The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  The great, redeeming event in this dark narrative of his life was, as he saw it, his election to Skull and Bones, a “trifle,” he conceded, but an “honor that I probably took in with absurdly ludicrous seriousness,” not because of the friends he made or the connections he acquired, but because of its validation of him as a man of importance. Receiving an honor so coveted by so many others—“nice boys with nice families … wanting that so badly” and not getting it “for one reason—because I got it”—was “as evil and human a delight as probably even Mr. Satan had, but I had it and I couldn’t but have it.” But Skull and Bones was far from enough. Harry needed to achieve it all—the wealth, the fame, the influence that others had been handed by birth but that he would have to acquire by sheer effort. “The main thing is to win and nothing is justified except in that perspective…. I have got to rise to the ordinary level of the ordinary upper-class bourgeois. Then and only then can I begin the great march, the great knight-erranthood, of achieving my knighthood, my rank among the good and faithful.” A few days later he wrote again—perhaps afraid that he had revealed too much—and asked Lila not to take the letter seriously. “Don’t think about it much. I don’t think about it. If I did, I would have been beaten long ago.”19

  All of this—the ambition, the resentment, the fear of failure—made his still-uncertain marriage into a kind of lifeline. He loved Lila, to be sure, but he also needed her both as validation of his rise to respectability and as an entrée into the social world he coveted. As her return from Europe approached, his letters became more ardent. “You can think of this pilgrimage to the boat [to mail a letter to Lila] as a pentecostial [sic] march to the shrine of you, there to confess—everything!” And to his great delight, Lila too—despite having spent months with her mother away from Harry—became more impassioned as their reunion drew near. “Paris looked so appealing,” she wrote of her last days before returning to America, “and [the city] reproached me sadly for being so anxious and glad to leave her.” Later she wrote emotionally, “I cannot understand why Heaven rewards one of its most impractical miserable sinners with a husband who is among the most capable men of his generation on this continent. May Heaven make up the deficiency on my side and thus reward you.” Lila’s arrival in New York, and her obvious joy at being reunited with Harry, seemed to dispel his remaining doubts. Having kept an almost morbid secrecy about their relationship for over three years, he now began to talk openly about it. Lila, in turn, started spending more time in New York, and more unchaperoned time with Harry. Her family even seemed to warm up to the prospect of their marriage, perhaps in part because of the signs of Time’s progress and because Harry began paying himself, at Frederick Haskell’s insistence, more than five thousand dollars a year. Early in the fall they announced their engagement, and for the next several months—until the wedding day, December 22, 1923—they were awash in the details of planning the event, the honeymoon, and their home together after they were married.20

  The wedding itself reflected none of the doubts that Lila’s family had once expressed about the marriage. It was a lavish Chicago social event, painstakingly orchestrated by Lila’s mother. The ceremony was conducted jointly by the Haskells’ parish minister and Harry’s father. It took place in the same enormous church that Harry had often attended with Nettie McCormick. His sister Beth was there as well, but the rest of his family—his mother, Sheldon, Emmavail—were far away in Beijing. The distance from his family was not only geographical. The pious Emmavail had ceased communicating with Harry months before and was talking sternly to her parents and siblings about her disapproval both of the marriage and of the values that she believed lay behind it. Harry was saddened but resigned. “Write me about Vail if you want to,” he said dismissively in a letter from the Homestead resort in Virginia, where he and Lila spent a brief honeymoon. His mother seized on this cool reference as an excuse to forward the letter to Emmavail, noting plaintively in the margin that “in his real heart, Harry does care about you and he wants your welfare and happiness. This is the 2d time he has asked about you…. Harry knows the real from the false in life—& I do believe he and Lila will not become like the idle rich.”21

  Back in New York, Harry and Lila settled in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a place considerably better than the dreary “flats” that Lila had claimed her newly married friends occupied. They could afford to do so, and to hire a maid to help them, because of financial assistance from Lila’s family. Harry valued the home because it made Lila happy and because it served as a sign of his own ascent. But he paid little attention to the organization and running of the household, for within less than a week after his marriage he was again working almost unceasingly—making his absence from family life an enduring part of their marriage. (“I do wish you would come home in time for dinner these days & at least stay till after breakfast,” Lila pleaded resignedly three years after their wedding.)22

  The improvement in Time’s performance in 1924 dispelled much of the panic that had characterized the magazine’s first year, but the business was not yet on sound footing. As circulation grew, problems of production and distribution became more serious. Luce and Larsen were particularly frustrated by the New York City post office, through which all issues of the magazine were mailed to subscribers. “In New York,” one member of the staff recalled, “we were nothing but a pamphlet, and we got put on a train when they didn’t have anything else to do with the space.” The hope was that all readers would get the magazine on the same day; but given the delivery problems, many Time subscribers received one issue after the next issue had already been printed. Luce soon came to believe that the only solution was to move operations out of New York.23

  He and Hadden had been considering moves almost since the first days of the magazine. Throughout 1923 they seriously explored a move to Washington, D.C., in part because of the reportorial advantages of being in the nation’s capital (although for a magazine that as yet did no reporting, this was hardly a decisive factor); in part because Luce liked the city and knew that Lila did too; and partly because they recognized that there were significant financial advantages to being outside New York. The Washington idea quietly died in late 1923, Luce and Hadden finally agreeing that “our organization was still too rickety to move.” A year later, however, the idea of moving seemed to Luce a way to rescue, not threaten, the business.24

  Early in 1925 Hadden and Larsen, to Luce’s considerable chagrin, took six weeks off for a trip to Europe. During (although not necessarily because of) their absence Luce redoubled efforts to find an alternative site for the magazine and soon settled on Cleveland, Ohio, in part because it was a major industrial city and cultural center, one of the most important cities in the Midwest. But it was also because of the Penton Press, located in Cleveland, which offered to print the magazine at a significantly reduced cost. Penton also offered office space in its building for a modest rent. The move, Luce claimed, would save the company twenty thousand dollars a year and would, in effect, give everyone a raise by placing them in a city with much lower living costs than New York. It would also give Time better access to its subscribers, both because of its location closer to the center of their circulation base and because the local post office was much more hospitable to the magazine than was the Manhattan one. By the time Hadden and Larsen returned, the decision to move was almost irrevocable. Larsen did not protest, but Hadden balked, although Luce always insisted he had kept him informed of the plans by mail during his absence. Hadden’s reluctance was almost wholly personal. His family, his friends, indeed his life, were deeply tied to the city. Unlike the newly domesticated Luce, he thrived on New York’s late-night social world and its tolerance of iconoclasts. At times Hadden seemed to regard moving to what he considered a provincial city in what he called “the sticks” as a kind of death. He argued so strenuously with Luce that they eventually adjourned to a nearby hotel to continue their heated debate away from the rest of the staff. But Hadden had no answer
to Luce’s case for the financial advantages of moving and finally, if grudgingly, agreed.25

  For a company later known as a place that treated staff unusually well, the move to Cleveland was harsh, even brutal, to the small community of Time employees. Luce and Hadden announced the move with little advance notice, terminated all employees, and then gave them two days to move to Cleveland. Once there they were rehired, but in most cases with no help in financing the move—except for the young women of the research team, who were provided with chaperones and hotel rooms until they could find more permanent lodging. Despite the difficulties—dictated by the magazine’s still-parlous financial condition—the vast majority of editorial employees followed the magazine to Ohio. (A significant exception was Thomas Martyn, the English “aristocrat” whom Luce so admired. Martyn resigned in anger when told that the company would not reimburse him for the costs of moving. In 1933 he became the founding editor of Newsweek.) The advertising staff stayed behind in New York, as did the Saturday Review, which—disgruntled at what it considered the poor service it was receiving from its distant partners—soon severed its ties with Time. (Luce later considered the loss of the Saturday Review a serious mistake.)26

  For Luce, relocating to Cleveland was part of the process of building the kind of family life that—never having had such a life himself—he imagined was the American norm. He and Lila rented a comfortable apartment in the affluent suburbs, bought a car, hired a servant, joined the country club, and happily entered the social world of the local gentry. Their first son, Henry III (named for Harry’s father but always called Hank), was born in April 1925, shortly before the move. Both parents believed that this “more friendly,” “hometown-like” city would be a good place to raise a child and to improve their own social standing. In New York, Time was still a small, obscure operation. But in Cleveland it was considered a significant institution, and it made Luce a prominent figure in the community.27

  Hadden, however, hated Cleveland. Reluctant to move there in the first place, he began unhappy and became progressively more so. Separated from family and friends, he lived in a room in a downtown club and developed an awkward social life with the unmarried male members of the magazine staff, conducted mostly late at night in downtown speakeasies. When sober, Hadden was usually able to hide his contempt for the city. But late at night, after hours of drinking, he would often ride around town in his used Chevrolet shouting, “Babbitt!” at Clevelanders he passed on the street. He traveled to New York almost every week as soon as the magazine went to press, then returned a few days later to edit the next issue. “I have been here 44 weeks,” he said after his first ten months in Cleveland, “and made 36 trips back to New York.” After a little more than a year in Cleveland, he finally agreed to switch jobs with Luce—Harry to serve as editor and Brit to manage the business. Hadden made no secret of his motives. He knew that the business affairs of the magazine would allow him to spend even more time in New York.28

  For the sake of the magazine, however, Hadden did make some efforts to ingratiate himself with Cleveland. He published an article in the Clevelander, a local Chamber of Commerce magazine, in which he praised the resources of the city, thanked the local newspaper staffs for their help to the magazine, and even insisted, somewhat hypocritically, that Cleveland did not have the “blatant, back-slapping, ‘booster’ style of city salesmanship that makes one blench [sic] as he reads the Babbitt books.” And he accurately cited the principal attraction of the city to Time—its location at the geographical center of the magazine’s subscriber base. “Time is here to stay,” he said, as he continued to maneuver to get out. “We like Cleveland.”29

  Hadden and Luce tried to raise their profiles in the community by introducing a Time quiz to local Chamber of Commerce audiences. The exercise was, Harry said at one such event, an antidote to the ennui that many people felt about their “specialized selves,” a way of reintroducing them to the “multiple selves” they remembered from their youths. The quiz tested the audience’s knowledge of current news as reported in Time. The tests were well received, and Luce and Hadden repeated them for a while in other Midwestern cities (as well as printing them in the magazine and using them as radio promotions). But they tired of the device quickly and dropped them after a few months.30

  Whatever the tensions and conflicts created by the move to Cleveland, it played a critical role in the evolution of Time. In a period in which the magazine’s finances remained precarious, the relocation saved the company substantial costs and facilitated much more effective distribution to their growing subscriber base. Far more important, being in Cleveland enabled Time to achieve something seemingly mundane that was in fact essential to its survival: a second-class mail permit, which would allow the magazine to get first-class mail treatment at reduced rates. In the past only newspapers had received this service. Luce had tried in vain to secure the permit in New York, arguing that Time was a “weekly newspaper.” But without a proven track record, and without influential supporters, he had been unable to make progress. In Cleveland, however, Time became a project behind which the entire commercial community rallied. (It was, Hadden ungraciously explained later, because “there was nothing else going on in that town.”) The city government, the Chamber of Commerce, the local post office, individual businessmen, and several Ohio congressmen were all eager to help what they saw, correctly, as an institution that could bring luster and profits to Cleveland. With their help, both in Cleveland and in Washington, Time received the permit in early 1927. “It was,” Luce wrote his directors, “the single greatest piece of good fortune that has ever come Time’s way.” Even years later he continued to believe that this one event “made all the difference.” By mid-1927, less than two years after the move to Cleveland, circulation had risen to more than 130,000, and advertising income was also increasing. Time was now making a modest but growing profit.31

  As the business grew stronger, however, the attractions of Cleveland grew fainter—despite the enormous boost the community had given to Time’s growth. In June 1927 Harry and Lila left on a long-promised monthlong trip to Europe, in some ways, a deferred honeymoon. When they returned in July they discovered that Hadden had persuaded almost the entire staff and the members of the board of directors to support moving back to Manhattan. It would, he argued, allow Time to become “the authoritative, up-to-the-minute, all-seeing newsmagazine that it has never been.” It cannot have been lost on either of them that this sudden reversal paralleled almost exactly the decision to move to Cleveland in the first place, taken by Luce while Hadden had been traveling in Europe two years earlier. Luce was not as enthusiastic about leaving as Hadden was. He and Lila had grown comfortable in Cleveland, although they too sometimes showed signs of boredom with the city. Lila was often in Chicago, leaving Harry alone at times for several weeks; and Harry was often in New York—less often than Brit was, but enough to suggest at least a measure of restiveness. He occasionally complained about their isolation. “Are we lost in the Midwest?” he half-jokingly asked at one point on noticing that they had received fewer Christmas cards than they had gotten in New York. In the end, though, this move was a business decision, just as it had been in 1925, and there was no longer a compelling business reason to stay where they were—particularly once Luce struck a deal with R. R. Donnelley, a reputable Chicago printing company that offered to produce the magazine, thus preserving the geographical advantage of sending Time out from the Midwest. Luce may also have been at least partially persuaded by Hadden’s argument that being in Cleveland robbed Time of energy, of direct access to news, and of the stimulus of competition. And he may have felt, as Hadden certainly did, that Time was beginning to outgrow Cleveland. In any case, Luce said later, “Hadden was so determined to get back to New York that there was no use arguing.” The move occurred abruptly within just a few weeks of Luce’s return from Europe. In late July Hadden threw a party at the Rowfant Club, where he had been living, to celebrate Time’s departure
, a party so rowdy that he was asked to resign from the club the next day. By August 1 the circulation staff (with the exception of Larsen) had moved to Chicago, and everyone else was back in New York.32

  Returning to New York far more prosperous than they had been when they left, both Hadden and Luce traded up. Brit, who had lived in Brooklyn Heights with his parents before moving to Cleveland, now moved into a large apartment on East Tenth Street, which he shared with two friends. Harry and Lila leased a spacious town house on East Forty-ninth Street in Turtle Bay.

  By the end of 1927 Time had finally become what Hadden had somewhat presumptuously called it at the end of 1923: “an established institution.” The magazine was not yet the great national, and even international, phenomenon it would eventually become, but it was stable, profitable, and increasingly popular. The company started the year with more than $154,000 in cash, twice the amount of a year before. Advertising revenue, which had been almost negligible in the first year or so, now exceeded subscription revenue, which itself had increased dramatically as circulation rose above 170,000.33

  The magazine itself had changed less profoundly than had its finances, but it too had evolved in a number of ways. The look of the magazine was only slightly different from what it had been in 1923. Photographs, rare in the first few issues, became common by 1924, although their tiny size tended to limit them to portraits. In 1926, after the move to Cleveland, the familiar red border appeared on the cover—made possible by the use of coated stock, which also permitted the printing of color advertisements on the inside and back covers. Issues became fatter, less because of an increase in editorial content, which the editors determinedly kept more or less steady, than because of the growth in advertising. Time was a reasonably attractive magazine by the standards of its era, but somewhat staid. Its three narrow columns and its unvarying typeface—a layout that changed relatively little for more than forty years—made it look more like the serious newspapers that Luce and Hadden sometimes scorned than like the youthful, somewhat sassy magazine it aspired to be.34