The final trial run, titled “Rehearsal” and printed in September, was better. It included a multipage, vaguely Uncle Remus–like story on “cotton pickin’” that described black workers as “Pappy” and “Cap’n.” But it also included a photo array of the U.S. Open golf tournament, inundated by rain; a gallery of pictures of world events; striking and reasonably tasteful photographs by the well-known commercial photographer Paul Outerbridge of a female nude, which nevertheless caused such a barrage of criticism that real nudity rarely appeared in the actual magazine; a story on a Nuremberg rally in Germany; and the first of many Life articles on Chiang Kai-shek. Its design was clean and reasonably handsome, although not particularly lively. Some pages looked like dull filmstrips; others—including one laid out by Luce himself—chaotically random in design. There were sharp criticisms from Ingersoll (“so much worse than the first dummy”), a view likely driven in part by his feeling that Luce was ignoring his advice; and from the prominent journalist Dorothy Thompson (“I don’t think it’s good enough…. unmodern”). Longwell himself conceded that it “is no good yet,” but he believed nevertheless that it was “beginning to be a picture Book … one hell of an invention.” Luce was critical too, but like Longwell he was encouraged, and he decided the time had come for the launch. “We won’t experiment any more,” he said. “We’ll learn to do this in actual publication.”22
In mid-October 1936, only a few weeks before the publication date, Luce decided that the existing Life staff was inadequate to the task before them. Martin’s alcoholism and depression were becoming worse, making him more and more unreliable. He was increasingly abusive toward his colleagues (and especially toward Longwell, a creative if somewhat disorganized editor with limited managerial skills). A few months earlier Luce had named himself managing editor for an “unstated term of months or years,” hoping he could compensate for Martin’s weaknesses. But he quickly realized that this was not a long-term solution to the problem. In late October, after a disastrous lunch during which Martin drunkenly abused Luce in front of other editors, Luce abruptly moved Martin out of Life and back to his old job as managing editor of Time. He described Martin as “a most able editor and an equally difficult collaborator,” and he evidently hoped—overlooking the addictive and abusive behavior that lay at the heart of Martin’s problems—that once again alone at the head of Time, Martin would regain his old form. (Luce refused to do what Larsen and others recommended—fire Martin altogether. That was probably in part because Luce was sensitive about removing Brit Hadden’s cousin and one of the few remaining reminders of Hadden’s once-formidable presence, which in most respects Harry had already allowed to fade.) At the same time he moved Billings out of Time, with two days’ notice, into a position he called “collaborator-in-chief” and “alternate managing editor” of Life, all the while preserving his own claim to be the real managing editor. Billings, the ablest editor in the organization, moved smoothly and successfully into the work-in-progress that was about to become Life—although not without reservations.23
“At 5 o’clock,” Billings wrote in his diary on October 23,
Luce called me to his office, shut the door, and proceeded to tell me that a great crisis had arisen on Life—a crisis due to Martin’s behavior…. He thinks he and I could work well together, and so on. I was surprised and startled at this proposal. I know nothing of the philosophy of Life and am devoted to Time, which is clicking along well…. Yet Life is a new job with fresh excitement—and much harder work, I suppose. My answer to Luce was: I am ready to do whatever he thought best for the organization.
A few days later, as Billings began his new job, Luce gave him his first and most important order: “We’ve been fussing around for six months with theory and philosophy. From now on, to hell with theory and philosophy—you’ve got to get out a magazine.” The first issue, he said, would go to press in two weeks.24
The creation of Life’s first issue took place in the midst of so much haste and confusion that the many accounts of the effort seldom coincide. To Luce the last weeks were a time of consolidation, in which departments were organized, policies implemented, visual and literary style guidelines created. To Billings “everything was rush and confusion … and nothing was really accomplished.” To other staffers it was a period of exhilaration combined with exhaustion. To outsiders—including editors and writers from the other Time Inc. magazines accustomed to their relatively tidy editorial systems—what was happening in the Life offices looked like pure chaos. Even so, a great many important decisions were made in these weeks that would shape the character of the magazine for decades. The logo—a simple red rectangle in the upper left-hand corner of the cover with “LIFE” spelled out in austere white letters—replaced earlier experiments that involved a floating logo with a more elaborate typeface. The cover design called for a single black-and-white picture covering the entire page, interrupted only by the logo on the top left and a red band at the bottom providing the date and price—again, a much simpler layout than earlier efforts had displayed. The trim size of the magazine was expanded, to make it slightly bigger than the Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, and other large-format magazines—both to increase the space for photographs and to ensure that Life would stand out from its competitors when lined up on the newsstands. Departments were established, as they had been during the creation of Time: a roundup of national and world events (Life on the American [or World] Newsfront); a regular feature on a new Broadway play or a new film or film star (later called Spectacle of the Week and then Movie of the Week); a short-lived President’s Album, chronicling Franklin Roosevelt’s activities; sports; science; and the popular feature Life Goes to a Party. Beginning in the second issue, a long-lasting feature—Speaking of Pictures, named after a casual comment Billings had made to Luce—became the opening piece in every issue, devoted to whatever photographs the editors found especially arresting. Thanks in large part to Billings’s calm and unruffled demeanor, the frantic process of invention finally evolved into the careful assemblage of a first issue, which went to press on November 13 and appeared on the newsstands a few days before the official publication date of November 23, 1936. It was far from perfect, without the consistently crisp and often dazzling visual impact that Life would achieve in later years. But it was striking, varied, and entertaining.25
The first cover was an extraordinary Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana—then the largest public-works project ever undertaken in the United States. Its monumental, turreted facade, wreathed in shadows, was almost abstract in its simplicity—an image that evoked both ancient and modern aesthetics. It gave the first issue a gravity that helped announce that Life would be something important. The cover was tied to the magazine’s first major “photoessay,” a portrait (with text by MacLeish) of the community of workers and speculators in the small boomtown of Fort Peck that had grown up around the construction of the dam—men and women drawn to Montana by a New Deal project, but living and working in a setting that represented the on-the-make freedom of the imagined American frontier. It was typical of what became a staple of Life—a brief but suggestive image of a place far from the urban, cosmopolitan world in which most Life readers lived. Also in the first issue was a lively if condescending portrait of Brazil and its “charming” but “incurably lazy” people; a portfolio of color images of work by the then-popular regional painter John Steuart Curry; a worshipful story (carried over from the final dummy) on the hit Broadway play Victoria Regina, starring the “Greatest Living Actress,” Helen Hayes; an equally gushing portrait of the rising movie star Robert Taylor; an Eisentaedt portrait of a San Francisco Catholic school for Chinese immigrants who, “slant-eyed and shy,” were learning “to say very instead of velly;” an account of a French hunting party (the precursor of the Life Goes to a Party feature, which debuted in the second issue); a two-page set of images (also carried over from the dummy) of black widow spiders, the first in a long line of Life nature
stories; and an interview with the cuckolded former husband of Wallis Warfield Simpson in the aftermath of his divorce. But perhaps the most memorable image of the first issue was a full-page photograph at the front of the magazine. It showed a doctor, wearing a surgical mask, standing in a delivery room, and holding a newborn baby. Its caption: “Life Begins.”26
Even before the first issue appeared, it was becoming clear that Life would be an enormous popular success—a result of effective advertising, extensive press coverage, the reputation of the company, and the popular hunger for pictures that Luce had cited as a reason to create Life. “It is at once dumbfounding and deeply gratifying,” Luce wrote in a letter to potential subscribers months before publication,
to learn the response to our earlier letter inviting encouragement and support for the picture magazine we have been planning so long—
26,151 answers in one day—
72,955 within a week—
162,450 to date, with still more pouring in—
And saying
“You can count on me as a Charter Subscriber.”
There were 235,000 subscribers by the time the first issue appeared—almost the entire guaranteed circulation before any newsstand sales, for which requests were also growing fast. Shortly before publication, the circulation manager announced that because of the frenzied, anticipatory interest “every dealer is to receive the same number of copies of Life that he receives of Time.” “One dealer in New York who sells two copies of Time a week placed an order for 250 copies of Life,” Pierre Prentice, the circulation manager, wrote. “All the dealers are … mad that we were not able to supply them with more copies of Life.”27
Nothing, however, truly prepared Luce and his colleagues for the public response to Life when it finally went on sale. Some images collected by the editors at the time suggest the character of the magazine’s first weeks: a used-book shop with a sign pasted in the window—“Life Wanted, Good Prices Paid;” a classified ad in the San Francisco Examiner in December 1936—“LIFE magazine, 1st edition; 2; $3.50 each. Phone VA1. 5927. afternoons;” a drugstore in Detroit with a copy of Life in the window below a sign—“Sold Out But Read It Here; heavily marked up distribution lists from newsstands in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Keyport, New Jersey, from dealers who were saving copies of Life for regular customers (the Keyport dealer rationed copies by selling the magazine to each customer only on alternating weeks); and a cartoon in an advertising magazine showing a group of businessmen around a table, one of them sputtering, “W-w-what’s that! You say you saw an unsold copy of this week’s ‘Life’ at a newsstand on 42nd Street?” A Los Angeles dealer wired Time Inc.: “First issue of LIFE caused heaviest demand … of any publication ever known. Clean sell-out. We lost thousands of sales, and still a heavy demand.” It was not an idiosyncratic response. All two hundred thousand newsstand copies sold out the first day, some of them in the first hour. Dealers from around the country wired their distributors that they could sell five hundred more copies (Cincinnati), one thousand more (Lansing, Michigan), fifteen hundred more (Worcester, Massachusetts), five thousand more (Cleveland). “The demand for LIFE is completely without precedent in publishing history,” the overwhelmed Prentice wrote. “If we could supply the copies, the dollar volume of our newsstand sales of LIFE this month [December 1936] would be greater than the dollar volume of sales of any other magazine in the world. There was no way we could anticipate a bigger newsstand business the first month than magazines like Collier’s and Satevepost have built up in thirty years.”28
But popularity in this case did not mean success. Time Inc. paid a significant price for the overwhelming demand for Life. Part of the price was ill will—the anger of customers at the shortages. There were conspiracy theories that the scarcity was artificial to force prices up; that tying the distribution of Life to Time was a “racket” to lift Time’s circulation; that the company was favoring some newsstands unfairly over others; and more broadly, a belief that only incompetence could account for the vast shortages, which continued for many months. Prentice quickly abandoned the practice of tying Life allotments to copies of Time sold, and he deliberately underserved some of the news dealers whom critics had charged (falsely, Prentice insisted) that the company was favoring. But the more important problem of Life’s fantastic popularity was a financial one. Production of the first issue of Life, projected originally at 250, 000, grew to nearly twice that by the time of publication—demolishing the careful financial estimates that had allowed the company to project a modest profit. With subscription and newsstand prices fixed more or less indefinitely, and with advertising prices fixed for a year, every copy sold above the projected 250,000 contributed to what soon became an enormous deficit. Losses quickly rose to fifty thousand dollars a week, and Luce predicted a $3.5 million loss in 1937.29
Within the company a debate emerged over how to deal with this seemingly catastrophic triumph. Luce himself appeared for a time to prefer limiting circulation, perhaps to reduce the deficits, perhaps because he was uncomfortable with the rapidity with which his “work-in-progress” was becoming a national phenomenon. But most of his colleagues urged him to swallow the losses in what Charles Stillman, a Time Inc. financial officer, called “an atmosphere of complete and serene confidence” and to grasp “the chance of a lifetime.” Larsen backed Stillman; and Luce soon gave in and agreed to increase production as fast as possible, and to raise advertising rates as high as possible. By the end of 1937, a year after Life’s birth, circulation had reached 1.5 million—more than triple the first-year circulation of any magazine in American (and likely world) history—while the losses continued to grow.30
Increasing supply to keep up with demand required an almost Herculean effort. The production of Life was constrained by a serious shortage of paper, an inadequate number of presses, and serious fire hazards in the gas-heated presses already in use, which were running dangerously almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The challenge was complicated by the uncertainty, laced with incredulity, about how high the demand for Life would rise. Every increase in production was overmatched by the increase in demand. Could Life’s popularity be sustained? How far would the demand extend? In an effort to answer those questions, Life staged an experiment in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the initial supply of 475 copies had sold out rapidly on the first day. A few weeks later, Worcester received 2,000 copies, which also sold out immediately, then in subsequent weeks 3,000, 4,000, 9,000, and finally 11, 000. In every case the entire run sold out in a few hours. Extrapolating from these numbers, the circulation staff began to believe that Life might reach a circulation of up to 6 million. That prediction proved unrealistic in the magazine’s first decade; some of the demand for Life in its first months was surely a result of a short-term consumer frenzy driven by the scarcity itself. But it was clear nevertheless that the appetite for the magazine was not even close to being satisfied.31
In the end Life ran a deficit of three million dollars in 1937—driven in part by the company’s almost ten million dollars of investments in production capacity and more than five hundred new employees in New York and Chicago. Time Inc. quickly outgrew its once-lavish quarters in the Chrysler Building as soon as Life began, and the company soon moved into its own building in the new Rockefeller Center. The result of this rapid and dramatic growth in expenses was that Time Inc. as a whole—accustomed to robust profits—cleared less than two hundred thousand dollars that year. “We are poor again,” Luce wrote to his colleagues in mid-1937. “We are no longer a rich company…. So what’s to be done about it? What’s to be done about it is, obviously, to get rich again.” One way to do that was to continue to raise Life’s advertising rates for new customers, which the company had done repeatedly since the first months of publication. By the end of 1938 the rates were the highest of any magazine in the country—almost 20 percent higher than those of their closest competitor, the Saturday Evening Post.32
Many advertisers bal
ked at the high rates, still uncertain about Life’s potency as an advertising medium. Luce was concerned that readers did not give serious enough attention to the magazine and thus to the advertisements, that they did little more than simply flip through the photographs. Larsen believed that the problem was Life’s unconventional audience—a readership that had no distinctive characteristics (income group, gender, special interests)—and that advertisers were not certain whom they were reaching. To help the company and its advertisers understand the magazine’s readership, Luce recruited a group of prominent survey researchers and statisticians, George Gallup and Elmo Roper among them, to measure the impact of Life and, most of all, to determine how many people were actually reading it. This “Continuing Study of Magazine Audiences” (CSMA)—funded by Life but technically independent—concluded in early 1938 that Life’s impact was far larger than its circulation suggested; that there were as many as fourteen readers on average for every issue published; that the total readership of Life, therefore, was not the 1.8 million people who actually bought the magazine, but more than 17 million people—the “pass-along” readers—who actually saw each issue. Although rivals disputed the CSMA findings, Life used them vigorously to persuade advertisers that the magazine was an unparalleled advertising venue. Over time the notion that Life’s readership went far beyond its formal circulation became a powerful assumption not just at Time Inc. but through much of the publishing world.33
By early 1938 Life’s circulation growth seemed to have lost momentum. “We’re having trouble selling 2,000,000 copies a week,” Billings wrote in his diary. “Hence, we have to pick material that will sell that last 100,000 copies [to get circulation up to the two million guarantee to advertisers].” Luce worried that Life might be losing its novelty, that it was already growing tired and predictable. As always when he sensed editorial weakness, he made his presence felt. “We have to get more and more remarkable pictures,” he complained. “We have got to have sound reading matter…. LIFE lacks humor.” To Billings such periods were agonizing, not just because he found Luce’s presence intimidating but also because Luce’s interventions rarely provided useful advice. “Luce came in, sat down, looked at layouts over for 30 minutes,” Billings wrote of a meeting with Luce to discuss “the form and patterns” of Life. “Then he got up and said, ‘I can’t help you—you’ll have to work it out for yourself.’” Luce’s intrusions were particularly unsettling to Longwell, whom Billings described as “a bundle of nerves and tall talk” and who, when Luce expressed his concerns, “yowled and yammered and swore and shouted—and plainly showed his frustration.”34
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