Bosom Buddies

Clare Boothe Luce liked her women friends brainy but chic. Laura Z. Hobson fit the bill, and the two struck

up a fast friendship, scripted by Clare and acted out by a sometimes surprised, always fascinated Laura

by Laura Z. Hobson

One of those storybook coincidences that make for such great anecdotes years later when all pain is spent tied Henry and Lila Luce's divorce to Thayer Hobson's and mine.

It was a Thursday night that Thayer told me about Isabelle, the third of January 1935. He had intended to tell me the night before, waiting only through the New Year's festivities, settling on the second night of the New Year to say, "I have something to tell you."

But on the morning of that second day, a Wednesday, Harry had called me on the office phone (I was writing promotion for Time magazine), asking if we were free that evening, and how about dinner and the opera with Lila and himself. I checked with Thayer and told Harry's secretary we'd love to. Thus my marriage lasted one day longer, courtesy of Harry Luce.

The Luces were living in a rather grand apartment on East Seventysecond Street, just off Fifth Avenue. Though we were just four at dinner, it was all very formal, with a couple of footmen in livery behind the dining-room chairs. (I'm sure this was Lila's doing, not Harry's.) We dined and went off to the old Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway, below Forty-second Street.

The opera was Manon, not anybody's favorite. During the intermission, going to the bar for drinks, we paired off, Lila with Thayer, Harry with me. Harry was bored with the music; he seemed nervous; he fidgeted and talked about the difficulties of launching The March of Time in the nation's movie houses next month.

"Harry," I said after a bit, "what with all the extra work on The March of Time and everything else, you look sort of bushed. Maybe you could do with a little vacation."

◄ CLARE LETS LOOSE Top left, a scene from the 1939 film version of Clare Boothe Luce's The Women: (left to right) Joan Crawford, Aileen Pringle, unidentified model, Joan Fontaine, Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, and Phyllis Povah. Bottom left, her wit and patrician beauty made the former Clare Boothe Brokaw a star at Vanity Fair, where she was managing editor.

Lila, I later learned, was saying to Thayer, "You've been driving yourself too hard, Thayer, you sound tired out. Why don't you take off for a while, not on another publishing trip, just a vacation?"

The intermission ended and we all went back to our seats, two young couples in evening dress at the opera, living the fashionable life of New York. The next night I got the news from Thayer, and Lila got her news from Harry. He had fallen in love with somebody else and he was sorry to hurt her, but he wanted a divorce.

The someone else was Clare Boothe Brokaw, and he had met her a few months before, at a party at our house. We had known Clare for a couple of years; we'd met at a cocktail party at the Alfred Knopfs' and had become friends. In those days she was not political at all. She was a wealthy woman because of the settlement her lawyers had won for her when she divorced the millionaire George T. Brokaw, whom she once described to me as a sadistic drunk who would force sex on her the very night she came home from the hospital after each of her several miscarriages. But "leading an alimony life" was not for her; she had recently become managing editor of Vanity Fair, one of the city's smart magazines. Her first book, Stuffed Shirts, was a success, full of barbed wit. She was amusing and clever to talk to, and one of the really beautiful women. She spoke with animation, and had an odd little trick of clipping off certain words and phrases. It gave her speech a staccato brightness, and today, when I hear her on television, I often catch that same little clipping off.

Many a hostess thinks an extra woman at dinner is a handicap, a load, a drag, but no hostess ever thought that about Clare. She had been at our house several times, and then came the night the Luces were there too. When I invited her, I told Clare who the other guests were to be, and I still remember her entrance. People were standing around in the living room, drinks in hand, chatting, waiting for whoever was missing to get there.

At last she came through the arch that led from the hall to the living room, and paused, waiting for Thayer or me to come and introduce her. She stood there with her blond head slightly tilted to one side; she was wearing a black evening dress with lovely jewels, but instead of the usual corsage at her shoulder, she was carrying a small nosegay of white flowers in both her hands. As she waited, she seemed to be looking demurely down at them.

Maybe she hadn't intended to make an entrance, but make it she certainly did. The only other thing I remember clearly about that night when the future Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Luce first met is that after dinner they stood a little apart from everybody, talking by themselves, she leaning back into the curve of the piano, facing the room, and Harry, ignoring the room, turning his back on it, holding forth intensely and then listening intensely.

Clare was too clever to appear impressed with him; she would say something light and laugh, then change moods and seem totally absorbed by what he was saying. Some of our other guests told me she was baiting him about his beloved Fortune magazine, tossing out little mots about how bad it was and how easily it could be made better.

When Clare herself was a hostess, she never regarded an extra woman as a drag—if it was the right kind of extra woman. She invited so many men to her dinners and parties that she was delighted to meet women who would fit in.

"What I want," she told me once, "is a woman with brains who gets her clothes at Bergdorf Goodman."

It appears that I met her requirements; while Thayer was off on that second "publishing trip," she invited me to several dinners. She had an apartment high up in the SherryNetherland hotel on Fifth Avenue, across from the old Plaza, a large sixroom affair on an annual lease, whose rent, her brother David told me, was $6,000 a year, which today would be more than $30,000. It was furnished with her own things, and each room could have been photographed in full color for any of the upper-bracket magazines.

Her dining room is the room I remember best. It had raspberry-colored walls, white carpet, draperies and chairs also in white, and the long roomy table was a gleaming oblong of blue mirror. My datebook tells me that on one of the nights I was there the other dinner guests were Bernard Baruch; Sir William Wiseman; Sam Behrman, the playwright; Raymond Moley, one of Roosevelt's "brain trust"; a Somebody Wiggin, first secretary of the British embassy; Mark Sullivan, the author; Marya Mannes, who would become an author; and Dorothy Hale, who was to become deeply involved with Harry Hopkins, another member of the brain trust.

But it was not anybody's brains that impressed me enough that evening for me to be writing about it now. It was something Clare said when we were alone after dinner. I had gone to her bathroom, and as she opened the door to it for me, I took one look and blurted out, "Ye gods."

It was twice the size of an ordinary bathroom, and the bath mat covering the large rectangle of floor was not your ordinary bath mat either. It was not terrycloth or shag or carpeting; it was fur, white ermine, with the little blackish brown paws attached at intervals, as ermine was often done at that time.

But the bath mat was not the whole story. The same white ermine with the dangling dark paws had been made into a cover for the toilet seat.

Clare laughed at my astonishment.

"It used to be a coat," she said. "My mother-in-law, Mrs. Brokaw, gave it to me and I hated it. While I was married I had to wear it and wear it, but I always knew that once I was divorced, I'd find a perfect use for it."

Because of the odd juxtaposing of events in that one month of January 1935, and because I knew both Harry and Clare, I was to have a more concentrated friendship with Clare for a while than I would have for the rest of my days.

Like most of the world I still knew nothing about their plans to marry, but within three weeks Clare herself chose to let me in on the secret. Being Clare, she did it in her own special way.

At the end of the month she was leaving for a vacation at Hobcaw, Bernard Baruch's vast country estate in Georgetown, South Carolina. She gave herself a going-away party, and I was one of the people she invited.

My datebook for the entire month is blank except for three brief entries: the first about the Luces and the opera, the next night's "Thayer tells me about Isabelle," and a final one nine days later, "Thayer departed."

Clare knew about that, and when I declined her invitation, saying, "I just can't," she said, "You just can," and gave me a lecture about showing the world not only that you could take it, but that you were alive and free and available for something new and attractive.

I went, and it was one of her usual gatherings of the affluent and clever. Toward the end of dinner, she tapped her fork against a glass until she had everybody's attention. Then she said, "I have a big secret, but I'm only going to tell you a part of it."

"What secret?" The whole table said it in various forms, and after suitable suspense she said, "I'm going to be married."

"To whom?"

"When?"

"Why is it a secret?"

She obviously enjoyed the commotion. "I told you it has to stay a secret for a while, but I'll give you a clue." She looked mischievous and happy. "He's connected with the movies."

"Douglas Fairbanks?" somebody asked.

"Robert Taylor?"

"Clark Gable?"

Names of handsome movie stars tumbled about the table, with Clare shaking her head at each one. "He's not an actor—I never said he was an actor." Whereupon the name of every movie producer was mentioned, with the probable exception of Sam Goldwyn.

At last she put a stop to it; she was keeping us guessing just for fun, she said, but the marriage was no fabrication, and we'd all hear about it in due time.

But when we were alone, fixing our makeup in that ermined bathroom, she said, "You ought to know who it is—you know him."

"I know him? I don't know a soul in the movies."

"You know him quite well." I looked blank, and she added, "I'll give you one more clue—he's powerful and he's young and he's rich."

I still didn't catch on. Then she exclaimed, "Laura! It's Harry!"

"Harry Luce? But you said—"

"The March of Time is connected with the movies, isn't it?"

My gasp of comprehension made her laugh.

"I just had to tell somebody who knows Harry," she said, "or I'd go mad not being able to talk about him for the next few months."

She swore me to secrecy, and I gave her my pledge. Only later did I reflect on the order of those three adjectives she had used to describe her new love. Powerful and young and rich. And the greatest of these is. . .

It was only a few days before she showed that she really did need to talk about Harry with somebody who knew him. She called me from South Carolina and asked me to come down to Hobcaw for a week.

I couldn't possibly ask for a vacation seven weeks after I'd started at Time, I said, but she had already taken care of mundane details like that. She had told Harry she had confided in me, that she needed to see me; he had agreed; all I had to do was go through the motions of saying I would be grateful for a little time off.

That was the first time I ever felt that an invitation from Clare had something of command performance about it, and, heaven knows, the vision of a week away from that empty apartment was temptation enough.

I did see Harry, each of us deadpan, with no mention of Clare or where I was going. I had to put it off until the weekend to attend the gala black-tie party, celebrating first night of The March of Time, but the very next day I took the train for South Carolina—and ran into one more Clare-typical episode, the most bizarre in this period of our concentrated seeing of each other. At the time it shocked me out of my wits, though I see it differently now.

I was met at the railroad station by Mr. Baruch's car and chauffeur, driven to the dock where Mr. Baruch's yacht awaited me, and when we arrived at Hobcaw, though it was still very early in the morning, there stood Bernard Baruch himself to welcome me. Clare was nowhere in sight.

There had been a large house party in progress for several days, with various senators, generals, writers, all well known, but the guests were leaving that morning or afternoon— including Mr. Baruch. Clare and I were to be alone.

Thayer and I had, on occasion, been weekend guests at various large estates where fine tennis courts, swimming pools, croquet courts, and a stable full of splendid horses all awaited your pleasure, but this stay of mine at Hobcaw enlightened me further about some of the habits and foibles of the very rich.

In my bathroom every single morning, I found untouched bars of imported French soap still in their handsome wrappers and sealed—the new bars I had used the day before had vanished. I soon wondered what they did with all that expensive dayold soap. A new fire was laid in the fireplace every morning; my riding clothes and boots were brought back, the boots polished, the riding habit newly pressed; the underwear and evening dress I had worn the day before were collected while I was having my breakfast from a tray in bed. More impressive to me than any of this was the fact that in the bathroom exactly five sheets of toilet paper had been removed from the roll and then placed back ready to be plucked—presumably to save me the effort of yanking off the sheets myself.

I never saw Clare until we met for lunch. She was writing a play; I think the title was to be Napoleon Slept Here. (This was before her first smash hit, The Women.) We would part again after lunch, and she would go back to her play. I was also trying to write one, about newspaper reporters; mine was to be called ThirtyThirty, because 30, or XXX, was the journalist's sign of the end of a story.

Then we would meet at five, dressed for a ride, our horses brought to us by grooms. She, I was sure, had had a productive afternoon—she looked happy and satisfied. I had spent most of the time weeping over my lost marriage, doing half a scene, trying to partake of my one anodyne, writing.

Each evening we dressed for dinner, the two of us, and then Clare would read me what she had written that day. I don't remember much of its plot, but I know that lines were witty, acidulous, and that many of them made me laugh. Then we would part and go to our firelit rooms—she to the happiness of new love and waiting for marriage and I to my nightly struggle for sleep.

One evening, just after dinner, we were in the living room, and Clare was talking about Harry and their plans. I was standing near the mantel, I remember, one arm propped up on the corner of it. Clare was telling me about some letters she had just received from Harry—she never read any of his letters aloud, but she would paraphrase and tell me bits that amused her and things she had written to him.

Quite suddenly, she said, "Do something for me, will you?"

"What? If I can."

She was looking at me speculatively.

"Take your dress off, Laura."

"My dress off?"

"Off." She made a sweeping gesture, indicating something tossed away. She was smiling. Nothing about her voice or expression had the slightest hint of sexual interest— the notion never even entered my head. She was up to something mysterious, and I couldn't imagine what, but it was instantly clear that sex or attraction had nothing whatever to do with it.

"Come on," she urged. "I'll say why in a minute."

I shrugged and dropped my dress to the floor. I wore no bra and stood there in my brief underpants, my dress making a silken circle around my ankles. I was still near the fireplace.

Clare was gazing at me, at my breasts. She cocked her head to one side and stared for a moment. Then she said, equally calmly, "Would you lie down on the sofa? On your back?"

By now I was thoroughly intrigued myself. What was this crazy woman up to? What was behind all this? She was scheming something; I could almost feel her mind planning ahead.

I lay down on the sofa. For a moment she didn't move.

She knelt about three feet away from me, her eyes now on a level with my own. It became clear she was interested not in my entire body but only in my breasts.

"Put your arms over your head, would you, just for one more minute?"

That I did too. I had never been particularly proud of my breasts, though in that day, long before the fashion for large, opulent bosoms, I had never needed to worry about them either. But as she continued to kneel there on the carpet motionless, gazing as if at a portrait in a museum, Clare managed a look of pure approval.

"Thanks a million," she said then, and turned away. I arose, slid into my forsaken evening dress in one swift movement. "Okay, let's have it—what the hell is all this about?"

She laughed, a laugh of self-congratulation and, I think, gratitude for a favor well done by me. Then she laid her hands over her own breasts and made a slight grimace.

"After five pregnancies," she began slowly, "and four miscarriages. . . "

She didn't finish the sentence; she was shaking her head in a kind of dismay. I remembered what she had told me about her marriage to George Brokaw; I knew that only one of her pregnancies had ended in the birth of a child, her daughter, Annie. I understood what she meant by that look of dismay.

"You've never gone through a lot of miscarriages and pregnancies," she said then, "so I wanted to see what virgin breasts looked like. I'm going to get myself fixed—I want to be perfect for Harry."

I never knew whether she ever actually did it or not, but at the time this little directorial performance of Clare's left me speechless, especially the cool collectedness with which she brought it all off, sans apology, sans self-justification, except for that telltale gesture and little speech at the end. I kept the whole episode a secret for years and years, from everybody except my analyst.

But nowadays—and indeed for the past two decades or more—with half the movie and TV stars and countless other well-heeled women having their faces lifted, their buttocks tightened, bosoms raised, fat hips surgically shaved off, it merely shows me that fifty years ago, in 1935, I was useful to Clare the Pioneer.

Remembering that night now, finding myself smiling over it, I kind of admire the nerve and resolution she had then, and discover myself half wishing that she had never gone into politics, because it really used to be such fun knowing her before she did.