Clare, in contrast, wrote more provocatively, and presciently:
I, you see, have everything to gain by having you—I lose what? A tedious liberty? … The burden of independence, the loneliness of self sufficiency, that is all I lose. Precious little in exchange for love (with all its rigors) and companionship, with its joys…. But you—my little minister, you will lose a whole peaceful agreeable way of life.
And unlike Harry, she was willing to analyze herself with at least some honesty:
I am capricious, deceitful, moody, impetuous, and utterly relentless in demanding patience and perfection in others…. Altogether you might say that I am a fine subject for a psychological novelist but a very trying creature for a wife.
While Harry was writing Clare, he was also writing to Lila insisting that she would remain an important, if absent, part of his life. “Darlingest,” he wrote early in 1935, “(Because that word meant you and only you for so many years, let me keep it for you only.) They were years, too, which, in the short arc of life were, will always be, so important to us both…. Someday I shall try to put in writing what I have tried to tell you these weeks—my love and, weak though the work, my deep, my very deep appreciation for all that you have been willing to go through.” A few weeks later he wrote again:
A good many years ago I undertook the responsibility of being, in a way, the gardener of your heart’s estate…. If it seems unthinkable to you that I could “walk out” on so important an undertaking, it is also true that I cannot construct any “defense” or “justification” for an action that is so unkind…. I can only pray that, if I did not turn out to be the magic that might have made roses blossom even in a desert—that anyway, somehow, I need not be only your blight and your unhappiness.
At the same time he was trying to explain to his family the reasons for what he feared would be, to them, an unthinkable decision. As expected, his mother and sisters responded with shock and some horror to the news, not only because of the divorce itself but also because of their sense of Clare as an ambitious and immoral woman. They rallied around Lila and listened to her own embittered descriptions of Clare (“an opportunistic woman … hateful…. She blinded him with her glamor”). His sister Beth was similarly alarmed, disdainful of Clare (“a coarse and dishonest woman”). She even wrote Clare to warn of the “tragic” impact of a divorce on the family. His father, as usual, was more understanding, concerned primarily about what would happen if his son’s second marriage failed as well (something that Harry’s mother considered highly likely). “At times I’d find him listless or blue as if he were sick,” Billings wrote. He considered Clare “a yellow-headed bitch who is spending his money like water,” and he viewed the divorce as “a disgusting piece of business.” Harry continued bleakly on his chosen course, absorbing the blows, making no effort to counter them, and consoling himself with ever-increasing expectations of the happiness he would find with Clare.38
As they awaited his divorce and remarriage, both Harry and Clare alternated between striving to stay apart and contriving to find ways to meet. After Harry’s declaration of love, Clare began traveling frantically in an effort to avoid scandal and gossip: to Florida, Bermuda, Cuba, South Carolina, France, Germany. Harry—sometimes discreetly, sometimes brazenly—followed her almost everywhere but stayed, usually, for only a few days. He was, of course, a busy man. But his reluctance to remain with Clare (and perhaps her reluctance to remain with him as well) was also a product of his guilt. Perhaps that was why his first sexual efforts with her were unsuccessful. (Clare, with characteristic indiscretion, told others of Harry’s insistence that he had rarely had a similar problem with Lila, that, as Clare described it, “he simply did it and then rolled over and thought about Time.”) During a brief, prewedding “honeymoon” in Charleston, South Carolina, in August 1935, they finally had their first successful sexual experience, and when they left Luce wrote her a somewhat stilted and slightly dolorous letter about their parting at the Washington, D.C., airport, from which they took separate planes back to New York:
They tramp across a street, her arm in his, to a bleak cafeteria. They tramp back. He watches her go up the gang-plank into the Douglass…. She looks out of the little window. He stands beneath the wing. They signal goodbye … the goodbye of those who know they are forever committed. But it was their first and they were strange to the possibility of being separate.39
After months of negotiations with Lila, alternately friendly and hostile, Luce finally agreed to a substantial settlement. Lila received the newly completed home in Gladstone, New Jersey; the contents of their rented home in New York; and two million dollars, roughly a third of Luce’s net wealth. Lila traveled to Reno, Nevada, to finalize the divorce. During those same weeks Clare hid away on the South Carolina estate of her former lover, Bernard Baruch, and wrote her first play. It was a devastating, perhaps even vindictive, portrait of a dysfunctional marriage, clearly based on her own years with George Brokaw. Abide With Me, as she titled it, opened on Broadway on November 21, 1935, received almost uniformly savage reviews (including a tortuously edited one in Time that managed only to be somewhat less hostile than the others), and closed after thirty-six performances. Harry and Clare were married, seemingly unpropitiously, two days after the disastrous opening, in a private service at the First Congregational Church in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. It was attended only by Clare’s immediate family and Harry’s younger brother, Sheldon.40
Luce’s marriage to Clare changed his life in many ways, but among the most important was a greatly increased visibility. After years of professional fame but relatively personal obscurity, Luce became a bona fide celebrity—a man of certifiable power married to a woman of enormous public interest. Everywhere they went they were noticed and watched. Newspapers and magazines chronicled their social lives, their travels, their public statements, their homes, their clothes. (“Ma came down for me in the car and saw Henry and Clare Luce on 43d St,” Billings wrote about his mother-in-law in the spring of 1936, “a sight that thoroughly excited her.”) And now that Luce was a focus of public scrutiny, his chroniclers felt free to publicize their grievances toward him as well. Nowhere were the costs of celebrity more visible to Luce than in a famously withering profile of him in The New Yorker less than a year after his second marriage—a profile that emerged out of, and greatly inflamed, a long-running feud between the two publishing organizations.41
Time Inc. and The New Yorker were in many ways fundamentally different. Time and Fortune were newsmagazines; The New Yorker’s sensibility was largely literary. Time aspired to reach a broad national audience; The New Yorker was self-consciously elite—not, it claimed, “for the old lady from Dubuque.” Luce prided himself on his magazines’ recognition of the importance, and even the virtues, of commerce (“Business is the focus of our national energies,” he had written in the prospectus for Fortune). The New Yorker staff was equally proud of its supposed isolation from the world of commerce, leaving business matters to professional managers whom the writers claimed to despise. But there were also striking similarities, which very likely accounted for much of the rivalry between the two organizations. Both were the products of the generation that came of age after World War I, and both were the creation of bright and ambitious young men (Hadden and Luce at Time Inc., Harold Ross at The New Yorker). Both magazines reflected the skeptical culture of the young writers and intellectuals of the 1920s and their Mencken-influenced iconoclasm. (“Everyone was in [the Mencken group’s] spell,” Roy Larsen later recalled of the early Time; the same was true of many New Yorker writers and editors.)
Time, and to a lesser degree Fortune, reveled in skewering public figures with tart (and often invented) language. The New Yorker was no less censorious, and in fact built much of its reputation on its famous profiles, which were also often condescending and deflating. Both magazines were brash and opinionated in their early years, and both were largely apolitical but culturally conservative. And while The New Yor
ker prided itself on the quality of its writing and scorned the formulaic “Timese” of its rival, its own language—although less consistent than Time’s—displayed some of the same self-conscious cleverness. It had its own affinity for inverted sentence structure (“Particularly dire are the equinoctial storms that sweep the open-air gardens of Greenwich Village tea rooms this season”); its own use of vivid physical descriptions designed to deflate the pompous and powerful (“a rather heavy-set reddish person … a young face, despite two very long white fronds of mustachios, blue at the ends on account of having been inadvertently dipped into the inkwell so often”). Dwight Macdonald, the former Fortune editor whose disdain for the Luce publications was no secret, had a similar aversion to The New Yorker. In their different ways, he believed, both were creatures of the world of wealth and privilege, without any serious convictions. Fortune, he had long argued, was simply a tool of the capitalist elite. The New Yorker, in turn, was the “humor magazine of ‘our ruling class.’” The renowned Columbia historian Jacques Barzun—a frequent contributor to Life, who once appeared on the cover of Time—expressed his own exasperation with the two magazines. A case could be made, he said, that “the liberal New Yorker” was a “match” for “the conservative Time,” both exhibiting “the same attitude—derisive, suspicious, faintly hostile.” Ingersoll later wrote of The New Yorker in the Partisan Review, which he then edited, “Its editors confine their attention to trivia. Interlarded with the advertisements are various ‘departments,’ devoted to practical advice on the great problem of upper-class life: how to get through the day without dying of boredom.”42
The 1936 New Yorker profile of Luce was an indirect result of the inherent competition between these two organizations, but it was more directly a result of the personal rivalry created by Ralph Ingersoll’s movement from managing editor of The New Yorker to managing editor of Fortune. Harold Ross, the brilliant but disorganized founding editor of The New Yorker, had discovered Ingersoll in the first months of the magazine’s life and had soon come to see him as indispensable—an obsessively hardworking dynamo who brought order to the once-chaotic office during the day and became a hard-drinking companion of the rest of the staff at their favorite bars late into the night. But Ingersoll’s relationship with Ross soon deteriorated, a result of what New Yorker writer James Thurber described as Ross’s “almost pathological cycle of admiration and disillusionment.” The once-intimate friends gradually became embittered enemies. Ross was the self-educated, upwardly mobile son of a Utah grocer with a deep-seated resentment of the wealthy and well born, the very people to whom his magazine so effectively catered. He had particular contempt for the owners of his magazine, but he came as well to resent Ingersoll’s own aristocratic, Hotchkiss and Yale background, which Ingersoll displayed every week in his lightly regarded pieces on what later would be known as Ivy League football. (Ingersoll “talked to people like Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Ross once complained.) Ingersoll in turn came to despise Ross as an erratic and malicious man who treated him, and others, shabbily. Both were people of large egos who did not overlook or forget slights.43
Although Ingersoll left The New Yorker behind when he moved to Fortune in 1929, his simultaneous fascination with and resentment of his former magazine lingered for years. In 1934 he proposed a profile of The New Yorker for Fortune, and even toyed briefly with doing it collaboratively with the New Yorker writers themselves (who declined the invitation, despite Ingersoll’s assurances that the piece would be “a labor of love”). The profile, which appeared in August 1934 and which Ingersoll wrote himself, was superficially friendly but—as Ingersoll certainly knew—certain to infuriate the New Yorker staff.44
“Harold Ross’s father was not a Mormon,” it began, with a barbed reminder of the editor’s far-from-cosmopolitan childhood. “But his uncle joined the Church to get trade for his Salt Lake City grocery store. When Harold was fourteen he went to work in this store and, before he became sensitive about his eccentricities, he used to talk about his career there.” And so it continued through seventeen pages of text, photographs, and New Yorker cartoons. Ingersoll knew the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of his former colleagues well, and skillfully assaulted them all. Ross, he wrote, was “furious” and “mad” and “had neither the wit nor the ability to write himself.” James Thurber was a “blotter-and-telephone book scribbler.” The cartoonist Peter Arno was “tall, handsome, arrogant … disagreeable,” and “his wit has lost its tang.” Wolcott Gibbs, he observed, “hates everybody and everything, takes an adolescent pride in it.” As Ingersoll well knew, the New Yorker writers disdained business and took pride in their purely literary commitment to the magazine. He slyly described the magazine as “a good publishing property,” whose “fundamental success is based on the simple mathematics that a merchant can, at $550 a New Yorker page, call his advertisement to the attention of some 62,000 active and literate inhabitants of the metropolitan area.” Although he wrote positively, if somewhat condescendingly, of the literary quality of the magazine, he was mostly interested in puncturing its writers’ pretense that they were engaged in an intellectual enterprise rather than a business. “The New Yorker is fifteen cents’ worth of commercialized temperate, distillate of bitter wit and frustrated humor,” he wrote. “It has nothing to apologize for as a money-maker. It ran more pages of advertising than—hold your breath—the Saturday Evening Post itself.” He calculatedly infuriated the most prominent members of the staff by publishing their salaries—forty thousand dollars for Ross, eleven to twelve thousand for his most eminent writers. (They all claimed that they were paid much less than reported. Shortly after the Fortune piece appeared, E. B. White wrote sarcastically in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” “The editor of Fortune makes $30-a-week and carfare.”)
Although the profile was Ingersoll’s project, Luce paid the consequences. Ross decided almost immediately that The New Yorker should take revenge, but he bided his time. Two years later he published a savage profile of Luce by the wickedly clever Wolcott Gibbs. In many ways it paralleled Ingersoll’s portrait of The New Yorker—offering the same barbed profiles of Time writers and executives, the same indiscreet publication of the salaries of editors and writers, the same condescending praise for the magazine’s success combined with barely disguised contempt for the content of the magazine. Gibbs described “strange, inverted Timestyle” as “gibbersish,” the product of “Hadden’s impish contempt for his readers, his impatience with the English language.” To prove his point Gibbs wrote the entire article in a hyperactive version of Time’s own language, as in his brilliant quip, “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” Luce was an “ambitious, gimlet-eyed Baby Tycoon…. Prone he to wave aside pleasantries, social preliminaries, to get at once to the matter in hand.” Of Luce’s relationship with Hadden, Gibbs wrote invidiously:
Strongly contrasted from the outset of their venture were Hadden, Luce. Hadden, handsome, black-haired, eccentric, irritated his partner by playing baseball with the office boys, by making jokes, by lack of respect for autocratic business. Conformist Luce disapproved of heavy drinking, played a hard, sensible game of tennis, said once “I have no use for a man who lies in bed after nine o’clock in the morning.”
And of Luce’s future:
Certainly to be taken with seriousness is Luce at thirty-eight, his fellowman already informed up to his ears, the shadow of his enterprise long across the land, his future plans impossible to contemplate. Where it all will end, knows God!45
The Gibbs profile of Luce was mostly accurate and far from wholly negative. Just as the Fortune piece greatly boosted the visibility of The New Yorker, so the profile of Luce certified him as a major public figure and a man of extraordinary power and achievement. It probably did the company, and Luce himself, more good than harm. A man of less intensity and seriousness might have treated it as the brilliant joke it partly was, but Luce—who read the piece in galleys several weeks before it appeared—viewed it
only as a savage attack. Perhaps unwisely he asked to meet with Ross and Gibbs and St. Clair McKelway (another New Yorker writer, who had worked on the profile with Gibbs) before publication—a decision he later bitterly regretted. Gibbs lost his nerve and failed to attend, but Luce, Ingersoll, Ross, and McKelway met for dinner, followed by a long night of drinking that ended at 3 in the morning. (“Oh, that terrible night,” he recalled years later. “I should never have gone over. Ingersoll dragged me there.”) Accounts differ as to who was drunk and who, if anyone, remained sober. But it is clear that Ingersoll and McKelway drank heavily and had to be separated at least once to avoid fisticuffs. Luce and Ross talked at length, neither giving an inch to the other. Luce complained of inaccuracies. Ross replied that getting the facts wrong “is part of the parody of Time.” “God damn it Ross,” Ingersoll remembered Luce saying, with the residual stammer that still reappeared at moments of stress or excitement, “this whole God damn piece is ma- ma - malicious.” Ross replied: “You’ve put your finger on it, Luce. I believe in malice.” A few days later Ross followed up with a five-page letter, which greatly intensified the feud. “I was astonished to realize the other night,” he wrote,
that you are apparently unconscious of the notorious reputation Time and Fortune have for crassness in description, for cruelty and scandal-mongering and insult. I say frankly but really in a not unfriendly spirit, that you are in a hell of a position to ask anything…. You are generally regarded as being mean as hell and frequently scurrilous.
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,
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