Word: sheed
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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...
...Sheed, bemused, recalls his father's suggested opening for this book: "She was the best of dames, she was the worst of dames." But, the son concludes, that summary is inaccurate: "She was good at just about everything." Yet this, too, is insufficient. He seeks further definition in 1977, when he journeys to Hawaii to replay house guest to Clare, now half-blinded by cataracts, living in "a fur-lined rut" but still capable of casting her spell...
...concludes that his witty, zealous subject is a pioneer, "the first" cutting her way through a man's world that most women were scared even to enter." As to what she is not-including the "bitch" her enemies accused her of being-Sheed is less sure. She is not "a heartless schemer," she is not a "cold climber." Certainly she is not just "Luce's woman." In the end, all he can do is shrug and quote his subject: " 'Do not defend me' is almost her heraldic motto, and I'll do my best...
Thus the Clare Boothe Luce who emerges in this lively, shrewd, indulgent book is, sui generis, a complicated and brilliant woman who has more or less equally enjoyed LSD and scuba diving and her honorary status as general in the U.S. Army. Sheed's book is complicated too. It is not, he ultimately concedes, a biography at all. Maybe, he suggests, "Notes on a Career" will...