By Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor
When I inherited my great aunt’s desk (purchased by her father from Freeman’s Auction House in 1934), I knew the contents of the desk fairly well. I knew that among the scrapbooks and photographs there was a long typewritten letter signed by Clare Boothe Luce, playwright, member of Congress, editor at Vogue and Ambassador to Italy (appointed by President Eisenhower) in 1953.
Boothe Luce, a Republican feminist, was a hero of my great aunt’s. I dismissed my great aunt’s adulations then because Boothe Luce was a Republican, but the letter forced me to take another look at her life, a world filled with psychedelics, elevator rides, stuttering and the glamour of fame.
Boothe Luce dropped out of school at age 16, married a Manhattan millionaire at 20 with whom she had one daughter. Her husband’s ribald alcoholism caused her to seek a divorce in 1949, two years into the marriage. The death of her daughter in an automobile accident caused her look into psychoanalysis and religion in 1945.
Psychoanalysis did not work for her but a chance meeting with Bishop Fulton Sheen (my great aunt was fond of saying that they met in an elevator) initiated a series of meetings which resulted in Luce’s conversion to Catholicism. That conversion did not come easy. Thomas Reeves in his biography of Bishop Sheen, "The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen,”(2002), writes that Luce was a "tough convert,” who "lashed out at Sheen” frequently. She did not swim softly across the calm Tiber.
According to Boothe Luce’s biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris (Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce), after her conversion she found it difficult to write "nasty plays about women.”
Boothe Luce, who wrote her famous play, The Womenin three days, gave up playwriting after her conversion. A Miami Heraldreviewer, commenting on the second volume of Luce’s biography, wrote: "Conversion ruined her creativity. Henceforth she became preachy; her prose, which had been praised for its acerbic honesty, grew hesitant and predictable. The threat of damnation did not stop her from attempting suicide on multiple occasions over her husband’s infidelity.”
The narcissistic and overbearing Boothe Luce never lost her remarkable sense of humor. When it came to men she expected them to give up everything for her.
Boothe Lucenever wanted to stop living the life of a young woman. At age 80 she told Morris that she was "having an attack of the dismals.” Morris asked her what she meant. Boothe Luce responded, "It’s Saturday night and I don’t have any bows. A homosexual Admiral would be good. He’d come in a uniform but at the end of the evening I wouldn’t have to put out.”
When Clare Boothe met Henry Luce he was the world- famous publisher of TIMEmagazine. He was also married with two children. Clare wanted to have an affair but she told him to settle his affairs first and then meet her in Europe. Morris maintains that Henry Luce always "had trouble sexually.” His sexual problems with Clare had everything to do with putting her on a pedestal. "After two years of marriage he still couldn’t make love to Clare at all…as someone once said, it’s hard to make love on a pedestal.”
When President Eisenhower appointed Boothe Luce Ambassador to Italy the Italian people felt insulted because Boothe Luce was not a man. Boothe Luce was also treated in less than ambassadorial terms by her fellow diplomats in the United States. Yet after only one week in Italy, Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce managed to win the hearts and mind of the Italian people.
In 1965-66 in Miami, Clare met another cultural celebrity in an elevator. This time it was Abbie Hoffman who had the chutzpah to ask Luce if she had ever taken LSD. Luce said she had, to which Hoffmann replied, "I took it once,” to which Boothe Luce, a frequent LSD user, exclaimed, "Only once?” Morris writes that Luce’s departing words to Hoffman were, "See you in Nirvana.”
The letter from Clare Boothe Luce to my great aunt is dated 1956 and was written in response to a letter about a long forgotten minor political issue. While hardly a collector of autographs, I did check the signed letter’s possible worth and found it to be somewhere near $165.00. (This comes nowhere near the value of the signed personal letter to me from Elizabeth Taylor, valued at $1200, another story for another time.)
The letter to my great aunt caused me to look deeper into Boothe Luce’s life, as well as her famous husband.
I discovered that Henry Luce (1898-1967) had a serious stutter as a child. Luce’s stutter was apparently caused by a tonsillectomy at age 7 when the anesthesia wore off before the operation was over. This left him with a stutter. The stutter caused him to be made fun of and mocked as a student. When he transferred to an English boarding school a "speech correctionist” taught him to take a short breath before each sentence. This alleviated much of the problem but his stutter never entirely disappeared.
The stuttering connection interested me because I stuttered as a child. I’d go full red in the face, say "um” a million times barely able to get a few words out before gasping for breath. In high school I’d plead with certain teachers to allow me to do written classroom reports rather than oral ones. I was still stuttering as a freshman in college. The stutter left years later when I took a Learning Annex course on public speaking in Center City. The teacher, a former NYC ballet dancer, discovered how to fix it: She taught me how to breathe, a la Henry Luce.
With Henry Luce, the more he slept, the more his stuttering seemed to abate. At one point Luce was talked into taking LSD by Clare, whom Morris says always wanted to try the latest thing. In 1959 LSD was the latest thing; it was also unregulated and there was no Dr. Timothy Leary on the scene. LSD was not only prescribed by psychiatrists for depressives and criminals but for the intelligentsia, who flocked to it as a way to enhance the mind. Clare took her LSD under the direction of English philosopher Gerald Head. "She always had good trips,” Morris said in one interview.
No jumping out of windows thinking she could fly for Clare!
When she talked Henry into taking LSD she may have heard from Head or others that the drug has something to do with the relationship between psychedelics and speech fluency.
Did Henry Luce take LSD to help alleviate his stuttering?
The marriage of psychedelics and speech fluency has been written about over the past few decades. In a 1970 piece on the effects of psychedelics on Language, Stanley Krippner observes that, "A permanent state of altered consciousness is neither practical nor desirable. However, the individual may return to the world of imprinting, conditioning, acculturation, and verbalization with new insights if his psychedelic session has been properly guided.”
Many other references to LSD and speech problems pop up in the world of so called independent drug journalism. In a blog entitled Speakingfreely (the author identified only as T.H.) we learn that,
"….While under the influence of the mushrooms, an amazing change had occurred: I was neither stuttering, nor cycling through potentialities in my mind for word or phrasing substitutions….This was a profound experience at the time, because my stuttering had recently become more severe and was increasingly disrupting my life. Then, as if by magic, the mushrooms I ate that night induced a phenomenon of full-fluency that I had never imagined possible.”
Henry Luce became a staunch advocate of LSD and even promoted its use in articles in many of his magazines.
It should be noted that the taking of LSD was once regarded as a sacramental-like experience, an exercise in expanding one’s consciousnesses. It had not yet become a frivolous party drug "just to see the colors” or the face of an owl in the dining room wallpaper.
