The Publisher (16 page)

Once more without a job, he “went back to the conclusion I had come to in England”—that he should find a position in business and ensure his financial security. But the bleak recession winter was not a good time to be looking for work anywhere. He wrote Harold McCormick again asking about the possibility of a place at International Harvester, but there were still no jobs. He made the rounds of other Chicago businesses but found only more discouragement. As he always did when he sensed defeat, he tried to distance himself from his failure and took refuge in “philosophy.” He was, he insisted, not really interested in “worldly things,” and he was determined to wait before committing himself to any specific future. He expressed pity for Harold McCormick, whose path in life had been predetermined and who thus had “never had a chance.” And he insisted, perhaps somewhat too emphatically, that “I regret nothing.” He also took comfort in what he considered his great achievements at Yale. “What has been can never be destroyed. It is treasure laid up in heaven, and perhaps all I shall ever be able to claim there. And I am determined that no action of mine in the future shall cast a shadow upon the brightness of the past.” By the end of the year he was considering moving back to Manhattan, where his parents were living temporarily. But there was, he told his mother, “something that may keep me away from New York”: That “something” was Lila Hotz.
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Harry and Lila’s infatuation with each other had been sustained primarily by letters until they found themselves together in Chicago. In the nine months between their first meeting in Rome and their reunion in Chicago, they had spent a total of little more than a week in each other’s company. Now that they were in the same city, they had their first chance to spend extended time together—although it was carefully bounded by the proprieties of Chicago society and the strict chaperon-age to which, even at age twenty, Lila was still mostly subject. For Harry the relationship was dazzling not just because of his feelings for Lila, but because of the glamorous social world to which it gave him entrée. Lila’s family was wealthy, well connected, and socially prominent, and Harry found himself drawn into a swirl of parties, balls, dinners, and other events in the busy Chicago and Lake Forest social scenes. Modestly subsidized by the now-ailing Mrs. McCormick, he acquired some expensive
clothes, hats, and even a slightly foppish walking stick. For a short time he sported a fashionable mustache. (Returning once to the
Daily News
building in the evening to retrieve a book he had left behind—dressed for Lake Forest, walking stick in hand—he entered an elevator with the editor in chief, Henry Justin Smith, who looked him over and said sardonically, “Ah, Luce, a journalist I see.”)
⁵

Sometime in October, having previously said almost nothing to his parents about Lila, he wrote his mother a “personal line” on a subject he thought would be “of some interest to you.” He was seeing “the young woman,” he said, “about every other day, with the result that I am in no condition to have the custody of my own person and am totally irresponsible for any of my actions.” This was his first serious relationship, and he did not yet trust himself to succeed at it, particularly given his own penury and his fear (which turned out to be justified) that Lila’s mother would oppose their relationship because she believed Harry to have inadequate social or financial standing. And so he tried to prepare himself, as he often did, for disappointment. “I don’t dare look ahead,” he told his mother (after cautioning her not to say anything about Lila to his father, whose disapproval he still feared above all else). “I suppose the crash is bound to come, but it’s just too awful to think of. At present, everything is ok, in fact, magnificent, because, as I say, I just don’t think.”
⁶

As their relationship deepened, Harry and Lila managed to find more time to themselves—on weekends, when they spent afternoons alone in the garden or in a sitting room at Lila’s home, or occasionally in the evenings, when they went alone to a restaurant or club for dinner. At some point that fall they proclaimed their love for each other, and Harry asked Lila to marry him. She was not ready to accept. She still had some “reservations” about their relationship, she told him, but had “great trust” in his ability to “work things out.” Harry claimed to be puzzled. “I did not absorb a very accurate understanding of these reservations,” he wrote her. “I hope you will explain them more formally.” But he almost certainly sensed that they were related to his straitened economic circumstances, which still made him seem an inappropriate match to Lila’s socially ambitious family (and perhaps to Lila herself). Speculating in a letter to Lila about the continuing uncertainty in their relationship, he suggested coldly that perhaps “it was unfortunate that I should have allowed myself to become interested in you since you would never marry such an impecunious nobody, even if I should succeed in making myself fairly agreeable, which apparently I have not altogether done.” But at
other moments he expressed real pain. “Do you think I wanted to fall in love with you or anybody?” he asked, recalling his earlier and now abandoned determination to lead a single life. “Don’t you know how I tried to kid myself out of it? … Can’t you imagine how … I almost cheered when first it occurred to me that perhaps $1,000,000 stood between us, and how I almost praised God for such a thoroughly practical, sensible world? And—don’t you see?”
⁷

One reason being laid off at the
News
came as such a blow to him was the threat it posed to his hopes of marrying Lila. It was also because the sense of professional failure it produced in him was in such contrast to the intoxicating social world he was simultaneously inhabiting. He yearned for the wealth that he saw around him. “How I should love to have an ancestral home where I could bring you,” he confessed. “I have never wanted this kind of thing before.” He even began to regret, even slightly to resent, his father’s choice in going to China and “giving up all that America offered.” This was, he said, “the only bitterness my heart has felt, that I have not the things I should love to give you.”
⁸

At this dark moment, with Luce wrestling with his desire for Lila and his fear of failure, lifelines suddenly appeared. He accepted a verbal offer of a job with a machine-manufacturing firm in New York, despite Lila’s unhappiness about his leaving Chicago. He no doubt concluded that he would have a better chance of winning her if he was employed in New York than unemployed in Chicago. But before he could begin the new job, Brit Hadden wrote him to relay an offer to the two of them to go to work on the
Baltimore News
, part of a chain of newspapers owned by the legendary Frank Munsey, the longtime publisher of the popular
Munsey’s Magazine
. The jobs had been arranged for them by their Yale classmate and fellow Skull and Bones member Walter Millis, who was already working there. They would be paid forty dollars a week (far more than either of them had made at their previous newspapers), he wrote excitedly to Lila, and they would “circulate in all departments of the newspaper, with practically a guarantee that inside of a year we will be minor officers at $4,000 a year. They are crazy to get us.” They would also have a chance, Hadden reminded Luce, to work on what they both were now calling “the paper,” the magazine they still dreamed of starting. Luce wavered at first about taking the Baltimore job, but Hadden—“furious at me” for not being as enthusiastic as Brit was—finally persuaded him that it was a “good gamble,” and he accepted the position. Hadden had already quit his dreary job at the
World
, where he had been toiling on such stories as “Sugar Bowl Made Lump on Her
Head,” and “Cuts Wife Silk Hose for Use as Socks.” He had spent previous months working on a tramp steamer. Like Luce, he was ready for a challenge.
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Suddenly filled again with self-confidence, Luce wrote his former editor at the
Daily News
that he was leaving “the grand army of the unemployed” for a job he made clear was considerably better than the one he had lost. He was, he said with mock regret, ignoring Smith’s advice to “get out of newspapers.” “What makes it worse,” he cockily added, “is that two of us are showing signs of pernicious insanity and will probably undertake a new publishing venture in a few months.” In a tentative postscript, however, he revealed his lingering professional anxiety: “I suppose I am not under any obligation to explain to Mr. F. Munsey’s representatives that I was ‘fired’ from the News. If you think I am, will you please let me know?”
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Luce spent no longer in Baltimore than he had in Chicago. Except for his separation from Lila, however, it was a much happier experience. The work at the
Baltimore News
was in fact not very challenging. He and Hadden were the junior reporters on the staff, and they were again covering the least-appealing stories. But because he was once again working with friends, and because the Baltimore paper, unlike the Chicago one, was proud to have “college men” on the staff, he was much better treated and felt much more confident than he had been at the
Daily News
. “I did a totally unique story, rather impossible, but elicited favorable comment,” he wrote shortly after his arrival. “Interest shown in us is the main point.” A few days later he reported, “Nothing that either of us has written has been rejected…. We seem to be quite the pets of the office.” Luce and Hadden quickly developed a reputation as “star men” in writing features and (ironically, given Harry’s experience in Chicago) were asked to “try our hand at working up a ‘Ben Hecht’ series.”
¹¹

But the newspaper job, despite the chances for rapid advancement—his salary, he reminded Lila, “will be about as much as any class-mate is making (with a year’s start on me)”—was only an expedient. He and Brit were quietly planning what Harry called “the gamble of our lives on which everything depends, everything … the crazy half-romantic thing that has ruined thousands before us.” They were, he told Lila, going to start

Luce and Hadden usually finished their work at the paper at 3 o’clock (the
News
was an evening paper). They then returned promptly to the apartment they shared with Millis on the shabby top floor of a Baltimore mansion (rented out by “nice people” who were in financial difficulty) to plan strategy and experiment with formats. “We were groping toward … the practice,” Luce later recalled, “by actually chopping up the
New York Times
, and reorganizing [it] on a weekly basis, and then trying to put these stories together.” Stopping only for dinner, which they took with another “‘society’ family, slightly impoverished,” they worked for hours every night. They typed out sample stories, experimenting with different styles and formats. Millis, who had the greatest literary talent of the three, actually did most of the writing; but Hadden and Luce were clearly in charge. They were trying to find the fatal flaw in their idea and, they claimed, failing to find it. But their ideas about timing, location, and business plans changed constantly. They would start publishing almost immediately; they would wait six months; they would wait a year, or more. They would stay in Baltimore; they would move to Washington; they would establish themselves in Detroit or Cleveland or New York. Hadden and Luce would be the sole stock owners; they would distribute stock among investors; they would attract people to work on the magazine by giving them stock as well. Almost everything was in flux. But the core idea—what the magazine would be and what purpose it would serve—remained fairly constant. “The thing is very largely Hadden’s idea,” Luce privately confessed to Lila, “but he swears that without me he cannot put it over. Personally I think I am dashed lucky to be teaming up with him again.”
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After a few intense weeks they began to interrupt their work occasionally to participate in the Baltimore social world—a world far more staid and conservative than the New York and Chicago scenes with
which Luce and Hadden were familiar. “Before I forget it, please send dress suit and white vest and cut-a-way [
sic
] and old heavy shoes,” Harry wrote his mother. “Baltimore is very old-fashioned.” Making use of their Skull and Bones connections, they found themselves “adopted for the nonce” by several families of the Baltimore elite, who secured them invitations to the city’s major social events. Luce viewed these social leaders with the same envy and awe he had felt in Detroit and Chicago when in the presence of wealth.
¹⁴

Left to himself, the security-conscious Luce might have settled in at the
Baltimore News
, at least for a while, and tried to build a life for himself (and Lila) in the city. But Hadden never let him get too comfortable. He goaded and exhorted Harry to move their joint project—“the gamble of our lives”—forward more rapidly. Even while still working for the
News
, both Hadden and Luce began traveling intermittently to New York, to solicit advice from, among others, their former Yale English teacher Henry Seidel Canby, and to court potential investors through their Yale (and Skull and Bones) connections. In Baltimore they continued to refine their plans for what they were not yet calling a “magazine,” but rather a “weekly newspaper,” still tentatively titled
Facts
. By the beginning of February 1922, they decided they were ready to take what Luce called the “great leap into the unknown.” Although they had as yet raised very little money and had still not hired any staff, they negotiated a seven-week leave from the
Baltimore News
and moved to New York to begin bringing “the paper” to life. “I am confident,” Hadden wrote his mother, “that in the seven weeks prior to April 1, we shall be able to determine whether or not the paper,
Facts
, is going to be brought into existence.”
¹⁵