A modern "machiavelle" identifying, enchanting and securing men of means, the author of The Women knew whereof she wrote.

The biography of Clare Boothe Luce reads like a nineteenth-century melodrama about one of the greatest courtesans in history. But rather than die decently in the last act of a convenient consumption to save the honorable man who loves her from sacrificing himself on the altar of matrimony, Clare Boothe Luce seduced, married, seduced some more and thrived. Not only did she live to a ripe old age, but her fortunes continued on a giddy trajectory from improbably humble beginnings to a place in the House of Representatives, an ambassadorship to Italy and as consultant to several administrations, with a stop-off at a tryout for the 1920 U.S. Olympic swim team, the managing editorship at Vanity Fair and boffo Broadway success to boot.

Ann Clare Boothe was born in 1903, the second illegitimate child of Anna Clara Schneider, a poor girl from a respectable Harlem family, and William Franklin Boothe, a piano manufacturer turned itinerant violinist. Because he had been sued by his first wife for divorce on the grounds of infidelity, Billy Boothe was legally forbidden to marry Clare’s mother in New York State. In 1912, tired of moving around the country, the wolf constantly at the door, perhaps weary of thinking up aliases (they had been the Franklins in Manhattan, and for a time in Tennessee and Illinois, the Murphys or Murfés), Ann Snyder (as she anglicized herself) took her children and returned to New York. Once back in the city and settled in modest digs, Ann styled herself a widow and seems to have kept body and soul together by operating as a very discreet call girl. Soon, however, she landed a sugar daddy in Joel Jacobs, who would be a benefactor to her children and her own boon companion throughout the rest of her life, even after she married a quiet Connecticut doctor taken in by the respectability Jacobs’ money had bought the bride.

It’s not difficult to understand the horror of poverty and dependence Clare would have for the rest of her life. Her mother made of matrimony a military campaign with wealth, "respectable wealth"—not the Jewish affluence of a Jacobs—the only acceptable prize. And dutifully Clare married for money. George Tuttle Brokaw was a weak-willed, middle-aged, alcoholic playboy, and so easy prey for Clare’s soon-to-be legendary wiles. She confided to her diary that, she "was endowed with a masculine perception, a half-masculine mentality, and a thoroughly feminine method of living." This was the combination which, in addition to her beauty, made men putty in her hands and their wives leery. It didn’t take Clare long to tire of George’s lack of ambition and constant drunkenness. When he checked himself into a sanatorium to dry out, it made a public record of his drinking problem, and she finally had the grounds for divorce. Leaving her daughter Ann behind with a governess, Clare Boothe Luce took a fateful trip to Reno.

The idea of writing a play about the denizens of a Reno resort occurred to her as a take off on Grand Hotel. She began a fragment but put it aside in frustration when she’d written herself into a corner. On returning to New York she wheedled Condé Nast into finding her a place in his magazine empire. She insinuated herself as a caption writer at Vogue, moved within the year to Vanity Fair and before three years had expired in her tenure there she was managing editor, succeeding her ex-lover Donald Freeman, who had been killed in an automobile accident. She was not yet thirty years old and had landed one of the plum positions among New York’s literati. She was also engaged in a complicated danse d’amour with Bernard Baruch. But though he was very much Clare’s type, lots of money, even more power and aged to a father-figure perfection, Bernie was married. So was Henry Robinson Luce, but at his second random encounter with Clare, he told her he had to have her and was leaving his wife of eleven years right then.

Clare would complain, "Women can’t have an honest exchange in front of men without having it called a cat fight."

Now that she was married to Time magazine, the newly coined Clare Boothe Luce assumed that her career in journalism was about to enter a new ascendancy. Henry had decided to publish a pictorial weekly that would be called Life, and Clare waited patiently to be anointed editor. When a man was named to the post, Clare bitterly realized that even strategic marriage was no defense against the glass ceiling. In vengeance she threw herself back into a playwriting career that had begun a little feebly with the neither fish-nor-fowl, farcical melodrama Abide with Me. She betook herself to a West Virginia resort and in three days penned the first draft of The Women.

The idea for the play came from a conversation she’d overheard in a tony Manhattan ladies room. Two women were discussing an affair one of them was having with a man Clare knew. Here was the incident; now Clare needed a gimmick to put the piece over. Dusting off her Reno hotel fragment and coupling it with the powder room powder keg, she had it. All the scenes would be laid in exclusively feminine domains, the cast of characters all women—a Broadway first—daughters of Eve all in fighting trim, all in peak form. Though less popular in the provinces during trials, The Women was a bona fide hit in New York and a smash in London, too. A film version followed. A superb screenplay by Anita Loos, luscious haute-couture confections by Adrian, and George Cukor’s masterful wrangling of all the female ego that Tinseltown had on offer in 1939 combined to create a classic. In fact, the film’s two-word tagline—"Jungle Red"—is one of the most famous in Hollywood history. Even Gertrude Stein had to admit she "liked it, at least a little bit."

Though Clare would complain, "Women can’t have an honest exchange in front of men without having it called a cat fight," her play certainly gives her lament the lie. The Women positively thrives on the energy of the cat fight, on the thrill of the boudoir as abattoir where the color of Elizabeth Arden’s famous door is suggestive of more than the "Jungle Red" of socialites’ nail enamel. Bread and circuses be damned, give us cake and catwalks; here is blood sport in a pink, satin-tufted, perfumed arena, and Clare Boothe Luce its immortal empress.

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