 Clews' older sister, Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons (who married U.S. Representative Herbert Parsons), became a renowned anthropologist, author and activist, with three university degrees, including a Masters and a Doctorate from Columbia University.During the same period of time when his one-year older sister was achieving academic success, Clews himself failed at three successive universities by the time he was 20 years old, having been expelled from Amherst College, dropping out of philosophy at Columbia and then thrown out of Leibniz University Hannover in Germany.Clews then joined the family financial firm under the tutelage of his father, but that business held no long-term future for his artistic sensibilities.