One of Most Powerful Women of 20th Century : Clare Boothe Luce Dies of Cancer at 84
Clare Boothe Luce, writer, politician and diplomat who became one of the most powerful American women in the 20th Century, died of cancer Friday at her home. She was 84.
Luce, a power of the Time Inc. publishing empire, was a congresswoman and the nation’s first woman ambassador to a major country. By the time the feminist Republican entered politics in 1942, she already was a noted journalist, author and playwright, with a Broadway smash hit, “The Women.”
Luce cemented her role as one of the most influential women of her generation with her marriage to Henry R. Luce, Time Inc.’s co-founder and editor in chief, who died in 1967.
Luce, attractive and adventurous, reflected her blithe self-confidence in answering whether being a woman was a disadvantage for an ambassador. “I couldn’t possibly tell you. I have never been a man.”
Luce, a convert to Roman Catholicism, showed flashes of the energy that drove her even during her last, long fight against cancer, associates said.
“She had been ill for a long time,” said Robert Armstrong, executive director of the Henry R. Luce Foundation in New York. “She died at home, at the Watergate. She died of cancer.”
A Watergate condominium employee, who requested anonymity, said the maids noted that Luce’s “spirits had been up and down for the past six months. At one point they would say she was fine and giving orders and then she’d be down. It was apparently just up and down like that.”
Armstrong said memorial services were scheduled for Tuesday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and on Wednesday at St. Stephen’s Martyr Church in Washington. Burial will be private.
In 1983 President Reagan presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and called Luce “a persistent and effective advocate of freedom.”
Born April 10, 1903, in New York, Clare Boothe was the second child of violinist William Boothe. He died a few years later and the family moved to Old Greenwich, Conn., where his widow, Ann Boothe, married Dr. Albert Austin, a physician who quit medicine to serve in Congress. He represented the same Connecticut district that Luce was to represent later.
Clare Boothe was only 18 when she went to work for Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont’s National Woman’s Party, which was dedicated to equal rights for women.
After a short marriage she went to work for Vogue magazine and in 1933 was named managing editor of Vanity Fair.
She quit Vanity Fair a year later to go to Europe as travel correspondent for a news syndicate. Her new employers were isolationists, and they fired her when she began to report that Americans could not afford to be indifferent to impending signs of a new European war.
When she first met Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, they disliked each other on sight. But on the evening of their third meeting, he suddenly said: “I’ve just discovered that you are the one woman in my life.” They were married in 1935. Nine years later, she won a seat in Congress from Connecticut and was reelected in 1944.
The most famous of her plays, “The Women,” opened on Broadway in December, 1936. It was a spectacular success and was staged later in a number of foreign countries. Two years later came “Kiss the Boys Goodbye” and in 1939, “Margin for Error.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower named her ambassador to Italy in 1953, making her the first woman named to such a post. In 1959 she was nominated as ambassador to Brazil, but she resigned less than a week after the Senate confirmed her because of the controversy that grew from her verbal jousting with Sen. Wayne Morse during the confirmation hearing.
Luce’s survivors include two stepsons, Peter Paul Luce and Henry Luce III, and 10 stepgrandchildren.
