The Publisher (27 page)

Luce (
left
) and Brit Hadden (
right
) at Hotchkiss in 1916, inseparable friends and rivals.

Luce in uniform in 1917, a cadet at Yale. A few months later, he and Hadden were transferred to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where they spent the rest of the war training infantry.

Lila Hotz, the alluring Chicago socialite whom Luce met in Rome on New Year’s Eve 1920 and who became Luce’s first love and first wife. Luce was attracted to her both because of her warmth and energetic charm and because of her social distinction and family wealth. She is pictured with the couple’s boys Hank (
right
) and Peter Paul.

The first offices of Time Inc. were above a retail store in a building on East Seventeeth Street in New York City. It was the first in a series of constantly moving and expanding headquarters for the magazine. This picture was taken some years later by Margaret Bourke-White, the first staff photographer for the company.

Brit Hadden was only twenty-five when this photograph of him was taken shortly after the publication of the first issue of
Time
magazine. Despite his sober pose, he was a lively, engaging, volatile young man of great brilliance, whose relationship with Luce was both extremely close and extremely competitive.

The first issue of
Time
magazine, in March 1923. The line drawing of the powerful Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Joseph Cannon was the first in a long tradition of portraying people on the cover. Soon after the magazine’s debut, it acquired its trademark red border, and a few years later it began using color portraits created by a group of artists commissioned by the magazine.

Luce promised that
Fortune
would be the most beautiful magazine ever published. Whether or not it achieved that goal, its design was undeniably impressive—and expensive—as was the magazine itself. The first cover, in February 1930, designed by Thomas Cleland—who had also chosen the typefaces and other design elements—showed a “wheel of fortune,” a symbol of the magazine itself and of the precariousness of fortune in the first year of the Great Depression.

Some of the successful early editors and writers of
Fortune
in the 1930s:
Clockwise from top left:
Ralph Ingersoll, managing editor; Archibald MacLeish, Luce’s most admired writer; Dwight Macdonald, a talented young reporter who claimed to loathe his job; and James Agee, also unhappy at
Fortune
but reluctant to give up the salary. By the end of the 1930s, all of them had left. None of them had any previous experience in business writing, but Luce considered that an advantage—as in many ways it was until the group began to disband.

Margaret Bourke-White was the first woman to be hired full-time at Time Inc. as a photographer—and for that matter, the first woman to serve outside the clerical and research staffs at the company. She was intrepid, and eager for the world to know it—as this dramatic photograph of her perched with camera on a parapet of the Chrysler Building far above Manhattan illustrates.

Laird Goldsborough was Foreign News editor of
Time
from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. He was a brilliant and efficient writer with a big personality, and he towered over his colleagues even while writing often and favorably of Mussolini and bitterly criticizing the antifascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Luce began easing him out shortly before the beginning of the war.

The first cover of
Life
magazine, 1936, featuring a dramatic Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. The picture’s monumentality drew immediate attention to the new magazine and helped make it an immediate, sensational success. Bourke-White was the first great celebrity among
Life
photographers, but she was soon accompanied by a large retinue of equally talented (and in some cases equally famous) colleagues.