about political campaigns. i have been through four .residential campaigns both candidates inevitably are drawn by the diversified nature of their part to compromise a little. this is true always of both candidates. that general eisenhower had made no more compromises to bring all the divergent elements of one great artie together -- great party together. to some voters, this is disillusioning. two people who understand politics, it is the nature of our two-party system. >> sylvia jukes morris, your second book on clare boothe luce starts where? 1952, i don't know what month that was but in november of 1952, eisenhower appointed her ambassador to italy. she had always wanted a position like that because she loved italy. she had been there many times. she had been during the war and also as a terrorist. -- a touruiist. the book doesn't begin there. the last book ended where she was elected to congress. describes herok arrival at union station in january of 1943 as a representative from connecticut. >> why is clare boothe luce worth two large books written by you? >> i don't know that it is about worthiness. it is more about interest. she was such a multifaceted person, had so many are compliments, too many for her own good really. of a lack of what you would call -- she never got a university degree, she was always afraid at every job that she was going to be found out that she was unqualified. that is why she changed professions so often. who writing about a woman had nine lives, not just one. i just got so intrigued by how she got to where she got, which was to congress. >> you were here 17 years ago. you said that you had done most of the research for the second book. why did it take 17 years? >> i had done most of the research at the library of congress because all the papers had been deposited there. research on the state department. the problem was that many of the papers were still classified. hawaii tod gone to work on mrs. luce's personal papers. she kept every scrap from the day she was born practically. never threw anything away. all her diaries, letters, analysis of herself which she frequently wrote. i had seen them and they were to be shipped to the library of congress for me to work on them there. i didn't have time to xerox everything. i waited and waited for them to come. she was still alive and they never came. we thought they were lost at sea. when she died, i got a call from somebody who was clearing out a warehouse in washington where she had stowed a lot of furniture she didn't need. he said, you won't believe this, that trunk with all the papers is here. it is clearly labeled but it was shipped to the warehouse. i thought they were lost and i was really desperate. all the really important stuff was in that trunk. the personal stuff which gave an idea of the real clare. that is why the book took so long. there is a new book of letters of robert frost. they say there is so much more in it now than the original edition. time goes by. wasatch us up with who she and the number of different things she did. >> she began by wanting to be an actress. she liked the glamorous life. she liked being in front of the camera, on the stage. also, she liked the fact that actresses if they were successful became wealthy. her mother who had always thought that money was the most important thing in the world because she didn't have any, encouraged that. before she was in her teens, she got a part under studying mary pickford in a broadway play. -- a tasteistaste for life behind the lights. she was a major character as a 13-year-old in a thomas edison movie. she went out to new jersey and made this film. it was called "heart of the waif." she really wasn't an actress. i think she was a bit too concerned with her own persona rather than the persona of the person she was supposed to be playing. she realized maybe her real talent was writing for the theater or the movies. she started to write plays in her teens. by the time she was 33 years old, she had written one melodrama which was a flop, and then she had this immense " which with "the women went on to become a major film russell and itnd is still played today constantly on television. >> she was born in new york city and she died in south carolina? >> she died actually in washington. -- it was aed plantation actually in south carolina. near what was called monks corner. in the end, she and henry louis paid for the plantation, she persuaded him after she converted to catholicism, to give it to the trappist monks. it is still a monastery. henry louis put it in his will that he wanted to be buried there too even though he was a presbyterian. she didn't know that until she saw the will. mother whor and her were killed in car accidents -- >> what did her father do? >> the father began wanting to be a violinist. with a name like william booth, it is hard to make it in that field in those days. he never had much success. so he went into the music business, the manufacturing of pianos. he was quite successful in philadelphia for many years. becamepiano business, he a salesman. i never found evidence that the parents were actually married. i could never find a marriage certificate. i found a letter that she wrote to harry which says, i was born probably illegitimate. she was bornaimed on riverside drive in new york city. actually, she was born in spanish harlem. how did she become a republican? she started out a democrat. >> she did. one of her early lovers was the so-called advisor to fdr. i don't know how much he did actually advise him. married with children. he fell in love with her and she -- he was a democrat and he took her to the 1932 convention where fdr was nominated and then went on to become president. for many years, she followed that life of a liberal. but she said after she married luce, there was no way she could not be a republican. there would be nothing but arguments in the house. so she converted at that point. as you probably found, her voting record in congress as a republican from connecticut was extremely liberal. immigration, the chinese and indians. she was against the colonial powers like britain. bill.s very much pro-g.i. she was also, what was the other generous tolly more people who didn't have anything. the taxes would be raised on the rich. >> in your book, you talk about a dinner that you had with her near the end of her life. one of those at the dinner was pat buchanan. if you walk outside the studio, the heritage foundation has a room dedicated to clare boothe luce. , that veryt happen conservative place would honor her that way? >> she got more conservative as she got older. in my first volume, i said that clare became more conservative when she had more to conserve. , sheshe got rich herself was less happy about the taxman coming. >> how long was her first marriage? >> the first marriage lasted for six years. it was to a fifth avenue millionaire who made a major fortune during the civil war. he was more than twice her age at 44 years old. she was 20 when they married. her mother tried to marry her off to the prince of wales. unfortunately, their luggage got delayed and she never got to drink with the prince of wales. given that he married an american avenue until they, it wasn't as far fetched as it seems. >> how long was she married to henry luce? 1935 and heied in died in 1967. they stayed married, although it was a troubled marriage in many ways. was not a sexual relationship after the first couple of years. he had problems physically, but also he put her on such a pedestal that she was like a madonna figure. he found it very hard to have sexual relations with her. >> she was in congress for how long? >> she was in congress for two terms. >> what did she do as a congressperson from connecticut that made the headlines? >> it was not a voting record that was stellar. candid enough to say when she made her last speech in congress. it was a democratic hunger is. it is very difficult for a republican to get things through. >> what did she do after she was in congress? >> after she left congress, she was hoping to go back to the theater. by then she had had three broadway hits. all three were made into movies and were successful. she had to go back but she found that the kinds of plays she ,rote, which were satirical rather at citic wit -- acidic wit, she found that hard to do after what she had seen in world war ii. her particular gift was that. to go back to writing melodrama, she wasn't really equipped to do. she simply couldn't write the funny comedies anymore. she then went on the lecture circuit. she used to do a lot of public speaking. then she converted to catholicism. .hen she got back into writing she went back to hollywood. she had already written a play about china before she went to congress but it was never made. million"lled "the 400 which is interesting because their population is now 1.4 billion. that never was made into a movie. in the 1940's, she tried to -- one devilwis is trying to make the other more effective in making christiansen built -- christians sinful. they realized it was rather heavy stuff. it wasn't something for hedy lamarr. why did sheshe and convert to catholicism? reason was,he major she felt like her life had grown crummy. wasink a lot of it because the war. she was so disillusioned with human nature, the horrors she had seen. she was at the opening of the camps. killed, daughter was she got into such a deep depression to be suicidal. >> how was her daughter killed? >> it was a really ironic that in a way. clare was speaking in san francisco and anne was a student at stanford. she went up to see her mother in san francisco. they stayed the night together and had dinner. a late sleepers because she was up half the night writing. she said, tomorrow, you go on ahead back to campus and i will join you for lunch. ann caught a ride with a friend of hers who had a little convertible car. they've drove to palo alto together. it was approaching 9:00. out of the side street which came a car at tremendous speed, somebody late for work. as they crossed the intersection, he hit the rear end of their car. wasdoors opened and ann thrown against a tree and the car careened into the tree and squashed her against it. she was dead almost instantly. >> how old was she? >> 19. she was about to graduate early. she was graduating stanford that spring. to these oldack black-and-white tapes of a program that aired back in the 50's. it is the best record we have of being able to see her. let's watch some more and have you analyze her some more. >> the great dispute going on is to whether women are more intelligent than men. it will be interesting to see what the women do in this election because they have more votes to cast. all the polls show that women will prove they are more intelligent than men because more women are in the surveys voting for eisenhower. >> why do you think more women will vote for general eisenhower? >> because women have a better instinct about character. concerned at a mental level with the issues, but they are very concerned with what kind of a man, what kind of character he has. i know that women instinctively feel enormous trust in eisenhower's capacity to lead them and their nation and their families to a better america. >> she is talking about character. storiesk is full of dalliances with men and her husband, to the point where it is a bit exhausting. [laughter] when we talk about this 17 years ago about the first book, where did those folks get off thinking that they were full of moral character when they were constantly fooling around? >> it is a dichotomy, isn't it? people really want to be faithful i think in their relationships, but the sexual urge i suppose is very great. the opportunities arise if you are traveling and you are away from home as she was. also, she was so beautiful and so smart and so witty. she was always irresistible to men. richardher old age, cohen the washington colonist was at this party, and they were having coffee. at one point, she began to stroke his beard. sn said, i have never met 80-year-old-- an that i wanted to leap into bed with. she had this seductive quality her entire life. her mother had it too. i was interesting in the shot you just put because she talked about thinking. someone said, you think like a man. she said, thought has no sex. she always didn't like the idea pandering because of her sex. >> how many days do you think you personally spent with her? >> the last seven years of her life. i moved to washington to be inse because i had to work the library of congress. also, she had an apartment at the watergate and i went to hawaii to stay with her their too. we even went to london for the anniversary of the production of "the women." we went a week before it opened. we were sitting at the table and she said, there are very few plays you put on after 50 years. possibly shakespeare. she had a sense of her own worth. >> what was your relationship? there is a scene near the end of her life where you are at her home and you take her into the bedroom, kiss her good night and you talk about that in the book. it sounds like you were very close. >> we got close because at one point she was staying at a hotel before she got her watergate apartment. she was sick and she didn't have a made. she was actually a loan. she said, could you stay with me? my husband and i moved in until the new help came. i ended up preparing her breakfast, lunch and dinner for a few days. at that point, i think she felt vulnerable. she started to open up to me about her first marriage, the death of her daughter, all of the things which affected her life. >> what was your number one source of -- this is full of quotes from her. it is full of the actual stories about henry luce's affairs, her affairs, where did you find it all? >> i interviewed the lovers. henry luce at that point had two lovers or three actually. he had a slight fling with pamela harriman for example. libertyrymple who was a -- literary agent. he had a longtime relationship with her. she said it wasn't consummated, i have no proof of that. the third relationship certainly was. was half campbell who his age. >> before you tell that story, luce did what? >> he started out straight out of yale with a college friend and together they raised money to start a magazine. it was going to be called facts and then they changed it to time . as we know, time was a huge success. he then founded life magazine and then -- not architectural digest, i forget the last name. it was a construction magazine which was about finance. harry was left with the whole company and he just went from strength to strength. >> when he died, the euro member how much he was worth? >> it was over $100 million but he had given a lot of it away. he gave a lot to the henry luce foundation. he didn't have quite as much money to leave as he would have done. >> that would have been in the 1960's? >> in the late 1960's, he died. >> where were the houses? that pointes, at they had houses in connecticut, phoenix, and of course a new york apartment. usually at the waldorf. they did buy an apartment toward the end of harry's life. >> here is a quote from your book. drooped from his potbelly she cringed at the sight of harry ambling about the deck in shorts that drooped from his potbelly, faded sneakers with smearing spectacles perched on his nose. he was now so deaf that he needed a hearing aid." >> harry didn't care about anything really except work. she put him together and make -- he was an incens ssant chain-smoker and he was always covered in ash. that she hadso old to go out and buy new ones for him. as for the sox, he was allergic to wool so he always wore silk socks. the problem was that sometimes he put -- he even went out in odd shoes on occasion. he cared so little about his appearance. food too. he never cared what he ate. >> did you get that from an interview? at one point,d why do i want to cling so tenaciously to this man? if you look at him, he is rude in his manners, he is disheveled. she tried to analyze it. she wrote down a lot about his faults. campbell, who was she and where did henry luce meet her? >> lady jean campbell was the granddaughter of lord beaverbrook. he was from canada but he founded the daily mail and the evening standard. he became lord beaverbrook. jean's parents had multiple divorces and she was a neglected child. she clung to her grandfather and live the love of her life with her grandfather who had a house in jamaica. he kept a house in new brunswick in canada and also a country house and a london apartment. she was used to a luxurious life. she actually didn't have any money of her own until he died ,nd left her 500,000 pounds which seems like a lot then. as she got older, it was worth less and less. harry and clare first met in jamaica when she went to stay with lord beaverbrook. highly intelligent. as the years went by, harry would go to europe alone without clare and he would meet lady jean at her grandfather's houses. at one point, he just fell in love with her. came back home and told his confidant, a woman called mary bancroft who was the daughter of the founder of the wall street journal. she would have liked to have had an affair but he never did it with her. he said, i really liked this girl and want to marry her. he really wanted to divorce clare and marry this 29-year-old girl. >> why didn't he? >> i don't know whether to give away the plot too much. a heavynt into depression and attempted suicide. he realized that he couldn't be responsible for that. but the affair continued off and on for many years. it had been going on for three years before clare even found out about it. it was really a true love story. she was so devastated when he told her finally, we can't be together. she wanted to have children, so she didn't want to continue the affair. in a rash moment, she went to a party and met norman mailer and got pregnant by him. eventually married him. it was a short-lived marriage, only lasted a year. harry always told her, if you ever see my picture on the cover of time magazine, you will know i am dead. she was trying to get over her love for henry luce. she took a cruise around the world. she got off the ship in fiji and went to a drug store and saw on the newsstand, a copy of time magazine with his picture on the cover. she knew that he died. accent the by your right way, born and raised in great britain. where did she get what sounds like an accent? was mannerhink she born. she had very cultivated, almost british tones for her voice. was nothing if not theatrical. she could imitate people. i think she decided that she was going to speak like an aristocratic brit. >> is this the way she spoke to you when she wasn't with lights on her? >> yes. sometimes she would just be funny and do accents and things like that, but she always spoke pretty well as you see her speak publicly. >> this is again from 1952. >> i think it is so important an the counter barrage, the smokescreen of mccarthyism has been set up to hide the terrible issue from the public. policiesson's foreign were directly responsible for the loss of china, the handing over of china to the communists, and the fact that our boys are now fighting these people in korea. that when history writes the record of appeasement, the loss of 100 million people a year behind the iron curtain, the loss in treasure and in blood to our people, that we have suffered under dean acheson will be a very black book in history. >> it is interesting how she talks about, we lost china. like we ever owned it. we talk now about like we lost iraq. we never owned iraq. it was the way they thought then. they thought anybody who became communist was lost to civilization. 1952, you say she became the ambassador to italy. how did she get the job? >> well, because she gave a lot of money to ik's campaign and so did henry luce. >> her money or his money? -- butwould always say it was usually from harry's pocket. they both expected to be rewarded with a post. harry would have liked to be secretary of state. of course, he was not political by nature. hold babies and be playful on the campaign trail. there was no way he would ever become a politician. it was left to her and she was summoned by ike when he had an office at the commodore hotel. he was appointing people to the u.n., all these diplomatic posts. he summoned her and she didn't know what he was going to offer. he said, would you like to be secretary of labor? the first woman cabinet minister under fdr had been secretary of labor. said, i realized when i was in congress that i wasn't too good handling the unions. i wouldn't be a good candidate for that. niceaid, london would be but i believe it has already been given. he said, what about rome? that was secretly what she was hoping for. and she got it. been women ambassadors to post before. luxembourg, norway, minor posts. -- we have about video clip just so people who don't remember him, and he was prominent on television. here he is. how long was this show, 30 minutes? >> i never actually saw it live. i don't know. it was probably half an hour. >> we have one that is in color here. >> millions watched it. >> he ended up being the bishop of rochester, new york. here is fulton j shane. isthe title of this telecast what holds us together. we are in an entirely different age. our new task is quite different. is how to prevent ourselves from going to pieces. in other words, ever since we split the atom, people are split. nationalities, social groups. all the as if almost rubik's have fallen apart. >> you could see from that why he and clare got on so well. they are both theatrical. >> how much time did they spend together? >> she was the longest convert that he had ever worked with. took the longest time. she was so intellectually brilliant that she had to have all the answers to everything before she could convert. only took three weeks i believe. took many, many months. tohow close did she get bishop shane? >> very close. he always adored her and said she was the smartest woman that he had to teach. >> you talk about other priests that she got very close to. >> father murray, another great intellectual priest too. he in fact saved her life. one of her suicide attempts took place when he was in the house. becausehe did it then she hoped to be rescued -- we don't know. but he became her savior at that point. he watched her very closely from then on and was very instrumental in keeping the marriage to harry from going all the way to divorce. >> what is the story about the lst? father murray took some lsd according to you. >> it began in the late 1950's because people thought this particular drug was going to be useful in treating schizophrenics, depressives, criminals. they thought it was a benign drug. many experiments were made. one doctor who worked with the veterans hospital in california, dr. sidney cohen was interested in its effects on people of high creativity. e of course was a candidate for that. she actually was not part of the program per se. she got the drug through a man who sometimes worked with coh en who was not a doctor, a berlin --a british philosopher. it was he and his partner who administered it. she only later on got the drug from cohen. you could not buy it in the early days. you could only get it from a laboratory in switzerland. it was only when people did begin to buy it and have bad trips and jump out of windows and everything that in 1965 it was made illegal. clare didn't take it after that but she took it for several years before. she quite liked it. >> itchy ever get in trouble with it? >> she didn't but her stepson had a really bad trip and never wanted to do it again. harry had quite a benign trip a couple of times. he imagined he was conducting an orchestra. when you were here 17 years ago, your husband lived in this town part-time. you had a townhouse right over on capitol hill. what has happened in your life for the last 17 years and do you have a place here anymore? >> not in washington. leaving washington broke my heart because i loved that house on capitol hill. after 9/11, the world changed. camp.ll became an armed everybody in congress and the lived rightt, we alongside the library of congress, it became like an armed camp because they started to close off the streets. i wantedy husband nor to live that way. and we always had an apartment in new york. we found a house in connecticut that happened to have a concrete basement. by then, we had accumulated so many papers and documents, they were spilling over into our garage. it wasn't safe. this house having this concrete basement was a big draw for us. we got it in connecticut. >> what is life like -- you have no children, but the two of you have written for a living from the beginning of your relationship. what are the pluses and minuses? do you work together in the same spot? >> we began in our new york apartment working back-to-back at two desks in one room. we have the house, we had a different room on different floors. the same applied in connecticut. garagea study over the and he has won on the upper floor of the house. in new york, we have a slightly bigger apartment. it has a balcony. i work up on the balcony and he works at the back of the apartment. we are quite separate. the only disadvantage of both being writers is that there is nobody really to play the supporting role. books you are between and we never seem to be between books. that is the disadvantage i would say. of course, if you are a writer and you share that skill, it is toy nice to have somebody have a final take on it. that is an advantage. >> what was harder on you, when she died or when you've finished your last word of your last book about her? >> when she died, i had seen her recently. one morning at 9:00, the phone rang. it was her secretary. she said clare died in the night. i had a thump in the heart. i rushed over to the apartment. the body had been taken away so i didn't see her dead. i had spent much time with her in the last year of her life. she became uncharacteristically absent-minded. she left her purse at the theater one night. she lost her room key at the hotel. one morning, when i went to wake her for breakfast, i couldn't get her to open the door. when she finally came, she said she had to take a valium because she couldn't sleep. i helped her dress and said, the trouble with you is you want to do more than your body will allow. she said, yes. that is why i am so sad. we got back to america. she called and said, guess what, i have got a brain tumor. it was rapid, the growth. she died in october that year. it was really sad to see that the klein. the woman had been so intellectually brilliant and curious. she always wanted the latest gadgets and knew how to operate them, which i never did. what was your reaction when you wrote your last word? how many total pages? >> i cut 100 pages from that book. i had so much material. i knew that people didn't want door stoppers. nobody has the rhyme -- the time to read these books. it is still quite dense. a lot of stuff i had to cut from the endnotes. it was such a good story i couldn't leave it out and they end up in the endnotes. >> when did you write the last word? >> i wrote the last word on july 25 last year. it took almost a whole year to publish the book. copy editing, getting the pictures, you have to get so many permissions now too. everybody you quote, you have to get permission from their ancestors. in some cases, for example general willoughby who clare had the affair with, he only married afterclare wouldn't marry him, he had an illegitimate child. person. track down that he had died and i had to track down the grandchildren. it took many months just to get the permissions to use the quotations that i used in the book. you are only allowed to quote 11 words without getting permission. >> did you get turned down by anybody? >> the only person who ever turned me down was for volume one. that was a quote of a letter from randolph churchill. he was madly in love with clare . he proposed every time he saw her. i had to get permission from his son, winston churchill junior. i had to show him the letters i wanted to quote. he said no. he was the only one. i ended up having to paraphrase those letters and use just the 11 most crucial words without having to get permission. >> if i got it right, on page 99 she says, julian simpson remained the only man i ever loved. who was julian simpson? >> julian simpson appears in volume one. she met him on one of her trips to europe where her mother was trying to marry her off to european royalty. , handsomethis dashing captain who fought in world war i. they fell for each other. toeven hired a rolls-royce drive them to southampton. they were quoting poetry to each other on the way down. he came to america to visit her. her mother said, this man is just in the army. he doesn't have any money. you have to marry somebody rich. so he went home disappointed. but they corresponded for a while. they never saw each other until he came to america. she tried to see him during the war but he went back to europe during world war ii. i think he got into the spy business and he was in palestine for a while. up when she was working in california. somehow he found her and shhe was 50 years old. in her mind's eye, she was -- he was still a dashing captain. he had obviously become quite a drinker. she was deeply disappointed. unbeknownst to her, he had actually married somebody in australia. that woman had died after a while. i tracked him down and found a cousin that knew him in australia. he said that he actually died in the homosexual quarter of sydney. in his will, which i also got a copy of, julian simpson left his money to, my dear friend somebody, and admiral in the navy. it seemed that part of their problem was he was bisexual and he was never strong enough to just snatch her away and say to hell with your mother. he had this dual nature apparently. >> here is 1970. this is firing live that william buckley used to have on television. she appears on this program. >> i think there is no evidence whatsoever as of now that president nixon is or will become a great president. but i take a rather simplistic view of what a great man is. man is alwayst the author of a unique and significant action. the extraordinary thing is, or so seems to me, that a great man can be described by his unique actions. sentenceut this in one , you don't even have to know the man's name. for example, he died on the cross to save us. discover a route to the old world and found a great new world. armies andthe rebel for his mother country, founding a great nation. >> what are you hearing there? >> she is repeating herself, actually. she once went to the white house during the cuba crisis. jfk invited her down for a chat. really he wasn't getting the kind of press in time magazine that he would have liked to be getting. might haveclare some influence at the magazine. she actually didn't. aboutuld talk to harry various things and hope it might make its way into the magazine, but there was no guarantee. jfk invited her for a chat and she began to tell him what was wrong with his cuba policy. why are you fighting a war in vietnam against the communists when you want to fight castro 90 miles off our florida shores? he didn't like being talked to like that. he said, things are very different once you are in the white house. so that's meeting didn't go well. it was at that meeting where she said, you have to be known by a single sentence. like abraham lincoln freed the slaves. you have to have something you are going to be remembered for. i wonder what it'd going to be. he said, what i am more interested in is not having to drop a nuclear bomb. be the first to president to drop a nuclear bomb. it was a contentious meeting. she is rather repeating that idea of a single sentence to finding you. >> you found this in an oral history. a president have to be the average man's idea of his father. ike could have been anybody's father. truman, easy to imagine as an uncle. kennedy was like your husband, your sweetheart. dewey and stevenson had been brother-in-law types. nixon had the same liability. he was even cousinly. [laughter] >> she had it in a nutshell there. she had a relationship with lyndon johnson, with richard nixon, john kennedy. did she have a relationship with john kennedy's father? >> yes, they had a romantic relationship actually. while he was married to rose kennedy. he had many relationships. europe when hen was ambassador. "europee a book called in the spring." she stayed with him in his country place. they go way back. concerned,ixon was she always liked nexen and he liked her. there was a moment and had a seriousike illness and they thought, there is no way he is going to come back from this and be president. xon will have to take over. when nixon runs again, he will probably choose clare boothe luce as his running mate. she would have been the first vice president female. as we know, it didn't turn out that way. ike came back and nexen got defeated against jfk. wrote his nixon memoir, he said the one person who could have been president as a woman was clare boothe luce. she had all the qualifications. >> near that same quote, you say that clare's sons from a former the same is that william hurt in the movies? >> hank luce married his second wife, a woman who had been married to mr. hurt. she had two sons. it was william who went on to be the great movie star. i think he is fantastic actually. he became her step grandson i suppose. >> have you got another book you are writing? >> no, i spent the whole year finishing this one. now i am on the road publicizing it. that will go on more or less to the year. >> you have another book you think you want to write? >> not so far. my theory about biography is that the subject finds you. it happened with my husband several times and happened to me both times too. was a wonderful accident of history have it came about. >> how did edith roosevelt's biography start with you? >> my husband was writing about theodore roosevelt. when i was helping him type on the old typewriters, i said, you don't have much in this book about the wife, the second wife. he said, there is nothing known about her. i said, there must be something. that is when i started to investigate her. i found a lot of correspondence from her. it was a character waiting to be discovered. lorensen's profile of clare boothe luce came when? >> that was in 1974. she asked clare if she could borrow $10,000. clare said, i don't think you can pay me back but i will give you two point $5,000. she went off and wrote that clare inhich shows rather a bad light. summarize theo major events of her life, accusing her of -- >> yes. women, many of whom didn't like her or were envious of her, and the men who were totally seduced by her. churchill sent her her first painting set and they became quite good friends. >> you make another list, the next page. so many friends and lovers have died. who was chavez and was he a lover? >> that is for debate. chavez was the most brilliant mexican composer who ever lived, and could be one of the most brilliant composers anywhere. romemet at the gallery in where clare was indulging her love of that country. she was looking at a renaissance painting and he stood beside her and started a conversation. turned out he lived in new york in the 1920's and was a close friend of aaron copland and other modern composers. he even conducted the symphony orchestra. this was a well-traveled musician. he fell in love with her. she went to visit him in mexico. he have a wife who was a concert pianist. he said, we cannot be lovers. we cannot marry. but he still remained with her and the friendship continued until the late 1970's, when he died. they corresponded and he would come to see her. he ended up writing a symphony dedicated to her daughter, which clare commissioned and paid him for. it is symphony number three, which is considered his best work. ann. the one dedicated to >> after all is said and done and you spend a lot of your life thinking and writing about clare boothe luce, what is your favorite moment? >> with her? or in her life? her, the highest point i think would be when we went to canada to see a at theion of "the women" shakespeare festival in canada. then of course a highlight would have been seeing -- >> what is a moment you don't like to run member? >> i think her death is the moment i most regret. i admired her so much. she had her faults. she was narcissistic and she would be the first to admit that, but could be a monster too. overall, i think you just had to admire her accomplishments considering where she started out. died in 1987. the name of the book is "price of fame." our guest has been sylvia jukes morris. thank you very much. ♪ transcripts or to give us your comments, visit us -a.org.d [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> next, president obama meeting with young african leaders. then a conversation with former missouri congressman todd akin. at 11:00 p.m., another chance to see "q&a." the british parliament is in recess this month. "prime minister's questions" will not be seen tonight. president obama announced new efforts to expand the program and renamed it the mandela washington fellowship. it is made up of 500 of promisingn african young leaders. students attend a program focusing on entrepreneurship, civic leadership, and public management. the summit was held prior to president obama hosting african heads of state this week at the white house. his townhall with the young leaders ran just over one hour.