Price of Fame
The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die,” Clare Boothe Luce told her biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris. Price of Fame, the concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath, chronicles Luce’s progress from her arrival on Capitol Hill through her career as a diplomat, prolific journalist, and magnetic public speaker, as well as a playwright, screenwriter, pioneer scuba diver, early experimenter in psychedelic drugs, and grande dame of the GOP in the Reagan era. Tempestuously married to Henry Luce, the powerful publisher of Time Inc., she endured his infidelities while pursuing her own, and remained a practiced vamp well into her crowded later years, 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, Ronald Reagan, and countless other celebrities. 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.”
Praise for Price of Fame
“The twentieth-century history of this country, seen through the eyes and actions of a remarkable woman . . . one of the most fabulous, intimate biographies I have ever read.”—Liz Smith, Chicago Tribune
“The epic Price of Fame is a thrilling account of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing and ambitious society figures.”—Amanda Foreman, bestselling author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
“Delicious . . . In Price of Fame . . . Sylvia Jukes Morris takes up the story she began in Rage for Fame. . . . Both books are models of the biographer’s art—meticulously researched, sophisticated, fair-minded and compulsively readable.”—Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal
“Clare Boothe Luce [was] one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious, unstoppable and undeniably ingenious characters. . . . This full, warts-and-all biography hauls her back into the limelight and does her full justice.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“Poignant and profound . . . nothing short of a triumph.”—Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, The Washington Times
“Compelling . . . [a] brilliant biography.”—Peter Tonguette, The Christian Science Monitor
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lively second volume by Morris (Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce), Luce (1903-1987), the playwright and wife of Time magazine founder Henry R. Luce, becomes a politician, right-wing firebrand, and feminist pioneer. Morris follows Luce from her election to Congress in 1942, to her service as Eisenhower's ambassador to Italy, to her enduring role as one of America's most vehement and sought-after conservative commentators. Morris's shrewd portrait shows a woman of extraordinary contrasts: a celebrated beauty and wit who inspired giddy love letters from generals; a sharp thinker and writer; a strident anti-Communist (who occasionally spouted anti-Semitic rants) who championed civil rights and Zionism; a manipulative charmer and fragile soul who sought refuge in Catholicism, LSD, and sleeping-pills. (The author paints Luce's relationship with Henry as one of history's great marital melodramas, full of mutual admiration, infidelity, and misery.) Morris, who once lived with Luce and had access to her diaries, evokes her subject's charisma without unduly succumbing to it; she presents a clear-eyed assessment of Luce's strong, egotistical personality that does full justice to this fascinating icon. Photos throughout.
