Word: clare
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...CLARE BOOTHE LUCE by Wilfrid Sheed; Dutton; 183 pages...
...small wonder that when 18-year-old Wilfrid Sheed met her he was awestruck. Her intimidating husband, the novelist-critic recalls, "summed me up with brutal accuracy as someone he didn't have much to learn from, certainly not enough to crank up his famous stammer for." But Clare Boothe Luce was something else. At 46, she remained "drenchingly beautiful" and "slightly coquettish." Wilfrid was the son of Roman Catholic publishers, and Clare had become a famous convert to the Catholic Church. Religion was their touchstone, and at the Luce house in Ridgefield, Conn., she made him feel...
...Clare was like "a very understanding nun" to the "tongue-tied Oscar Wilde," as Sheed remembers himself. On one occasion the understanding nun reclined uneventfully on the Sheed bed. When the summer came to an end, she gave her young friend a new Oldsmobile...
What 18-year-old would ever recover? Not Sheed; not quite, though he makes a heroic effort to reach back through the charm to the exemplary life. Clare Boothe Luce's legend, he reports, "could be studied like a Grecian urn, with her forever reaching or being reached for, depending on one's angle of vision." As for her admirers, "They were happy to celebrate her conversion, or her achievements as a Woman, or her spunky duels with F.D.R. in perpetuity. If she had gone out of existence like St. Christopher, they'd have kept...
With good reason. A generation before the movement, Clare Boothe Luce displayed more ambition than Gloria Steinem put together. She led more serial lives and enjoyed more careers than an amalgam of Jane Fonda, Betty Friedan and Sandra Day O'Connor...