Price: Jan. 23, 2015

Price of Fame begins in January 1943 with Clare’s arrival on Capitol Hill as a newly elected Republican from Connecticut. The thirty-nine-year-old beauty attracted nationwide attention in a sensational maiden speech, attacking Vice President Henry Wallace’s civil aviation proposals as “globaloney.” Although she irked President Franklin D. Roosevelt by slanging his New Deal as “a dictatorial Bumbledom,” she impressed his wife Eleanor.
Revealing liberal propensities, she lobbied for relaxed immigration policies for Chinese, Indians, and displaced European Jews, as well as equal rights for women and blacks. Following Hiroshima, the legislator whom J. William Fulbright described as “the smartest colleague I ever served with” became a passionate advocate of nuclear arms control. But in 1946, she gave up her House seat, convinced that politics was “the refuge of second-class minds.”
After a few seasons of proselytizing on the Catholic lecture circuit, Clare emerged as a formidable television personality, campaigning so spectacularly for the victorious Republican presidential candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that he rewarded her with the Rome embassy.
Ambassador Luce took an uncompromising attitude toward Italy’s Communist Party, the world’s second largest, and skillfully helped settle the fraught Trieste crisis between Italy and Yugoslavia. She was then stricken by a mysterious case of poisoning that the CIA kept secret, suspecting a Communist plot to assassinate her. The full story, told here for the first time, reads like a detective novel.
Price of Fame goes on to record the crowded later years of the Honorable Clare Boothe Luce, during which she strengthened her friendships with Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham, John F. Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh, Lyndon Johnson, Salvador Dalí, Richard Nixon, William F. Buckley, the composer Carlos Chávez, Ronald Reagan, and countless other celebrities who, after Henry Luce’s death, visited her lavish Honolulu retreat. In 1973, she was appointed by Nixon to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a position she continued to hold in the Ford and Reagan administrations.
Sylvia Jukes Morris is the only writer to have had complete access to Mrs. Luce’s prodigious collection of public and private papers. In addition, she had unique access to her subject, whose death at eighty-four ended a life that for variety of accomplishment qualifies Clare Boothe Luce for the title of “Woman of the Century.”
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