The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  The most direct influence on the creation of Life was probably the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (known to most of its readers as “BIZ”). This was not because BIZ was a true picture magazine. For the most part it used photographs to illustrate text, which dominated its pages. But it was a pioneer in laying out multiple photographs—varying the size, shape, and positioning of pictures to enliven the page. And its most influential editor, Kurt Korff, spent some time consulting on Life after he fled the Nazi regime in the early 1930s. The Hungarian-born photographer Endre Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa, was also on the staff of BIZ before he, like Korff, fled the Nazis. He, too, moved to the United States, and became a staple of Life. But BIZ was only one of many European models. The Anglophiles on the Time Inc. staff, Luce among them, were also familiar with the Illustrated London News, whose format was much closer to Life’s than was the layout of the Berliner Illustrierte. In the London magazine, pictures dominated text. It was more adventurous than BIZ in its layouts, in its use of captions to turn pictures into stories, and in the wide range of subjects, some serious and some frivolous, it chose to attract readers. The most artistically interesting magazine of its time was the Parisian Vu, with striking modern typefaces, dazzling cover designs (not unlike those of Fortune), and ambitious “photo essays” that told such important stories as the return of the Saar to Germany, the Spanish civil war, and crises in Russia, along with elegant presentations of art, theater, and dance. Clare had cited Vu as the model for the photo magazine she proposed to Condé Nast in 1931, and one of the earliest efforts in the planning of Life was a largely unsuccessful attempt to lure some of the Vu photographers and editors to New York.11

  The idea of picture magazines in the 1930s was not without its critics in Europe. To the socialist Left, the magazines were tools of the bourgeoisie, reinforcing a middle-class view of the world and luring the proletariat into its culture. To intellectual critics of popular culture (among them the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote pessimistically in 1938 that “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture”), the photo magazines were vehicles by which “readers” became “lookers,” and “understanding” became simply “seeing.” That BIZ and other German picture magazines became tools of Nazi propaganda not long after 1932 without losing their popularity further persuaded many critics—in Europe and America—that mass-produced images were dangerously powerful manipulators of culture and society. (Such criticisms augured, and helped shape, the later emergence of a broad critique of “mass culture” in the United States—among whose leaders was the Time Inc. veteran Dwight Macdonald.) But the appetite for photographs overwhelmed the critics. To publishers, they were becoming irresistible.12

  “The talk—everybody in ‘21’ and everywhere else—was saying there ought to be a picture magazine,” Luce recalled of the early 1930s. But despite broad enthusiasm for the idea, the actual creation of Life was a slow and difficult process that he almost abandoned at several points. As he had done with Fortune in 1929, Luce created an Experimental Department late in 1933 to consider “a new magazine—a weekly or fortnightly current events magazine for large circulation, heavily illustrated.” He moved Martin out of his post as managing editor of Time to direct the project. Dwight Macdonald, the restive Fortune writer, served as Martin’s “junior colleague.” A few months later, Luce asked Daniel Longwell, the only editor in the company with extensive experience with pictures, to help plan the contents and look of the magazine, as his design of Four Hours a Year had made clear. Unlike the slow, relatively quiet planning for Fortune, which Luce had undertaken over the objections of Hadden and had tried to hide from him, the preparations for what became Life were intense, frantic, and visible to everyone in the organization. Within a few months of the creation of the Experimental Department, the first dummies appeared, using the then-preferred title “Parade.” Reactions were mixed, and Luce began feeling uneasy with the project. “We were being completely fuzzed up by all this arty talk…. a lot of theoretical stuff,” he later recalled. A little more than six months into the planning, he abruptly terminated the project. “No plans have been developed by TIME INC. for any new publication of any sort,” he announced in June.13

  For a time it appeared that the project might be abandoned permanently. “Even now they don’t know if they are going to publish it,” Billings wrote, worried that Martin might return to Time and displace him as managing editor. Luce himself told colleagues that he was not yet sure they were capable of producing the kind of magazine he was imagining. But in fact work on the project resumed after only a slight pause, largely because of the energy and commitment of Longwell—a passionate supporter of the magazine, who fought to keep the idea alive when many others seemed ready to give up. “A picture magazine is long overdue in this country,” he wrote Luce in September 1935. “A war, any sort of war is going to be natural promotion for a picture magazine.” Having invited Kurt Korff to consult, he found his advice rather obvious: choosing “a good title—a short one;” avoiding “brown color for printing…. Brown is not a gay color;” and saving “no money on editorial material. Get the best you can.” But his presence and example helped legitimize Longwell’s efforts, and he taught Longwell and others to look carefully at photographs, to choose pictures that were interesting and arresting, whatever the subject.

  By early 1936 momentum was once again growing behind the project, driven in part by Luce’s own revived enthusiasm for the idea, which was no doubt attributable in part to Clare and their honeymoon conversations about the project. “Luce was all for the picture magazine,” Larsen observed at the time. “He’s got it in his blood bad.” The growing inevitability of the project was also evident to Ralph Ingersoll, who had opposed the idea during the first round of planning, fearing that it would compete with Fortune, but who now prudently changed course and became one of its champions. Ingersoll drew in Archibald MacLeish (who wired back that he was “too enthusiastic about the whole project to make any sense by telegraph”), solicited ideas from members of the Time staff, and attempted (ultimately unsuccessfully) to make the project his own.* Martin (when he was sober) and Longwell also began laboring again on designing the magazine.14

  In the meantime Luce and others began working on the practical underpinnings of the project: production and finance, both of which presented at least as many challenges as did the editorial planning. Everyone at Time Inc. expected a successful picture magazine to attract a much larger audience than anything they had ever created before. But publishing the mass-circulation periodical Luce envisioned required a kind of printing for which there was as yet no capacity. High-quality photography needed expensive coated paper, which at the time was available only in single sheets, impractical for a circulation that Luce and others imagined reaching and perhaps exceeding a million copies a week. Using existing photographic printing techniques on rolled paper, of whatever quality, was also impractical because photographic images needed time to dry and a rotary press would smudge them. But R. R. Donnelley, Time’s longtime printer in Chicago, was already experimenting with “heatset printing,” which combined fast-drying ink with a gas-heated printing press capable of producing rapid, clean photographic images. At the same time the Mead Corporation, which had been supplying paper to Time for years, developed a new kind of paper—“Emmeline”—which was relatively inexpensive, capable of reproducing photographs well, and adaptable to the large rolls required by high-volume printing. We “presented these to Harry,” a Donnelley executive recounted, “and explained to him what we thought were the speed possibilities…. Harry said, ‘I think this is it. I think this will let me start an entirely new type of publication.’” 15

  The prospective size of the circulation was not only a production challenge but a financial one as well. By the spring of 1936 a consensus had developed within the company that circulation would start out at around 250,000 and gradually grow over the course of several years to a much
larger number. The company offered prospective advertisers relatively low rates, consistent with the projected initial circulation, and promised them no cost increases for at least a year. There were tentative predictions of a modest profit of about four hundred thousand dollars in the first year. But everyone understood that their calculations were unreliable and that a circulation significantly above the guarantee would demolish their estimates. The magazine would be priced at 10 cents per issue on newsstands, and less for subscribers—well below the cost of production. Advertising would close the gap, but only barely, and only if circulation remained below 250,000; every copy sold above the guaranteed circulation would be sold at a loss. Luce was aware of the risk, and he considered suggestions for mitigating it—reducing the page count, cutting down the page size, using cheaper paper. But other colleagues opposed these changes. “Never in our history,” one of his colleagues wrote him, “have we come out of any tight spot by a choice of conservatism or economy in the usual sense of those words, but always by expenditure of more money and more effort to gain greater income at greater expense.” In the end Luce’s own preference for quality trumped his concern about profit, and he made no significant compromises, betting that moderate circulation growth would protect the company from large initial losses. In the short term, at least, it proved to be a bad bet.16

  To Luce, however, finding a way to make a profit was a less important and less interesting challenge than working on the content and design of the magazine, and he threw himself into the planning process with an enthusiasm comparable to his early involvement with Fortune. To the occasional dismay of his editors, he spent hours each day in the Experimental Department offices reviewing copy, marking up dummies, and flipping through photographs. Even when he was physically absent, his colleagues felt his presence through the frequent arrival of lengthy memos outlining a new feature or department that he wanted the staff to develop. Like everyone else Luce was struggling to develop a structure for Life. “He was constantly changing—tossing things out and putting things in—trying to arrive at the right formula,” one of his colleagues noted. But there was a certain consistency in how he envisioned the project. It would be as broad as possible in its scope, attempting to embrace the totality of the world, not just prominent people and events. Its signature element would be the photographic essay, an extended examination of an event or topic driven by what Luce liked to call “beautiful pictures” with relatively minimal text. And while the magazine would take on some of the most serious issues of its time, it would not shy away from the frivolous, the fashionable, and even occasionally the salacious. If Time had been conceived as a digest of the news for busy, literate people, and Fortune had been created to serve the interests of businessmen, Life was promoted from the beginning as a magazine for everyone. It would, Luce insisted, cut across class, ethnicity, race, region, and political preference and become an irresistible magnet for men and women of all backgrounds. Unsurprisingly Life never really attained this lofty goal. “Life means more to the educated than to the illiterate,” one of the company’s early advertising executives conceded. But the aspiration to create a democratic periodical was real, and its creators genuinely wanted it to have “mass appeal.” They believed that a broad readership was capable of understanding serious material and was not interested only in what Luce called “grue, sex, nonsense, and mugs.” Those beliefs helped ensure that Life, even though it would never appeal to everyone, would eventually reach a much broader audience than all but a few magazines in American history.17

  Many people, Luce among them, had attempted to write a prospectus for the new project, beginning as early as 1933. Most of these initial efforts presented detailed and often technical descriptions of what the magazine would look like and what it would examine. But in June 1936 Luce decided on a different approach—an essentially literary portrait of the magazine that would convey his own ambitions and aspirations and that would excite both potential readers and potential advertisers. To a considerable degree, the prospectus achieved this goal, especially in its opening paragraphs, which became a minor classic of journalistic writing:

  To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work—his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms; things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in the seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed. […]

  Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind.

  To see, and to show, is the mission now undertaken by a new kind of publication.

  Luce consulted with many people about the prospectus, most importantly Archibald MacLeish, whose poetic sensibility Luce wanted to incorporate into the document. In late June, MacLeish had sent him a draft that included a key phrase that appeared in the final product: “things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to.” Luce adopted those lines, but little else from MacLeish’s draft. MacLeish, in turn, made some important changes in the new draft that Luce created. The version Luce sent back to MacLeish began: “To see life, to see the world, the cockeyed world; to eye-witness the great events in the human comedy of error.” MacLeish persuaded him to simplify the opening phrase and slim down the document, added a few short phrases, but did not substantially change the language. The prospectus itself had an unusually large audience: advertisers, journalists, editors, and current Time Inc. subscribers.18

  Choosing a title for the magazine was itself a major undertaking. After abandoning the initial choice of “Parade” in 1934—a name rejected in part because of the difficulty of buying the title from an existing periodical—Luce and his colleagues spent almost two years trying to settle on another title. For surprisingly long they toyed with “Dime,” which was the proposed cover price (and which, of course, rhymed with Time), but eventually almost everyone acknowledged that the price would likely change at some point and that publishing both Time and “Dime” would be confusing, if not ridiculous. Another early favorite was “Show Book of the World,” which accurately described the goals of the magazine, but which many of the editors came to believe was too wordy and clumsy. There were many, many others: “Frame,” “Sight,” “Picture, “Wide World,” “Earth,” “Eye Witness,” “Look,” “See,” “Scope,” “Clicks,” “Camorama,” “Snaps,” and “Eyes of Time.” Roy Larsen made what Ingersoll at one point called “a pretty air tight case” for calling the magazine “The March of Time,” which would capitalize on the name recognition (and large advertising budget) for the company’s newsreels. Luce balked at them all.19

  In retrospect it seems puzzling that the name “Life” came to the fore so late in the process. Luce himself was certainly aware of Clare’s preference for the title, which stretched back to her 1931 proposal to Nast. “Life” appeared on almost all the lists that the editors considered in 1935 and 1936, and it received support here and there from many of the participants in the process, including Luce’s family friend James Linen (who later joined the company and eventually became its president). It seems likely that the prospectus itself, and particularly its powerful opening phrase, “To see life,” played a role in the final choice. The prospectus was still using “Show Book of the World” as a title, but even before its release, Luce was confiding to friends that he wanted the name “Life”—then the title of a once-popular humor magazine that had fallen on hard times. Luce asked Larsen to inquire about buying it out so that he could use the name, and the struggling Life publishers accepted with surprising alacrity, asking only for jobs for some of their employees and the relatively modest sum of $92,000 (much less than Larsen had been prepared to offer). Within a little more than a month, the deal was complete, and by early October the company had c
ommitted itself irrevocably, and publicly, both to the name Life and to the publication of the magazine.20

  The biggest challenge, of course, was finding the right look, style, and content for the magazine they envisioned. Despite all the models of photographic journalism at their disposal, the creators of Life felt they were moving in uncharted waters, determined to create something that would be entirely new. Their initial efforts were discouraging. An early dummy was pieced together at the beginning of 1936 as an experiment in “articulating a language of pictures.” It was widely viewed as a disaster: a jumbled mélange of celebrity portraits and underworld scandal with little coherence and even less sophistication. An offensive story about a police hunt for a black suspect, culminating in the suspect’s murder, was entitled “Nigger Hunt.” Several pages were devoted to a group of nudists in San Diego—a salacious appeal to an unsophisticated audience. But at the same time, it included a five-page spread on the tennis star Don Budge, which seemed to cater to the mostly affluent fans of the game. The second try—a “published” dummy, designed in May 1936 and printed in August—was more respectable in its contents, with striking photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt and Bourke-White, color reproductions of early Christian art, and stories on Katharine Hepburn and the cosmetics titan Elizabeth Arden. But it, too, seemed to most of those who read it to be a drab and lifeless effort. Paul Hollister, the director of advertising at Macy’s and a widely admired graphic designer, was appalled. “It is inconceivable,” he wrote, “that even a dress-rehearsal just for ‘fun’ should have turned out so far short even of where you intended it should turn out as a teaser.” At Luce’s request he took the dummy home, spent a few days cutting and pasting, and sent back a version with the same content but with a design that Luce and others greatly preferred.21