Her writings extended from drama and screen scenarios to fiction, journalism, and war reportage. As an author, she was best known for her 1936 play, Women, which, three years later, became a motion picture renowned for its all-female cast. She served as a United States representative from 1943–1947 and, from 1953–1956, served as United States Ambassador to Italy. She was active politically, and campaigned for every Republican presidential nominee from Wendell Willkie to Ronald Reagan.
She was intelligent, versatile, forceful, charismatic, beautiful, and, to put it mildly, “unprincipled.” She married twice, to millionaires whom she admittedly did not like. The first left her a divorcee, the second, a widow. Time called her “The Renaissance Woman of the Century.” Her achievements were enviable, but her life was turbulent.
She was born Ann Clare Boothe in New York City on March 10, 1903. Her parents were not married and separated in 1912. She would use Clare Boothe Luce as her professional name in honor of her second husband, Henry Luce, a magazine publisher who founded Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated.
Despite her talents and her wealth, she was unhappy. “Some vast uneasiness,” she wrote, “restlessness, discontent suffused the very essence of my being.” Something essential was missing from her life and it plagued her.
Tragedy struck in 1944. Clare’s only child, Ann Clare Brokaw, a 19-year-old senior at Stanford University, was killed in an automobile accident. As a result of the tragedy, Luce explored psychotherapy to relieve her chronic depression. She also explored religion, something that no one who knew her would have expected.
One day in 1945, Fr. Fulton J. Sheen, who had been alerted to her situation, invited her to dinner. It would be a tête-à-tête that would have global consequences. When the dishes had been taken away, Fr. Sheen turned to the subject of religion. “Give me five minutes to talk about God,” he said, “and then I will give you an hour to state your own views.” Luce, still grieving over the loss of her daughter, exploded: “If God is good, why did he take my daughter?” Sheen responded calmly: “In order that through that sorrow, you might be here now starting to know Christ and His Church.”
Over the next five months, Sheen provided her with instruction. Luce was an attentive but demanding student. “It took Fr. Sheen several months,” she later wrote, “to clear away that thick fog of prejudice and superstition acquired through a lifetime.”
The dinner had a significant impact on both diners. “Never in my life,” Sheen was to recall, “have I been privileged to instruct anyone who was as brilliant and who was so scintillating in conversation as Mrs. Luce. She has a mind like a rapier.” In her testimonial, Luce said of Msgr. Sheen, “I never knew a teacher who could be at once so patient and so unyielding, so poetical, so practical, so inventive, and so orthodox.”
Sheen received Clare Boothe Luce into the Catholic Church in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Feb. 16, 1946. Her conversion was indeed a conversion. Actress Loretta Young testified that Luce had changed completely. “She remained strong,” said the Oscar-winning actress, “but in a positive way. I couldn’t believe she was the same woman after her conversion.”
For the rest of her life, until she passed away at the age of 83, Clare Boothe Luce was a zealous champion of the Catholic faith. Pope Pius XII welcomed her as a friend. In a private audience with him, she proceeded at length to persuade him of her newfound faith. “Yes, yes, I know, Mrs. Luce,” the pope retorted, “I am a Catholic, too” (“Io sono una Catholico”).
As a memorial to her daughter, beginning in 1949, Luce funded the construction of a Catholic church in Palo Alto, Calif., for use by Stanford University’s campus ministry. In 1957 she was awarded the Laetare Medal, Notre Dame University’s most prestigious award for American Catholics. She was named “Dame of Malta.” There were many other honors. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan honored her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Clare attested that most converts, including herself, are “Good Friday converts” who “enter God’s kingdom through pain.” In the first of three articles she wrote for widely circulated McCall’s magazine, she wrote candidly about her conversion: “Well, I suppose that the overall reason, the one that includes all the others and, therefore, one might say the real reason, is that upon careful examination, Catholic doctrine seemed to me the solid objective truth.” She also stated, rather tersely, that she became a Catholic “to rid myself of the burden of sin.”
Thousands of letters poured in to the magazine. A Notre Dame priest was particularly impressed: “Perhaps not since Newman’s time has the publication of an apologia created such a stir.”
In other writings about her conversion, Mrs. Luce confessed that she gave “complete intellectual assent to Catholic truth” because it contained answers to the great mysteries of life and death. She expressed her gratitude for “being absorbed in the miracle of God’s love.” She acknowledged that her soul had turned from darkness, from love of self, to love of God. She regarded conversion as the climax of a thousand graces.
Luce spoke of the “remarkable joy” that Fr. Sheen had brought to her life, and of his saintliness. She called him “my beloved archbishop.” Sheen said a Mass every year for Luce’s departed daughter. In the mysterious ways of God, Ann Brokaw was the link that brought together two extraordinarily gifted people. Deo gratias.
