The Publisher (80 page)

Despite all the anger, all the regrets, and all the recriminations, both Harry and Clare once again found it difficult to imagine ending their marriage. When Clare said she would not fight the divorce, Harry backed away from his initial demand and said he would do nothing unless Clare “made the divorce decision mutual.” Eight months later, after “endless” discussions of their plight, Clare announced what she called a “‘unilateral decision’ that I would not consent to a divorce ‘now or ever.’” Harry—having now visited Jeanne in Paris to discuss the future of their relationship—returned to New York to tell Clare that, despite her ultimatum, he would continue the affair with Jeanne and that he “would still marry her if I were in a position to do so.” In the meantime he proposed a “legal separation” to allow him to live with Jeanne, while Clare remained officially (and financially) his wife. But a few days later, when she acquiesced and offered to allow the divorce, Harry once again changed his mind and insisted that he wanted the marriage to continue. His reasons, he said, were the immorality of divorce, “our long involvement: 25 years of marriage,” and “prudential” reasons: “my family is against it, business associates, the church, my age,” and the “damage to my public image and public responsibilities.”
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The struggle over their marriage was never private. As with almost every aspect of their lives during their long marriage, both Harry and Clare relied on others to smooth their way and facilitate their needs, even in the midst of emotional chaos. At the center of this group of retainers was Harry’s sister Beth—as always his confidante and now his intermediary between both Clare and Jeanne. Beth was always working in what she believed were Harry’s best interests (even if Harry himself sometimes disagreed with her). Her husband, Maurice “Tex” Moore, a
partner in one of New York’s leading law firms and the chairman of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University, protected Harry’s legal and financial interests. Roswell Gilpatric, a lawyer in Tex Moore’s firm (and soon to be deputy secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration) was assigned at one point to mediate their marital dispute. People whom Clare called “the Timeincers” also intruded occasionally: Allen Grover, Roy Larsen, C. D. Jackson. Clare considered all of them her enemies. (“Any other vitally interested parties in this line up, which is about 10-to-1 against you and me?” she asked Harry caustically.)
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There were, of course, other participants as well—most prominently the press, which began publishing speculations about Harry’s affair with Jeanne in 1959. The rumors attracted little attention until early 1960, when the story appeared in a column by the nationally syndicated gossip columnist Leonard Lyons. Harry, Lyons said, had decided to marry Jeanne. Clare publicly brushed the rumors aside and joked that “if I divorced Harry, and married the Beaver [Lord Beaverbrook], I would become Harry’s grandmother.” Harry denied the rumors too, but damningly. “Clare and I are here together,” he responded to a press inquiry when they were both in Ridgefield. “It is all very premature to say the least.” The early signs of public scandal almost certainly helped them both to begin reconsidering divorce.
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After months of fruitless discussions, Harry proposed the use of a “qualified witness” to help them mediate their differences. Their choice was John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit priest and eminent theologian with whom Harry and, more important, Clare had spent much time together. Murray had been helpful to Clare during her conversion to Catholicism and had become a frequent fixture in the Luces’ many houses—seeming, some friends said, “more at home there than the Luces were.” He had been a spiritual and moral adviser to both of them. During the marital crisis he worked steadily to avert a divorce, to the frequent irritation of both parties. But Father Murray was the only person with whom Harry and Clare felt comfortable sharing their troubles. Both of them wrote lengthy accounts for Murray of their feelings, and they used him frequently to mediate conversations that might otherwise have become unbearable. Clare poured out her misery in many letters to Murray: “All of the experiences of my life, public and private, have convinced me we live in an age fraught with violence, hatred, futility, greed, lust—in which ‘the great’ are often uglier and meaner than the small … an apocalyptic age—the age of the aborted American Century—a century reflected in the very confusions, weaknesses, greeds of its author.” Harry
was less melodramatic but equally frank. “I have resigned myself to a ‘marriage of convenience’ and have given up on love.”
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In the midst of this agony, yet another group of companions and facilitators entered their lives: Gerald Heard, a writer, self-proclaimed philosopher, and sometime mystic, and his secretary and partner Michael Barrie. Clare had met them originally during her short stay in Hollywood in the 1940s, and they had been frequent visitors to Clare since then in Connecticut and more recently in Phoenix. Heard, who liked to call himself a “historian of consciousness and its evolution,” had been experimenting with various hallucinogens and other drugs that would, he hoped, help break down the barriers that separated people from their deepest feelings and instincts—a goal that predicted some of the popular literature of the later 1960s, among them Norman O. Brown’s
Love’s Body
and Theodore Roszak’s
The Making of a Counter Culture
. In 1960 Heard was particularly interested in LSD, which some psychiatrists were beginning to consider a possibly useful method of treatment.
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Clare had first tried LSD when Heard introduced her to it in 1958 in Connecticut, around the time of her withdrawal from the ambassadorship to Brazil. LSD was, she later wrote, responsible for “the serenity with which I faced that ordeal” and also for the later “burst of creative vitality” that took her to the Caribbean to start her new novel. Heard and Barrie came to Phoenix again the next year, in the midst of the Luces’ marital crisis. They were accompanied by Dr. Sidney Cohen, one of the most prominent psychiatrists studying LSD. Clare began taking frequent doses under the supervision of Cohen, who kept careful records of her behavior and her statements during her periods of hallucination. (Correspondence from the time also suggests that she became infatuated with him, although there is little evidence that the feelings were reciprocated. “I flirted with you,” she later wrote, but “you had not the slightest wish to flirt back.”) Once again she found in LSD a refuge from her misery and anxiety.
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Perhaps hoping that LSD would provide Harry with the same “serenity” that it had given her, Clare persuaded him to join the experiment during one of his trips to Phoenix. Dr. Cohen kept a meticulous record of Harry’s reactions, which were something of a letdown for both the doctor and the “patient.” After taking “100 Gamma of LSD” at 11:45, Harry sat at his desk, lit a cigarette, and began reading Lionel Trilling’s biography of Matthew Arnold, interrupting himself occasionally to discuss the relationship between Arnold and Cardinal Newman
with Gerald Heard. About an hour and a half later Dr. Cohen recorded the following exchange: “CBL enters. She puts flowers near HRL and asks if he sees color vividly. HRL: ‘No.’ Reads aloud from Trilling re the religious life.” Half an hour later Harry no longer felt “in command of myself” and said he wished “this stage would pass.” But he was alert enough to begin a new conversation: “Talks about visit to Oxford last summer…. Talks about Lord Halifax…. Talks of Chartres Cathedral.” At 2:50 p.m., more than three hours after he had taken the drug, Harry finally noticed a change in his response to his surroundings. As Cohen recorded Luce’s reactions: “Now things are getting sharper, … I’m beginning to see what Clare said. The aliveness…. This perception is fantastic. Oh yes, quite wonderful. Not the visionary gleam, but quite wonderful.” At 3:50, Cohen noted, Luce “goes off to think for a while.” Luce never tried LSD again, although he retained an interest in hallu-cinogenics. When asked later about his reactions, he said he had “not particularly enjoyed it” but had found it “bio-chemically speaking interesting.”
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Years later, when her experimentation with LSD became public, Clare insisted that her use of the hallucinogen had “saved our marriage.” Nothing in her voluminous contemporary writings about her marital problems suggests that this was true. But the marriage did survive.

In the spring of 1960 Harry promised to break off his affair with Jeanne, although in fact he continued it intermittently for almost another year, until Jeanne herself ended it in favor of a relationship with—and ultimately a brief marriage to—Norman Mailer. (Clare speculated that one reason for his breakup with Jeanne was that a prostate operation in 1960 had affected his sexual performance, but by then the affair was already unraveling.) Once the decision was made to continue the marriage, however, recriminations continued for a time. Harry was intermittently bitter about the diminished prospect of what he liked to call a “free life.” “Okay,” he said with unhappy resignation during one of their many conversations about their reconciliation. “As usual, you get what you want, but I have to take the Castor Oil.” During another tense discussion he said, “I can’t win against you.” Most of all he wearied of the “incessant scenes and quarrels with Clare.” It “had to stop,” he told Father Murray. “I can’t get any work done.” Clare—emotionally exhausted—continued to express distrust. She was, she said, nothing but a “resident housekeeper” to Harry. He had chosen to continue “a marriage with me, because for a variety of prudential reasons, having nothing
to do with me, it seems best on the whole for you.” In July 1960 she wrote melodramatically in her diary, “I am of this morning, faced with the total disintegration of my personality and the final, fatal collapse of my ego…. I don’t know
who
I am in relation to anybody in this world.” Harry, clearly, was not the only cause of her misery. After years of professional and social prominence, she was no longer a major celebrity. She was mourning not only the problems of her marriage (problems she had once compartmentalized and largely ignored) but also the end of her dazzling public life. That was in part what made the survival of her marriage so important to her. Being married to Harry was, she feared, the only distinction she would have in the years to come. And so she fought ever harder to keep the marriage going and to force Harry to commit to it.

Clare imposed conditions on her reconciliation. Harry would have to end the affair with Jeanne, “unequivocally and finally,” to “tell Beth and Tex … in my presence that the affair is over for good and that you desire to stay married to me,” that he “escort me personally through the new TIME and LIFE Building as though you were pleased and proud to show it to me,” and that he “write me a letter telling me … that you hope we can make a good life together for the rest of our lives.” “Why is that letter so important?” Harry asked when Clare complained that he had delayed writing it. It would, she said, make clear that “he was in it ‘for keeps’”
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Little by little, as Clare put it, “the terrible storm … subsided.” Harry wrote, without anger, that “we should go on for the rest of our lives together … after all the needless amount of words, quarrels, arguments…. The decision to do so should be by a simple yes from me and a simple yes from you.” They had no illusions about a great romance. They would, Harry said, “live from day to day and from season to season,” and enjoy “Christian fellowship” and “affectionate companionship.” By the fall of 1960, while Clare was spending several weeks in Hawaii, he was able to write to her with something of the warmth that had once been a more common part of their marriage. “Darling, I do miss you so, but it seems so useless to cry about that—except just to keep telling you that there is still a dream of real companionship I cling to despite all the ravages of war and time. We
will
have our Peace in our time because we are making it in love.” And Clare, too, gradually found her way to a calm affection. “Your voice on the telephone this morning, so full of warmth and strength and lovingness … made me very happy…. I seem to have some sort of vision—very akin to LSD
really!—that all is as it
must
be, ‘everything composes.’” Years later, making notes while looking back at her diaries on what she called their time of “sturm und drang,” Clare wrote:

Sometime in 1960 Clare wrote a long, introspective memorandum, addressed to Harry but evidently never delivered to him, about what she called “diminishments.” To Clare the diminishments were her loss of a serious career, her loss with age of much of her beauty, her loss of sexual fulfillment, and most of all—in this time of despair—her “loss of hope.” Harry was never one to record his own feelings honestly. He rarely spoke openly about his own “diminishments,” but he was certainly aware of them. Although he was only in his early sixties, he looked like a much older man—the result of many years of intense work, travel, and anxiety, and of a lifetime of heavy smoking. He was suffering from heart and prostate troubles. Perhaps most of all he was aware of his failure to grasp his last chance for true romantic love, a failure that he himself had decided to absorb.

Nor did he often have the comfort of family. His reconciliation with Clare was successful as far as it went. They learned to avoid rancor and to create a familiar and usually comfortable companionship, but they continued to spend much of their time apart. He remained close to Beth Moore, but he saw little of his other siblings (his sister Emmavail, who still lived in Philadelphia and who seldom saw Harry; and his much younger brother, Sheldon, who—after a brief career in Time Inc.—moved on to new business efforts far from New York). Harry had somewhat more contact with his two sons, Henry III (Hank) and Peter. He was closer to Hank, who aspired to follow in his father’s journalistic footsteps. Hank worked for a time at the
Cleveland News
and later joined Time Inc., where he spent much of his professional life although never rising to a position of great prominence. Harry expressed pride in Hank’s achievements, but also worried that he was too dependent on his father’s support. (Hank later became the longtime president of the
Henry Luce Foundation, which Harry established before his death and to which he left the largest portion of his estate.) After attending MIT Peter joined the air force and then moved to the West to work in aviation. He saw his father relatively infrequently. Harry wrote letters occasionally to both his sons, letters that were meant to be affectionate but that revealed little intimacy. They sometimes read like essays on the state of the world. (“A wonderful old philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, … was one of the first to point out that in the twentieth century, for the first time in human history, conditions of human life changed radically in
one
generation,” he wrote Peter on his twenty-first birthday.) Harry ensured that both his sons were financially secure, and in the late 1950s and 1960s he began to spend more time with Hank in particular. But after decades of only occasional attention to his sons, whom he had left behind in 1935 to marry Clare when both boys were under ten, the relationship always remained somewhat distant. Harry did develop a special interest in his grandchildren, and particularly in Christopher (known as Kit), Hank’s son. Kit traveled with his grandfather occasionally, visited him and Clare periodically in Phoenix and Connecticut, and saw him more often than most of Harry’s other relatives did. Kit had a relationship with Harry that few others did—one of uncomplicated affection.
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