When Harry Met Clare . . .

By John Elson

HENRY & CLARE: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF THE LUCES

by Ralph G. Martin; Putnam; 463 pages; $24.95

The first serious encounter between the co-founder of this magazine and the ^ woman who became his second wife took place at a 1934 dinner given by mutual friends. Clare Boothe Brokaw sat at Henry R. Luce's right, but they scarcely talked, and he left early; she thought him fascinating but incredibly rude. Two months later, at a Waldorf-Astoria party honoring Cole Porter, it was a different story. Oblivious to other guests, including his then spouse Lila, Luce sat with Brokaw at a corner table and conversed intently until 4 a.m. In the hotel lobby, he blurted out, "How does it feel to be told that you are the one woman, the only woman, in a man's life?" "Whose life?" she asked. "Mine," he answered.

Thus, according to this slovenly written tattletale, began one of the most famous of America's celebrity unions. With 11-year-old TIME both popular and profitable and newly born FORTUNE a critical success, Harry Luce, then 36, was on the verge of becoming the nation's most powerful magazine publisher. Clare Brokaw -- journalist and playwright, future Congresswoman and ambassador -- at 31 was Manhattan's paradigmatic gay divorcee, renowned as much for her merciless wit as for her delicate porcelain beauty.

The pair married in 1935, but the union was not perfect. Harry, Martin writes, had extended relationships with Jean Dalrymple, a Broadway producer and theatrical agent and (platonically, it seems) with Mary Bancroft, who, among other accomplishments, had been a wartime spy master for the OSS. Clare's lovers, according to the author, included financier Bernard Baruch, Sir Winston Churchill's son Randolph and others (as the saying goes) too numerous to mention. Martin portrays Harry as a reluctant adulterer, consumed with Presbyterian guilt, who sought from other women the kind of feminine solace Clare could not or would not give. Clare, by contrast, is limned as a dazzling but neurotic conniver for whom sex was primarily a way to keep men at her feet.

The liaison that most seriously threatened the marriage, which endured until Luce's death in 1967, involved Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of the British press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook. As a favor to the Beaver, TIME in 1956 found a minor job in its picture department for Lady Jeanne. Luce became so openly smitten with this cheerful redhead, 31 years his junior, that rumors of the affair appeared in gossip columns. He discussed a divorce with Clare but backed away, Martin alleges, when she attempted suicide and demanded editorial control of Time Inc. as the price of freedom. On the rebound, Lady Jeanne ^ briefly and tempestuously married novelist Norman Mailer.

All this is quite titillating -- and some of it has been recorded before -- but there are grounds for wondering how accurate Martin's amatory scorekeeping really is. In his acknowledgments and chapter notes, the author cites the "invaluable" assistance of interviews with Richard M. Clurman, for many years Time Inc.'s chief of correspondents, and his wife Shirley, a close friend of Clare's and a former TIME publicist. But Dick Clurman states categorically that he merely gave Martin a list of potential sources and was too busy to submit to an interview. Shirley Clurman says she spoke with Martin "for 20 minutes, maximum." Asked about the author's assertion that Clare and Randolph Churchill were lovers, Mrs. Clurman has a succinct retort: "Garbage!"

These are not the only credibility gaps. Henry & Clare is rife with errors, undocumented innuendo, non sequiturs and contradictions. Martin shows little understanding of how the Luce organization worked; the portraits of his principals are caricature-crude, especially in the case of Clare. In biography even more than architecture, God is in the details. By that standard, Henry & Clare deserves the scathing verdict that Luce often penciled on drafts of unsatisfactory stories: "Needs work."