Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce

“I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die,” Clare Boothe Luce told her biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris. the concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath, chronicles Luce’s progress from her arrival on Capitol Hill through her career as a diplomat, prolific journalist, and magnetic public speaker, as well as a playwright, screenwriter, pioneer scuba diver, early experimenter in psychedelic drugs, and grande dame of the GOP in the Reagan era. Tempestuously married to Henry Luce, the powerful publisher of Time Inc., she endured his infidelities while pursuing her own, and remained a practiced vamp well into her crowded later years, during which she strengthened her friendships with Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham, John F. Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh, Lyndon Johnson, Salvador Dalí, Richard Nixon, William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and countless other celebrities. Sylvia Jukes Morris is the only writer to have had complete access to Mrs. Luce’s prodigious collection of public and private papers. In addition, she had unique access to her subject, whose death at eighty-four ended a life that for variety of accomplishment qualifies Clare Boothe Luce for the title of “Woman of the Century.” “The twentieth-century history of this country, seen through the eyes and actions of a remarkable woman . . . one of the most fabulous, intimate biographies I have ever read.” “The epic is a thrilling account of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing and ambitious society figures.” “Delicious . . . In Sylvia Jukes Morris takes up the story she began in Both books are models of the biographer’s art—meticulously researched, sophisticated, fair-minded and compulsively readable.” “Clare Boothe Luce [was] one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious, unstoppable and undeniably ingenious characters. . . . This full, warts-and-all biography hauls her back into the limelight and does her full justice.” “Poignant and profound . . . nothing short of a triumph.” “Compelling . . . [a] brilliant biography.”