The Publisher (62 page)

The rethinking of
Life
had actually begun not with Luce but with Longwell, who in 1944 wrote a memo complaining that the magazine had lost its youth—not just the youth of the magazine but of the people who ran it.
Life
, he argued, “should be a young man’s magazine…. We’ve reached a high but dead level of competence…. Our first and primary duty as editors is to make the magazine reflect its title.” This was in Longwell’s first year as editor. By 1946, however, he had begun to bow out and turn the weekly editing over to his talented colleagues Joseph Thorndike and Ed Thompson, both of whom understood that they were in a competition to succeed him. By then the number of people trying to rethink
Life
was growing almost exponentially. The magazine had what Billings called “a jittery uncertainty” and lacked “a smooth even flow of purpose.” But equally troubling to him was the parade of intruders trying to “fix” the magazine, people who were “directly, or indirectly, pulling and hauling at the … editor—Larsen, Heiskell, Longwell, Billings, Luce…. If one man were editing straightaway for the next couple of years, there would be less feeling of fuzzy command.” But that was not to be. In October 1946, Luce made Thorndike the editor. Three years later Thorndike resigned, frustrated
by Luce’s continual intrusion and what he considered the undermining of his authority. He was succeeded by Ed Thompson, who also encountered frequent interventions by Luce and others but nevertheless remained in the job until 1961.
³⁰

In the fall of 1948 Luce sent a memo to the
Life
editors that was, among his many such memos, distinctive for its elaborate metaphors. He referred to an English film about the love affair between British bird lovers and a small bird known as the tawny pipit. That love affair—that elevation of an ordinary, unimportant bird into an object of extraordinary fascination—was, Luce argued, the key to a successful magazine. “As long as the English were on top of the world, their imaginations were on top of themselves…. Everything they saw, everything they learned, was absorbed in their imaginations.” The moral of this strangely contrived parable was that “if you want to make … anything … interesting, it must be loved by the writer and the editor.” In other, more conventional memos, he made his views much clearer—that the magazine should express its love of what Luce believed was America’s great moment, its unprecedented opportunity to be the new Britain, to reshape the world. In 1948, in response to a proposal for a “Western Culture” project, Luce grandiosely insisted that the series should aspire “to add up to a coherent interpretation of history…. The drama of Western Culture culminates in the creation of the United States of America. And this interpretation invites all Americans to take stock of American civilization at the moment of history when the U.S. has become the heir and chief guardian against the whole body of Western Civilization against the forces of reactionary neo-barbarism.”
³¹

But Luce did not stop with Western civilization.
Life
, he soon argued, must become something like a textbook for men and women in need of instruction (whether they knew it or not). They should be presented with “convictions as to the nature of man and the purpose of human life.” To support that goal, he proposed “a combination of an introduction to, and summary of, Freshman Psychology A.”
Life
should also, he argued, take on the social sciences “and show, by encyclopedic selection, what is the basic material and method of each of the disciplines.” It should develop a concern “for the Non-European world … getting Americans acquainted with the many, many, many different peoples and customs and politics.” And the magazine would, he insisted, develop a higher level of taste: “There is in picture journalism a special peril of bad taste; we will have no bad taste in
Life.”
³²

Above all he had decided that the most important element of the
kind of journalism he was advocating was “faith.” Faith, Luce said, was “what a man does actually believe in as shown by what he does and how he lives…. Like democracy itself, and inescapably with democracy, journalism must fight its way through to a better and brighter world—or at least perish honorably in the attempt.”
Life
—which had begun to show people interesting photographs, to revel in the curious and the entertaining, and to attract eager readers to such trivial but entertaining features as Life Goes to a Party—that lively, inventive, and never-too-serious magazine was now to become a chronicle of the West’s (and America’s) march to democratic greatness.
³³

As was usually the case, Luce did not entirely get his way.
Life
continued to publish photographs and essays that were pure entertainment, and the magazine moved through the late 1940s and 1950s with continued popularity and success. But if Luce did not transform
Life
, he did alter it.
Life
was increasingly devoted to more serious material—often long, sometimes tedious, always worthy. Luce could rarely resist contributions from major world figures, no matter how dull their writing. His editors shuddered when he returned from trips abroad, fearful that he had brought with him yet another ponderous article from a king or minister or celebrity.

The most famous example of
Life
’s new role—and almost certainly its most prominent—was its publication of excerpts from the writings of Winston Churchill. This was a large and important innovation for
Life
, which had rarely before published material from books and certainly never so massive a series of texts as Luce wanted from Churchill. The courtship was long and complicated. Churchill’s chief, and perhaps only, interest in the relationship was financial. No longer prime minister, he had to maintain his lavish lifestyle on his own. The combination of his own modest fortune and high British taxes left him feeling insecure and impoverished.
Life
, to Churchill, was a great revenue stream. Luce’s interest, by contrast, was only indirectly financial. His principal motive was his belief that capturing the work of such a great figure would elevate
Life
to an even higher level of eminence in American publishing. Churchill was one of the great figures of his time and, Luce, as always with great figures he admired, wanted to be associated with him.

The relationship between Churchill and Luce began in 1945, when Walter Graebner, the London bureau chief for Time Inc., heard from Randolph Churchill that his father was interested in having some of his paintings reproduced in
Life
. Longwell and Thorndike were not enthusiastic
about the idea, but Luce saw an opportunity to draw Churchill into a deeper association with the magazine. He paid Churchill twenty thousand dollars to reproduce sixteen pictures in the magazine—pictures that were more pleasant curiosities than significant art. A few months later Graebner accepted an invitation to Churchill’s home and was read a series of secret speeches Churchill had made to Parliament during the war. Perhaps, he suggested,
Life
would like to publish several of them—for seventy-five thousand dollars. Luce paid fifty thousand dollars, even though he was bored by the speeches. Churchill accepted the fee. “Let’s hope a wide public feels differently,” he confided to Billings of the speeches. “It can be worth the space plus the money if, in some sense, Churchill becomes ‘our author.’” What Luce really wanted was to publish excerpts from Churchill’s promised but still unwritten memoirs. And he spared no effort or expense to acquire them.
³⁴

Over the next several years
Life
showered favors and money on Churchill. When Churchill complained that he could not afford a vacation because he could not take British currency out of the country,
Life
paid for long visits to Morocco, Florida, and other warm climates where he could paint and, Luce hoped, write. Luce gave lavish and fawning dinners for Churchill when he was in New York, and he traveled to England periodically to flatter and encourage him. It did not take long for Churchill to sign a contract. In the spring of 1947 Luce agreed to allow
Life
and the
New York Times
to share publication of the memoirs for the then-staggering sum of $1.15 million—$750,000 from
Life
and $400,000 from the
Times
. “But,” Billings wondered, “will Churchill really buckle down and write top-notch stuff or will he just string a lot of murky official papers together?”
³⁵

Luce assured his colleagues that he would not interfere with the delicate task of editing Churchill’s work, but he could not help himself. He began bombarding Churchill with suggestions on how to tell the history of the war. In particular he tried to persuade Churchill to share and write about Luce’s own contempt for Roosevelt. “He played a most two-faced and ineffective part in the efforts to prevent the so-unneccesary [
sic
] war,” Luce wrote, and thus betrayed his country and the world. He also prodded Churchill about what he called the failure at Yalta, which he also blamed on Roosevelt. Churchill read Luce’s letters but never replied.
³⁶

Churchill ultimately did write the book, and more quickly than he had once predicted, even if in a way that made Graebner and Luce nervous. “Churchill does most of his work in bed,” Graebner reported. “He
keeps six secretaries busy…. One secretary drives with him to and from the country, as Mr. Churchill uses this time to dictate. ‘I can do about 1,000 words while motoring to Chartwell—never less than 800,’ says Churchill.” Longwell and a young
Life
editor, Jay Gold, were dispatched to help edit the first volume, which dealt with the prewar years. It was voluminous, sprawling, and often turgid. Luce himself jumped into the editing process and wrote Churchill about problems of the “architectural structure” of the book. Churchill insisted that the incoherence of the manuscript reflected the incoherence of the policies pursued by nations in those years. But he was not a stubborn writer, and he gradually allowed the two editors to reshape his material to fit the magazine.

Publication of the excerpts began in the spring of 1948. They were not popular with
Life
’s readers and had what Andrew Heiskell called “a devastating effect on newsstand sales.” Churchill wrote at great length, occasionally brilliantly, often tediously, and sometimes almost incoherently. Even the most rigorous editing could not make the material consistently interesting. He also padded the memoirs with official documents and produced six volumes, not just the five promised in the contract. (He asked for more money, and Luce—after scaling down his extravagant demands—augmented his fee.) But despite the many ways in which the publication of the memoirs proved disappointing, Luce was not deterred. Not only did he continue to publish excerpts from the memoirs into the mid-1950s, but he also bought the serial rights to Churchill’s next major work,
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
. He published as well a multipart memoir by the Duke of Windsor (the former king), which was even less interesting to the editors and to most readers than the Churchill materials. But if
Life
was going to be the serious and influential magazine he wanted it to be, Luce reasoned, how could he fail to publish the work, however dull, of such eminent figures in history?
³⁷

The serialization of Churchill’s work was in many ways the launching point for making magazine journalism a vehicle for book promotion. Not long after
Life
published Churchill’s books, other magazines began working to excerpt books from many other prominent figures from the war years: generals, monarchs, politicians, diplomats. Rarely did any magazine attract large readerships for these pedigreed texts, but the prestige of being able to boast of such distinguished authors soon became as irresistible to other editors as it was to Luce—and an increasingly competitive venture.

•    •     •

Because the rethinking project stopped well short of Luce’s hopes, he began to think of new vehicles to help him tackle the great ideas he yearned to express. Luce had long dreamed of publishing a magazine of opinion. Time Inc.’s decision to end its brief association with the
Saturday Review
in the 1920s had long been a source of regret to him. Almost thirty years later he was still in search of a way to be a more important player in the battle for ideas. The most influential opinion magazines in the 1940s—the
New Republic
, the
Nation
, and others—were mostly liberal periodicals dominated by people committed to the New Deal. Luce never said so, but it was clear that he hoped to create a magazine that would offer a different and more conservative view of the world. The most important force in driving the project, however, was a new figure in Luce’s life—Willi Schlamm, an Austrian émigré and a disillusioned Communist moving rapidly to the Right. (He would eventually end up as a mainstay of
The National Review
.)
³⁸

The relationship between Luce and Schlamm baffled many of their colleagues. For a relatively new and quite junior member of the
Fortune
editorial board, he seemed to have unusual access to Luce and was often the influence behind some of Luce’s raging explosions about questionable taste in the magazines. In the summer of 1947 the two men vacationed together in the White Mountains, behavior so uncharacteristic that it threw Luce’s longtime and deeply loyal secretary into a “tizzy,” worrying aloud that “There’s something terribly wrong with Mr. Luce.” Schlamm began to be invited to dinners and events that others considered inappropriate for a junior editor. Luce’s influential deputy Allen Grover referred to Schlamm’s “evil and disruptive influence over Harry—this little nobody who had inserted himself into the very heart of a domestic crisis in the life of America’s most effective publishing enemy of communism.” Billings referred to “Schlamm’s Svengali influence over Luce.” Early in the planning of the new magazine Luce asked Tom Matthews to lead the development of the project, with Schlamm as his deputy. But within weeks Schlamm had persuaded Luce that he should be co-editor. Matthews disliked Schlamm, was furious to be asked to share authority with him, and ultimately withdrew from the project altogether. But Schlamm continued to promote the project, and Luce continued to support it.