Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  When Ingersoll and Luce arrived at Ross’s apartment, McKelway recalled, “Luce came straight across the room to me (he remembered me from the interviews) and said in a kind of whine, ‘It’s not true that I have no sense of humor.’ I thought it was one of the most humorless remarks I’d ever heard.”

  And so it went. Luce stammered; Ross punctuated his retorts with refrains of “goddamn.” Guaranteeing to heighten the tension, liquor was brought out. McKelway and Ingersoll freely partook, the virtuous Luce restricted himself to one drink (“making a valiant effort to get it down without gagging”), and the ulcer-ridden Ross abstained completely. The four quickly proceeded to spar, Luce and Ingersoll picking apart the proofs line by line, Ross and McKelway vigorously defending their material. Less important than any particular set of facts was Gibbs’s overall theme. Luce wailed, “There isn’t a single constructive thing in the whole piece.”

  “We didn’t set out to do a constructive piece,” Ross told him. “We simply tried to do a fair piece.” Regarding Ross unbelievingly, a stunned Luce exclaimed, “Fair!” and shook his head, apparently resigned to a public crucifixion. Beseeching Ross again that the Profile contained nothing positive, Ross replied, “That’s what you get for being a baby tycoon.” An exasperated Luce managed to sputter, “But God damn it, Ross, this whole God damn piece is ma-ma-malicious.” Ross agreed. “You’ve put your finger on it, Luce. I believe in malice.”

  Among the many points to which Luce objected was Gibbs’s merciless recalling of how Clare’s drama Abide with Me had opened to disastrous reviews just a few days before she married the baby tycoon. Gibbs quoted verbatim a devastating passage by the New York Herald Tribune’s theater critic, Richard Watts, who had written that an overeager Clare had taken a curtain call in response to apparently nonexistent cries of “Author!” Clare, Watts said, “must have been crouched in the wings for a sprinter’s start.” Luce complained, “We didn’t mention your wife in Fortune.” That gave Ross pause. He beckoned McKelway to follow him into the foyer and asked, “Did they mention my wife?” McKelway shrugged. “I can’t say. I never read the damn piece all the way through.” Ross agreed to downgrade the anecdote to a footnote—thereby guaranteeing that it would receive even more attention.

  Luce seized on the absurd $45.67802 weekly salary figure, arguing that it was “far, far too low” and did not account for the Time Inc. mail clerks in Chicago. Lying through his gapped front teeth, Ross insisted, “That figure was arrived at only after the most painstaking research. We’ve checked it and rechecked it and we have every reason to believe that it’s accurate.” When Luce declared that another tally was “completely, absolutely wrong,” Ross replied mildly, “Wrong? Perhaps. Perhaps it is—but that, after all, is part of the parody of Time.”

  That set Ingersoll off. He began shouting that the whole undertaking had been conducted under false pretenses and repeated his charge that it was in the worst Hearst tradition. A self-assured McKelway suggested that this was altogether appropriate for a portrait of Hearst’s heir apparent. At that, “Ingersoll sprang from his chair and was advancing menacingly toward McKelway when Luce suddenly reached out, put his hand on his aide’s head, and pressed him gently back.” On that violent note the inconclusive, ill-conceived gathering wrapped up at about three a.m. A sodden Ingersoll leaned on Luce in getting out the door. Luce, looking crushed, may well have been blotto himself, giving the lie to Gibbs’s assertion that he rarely imbibed.

  A few days later Ross composed a remarkable five-page single-spaced letter to Luce that more fully set out the rationale for the tone and content of Gibbs’s Profile. He prefaced it by stating, “The article went to your office in the form it did as a gag, a malicious playfully vindicative [sic] gag, from a gagmag. Ingersoll, with lofty arrogance, made this office sweat to the last drop when he could and we thought we would open his pores up. We did not foresee that you also would join him in the steamroom, but that just made the gag better.”

  His preliminaries out of the way, Ross disposed of Luce’s objections. He disputed the publisher’s claim that Gibbs hadn’t written a single nice word about him. On the contrary: “It was generally felt that the total effect of the article and its being in existence at all were enormously favorable, and that our listing of your remarkable growth, the figures themselves, were complimentary in the highest degree, presenting you, in fact, as practically heroic.”

  In addition to many other points, Ross defended the use of the Watts quote “as being exactly the kind of item Time would pick up and use itself.” He similarly defended a paragraph that dwelt on Luce’s future plans, including a possible run for public office. “Vehemently denies this Luce, denies any personal political ambition,” Gibbs had written. “It was regarded,” Ross explained, “as exactly the kind of thing Time is doing constantly: denying the weird and, as we call it, ‘grotesque,’ rumor after starting it, thereby getting the full news value of it.** Moreover Time enterprises are always speculating on people’s ambitions.” As for the disclosure about the palatial dimensions of the River House digs—which Luce was then subletting—Ross pointed out that Kinkead had dug up a real estate advertisement that accurately described the size of the space: “You are offering the place for rent as a fifteen-room apartment, a pretty state of affairs if it isn’t true.”

  Threaded throughout this missive were Rossian thoughts on journalistic ethics. “I was astonished to realize the other night that you are apparently unconscious of the notorious reputation Time and Fortune have for insult,” he wrote.†† “I say frankly but really in a not unfriendly spirit, that you are in a hell of a position to ask anything.” He also quoted from a memo that Gibbs had previously written him about the whole sordid undertaking:

  I think Time has gratuitously invaded the privacy of a great many people; I think it draws conclusions unwarranted by the facts, distorts quotes, reprints conclusions unwarranted by the facts, reprints rumors it knows have little foundation, uses a form of selective editing in getting together a story from the newspapers that throws it altogether out of focus, and that Timestyle is an offense to the ear. I said that Mr. Luce was humorless because I could find nothing in the source or in the reports of people who had talked to him that indicated anything else. Also I doubt very much if a humorist would last a week as president of Time, Inc. I’m not even sure that “humorless” is a disparaging term. In any case all statements and editorial conclusions in the piece are matters of honest opinion with me, usually made after reading the evidence of a great many people. Don’t know if Ingersoll and Luce realize just how much source material went into this thing, and from what widely divergent people it came. In almost every case I’ve tried to follow the most temperate estimate, throwing out a lot of stuff that would have made the boys’ hair stand up.

  Ross wound up with a body slam:

  After our talk the other night I asked at least ten people about Time and, to my amazement, found them bitter, in varying degrees, in their attitude. You are generally regarded as being as mean as hell and frequently scurrilous. Two Jewish gentlemen were at dinner with me that night and, upon mention of Time, one of them charged that you are anti-Semitic, and asked the other if he didn’t think so too. The other fellow said he’d read Time a lot and he didn’t think you were anti-Semitic especially; you were just anti-everything, he said—anti-Semitic, anti-Italian, anti-Scandinavian, anti-black-widow spider. “It is just their pose,” he said.

  Ross signed this marathon dispatch “Harold Wallace Ross” and appended the words “Small man . . . furious . . . mad . . . no taste”—all of them epithets that Time Inc. had previously applied to him. The whole “childish” matter was now over, Ross said.‡‡ But there was no way that so bloody a feud could expire easily. A characteristically sour Luce shot back:

  Thank you for your letter of November 23. It was not “up to you” to make any explanations so far as I was concerned, but in any case I wanted to thank you for the personal trouble you took with the Time
-Luce parody.

  Of course I regret you felt it necessary to print that Richard Watts quote. I only regret that Mr. Gibbs did not publish all he knew so that I might learn at once how mean and poisonous a person I am.

  Mr. Gibbs, like you, is undoubtedly sick of the whole subject. But, having located a poison more or less at large in society, he may perhaps like to help mitigate it. And this, I assure you, he can do if he will take any current copy of TIME and red-pencil every example of “cruelty, scandal-mongering and insult”—and send it to me.

  It has been widely reported that Gibbs’s barbed treatment managed to kill off Timestyle in one fell swoop, and that after the parody appeared, nobody at Time would dare employ it again. This is far from the truth. Thanks in part to Gibbs, much of Time’s prose did become noticeably less wacky. But many of its affectations—dropped articles, colorful descriptives, and especially, inherent biases—lingered for years.

  Still, there was no arguing with what Gibbs had accomplished. For once, Alexander Woollcott’s enthusiasms were in order when he personally wrote Gibbs that his masterwork was “the most creditable thing that magazine has ever printed. Its publication renews my enthusiasm for the magazine and its guile as a piece of parody fills me with envy and admiration.” In Harper’s, Bernard DeVoto declared that Gibbs had executed “the most distinguished public service of American journalism in 1936.” By one reckoning, the Luce issue was only the second number of The New Yorker that had sold out. (The previous one, in 1934, had been given over largely to a parody of Punch, titled “Paunch.”) Winchell reported a rumor—which he probably started—that Luce had descended on The New Yorker’s offices on Thanksgiving to personally beat Gibbs up, only to find that the place was closed for the holiday.

  Ross considered the spoof “one of the best pieces ever run by a magazine, unquestionably, and my part in it was satisfying and wholesome.” And he patted Gibbs on the back with the circulation figures to prove it:

  There is no doubt the Luce piece did something. . . . The issue of Nov. 14th, two weeks ahead of Luce sold 140,000. Nov. 21st was down to 138,000 and then Luce makes 141,000. That broke the record, but the next issue broke it again; sold 144,000. The plain fact is that the Luce Profile not only broke a season’s record for the issue in which it appeared, but continued with the next issue and broke the record again. A peculiar, but gratifying effect.

  Inevitably, the scrapping would continue. Less than a month after the parody appeared, The New Yorker ran a “Funny Coincidence Department” note that effectively accused Fortune of plagiarizing an item from Magazine Digest. Actually, the original had appeared in Fortune, prompting its managing editor, Eric Hodgins, to declare, “I find it hard to dissociate anything the New Yorker does these days from venality.” When Hodgins told Ross about the mistake, and Ross fired back an impolitic response, Ingersoll told him, “The river looks very tempting this afternoon. I suggest—not entirely facetiously—that you go over and jump into it.” In a subsequent “Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse,” The New Yorker apologized grudgingly, stating that the matter seemed only “to be partially set in order.”

  In 1937 Life published a photo of Ross enhanced by the famed caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who drew sinister eyebrows and a bushy mustache on Ross’s grinning face to transform him into a dead ringer for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. In 1938 Ingersoll mischievously added the name of Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker’s dandyish symbol, to Time’s masthead. After keeping the name there awhile, Ingersoll planned to drop it and explain that Tilley had been fired. But when Corey Ford, who had named Tilley, threatened to sue, Ingersoll abandoned the plan.

  In 1940 a flap ensued when Freddie Packard supposedly sent a telegram to Hodgins that inquired DOES THE PRESENT MRS LUCE WEAR BLACK UNDERWEAR. Packard said he wasn’t responsible and may well not have been; his first and middle initials were erroneously rendered as “R H.” In any event, some months later Margaret Case Harriman published a two-part Profile of Clare titled “The Candor Kid” that began, “Once upon a time, in a far country called Riverside Drive, a miracle child was born and her name was Clare Boothe. Over her cradle hovered so many good fairy godmothers that an S.R.O. sign was soon put up at the foot of the crib.” Shawn was delighted. “As for Harriman’s bitchy tone,” he wrote, “I think it’s perfect; amounts to doing Boothe in her own terms, much as Gibbs did Luce in Timestyle.”§§ In 1945 Charles Morton published in The New Yorker a casual that made sport of Time’s burgeoning editorial roster, predicting that at some point Luce would be anointed “Exalted Supreme Editor-in-Chief.”

  Gibbs himself was happy to keep stoking the antagonism, almost to the point of exhaustion. In 1938 he gleefully noted in “Comment” that clerical workers, researchers, and writers for Fortune (“probably the third heaviest magazine in the English language”) had been ordered to report to their desks by nine, nine-thirty, and ten a.m., respectively. In 1940 he reported that Life had conquered its struggle “to figure out a way to print a picture of a living, breathing woman with absolutely no clothes on” while making a significant cultural statement in the process. “They merely photographed a life class at the Yale Art School. This had Yale, it had Art, it had Class, it had America; it had everything, including no clothes on.” There was also a Gibbbsian “Comment” from 1944 that described a Time Inc. worker who swore that one day he would destroy Luce’s all-omniscient construct by shouting down its hallways, “I don’t know!” Gibbs’s subject summed up, “The whole damn thing will just come tumbling down.”

  Gibbs further published a casual called “Beauty and Gutzon Borglum” that was based very closely on his uncomfortable 1931 encounter with Clare. Disguising her as the “very beautiful and strange” Myrna Haskell, he concluded the vignette by having his alter ego exit Clare’s apartment in a daze: “As he rode down Madison Avenue, he thought somewhat about the well-known sculptor but mostly about Miss Haskell’s mind. For some reason he was never able to explain, it made him think of confetti.”

  “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce” may have been played for laughs, but Ross remained deadly serious about Luce and what he regarded as a truly dangerous enterprise. “Time is terrifying, and ought to be put out of business but it gets more powerful daily,” he wrote Martha Gellhorn at the height of World War II. “If Clare isn’t president Henry will be, and I’ll probably get run out of the country.” He subsequently told Gellhorn, “If either of the Luces become president I positively will leave the country and your suggestion of Cuba sounds fine. One or the other of them may make the White House if they don’t tear each other to pieces on some occasion before they get there. I think they are the two most ambitious people I have ever encountered.” In a lighter vein, Ross sent around a memo that recommended abandoning the use of the word understandably. He explained, “I saw it in Life the other day, and when Life takes up a word, it is time for us to unload, I think.”

  Luce eventually dismissed the Profile but he could never quite elude it. Two years after its appearance, a condensed version ran in Scholastic magazine. Long after that, when Luce was at Rollins College in Florida to make a speech, he decided to drop in on a class in contemporary biography. “And what do you suppose the class was discussing?” he complained. “Me! And what do you suppose they were using as their text? That goddamn article in The New Yorker! So now my question is, Is this thing going to be engraved on my tombstone?”

  Curiously, Gibbs would have his own mild rapprochement with Luce. In 1946 he published a piece about Ethel Merman in Life, evoking at least one complaint of disloyalty. Two years later, when Ross accepted but killed a twelve-thousand-word Profile that Gibbs had written of Noël Coward, Gibbs returned to Life to peddle it. But he insisted that it not be cut, edited, or otherwise molested. Gibbs knew that those were impossible terms and practically dared the editor Robert Coughlan to reject the piece. “This brings me to money,” Gibbs wrote, “about which in many ways I am a son of a bitch. If, by some miracle, like Luce d
ropping dead, you wanted to print it in two parts I’m afraid I’d want a price that would make everybody drop dead.” The Coward story was never printed.

  Gibbs would come to feel a strange ambivalence toward the parody. Privately, he was pleased to have given Time a well-deserved comeuppance and was gratified by the praise and the controversy. Over the years, though, he grew tired of having the piece being remembered above everything else he had written, especially when anyone quoted—or just as frequently, misquoted—its most deathless line. When Henry Holt anthologized the spoof in More in Sorrow, Gibbs confided to Thurber, “I wanted to change ‘the famous profile on Luce’ to ‘the ill-advised,’ etc., and they are still trying to figure out what to make of that.”

  Just the same, Gibbs stood by his work. Some twenty years after “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce” appeared, he considered expanding it. He resisted the temptation.

  It seemed to me at first that Mr. Luce’s career ought to be brought up to date, but my second, and final, decision was that this would be superfluous, not because of the extra effort involved, a matter naturally of small concern to me, but because whatever changes have taken place in him have had to do with increasing celebrity and scope rather than any fundamental shifting of personality. It is obvious that Mr. Luce occupies a more obtrusive position in the nation than he did in 1935 [sic], but I see no reason to suppose that he is a different man.

  * George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962), a German American writer and Nazi propagandist, was imprisoned by the State Department for five years.