Sylvia Jukes Morris

Rage For Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce is, as its title implies, a soaring story. No American woman of this century aimed so accurately, or rocketed so far, as Clare Boothe Luce—legendary playwright, editor, politician, wit, and social seductress. "Her method was simple, aim for the top," ... (more)wrote an envious colleague. Born illegitimate on New York's Upper West Side, with nothing to recommend her but blonde good looks and a ferocious intelligence, young Clare used sex, street smarts, acid humor, and money to plot a career more improbable than anything in her own fiction and drama. This biography—based on substantial interviews with Clare Boothe Luce and total access to her papers—tells how she transformed herself from an impoverished and itinerant child into a woman who, at thirty-nine, could seriously speak of becoming "the first lady Vice-President." Her teenage experiences as a stage and film actress fueled a lifelong hunger for bigger roles and larger stages to play upon. In her twenties she was already famous for the brilliance of her short stories and dazzling cocktail-part repartee. She was a successful playwright who wrote three Broadway hits in a row between 1936 and 1939. The dry-martini dialogue of her masterpiece The Women ("I'm a virgin...a frozen asset.") is still making audiences gasp around the world. (Indeed, just last year some of Hollywood's top female actresses, including Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, and Marisa Tomei, participated in a reading of a newly updated version of the script.) Even before Clare wrote her first play she was managing editor of Vanity Fair. She was at various times the lover of an extraordinary variety of men and wife to two millionaires—notably Henry Luce, influential publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune. Before she was forty she had also written a best-selling book on the Phony War, worked as a roving correspondent for Life in WWII, and won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. In RAGE FOR FAME Sylvia Jukes Morris, author of Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady, has produced a sterling biography, as remarkable for its meticulous documentation (the fruit of fifteen years of research) as for the intimacy of its point of view. A few months before Clare Boothe Luce died in 1987 she told Ms. Morris, "I feel closest to you, because you know everything." —from the publisher's website