The Women's Woman

As a top Broadway hit of the 1930s, The Women was one of the earliest Women's Liberation plays in the U.S. After countless performances throughout the world, The Women returns to Broadway this week. TIME Associate Editor Gerald Clarke talked with its author, Clare Boothe Luce.

"The play calls for a blonde seductress, and they cast it with a sultry brunette," complained Clare Boothe Luce. "Now they're trying to persuade me to rewrite it for her. I would have thought that no one would ask me to rewrite the characters of a play that is 37 years old." She paused before adding the obvious: "I, of course, have no intention of doing it." Once as famous for her sharp tongue as for her beauty, she is mellower now (she celebrated her 70th birthday this month), but not so mellow as to rewrite her best-known play. When The Women is revived on Broadway this week, after two weeks of tryouts, the changes will be in the cast: a blonde seductress will replace Lainie Kazan, the temperamental brunette who refused to wear a blonde wig for the role.

For Mrs. Luce, the revival has already been an exercise in dej`a vu. Though she, like many younger women in the women's movement, sees the play almost as a tract for Women's Lib, the out-of-town critics, like their predecessors a generation ago, were shocked that a woman could say such spiteful things about other women. "They just do not like to think that there could ever have existed this particular streak in women," she says with a laugh. "It is most chivalrous of them. But what annoys me just a little is that reviewers even now, after all the years I have fought and pleaded and written about the cause of women, persist in picturing me as an enemy of my own sex. Every time a woman opens her mouth about another woman she is supposed to be giving her final view about her sex. This is, of course, unconscious male chauvinism.

"Actually," she continues, stopping only to puff an ever-present Kent cigarette, "the play is a satire. Anyone who understands a satirist's mind knows that he is someone who is deeply disappointed and takes his revenge in poking fun at the objects of his disillusionment." Mrs. Luce's disillusionment was with her pre-Women life in the cafe society of the 1920s and 1930s where rich women with nothing better to do turned on themselves. "It was a life I did not like," she says firmly, underlining every word. "The expectation of my youth was that women were on the road to liberation. But I discovered that it was still not a world where a woman could make a life for herself--though I then did, of course."

Divorcing herself from that life, as well as from Millionaire George Brokaw, whom she describes as a "Fifth Avenue Beau Brummel," she became managing editor of Vanity Fair, one of the smartest magazines of its day, in 1933. A year later she quit to write on her own, and in 1935 married Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc. Two days before they were married, her first Broadway play opened. "It was called Abide with Me," she recalls, "and it abode with nobody. When the curtain went down, some members of the cast brought me forward from the wings. I took a frightened little bow. After a terrible roasting the next morning, one of the critics ended with a line that is graven on my mind: 'The end of it all was that Miss Boothe sprang out like a gazelle to cries of "Author! Author!"--which were audible to no ears but her own.' I have never been to the opening of a play of mine since."

The day she and Luce were to leave on their honeymoon they received an advance copy of the TIME review, which was, for perhaps obvious reasons, less harsh than the newspapers. "Harry paced up and down the room and finally said: 'Darling, no Marion Davies you. You know this wasn't a good play and I know that it wasn't a good play. I'm going to write a review.' " He did, but deciding that it was still too kind, she rewrote it. Their collaboration, which damned her efforts as "tedious psychiatry," appeared the following week in the magazine.

From the start, the relationship between Clare and her husband's magazines was uncomfortable. To show their independence, the editors were often snide when they referred to her. Luce himself bridled at their treatment of his wife, but refused to interfere. Eventually, it was decided by all involved that the best course was simply to ignore her, a policy that was broken only when it was necessary to chronicle her career as war correspondent, Congresswoman from Connecticut, Ambassador to Italy, an early scuba diver and a leading, often controversial figure in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. "So I never was on the cover of TIME and I never was on the cover of LIFE," she now sighs unhappily, but without bitterness. "That was the way it had to be, but what really hurt was that the rest of the press went on saying that I was the darling of Time Inc."

After her husband's death in 1967, she retired to Hawaii, where they had recently bought land. "We had been in the very familiar Eastern-seaboard, affluent-living situation," she says. "An apartment in New York, a home in the country and a place in Arizona for the winter. It had been like that for me since I was 19. I had one great desire, which was just to have one house. I had two conditions: it should be under the American flag, and it should be as livable in winter as summer. I'm too old to shovel snow off my doorstep in Connecticut."

In Hawaii, she still sees many of her friends, who fly in and out--"I come to New York now for a rest," she jokes--and she still writes about the women's movement, which she has been involved in since her teens. Her advocacy of women's rights has not lessened over the years, and she wrote an essay, "Woman, a Technological Castaway," for the 1973 Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook. "In every marriage there are two marriages," she wrote. "His and hers. His is better . . . What man now calls woman's natural feminine mentality is the unnatural slave mentality he forced on her, just as he forced it on the blacks. He made her the 'house nigger.' In the end, man dropped the shackles from woman's body only because he had succeeded in fastening them on her mind. Man did not grant woman the vote until he was reasonably certain that her slave mentality had become second nature and that she would not act to bring about her own emancipation."

Despite her age, it is still clear what Photographer Cecil Beaton meant when he described Mrs. Luce as "most drenchingly beautiful"--she still has a great, lingering beauty, with a near perfect profile. Several unsuccessful operations for double cataracts have left her somewhat frail, however, and she finds that she is usually too tired these days to attend the theater, one of her great loves. But she was tempted to make an exception--and break her rule about her own first nights--to attend the opening of The Women. She finally decided against it. "It will probably be my last play on Broadway," she says, "and I am terribly eager to see it. But I fear that would be unlikely."

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