Playwright and U. S. congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce was hailed as one of the most able and outspoken women in public life.
She became ambassador to Italy in 1953, the first American woman to represent her country to another major world power.
Background
Ann Clare Boothe was born on April 10, 1903, in New York City, United States to Anna Snyder and William F. Boothe.
Although her father, a violinist, deserted the family when Clare was nine, he instilled in his daughter a love of music and literature.
Education
In 1912 Clare became understudy to Mary Pickford in David Belasco's The Good Little Devil.
She subsequently obtained similar understudy parts.
In 1915 Clare entered St. Mary's, an Episcopal school on Long Island, where she met the daughter of journalist Irvin Cobb.
A frequent visitor to the Cobb home, Clare was awed by such celebrities as Flo Ziegfeld, Kathleen Norris, and Richard Harding Davis.
A bright student, in 1917 Boothe enrolled in the Castle School at Tarrytown, New York, from which she graduated at the head of her class.
Career
In 1919 Luce went to New York City to find work.
Soon the three journeyed to Europe, where she met Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, the women's suffrage leader.
In New York Alva Belmont offered Clare a secretarial position.
Determined to apply her writing talents, Clare appealed to Conde Nast, owner of Vogue.
After a brief trial she was hired, but soon went to Vanity Fair.
About the time of her marriage to Henry Luce, Clare produced a play, Abide with Me, which met mixed reviews. When Henry started Life magazine, Clare wrote another play, The Women, a biting satire on modern life. It opened in New York on December 26, 1936, to wide critical acclaim.
Clare dabbled in left-wing politics during the 1930s but was ultimately as repelled by Communism as she was by Fascism. In the face of war, in 1939 Clare left for Europe as a Life correspondent.
She interviewed Winston Churchill and visited the doomed Maginot Line in France.
The resulting article was a Life cover story on December 8, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked in the Far East.
Throughout World War II she produced many Life stories, often at peril to her safety. Clare Boothe Luce ran for office in 1942, winning the same Republican congressional seat from Fairfield County, Connecticut, held by her step-father in 1938.
Sadly, her daughter Ann Brokaw was killed in an auto accident in January 1944.
This misfortune led her to take religious instruction from Rev. Fulton J. Sheen.
Later that year Luce won reelection to her congressional seat, but a growing spiritual unease prompted by her daughter's death caused her to resign from politics in 1946.
Luce plunged into writing: screenplays, articles, a movie script, and a monthly column for McCall's.
Drawn again to the political arena, she was a delegate to the Republican National Presidential Convention in 1952.
In 1953 President Eisenhower named her U. S. ambassador to Italy.
Religion
She announced her conversion to the Roman Catholic faith after the death of her daughter.
Politics
She was strictly opposed to Communism and Fascism.
Membership
She was a member of the United States House of Representatives.
Connections
She married George T. Brokaw in 1923. Their daughter Ann was born in August 1924, and the family lived at the epicenter of society until Brokaw began to lose his long battle with alcoholism. She divorced him in 1929 and in 1935 married Henry R. Luce, noted publisher and editor-in-chief of Time and Life magazines.