The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  He signed it with a bitter reference to the description of him in the Fortune profile two years earlier: “Harold Wallace Ross—Small man … furious … mad … no taste.” Luce wrote back curtly and coldly,

  I only regret that Mr. Gibbs did not publish all he knew so that I might learn at once how mean and poisonous a person I am…. Having located a poison more or less at large in society, he may perhaps like to help mitigate it. And this, I assure you, he can do if he will take any current copy of TIME and red-pencil every example of “cruelty, scandal-mongering and insult”—and send it to me.46

  It is hard not to see in this feud something more than a rivalry between two magazines. It also appears to have been very personal, even if neither of the parties fully realized it. There was something about Luce that irritated people like Ross and Gibbs. Perhaps it was Luce’s image of stolid, humorless propriety (an image his passionate relationship with Clare may have belied, but that did not change how he was perceived by the public). Perhaps it was his grim seriousness as he wrestled with the “great questions of the world,” the kinds of questions that Ross (and most other New Yorker writers of the time) largely ignored. There was also something in this rivalry that resembled Luce’s tortured relationship with Hadden (whose personality Gibbs mischievously compared, unflatteringly, to Luce’s in the New Yorker profile). Ross, like Hadden, was iconoclastic, charismatic, brilliant, slightly crazy, and—at least on the surface—rarely serious, the kind of person Luce found discomfiting. Ross, like Hadden, fought against becoming an august and worldly figure. Luce, in contrast, embraced and carefully nurtured his fame and his power. The battle with Ross, transitory and frivolous as it may have been, provided a snapshot of the kind of person Luce was, and was not, as he entered a new period in his life.

  *The hyphen disappeared in 1937.

  VIII

  “Life Begins”

  The beginning of Harry’s new life with Clare coincided with the creation of Life magazine, perhaps the most popular periodical in American publishing history. Together these momentous events—one personal, one professional—changed the trajectory of his career and his sense of his place in the world.

  Luce’s interest in a “picture magazine” had many sources. Clare, while serving as managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1932, had written a memo to Condé Nast urging him to create a magazine for photographs that she proposed naming “Life.” Her first two social conversations with Harry, according to Clare’s later accounts, were about the challenges and prospects of such a publication. Throughout their courtship and even during the first months of their marriage, the idea for a new magazine was part of the bond between them—a shared professional interest that intensified their physical and emotional attraction to each other. Early in their relationship, again according to Clare, Harry promised to make her managing editor of his new publication.1

  But while the prospect of Life helped bring them together, it failed to avert a rift in their marriage that began within weeks of their wedding. Their relationship had begun as a product of passion and ambition. The passion ebbed fairly quickly, but the ambition survived. It did not take long for their love affair to turn into something like a marriage of state—enduring, but at the same time competitive and largely unromantic.

  • • •

  Days after their quiet wedding, Harry and Clare left for a two-month honeymoon in Cuba, where they had borrowed a villa from a friend. For the first several weeks the trip was marred by almost constant rain, which kept the newlyweds indoors and restless. Later a cruise on a friend’s yacht was again spoiled by rough weather and Clare’s seasickness. When the skies finally cleared, they tried playing golf, until Harry discovered that Clare was much better at the game than he was. (They never played together again.) Even the ocean sparked Harry’s intensely competitive instincts when he realized that his was no match for Clare’s strong swimming. In many small ways the long honeymoon introduced each of them to aspects of the other’s personality that their whirlwind courtship had obscured. They were both intensely self-centered and exceptionally ambitious, and they saw each other in part as vehicles for their own aspirations, a belief that helped keep their marriage together for more than thirty years. But each also came to see the other in some ways as a rival, which contributed over time to an increasing coolness and distance in their relationship. Among the prices of this tense relationship, as Clare later wrote, was Harry’s recurring difficulty in maintaining a sexual relationship with her, a problem that began before their honeymoon and gradually became permanent. (Both had subsequent multiple extramarital affairs—hers frequent, his more intermittent.) Equally damaging to the marriage were their preoccupations with their own careers—relatively unusual among affluent married couples in the 1930s and a situation that Harry, at least, found daunting and intimidating.2

  One thing that did keep their intimacy alive for a time was the idea of the picture magazine that absorbed them both. During their honeymoon Harry gathered issues of European picture magazines. He and Clare cut them up and arranged the photographs together to try various layouts. In this exercise as in others, Clare was at least as skilled as Harry, which probably annoyed him as much as her skill at golf and swimming did. His alleged early promises of appointing Clare managing editor of the new magazine were not repeated, but Clare continued to believe that she would be involved in the project. She was not alone in that belief. During Luce’s absence, Billings described in his diary a visit from John Martin, drunk as usual, during which Martin “indicated that Clare Luce was the real boss of the new magazine.” Others in the organization, including Billings himself, undoubtedly shared such fears. The issue came to an inevitable head when Harry and Clare were invited to dinner not long after their return to New York by Ralph Ingersoll and Daniel Longwell, recently hired as picture editor for Time, who had previously edited picture books at Doubleday.3

  According to Clare’s later (and perhaps not wholly accurate) claims, Harry predicted to her that the purpose of the evening was to offer her a position on Life. But whatever her expectations, the dinner was, in fact, an organized effort—led by the aggressive Ingersoll—to “gang up on Harry” and persuade him to recommit himself to the company and to the creation of the new magazine. Accounts of the evening differ, but all versions agree that both men spoke harshly to Harry about his focus on Clare. Clare recalled that Longwell said, “Harry, you have got to make up your mind whether you are going to go on being a great editor, or whether you are going to be on a perpetual honeymoon with one hand tied behind Clare’s back.” Understandably offended, Clare lashed back, telling them, “Harry can publish a better magazine with one hand tied behind his back than you can publish with both of yours free.” According to Ingersoll she said, “Harry, has it ever occurred to you that you have surrounded yourself with incompetents?” All accounts agree that Clare stormed out alone. She claimed later that after regaining her composure she told Harry that it would be best for her to have no connection with Time Inc., that she would instead return to playwriting. Escaping on her own to the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, she started work on what would be her most successful play, The Women.4

  That The Women was written so soon after this humiliating episode may have reflected in part Clare’s own sense of betrayal at the hands of men. (“I would be ashamed to have a wife who wrote so autobiographically,” the privately caustic Billings wrote after attending a performance.) The play itself—a Broadway hit and later a successful 1939 film with a luminous cast—was a purely domestic drama. Mary Haines, a loyal and loving wife, is abandoned by her husband, who divorces her in order to marry a scheming temptress. Once alone, Mary navigates through a world of gossip and intrigue while retaining her own dignity. But eventually she decides to “sharpen her claws” and win her husband back. “Haven’t you any pride?” one of her female friends asks as she prepares to return to her inconstant husband. “No, no pride,” she answers. “That’s a luxury a woman in love can’t afford.” In
both the play and the film, only women are visible, revealing Clare Luce’s sense of the separateness and vulnerability of the female world.5

  Clare must certainly have realized by then that her own marriage—which tied her both to her husband and his company—was also embedded in a world in which men and women inhabited largely separate and highly unequal spheres. Harry’s world, the world of Time Inc., was one in which only men served as editors, writers, and publishers, while the women occupied clearly subordinate positions as researchers and “reporters.” The two groups lived together in a culture that discouraged even such modest interactions as shared business lunches—a taboo reflected in the exclusion and humiliation of Clare at the infamous dinner with Ingersoll and Longwell. Unlike Lila, who had always kept her distance from the company, Clare, an experienced magazine writer and editor herself, was a palpable threat to the all-male culture of Time Inc.—a culture very different from that of the Condé Nast empire, in which Clare had risen to the post of managing editor of Vanity Fair, and where women were in many positions of authority. Whether or not Clare’s resentment of the Time Inc. culture shaped her play, she was almost certainly right in thinking that the evening with Ingersoll and Longwell was more about their resentment of her talent and apparent influence than it was about Harry’s inattention to the magazines. Very likely, Harry’s failure to defend her against the offensive behavior of his male colleagues became another factor in the changing character of their marriage.

  Her return to playwriting did not, however, entirely end her interest in Time Inc. For years she continued—often with Harry’s encouragement and support—to propose projects for the magazines. Billings complained frequently of the pressure from Luce to publish his wife’s material, even when he believed it was “tripe … unprintable.” Although he was honest enough to admit that Clare was “a good writer,” and although he ran a number of her articles without complaint, his general view of her was contemptuous. He gleefully recorded in his diary criticism of Clare that other colleagues shared with him in office gossip: “a really shallow-minded [woman], with little native wit—but has a desperate drive which forces her on and on;” “a bitch” who exercised “an evil influence” on Luce; a woman of “intense ambition” who was making Harry miserable and causing him to have “lost all his old friends.” Billings himself complained that “Clare and her petty-politicking give me a royal pain!”6

  The gradual erosion of the passion that had driven Harry and Clare together was the result of many things. Harry never fully overcame his guilt at his abandonment of Lila, and he reproached himself for having allowed passion to overcome duty. They were also a childless couple, even though both had children from their respective first marriages. Harry’s sons remained with Lila and visited their father only intermittently; Clare’s adolescent daughter, Ann, was mostly away in boarding school at Foxcroft. Harry was opposed to having more children, and Clare did not push the issue, although she later resented it. But most of all the marriage cooled because their romance was always of secondary importance to their competing thirsts for power and fame. Time Inc. was the first site of their rivalry, but only one of many. Harry agonized over the competing desires of his wife and his colleagues and often made efforts, sometimes at considerable cost to himself, to facilitate Clare’s aspirations. “I have tried and do try,” he wrote her painfully, “a) not to let my career interfere with yours or with my greater career as your husband and b) at the same time to maintain a friendly diplomatic relation between them.” A few days later he wrote again: “The only thing I want to say is that I’ll promise to be good—but it seems fitting to withhold this promise until the time when my words may once again claim your faith.” Clare, in the meantime, never ceased trying to create a public life of her own as important as her husband’s, both inside the company and without.7

  A compensation for their increasingly cool relationship—part of what kept the marriage mostly amicable even if decreasingly romantic—was the glittering public life they were able to build together. Harry provided the means. Clare provided the glamour—a glamour, to be sure, much enhanced by her marriage to a powerful man, but one that the socially awkward Harry could not have acquired alone. They may have realized that their marriage was not the “great romance” that both had once hoped for, but they continued to aspire to a great life. They would be, as Harry wrote plaintively to Clare on New Year’s Day 1937 (which Clare spent away from him), “the Luces the Magnificents.”

  They began their search for magnificence with their homes. Shortly after their marriage they moved into a palatial eleven-room residence in River House, a fashionable building overlooking the East River. It was the first of several opulent apartments they occupied in the city. At the same time they established their official residence in Connecticut (largely to escape higher taxes in New York), renting for a while in Stamford, then buying a larger estate in Greenwich, and finally in 1947 settling in Ridgefield. Perhaps their most ambitious acquisition was a 7,200-acre former plantation named Mepkin, near Charleston, South Carolina—not far from the Baruch estate where Clare had spent much time before her marriage to Harry. The property had been neglected for years, but the Luces poured money into landscaping while at the same time tearing down most of the existing dilapidated structures and constructing a complex of new buildings designed by the young modernist Edward Durell Stone, soon to be one of the architects of the Museum of Modern Art. A large white-brick main house overlooked a cluster of guest cottages, all furnished in austere but elegant International Style. Clare spent considerable time at Mepkin, writing and entertaining guests, usually without Harry, who came only occasionally on weekends.

  Harry was slightly uncomfortable with the opulence and occasionally insisted that they should not live so ostentatiously, but he did little to stop Clare, who had more ambitious plans, from spending whatever she liked. In all their homes they displayed their many collections: Chinese art and pottery, important Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings, photographs of themselves with statesmen and celebrities. There were lavish displays of flowers at all times. Clare loved monograms and put her initials on almost everything she could—towels, sheets, cigarette boxes, cocktail napkins, stationery. She loved the glass-and-mirrored style of the 1930s and even installed a circular glass staircase in her Greenwich home. They relied on servants for almost everything they did—ten or so in Greenwich and later even more in their even grander twenty-eight-room Ridgefield estate. They were rarely without guests, who sometimes stayed for days, and on occasions months, at a time, playing tennis, swimming in the pool, riding horses—whether Harry or Clare was there or not.

  Buying and furnishing homes was only the beginning of the conspicuous luxury in which the Luces now lived. Always fashionably dressed, the oft-photographed Clare now spent much more on clothes than she had in the past, and she insisted on upgrading Harry’s own often shabby wardrobe. She collected art and antiques. She commissioned a bust of Harry by the fashionable sculptor Jo Davidson and a portrait of herself by the famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. (Harry disliked the bust, and Clare disliked the portrait.)8

  Clare traveled widely and expensively (often without her husband); spent time in Hollywood, where she briefly flirted with becoming an actress and screenwriter; then moved on to Hawaii, which she came to love and where she learned to surf. Harry watched nervously as Clare moved nomadically around the world, worried by her growing distance from him. He responded by spending even more money in an effort to please her, including an aborted effort to buy her a house in Hawaii. “Oh darling, we have got it—the chance to ride to glory,” he wrote desperately in an effort to repair the rift that was opening between them. “I want to start all over again—first with the avowals, and then with the sweet reconnoitering through all the labyrinths of personality, and reconnecting, too, into the limits of space and time and human destiny and then, comfortably, nothing denied us, I want to start all over again with our plans.” But the passion seemed to fa
de quickly when they were together. He suffered from the biting sarcasm with which she often responded to his opinions. (“You have really been too cruel,” he once wrote. And “I am sorry,” he wrote after another “unhappy” conversation. “Sorry for what? Well, I don’t know exactly.”) At one point he told colleagues at Time Inc. that he might abandon the company to save his marriage. But it was a threat that he never seriously considered implementing. However much he wanted to make his marriage work, he wanted professional success even more. And beginning in the spring of 1936, despite (or perhaps partly because of) his marital difficulties, he focused his ambition squarely on the new picture magazine.9

  The idea for what became Life magazine came from many sources—so many, in fact, that it would have been surprising had Luce not considered the idea. A picture magazine had been one of Brit Hadden’s many proposals in 1929 for diversifying the company—one he preferred to Luce’s plan for Fortune but never pursued. Clare had been imagining a similar project for years, and Harry’s friend John Cowles, publisher of the Des Moines Register, discussed with him his own ideas about a picture magazine (which eventually became Life’s principal rival, Look). By 1935, when plans for the new periodical began in earnest, there were already examples of successful picture magazines both in America and in Europe. Fortune itself had helped pioneer the use of serious photography as an integral part of its stories, and it had employed some of the same talented photographers who would later become important to Life. The March of Time had also increased enthusiasm within the organization for the use of visual images. (A lavishly illustrated 1936 book celebrating the newsreel—Four Hours a Year—became one of the models for the new magazine.) Many American newspapers, including the New York Times, had been experimenting since the early twentieth century with “rotogravure” sections that presented dense collections of photographs, usually in Sunday editions. Vogue, Vanity Fair, the Saturday Evening Post, the Literary Digest, and other mass-circulation magazines were making extensive use of photographs by the early 1930s. But using photographs to illustrate a periodical was not the same as making photographs the principal subject of a magazine. Luce and his colleagues had to look to Europe to find successful examples of that.10