Clare Boothe Luce: Playwright, Congresswoman, Ambassador
Clare Boothe Luce built three separate careers that would each have made an ordinary life: she wrote a Broadway hit performed entirely by women, sat in the U.S. House of Representatives while a world war raged, and became the first American woman ever appointed ambassador to a major foreign power. She did all of it in a country that rarely permitted a woman to finish even one such career.
A Nomadic Childhood, an Early Talent
Born Ann Clare Boothe on March 10, 1903, in New York City, Luce spent a peripatetic childhood moving among Memphis, Nashville, Chicago, and New Jersey, the daughter of a mother determined to see her daughters marry well and a musician father who left the family early. She was academically formidable from the start, graduating first in her class from a cathedral school in 1919 at just sixteen. Her first marriage, to the wealthy Wall Street financier George Tuttle Brokaw in 1923, gave her financial independence and a daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw, but ended in divorce in 1929 amid Brokaw's alcoholism.
Vanity Fair, Vogue, and a Reputation for Wit
Divorced and independently wealthy, Luce moved into magazine work, serving as an editor and caption writer at Vogue and then Vanity Fair, where her sharp, epigrammatic style built her a reputation as one of the era's wittiest writers, a persona she later carried into fiction with the 1931 short story collection *Stuffed Shirts*, a satire of New York high society drawn from her own social circle.
Broadway's The Women
Luce's greatest theatrical success came with *The Women* (1936), a scathing satirical comedy performed entirely by a cast of more than forty actresses, with no men appearing onstage at all, that dissected the manners and cruelties of wealthy New York wives. It became a Broadway sensation and was adapted into a successful 1939 Hollywood film. She followed it with other plays engaging directly with the political crises of the era, including *Margin for Error* (1939), a critique of Nazi ideology staged as it was unfolding in Europe, and *Kiss the Boys Goodbye*.
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As World War II approached and then engulfed Europe, Luce reinvented herself again, working as a correspondent for Life magazine (published by her husband Henry Luce) and touring battlefields in Europe and war zones in Asia. She interviewed major wartime figures including General Douglas MacArthur and India's Jawaharlal Nehru, and wrote with unusual bluntness about combat, describing it as "a world where men have decided to die together because they are unable to find a way to live together."
Congress and the Coining of "Globaloney"
In 1942, Luce was elected to represent Connecticut's Fourth District in the U.S. House of Representatives, serving two terms from 1943 to 1947 and earning a seat on the powerful House Military Affairs Committee. Her maiden speech attacked Vice President Henry Wallace's expansive postwar aviation policy as unrealistic, coining the term "globaloney," a word that entered the American political vocabulary. She co-authored the 1946 Luce-Celler Act, which allowed Indian and Filipino immigrants to become naturalized U.S. citizens for the first time, a meaningful crack in the racially restrictive immigration law of the period.
Ambassador to Italy and the Trieste Crisis
President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Luce U.S. Ambassador to Italy in 1953, making her the first American woman ever to hold ambassadorial rank to a major nation; Italians affectionately called her "la Signora." Her principal diplomatic achievement was helping negotiate a peaceful resolution to the 1953–1954 Trieste Crisis, a territorial dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia that had threatened to destabilize NATO's southern flank. She was later confirmed by the Senate as ambassador to Brazil in 1959 but resigned before taking the post amid political controversy.
Grief, Faith, and Conservative Advocacy
The 1944 death of her only child, Ann, in a car accident during her college years devastated Luce and led her to seek counsel from Bishop Fulton Sheen; she converted to Catholicism in 1946 and became an active Catholic essayist, later funding construction of Saint Ann Chapel at Stanford in her daughter's memory. She remained a committed conservative and anti-communist for the rest of her life, campaigning for every Republican presidential nominee from Wendell Willkie through Ronald Reagan and helping establish the Atomic Energy Commission.
Marriage to Henry Luce
Luce married Time and Life publisher Henry Luce on November 23, 1935, joining two of the era's most formidable and ambitious public figures in a marriage biographers have generally described as intellectually vibrant if unconventional; it lasted until Henry's death in 1967.
Why Clare Is Called a Genius
The case for Luce's genius is her sheer range across incompatible worlds: Broadway satirist, war correspondent filing dispatches from the front, sitting congresswoman shaping immigration law, and history-making diplomat resolving a genuine international crisis, each career pursued to a level of accomplishment that would define most people's entire working life. Contemporaries and later historians credited her with an unusually quick, aphoristic wit and a fearlessness about entering rooms, boardrooms, newsrooms, the House floor, foreign ministries, where women simply were not present, and succeeding on the merits once there. The honest counter-case is that Luce's success was substantially enabled by wealth and marriage, first to Brokaw's fortune and then to Henry Luce's publishing empire, which bankrolled her writing career and amplified her political visibility in ways less privileged women of comparable talent could not access; critics have also noted that her conservative anti-communism sometimes shaded into the era's excesses, and that "The Women," her most celebrated work, has been read by some feminist critics as reinforcing the very catty stereotypes about women it satirized rather than subverting them.
Legacy
Luce died of brain cancer on October 9, 1987, in Washington, D.C., having received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan in 1983 as the first woman to serve in Congress so honored. Her nearly fifty-million-dollar bequest established the Clare Boothe Luce Program, which has since funded degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering for close to two thousand women, ensuring that her name now signifies opportunities for women in fields she never formally entered herself.
Achievements
- Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1983
- Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
- Laetare Medal — 1957
