The Publisher (37 page)

The films had their share of fluff: a breathlessly admiring feature on summer theater in New England featuring “the coming stars of stage and screen;” a worried story about hunting and the need to restrict
shooting to allow the duck population to replenish; a piece on the sale of dogs filled with images of children cuddling small puppies; and an ominous account of the spread of Dutch Elm disease and other insect-borne plagues, with a militarylike description of “the nation’s crucial battle against bugs.” But
The March of Time
also dealt with more serious subjects, and as early as its first episodes in 1935 paid particular attention to the growing threats of war in Europe and Asia.
²⁵

The films, like the magazines, had one cultural standard that they used consistently to interpret and explain events: the progressive outlook of the Anglo-American world, reflecting Luce’s own consistent views. Almost everything carried in
The March of Time
either displayed that world or made invidious comparisons with it. One example was an otherwise pointless piece about Lake Tana in Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile. “High in the mountains of northeast Africa,” the narration boomed over shots of the landscape, “fed in the rainy season by the drainage of a vast plateau, lies a lake seldom visited by white men but of vital importance to one great white nation.” The importance of the lake, in short, was that it irrigated cotton fields that were important to the British textile industry. An enthusiastic 1936 story on Palestine celebrated the “thriving Jewish settlements” that refugees from Europe were building there—“a miracle in the desert” that yesterday (in the hands of the Arabs) had been nothing but “a world of sand and cactus where jackals roamed.” Not surprisingly given Luce’s well-known interests, the films gave particular attention to China. It was a difficult subject, because China in the mid-1930s was simultaneously in the midst of an aggressive effort to “modernize” the nation while facing a growing invasion from the Japanese. Luce’s preference, unsurprisingly, was to emphasize progress. As a result, the films offered a relentlessly optimistic picture of Chiang Kai-shek’s success in bringing the once-backward nation into the modern, progressive, Western world. Over upbeat scenes of new buildings, museums, schools, and swimming pools, the film’s announcer declared that “a new generation acquires a deepening sense of national unity, and a newborn happiness spreads through the land … and in mid-summer 1937, China’s transition to a progressive, reorganized nation is in full swing.” The Japanese, in contrast, were the backward alternative to the people of China—a combination of mindless automatons slavishly committed to the state, and smirking savages bent on violence and destruction. It was a portrait that augured the harshly racist American demonization of Japan during World War II.
²⁶

Among the most ambitious stories of the early
March of Time
—and
the one most revealing of its techniques and standards—was a January 1938 film titled “Inside Nazi Germany.” The film was not, in the beginning, a reflection of any strong interest in Germany by the filmmakers. Prior to 1938 de Rochemont had paid relatively little attention to the Nazis, except to display those Americans who were promoting measures to keep the United States out of any future war. The German story was, rather, the result of the availability of rare film from within Nazi Germany itself, shot by a freelance photographer, Julien Bryan. On assignment from
The March of Time
, he shot twenty thousand feet of what he claimed was “uncensored material.” In fact Bryan’s film was largely unremarkable. Whether because of restrictions on what he could shoot, or because he was himself cautious about what he filmed, he brought back footage that was of high photographic quality but of little real interest: images of middle-class Germans living ordinary, prosperous lives; footage of German youth groups and public-works laborers that were almost indistinguishable from American images of Civilian Conservation Corps camps or Works Progress Administration projects.

De Rochemont and his staff were undeterred. Determined to present a shocking image of a brutal state, they used Bryan’s idyllic images as a kind of foil to set up their real message. The “air of prosperity” in Berlin, the “plain cheerful people” moving through cities or working on farms, portrayed what was, in fact, a Potemkin village hiding an evil regime. Germans were living normal lives on the surface but in fact they were part of a society “with one mind, one will, one goal—expansion,” a nation in which, “for the good Nazi, not even God stands above Hitler.” The upbeat music of the opening scenes quickly turned dark and ominous. The narration acquired a doomsday tone, with descriptions that were hyperbolic even for a regime whose crimes would seem almost impossible to exaggerate. “From the time the German child is old enough to understand anything,” the announcer proclaimed, “he ceases to be an individual and is taught that he was born to die for the fatherland. Scarcely out of kindergarten, the child must take the place allotted to him in the great Nazi scheme and from then on think and act as he is told.” To supplement the banal live footage, de Rochemont staged dramatizations—thugs painting anti-Semitic graffiti on buildings, police rounding up Jews, loyal Nazis saluting one another in their kitchens—creating the ominous visual images that Bryan had failed to provide. Much of the dramatized footage was shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, because its large German neighborhoods had a credible visual similarity to bourgeois Germany. John Martin, the former
Time
editor now
(briefly) assigned to the newsreels, wrote the film’s final words: “Nazi Germany faces her destiny with one of the great war machines in history. And the inevitable destiny of the great war machines of the past has been to destroy the peace of the world, its people, and the governments of their time.”
²⁷

The film was predictably controversial—with German officials in the United States and small groups of German Americans attacking it as biased and inaccurate propaganda, and with anti-Nazi critics arguing that the film had not been anti-Nazi enough. Some distributors complained the film was simply too controversial, that it would alienate movie audiences. Jack Warner, the head of the Warner Brothers studio, argued that the film was “pro-Nazi” and refused to distribute it in his theaters. (Warner dismissed the anti-Nazi narration and argued that viewers were influenced only by what they saw, not by what they heard—an argument Luce disdainfully countered with a sarcastic reference to Warner’s role in creating the first sound movies.) A few more thoughtful critics, drawn to comment on the film by the strong response it received, expressed concern that the manipulation of images and words to express an opinion—however justified—was a dangerous exercise of a power that could easily be misused.

The most ardent critics of the film, and of
The March of Time
generally, were the intellectuals and critics of the Popular Front—the broad coalition of the antifascist Left launched in 1935 by the American Communist Party. They did not object to the criticism of Nazi Germany. Their critique was more fundamental: that
The March of Time
, with its “chromium-bright polish,” was, like the rest of Time Inc., simply doing the work of Wall Street and the capitalist world of which it was a part. The films displayed a “trend toward militarism and reaction” and were “doing exactly what Hollywood is doing: avoiding or distorting reality.” The power of
The March of Time
was, however, unmistakable, and Popular Front filmmakers responded not just with criticism, but by creating a newsreel of their own,
The World Today
, which in its brief life adopted many of Time Inc.’s editorial and filmmaking techniques to present what they considered newsworthy events: most notably a sympathetic portrayal of a rent strike in Queens.
²⁸

“Inside Nazi Germany,” despite its occasional critics, was one of the most successful and most watched of all of Time Inc.’s films. Theaters that did not normally show
The March of Time
leaped at the opportunity to screen it when Warner and other theaters banned it. It was also, on the whole, one of the most highly praised of all Time Inc. productions.
“March of Time,”
a British critic wrote, had “won the field for the elementary principles of public discussion,” and had strengthened the possibility of “a revitalized citizenship and of a democracy at long last in contact with itself.” The
New Republic
, a frequent critic of Luce publications, grudgingly admitted that “it is heartening to see good young blood making a field-day of the creaky superstitions of the movie trade.”
²⁹

“Inside Nazi Germany” was not an artistic or technical breakthrough.
The March of Time
had long ago learned how to shape material to convey a powerful message, whatever the visual images at its disposal, even if on less explosive topics. But this particular story was significant in other ways, for it marked a decisive step by
The March of Time
(a step paralleled by the rest of the growing Luce empire) away from its earlier vaguely pacifist and isolationist leanings and toward a more aggressive effort to mobilize the nation in opposition to the rise of fascism. For much of the rest of its relatively short life,
The March of Time
was increasingly, and ultimately almost exclusively, a chronicler of aggression and war, and a champion of America’s growing leadership in the world.
³⁰

Luce’s restlessness in the mid-1930s ultimately extended to his family life. He had a stable, comfortable, but increasingly conventional marriage, dominated by the demands of running a household and raising two young boys to whom he was only erratically attentive. Luce was endlessly immersed in the affairs of his company, working late into the evening and on weekends. Lila—who had tried to show an interest in the magazines early in their marriage—became increasingly remote from Harry’s work. She and the boys decamped frequently to rented houses in Connecticut or New Jersey, or to nearby resorts. Harry as often as not failed to join them or arrived trailing business associates with whom he spent much of his time working. In New York, Harry was out almost every night, often without Lila, even though she liked social events more than he did. Real bonds of affection remained between them. Lila was devoted to Harry, but she was also somewhat in awe of him. (Friends occasionally commented on how much more animated and interesting she was when she was not with her husband—“most pleasant,” Billings once noted, “bubbling and bouncing around rather ecstatically.”) Harry, for his part, was tolerant of but generally bored with her preoccupation with decorating and fashion, and with the frequent presence of her wealthy mother, who reinforced Lila’s more trivial
interests. The passion of their courtship and their early years of marriage had obscured some of the profound differences between them. But now that the passion had faded, their relationship was driven more and more by routine. In 1934 Harry and Lila agreed to move the family to New Jersey so that the boys could enter a country day school. (Lila, who had attended school in New York as a girl, was favorably disposed toward city schools, but Harry clung to an image—largely unrelated to his own peripatetic experience as a child—of his sons growing up in a small, stable, sylvan community.) They found an imposing property in Gladstone and began to build a large house (designed to resemble the French châteaus that Lila loved) on a hill overlooking the pristine New Jersey countryside. There was nothing to suggest that the marriage was in jeopardy. Indeed, it might have survived indefinitely had it not been for Harry’s unplanned meeting with a woman who would change his, and his family’s, life: Clare Boothe Brokaw.
³¹

Clare Boothe was born in New York City on March 10, 1903, into a family clinging precariously—and not wholly successfully—to middle-class respectability. Her mother, Ann Clare Snyder, was the daughter of an immigrant butcher whom she later described, falsely, as the son of an impoverished Austrian nobleman. As a young woman Ann Snyder was an unsuccessful actress and dancer, and she never wholly lost her taste for the fast, itinerant life of the show-business world. Clare’s father, William Boothe, was an off-and-on businessman and a professional musician who periodically changed his name to escape his creditors. William was already married to the first of his three legal wives when his relationship with Ann began in 1901; he never married her. They lived together in Tennessee for several years (then using the name “Murphy”) while Boothe embarked on a failed career as a violin teacher. Ann left him in 1912 and returned to New York with Clare and Clare’s younger brother, David, and she sustained herself for several years through relationships with wealthy (and sometimes married) men. Joel Jacobs, a successful, unmarried businessman, took a special interest in the family and provided them with enough financial support to allow Ann to send her children to a series of elite boarding schools, which Clare mostly hated. “I never drew a happy breath in my entire childhood,” Clare later wrote in a fragment of an unfinished and unpublished memoir.
³²

Shortly after World War I Ann began a relationship with Elmer Austin, a successful and sophisticated surgeon whom she married in 1921, after vacillating for more than a year between the wealthier Jacobs
and the more “respectable” (non-Jewish) Austin. The marriage secured Clare’s access to the world of wealth and privilege in New York, where she stood out for her beauty, her glamour, and her seemingly self-confident charm. In 1923 Clare married George Tuttle Brokaw, a socially prominent heir to a clothing fortune who was twenty-three years her senior. Their daughter, Ann, was born the following year. But the marriage was a disaster from the start. Brokaw was a boorish drunk with few interests beyond riding, golf, and gambling. Clare was a restless, ambitious young woman who felt stifled by her husband’s dull, self-indulgent routine. They divorced in 1929, after a settlement that left Clare and her daughter financially secure. No longer content simply to seek a good marriage, Clare began looking for a career.
³³