The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

by Alan Brinkley

  Mary Bancroft was an intelligent, witty, combative woman from a distinguished but broken family, who spent much of her life in failed relationships—two marriages that ended in divorce, and affairs with such celebrated figures as the psychiatrist Carl Jung and the future CIA director Allen Dulles. Unbeknownst to Luce and most others who knew her, she had also served as an effective American spy in Europe during World War II. She met Luce by chance in 1947 at a dinner for visiting publishers in Zurich, where she was then living. Bancroft was an avid Democrat and liberal, and when introduced to Luce, she said, “So there you are, Public Enemy Number One.” (“I loathed ‘Timese,’” she later explained, and “thought that reading Time was actually reading a form of advertising, rather than what I regarded as journalism.”) But she was nevertheless fascinated by Luce, and only when learning of his likely presence had she agreed to come to the dinner. Luce was clearly intrigued by her as well. “Is that any way to talk to a man who invented the American century?” he flirtatiously asked that evening, and then insisted that she sit next to him at dinner. On “that very first evening,” she recalled years later, “I know I felt that here at last was someone I could say anything to … and wouldn’t be hurt in any way as a result.” They met several times again before he returned to New York, and they sustained an intense intellectual and at times emotional relationship that lasted for more than thirteen years.27

  Their friendship was not an easy one. During much of their relationship Bancroft was simultaneously involved in her affair with Dulles (who repeatedly asked her, “Have you turned your friendship with Henry Luce to any practical advantage yet?” and who frowned when she told him no). Bancroft and Luce communicated primarily through letters, and in them they bantered and sometimes fought—over issues of politics and over their own personal problems and crises. They disagreed furiously at times about public figures whom he admired and she loathed: Douglas MacArthur, Richard Nixon, and most of all Whittaker Chambers, whom Bancroft attacked almost obsessively in long, convoluted letters that Harry apparently chose not to answer (although his side of the correspondence has not survived except in a few fragments).* When they were actually together, which was not often at first since they were so frequently on opposite sides of the Atlantic, they met in restaurants or hotels (where Bancroft always insisted that Luce book a sitting room for their conversations). They had long conversations that were, on the whole, less searingly personal than their letters were. When Bancroft moved back to the United States, and eventually to New York, their meetings increased but remained intermittent.28

  It was never a sexual relationship. Luce was already involved with Jean Dalrymple when they met. After that relationship ended he carried on a series of other sexual affairs (most of them relatively casual and brief) while continuing his friendship with Bancroft. “I feel no physical attraction between us!” she wrote Luce in 1951. “Every single man with whom I have, or ever have had, a friendship has been, I know, attracted to me and I am convinced that you are not.” But neither was their relationship a purely intellectual one. Luce wrote her with deep affection (“Bless you—and may you never die;” “à Dieu, dear heart;” “I am taking to the boat (via England) an immense treasure—your letters…. Some part of the boat trip … will be devoted to serious study of this course in … the wisdom of love.”) Her letters to him, he told her, were “minor masterpieces,” and he thanked her for being “a bringer of happiness without effort or price or art.” He also taunted her at times: “I was … amused to find you lined up with the conventional goody-goodies. Mary Bancroft a part of the Eleanor Roosevelt claque—ha!” He once asked her “why you are so relaxed about communism” (and received no answer), and he reprimanded her for taking up the causes of “all my ill-wishers.” And yet he reveled in her thoughts: “One thing you and I have in common is that we know the sheer wonder of human existence, the utter amazingness of it.” And he wrote of her “spirit … so wonderfully compounded of the eager and the compassionate…. You see things wonderfully, and your heart beats like four giant motors.”29

  To Luce, Bancroft was an engaging, provocative sparring partner, and at times a warm and intimate friend. But the relationship looked different to her than it did to him. He wanted warmth and support, fused with intellectual excitement. She wanted more—including somehow the ability to “save” him. Most of all that meant saving him from Clare, who to Bancroft was a source of both fascination and loathing. “It is perfectly extraordinary,” she wrote in 1957, “to see this man, who is so tough, so able, so powerful, absolutely shattered by that woman.” She read obsessively about Clare, accumulated a large collection of newspaper and magazine clippings about her, and gossiped about her with the Time Inc. executives she came to know (most of whom disliked Clare as much as she did). She wrote to Luce more often than she wanted—she seemed unable to stop herself—urging him to end the marriage. “Harry told me that he didn’t think anyone had any idea how destructive [Clare] was,” she wrote in her diary. “How preoccupied with herself, how never a day goes by that he doesn’t have to do some ‘errand’ for her.” Her response to Harry’s frequent complaints about the marriage was to try to persuade him that he did not understand Clare, that her threats and apparent dependence on him were attempts to keep her in the marriage, that she wanted to stay with him because of the wealth and visibility he provided her, not because she loved him. “She doesn’t want to give this up and will fight like a tiger whenever it seems endangered,” she argued. She wondered how Harry could “endure her innate vulgarity,” how he failed to see that “she’s a razor sharp knife.” He was, she wrote, “absolutely insane if he for one second imagines that he is going to turn her into a wife or anything else except what she is…. It is beyond me to know why he thinks Clare is dependent on him.” What was the “worst thing he could imagine happening,” she asked him once. Killing herself, he replied. “I told him I didn’t think she would kill herself,” but he should “even stop being afraid of that. If she was going to kill herself, he couldn’t stop her.”30

  Although Bancroft insisted that her interest in Clare was for Harry’s sake, not her own—that she wasn’t trying to free him to love her—there were times when her motives were not so clear. Her feelings toward Harry were sometimes more intense than she let on, as a diary entry suggested when they were in Paris together in 1950. She came to drop off a letter at the Hotel Ritz, where he was staying. Rather than leave it with the desk, she went to his room and, noticing the door ajar, stood there watching him for a long time and “wondering as I stood before that door … why he even bothered with me at all…. And I decided then it had something to do with truth—that I would always tell him the truth.” Several years later she wrote him that “I still love you very, very, very dearly—but I ain’t in love with you any more.” Some of Luce’s friends and colleagues tried at times to find out whether Bancroft might marry him if he left his wife. “He’s afraid to go to bed with me,” she told Allen Grover. “If you order me to marry him—that I might be able to pull off someday…. But he’s not going to bed with me.” She was often exasperated with him for the same reason other people were. She bridled at the limits of their friendship, and the lack of explanation for it. “WHAT IS THERE ABOUT ME THAT YOU WISH YOU HAD?” she shouted in frustration in one of her letters. She was usually the driving force in their friendship, the one who wrote the most letters, the one who arranged most of their meetings (sometimes calling his office five or more times a day to try to schedule a dinner or a drink). She was frustrated by his reticence (“He just can’t be simple and open and straight about what he means,” she complained). But she never pushed him to reveal his secrets.

  “I am in bad trouble—really bad trouble—inside myself, and you’ve got to help me,” she wrote Harry in 1955, a point when her relationship with Luce had become more important to her than she had previously revealed. “I have got to demolish the overexaggerated idea of me and my perceptions…. I’ve been playing with dynamite
and I want—by telling you all this—to take out the fuse…. It is a fact that I walk around in your unconscious.” She reproached him for what she considered his aloofness. “We have a bank full of unused assets. You pay no attention…. But that account is overdrawn.”31

  The imbalance in the relationship—Luce’s platonic and mostly passionless affection for Bancroft, her growing preoccupation with, and unrequited commitment to, him—gradually eroded their friendship. They continued to see each other, although less frequently after 1956. In 1959 he returned to her all the letters that had passed between them, which augured the break they both knew would come. She wrote him wistfully, “What a picture it all is, Harry—not only of our friendship—but of the times—our ‘times.’” In 1960 they parted amicably for good. Bancroft, no longer with any illusions, told him that she had become interested in someone else. Luce was well ahead of her—already deep in what became one of the most important relationships of his life.32

  “For four years,” Allen Grover observed in 1957, Harry had “dodged the issue” of his marriage. He could see Clare in Rome, in an attractive and interesting setting, and could then escape to New York for however long he wished to be there. “But now she is home,” Grover lamented, “he can’t get away from her.” What made Clare’s presence so difficult for him was that Harry had his own new romance—not one of the many sexual flings that they both had frequently entered but a genuine love that he believed equaled, and perhaps surpassed, the few real passions of his earlier life.33

  Luce had long been friendly with Lord Beaverbrook, the powerful and imposing press baron of England, who was also a significant British political figure (even though he was Canadian-born). Luce visited him periodically in London, in the English countryside, in New York, and in various Mediterranean resorts. For more than a decade he had seen but barely noticed Beaverbrook’s young granddaughter, Jeanne Campbell, the child of Beaverbrook’s daughter and the Duke of Argyll. Their marriage had dissolved not long after Jeanne was born, and both of her parents remarried. Jeanne followed neither of her parents and grew up in her grandfather’s home. By the time she was in her late teens, after boarding school and a brief time studying acting, she was serving as her grandfather’s secretary and assistant, and traveling with him wherever he went. Her relationship with him was stormy, largely because of what he considered her promiscuity, including a brief affair that especially infuriated Beaverbrook—with Oswald Mosley, who had been the leader of the British Union of Fascists (known as Blackshirts) before World War II. In 1956, when she was twenty-seven, she left her grandfather’s home to try life on her own.34

  With the help of her grandfather’s money and influence, she found an apartment in New York and a clerical job at Time Inc. During a vacation on the French Riviera with her grandfather, she encountered Luce—who was visiting Beaverbrook—for the first time as an adult. Jeanne was by now a tall, striking woman with untamed curly hair. Luce, thirty-one years her senior, was secretly attracted to her immediately, as he confided to Mary Bancroft on his return to New York. A few weeks later he walked into Jeanne’s office in the Time-Life Building and invited her to dinner. He invited her again the next night—both times alone in Luce’s apartment. (Clare was still in Rome.) Campbell later recalled the strange magnetism of this “shy, distant, gruff” man, whom to her surprise she began to find both “handsome and magnetic.” She was nervous at first, not sure why Luce was interested in her.35

  But Harry was relentless, for a time sending her so many roses that she worried her apartment looked like a funeral home; writing letters that, at first, Jeanne was too scared to read or answer; inviting her again and again to dinner, during which they had increasingly intimate conversations. It was not long before he told her he was in love with her, and not long after that they began a sexual relationship. Luce arranged a better job for her at Time Inc., as a researcher for Life. But Jeanne’s affair with Harry did not remain a secret for long within the company. Finding her position in the company awkward, she finally quit. She had never much liked the job in any case, and, as she herself later admitted, “wasn’t very good at it.”36

  It was, for the most part, a secret relationship. They almost always met in Jeanne’s apartment. Most of the time she would make dinner. (Having grown up with chefs and servants, she had to teach herself how to cook. “I became pretty good at it, especially French cuisine,” she remembered later.) In many settings Luce was oblivious to what he ate. But with Jeanne, she recalled, he “loved food, liked to talk about it and hear how it was prepared.” It was not just food he liked to talk about. Among her many attractions to Luce was her eagerness to listen as he talked “about everything—his family, his travels, his marriage, his ideas.” Jeanne was less voluble than he was, but she had a talent that eluded most people Luce knew: She made him laugh. (Many people knew Harry for years and never heard laughter from him.)

  Jeanne was restless sometimes, eager to go out to a restaurant or a movie. But Harry—who had shown no inhibitions about being seen in public with Jean Dalrymple—was now extremely cautious. Every now and then they would venture out together briefly, but Jeanne remembered how uncomfortable he was, “always worried about who would see him with me.” Having been through a traumatic, emotional conflict with Clare a decade earlier, he was perhaps more aware of the potential costs of this new relationship. But slowly an understanding began to grow between them that this was not just an affair but a long-term, perhaps permanent, union. Luce stopped sending roses and began buying her jewelry, furs, and other expensive gifts. Jeanne told her grandfather about Harry. (She later gave radically conflicting accounts of his reaction, from “he gave us his blessing” to “he was outraged.”) It was, she said, as if he “knew that we would eventually marry.” Luce himself, she recalled, spoke frequently of “when you are my wife.” Still, it was not an easy relationship. It was defined—as almost all his relationships were—by his desires and his needs. Jeanne rebelled at times and could be tart and wounding. She was impatient with his caution and “promises which weren’t fulfilled” of ending his marriage. During a trip they took together to Paris (where he felt more comfortable being in public with her), she replied to a complaint about what Luce considered her provocative wardrobe, “Why not? I’m your mistress after all.” But despite her occasional pressure on him to make a decision, Harry continued with his dual life, never allowing himself to be put in a position that would require him to choose.37

  At the same time that Harry was building his relationship with Jeanne, he was—willingly or not—rebuilding his relationship with Clare. In 1957 they began thinking about selling their Connecticut house in Ridgefield, which they had largely abandoned during Clare’s absence in Rome and Harry’s secret romantic life in New York. (In fact they kept it for another five years, after an ill-fated attempt to turn it into a research center for the study of the history of Time Inc.) But at the same time they bought a sprawling modern house in Phoenix, near the famous Arizona Biltmore. Their new home had great expanses of glass overlooking the hotel’s golf course. It was part of an enclave of homes of enormously wealthy people, many of them retired. Clare, restless and for the first time in many years without an active professional career, began spending more and more time there—with long breaks while she pursued her newest passion, scuba diving. Harry, in the meantime, saw Clare’s life in Phoenix as an opportunity for him comparable to her life in Rome. He could insulate himself from the conflict between his relationships—free to see Jeanne in New York, able to spend time with Clare far away from her competition. Despite his frequent complaints about Clare—to Mary Bancroft, to Jeanne, even to some of his professional colleagues—he was not ready to leave her. They seemed to the many visitors they invited to their Arizona home to be happier together than they had been for some time.38

  Early in 1958, en route to Phoenix from New York, a friend of Clare’s who was flying in the same plane as Harry passed him in the aisle and was shocked by how ashen and slack fa
ced he looked. He shook off her efforts to help and seemed quickly to recover. But a few days later he developed what he thought was a bad cold and spent much of the day in bed. The next morning, February 5, he awoke late. Clare brought him some soup and found him sitting up in bed. “I’m dying,” he told her. A houseguest watched him being carried to the ambulance. “I can still remember being outside in the garden when the stretcher came out carrying Harry,” she recalled later, “looking so ill, so unlike the powerful Henry Robinson Luce the whole world knew.” As he was wheeled into the emergency room, he joked darkly to Clare, “Life goes to a party.”39

  Luce had suffered a heart attack, serious but not fatal. He spent three weeks in the hospital, refused most visitors other than family, and made sure that news of his illness did not become public, fearful that the truth would destabilize Time Inc.’s stock price. Clare and the family retainers told the press that Harry was recovering from pneumonia. With the help of rest and anticoagulant drugs (which he took for the rest of his life), he gradually regained his strength and passed the time of his recovery playing Scrabble and especially bridge, with the same ferocious intensity that he and Clare had always competed. Luce, characteristically, invited the famous bridge expert Charles Goren to join their games (an ordeal for Goren because Harry, terrified of making mistakes, was a very slow player). Goren’s reward was his picture on the cover of Time later that year.40

  The period of Luce’s illness coincided with a moment of great anxiety in the United States. Only a few months before Luce’s heart attack, the Soviet Union had launched its first satellite, Sputnik I, followed by a series of other successful satellite launches through the first months of 1958. To many Americans, watching the stumbling, halting path of America’s own space program, the Soviet achievement appeared to be a sign of Russia’s growing power and America’s relative decline. The “Sputnik crisis,” as it was widely named, was followed by an almost equally traumatic event for many Americans: the 1959 visit of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, whose truculent manner and swaggering personality was a chilling reminder of the stakes in the Cold War. Time, for example, wrote of Khrushchev as “the embodiment of the elemental challenge” of Soviet Communism, the “naked drive for world power no less sustained than that of the late Joseph Stalin.” Six months later, in May 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, its pilot—Francis Gary Powers—captured by the Russians and put on display before the world, a planned Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit conference in Paris summarily and humiliatingly canceled by the Kremlin only days before it was to convene.41