The Publisher (39 page)

Time
, and to a lesser degree
Fortune
, reveled in skewering public figures with tart (and often invented) language.
The New Yorker
was no less censorious, and in fact built much of its reputation on its famous profiles, which were also often condescending and deflating. Both magazines were brash and opinionated in their early years, and both were largely apolitical but culturally conservative. And while
The New Yorker
prided itself on the quality of its writing and scorned the formulaic
“Timese” of its rival, its own language—although less consistent than
Time’s
—displayed some of the same self-conscious cleverness. It had its own affinity for inverted sentence structure (“Particularly dire are the equinoctial storms that sweep the open-air gardens of Greenwich Village tea rooms this season”); its own use of vivid physical descriptions designed to deflate the pompous and powerful (“a rather heavy-set reddish person … a young face, despite two very long white fronds of mustachios, blue at the ends on account of having been inadvertently dipped into the inkwell so often”). Dwight Macdonald, the former
Fortune
editor whose disdain for the Luce publications was no secret, had a similar aversion to
The New Yorker
. In their different ways, he believed, both were creatures of the world of wealth and privilege, without any serious convictions.
Fortune
, he had long argued, was simply a tool of the capitalist elite.
The New Yorker
, in turn, was the “humor magazine of ‘our ruling class.’” The renowned Columbia historian Jacques Barzun—a frequent contributor to
Life
, who once appeared on the cover of
Time
—expressed his own exasperation with the two magazines. A case could be made, he said, that “the liberal
New Yorker”
was a “match” for “the conservative
Time,”
both exhibiting “the same attitude—derisive, suspicious, faintly hostile.” Ingersoll later wrote of
The New Yorker
in the
Partisan Review
, which he then edited, “Its editors confine their attention to trivia. Interlarded with the advertisements are various ‘departments,’ devoted to practical advice on the great problem of upper-class life: how to get through the day without dying of boredom.”
⁴²

The 1936
New Yorker
profile of Luce was an indirect result of the inherent competition between these two organizations, but it was more directly a result of the personal rivalry created by Ralph Ingersoll’s movement from managing editor of
The New Yorker
to managing editor of
Fortune
. Harold Ross, the brilliant but disorganized founding editor of
The New Yorker
, had discovered Ingersoll in the first months of the magazine’s life and had soon come to see him as indispensable—an obsessively hardworking dynamo who brought order to the once-chaotic office during the day and became a hard-drinking companion of the rest of the staff at their favorite bars late into the night. But Ingersoll’s relationship with Ross soon deteriorated, a result of what
New Yorker
writer James Thurber described as Ross’s “almost pathological cycle of admiration and disillusionment.” The once-intimate friends gradually became embittered enemies. Ross was the self-educated, upwardly mobile son of a Utah grocer with a deep-seated resentment of the wealthy and well born, the very people to whom his magazine so
effectively catered. He had particular contempt for the owners of his magazine, but he came as well to resent Ingersoll’s own aristocratic, Hotchkiss and Yale background, which Ingersoll displayed every week in his lightly regarded pieces on what later would be known as Ivy League football. (Ingersoll “talked to people like Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Ross once complained.) Ingersoll in turn came to despise Ross as an erratic and malicious man who treated him, and others, shabbily. Both were people of large egos who did not overlook or forget slights.
⁴³

Although Ingersoll left
The New Yorker
behind when he moved to
Fortune
in 1929, his simultaneous fascination with and resentment of his former magazine lingered for years. In 1934 he proposed a profile of
The New Yorker
for
Fortune
, and even toyed briefly with doing it collaboratively with the
New Yorker
writers themselves (who declined the invitation, despite Ingersoll’s assurances that the piece would be “a labor of love”). The profile, which appeared in August 1934 and which Ingersoll wrote himself, was superficially friendly but—as Ingersoll certainly knew—certain to infuriate the
New Yorker
staff.
⁴⁴

“Harold Ross’s father was not a Mormon,” it began, with a barbed reminder of the editor’s far-from-cosmopolitan childhood. “But his uncle joined the Church to get trade for his Salt Lake City grocery store. When Harold was fourteen he went to work in this store and, before he became sensitive about his eccentricities, he used to talk about his career there.” And so it continued through seventeen pages of text, photographs, and
New Yorker
cartoons. Ingersoll knew the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of his former colleagues well, and skillfully assaulted them all. Ross, he wrote, was “furious” and “mad” and “had neither the wit nor the ability to write himself.” James Thurber was a “blotter-and-telephone book scribbler.” The cartoonist Peter Arno was “tall, handsome, arrogant … disagreeable,” and “his wit has lost its tang.” Wolcott Gibbs, he observed, “hates everybody and everything, takes an adolescent pride in it.” As Ingersoll well knew, the
New Yorker
writers disdained business and took pride in their purely literary commitment to the magazine. He slyly described the magazine as “a good publishing property,” whose “fundamental success is based on the simple mathematics that a merchant can, at $550 a
New Yorker
page, call his advertisement to the attention of some 62,000 active and literate inhabitants of the metropolitan area.” Although he wrote positively, if somewhat condescendingly, of the literary quality of the magazine, he was mostly interested in puncturing its writers’ pretense that they were engaged in an intellectual enterprise rather than a business. “The
New Yorker
is fifteen
cents’ worth of commercialized temperate, distillate of bitter wit and frustrated humor,” he wrote. “It has nothing to apologize for as a money-maker. It ran more pages of advertising than—hold your breath—the
Saturday Evening Post
itself.” He calculatedly infuriated the most prominent members of the staff by publishing their salaries—forty thousand dollars for Ross, eleven to twelve thousand for his most eminent writers. (They all claimed that they were paid much less than reported. Shortly after the
Fortune
piece appeared, E. B. White wrote sarcastically in
The New Yorker’s
“Talk of the Town,” “The editor of
Fortune
makes $30-a-week and carfare.”)

Although the profile was Ingersoll’s project, Luce paid the consequences. Ross decided almost immediately that
The New Yorker
should take revenge, but he bided his time. Two years later he published a savage profile of Luce by the wickedly clever Wolcott Gibbs. In many ways it paralleled Ingersoll’s portrait of
The New Yorker
—offering the same barbed profiles of
Time
writers and executives, the same indiscreet publication of the salaries of editors and writers, the same condescending praise for the magazine’s success combined with barely disguised contempt for the content of the magazine. Gibbs described “strange, inverted Timestyle” as “gibbersish,” the product of “Hadden’s impish contempt for his readers, his impatience with the English language.” To prove his point Gibbs wrote the entire article in a hyperactive version of
Time
’s own language, as in his brilliant quip, “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” Luce was an “ambitious, gimlet-eyed Baby Tycoon…. Prone he to wave aside pleasantries, social preliminaries, to get at once to the matter in hand.” Of Luce’s relationship with Hadden, Gibbs wrote invidiously:

And of Luce’s future:

The Gibbs profile of Luce was mostly accurate and far from wholly negative. Just as the
Fortune
piece greatly boosted the visibility of
The New Yorker
, so the profile of Luce certified him as a major public figure and a man of extraordinary power and achievement. It probably did the company, and Luce himself, more good than harm. A man of less intensity and seriousness might have treated it as the brilliant joke it partly was, but Luce—who read the piece in galleys several weeks before it appeared—viewed it only as a savage attack. Perhaps unwisely he asked to meet with Ross and Gibbs and St. Clair McKelway (another
New Yorker
writer, who had worked on the profile with Gibbs) before publication—a decision he later bitterly regretted. Gibbs lost his nerve and failed to attend, but Luce, Ingersoll, Ross, and McKelway met for dinner, followed by a long night of drinking that ended at 3 in the morning. (“Oh, that terrible night,” he recalled years later. “I should never have gone over. Ingersoll dragged me there.”) Accounts differ as to who was drunk and who, if anyone, remained sober. But it is clear that Ingersoll and McKelway drank heavily and had to be separated at least once to avoid fisticuffs. Luce and Ross talked at length, neither giving an inch to the other. Luce complained of inaccuracies. Ross replied that getting the facts wrong “is part of the parody of
Time.”
“God damn it Ross,” Ingersoll remembered Luce saying, with the residual stammer that still reappeared at moments of stress or excitement, “this whole God damn piece is ma- ma -
malicious
.” Ross replied: “You’ve put your finger on it, Luce. I believe in malice.” A few days later Ross followed up with a five-page letter, which greatly intensified the feud. “I was astonished to realize the other night,” he wrote,

He signed it with a bitter reference to the description of him in the
Fortune
profile two years earlier: “Harold Wallace Ross—Small man … furious … mad … no taste.” Luce wrote back curtly and coldly,

It is hard not to see in this feud something more than a rivalry between two magazines. It also appears to have been very personal, even if neither of the parties fully realized it. There was something about Luce that irritated people like Ross and Gibbs. Perhaps it was Luce’s image of stolid, humorless propriety (an image his passionate relationship with Clare may have belied, but that did not change how he was perceived by the public). Perhaps it was his grim seriousness as he wrestled with the “great questions of the world,” the kinds of questions that Ross (and most other
New Yorker
writers of the time) largely ignored. There was also something in this rivalry that resembled Luce’s tortured relationship with Hadden (whose personality Gibbs mischievously compared, unflatteringly, to Luce’s in the
New Yorker
profile). Ross, like Hadden, was iconoclastic, charismatic, brilliant, slightly crazy, and—at least on the surface—rarely serious, the kind of person Luce found discomfiting. Ross, like Hadden, fought against becoming an august and worldly figure. Luce, in contrast, embraced and carefully nurtured his fame and his power. The battle with Ross, transitory and frivolous as it may have been, provided a snapshot of the kind of person Luce was, and was not, as he entered a new period in his life.

T
he beginning of Harry’s new life with Clare coincided with the creation of
Life
magazine, perhaps the most popular periodical in American publishing history. Together these momentous events—one personal, one professional—changed the trajectory of his career and his sense of his place in the world.

Luce’s interest in a “picture magazine” had many sources. Clare, while serving as managing editor of
Vanity Fair
in 1932, had written a memo to Condé Nast urging him to create a magazine for photographs that she proposed naming “Life.” Her first two social conversations with Harry, according to Clare’s later accounts, were about the challenges and prospects of such a publication. Throughout their courtship and even during the first months of their marriage, the idea for a new magazine was part of the bond between them—a shared professional interest that intensified their physical and emotional attraction to each other. Early in their relationship, again according to Clare, Harry promised to make her managing editor of his new publication.
¹

But while the prospect of
Life
helped bring them together, it failed to avert a rift in their marriage that began within weeks of their wedding. Their relationship had begun as a product of passion and ambition. The passion ebbed fairly quickly, but the ambition survived. It did not take long for their love affair to turn into something like a marriage of state—enduring, but at the same time competitive and largely unromantic.