When Harry Met Clare . . .

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.