Anne Clare Boothe was born on April 10, 1903 in New York City. Her father was a violinist and businessman and her mother had been a dancer. Clare studied for a short while at the Clare Tree Major's School of the Theatre in New York. During the teens and through the twenties she was very active in the Suffrage movement. She married George Tuttle Brokaw, a clothing manufacturer, in 1923 and they divorced in 1929. Claire became Associate Editor for Vanity Fair in 1930. Between 1934 and 1940, after she resigned from working with Vanity Fair, she wrote plays that were produced on Broadway and some were made into movies. During her career as a playwright she met and married Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time and Fortune magazines.
In 1940, just as the Second World War was breaking out, she wrote and published a book about her travels in Europe titled "Europe in the Spring". By 1942, she was fully involved in wartime politics and ran for and was elected as a Representative in Congress for Connecticut's Fourth District. She remained in the political sphere the rest of her life. She was the second woman to be the ambassador to Italy, serving from 1953 to 1957.
After the untimely death of her 19 year-old daughter, she faced a spiritual struggle over the compassion and mercy of God. She turned to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen for spiritual advice. Through her struggle she became a Roman Catholic in 1946 and her writing energies thereafter focused on the spiritual life. She wrote the screenplay for a movie on the lives of two nuns, "Come to the Stable," that received an Oscar nomination for Best Motion Picture of the year 1949.
Clare Boothe Luce died in Washington, DC on October 9, 1987.
The Theatre Collection consists of notebooks and scrapbooks collected and compiled by Clare Boothe Luce. These contain announcements, programs, and review clippings from musical and theatrical life (including both classical and popular music) in the United States from 1891 to 1919.
The Clare Boothe Luce Theatre Collection consists of 1 Series:
Collection may be restricted due to fragile scrapbook pages.
The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives:
The Library of Congress:
This record series is indexed under the following controlled access subject terms.
Donated by Clare Boothe Luce in [1973?].
Processing completed in July, 2000 by A. Agnew. EAD markup completed in May 2006 by Cathey Dugan.
Series 1 contains the personal scrapbooks and notebooks of Clare Boothe Luce. These contain announcements, programs, and review clippings from musical and theatrical life (including both classical and popular music) in the United States from 1891 to 1919.