The Publisher (46 page)

Life
’s portrayal of women, and the uncertain appeal of
Life
to women, was of some concern to the editors themselves, who diligently gathered data on their audience that showed that more men than women read
Life
. “I do not feel that women and womanhood are well represented in
Life,”
Luce complained in 1944. He later delegated the most senior woman on the research staff, Mary Fraser, to answer the question “Why are women losing interest in
Life?”
Perhaps, she concluded, it was “all those girls on the cover—women readers resent the constant parade of debutantes and publicity seeking starlets.” Her solution to the problem was to move away from sex and toward domesticity. “What about a piece on Diet?” she proposed. “I’d like to see a story on Kitchens, with floor plans…. The kitchen is first in importance to women.”
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This prescription for attracting women was entirely consistent with what
Life
was already doing. The occasional prurient images of women in
Life
were always far outweighed by efforts to celebrate their distinctive contributions to family and community (and only rarely to such male domains as work or government). When women in
Life
were not fashion models or actresses, they were most often wives, mothers, daughters, girlfriends, socialites, college girls, and consumers. Stories about prominent men almost always contained photographs and descriptions of the loyal women who supported them—Albert Einstein’s stepdaughter cuddling a kitten; the composer Jean Sibelius’s wife entertaining visiting singers from Yale; U.S. senator Arthur Vandenberg’s wife pasting newspaper clippings into a scrapbook for her husband; Henry Ford’s matronly wife (who “shares her husband’s interests in antiques”) accompanying him to a social event. In one Picture of the Week, Eleanor Roosevelt sits in a movie theater talking earnestly with the producer Samuel Goldwyn about how pleased she was that her son Jimmy “is getting along so nicely in Hollywood.” College women were usually portrayed not as students but as fresh-faced sorority girls who (as
in a feature on Kansas University) “cook and clean to save expenses,” attend classes that teach them how to dress a baby, and “hope to find a husband on ‘the Hill,’” as the main campus was known.
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Little changed in the magazine’s first decade. “I’d like to see a round-up on the subject of GIRLS,” Luce proposed in the last months of World War II, “the girls who are the sisters, wives, sweethearts and potential sweethearts of our soldiers and sailors.” Perhaps the most famous picture in the history of
Life
—and one consistent with
Life’s
prevailing attitudes toward women—was the Eisentaedt photograph of VJ Day in Times Square showing a uniformed sailor embracing a passing young woman whom he did not know and passionately kissing her—as if to symbolize how returning men were preparing to seize back the women they loved, or at least wanted.
⁵⁶

In
Life
, the Depression was only occasionally visible—and usually through affirmative stories about the New Deal’s or the private sector’s ameliorative projects. Instead the magazine fixed its eyes squarely on the future. Like
Fortune
, it was in love with modernity, and with the idea of progress that modernity represented. Rockefeller Center—the dramatic complex of bold modern structures that arose in midtown Manhattan during, and despite, the Great Depression—was a favorite of the magazine, as reflected in Luce’s decision to move his company into one of its buildings shortly after they were completed. Like
Fortune, Life
also celebrated technological progress: steam turbines that delivered power more efficiently; dams and hydroelectric plants that transformed landscapes and economies; technological innovations such as Polaroid (“the new wonder”), consumer innovations that improved, or at least changed, the lives of individuals. And
Life
conducted as well a long love affair with the way in which middle-class American families lived and the homes they inhabited—always emphasizing progress and improvement. In 1937
Life
celebrated the “$5,000 Dream House” that the New Deal was helping middle-class families to buy through favorable lending policies. “Four out of five middle-class Americans would like to have homes of their own,”
Life
noted, and then illustrated a range of suburban houses of various, but familiarly suburban, designs that were now within reach of many American families. The magazine itself in fact became a participant in the wheels of domestic progress a year later when
Life
commissioned “famous American architects” to design eight new homes for families earning two thousand to ten thousand dollars a year—incomes that encompassed a large part of the middle class. (The company
also hired a Swedish designer to create simple, attractive furniture to complete
Life
’s vision of middle-class comfort.)
Life
helped facilitate the construction of examples of each of the home designs—one a starkly modern structure by Edward Durell Stone but most of them traditional colonials and capes. The plans and models for the
“Life
Houses” were distributed at modest cost to thousands of families, and within months nineteen houses based on them were under construction. “In homes throughout the U.S.,”
Life
reported, “youngsters and oldsters are using the models to help them project their dream house.”
⁵⁷

Despite the claims of Luce and his colleagues that
Life
was of almost universal appeal—that people from all classes, regions, religions, races, and backgrounds were drawn to the magazine—they always understood that their readership was largely middle class. If they had any doubts, their own research confirmed it. In fact, the larger the circulation became, the more dominant the middle class was within it. A survey in 1950 (one of the first serious and reliable analyses of the readership conducted by Alfred Politz Research) revealed that more than a third of
Life’s
readers were in the wealthiest 20 percent of the population, and that well under 10 percent were in the lowest. Readership declined on each step down the economic ladder. There was a similar correlation between education and interest in
Life
. Nearly 40 percent of
Life
’s readers had at least some college education (at a time when few Americans had ever attended college), while only 7 percent of readers came from the large population cohort that had no more than a fourth-grade education.
Life
’s readers were far more urban than rural, far more Northern than Southern, and considerably more young than old. (The second largest age group of
Life
readers consisted of ten- to nineteen-year-olds.) Politz was an independent survey researcher who conducted his “Audience” studies on commission from Time Inc., which published them internally. Further such studies later in the decade showed no significant change in the profile of the readership.
⁵⁸

“Life
for me was like the American flag,” the photographer John Loengard wrote after many years of work on the magazine. It was, the novelist William Brinkley wrote in 1961, “one of the most important elements in The American Civilization.” Carl Mydans, in his memoir of his own career taking photographs for
Life
, recalled: “We had an insatiable desire to search out every facet of American life, photograph it and hold it up proudly, to a pleased and astonished readership…. America had an impact on us each week we made an impact on America.” But not everyone, not even everyone who worked on the magazine, believed that
Life
was in fact presenting a true picture of the world it portrayed. There was a slow but steady exodus of photographers and writers who felt stifled by
Life’s
amiable positiveness. (Among the founders of the important photography agency, Magnum, created in 1947, were many disillusioned refugees from
Life
.) “I didn’t have to spend long at
Life
to face the facts,” the photographer John Morris recalled of his early, alienating days at the magazine. “We were entertainers as much as journalists. Photographers worked from ‘scripts,’ and stories were ‘acts.’” Whether they liked it or not, however, few doubted that
Life
exercised considerable cultural authority. It aspired to create a persuasive portrait of the nation’s life as the American people experienced it; it succeeded in producing a powerful image of the middle class, an image that fit the assumptions of the magazine’s creators and that affirmed and enriched the way in which most of its readership already understood their world. Large elements of society were either missing from the pages of
Life
or were portrayed in ways that made them compatible with the magazine’s (and most of the readership’s) outlook. In an era blighted by Depression, prejudice, social turmoil, and the shadow of war,
Life
offered the comforting image of a nation united behind a shared, if contrived, vision of the “American dream.”
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B
y the time of Luce’s fortieth birthday in April 1938, he had been a wealthy and powerful man for nearly a decade. He was no longer the anxious striver, the brash young man who, against all odds, had—with Brit Hadden—created the brilliant and precocious success of
Time
. He now more often appeared to be a reserved, aloof figure, fully aware of his importance and unafraid to assert it. His relationships within his company were becoming increasingly distant. His colleagues noted that he socialized with them far less than he once had; that he even began to ride up to his office in an otherwise empty elevator—not something he ever ordered or acknowledged but a kind of isolation that everyone in the company understood and observed. His contact with his staff consisted largely of sudden and often unwelcome interventions in their work and long, abstract memos about the purpose of his magazines. “He is no longer the shy simple fellow I first knew,” Billings observed. He had become “the great philosopher…. My complaint is that Luce is so busy being a Great Personage that he has forgotten the source of his greatness—the magazines we put out for him.” Luce had not forgotten about his magazines, as Billings soon learned. But they were no longer the only, and sometimes not even the principal, focus of his attention.
¹

The change in Luce—his gradual transformation from hardworking editor to self-conscious “great man”—was the subject of much speculation among his colleagues and friends. Some argued that it was a result of the enormous success of
Life
magazine, which had pushed him clearly into the forefront of the publishing world. Others were certain that it
was his marriage to Clare, whose thirst for fame and glamour (not to mention her competitive relationship with her husband) drove Harry to adopt a new persona compatible with her sense of entitlement and power. But by far the biggest influence on Luce in the late 1930s and 1940s was the advent of World War II, which drew him into the world of politics and statesmanship and significantly transformed his sense of his own importance. He was no longer just a successful editor and publisher. He was a man of the world, a person of influence and, perhaps most of all, a person of ideas—ideas that he believed were important to the future.

Prior to 1939 Luce’s interest in politics and world affairs had been generally fleeting. He seldom made overt political statements in public, and he was reticent about expressing his own views openly in his magazines. In fact he tolerated, at times almost encouraged, views that he himself did not share. For years he permitted
Time’s
foreign editor, Laird Goldsborough, to cover the European crises of the 1930s by lionizing Mussolini and shrugging off the threat of Hitler. Goldsborough was a good writer and an efficient editor, and that was enough for Luce. Similarly, for several years, he had not much interfered with the Popular Front sensibilities that Ralph Ingersoll and others helped bring to
Fortune
. The approach of war, however, strengthened and redirected the powerful sense of mission that had defined his life since childhood. Never fully content with personal and professional success alone, he saw in the great world conflict a defining moment in history—and also in his own life.
²

Luce was not immediately committed to American participation in the war in Europe when it began in September 1939, but he was wholly committed to the destruction of the Axis and to an important American role in achieving that goal. “The American refusal to be ‘drawn in,’” he wrote to a friend in Paris, “is a kind of failure to realize how deeply we are in, whatever we say or do.” The Sino-Japanese War, the threat to France and Britain, the looming enigma of the Soviet Union—all pushed him for the first time into an active role in trying to shape American foreign policy. Gone was his laissez-faire attitude toward the contents of his magazines. They, like him, were now soldiers in a cause, and Luce set out to train them in the proper presentation of the crisis. That required regaining control of his magazines.
³

The departure of Ralph Ingersoll in 1939 was one step in that effort. Ingersoll, who had acquired considerable authority over the editorial policies of the company, left of his own accord to start the newspaper
P.M.
, but he must have been aware of his deteriorating position within Time Inc., a position confirmed by the relief with which Luce, and many of his colleagues, greeted his decision to leave. The disillusionment with Ingersoll was partly because his arrogance and abrasiveness had made him unpopular with virtually all his colleagues. (“What a conceited egoist!” Billings noted after a farewell conversation with Ingersoll. “He’s been a snake-in-the-grass in the organization for years.”) But to Luce and Billings both, the main problem was that Ingersoll’s politics were too often at odds with their own. “The old
Time
is now gone forever,” Billings had lamented shortly before the shake-up. “Ingersoll has revolutionized and sovietized things.”
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