Among the most ambitious stories of the early March of Time—and the one most revealing of its techniques and standards—was a January 1938 film titled “Inside Nazi Germany.” The film was not, in the beginning, a reflection of any strong interest in Germany by the filmmakers. Prior to 1938 de Rochemont had paid relatively little attention to the Nazis, except to display those Americans who were promoting measures to keep the United States out of any future war. The German story was, rather, the result of the availability of rare film from within Nazi Germany itself, shot by a freelance photographer, Julien Bryan. On assignment from The March of Time, he shot twenty thousand feet of what he claimed was “uncensored material.” In fact Bryan’s film was largely unremarkable. Whether because of restrictions on what he could shoot, or because he was himself cautious about what he filmed, he brought back footage that was of high photographic quality but of little real interest: images of middle-class Germans living ordinary, prosperous lives; footage of German youth groups and public-works laborers that were almost indistinguishable from American images of Civilian Conservation Corps camps or Works Progress Administration projects.
De Rochemont and his staff were undeterred. Determined to present a shocking image of a brutal state, they used Bryan’s idyllic images as a kind of foil to set up their real message. The “air of prosperity” in Berlin, the “plain cheerful people” moving through cities or working on farms, portrayed what was, in fact, a Potemkin village hiding an evil regime. Germans were living normal lives on the surface but in fact they were part of a society “with one mind, one will, one goal—expansion,” a nation in which, “for the good Nazi, not even God stands above Hitler.” The upbeat music of the opening scenes quickly turned dark and ominous. The narration acquired a doomsday tone, with descriptions that were hyperbolic even for a regime whose crimes would seem almost impossible to exaggerate. “From the time the German child is old enough to understand anything,” the announcer proclaimed, “he ceases to be an individual and is taught that he was born to die for the fatherland. Scarcely out of kindergarten, the child must take the place allotted to him in the great Nazi scheme and from then on think and act as he is told.” To supplement the banal live footage, de Rochemont staged dramatizations—thugs painting anti-Semitic graffiti on buildings, police rounding up Jews, loyal Nazis saluting one another in their kitchens—creating the ominous visual images that Bryan had failed to provide. Much of the dramatized footage was shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, because its large German neighborhoods had a credible visual similarity to bourgeois Germany. John Martin, the former Time editor now (briefly) assigned to the newsreels, wrote the film’s final words: “Nazi Germany faces her destiny with one of the great war machines in history. And the inevitable destiny of the great war machines of the past has been to destroy the peace of the world, its people, and the governments of their time.”27
The film was predictably controversial—with German officials in the United States and small groups of German Americans attacking it as biased and inaccurate propaganda, and with anti-Nazi critics arguing that the film had not been anti-Nazi enough. Some distributors complained the film was simply too controversial, that it would alienate movie audiences. Jack Warner, the head of the Warner Brothers studio, argued that the film was “pro-Nazi” and refused to distribute it in his theaters. (Warner dismissed the anti-Nazi narration and argued that viewers were influenced only by what they saw, not by what they heard—an argument Luce disdainfully countered with a sarcastic reference to Warner’s role in creating the first sound movies.) A few more thoughtful critics, drawn to comment on the film by the strong response it received, expressed concern that the manipulation of images and words to express an opinion—however justified—was a dangerous exercise of a power that could easily be misused.
The most ardent critics of the film, and of The March of Time generally, were the intellectuals and critics of the Popular Front—the broad coalition of the antifascist Left launched in 1935 by the American Communist Party. They did not object to the criticism of Nazi Germany. Their critique was more fundamental: that The March of Time, with its “chromium-bright polish,” was, like the rest of Time Inc., simply doing the work of Wall Street and the capitalist world of which it was a part. The films displayed a “trend toward militarism and reaction” and were “doing exactly what Hollywood is doing: avoiding or distorting reality.” The power of The March of Time was, however, unmistakable, and Popular Front filmmakers responded not just with criticism, but by creating a newsreel of their own, The World Today, which in its brief life adopted many of Time Inc.’s editorial and filmmaking techniques to present what they considered newsworthy events: most notably a sympathetic portrayal of a rent strike in Queens.28
“Inside Nazi Germany,” despite its occasional critics, was one of the most successful and most watched of all of Time Inc.’s films. Theaters that did not normally show The March of Time leaped at the opportunity to screen it when Warner and other theaters banned it. It was also, on the whole, one of the most highly praised of all Time Inc. productions. “March of Time,” a British critic wrote, had “won the field for the elementary principles of public discussion,” and had strengthened the possibility of “a revitalized citizenship and of a democracy at long last in contact with itself.” The New Republic, a frequent critic of Luce publications, grudgingly admitted that “it is heartening to see good young blood making a field-day of the creaky superstitions of the movie trade.”29
“Inside Nazi Germany” was not an artistic or technical breakthrough. The March of Time had long ago learned how to shape material to convey a powerful message, whatever the visual images at its disposal, even if on less explosive topics. But this particular story was significant in other ways, for it marked a decisive step by The March of Time (a step paralleled by the rest of the growing Luce empire) away from its earlier vaguely pacifist and isolationist leanings and toward a more aggressive effort to mobilize the nation in opposition to the rise of fascism. For much of the rest of its relatively short life, The March of Time was increasingly, and ultimately almost exclusively, a chronicler of aggression and war, and a champion of America’s growing leadership in the world.30
Luce’s restlessness in the mid-1930s ultimately extended to his family life. He had a stable, comfortable, but increasingly conventional marriage, dominated by the demands of running a household and raising two young boys to whom he was only erratically attentive. Luce was endlessly immersed in the affairs of his company, working late into the evening and on weekends. Lila—who had tried to show an interest in the magazines early in their marriage—became increasingly remote from Harry’s work. She and the boys decamped frequently to rented houses in Connecticut or New Jersey, or to nearby resorts. Harry as often as not failed to join them or arrived trailing business associates with whom he spent much of his time working. In New York, Harry was out almost every night, often without Lila, even though she liked social events more than he did. Real bonds of affection remained between them. Lila was devoted to Harry, but she was also somewhat in awe of him. (Friends occasionally commented on how much more animated and interesting she was when she was not with her husband—“most pleasant,” Billings once noted, “bubbling and bouncing around rather ecstatically.”) Harry, for his part, was tolerant of but generally bored with her preoccupation with decorating and fashion, and with the frequent presence of her wealthy mother, who reinforced Lila’s more trivial interests. The passion of their courtship and their early years of marriage had obscured some of the profound differences between them. But now that the passion had faded, their relationship was driven more and more by routine. In 1934 Harry and Lila agreed to move the family to New Jersey so that the boys could enter a country day school. (Lila, who had attended school in New York as a girl, was favorably disposed toward city schools, but Harry clung to an image—largely unrelated to his own peripatetic experience as a child—of his sons growing up in a small, stable, sylvan community.) They found an imposing pr
operty in Gladstone and began to build a large house (designed to resemble the French châteaus that Lila loved) on a hill overlooking the pristine New Jersey countryside. There was nothing to suggest that the marriage was in jeopardy. Indeed, it might have survived indefinitely had it not been for Harry’s unplanned meeting with a woman who would change his, and his family’s, life: Clare Boothe Brokaw.31
Clare Boothe was born in New York City on March 10, 1903, into a family clinging precariously—and not wholly successfully—to middle-class respectability. Her mother, Ann Clare Snyder, was the daughter of an immigrant butcher whom she later described, falsely, as the son of an impoverished Austrian nobleman. As a young woman Ann Snyder was an unsuccessful actress and dancer, and she never wholly lost her taste for the fast, itinerant life of the show-business world. Clare’s father, William Boothe, was an off-and-on businessman and a professional musician who periodically changed his name to escape his creditors. William was already married to the first of his three legal wives when his relationship with Ann began in 1901; he never married her. They lived together in Tennessee for several years (then using the name “Murphy”) while Boothe embarked on a failed career as a violin teacher. Ann left him in 1912 and returned to New York with Clare and Clare’s younger brother, David, and she sustained herself for several years through relationships with wealthy (and sometimes married) men. Joel Jacobs, a successful, unmarried businessman, took a special interest in the family and provided them with enough financial support to allow Ann to send her children to a series of elite boarding schools, which Clare mostly hated. “I never drew a happy breath in my entire childhood,” Clare later wrote in a fragment of an unfinished and unpublished memoir.32
Shortly after World War I Ann began a relationship with Elmer Austin, a successful and sophisticated surgeon whom she married in 1921, after vacillating for more than a year between the wealthier Jacobs and the more “respectable” (non-Jewish) Austin. The marriage secured Clare’s access to the world of wealth and privilege in New York, where she stood out for her beauty, her glamour, and her seemingly self-confident charm. In 1923 Clare married George Tuttle Brokaw, a socially prominent heir to a clothing fortune who was twenty-three years her senior. Their daughter, Ann, was born the following year. But the marriage was a disaster from the start. Brokaw was a boorish drunk with few interests beyond riding, golf, and gambling. Clare was a restless, ambitious young woman who felt stifled by her husband’s dull, self-indulgent routine. They divorced in 1929, after a settlement that left Clare and her daughter financially secure. No longer content simply to seek a good marriage, Clare began looking for a career.33
For four years she did editorial work on several magazines, most notably Condé Nast’s glamorous Vanity Fair, where Clare became managing editor in 1933. But a year later, bridling at the anonymity of editorial work, she left the magazine to become a playwright, an ambition shaped in part by her brief career as a child actress years before. Just as Joel Jacobs had smoothed her mother’s path to stability during Clare’s childhood, so she herself relied on Bernard Baruch—with whom she had a long-term and not wholly discreet affair—to help Clare along the path to her own career.34
Luce was certainly aware of Clare Brokaw for several years before he met her, both because of her social prominence and her somewhat anomalous success as a woman in publishing. Lila was aware of her too. (“Who should appear in our very hotel here—much to my amusement,” she wrote Harry’s mother and sisters from Salzburg in 1932, “—but one C. Brokaw! And what a stupid face she has got!”) Clare, of course, was very aware of Harry—as everyone in publishing was by then—and had even written a short tribute to him in Vanity Fair several years earlier, despite her private belief that he sounded like a “dreary man.” They met for the first time at a dinner party in 1934, when Luce sat down with her abruptly, talked shop briefly, and then stood up brusquely and left. They had a similarly brief encounter a few months later, which ended equally brusquely. Clare considered him “extremely rude.” “He picked my brains and left me flat,” she later recalled. But their third meeting was different.35
On December 9, 1934, the prominent hostess Elsa Maxwell invited Harry and Lila to a “Turkish ball” at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Starlight Roof Garden. It was in honor of the opening of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical Anything Goes and included a performance of songs from the show. At one point in the evening, Clare noticed Harry walking across the room carrying two glasses of champagne back to his table. “Oh Mr. Luce,” she said flirtatiously as he passed, “you’re no doubt bringing me that champagne.” As the lights dimmed Harry sat down and began an intense conversation with Clare. When the lights came up, they were still talking. After a while he rejoined Lila briefly, told her cryptically that he had “been asked to stay,” and suggested that she go home without him. Always obliging, Lila agreed. He and Clare continued talking. When the party ended Harry asked her to come with him to the hotel lobby. According to Clare’s possibly embellished later accounts, he said to her: “I’ve read about it happening. But it has just happened to me. The French call it a coup de foudre. I think I must tell you—you are the one woman in my life.” Clare was stunned and somewhat incredulous (but also, certainly, intrigued), and they ended the evening by agreeing to meet at her apartment several days later—a meeting Clare must have imagined might never take place. But Harry remained besotted, and when he called on Clare again, he was if anything even more insistent in his declarations of love.36
Thus began the most agonizing period in Luce’s life. Since childhood he had struggled with the competing demands of ambition and virtue, a struggle rooted in his family, his education, and his faith. At every juncture—succeeding as a prep-school student, becoming a university leader, founding a company that in his view helped enlighten and enrich society—he believed he was reconciling these two goals. His passion for Clare was certainly compatible with ambition; she was, he realized, one of the most famous, glamorous, and accomplished women in New York and someone who would dramatically enhance his own celebrity. But leaving his wife and children was utterly incompatible with everything he had understood to be virtue throughout his life. At the same time that he was trying to persuade Clare to commit herself to him, a relatively easy task as it turned out, he was torturing himself with questions about the morality of his actions. Did he have the “Christian right” to take this step? What would his parents and his sisters think? How would this affect Lila and the boys? He took friends and colleagues aside and, uncharacteristically, poured out his anguish. “Harry … couldn’t work, had to walk around the block,” Billings commented. He had “been through hell for weeks.” Archibald MacLeish (one of his confidants) said that Luce was “shaken, overwhelmed, infatuated.” But in the end he returned to what he convinced himself was the decisive factor: his own sudden and largely unfamiliar passion. “Love is all there is,” MacLeish recalled his saying. “I haven’t any choice … because I love Clare.” Or as Ralph Ingersoll more cynically observed years later, “Any other course was beyond his capacity. Thinking, as Harry always did, in the most grandiose of terms, his new emotion was one of the Great Loves of All Time—possibly The Greatest.”37
In the year between their fateful encounter at the Turkish ball and their quiet yet controversial wedding, Luce sought both to assure Clare of his all-encompassing love and to persuade Lila not to think ill of him. During their many separations, he wrote love letters to Clare that were almost uncannily similar in language and tone to the letters he had written to Lila during their courtship of more than a decade before. He created a pet name for Clare (“Mike”) just as he had for Lila (“Tod”). He revived the exaggerated language of love he had developed during his earlier courtship, perhaps because in both cases he was unable to express his emotions except by relying on conventional, and sometimes banal, description. “Enchantress of our Twenty Thousand Days,” he called Clare. “After so many years the big really incredible dream came true,” he wrote. He was “hopelessl
y in love.” He seemed in many of his letters more struck by her beauty than by anything else: “Darling, darling, I love you…. And no matter how often I may observe your face, I shall never catch the lighting trick by which it shifts from brilliant theatrical beauty to the heart-shattering beauty of tender and companionable affection.”
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