The Publisher (19 page)

Their first important recruit after Sudler was Manfred Gottfried, an aspiring novelist, who had heard about the Luce-Hadden venture through the rumor mill at Yale, where he was a senior. He showed up one day in February at the office on East Seventeenth Street to find Harry and Brit alone in the room, sitting at matching, end-to-end desks under the window, an iron kettle between them to catch cigarette butts. Luce spoke energetically about their plans and grilled Gottfried about his modest experiences. Hadden, who was oddly shy with strangers, remained unsettlingly silent. A few days later Harry traveled up to New Haven to offer Gottfried the job, even if in a typically distracted way. He
asked Gottfried to accompany him to see a tailor. Talking all the way, Luce finally made his proposal standing pantless in a shop stall while his trousers were being pressed. Gottfried (who soon became known within the office as “Gott” and who remained with the magazine for decades) immediately accepted and began work in October, several weeks before his salary was scheduled to begin. Eager and capable, he did everything from writing copy to fetching coffee. He even persuaded his father to invest one thousand dollars in the magazine.
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Not long after that they met Roy Larsen, a 1921 Harvard graduate and former business manager of the university’s literary magazine, the
Advocate
. He was trying to find a place in publishing in New York. Predictably his youth and limited experience did not open up very many important positions for him. His Harvard classmate John Cowles, son of the publisher of the
Des Moines Register
, offered him an attractive, low-level job in his father’s company. But before he could take it,
Time
stepped in. Luce and Hadden could provide far more senior positions within their nascent organization than someone of Larsen’s age could have expected anywhere else, and they took his undergraduate achievements more seriously than other employers would have done. They pursued Larsen aggressively, perhaps because they recognized something in him they badly needed. He was competent, certainly, but he also exuded an air of solidity, maturity, and competitive tenacity (“a grim but smiling terrier,” a colleague once described him) that, for all their self-confidence, they feared they still partly lacked. In a company staffed entirely by people in their early twenties, Larsen (although a year younger than Luce and Hadden) seemed the most securely adult. He turned down the job of advertising manager, but Harry and Brit went back to him and finally persuaded him to take charge of circulation, a job more to his liking. They even offered him a salary of forty dollars a week, more than they were paying themselves. In return they got a talented and energetic partner, who struggled to build a subscription base for a magazine no one had heard of and few understood, and who—next to Luce and his successors as editor in chief—would become the most important figure in the company until his death in 1979. Using multiple mailing lists and enthusiastically written circulars, Larsen managed to build up a base of about eight thousand subscribers before the first issue appeared—a disappointingly small number to Luce and Hadden, although even they occasionally had to confess that it was “not so bad for a group of whippersnappers.”
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As they moved closer to publication, they expanded the staff further,
still drawing from friends, acquaintances, and people suggested by their Yale contemporaries. On the basis of a suggestion from a friend, they hired a young Oxford student, Thomas J. C. Martyn, by cable, without ever meeting him, because they had heard he was an experienced journalist. They discovered when he arrived in New York that he had no experience at all. “It was a stupid thing for us to do,” Luce later conceded. But Martyn turned out to be a talented writer of exactly the kind of stories Harry and Brit wanted. Thomas Rinehart, the son of a well-known novelist and a recent Harvard graduate (who, Luce believed, hid a “quick intelligence” behind a “simple” facade), and John A. Thomas, another recent Yale graduate, also joined the writing staff.
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In the meantime Hadden and Luce strove to shape the magazine itself. To some degree the concept remained remarkably unchanged from the idea they had developed in Baltimore, and even earlier—as the prospectus they prepared early in 1922 to present to potential investors made clear. “No publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed,” they stated in bold letters on the first page of the document. They followed quickly with a claim of “COMPLETE ORGANIZATION”—six departments (National Public Affairs, Foreign News, The Arts, Sports, and People) and twenty-four “sections” (among them Books, Theater, Music, Education, Religion, Business, Law, and The Professions). There would be approximately one hundred short articles each week, “none of which are over 400 words in length,” each placed “in its logical place in the magazine, according to a “FIXED METHOD OF ARRANGEMENT.”
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Into this rigid structure they would pour the results of what they described as a comprehensive search through “every magazine and newspaper of note in the world.” The cover of their first advertising circular was framed by a list of almost ninety periodicals, which they promised to read every week and use as sources. Unlike the
Literary Digest
, they pointedly claimed, they would cover “EVERY HAPPENING OF IMPORTANCE.” And while they would not have an editorial page and would not write “to prove any special case,” neither would they strive for “complete neutrality on public questions.” They even presented a slightly fussy “catalogue” of their own largely conservative “prejudices”—which included “a belief that the world is round,” “a general distrust of the present tendency toward increasing interference by government,” and a “respect for the old, particularly in manners.” In this, Larsen later remembered, they were drawing from Mencken, whom Hadden (far more than Luce) greatly admired.
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Only in November 1922, after they had raised enough money to start publishing, did they begin the serious work of turning these plans into an actual magazine. In their larger (but still modest) offices on Eighth Avenue, the slowly growing staff began squeezing into newly built cages and cubicles. The few walls were paper thin, so no one, including Luce and Hadden, could easily have a private conversation. Desktops were piled high with magazines and newspapers, and the floor was littered with the scraps of periodicals from which useful stories had been cut. Neophyte writers wrestled to condense complex news stories into a few hundred lively words, while Hadden and Luce sat at their desks reading the results, marking them up with pencil, and sending them back. (On weekends there was so little heat in the building that they sometimes retreated to the card room of the Yale Club and spread their stacks of papers out on tables there.) Hadden, in particular, was a tough critic, snarling and growling at prose he considered dull or obscure, penciling in adjectives and phrases that he thought would enliven the story, intimidating the writers, none of whom was much younger than he was. As they produced prototypes of the various sections of the magazine, they took them to the established editors and writers with whom they had been consulting from the beginning. “First section to get into form is ‘Books,’” Luce wrote, now that “Wells (Harpers) & Canby (Evening Post) have given OK.” But mostly they were on their own.
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It was slow going. “We publish the first issue of
Time
the last week of January or the first of February,” Luce wrote in November 1922, acknowledging that the date of the inaugural issue had slipped from December into 1923. “But first we have to make
Time
good enough to publish and that means eight weeks of writing, editing, and printing ‘practice issues.’ The writing of the practice issues will be carried on by a full staff just as if we were publishing. We shall be just as busy and rushed (if not more so) as we will when the thing is actually being published…. If they do not meet with our expectations, we will stop, having failed to produce what we said we would produce. If they meet our expectations, then the only thing that stands between us and certain success is that unknown quantity ‘luck,’ absolutely unguessable.”
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But while Luce and Hadden had often worried about the financing and marketing of the magazine, they rarely expressed real doubts about their capacity to write it successfully. “TIME is doing very well,” Luce wrote Lila early in December. “In fact a most unusual spirit of optimism seems to pervade the ranks.” A few weeks later, with the first “fairly good complete [sample] issue of TIME” in hand, he claimed to be in “a sort of
soggy pleasant frame of mind.” There were, to be sure, moments of concern. “Things are going very badly,” Luce wrote after the second “specimen issue” appeared. “We have yet to find the ideal assistants.” Hadden once returned deeply discouraged from a meeting with Walter Lippmann, who had been harshly critical of another sample issue. They postponed publication three times as they tried to improve. But little by little, the magazine began to approach their image of it. The later specimens already contained some of the magazine’s most enduring features. There was the distinctive lettering of the title; the cover portrait of a significant individual (the first complete dummy carried a black-and-white drawing of the financier Bernard Baruch); the brief, punchy news items (“Who will be the Republican presidential nominee in 1924? Senator James E. Watson answered this question on the floor of the Senate with an emphatic: ‘President Harding is the only possible choice!’ At once political tongues began to wag”). There was also the casual insertion of opinions into the most straightforward stories (“President Harding, in a speech before Congress, placed a constructive program before the people;” “The great Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama advocated [a second Isthmian canal] in 1897”).
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For Harry the last weeks of 1922 were doubly stressful. Not only was he working with Hadden to shape the content of the magazine, he was also working more or less alone to ensure that
Time
would be able to function as a business. This was an area of the enterprise in which Hadden took almost no interest and for which he had little talent. Luce, however, proved to be a very good businessman, somewhat to his dismay—since, like Brit, his original interest in “the paper” had been primarily editorial. (“Now the Bratch is really the editor of TIME,” he wrote, “and I, alas, alas, alas, am business manager…. Of course no one but Brit and I know this!”) He negotiated contracts with paper suppliers and printers. He contracted out the advertising. He supervised the budget. He set salaries and terms for employees. He supervised the setting up of the office. And whenever he could, he sat with Brit and marked up copy or discussed plans for the next issue. In the meantime he continued to have obligations to his family, to lead at least a modest social life, and of course to write to Lila in whatever spare minutes he could find. Even for someone in his twenties, the days were long and difficult. He described one of them in December:

“The whole staff felt the pressure,” Gottfried remembered years later. “For a couple of months nobody had any regular days off, and now [in January 1923] nobody had any days off whatsoever.” One by one staff members succumbed to the stress and exhaustion. Gottfried “was the first to weaken” and announced that he was going to take every Wednesday off. Nancy Ford, whose job as fact-checker for every article was one of the most difficult and time-consuming jobs on the magazine, seemed constantly to be battling exhaustion. (She left the magazine altogether a few months after it began publishing, unable to take the strain.) Luce, too, complained of the stress. “I’ve a splitting headache,” he wrote in the midst of one of those frantic days, and “never seem able to get as much done as seems positively
necessary
. If there were only 20 Bratches and 20 ‘me’s, we might have a chance of making good.” But for the most part these young pioneers—as they sometimes saw themselves—persevered; and as the release of the first real issue approached, they grew increasingly excited. “After this week,” Luce wrote as the publication day approached, “it’s head-on either to glory or perdition!”
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The intensity was partly a result of the smallness of the staff in relation to the size of the task it was managing. In addition to Hadden and Luce, there were four writers (Gottfried, Martyn, Rinehart, and Thomas), a circulation manager (Larsen), a fact-checker (Nancy Ford for a short time), and a few secretaries and part-time workers. Advertising sales (almost nonexistent) were handled by an outside contractor. Some copy came in from “contributing editors,” mostly recruited from friends and acquaintances, many of whom never appeared in the office; and much of what they wrote had to be heavily edited or entirely rewritten. In the end the tiny full-time staff did the vast majority of the writing. Although the magazine itself was neatly subdivided by topic, there were no clear divisions among the responsibilities of the writers and editors. Everyone did a little of almost everything.
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In mid-February they decided they were ready to publish, and they
began aiming for the last week of the month. Their already frenzied lives grew more frantic still as they aimed to meet their self-imposed deadline. But finally they delivered the last of their copy to the printer. Virtually the entire staff, launching a tradition that would continue through the first year of the magazine, crowded into taxis for the trip to the presses—to proofread copy once it was set and to write new stories as the morning papers arrived. After a few hours they sent out for fried-egg sandwiches and coffee. People stretched out on the long tables at the back of the shop and slept. Everything—sandwiches, copy, clothes—became covered with printers’ ink. Finally, in the early morning hours, they stumbled out and headed for home, crossing paths with Wall Street workers on their way downtown.
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