Word: luce
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When Clare Boothe Luce died last week in Washington at the age of 84, the country lost the pre-eminent Renaissance woman of the century, a pioneer who had shown once and for all that "self-made woman" need not be a contradiction in terms. If greatness, as she once said to Churchill, means "to see, to say, to serve," some measure of it surely belonged to so shrewd an observer, so pungent a speaker and so versatile a public servant...
...trajectory of Luce's career was especially dramatic given the modesty of her origins. Her mother was a former chorus girl, her father a violinist who . deserted his family when his daughter was nine. Before long, however, Clare Boothe was decorating her resume. In 1913 she was Mary Pickford's understudy in a play titled A Good Little Devil; by eleven she had written a play of her own; and at 16 she had run away from home to work in a factory making paper favors. When her mother remarried, she began to enjoy her first taste of society...
Having mastered that world, she turned her attentions to another. In 1934 she was introduced to Henry Luce, a missionary's son who was the co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc. She introduced him to an idea she had dreamed up, a glossy picture magazine to be known as LIFE. Just two days before their wedding, in November 1935, her first play, Abide with Me, opened on Broadway. In a review rewritten by the editor in chief and the playwright herself, the play was panned in TIME for its "tedious psychiatry." It closed after only 36 performances...
...showcase for its author's diamond-sharp barbs and her wicked wit ("a frozen asset" is how a virgin describes herself in the play), it opened in December 1936, ran for more than 600 performances and was soon turned into a popular movie. Having proved herself on that front, Luce took off again, this time to tour the world and cover the war for LIFE...
Sometime during those turbulent years, it occurred to Luce that her gift for strong opinions and withering bons mots might actually be best suited to another stage, and in 1942 she was elected Connecticut's first Congresswoman. Inevitably, those last two syllables dogged her in the largely all-male preserve of Washington, and her attempts to be taken seriously were not assisted by a typical poll that crowned her "the second best pair of legs in the country...