it provides into the life of a person who is rich, famous or influential as it is a window thrown open on the times when a person lived.
"Rage for Fame" is a richly detailed assortment of anecdotes, chronologically presented, about one of America's singular women and the individuals whose lives she intersected -- from presidents to generals, to ambassadors to real estate and journalism moguls. These were the men who helped lift America into its role as a twentieth-century world power.
Clare Boothe Luce was a woman who turned her relationships with men, her striking good looks, a quick intelligence and unflinching ambition, to her own advantage. Author Gore Vidal and friend of the U.S. ambassador to Italy under President Eisenhower, writes, "No woman was disliked more during her time than perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt."
Morris' sentiments about Luce's unstable past, her chronic narcissism and self-absorption, as well as her ability as a playwright, are unmistakable. "Her own life had amply furnished her with the stuff of pure comedy and tragedy, but she could draw from it only farce and melodrama," she writes.
"Having already passed her peak, she was perilously close to settling for stardom's poor relation, celebrity," says the biographer of a woman whose meteoric career took her from poverty to marriage to a wealthy New York socialite, to divorce, to the managing editorship of "Vanity Fair," to marriage to Henry Luce, founder of the Time/Life empire, to author of the Broadway flop "Abide With Me," to author of the acclaimed Broadway hit, "The Women."
It was "The Women," directed by George Cukor for the silver screen, which bootstrapped Luce's fame out of New York City. It was her access through her marriage to Luce, and national publication of her writing as a World War II correspondent, which gave her a platform to national politics.
Her story on the eve of World War II as Europe is cracking up, is fascinating reading. In 1940, Luce was "war correspondent" by day and beguiling dinner guest by night, lodging in Paris' finest hotels as the Germans skirted the Maginot Line to cross into France.
The book, which draws on conversations with Luce and countless others, as well as her diaries, ends with her election to Congress in 1942. The ending sets the stage for a promised volume two, which is expected to take readers through her time in Italy, Henry Luce's death in 1967, and her own death in 1987.
But back to volume I, which leaves readers wondering if Luce were living today, whether feminine society might be inclined to view her with more tolerant, even more admiring eyes.
One might not like her, but a reader today cannot help but respect her accomplishments in the face of obstacles of class and education. Nevertheless, Luce breezed by, seemingly unscathed. She had her focus trained lightly on her own "headlong advance" in a world where one conquest was never sufficient satisfaction for a "perpetual hunger for power in yet more spheres."
Why not? It was, after all, the tenor of the times when however big an American dared to dream, so the outcome could be. But back then, dreamers were mostly men. Clare Boothe Luce understood this, and realized her dreams in spite of it.
Marsha Vande Berg is a journalist in San Francisco.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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