As they moved closer to publication, they expanded the staff further, still drawing from friends, acquaintances, and people suggested by their Yale contemporaries. On the basis of a suggestion from a friend, they hired a young Oxford student, Thomas J. C. Martyn, by cable, without ever meeting him, because they had heard he was an experienced journalist. They discovered when he arrived in New York that he had no experience at all. “It was a stupid thing for us to do,” Luce later conceded. But Martyn turned out to be a talented writer of exactly the kind of stories Harry and Brit wanted. Thomas Rinehart, the son of a well-known novelist and a recent Harvard graduate (who, Luce believed, hid a “quick intelligence” behind a “simple” facade), and John A. Thomas, another recent Yale graduate, also joined the writing staff.38
In the meantime Hadden and Luce strove to shape the magazine itself. To some degree the concept remained remarkably unchanged from the idea they had developed in Baltimore, and even earlier—as the prospectus they prepared early in 1922 to present to potential investors made clear. “No publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed,” they stated in bold letters on the first page of the document. They followed quickly with a claim of “COMPLETE ORGANIZATION”—six departments (National Public Affairs, Foreign News, The Arts, Sports, and People) and twenty-four “sections” (among them Books, Theater, Music, Education, Religion, Business, Law, and The Professions). There would be approximately one hundred short articles each week, “none of which are over 400 words in length,” each placed “in its logical place in the magazine, according to a “FIXED METHOD OF ARRANGEMENT.”39
Into this rigid structure they would pour the results of what they described as a comprehensive search through “every magazine and newspaper of note in the world.” The cover of their first advertising circular was framed by a list of almost ninety periodicals, which they promised to read every week and use as sources. Unlike the Literary Digest, they pointedly claimed, they would cover “EVERY HAPPENING OF IMPORTANCE.” And while they would not have an editorial page and would not write “to prove any special case,” neither would they strive for “complete neutrality on public questions.” They even presented a slightly fussy “catalogue” of their own largely conservative “prejudices”—which included “a belief that the world is round,” “a general distrust of the present tendency toward increasing interference by government,” and a “respect for the old, particularly in manners.” In this, Larsen later remembered, they were drawing from Mencken, whom Hadden (far more than Luce) greatly admired.40
Only in November 1922, after they had raised enough money to start publishing, did they begin the serious work of turning these plans into an actual magazine. In their larger (but still modest) offices on Eighth Avenue, the slowly growing staff began squeezing into newly built cages and cubicles. The few walls were paper thin, so no one, including Luce and Hadden, could easily have a private conversation. Desktops were piled high with magazines and newspapers, and the floor was littered with the scraps of periodicals from which useful stories had been cut. Neophyte writers wrestled to condense complex news stories into a few hundred lively words, while Hadden and Luce sat at their desks reading the results, marking them up with pencil, and sending them back. (On weekends there was so little heat in the building that they sometimes retreated to the card room of the Yale Club and spread their stacks of papers out on tables there.) Hadden, in particular, was a tough critic, snarling and growling at prose he considered dull or obscure, penciling in adjectives and phrases that he thought would enliven the story, intimidating the writers, none of whom was much younger than he was. As they produced prototypes of the various sections of the magazine, they took them to the established editors and writers with whom they had been consulting from the beginning. “First section to get into form is ‘Books,’” Luce wrote, now that “Wells (Harpers) & Canby (Evening Post) have given OK.” But mostly they were on their own.41
It was slow going. “We publish the first issue of Time the last week of January or the first of February,” Luce wrote in November 1922, acknowledging that the date of the inaugural issue had slipped from December into 1923. “But first we have to make Time good enough to publish and that means eight weeks of writing, editing, and printing ‘practice issues.’ The writing of the practice issues will be carried on by a full staff just as if we were publishing. We shall be just as busy and rushed (if not more so) as we will when the thing is actually being published…. If they do not meet with our expectations, we will stop, having failed to produce what we said we would produce. If they meet our expectations, then the only thing that stands between us and certain success is that unknown quantity ‘luck,’ absolutely unguessable.”42
But while Luce and Hadden had often worried about the financing and marketing of the magazine, they rarely expressed real doubts about their capacity to write it successfully. “TIME is doing very well,” Luce wrote Lila early in December. “In fact a most unusual spirit of optimism seems to pervade the ranks.” A few weeks later, with the first “fairly good complete [sample] issue of TIME” in hand, he claimed to be in “a sort of soggy pleasant frame of mind.” There were, to be sure, moments of concern. “Things are going very badly,” Luce wrote after the second “specimen issue” appeared. “We have yet to find the ideal assistants.” Hadden once returned deeply discouraged from a meeting with Walter Lippmann, who had been harshly critical of another sample issue. They postponed publication three times as they tried to improve. But little by little, the magazine began to approach their image of it. The later specimens already contained some of the magazine’s most enduring features. There was the distinctive lettering of the title; the cover portrait of a significant individual (the first complete dummy carried a black-and-white drawing of the financier Bernard Baruch); the brief, punchy news items (“Who will be the Republican presidential nominee in 1924? Senator James E. Watson answered this question on the floor of the Senate with an emphatic: ‘President Harding is the only possible choice!’ At once political tongues began to wag”). There was also the casual insertion of opinions into the most straightforward stories (“President Harding, in a speech before Congress, placed a constructive program before the people;” “The great Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama advocated [a second Isthmian canal] in 1897”).43
For Harry the last weeks of 1922 were doubly stressful. Not only was he working with Hadden to shape the content of the magazine, he was also working more or less alone to ensure that Time would be able to function as a business. This was an area of the enterprise in which Hadden took almost no interest and for which he had little talent. Luce, however, proved to be a very good businessman, somewhat to his dismay—since, like Brit, his original interest in “the paper” had been primarily editorial. (“Now the Bratch is really the editor of TIME,” he wrote, “and I, alas, alas, alas, am business manager…. Of course no one but Brit and I know this!”) He negotiated contracts with paper suppliers and printers. He contracted out the advertising. He supervised the budget. He set salaries and terms for employees. He supervised the setting up of the office. And whenever he could, he sat with Brit and marked up copy or discussed plans for the next issue. In the meantime he continued to have obligations to his family, to lead at least a modest social life, and of course to write to Lila in whatever spare minutes he could find. Even for someone in his twenties, the days were long and difficult. He described one of them in December:
… my new steno arrived. Put her to work on 78 letters…. Then conference with paper-man…. Then down town to [bank] to open up our second account. Back to the office, advised … as to employing new man…. Then dashed to the Lotos Club where a disappointed printer gave me a drink and lunch…. Saw Hadden for a second and then began series of interviews with artists (commercial). Threw them out in time to dictate a few belated letters and then rushed out in pursuit of taxi and Helen [one of Lila’s friends from Chicago]. Arrived at Helen’s at 5:45, made profuse a
pologies … and then sat down to tea…. Skidded under the 7 o-clock wire at home for dinner…. After dinner back to work.44
“The whole staff felt the pressure,” Gottfried remembered years later. “For a couple of months nobody had any regular days off, and now [in January 1923] nobody had any days off whatsoever.” One by one staff members succumbed to the stress and exhaustion. Gottfried “was the first to weaken” and announced that he was going to take every Wednesday off. Nancy Ford, whose job as fact-checker for every article was one of the most difficult and time-consuming jobs on the magazine, seemed constantly to be battling exhaustion. (She left the magazine altogether a few months after it began publishing, unable to take the strain.) Luce, too, complained of the stress. “I’ve a splitting headache,” he wrote in the midst of one of those frantic days, and “never seem able to get as much done as seems positively necessary. If there were only 20 Bratches and 20 ‘me’s, we might have a chance of making good.” But for the most part these young pioneers—as they sometimes saw themselves—persevered; and as the release of the first real issue approached, they grew increasingly excited. “After this week,” Luce wrote as the publication day approached, “it’s head-on either to glory or perdition!”45
The intensity was partly a result of the smallness of the staff in relation to the size of the task it was managing. In addition to Hadden and Luce, there were four writers (Gottfried, Martyn, Rinehart, and Thomas), a circulation manager (Larsen), a fact-checker (Nancy Ford for a short time), and a few secretaries and part-time workers. Advertising sales (almost nonexistent) were handled by an outside contractor. Some copy came in from “contributing editors,” mostly recruited from friends and acquaintances, many of whom never appeared in the office; and much of what they wrote had to be heavily edited or entirely rewritten. In the end the tiny full-time staff did the vast majority of the writing. Although the magazine itself was neatly subdivided by topic, there were no clear divisions among the responsibilities of the writers and editors. Everyone did a little of almost everything.46
In mid-February they decided they were ready to publish, and they began aiming for the last week of the month. Their already frenzied lives grew more frantic still as they aimed to meet their self-imposed deadline. But finally they delivered the last of their copy to the printer. Virtually the entire staff, launching a tradition that would continue through the first year of the magazine, crowded into taxis for the trip to the presses—to proofread copy once it was set and to write new stories as the morning papers arrived. After a few hours they sent out for fried-egg sandwiches and coffee. People stretched out on the long tables at the back of the shop and slept. Everything—sandwiches, copy, clothes—became covered with printers’ ink. Finally, in the early morning hours, they stumbled out and headed for home, crossing paths with Wall Street workers on their way downtown.47
The first issue of Time appeared on late February 27, 1923 (with an official publication date of March 3). It was twenty-seven pages long, entirely in black-and-white, printed in small type. It had scant advertising, confined to the inside and back covers and the last few pages; most of the eleven advertisements were from banks and book publishers. But for now Luce and Hadden were concerned above all with the editorial content. And even in the first issue, readers could see the curious mixture of innovations that the two young men had been planning for years—rigid organization, concise news summaries, lively language, whimsical diversions, and casual, even at times sophomoric, expressions of opinion—that would characterize the magazine through much of its early history.
The cover was a black-and-white drawing of the retiring Speaker of the House of Representatives, Joseph Cannon. “Uncle Joe,” as he was known, had been a strict, even tyrannical, leader of the House for decades, and the editors of Time made no secret of their disdain for the “old guard” he represented. “Never did a man employ the office of Speaker with less regard for its theoretical impartiality,” they wrote. He was, they said, “no mere voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice that forbade anybody else to cry out—out of turn.” What was most striking about the inaugural issue, however, was how disciplined it was. No story was longer than four hundred words, and most were two hundred or fewer. There was no deviation from the “FIXED METHOD OF ARRANGEMENT” they had promised subscribers months before: a “National Affairs” section with eleven subsections; “Foreign Affairs” with sixteen subsections, each representing a particular area of the world; and another twenty sections covering the arts, professions, sports, finance, crime, the press, and other topics. A section titled “Milestones” presented news of significant marriages, divorces, and deaths. There was a strange (and deservedly short-lived) feature—“Imaginary Interviews”—that presented clever statements that the editors thought eminent people could or should have made. Perhaps most illustrative of Luce and Hadden’s commitment to sharing even their most trivial opinions with their readers was a pair of features at the end of the magazine—“Point with Pride” and “View with Alarm”—which gave them license to reveal their own passions and prejudices. In the first issue, for example, they “pointed with pride” to an effort by Yale faculty members to retain the requirement that all students study classics, and “viewed with alarm” the literary regard given to T. S. Eliot’s great, despairing poem The Waste Land and the high proportion of “Orientals” in the population of Hawaii. Over the next several years many of the frivolities and excesses of the first issue disappeared (sometimes to be replaced by others). But the enduring core of the idea for the magazine—organization, brevity, comprehensiveness, and partiality—was visible from the start.48 With the first issue finally in print, most of the staff went home to sleep. Luce, however, returned to his office, where he found Larsen on his knees on the floor, frantically burrowing through a chaotic pile of papers. They were the mailing wrappers for subscription copies. Larsen had hired a group of young women—“debutantes,” as he called them—to write the addresses on the wrappers and prepare them for the arrival of the actual magazine. Now he discovered that nothing was in order, that many of the addresses were wrong, and that some of the wrappers were too small to contain the magazine. Some of the subscription copies of the first issue did not get into the mail until after the third issue had been published.
Luce uncharacteristically ignored Larsen’s panic and went to his desk in the back of the office. Putting his feet on the table, he picked up the newly printed magazine—his already ink-stained fingers getting blacker still as he held it—and read it cover to cover. He had seen everything before, three or four times. But, as he recalled years later, “I had this sort of surprising feeling that it was pretty good.”49
*The ratio established by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty that reduced the armaments of the Great Powers.
V
“Time: The Weekly News-Magazine”
I can only say,” Luce wrote late in March 1923, “that Vol 1 No 4 will be published and that Vol 1 No 5 may or may not be published.”1
For a moment following the publication of the first issue, optimism ran high. Grasping at the compliments they received from friends and colleagues, seizing on the rapid sale of the inaugural issue in a few Manhattan locations, Luce, Hadden, Larsen, and their colleagues began to believe that Time might indeed be an overnight success. But those illusions vanished quickly. In the end the first issue sold nine thousand copies, a little more than a third of their projections. This was partly a result of the staff’s inexperience, as illustrated by the incompetent mailing of subscription copies of the first issue. But half of the five thousand newsstand copies were returned unsold as well. Nor was the critical reception encouraging. “The first issue of TIME,” Luce wrote disconsolately, “has received extraordinarily little praise.” For the next weeks and months the Time staffers worked simply to stay alive, “watching the mail-bag with maternal care” to see if enough subscription income would arrive each week to allow them to keep going, and praying “for courage to face the daily—in
fact hourly disappointment.” In the meantime their initial capitalization—just short of one hundred thousand dollars—was dwindling fast, and everyone recognized that substantial additional investments were unlikely until the magazine began to prove itself.2
At one point Luce and Larsen sat down “to see what was the worst we could expect in the next three weeks,” and they concluded that there was “no limit to the extent of the immediate catastrophe!—Not when people are already writing in at the rate of over 100 per day, telling us to cancel their trial subscriptions.” As he usually did when faced with difficulties, Luce shrouded himself in gloom and self-reproach. He was, he wrote to Lila, doomed to be a “second-rater.” And he claimed that he was resigned to the failure. “I really don’t believe I care what happens in April,” he wrote at the end of March. “I shall be more than happy to be April’s fool.” Worst of all “a lot of people who have bought the thing think it is the most terrible of all terrors.” But as in other times of anxiety, he also strove to maintain hope. “We have not begun to realize our aspirations in the making of our paper,” he wrote Nettie McCormick, with more optimism than he actually felt. “But the testimony of thousands of readers every week & in every state of the Union seems to indicate that we are on the right track.” After Condé Nast, the famously successful publisher of Vanity Fair and Vogue, invited Luce and Hadden to meet with them, Luce wrote brightly that the invitation—designed, they assumed, to satisfy the publisher’s curiosity—meant that the “big fellows are beginning to realize we exist.” He was grasping at straws.3
All the members of the staff braced themselves for the daily struggle—the struggle to write, edit, and produce the magazine; to keep up with the bills despite minimal funds; to wrest payment from their charter subscribers. “It was just like pulling teeth to get the $5 bills in,” Luce later recalled. In March they received slightly over eleven thousand dollars in subscription income, and in April more than seventeen thousand dollars. But whatever optimism this healthy increase produced was shattered in May, when income dropped to just over ten thousand dollars. “With any luck,” Luce noted sardonically, “one day we will have $5,000 on deposit.” Advertising income was also minimal. “From the advertising world as a whole,” their first annual report frankly observed, “Time has met with a cold reception…. Advertisers are human. It was years before evolution was generally accepted as a theory.” Inside the office they were less philosophical. Luce and his new (and first) advertising director, E. R. Crowe, were battling constantly—Crowe calling Luce amateurish, Luce accusing Crowe of extravagance. Crowe left angrily after only a few weeks of publication, returning his shares of TIME Inc. stock and, as Luce later recalled, saying “the hell with you.” There were other casualties as well. Hadden was unhappy with John Franklin Carter, one of the new writers, and dismissed him after a few weeks, leaving the editorial operations seriously undermanned. Luce, who was already fully occupied with the magazine’s precarious business operations, had to pitch in. (Carter went on to become a successful columnist, writing as “the Unofficial Observer.”)4
The Publisher Page 15