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ART AND SOUL: Luce embraced modernism
in planning her daughter’s memorial.
Eva Soos
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though few today would
recognize her name, Ann Brokaw’s death
has touched generations of Stanford students through
the memorial her mother built. On January 10, 1944, months
shy
of graduating summa cum laude, the 19-year-old was killed
in a car accident off Palm Drive on her way back to campus
after the holidays. For nearly half a century, St. Ann’s
Chapel in downtown Palo Alto was the main place of worship
for the University’s Roman Catholics. Then Stanford
was given its own parish in 1997, and the chapel’s
future clouded. Its sale this spring footnotes an almost-forgotten
page in Stanford’s history.
When Brokaw’s grief-stricken
stepfather insisted that her obituaries call him her father,
as she had done, the
media obeyed. It’s not surprising: he was Henry Luce,
founder of the Time-Life empire. Brokaw’s mother was
playwright, congresswoman and ambassador Clare Boothe Luce.
At
first the couple wanted to endow Stanford with a chair
or lectureship or perhaps a music room in Brokaw’s name,
but negotiations dragged on for six years. Stanford hoped
for more money, while Clare Luce complained that the University
was treating her like “a large foundation instead of
an individual,” according to Armando Trindade, PhD ’71,
in his dissertation “Roman Catholic Worship at Stanford
University: 1891-1971.”
“To Clare the news [of the death] was the end of life,
here and hereafter. The shock was so great, her grief so deep,
that it seemed she might lose her mind,” biographer Alden
Hatch writes in Ambassador Extraordinary (Henry Holt, 1956).
Urged to seek solace from the magnetic Monsignor (later
Bishop) Fulton Sheen, she challenged him: “If God is
good, why did he take my Ann?” Sheen’s response
launched months of intense discussion, and Luce became
a Roman Catholic
in February 1946. With her attempts to endow the University
failing, she decided instead to erect a chapel on Melville
Avenue, next to Norris House, home of the Catholic students’ Newman
Club.
Dedicated in 1951, the sanctuary is a modest treasure
of postwar art. Luce, a collector and Sunday painter,
told architect Vincent Raney that she hoped to make St. Ann’s “as
much of a gem in a small way as is Father Couturier’s
in France.” She was referring to the French revival of
religious art then under way; the model she had in mind
was Notre Dame at Assy, where Dominican priest Pierre Marie-Alain
Couturier had commissioned 15 eminent modernists to make
murals,
tapestries, mosaics and stained glass.
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SYMBOLIC: Mother-and-child imagery
adorns the chapel. Below right, Brokaw visits San
Francisco with Luce, center, hours before the fatal
crash.
Eva Soos
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Luce brought the
noted painter André Girard from France
to create life-size stations of the cross and paintings
on the glass windows—“painting on light,” he
called it. “André thought that painting on glass
would revolutionize the whole liturgical glass business,” says
John Kysela, a Bay Area art publicist and historian well-acquainted
with the church’s artwork. “He thought it would
outlast medieval stained glass. It didn’t.” Today,
the peeling panels desperately need restoration. Girard’s
artistry was better than his chemistry.
Still, he tackled
the job with enthusiasm. “If Clare
had let him, André Girard would have painted everything
here, including the ceilings,” says Kysela. Girard’s
creations reflected his religious perceptions. “He saw
Jesus as a radical rabbinical teacher, [given] his own
unusual compassion and love for the outcasts in society,” says
Kysela. Indeed, Girard, who had been a Resistance leader,
often emphasized demonic faces when painting crowds, and
sometimes they wore Nazi helmets. World War II had given the
religious
art revival its impetus, as leaders began rethinking theology
in view of the Church’s passive, if not complicitous,
wartime role.
At St. Ann’s, each window panel is dominated
by a different color—red, blue, green or yellow—although
their differences have faded. A similar chromatic scheme tints
the stations of the cross, angled with alternating windows
to illuminate
them.
In his dissertation, Trindade quotes Catholic philosopher
Jacques Maritain on Girard’s work. “Never perhaps
has he represented [the stations of the cross] with so
powerful a rhythm and so fascinating a pictorial eloquence
as in the
chapel of Palo Alto.”
Near the altar, a mosaic by Louisa
Jenkins of turquoise, lapis, shells, glass, gold leaf,
stone and ceramic depicts
a Madonna with a rosary. The California artist was a
close friend of Clare Luce. Jenkins also composed the mosaic-on-steel-mesh
baldachin over the altar, featuring angels with Picassoesque
faces. Hanging on the wall above the chapel doorway is
a large bronze sculpture (artist unknown) of St. Ann
protectively
guiding
her daughter, St. Mary—a spiritual counterpoint to Luce
and her Ann.
Their relationship was fraught with pain well
before Brokaw’s
death. Luce kept a hectic social and professional pace,
leaving her daughter to grow up almost without a mother.
Brokaw’s
letters show a lonely, unhappy girl struggling to reach
her mother through a phalanx of receptionists, publicists
and secretaries.
The fashionable Luce complained that Brokaw was unattractive
and didn’t know how to dress. Tall and shy—and
described by those who knew her as unspoiled and sympathetic—Brokaw
took on the impossible task of trying to live up to her
famous mother.
Then, after Brokaw came to Stanford, the
ice melted. As biographer Ralph Martin puts it in Henry
and Clare (G.P.
Putnam’s
Sons, 1991), Luce fell in love with her daughter. “Clare
now felt that she could talk to her daughter about almost
anything . . . this was somebody who loved her more than
herself, more
than anything.”
The small chapel has had a bumpy history
in recent years. The Diocese of San Jose decided to sell
it in 1998, along
with the Norris House, designed by Birge Clark, ’14,
to finance the new Parish of St. Dominic on campus. Concerned
that a sale
would negate Luce’s intentions, the Henry Luce Foundation
bought the chapel, while the house was sold to a Silicon
Valley executive. The foundation then leased the church
to the Thomas
Merton Society, a liberal Catholic congregation that hoped
to eventually buy it. The $1 million price tag proved too
much for them, however.
This spring, St. Ann’s was sold
to the Anglican Province of Christ the King, based in Berkeley.
The conservative
church, headed by Archbishop Robert Morse, favors a return
to the 1928
prayer book and a restoration of older customs and practices.
The
purchase is, as Morse might say, a providential one.
His wife, Nancy, ’42, was Brokaw’s “big sister” in
the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Stanford. He grew up
on the Peninsula and says he’s “loved St. Ann’s
for 50 years.”
Morse credits the Thomas Merton Society
with saving the chapel and says he’d like to see the
church “go
on doing what it’s been doing.” He sees St. Ann’s
Choir, which performs Gregorian chant, as a treasured musical
tradition to keep alive. “I want that place to be used and loved,” Morse
says. “I
also want to keep the intention for which it was built.
It’s
a poignant story—a story of love.”
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