Word: luce
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...play calls for a blonde seductress, and they cast it with a sultry brunette," complained Clare Boothe Luce. "Now they're trying to persuade me to rewrite it for her. I would have thought that no one would ask me to rewrite the characters of a play that is 37 years old." She paused before adding the obvious: "I, of course, have no intention of doing it." Once as famous for her sharp tongue as for her beauty, she is mellower now (she celebrated her 70th birthday this month), but not so mellow as to rewrite her best-known...
...Luce, the revival has already been an exercise in déjà vu. Though she, like many younger women in the women's movement, sees the play almost as a tract for Women's Lib, the out-of-town critics, like their predecessors a generation ago, were shocked that a woman could say such spiteful things about other women. "They just do not like to think that there could ever have existed this particular streak in women," she says with a laugh. "It is most chivalrous of them. But what annoys me just a little is that...
...Actually," she continues, stopping only to puff an ever-present Kent cigarette, "the play is a satire. Anyone who understands a satirist's mind knows that he is someone who is deeply disappointed and takes his revenge in poking fun at the objects of his disillusionment." Mrs. Luce's disillusionment was with her pre-Women life in the café society of the 1920s and 1930s where rich women with nothing better to do turned on themselves. "It was a life I did not like," she says firmly, underlining every word. "The expectation of my youth was that...
...well as from Millionaire George Brokaw, whom she describes as a "Fifth Avenue Beau Brummel," she became managing editor of Vanity Fair, one of the smartest magazines of its day, in 1933. A year later she quit to write on her own, and in 1935 married Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc. Two days before they were married, her first Broadway play opened. "It was called Abide with Me," she recalls, "and it abode with nobody. When the curtain went down, some members of the cast brought me forward from the wings...
...Luce were to leave on their honeymoon they received an advance copy of the TIME review, which was, for perhaps obvious reasons, less harsh than the newspapers. "Harry paced up and down the room and finally said: 'Darling, no Marion Davies you. You know this wasn't a good play and I know that it wasn't a good play. I'm going to write a review.' " He did, but deciding that it was still too kind, she rewrote it. Their collaboration, which damned her efforts as "tedious psychiatry," appeared the following week...