I have to tell you about my long affair with Clare Boothe Luce – although “affair” might be the wrong word to describe my connection with Mrs. Luce, seeing as how she has been dead for most of the time I’ve known her and, when alive, was never aware of my existence.

I first became acquainted with CB (I call her CB) during my teenage years. On a whim I decided to learn how to play backgammon. Because no one I knew played the game, I went to the nearest public library and checked out “Vanity Fair’s Backgammon to Win,” which was co-authored by someone by the name of Clare Boothe Luce. I liked both the book and Mrs. Luce’s quirky personality. While teaching myself backgammon, I played imaginary matches with CB. Later, I taught my youngest sister, Margie, to play. Despite being only eleven years old, Margie turned out to be a pretty good little backgammonist. When we played together, I always pretended that Margie was Mrs. Luce. I even called her CB and told her that it meant Champion of Backgammon.

One night, I caught a late-show broadcast of the classic 1939 film “The Women” and saw in the credits that it was based on a play by Clare Boothe Luce. What a thrill it was to discover that my backgammon buddy was a famous playwright! I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d discovered that Margie had been secretly playing third base for the Oakland A’s. At this point, I thought about writing a letter to CB and thanking her for teaching me the game of backgammon. But I never got around to it.

Years passed, I put away the backgammon board, moved away from home, and got married. Every now and then, I would run across some mention of CB in a book or magazine. I discovered that she was the originator of the expression, “No good deed goes unpunished.” I learned that she appeared in Thomas Alva Edison’s single-reel film “The Heart of a Naïf” when she was only twelve and competed in the Olympic swimming trials at the age of 17. I learned that she was an editor of Vanity Fair magazine when she was still in her early twenties and that she appeared in a Broadway play with Fred Astaire before he became a household name. I learned that she wrote the first play in the history of Broadway to feature an all-female cast and that she won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives at the age of 39. Her beauty was so striking that legendary photographer Edward Steichen asked her to pose for him, Cecil Beaton sketched her, and Isamu Noguchi sculpted her in marble. As the years passed, I became more and more fascinated with my old backgammon teacher.

Despite her numerous and impressive accomplishments, however, Clare’s name was not all that well known, perhaps because she was a political conservative, and the media prefer their female pioneers to be liberals. When I mentioned her name to people, most had only the vaguest notion of who she was, and many of those folks confused her with Anita Loos, the prolific Hollywood screenwriter and author of the novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” This was understandable, as the film version of Mrs. Luce’s “The Women” was scripted by Anita Loos, prompting more than one wag to observe that it should have been titled “The Loose Women.”

It wasn’t until CB’s death, in 1987, that I began to seriously delve into the details of her life. Intrigued by an obituary I had read in a newspaper, I set out to learn everything I could, and during the ensuing 20 years, I have acquired a small shelf full of books about her: three biographies, a memoir by a friend of hers, a biography of her second husband, Henry R. Luce, the founder of both Fortune and Life magazines. Whenever I am in a bookstore and see a biography of some prominent 20th century American, I check the index to search for Clare’s name.

Several years ago I got the idea of writing a novel about a man whose unrequited love for a prominent but wholly unobtainable American woman shadows his whole life. Originally I intended for Anne Morrow Lindbergh to be the object of my protagonist’s desire. She was beautiful, smart, talented, brave, and married to one of the most dashing and romantic figures of the 20th century. Good luck trying to win a woman like that.

I read as much as I could about Mrs. Lindbergh, but the more I read, the less I was able to invent her. She had documented her own life and feelings and thoughts so copiously in her diaries and other writings that it was difficult to fictionalize her. What’s more, although an admirable woman, she had been born into wealth and privilege, had received a first-class education, and it wasn’t altogether clear to me that she would have carved out a place for herself in American history without those benefits. I wanted my protagonist to worship a woman who had willed herself to the top through the force of her powerful intellect and personality. Only after several unsuccessful starts with the novel did I realize that CB was the natural choice to play the protagonist’s unattainable love interest.

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