Sylvia Jukes Morris

Speaker Brilliant to me. And which is all get out. Very funny. And even though she became a bit of a knob monologue just at the end of her life, she still kept that sense of humor, which was her saving grace and beauty to kept it right to the end, even at the age of 83. What people wanted to jump into bed with her really hard nosed journalists about you said to me the only eight year old I’ve ever wanted to put up with, she should go.

Speaker Just so we understand each other, most of what we’re going to talk about. Of course, has to do with Henry lives with us and the relationship. Exactly.

Speaker But I do want to know. At the time. But she was with him.

Speaker What was she like? What were goals or characteristics? What was her?

Speaker Well, we started. Yes, we started. I’m sorry, over just Millstone. Are you just starting now? So this is the first question. Yes, I see.

Speaker Well, Claire had already had quite a considerable career. By the time she met Henry Luce, she’d been managing editor of Vanity Fair magazine. And at the age of 32, when she met when she married Lucy, at least she was at the height of her powers and earned beauty. It was hard for me only knowing her in old age, you know, to imagine the impact that she had particular on men. She was a real femme tall. There wasn’t a man she encountered who didn’t fall madly in love with her. And people even committed suicide over her. She was that dynamic and scintillating. One journalist put it very well, he said. After an interview with her, he said it was like being dynamited by angel cake because she looked angelic. She had the fair hair. She had the translucent skin and the blue eyes. And this very calm, dignified posture and manner. But beneath this facade of great, calm and beauty was this devastating coruscating intelligence. She was always the smartest woman in any man. And for that matter, in any room, the smartest person in anyone. And Harry, one set of her, he said when they were in company together. He was so admiring offer. He said that inwardly I secretly bough. Because I’m so in awe of your gifts and your humor and your intelligence. And this was the case throughout her life. She had the kind of intelligence rather like a Margaret Thatcher, I think, or Jeane Kirkpatrick, somebody of incredible, brilliant intellect that went to the core of any problem, no matter what it was. She just went right to the heart of it. And that’s, I think, what made her such a fantastic politician, although she didn’t really have the temperament for being a politician because she was restless and impatient. And as soon as she conquered any kind of discipline, she’d like to move on and try something different.

Speaker So what may what may if they were what they made clear, her parian.

Speaker They will one of the first power couples they saw in each other, the kind of dynamism that worked better when they were together than when they were apart. He had access to all of the people in the world, from Nero to Churchill, Gandhi.

Speaker All of these people through the magazine, of course, they said. Time magazine was actually more powerful than the president in those days because of its reach. And it was published in so many countries and they were real policy makers and opinion shapers. So she saw her access to this world of power through Harry, which is what she always craved. She didn’t think that she could make it on her own because she hadn’t had the education that Harriet had. Harry went to the best schools. You went to Hotchkiss, you went to Yale. She had no education beyond the age of 16. She never went to college. So it was all innate, her brilliance.

Speaker And but she always felt she said she would say to me, you know, I don’t have the American Express card. I don’t have the imprimatur. I don’t have the degree. And she also, therefore, felt that one day in any job, she was going to be found out that she wasn’t really qualified to do it, although she really was, of course, because of her native intelligence.

Speaker So that was always her insecurity, plus what she sought, his total security in his own accomplishments and intellect because he’d been focused from boyhood really on working as a as an editor. That was his.

Speaker They can. Yes, it was their competitiveness. Yes.

Speaker They were highly competitive, particularly as the marriage soured a little. They would vie for the attention of people at the dinner table. Clair’s had been known even to bang on the glass. If the attention moved away from her huge egos and so it was not a good thing sometimes to be around. People were really rather embarrassed by it at times. The degree of their competitiveness. Harry thought she was a born politician and that really her achieved great achievement in life was to get elected to the Congress. And of course, it was part of his design, too, because he could then get to Washington and he could also have access to the power centers.

Speaker But I think that nevertheless, their intellectual compatibility was so great that that was what in the end, save the marriage, because long after the sex was came to an end, which he did extremely early on, they were intellectual companions for life.

Speaker So she was to read to him. He used to read to her while she did her needlepoint. And of course, they had many topics in common, including, as it turned out, religion when she converted to Catholicism. They would have long discussions about religion, too. So, yes, they were competitive and yes, they were incompatible in some ways. But on another level, they were highly compatible.

Speaker What where was she in her life when she met her, when she met Harry?

Speaker She had been married, as you probably know, to George Brokaw at the age of 20. Her mother was always ambitious to marry a wealthy man. You say you just get the rich man and that’s taken care of the money. Then you could do whatever you want after that. And Claire agreed with that. So she married this man who was more than twice her age.

Speaker He was 44 years old and he turned out to be an alcoholic. She found that out on the honeymoon. So she stuck it out. They had a child together. She stuck it out for six years and then she went to Reno and got a divorce and she was by then only 26 years old. And that’s when she got the job en vogue. And then eventually on Vanity Fair and became managing editor after the death of her one onetime lover who was a managing editor. And she stepped right into his shoes after he committed suicide over her. So she always thought. So when she met Harry in 1934. She was only 31 years old and had already got this managing editorship under her belt. But by then, also, she was anxious to move on this restlessness that I talked about earlier. She was ready for another challenge show, becoming the wife of Henry Luce, just fitted right into her scheme of things.

Speaker And so she in a way, this was a calculated romance.

Speaker You know, it was not calculated because when she first met him and they talked about picture magazines, an idea that she’d actually had when she was at Vanity Fair during the Depression, she told Condé Nast, you know, we can’t go on magazine is is ailing. And the trend in Europe now is to have a picture magazine. And she actually had a layout made. So when she talked to Harry Luce about it, the idea for a picture magazine, it was something he already had somebody at time and time working on a man called John Martin. So he was extremely interested. And she felt that he was picking her brain somewhat. But nevertheless, at about 10 o’clock, he took out his watch and kicked his heels and said, time to go, and just left her standing there. And she thought he was the rudest man she’d ever met. Few weeks later, she was at a party for Cole Porter and the Starlight Roof right in this hotel, as happened. And she saw Henry Luce coming across the room holding two champagne glasses. It was actually for his wife and himself. They were seated at a table with Condé Nast just beyond hers.

Speaker And she thought, ha, ha, here’s my chance to get my revenge on this rude man. Should our Mr. Luce is one of those glasses of champagne for me. And at that moment, the lights dimmed.

Speaker And so he sat down and gave her the glass. And they went into a huddle and they talked and talked for hours. He never went back to his own table. And then he said he would like to see her down in the lobby because he had something important to tell her. So we went downstairs into the lobby of the Waldorf and she found him pacing up and down there. And he said he experienced a crude food or what the French call a bolt of lightning. A love had just smitten him. He fell madly in love with her right there. And he said he wanted to marry her, but he thought that they should get to know each other for about a year. Well, she didn’t want this because they were too high profile people and she didn’t want any kind of scandal. So she told him to go ahead and see if he wanted to get a divorce. He had two young children, nine or five years old. I think they were that time. And she said, you take care of that and I will go to Europe. And when you’ve sorted your own private affairs and then come and we will see where we go from there. Very smart, very smart woman. Always in charge, always in control. And that’s what happened. So he followed her to Europe and they got married in 1935.

Speaker So just managing she didn’t hesitate and wonder, well, who I really love this marriage. I want to be married to this man. And she just sort of say, OK, this looks like a good deal to me.

Speaker I think there was a little bit of that. But she came.

Speaker She was we can talk about just the narcissistic personality for a while. You know, they’re very confident on the surface of things. And then as soon as they win somebodies affection, they also have the self-hate. So they feel, well, if he loves me, he can’t be up to much because otherwise he wouldn’t love me because I’m not really worthy of love. So as soon as she had won this love, she began to think, well, maybe he’s not such a big deal after all. Because if he were, he wouldn’t love me. And so the marriage really hit a rocky, rocky waters straight away. And he put her put her on such a pedestal. She was almost a Madonna figure to him that he found it very difficult to have sex with her because she was really too revered. And so he the marriage wasn’t well, the marriage, they they the relationship wasn’t consummated for quite a while. And then once they were married, he still found it difficult. He was impotent a lot of the time. With her, so she and after couple of years, so for maybe absence will make the heart grow fonder.

Speaker And I’ll go away for a while. So she went to Europe. The war begun by then, and she went to Europe and wrote a book called Europe in the Spring about the phoney war. Just before the real war began. And she dedicated the book to Harry and said to Harry, who knew why I had to go?

Speaker But when she came back, things were no better in that department. And he by then had wandered off the reservation, as she put it. He used to have these one night stands Gayton with actresses. And once he’d done that, being a good Presbyterian, he didn’t believe in sleeping with two women at once. So he would say that he didn’t feel well and that he would make excuses vcp her. But it was true that after the first couple of years there was no actual physical relationship. They stayed together.

Speaker But do we take just a circle? Do you need any water or do I sound at a horse? Yeah, I do. Dry. What affected there? Well, actually, I want to go back a little bit about Claire before I talk some more about Harry and Claire, because it’s been described and I wonder if you would describe it for me, the sort of the effect of when Claire walked into a room. What effect did she have on the environment since?

Speaker It was a calculated entrance in many ways. A friend who just went to clear walked into a room. So the effect to the. When Claire walked into a room, the effect that she had on people was calculated by her ahead of time. Laura Hopson, who is a friend who worked actually for Harry for a while and was a friend of hers for time. Described her going to a party at her house once and how she usually came after everybody else. So she could make this dramatic entrance and she would always be exquisitely gowned and bejeweled and her hair, every hair in place, and sometimes would even be carrying a little bouquet of poses. And she would come in looking very demure and looking down and then look up and then survey the scene until she got absolutely everybody’s attention and everybody would go silent because her impact was just just so devastating the way she looked and the way she held herself. She she was only about five foot five tall, but she looked much taller because she was she carried herself with such a regal way.

Speaker And she had a slight aloofness on first acquaintance, which quickly dissipated because she was really an extremely friendly person and charming and had to win everybody over. So this was the way the angel and the dynamite syndrome, you see that she had the charm, but at the same time she had the calculated ness of somebody who knew exactly how to make an effect, to make an impact on a room full of people.

Speaker And how did she impact men versus women? I mean, with.

Speaker She didn’t waste much time on women in the early years, except in so far as they were the hostesses. And she could be invited to the parties. But once she was invited, her whole focus was on men. And I remember when I first met her and I was already thinking of writing the book, the hostess of this party in Washington said to me, Oh, don’t be nervous because she won’t take any notice of you at all. She’s only interested in men. And I sat at the same table. I was able to observe this first hand. She was seated next to a military historian, which, of course, was right up his street. She was obsessed with military, military and tactics and warfare. And so she concentrated her entire focus on this man’s role. I mean, she didn’t even think about good manners that you had to turn to your left and then to your right. She found somebody interesting. She gave her full attention there. And it was practically always a man was, I think, because of their childhood lack, that she felt that she’d been abandoned by her father and therefore she was always looking for a father figure and be looking for a man that she could get her revenge on.

Speaker She could teach them a lesson that she didn’t get the chance to teach her father because he he never lived with them again after the early years. And I found out actually that it wasn’t it wasn’t William Booth who left her mother, whom I don’t think he ever married. It was the mother who felt that the father wasn’t ambitious enough for her, wasn’t going to make enough money, and she left him and took the children east, left him in Chicago. But Kay didn’t know that. She’d always been told that the father abandoned them.

Speaker Well, that seems like a that’s a psychological explanation. Was there. Yes.

Speaker More political affiliation there was, because, of course, in those days, men tend to be tended to have more powerful positions. And since she was primarily interested in power, the French ambassador once told me that he said whenever when I first met her, I knew straight away that her primary focus was power, how to get it, how to wield it, how to influence the world around her. So it’s quite normal and natural that that would be her focus at that time, unless she met a powerful one like Mrs. Gandhi. Then she’d give Mrs. Gandhi her entire focus. But for the most part, it was men she.

Speaker Was she? No, you mentioned that they talked about the picture.

Speaker Would you say she was instrumental in the conception of life or was it already under way?

Speaker No, it wasn’t under way. It was John Martin had been given the chore by Harry of seeing to see if it was feasible, if it would be lucrative enough. It would be financially would float. And but she had tried this. She’d had actually gone as far as to have layout’s made when she was at Vanity Fair. But the depression came and then the magazine went defunct. As you probably know, it merged with Vogue eventually. And Vanity Fair was no more until it was resurrected in the 80s. The same name, different magazine rarely but use the name. And so she was more ahead in a way than Harry, in that way of thinking. And she started. Paris view and picture post in England. She knew how to do it. And she had hoped that if he did launch a magazine, they didn’t know what was going to be called at that point that she would get to edit it off. They were married. And in fact, when the editors that the TIME editors invited her to dinner one night, she thought seriously that they were going to offer her a job as an editor, but they didn’t want to work for two Lucie’s. And they made it perfectly clear they didn’t want her in the magazine. And she was devastated. And that’s when she went off and wrote her play, The Women in Revenge. And then the name Life came to Harry. It didn’t come to him, actually. It was his editor and Ralph Ingersoll, who, when Harry wrote a proposal for this picture magazine and he picked out the third word in the proposal, which was life, but to portray life as it is all around us. And she said, that’s your title and that’s why her life was born. It actually at that time, another magazine had had that name. So Harry had to actually buy the magazine and all the subscribers in order to appropriate the name.

Speaker Did she try to prevail on when she saw that she was being rejected by the TIME editors?

Speaker Did she try to hold sway over Harry to sue, to convince him that, above all, his loyalty should be to her?

Speaker Who knows what the pillow talk was. But I think there was a deep hurt and a deep resentment, which was lifelong because she felt that life was really her baby and they had talked about it on their honeymoon in Cuba. And he always said life would not have happened if it weren’t for Clere of Cuba because they did lay out done down down there even when they were on this yacht sailing. They even pinned up the layouts to the wall. She was obviously had great input into the development of that magazine. And so she was bitterly disappointed to be left out when it came to the launching of it. And as it turned out, as you probably know, it practically bankrupted Harry because it was so successful that they hadn’t charged high enough advertising rates for the numbers that they had to print. He’d budgeted for like 250000 is sold over 450000 or so, and it was costing them far more money than they were getting in revenue.

Speaker But they just hung in there until they could raise the rates the following year. And then, of course, it was a huge hit, the most successful of all his magazines.

Speaker So doubly bitter for her, of course.

Speaker What were what were Claire’s politics? These are politics with kindred spirits today.

Speaker Well, Claire actually was a Democrat, she voted for Franklin Roosevelt. And under the influence, of course, of Bernard Baruch, an early lover of hers, was an adviser to Roosevelt. And she’d even flirted in the early thirties, as many intelligent people of that era did with communism. She met Harry Bridges. She was friendly with her Lawrenson, whose husband was the head of the Maritime Union. So she flirted with extreme. Right. Right. Left wing socialism at that. At that point. But as she got rich after her settlement from the broken marriage, when she got almost half a million dollars, she grew more conservative as she had more to conserve. And when she met Harry, she said there was no way to be married to Harry and not be a Republican. It would have been too much dissension in the marriage.

Speaker So she just switched and was a lifelong Republican and ended up really quite to the right of the Republican Party and old age.

Speaker Would you say she was further away from Harry in old age?

Speaker I think she did, probably, yes. I think she did, because Harriet was capable of voting for somebody like Johnson, if he thought that that person would be better for the country. But I think Claire in old age probably could never voted for a Democrat.

Speaker So how did Clare contribute to Harry’s power? Was this a two way street in terms of the.

Speaker Yes, because you see, Harry was shy, Harry was introspective. Claire was the opposite. She was an extrovert, very outgoing, so she could draw people to their table and entertain them, even though she was not particularly interested in cooking or anything like that. She never could boil an egg even, but she knew how to do it from her years as a broker or matron of Newport. She knew how to entertain. So that was very useful to Harry because he liked to have intelligent people at his table and therefore they were complementary. In that case, he was the question asked. He was always so inquisitive about everything. I think it was Harry’s way of making up for his own lack of creativity. Claire was more creative in every way. But Harry made up for his lack of creativity by the acquisition of knowledge. So whenever he was around, anybody who knew something that he wanted to know. He knew the right questions to ask.

Speaker That was the real journalist in him, was he?

Speaker When she embarked on her own political career. Was he? I think we talked about this a little bit early. Was he supportive? Was just that she might take some of the power of the family away from him. How did you feel about her going?

Speaker Oh, he was extremely supportive of her, always wherever she wanted to do. Almost to the point of indulgence. At one point, he even thought of giving up his own career because he felt that this love was so great. And they had. He said they had the capacity in their love to soar to greatness together just on the quality of their relationship. And he even told his editors at one point that if he had to sacrifice his job time for Claire, he would be perfectly willing to do it. He thought the relationship was so important in the early years. And so he was always supportive of her playwriting, always supportive of anything that she did. What he didn’t like about Claire was her desire to be a celebrity.

Speaker He thought that she had the ability to have real fame. She had the qualities to succeed in anything, really she set her mind to do. But Claire toid always with celebrity. She wanted her name in the gossip columns, and Harry didn’t like that. He said, I don’t mind your name being in the papers to do with your work, but I don’t want your name in the paper just for the sake of being in the society columns. He didn’t want her to become column fodder. In other words. And he was right, really. So that was a difference between them. But I want to be like them when she ran fully behind it because I thought her true gift actually was not playwriting, but politics.

Speaker He’s he’s he thought that she was brilliant politician. Unfortunately, her temperament played against her in that regard because she’d only been in Congress a few weeks when she said politics is the refuge of second class minds. She didn’t want to do the nitty gritty constituency, work the politicking in order to get the bills that you cared about through playing both sides of the street. She was much too straightforward. She she couldn’t do that. She got bored with that very quickly. But in terms of policy making and ideas, she was up there with the best of them.

Speaker What about this? Very strident and I know it’s very famous speech that she made at the forty four Republican convention about G.I. Joe, about G.I. Joe. Yes.

Speaker She seemed to be very hard on Roosevelt, right in the middle of a war when she the first part of the quote she said about Roosevelt is the second part is always left left out. She said, Roosevelt lied us into a war into which he should have led us. That part is the second part of that quote is usually left off, Roosevelt lied us into war. Which, of course, got all the Democrats totally incensed. But actually, if you think about what she actually said, it was true that Roosevelt knew the country wasn’t ready for war. So he had to string them along the best way he could until he could convince the majority of the population that it was the right thing to do. So she became very unpopular for that particular remark and rather unjustly, I think, because you bring up a good point.

Speaker She was, in fact, Harry.

Speaker And I guess Claire two were were way ahead of Roosevelt in terms of wanting to get into the war as well.

Speaker At first they were a little bit isolationist. You know, they backed Wilkie against Roosevelt for a while there. And I think partly majority of Americans didn’t want to get into another war in Europe. But, of course, Pearl Harbor changed all that and it became academic after after after the December seven. But Claire, of course, also saw that the British had to be unburdened of their empire. She didn’t believe in the British Empire. So she didn’t want to go to war to defend the British Empire. She wanted to go to war if she had to go to war, to have a more equitable society, more equal society. And so people don’t quite understand that quite often about Claire is that she didn’t go to war for the status quo. She wanted to change the world if they had to fight.

Speaker Would you say is a fair, as you put it, is that Harry and Claire were kind of the Republican version of an answer to Franklin and Eleanor?

Speaker I suppose they could have been if Harry had run for secretary of state or something, which he often toyed with doing, and even for the Senate at one point. He thought of doing. But Harry was not a born politician. He hadn’t got the personality for it. He could not have done the baby holding Chucky under the chin of the old ladies and stuff. It was not his nature. And it was not really Claire’s nature either. But there was a if nothing, if not an actress. She could dissemble.

Speaker So anyway, I’m not so much in terms of running for office, but of being sort of the power couple of the Republicans versus the power couple.

Speaker Yes. And in many ways, as I said earlier, the the Time magazine and life was more powerful than the president in some ways because they had such a wide reach worldwide. Their magazines went round the world and they would be the opinion makers. So it’s true.

Speaker I think that in some ways they were even more powerful, perhaps, than the Roosevelts.

Speaker Have to remember that people don’t hear my questions. Yes, sir. What is the significance of Clara being appointed ambassador to.

Speaker It was a reward for contributions to Eisenhower’s campaign, really care was was nominated by by Eisenhower to go to Italy largely because Harry had been such a big, big contributor to his campaign. And also because of Claires abilities, there had been a two term congresswoman. She was a staunch Republican, great supporter of the party, had campaigned for Willkie and for other people. And she was a loyal Republican and able. So if any woman was going to be appointed to anything in a way, because it made her not focus, you see, on any one thing.

Speaker So she never got to the top of any particular tree because of that. She she always envied people like Sandra Day O’Connor, for example, Madam Curie, who got to the top of their particular tree because they were so focused. She could never stay focused because she had all these talents which were always pulling her in different directions and also the fear of failure. I think the reason she stopped writing plays, she always said it was she couldn’t write plays during the war because the kind of play she wrote, which was satirical, witty, rather acidly, which he plays, didn’t go down well in wartime. And so she switched to politics. But I secretly think that the real reason she gave up is that she knew she would never be Tennessee Williams or even Arthur Miller. She would never really get to the top as a playwright. She didn’t have that kind of tenacity to stay with it. And also money in a way corrupted her, because if nothing concentrates the mind more than poverty, if you’ve got to write a play and get it produced in order to live, you stay with that play. You do the rewrites. You keep on working at it. But, Claire, if it didn’t fly the first time, she could just abandon it because she’d never needed the money after she got that first settlement.

Speaker And go back to the ambassador. Yes. Was it significant also that she was a woman? Yes.

Speaker Yes. Because no woman had ever had such an important post. That is one of the big three or four Rome in Moscow. Paris. She was the first there had been women ambassadors to Luxembourg and to Norway, but never the top job. And she got it. She was the first she was a pioneer in that way. And at first the Italians were very macho, started, you know, resented it greatly. And particularly when they thought that she was Clare Luce, the actress. In fact, the Roman newspapers printed a picture of Claire, the actress being ravished by Marc Anthony in a production of Shakespeare, Cleopatra. And they thought that this was their ambassador, a former actress.

Speaker But they quickly learned she she made her mark immediately and even the embassy staff that had been skeptical of a woman being able to hold down that job within the first week, they were eating out of her hand. She was so bright. So on top of everything. And the Italians were also eating out of her hand. Italian diplomats, too, because she she was tough. She was very anti-communist. She told them they weren’t going to get aid. They got the communists out of the factories. She was a straight talker. But at the same time, she was very pro Italy. And once when one of their airlines went down, she flew home, Alitalia, you know, to to make a point that it was safe to fly Italian airlines. So they soon started to call her LA.

Speaker Luchi liked one and her husband very often, as the ambassador’s wife says, he loved it.

Speaker And he moved his operations to Rome. So he worked out of the Rome office for six weeks. And then he would come back to New York and work here for six weeks and went back and forth. And he just loved being her consort, as it were.

Speaker He never had any ego problems in that department because Harry was so successful at what he did. You see, it wasn’t, like clear he didn’t have those insecurities that she had because he’d had such a stable family life, a very strong, loyal religious family that were devoted to each other, had great relationships with his parents and with his sister.

Speaker And Claire didn’t have that. So she always had this feeling of insecurity, both intellectual and in family support.

Speaker She didn’t feel she had that. Was he?

Speaker This was the people tell the story about how Harry Reid sat at one end of the table and she would sit at the other end, in fact, he had a better time than she did. And being unranked, as it were.

Speaker Yes, it was a difficult. What’s the word protocol situation as to where Harry was going to be seated, because he he was not the chief person. So Claire was at the head of the table and he had to play the consort row, which he did willingly and with a great sense of humor. But of course, he also got to be seated next to the most dazzling women in Rome, which cost our Harry a lot of money, actually, because Claire was very much in the shadow of these countesses who had this fantastic family jewels that they would wear these dinner parties. So Harry often had to step up to the counter and buy Claire a nice bauble so that she could compete with the Roman aristocrats, including a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar string of pearls.

Speaker Now on tonight’s story about that. Well, he bought her in 1960, I think, of a fantastic string of personal tiff, and it was a long string of pearls. That was the fashion at the time. And they were real pearls. So over the years, because of the danger of loss, she would send them to Tiffany or wherever she happened to be living in Washington or Hawaii to have them restrung. And right at the end of her life, she had a very lovely Spanish maid and she said, you know, this is Lucille Pose are not sitting quite right in the box anymore.

Speaker They always fell so perfectly into shape. But now I sort of have to put push them into place before they sit in their box properly.

Speaker So they said, well, maybe I’ll send them back to Tiffany where they came from and have them restrung properly. So she did. Whereupon she got a phone call from the head of Tiffani’s and he said, Mrs. Lewis. He said, I don’t know where you’ve been having your purse restrung, he said. But eight of these pearls and not the originals. They lost somewhere along the loans line. Somebody had stolen eight of the original pearls, replace them with culture pearls. And she never knew it. So I was very interested to see that at the sale of her jewelry, those pearls still fetch the price of two hundred fifty thousand dollars was.

Speaker How did Harry get involved with.

Speaker Lady Jean Campbell, and how did that affect their.

Speaker Well, it happened in 1956 when Harry was doing the commute between Rome and New York. And he came back to do his stint one on time and found that time had employed in the religion department, of all places, the religion page lady Jean Campbell. Who was the daughter, the granddaughter, other of his good friend, Lord Beaverbrook? The British press lord who’s a Canadian actually by birth. And Jean Campbell was in about 28, 29 years old, and they fell in love. She was the love her. Harry was the love of Jeanne Campbell’s life. And they began an affair, and this went on for several years until 1959, when the press, who very much protected their own Pulitzer and Hearst and lose, they didn’t write in the columns about the peccadilloes of their their peers. But one day, Harry got a call when he said they were out. They’re great. They’re great. They’re Connecticut house. I think it was from Pullet or Hearst saying, Harry, the Paris newspapers are back to break the story of your relationship with Lady Jean Campbell because they had been seen dining at Maxim’s there in Paris. And he said, we can’t hold the story anymore. We can’t be scooped. We’re going to have to run it. And he said, well, there’s no truth in it. I’m right here with Claire right this minute. Claire was sitting there doing her needlepoint. But anyway, the upshot of it was that he she said to him, look, if you marry Lady Jean, then I will marry Lord Beaverbrook and I will become your lady. I will become your grandmother.

Speaker And there’s more to it than that, actually.

Speaker That was the witty face that she put on it. But of course, she was devastated, mostly because of her pride. Pride was deeply, deeply wounded, even though there had been no sexual relationship in that marriage for. By then, I suppose, 20, 30 years. And. But Harry made the decision in the end, I suppose, for the sake of the magazine, because it had already been one scandal when he just divorced his first wife in order to marry Claire, and he didn’t really feel that he could put the magazines through that again. So he made the decision to stay. There were other factors, but that I think was the primary one. And. So in old age, they grow old together. And I don’t think he had any regrets in the end that he’d made that choice. But it was devastating for Lady Jane, who told me that she went took a trip round the world because she couldn’t get over this romance. She was very deeply hurt by it. And Harriet always told her that. He said, if you ever see my picture on the cover of Time, you’ll know I’m dead. And I think she got off her steam around the world at one point, I think, in the Fiji Islands. And she went into a drugstore to pick up something. And they had a stack of TIME magazine there on the newsstand in the drugstore. And Harry’s picture was on the cover. So that’s how she learned that Harry died. And she was just devastated. She never got over it. I think it was a great love of her life.

Speaker What was the attraction for her and so much older than she was?

Speaker She adored her grandfather. He was father, grandfather and lover to her. And, of course, their shared passion for journalism. She she was an aspiring journalist, too. So they had tremendous amount in common. And I think it was a true love affair actually mentioned.

Speaker This takes me back a little bit the first time straight, which, of course, was with Claire. What was the what was the effect of that of his of the Kouda food, as you call it, on his family and on his his were, you know, growing empire.

Speaker Lyla Luce was an extremely charming and sweet and tender woman, but she was no match for Claire intellectually, and I think Harry had always been looking for an intellectual as well as a soulmate. And although he had no grievance against Lyla, she’d always been a perfectly dutiful and loyal wife. The passion for Claire was so overwhelming, coupled as it was not only with a physical attraction to her, but this overwhelming intellectual compatibility that they shared that he just was miserable in his home life after that. And even though he loved his two young children, he just simply felt he couldn’t stay in all honesty. And Lyla was smart enough to understand that. And big hearted enough, magnanimous enough to let him go. And I think if it hadn’t been for the lawyers who get into the act and start to wrangle over the finances in any divorce, she would have had a perfectly amicable divorce and would have been perfectly happy with any settlement that he wanted to make. But there were a few glitches along the way. As soon as the lawyers came on board and started to ask for more of a settlement. They wanted more money upfront rather than gradually over the years as he’d wanted to pay it out. They practically bankrupted him in time. At one point he hardly had any cash because she wanted not only the house in the New Jersey, but also in the apartment in New York. But at two million cash, which he had helped to pay out over a number of years. So it grew a little rancorous in there for a while, but they got over that and they remained devoted friends until his death. He still used to go round and see Lyla and talk to her and write a nice note with great affection.

Speaker Was he being the religious man? Was he was it guilty? Did he feel guilty about what he was doing?

Speaker Oh, immensely guilty. Because Harry was a Calvinist at heart. You know, he was a real diehard Christian Presbyterian and he shared that with Beaverbrook.

Speaker In fact, Beaverbrook was the man other than Churchill that you probably most admired because of Beaverbrook ability to carry out various affairs without it interfering with his conscience too much. Harry aspired to that, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

Speaker It always bothered Harry. He was a deeply moral man. So it always problem that he had to have any divorce at all. But his love of Claire was just too overwhelming.

Speaker You know, Claire, and I’m fascinated by this, too, and I wonder if you can read kind of this for me.

Speaker Claire asked Harry about why he was having a 40 year anniversary party for time rather than a fiftieth anniversary or according you call.

Speaker I don’t remember that offhand, but what his reason was for it?

Speaker Well, his reason was that.

Speaker Sixty three. Oh, why didn’t he be there? Oh, yes, of course, yes. That would have been in 1963. And Harry, of course, as we know, died and four years later. So he was already feeling the effects, I think, of a lifetime of heavy, heavy smoking and. He was ordered drunk, Harry, not an alcoholic, but he was like many people in the culture of that time.

Speaker Certainly the journalistic culture who drank pretty heavily. Hard liquor. And he had he suffered from a hardening of the arteries, as many people do, who smoke. And he was ever interested in food, particularly. So I don’t think that he suffered from an excess of too much fat or anything like that. But he must have felt not too well. Some mornings when he woke up from the combination of tobacco and alcohol. So he he probably did feel that he wouldn’t be around. And he was right, of course.

Speaker Was what was their relationship like after Lady Jean when she threatened to divorce him? He finally decided it wasn’t worth it. How was it how did Harry and Claire get on after?

Speaker Marriage was an extremely strained for a couple of years there. I would say 1959 to 62. It rankled with care, of course, always forever more that this man that she had thought that she loved and loved. Probably as deeply as she could have loved anyone, given her her personality and her faulty parenting and all the things that went with her childhood. But I think they got through it with the help of a religious. A monk. Father John Courtney Murray, who became a great friend of both her and Harry, and he helped them both through it. He listened to them. He was almost more than a confessor. He was almost a psychotherapist with them. They talked endlessly. They wrote him endless letters about it. And they just worked through it to the point that once they had decided to try and make a go of it and stay together in old age in Phoenix, where they moved for so that Harry could get some more exercise, miniature golf courses built built more states in Phoenix. They lived right on the back of the golf course. They had a quite amicable old age. And at one point, apparently, Harry got quite amorous with Claire as though he were trying to restore some kind of physical relationship. But she said, no, she couldn’t. She could only just have a friendship from then on, a deep friendship, but knows no sexual relationship.

Speaker So people are friends, kept them together physically together.

Speaker It was this it was a shared passion for ideas, really.