Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Time was also widely reviled. Intellectuals hated its condensation of the news, missing as it often did many of the finer points of important current events and framing unfolding stories with neat beginnings, middles, and endings. Devotees of objective journalism were astonished by Time’s sneaky bias in favor of the Republican Party and big business, its admiration of Mussolini, and its outright disgust with Communism. Members of the working press gnashed their teeth when they saw how Time’s editors appropriated and rewrote their copy without giving them credit. Provincial subscribers resented the magazine’s smug eastern establishment attitude, and its penchant for mongering rumors turned off upright readers. Sticklers for exactitude were frequently appalled at Time’s routine contempt for facts. As early as 1925, one reader had complained to the editors, “Time’s inaccuracies are chronic, flagrant and even self-evident.”

  And purists of the English language hated the magazine’s jarring, often baffling assaults on their mother tongue. Time made a fetish of obscure words like tycoon, kudos, and pundit and invented others, like socialite. For quick identification, the magazine had perfected the art of the neat, often embarrassing epithet, such as “wild-eyed” President Francisco Madero of Mexico, “torpedo-headed dynamo” Walter P. Chrysler, “hen-shaped” New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and “duck-hunting dentist” Senator Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota. Time’s monikers frequently ran to the absurd. Football star Red Grange was an “eel-hipped runagade”; the prince of Monaco, a deep-sea diver, was a “bathysophical enthusiast”; and supporters of Prohibition were “adherents of aridity.”

  The magazine’s prose was conveyed in a weirdly fractured form that flouted many of the conventional rules of grammar and usage. For expediency’s sake, the word and was often eliminated, with two-part thoughts mashed together via a comma or an ampersand. The article the was routinely jettisoned. The sentences themselves were often tortuously inverted and cluttered. “To Versailles (150 years ago) swarmed empurpled princelings, intent on an implicit mission of state,” was typical. So distinctive was this bizarre argot that it acquired its own neologism: “Timestyle.” Gibbs considered it “one of the great literary comedies of our time.”

  Timestyle was the invention of the brilliant, boisterous Briton Hadden who, with his Yale classmate Luce, had created Time. Hadden was a brash product of the 1920s, a party animal complete with pocket flask and a flip disregard for everything holy. Among his specialties was exposing the embarrassing middle names of such public figures as the automobile manufacturer William Crapo Durant and Saturday Evening Post owner Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis. By laying bare these and similar personal details, his cousin and Time writer John Martin said, the impish Hadden was “undressing them in Macy’s window.”

  “Hadden had not set out to create a new style of writing,” wrote his biographer, Isaiah Wilner. But he did so out of the need for terseness and the reader’s attention alike. Long denied his place in Time history, Hadden was the true originator of the magazine. When he died, tragically, of a streptococcus infection early in 1929 at the age of thirty-one, Luce assumed the company mantle. Unlike the rambunctious Hadden, he was an empire builder, politically minded, personally abstemious, and an altogether cold fish—in short, perfect for debunking.

  In its own way, Time was actually much like The New Yorker—urbane, snappy, and self-assured. “Naturally,” said David Cort, Life’s foreign editor, the two magazines “knifed each other at every opportunity.” But Ross, unlike Luce, had no particular political ax to grind. He was fanatical about accuracy and grammar. He also had a personal feud with Luce.

  The feud began when Hadden saw a prepublication announcement for The New Yorker in 1925. Seizing on Ross’s famous declaration that his magazine would not be “edited for the old lady in Dubuque,” Hadden snorted to his writer Niven Busch, “Damn it, the old lady in Dubuque is smarter than they are. Dubuque is a great place and just as sophisticated as New York. That’s your angle, and make it plain that the magazine won’t last.” Busch’s subsequent slam at The New Yorker’s start-up, in Time’s March 2 issue, concluded with a suspiciously pat quote from an elderly woman in that quintessential small town: “The editors of the periodical you forwarded are, I understand, members of a literary clique. They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity. They were quite correct, however, in their original assertion. The New Yorker is not for the old lady in Dubuque.”‡

  More than anything else, it was a seventeen-page, full-blown look at The New Yorker in the July 1934 issue of Fortune that brought down Ross’s wrath. The author was Ross’s former right-hand man, Ralph Ingersoll, by this time a rapid climber of Luce’s corporate ladder. Ingersoll’s disclosure of juicy personal details about the magazine’s prime movers proved jolting. Ross’s face, Ingersoll wrote, was “made out of rubber which he stretches in every direction. Out of the lower half hangs a huge Hapsburg lip to which cigarettes stick. Widespread teeth diverge downward. . . . Ross’s eyes are fierce, shifty, restless.” Katharine White, he said, was “hard, suave, ambitious, sure of herself” and, being a woman, “may have recourse to tears.” Ingersoll exposed her husband as “shy, frightened of life, often melancholy, always hypochondriac,” while Thurber was “madder than White.” As for the “slim, handsome, macabre” Gibbs, “He hates everybody and everything, takes an adolescent pride in it. To a simple honest comment on life he is likely to snap ‘don’t be banal!’ ”

  The piece hardly caught Ross off guard. Several months before its appearance, he had written Ingersoll, “Hadn’t you better show it to me to check for accuracy? I will promise not to try to soften the harshness, if any, but I do think you ought to get it right, and Fortune has made quite a few mistakes.” He even said, “I would love to have a chance to write it myself.” When the article finally hit the stands, Ross claimed he didn’t read it, even though “every wise guy in town is speaking about it, or writing, or something.” Still, he acknowledged, the story had “kicked up all sorts of unhappiness in subtle ways.” Part of that unhappiness arose because Ingersoll printed the salaries of many of The New Yorker’s leading lights, not always correctly. In response, Ross put a notice on the office bulletin board that read, “I do not make $40,000 a year.” By way of a potshot, White wrote a cryptic “Comment” entry that stated, “Gossip Note: The editor of Fortune makes thirty dollars a week and carfare.”

  Ross was particularly mortified at how Ingersoll had dumped on The New Yorker’s art arrangements: “Some artists are good on drawings, weak on ideas. Arno is one and much of his reputation is founded on wit that is not his own. Nowadays The New Yorker gives Gluyas Williams all his ideas.” The barb so unsettled Williams that Ross reassured him, “Please stick with us, and please remember this: So help me, there’s no sin, no harm, and nothing unethical in drawing up an idea suggested by a man who can’t possibly draw it himself.”

  In the spring of 1935, Ross began contemplating a counterattack. The project was initially assigned to Allene Talmey, an editor at Vanity Fair and Vogue, and it may even have been proposed by her. Requests for information were made. Ingersoll, no dummy, was naturally suspicious and tried to draw Ross out about what he really had in mind:

  Thanks for your note telling us that the Luce Profile is a bona fide project. But what was all this you were telling me about on the telephone: that Miss Talmey was only a stooge, sent to us to get facts for someone else in the office to rewrite; that “someone who knows Luce well” (whose name you wouldn’t tell us because it might make us mad) was really going to do the job? Pardon my thinking it sounds like a gag.

  God knows if the New Yorker feels like writing a Profile of Henry R. Luce there is nothing TIME INC can do about it. And we are all journalists together. Why the comic opera intrigue?

  Come clean, pal, with (a) who’s going to write the piece, (b) our rights in the matter of checking the factual contents, and (c) just what sort of a hearing, if any, we are entit
led to at the trial of Mr. Luce and his magazines in print, and we will get down to cases.

  The project was shelved for a while, likely in an attempt to elude Ingersoll’s skepticism. Gibbs came into the picture after Katharine White suggested a parody of Fortune by way of retaliation. McKelway shifted the focus to a parody of Time “because nobody but business executives who are being written up and ambitious dentists ever see Fortune, much less read it.” And he nominated Gibbs as the best man to undertake “such an antic job.”

  Apart from his unflattering depiction in Fortune, Gibbs had no personal quarrel with Luce. But he did hold a grudge against some of the publisher’s people, including his second wife, Clare Boothe Brokaw. As ambitious in her own way as her husband, Clare had been an editor at Vanity Fair before she met Luce and was eager for freelance assignments. One day in 1931 she called up Gibbs to ask him over for drinks. Thinking he was being invited to a cocktail party, Gibbs responded in the affirmative—only to discover that he was the only guest. This was a familiar tactic for Clare. She would routinely have an editor over to her penthouse on Beekman Place and, “after giving him a cocktail, would inform him that she had a little time on her hands and thought it might be fun to dash off some articles for his magazine.” In Gibbs’s case, she suggested a Profile of the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, doing so with considerable snootiness. “Write that down,” she told him. “Here, I’d better spell it for you.” Gibbs was especially put off by her remark, “You Americans like your drinks sweet, don’t you?,” coming as it did from a fellow countryman. “This was the Vogue influence,” he concluded. “Hanging around with foreigners or something.”

  The Luce endeavor gelled throughout 1936. Ingersoll remained dubious and tried to dissuade Luce from cooperating. “The fewer facts you give them,” he said, “the less they’ll have to twist to your discomfort.” At one point he implored his boss, “They hate you over there. They’ll take long knives and cut you into little pieces and put you over a fire.” But Luce, as a fellow journalist, felt obliged to respond to The New Yorker’s inquiries. Anyway, his ego would not allow him to avoid being featured in one of the country’s most prestigious publications.

  “It became an office project, the like of which I’d never seen,” said McKelway of the Profile. The “Talk” staff dug up facts, and McKelway interviewed Luce in “deadpan manner,” giving no hint that a bushwhacking was under way. Nor did he mention Gibbs, who had by this time acquired a reputation as a satirist. The background material included Talmey’s preliminary research and the testimony of more than a dozen Time employees who were only too happy to pull the pants off their boss. Eugene Kinkead, an enterprising young New Yorker reporter, supplied some key facts. After Luce assured McKelway that he had leased the “smallest apartment in River House” at 435 East 52nd Street, dismissing it as a modest dwelling of four or five rooms, Kinkead somehow managed to wangle his way in. He discovered that the wealthy Luce was in possession of a grand assemblage of fifteen rooms and five baths.

  Armed with a mass of information, Gibbs started writing, employing his natural wit and acid to weave a seamless send-up. When necessary, he improvised. Lacking the weekly salary of the average “Timemployee,” he ran his index finger across the top row of his typewriter keys to arrive at the figure of $45.67890. Ross protested, “Look, this is too damned obvious. They’ll get wise to it.” So Gibbs changed the number to $45.67802. Though hardly accurate, the preposterous amount was a perfect touch for a satire. So sly was Gibbs’s fictional accounting that the credulous critic Dwight Macdonald, who then worked for Fortune, later cited the $45.67802 tally as evidence that Luce had sweated his labor.

  The resulting 4,500 words, running in the November 28 issue and titled “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life. . . . Luce,” constituted a tour de force for Gibbs and The New Yorker alike. The peg was the launch of Life. “Sad-eyed last month was nimble, middle-sized Life-President Clair Maxwell as he told newshawks of the sale of the fifty-three-year-old gagmag to Time,” the piece began. The first issue, Gibbs wrote, “pictured Russian peasants in the nude, the love life of the Black Widow spider, referred inevitably to Mrs. Ernest Simpson.”

  Following some background on the sale of the old Life title to the Luce gang and its reincarnation as a picture magazine, Gibbs struck with his nut graph: “Behind this latest, most incomprehensible Timenterprise looms, as usual, ambitious, gimlet-eyed, Baby Tycoon Henry Robinson Luce, co-founder of Time, promulgator of Fortune, potent in associated radio & cinema ventures.”

  From the first sentence to the last, the piece was an all-out assault on Timestyle.§ “Sitting pretty are the boys,” “In a quandary was Bridegroom Luce,” “Doomed to strict anonymity are Time-Fortune staff writers,” and “Shotup [as opposed to “upshot”] of this was that Luce, embarrassed, printed a retraction” were representative thrusts. Paragraph after merciless paragraph rammed home the point:

  “Tycoon,” most successful Timepithet, had been coined by Editor Laird Shields Goldsborough; so fascinated Hadden with “beady-eyed” that for months nobody was anything else. Timeworthy were deemed such designations as “Tom-tom” Heflin, “Body-lover” Macfadden.¶

  “Great word! Great word!” would crow Hadden, coming upon “snaggle-toothed,” “pig-faced.” Appearing already were such maddening coagulations as “cinemaddict,” “radiorator.” Appearing also were first gratuitous invasions of privacy. Always mentioned as William Randolph Hearst’s “great & good friend” was Cinemactress Marion Davies, stressed was the bastardy of Ramsay MacDonald, the “cozy hospitality” of Mae West. Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

  Countering Time’s neologisms, Gibbs concocted some of his own, tossing off the March of Time as “Cinemarch” and Luce’s personal assets as his “Lucemolument.” Gibbs even described McKelway, though not by name, as a “Newyorkereporter.” And he tore into the “cold, baggy, temperate” Luce himself.

  At work today, Luce is efficient, humorless, revered by colleagues; arrives always at 9:15, leaves at 6, carrying armfuls of work, talks jerkily, carefully, avoiding visitor’s eye; stutters in conversation, never in speechmaking. . . . Prone he to wave aside pleasantries, social preliminaries, to get at once to the matter in hand. Once to interviewer who said, “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” snapped Luce, “Well, you are.” . . . He drinks not at all at midday, sparingly at all times, sometimes champagne at dinner, an occasional cocktail at parties.

  In the best Time tradition, the piece was sprinkled with such three-dollar words as jocosities, necromancy, and transmogrified. Similarly, it was laced with odd and arresting footnotes. A reference to a recent issue of Fortune weighing “as much as a good-sized flounder” was asterisked thusly: “Two pounds, nine ounces.” When Gibbs noted in a humdrum passage given over to annual earnings that Time Inc.’s net profits had dropped more than $200,000 in 1932 from the year before, he jotted at the bottom of the page, “Hmm.”#

  Gibbs attacked the Lucean brand of fact gathering: “Typical perhaps of Luce methods is Fortune system of getting material. Writers in first draft put down wild gossip, any figures that occur to them. This is sent to victim, who indignantly corrects the errors, inadvertently supplies facts he might otherwise have withheld.” In deference to Ingersoll’s Fortune piece, Gibbs printed the salaries, known or assumed, of a number of key Time Inc. executives, along with their personality quirks. Not content with mentioning Ingersoll’s $30,000 paycheck and $40,000 stock income, Gibbs sketched him as “Burly, able, tumbledown Yaleman Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, former Fortuneditor, now general manager of all Timenterprises, descendant of 400-famed Ward McAllister. Littered his desk with pills, unguents, Kleenex, Socialite Ingersoll is Time’s No. 1 hypochondriac, introduced ant palaces for study & emulation of employees, writes copious memoranda about filing systems, other trivia, seldom misses a Yale football game.”

  Gibbs finished with a grandiloquent Timestyle flourish: “Certainly to be taken with seriousness is Luce at thirty-eight, his fel
lowman already informed up to his ears, the shadow of his enterprises long across the land, his future plans impossible to imagine, staggering to contemplate. Where it all will end, knows God!”

  Ostensibly in the interests of accuracy and courtesy, and certainly in the cause of revenge served cold, proofs of the piece were dispatched to Ingersoll. A couple of hours later, he telephoned McKelway. “Hearst tactics!” he shouted. “Time-Life was in an uproar about it; there was a continuous procession of people in and out of Mrs. White’s office,” recalled the newly arrived William Maxwell. “I sat taking in snatches of the excitement.”

  Ingersoll insisted that he and Luce meet with Ross that night. Drawing out the drama, McKelway replied that Ross had a dinner party going on. Why not make it tomorrow? Ingersoll persisted, and so it was arranged that the four men would meet at Ross’s penthouse at 22 East 36th Street at 11:30 p.m. “Bulls like to fight,” said a weary New Yorker staff member.

  What followed was one of the most infamous intramural dust-ups in journalistic history. “Oh, that terrible night,” Luce said years later. “I should never have gone over. Ingersoll dragged me there.” For reasons not entirely clear, Gibbs was not present. According to Ingersoll, “[He] lost his nerve and didn’t show. He hid out in some bar and got telephoned flashes from McKelway.” By another account, Ross excused him as “a man of weak character” who would likely cave in to Luce’s protests. Yet another story had Ross keeping him out of the fracas “on the grounds that no author should be subjected to such a strain.”