The Publisher (15 page)

The Oxford term did not begin until October, so late in August, Harry traveled to Paris, hoping to spend some time with Brit Hadden, who was expected in early September. Once again he found himself in demand, chaperoning the daughter of a Yale alumnus “for three entire days—which by the way is some job…. On Friday we tore all over town, seeing as much as we could, and went to the opera, Faust. Saturday the same, driving through the Bois in the evening…. Altogether we, or at least I, had a ripping time.” A few days later, before Brit arrived, Harry left unexpectedly on a trip to Istanbul, which he, like many Anglo-Americans (and virtually all Greeks), still called Constantinople. His wealthy Yale friend Hugh Auchincloss had arranged the trip months before, only to find that his original traveling companion could not join him. He invited Harry to come along and offered to pay his expenses “over a certain amount,” since he himself planned to travel in style. They rode first class on the Orient Express, in berths reserved for them by the American ambassador in Paris, an Auchincloss family friend; and they found themselves lavishly attended by embassy officials in almost all the cities they visited.
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Even so, Harry was appalled by eastern Europe—“another world, a world poorer, more animalistic, uncontrolled, dishonest, a people of geniuses and crooks, whose geniuses unfortunately are dead.” Istanbul itself was a “dirty, filthy place,” made tolerable to the young travelers through their “pull with the embassy,” which gained them access to lavish dinners and even the chance for a monthlong trip around the Black Sea aboard an American destroyer—an invitation they had to decline. Next was a hurried trip back through Romania, whose capital, Bucharest, was a “beautiful city—the Paris of the Balkans,” but whose people were “a lot of dirty crooks! That goes without saying.” Returning finally to Paris, he felt as though he were “coming home.”
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By the beginning of October he was ensconced at Oxford, living in
modest “digs” near Christchurch with a Yale classmate and bemoaning the “Britannic shell” that made it difficult to make friends with English students. He arranged to read English history, beginning with the Tudor period. He joined the Oxford Union (although he had little hope of actually speaking before it). He played a great deal of bridge and tennis. And he energetically socialized with other Americans at Oxford, and with their families and friends in London. There was none of the methodical striving and frantic competitiveness that had characterized his time at Hotchkiss and Yale. The year at Oxford, he explained to his skeptical parents, was “a holiday I feel justified in taking. I think it will bring me back stronger and fresher and broader-gauged.” To their suggestions that he was being frivolous and extravagant, he replied defensively: “I don’t think I can be accused of having sought out rich friends. I have never tried to be ostentatious in the slightest. I have tried to get to know all the best men I could. Some of them are very rich, with an occasional exception they are all much wealthier than I. That comes of going to Yale.” In any case, he argued slightly defiantly, it was too late to back out now, and “precious little opportunity for economizing.” Still, after receiving their gentle reprimands, he was careful in future letters to write more often about his intellectual than about his social life.
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In reality, although Harry drew some excitement from his reading of British history and enjoyed his frequent encounters with Harold Laski (now back in England) and his “bolshevik crowd,” he was not very interested in the intellectual life of Oxford. Instead he spent as much time as he could traveling and engaging with the upper ranks of expatriate society. Over Christmas he visited Geneva and used his Yale contacts to arrange a privileged visit to the inner workings of the League of Nations. He then spent time in Rome, guided by help from the American Embassy and his former Chefoo and Yale schoolmate Thornton Wilder, who was ensconced at the American Academy writing plays. “Next week,” he wrote from Rome on Christmas Eve, “I attend a dance or two—a side of Rome I didn’t see last time!” At one of those dances he met an attractive young American woman, Lila Hotz, to whom he was apparently immediately and powerfully drawn. (“For twenty-three years,” he wrote her later, “I never considered marriage except with supercilious scorn…. Then one night in Rome, theories, attitudes, pronouncements were demolished by—well, by a mere fact.”)
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Lila was from a wealthy, socially prominent Chicago family. She had attended the Spence School, in New York City, one of America’s most prominent and most academically serious schools for young upper-class
women. She was now spending a year in Europe, in the manner of many young women of her class, studying art and leading an active social life. She had rich, curly dark hair, pale skin, and large, dark, haunting eyes. Although she was not nearly as serious or intellectually curious as Harry, she was well read, well educated, and sophisticated enough to find him intriguing and to intrigue him in turn.

They soon began an extended if at first somewhat guarded correspondence, to which Harry was by far the more frequent contributor. Unaccustomed to the rituals of courtship, Harry apparently made various social blunders, for which he periodically wrote long, erudite apologies. He was frequently on the defensive against what he called Lila’s “powers of psycho-analysis” and her complaints that he was not sufficiently open about his “inner feelings.” He once sent her a cartoon from
Punch
, which he evidently considered appropriate to their relationship; titled “Psycho-Analysis, or The New Game of Laying Bare One’s Inmost Soul,” it portrayed a young couple in evening clothes sitting on a sofa—the woman looking searchingly at her partner waiting for some emotional revelation, the young man sitting rigid, his hands on his knees, his eyes wide with terror. At one point, in Paris, Harry left flowers for Lila at her hotel, with a penitent note: “In the hope that violets are sufficiently impersonal.” But the petulance and the apologies were themselves something of a teasing ritual between two young people deeply attracted to each other without knowing each other very well. In the spring Lila—with her mother along as chaperone—came to Oxford as his guest for polo matches and a dance at Magdalen College. (“The shock of coming down to earth has been too exhausting,” he wrote her in London a day or two after she left Oxford.) He made no mention of her in his letters home.
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Harry’s year at Oxford—and more significantly the extensive European traveling he did during the course of it—made a very different impression on him than had his earlier European journey in 1913. Then, as a young boy traveling alone and living penuriously, he had marveled at the artistic splendor and rich history of the first Western countries he had seen since his childhood trip to America. Now, as a young man—traveling on the Continent as often as he could during the long vacations between the Oxford terms, moving portentously through embassies and aristocratic homes in the company of wealthy friends—he judged everything in comparison with the United States, and (except for England itself, for which he had developed a typical upper-class American admiration) found almost every place wanting in contrast. Rome, he noted,
was still striking for its storied magnificence, but it was also notable for the squalor of its politics—wholly “bourgeois,” having “nothing whatever to do with society, which consists of decayed nobility.” Rome’s splendor was in the past, he concluded, and “one realizes that magnificence is now of America. May it prove to be a moral and spiritual magnificence.” For the rest of his life Harry was an avid overseas traveler, and his year abroad after Yale remained, in a way, a prototype for the kind of journeys he would later routinely make—in the careful planning for maximum comfort; in the expectation of lavish attention from diplomats and local elites; and in the energetic pursuit of new sights and experiences. He also displayed a newly dismissive contempt for the “filthy,” “crooked,” and “backward” cultures he encountered, which he judged by rigid Western standards as objects for improvement and elevation.
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Through it all he was pondering his future, in ways that revealed a wavering from his earlier firm resolve to enter journalism. He was, he insisted, still committed to entering “public life,” perhaps as a journalist but also perhaps as a writer or a politician. (He was even then beginning to write essays designed for publication in such American magazines as
Harper’s
and the
Atlantic
and was sending them timidly across the Atlantic under a pseudonym, so that rejections—which he consistently received—would not damage his reputation.) But having spent so much time with much more affluent friends and their families, he was naturally becoming more aware of the significance of wealth. To his parents he was apologetic about his growing interest in what he called, only half jokingly, “dirty sordid money,” but he did not back away from his determination to make some. He would, he said, consider spending the next ten years working in business (most likely manufacturing) “until I can get to the point where money will mean nothing to me.” And he was already in correspondence with Mrs. McCormick—old, ailing, but still very fond of Harry—about the possibility of a job in the family firm, International Harvester, when he returned from Europe—a possibility, given its source, that he came to consider a virtual certainty.
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His last weeks at Oxford—weeks when degree candidates were absorbed with exams but during which the departing Harry had no responsibilities—were a time of idyllic leisure, interspersed with attendance at crew races, polo matches, and other Oxonian social events. “Everything goes along monotonously happy. I am playing tennis every afternoon…. Doing practically no serious work but read as the spirit moves me.” He might, he said, begin work at Harvester on August 1
or—if his social life in America replicated the life he had built in England—“loaf all of August” and begin in September. Brit Hadden, he reported as he prepared to sail, might move to Chicago as well, “which will be mighty lucky for me. We would share digs, etc. That lad is really quite tremendous.”
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B
rit Hadden did not move to Chicago that year. He returned to New York after a summer of traveling and went to work for the prestigious
New York World
, a job he got by marching into the editor’s office and stating that he needed experience at a good newspaper to prepare himself for starting his own. But Luce was not really much interested in what Hadden was doing in any case. He had other plans, centered on the promise of a job and, perhaps more important, the promise of romance.

The job at International Harvester proved chimerical. Shortly after his arrival in Chicago, in the midst of the severe recession of 1921, he went to the office of Mrs. McCormick’s son Harold, the president of the company. According to Luce’s own later accounts, one of the McCormick executives told him that, given Mrs. McCormick’s interest, he could have a job if he wanted one, but that someone currently on the payroll would have to be fired to make room for him. “Of course I don’t want you to fire anyone,” Harry remembered replying. The story is certainly plausible. But it is also consistent with Luce’s earlier explanations of thwarted ambitions—most notably his failure to win the chairmanship of the
Yale Daily News
, which he also claimed to have selflessly abandoned in the interests of others.
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Luce soon found another, less lucrative job, on the
Chicago Daily News
. The
News
was, in the eyes of the city’s prosperous middle class, the “respectable” paper in town—without the egomaniacal flamboyance of Col. Robert McCormick’s
Tribune
or the Hearstian populism of the
Herald-Examiner
. But the
Daily News
was hardly the sober guardian of standards that its defenders liked to believe—as Luce soon discovered when he was assigned to work as an assistant to the popular columnist Ben Hecht, who later became a successful playwright and screenwriter. He was perhaps best known for the play, and later film,
The Front Page
, which he wrote with Charles MacArthur—a classic, if romanticized, portrayal of life in a Chicago newsroom.

Hecht was only four years older than Luce, but he had already developed the crusty style of a grizzled newspaperman. His column, “A Thousand and One Afternoons,” consisted of colorful and often sentimental stories about ordinary Chicagoans. And while Hecht did not invent the stories—there was always a real event at the core of his column—he had no inhibitions about embroidering and enhancing reality. Luce’s job was to find a nugget of truth, an offbeat story or event, on which Hecht could base his flights of fancy. The relationship was apparently not a successful one, and it lasted little more than a month. Hecht was condescending toward his assistant. Luce was privately contemptuous of the column he was helping Hecht create. After a few weeks they parted ways.
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Years later Hecht claimed to have fired Luce for incompetence. But Luce did not leave the paper when he left the column, which casts some doubt on Hecht’s self-serving account. Luce joined the general news staff (moving, he later claimed, because both Hecht and his editor decided he was too talented to be Hecht’s legman). He worked for a while as a junior reporter, scouring police stations, the courts, and the streets for news. His occasional stories were not invented or embroidered, but they were sometimes as idiosyncratic as Hecht’s column had been. Among his published pieces were an account of a millionaire tossing money to a crowd in front of his hotel, a description of a Russian pianist giving a concert from a rowboat in Lincoln Park, a story about a religious group that had declared playing baseball a crime. He remained frustrated by what he considered the triviality of his assignments and by his lack of greater progress at the paper. “I haven’t shown any brilliance,” he wrote desolately to his parents (describing what he called his “fatuous existence”), “yet apparently the work has been satisfactory.” Even that did not last very long, however. The
Daily News
was no more immune to the postwar recession than was International Harvester, and it began laying off employees in the fall of 1921. Luce, among the most recently hired, was one of the first to go. “It was a pretty bad blow,” he confessed to his mother, but he took some comfort from the assurances
he received from his editors that his work had been “thoroughly satisfactory” and that they would gladly hire him again if they could. “I don’t suppose it really means I have failed,” he concluded, “but just that I haven’t been anything out of the ordinary.”
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