The Publisher (20 page)

The first issue of
Time
appeared on late February 27, 1923 (with an official publication date of March 3). It was twenty-seven pages long, entirely in black-and-white, printed in small type. It had scant advertising, confined to the inside and back covers and the last few pages; most of the eleven advertisements were from banks and book publishers. But for now Luce and Hadden were concerned above all with the editorial content. And even in the first issue, readers could see the curious mixture of innovations that the two young men had been planning for years—rigid organization, concise news summaries, lively language, whimsical diversions, and casual, even at times sophomoric, expressions of opinion—that would characterize the magazine through much of its early history.

The cover was a black-and-white drawing of the retiring Speaker of the House of Representatives, Joseph Cannon. “Uncle Joe,” as he was known, had been a strict, even tyrannical, leader of the House for decades, and the editors of
Time
made no secret of their disdain for the “old guard” he represented. “Never did a man employ the office of Speaker with less regard for its theoretical impartiality,” they wrote. He was, they said, “no mere voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice that forbade anybody else to cry out—out of turn.” What was most striking about the inaugural issue, however, was how disciplined it was. No story was longer than four hundred words, and most were two hundred or fewer. There was no deviation from the “FIXED METHOD OF ARRANGEMENT” they had promised subscribers months before: a “National Affairs” section with eleven subsections; “Foreign Affairs” with sixteen subsections, each representing a particular area of the world; and another twenty sections covering the arts, professions, sports, finance, crime, the press, and other topics. A section titled “Milestones”
presented news of significant marriages, divorces, and deaths. There was a strange (and deservedly short-lived) feature—“Imaginary Interviews”—that presented clever statements that the editors thought eminent people could or should have made. Perhaps most illustrative of Luce and Hadden’s commitment to sharing even their most trivial opinions with their readers was a pair of features at the end of the magazine—“Point with Pride” and “View with Alarm”—which gave them license to reveal their own passions and prejudices. In the first issue, for example, they “pointed with pride” to an effort by Yale faculty members to retain the requirement that all students study classics, and “viewed with alarm” the literary regard given to T. S. Eliot’s great, despairing poem
The Waste Land
and the high proportion of “Orientals” in the population of Hawaii. Over the next several years many of the frivolities and excesses of the first issue disappeared (sometimes to be replaced by others). But the enduring core of the idea for the magazine—organization, brevity, comprehensiveness, and partiality—was visible from the start.
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With the first issue finally in print, most of the staff went home to sleep. Luce, however, returned to his office, where he found Larsen on his knees on the floor, frantically burrowing through a chaotic pile of papers. They were the mailing wrappers for subscription copies. Larsen had hired a group of young women—“debutantes,” as he called them—to write the addresses on the wrappers and prepare them for the arrival of the actual magazine. Now he discovered that nothing was in order, that many of the addresses were wrong, and that some of the wrappers were too small to contain the magazine. Some of the subscription copies of the first issue did not get into the mail until after the third issue had been published.

Luce uncharacteristically ignored Larsen’s panic and went to his desk in the back of the office. Putting his feet on the table, he picked up the newly printed magazine—his already ink-stained fingers getting blacker still as he held it—and read it cover to cover. He had seen everything before, three or four times. But, as he recalled years later, “I had this sort of surprising feeling that it was pretty good.”
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I
can only say,” Luce wrote late in March 1923, “that Vol 1 No 4 will be published and that Vol 1 No 5 may or
may not
be published.”
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For a moment following the publication of the first issue, optimism ran high. Grasping at the compliments they received from friends and colleagues, seizing on the rapid sale of the inaugural issue in a few Manhattan locations, Luce, Hadden, Larsen, and their colleagues began to believe that
Time
might indeed be an overnight success. But those illusions vanished quickly. In the end the first issue sold nine thousand copies, a little more than a third of their projections. This was partly a result of the staff’s inexperience, as illustrated by the incompetent mailing of subscription copies of the first issue. But half of the five thousand newsstand copies were returned unsold as well. Nor was the critical reception encouraging. “The first issue of TIME,” Luce wrote disconsolately, “has received extraordinarily little praise.” For the next weeks and months the
Time
staffers worked simply to stay alive, “watching the mail-bag with maternal care” to see if enough subscription income would arrive each week to allow them to keep going, and praying “for courage to face the daily—in fact hourly disappointment.” In the meantime their initial capitalization—just short of one hundred thousand dollars—was dwindling fast, and everyone recognized that substantial additional investments were unlikely until the magazine began to prove itself.
²

At one point Luce and Larsen sat down “to see what was the worst we could expect in the next three weeks,” and they concluded that there was “no limit to the extent of the immediate catastrophe!—Not when people are already writing in at the rate of over
100
per day, telling us to cancel their trial subscriptions.” As he usually did when faced with difficulties, Luce shrouded himself in gloom and self-reproach. He was, he wrote to Lila, doomed to be a “second-rater.” And he claimed that he was resigned to the failure. “I really don’t believe I care what happens in April,” he wrote at the end of March. “I shall be more than happy to be April’s fool.” Worst of all “a lot of people who have bought the thing think it is the most terrible of all terrors.” But as in other times of anxiety, he also strove to maintain hope. “We have not begun to realize our aspirations in the making of our paper,” he wrote Nettie McCormick, with more optimism than he actually felt. “But the testimony of thousands of readers every week & in every state of the Union seems to indicate that we are on the right track.” After Condé Nast, the famously successful publisher of
Vanity Fair
and
Vogue
, invited Luce and Hadden to meet with them, Luce wrote brightly that the invitation—designed, they assumed, to satisfy the publisher’s curiosity—meant that the “big fellows are beginning to realize we exist.” He was grasping at straws.
³

All the members of the staff braced themselves for the daily struggle—the struggle to write, edit, and produce the magazine; to keep up with the bills despite minimal funds; to wrest payment from their charter subscribers. “It was just like pulling teeth to get the $5 bills in,” Luce later recalled. In March they received slightly over eleven thousand dollars in subscription income, and in April more than seventeen thousand dollars. But whatever optimism this healthy increase produced was shattered in May, when income dropped to just over ten thousand dollars. “With any luck,” Luce noted sardonically, “one day we will have $5,000 on deposit.” Advertising income was also minimal. “From the advertising world as a whole,” their first annual report frankly observed,
“Time
has met with a cold reception…. Advertisers are human. It was years before evolution was generally accepted as a theory.” Inside the office they were less philosophical. Luce and his new (and first) advertising director, E. R. Crowe, were battling constantly—Crowe calling Luce amateurish, Luce accusing Crowe of extravagance. Crowe left angrily after only a few weeks of publication, returning his shares of TIME Inc. stock and, as Luce later recalled, saying “the hell with you.” There were other casualties as well. Hadden was unhappy with John Franklin Carter, one of the new writers, and dismissed him after a few weeks, leaving the editorial operations seriously undermanned. Luce,
who was already fully occupied with the magazine’s precarious business operations, had to pitch in. (Carter went on to become a successful columnist, writing as “the Unofficial Observer.”)
⁴

Little by little, however,
Time’s
fortunes improved—not so much as to erase the anxiety, but enough to create some realistic hope. Word of mouth was drawing new subscribers to the magazine, slowly increasing circulation. “I
think
,” Luce wrote in May, “that two weeks from now I will be saying with some light degree of definiteness that TIME will in all probability at least outlive the summer, and that if it can do that there may be hope for it.” His spirits brightened considerably in June, when he was invited to give a short speech at the Yale commencement as a representative of recent distinguished alumni. “Feeling fit as fiddle and ‘morale’ is very high,” he wrote after the event. “The speech is of absolutely no importance … except as a soothing reassurance that our classmates cannot point the finger of scorn at us.”
⁵

Having resisted paying to publicize the magazine in the early months, Luce and Hadden now decided to use some of their precious dwindling capital to take out advertisements in prestigious but relatively inexpensive magazines such as
Harper’s
, the
Atlantic, Century
, and
Literary Digest
. They seemed to help. Circulation began a slow but steady rise and averaged 18,500 over the second half of the year—more than twice where they had started, even if little more than half of their projections. They ended the year with a little over $36,000 in the bank and another $9,500 still owed them by subscribers and advertisers. They had spent more than half their initial capitalization to stay afloat, but they had feared much worse.
Time
, Hadden wrote optimistically at the end of 1923, “has grown from an idea into an established institution” and “has gradually been accepted by an increasing number of people as part of their weekly reading.” But the boasting was, they realized, to some degree premature. The charter subscriptions were set to expire in February, and they knew that to survive they needed a healthy renewal rate. Once again they waited nervously each day for the mail to gauge their success. In fact renewals were strong, and new subscribers were continuing to sign up as well.
⁶

According to their initial agreement, Luce and Hadden were scheduled to trade jobs each year, alternating between running the business and editing the magazine. Early 1924 was Luce’s turn to be editor. But the switch did not occur. Both men realized that Hadden had little interest in or talent for business matters, and Luce—who in other circumstances might have insisted on the trade anyway—decided that the time
was not right. Despite the improvement in
Time’s
health by 1924, Luce remained appropriately worried about survival. “Oh, we were in too much trouble … too much trouble,” he later recalled of his decision to stay where he was.
⁷

By mid-1924 they were becoming more confident. Over the next nine months they raised an additional fifty thousand dollars from the original stockholders, “quite easily” according to Luce, in return for more stock. They were even willing to consider expansion. Henry Seidel Canby, their onetime Yale instructor, was now the editor of the struggling
Saturday Review of Literature
. He approached
Time
and proposed a partnership, which Luce and Hadden were, as Luce later put it, “nervy enough” to accept.
Saturday Review
moved into offices in
Time’s
inelegant building, contributed to the rent, and shared other expenses. Larsen in return helped them more than double their subscription base. The editorial life of the
Review
remained largely autonomous, but the partnership gave
Time
more visibility and, perhaps as well, an entry point into the
Review
’s small but elite readership.
Time
’s circulation grew even more rapidly in the second half of the year, so much so (to seventy thousand a week) that the magazine registered its first profit at the end of 1924 (a modest $674, but a tremendous advance from the heavy losses in 1923).
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Launching
Time
and tending it during its perilous early months was an enervating job. Luce worked constantly, maintaining only the most minimal social life and even seeing very little of his family when they were still in New York. Often he returned home after everyone else was asleep and left in the morning before anyone was awake. In the summer of 1923 the family moved out of Manhattan to a summer house (which Harry never visited) in upstate New York for a few weeks, after which his mother and Sheldon returned to Beijing (joining Emmavail, who was working at the YWCA there). Later that fall his sister Elisabeth returned to Wellesley, and his father embarked on another arduous round of fund-raising in the Midwest. Harry remained in the city, so busy that he seemed almost oblivious to his family’s dispersal. With the family apartment in Morningside Heights now gone, he lived for a time in a room at the Yale Club and then moved downtown to a spartan and less expensive room (“four walls and a door, and a very fine desk,” as he described it) on Stuyvesant Street, to be nearer the office. He was accustomed to a frenzied life, and the pace of work—exhausting as it must have been—did not often seem to bother him. Quite the contrary, in
fact, for despite his frequent complaints about the grim fortunes of his enterprise, he loved the battle. “Doing something, getting something done, … finding a way out of a difficulty, … just the ‘game’ of it,—that … is the ‘kick’ I get out of it all—whatever it is, now, or in the future.” And yet this period of intense preoccupation with the magazine coincided with a period in which he was desperately attempting to sustain what at times seemed to him a hopeless romance.
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