(April 10, 1903 - October 9, 1987)
A playwright, author, and prominent public figure, she was born in an apartment on Riverside Drive. She was raised by her mother after being abandoned by her father as a child. Her mother's gifts to her and her brother were always books, because she felt that knowledge, culture, and hard work were the keys to success.
Determined to become a writer, she convinced editors at Vogue to hire her and she became an editorial assistant. She moved on to Vanity Fair. Her second marriage to Henry R. Luce, editor-in-chief of Time-Life-Fortune,
She made several attempts at acting. When she was a child, her mother had taken her to meet David Belasco who hired her as an understudy to Mary Pickford and she played a bit part in the film. As an actress she was unsuccessful but writing plays for actresses became her passion. She had written several plays but her first to be produced on Broadway was Abide With Me (1935) a story of mental cruelty and murder. However her third play The Women, a satire on society women, was a major theatrical success (December, 1936) running for 657 performances. Made into a movie directed by George Cukor, it starred Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard and others. It was also adapted as a musical, Opposite Sex, filmed in 1956. Although many critics disliked the play for its shocking portrayal of women, it has been produced in eighteen foreign countries and translated into eleven languages. Over 250,000 women have performed in it. Her intention she said was "to satirize a very small, special group of rich, idle, social female parasites. My aim was to write a clinical, sober-sided, if impolite genre study of Manhattan manners." But the critics viewed it as an attack on her sex and insisted that she had written an hilarious but wicked lampoon on all women.
She believed that women of her generation had the most and the best. Her philosophy was summarized in an interview. "My early disadvantages spurred me on to accept the challenges of life, to look for avenues of expression, to be the best I could be in whatever I tried. Coming as far as I have, I see each day's dawning as a triumph, with the curtain rising on a tremendously exciting show. I love every minute of it."
Resource: Lucille M. Pederson, Notable Women in American Theatre. ed. 1989
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