The Publisher (21 page)

The struggle for
Time
was, in fact, crucially connected—in Luce’s mind at least—to his struggle for, and sometimes with, Lila. Harry remained infatuated with her and was constantly fearful that she might give up on him. At the same time he worried that the woman he loved might not be wholly compatible with the life he envisioned for himself. By now he and Lila had known each other for more than three years and had developed a very serious relationship. They had quietly and informally agreed to marry. But the marriage, at least in Harry’s mind, remained far from certain, since Lila’s family—in particular her somewhat imperious stepfather, Frederick Haskell, a prominent Chicago banker—remained skeptical. Haskell questioned the suitability of a young man with little money and an uncertain career: “a person of no importance,” as he put it. His views were no secret to Harry, who wrote Mrs. McCormick that his prospective stepfather-in-law was “apparently convinced that I am thoroughly worthless.”
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The relationship, with the exception of the few months Harry had spent working in Chicago, had been—and remained—mostly epistolary. Harry wrote long impassioned letters to Lila every two or three days, often rushing to Penn Station late at night to get them onto the last train to Chicago. Lila wrote frequently in return, less often than Harry but with equal affection. They had pet names for each other: Lila was “Tod,” and Harry was “Chuck.” More often they used gushing terms of endearment—“Beloved,” “Dearest,” “Carissima,” “Angel,” “Beautifulest,” “Totally adored.” And yet they rarely saw each other. Lila traveled occasionally to New York with Mrs. Haskell, but even then Harry found it hard to see her, both because he was busy at work and because, when he was free, Lila’s vaguely hostile mother had often made plans that excluded him. For a while they took to meeting in Washington, where Lila went occasionally to see friends. But even these infrequent, furtive visits came to a sudden halt in late June when Lila sailed with her mother for a summerlong sojourn in Europe—a trip perhaps designed to encourage her to forget about Harry.
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Despite her constant reassurances Harry could not help but fear that
Lila’s love was incomplete and unreliable, and he rarely hesitated to share his anxiety with her. He believed, or at least claimed, that his love had begun earlier, and was deeper than hers. He insisted, for example, that he had fallen in love with Lila in Rome in 1920 “at first sight,” but that Lila did not then reciprocate. Even three years later he continued to search for reassurance. “I am desperate to find out whether or not you love me,” he wrote her in Europe in July, not long after reading Lila’s own impassioned assurances that she did. He could not help worrying about how Lila’s mother might be turning her daughter against him, and he wrote—perhaps preemptively—of the financial uncertainty about which he felt certain Mrs. Haskell was warning her daughter. He begged her to “reconcile yourself to the fact that for a little while you have got a lover who cannot play that role [the successful provider] as it ought to be played.” When Lila wrote that he should be satisfied with knowing she loved him, Harry continued to fret. “When it’s this job and that job, and get up and rush to the office, and hear this bad news and that bad news, … and get a bad lunch, and find this gone wrong and ‘must do that,’ and catch the subway and be late for dinner, and this
must
be done tonight, and now let’s get to bed, and start all over again tomorrow—Well, Tod, it’s not in me to maintain through all that drab and wretched business the calm and philosophical confidence of the idealist whose feet are planted upon the bases of the universe and whose right hand upholds the footstool of the throne of God.” The grandiose rhetoric could not disguise his terrible mundane anxiety.
¹²

His relationship with Lila was almost certainly the first serious romance of his life, and at times he seemed—at least in writing—utterly besotted, writing page after page of impassioned statements and restatements of his love. But as the level of commitment grew, Harry also began trying, in effect, to “improve” Lila. This was visible at times in small and inconsequential ways: his graceless references to her misspellings (“By the way, you might spell the great man’s name [Sam Insull] correctly!”); his blunt corrections of minor factual mistakes (“Tuchuns [Chinese military governors] have nothing to do with bandits … either etymologically or socially”); and his complaints about the brevity, superficiality, or, as he saw it, condescension of her messages. (“Don’t treat me like a pitiable dachshund with one leg shot off, but like a live animal!”)
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But his criticisms were also visible in larger ways. He chided her for her frivolousness, and for a while lectured her about spending too much time playing bridge. He balked at times at Lila’s aristocratic prejudices,
sometimes by mildly ridiculing her (“We are having turkey hash. It’s very unByronic & besides I know you despise anything so plebeian”), and sometimes by challenging her, as if to test her loyalty. “Some time ago you spoke scornfully of the ‘flats’ your young married friends inhabit,” he wrote almost tauntingly at one point. “Well, you shall see, as soon as we can afford anything even as good as that—pop! We shall be in it.” In fact the relative claims of status and achievement were a frequent source of discussion between them. “Some people,” he wrote pointedly, “do attach great importance to comfort, to eminent respectability, etc…. Other people believe that these things, while
very
desirable, are not to be compared in value to other things. The corollary of the former belief is that there is no immortality and that therefore no one will even know whether it was not just as important to attend the right party and have a ‘good time’ as it was to attend the right church and love ‘justice.’” On another occasion he accused Lila of not valuing his work. “I think you care a great deal more for the kudos (fame etc) or the general results which personally accrue to me out of it than for the actual doing of it, and I care just the other way around.”
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Harry was right about Lila, at least in part. She was a vivacious, even flirtatious young woman who was immersed in the whirl of society and who—as Harry perceptively noted—lived “for the entire crowd.” She was preoccupied with the trappings of the upper class: its social conventions, its material expectations, its style, its values. She loved things—furniture, clothes, houses, jewelry—and continued to do so throughout her very long life. She cared a great deal about appearances and looked to Harry not just to be successful but also to be socially presentable, which at times he still was not. He often dressed badly (“dashed in and bought a suit, all ready made so that it probably fit about as well as a pair of pajamas,” he once wrote her); he had almost no awareness of his physical surroundings (he once described his residence to her as “two beds, four chairs, and a table”); and he was not yet wholly comfortable—and perhaps never fully became so—in Lila’s elite social world because he did not like, and was not good at, small talk and gossip. In some ways it was hard to see how someone as serious and intense as Harry had found himself drawn to Lila—and vice versa.
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And yet a large part of Lila’s appeal to Harry had always been that she provided things he himself did not have. Despite his protestations, he shared her aristocratic aspirations, coveted her social position, and envied her family’s wealth. These were not his only ambitions, of course, but they were far from the least important. His own social life, limited as
it was, was securely rooted in the world of his wealthy friends from Hotchkiss and Yale. He spent weekends in the summer of 1923, a summer in which he never visited his family in their own modest summer quarters, playing tennis and attending dinners at the country homes of people in his “circle.” As much as he tried at times to resist the values and prejudices of the world of the wealthy, he found himself drawn to them—to their assumptions of entitlement, to their camaraderie, to their willingness to express and even defend positions that might shock people outside the circle. For Luce, at least, this was still a predominantly male world; and through his late-night conversations with his upper-class friends, he labored to find a social philosophy of his own—one that seemed to change almost weekly but was always at least to some degree in opposition to his understanding of Lila’s worldview. When she wrote him about the value of the aristocracy, he subtly chided her by hinting that she did not understand what the aristocracy really meant. He parroted for a time the views of his English colleague, Thomas Martyn, citing Martyn’s pompous statement that if the Duchess of Devonshire thought him ill-mannered, “I shouldn’t care twopence.” But if “the man who sells newspapers in front of my club should fail to respond heartily to my ‘Good morning,’ I should be upset for a week.” This was evidence, Harry claimed, of the “undeveloped” American sense of “what it is to be aristocratic.” And yet on another occasion, apparently after an evening of conversation with his Skull and Bones colleagues, he wrote to Lila very differently, but again implicitly chidingly, about her modest charitable work in Chicago: “Don’t kid yourself into believing that you really sympathize or ‘feel for’ the poor people…. I make no pretense about the poor…. My claim to virtue is that at least I don’t pretend to sympathize with them.” And even though he rarely expressed, and often fiercely criticized, racial and religious prejudice, he continued occasionally to fall unthinkingly into the casual bigotry of the upper class of his time, referring, for example, to his physician as “the Jewboy doctor” who lived in a “swank Jew apartment on Riverside.”
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The summer of 1923 was a hard one for Luce, despite the slowly rising fortunes of
Time
. His family had left the city. Lila was in Europe. He was living in a depressing room. And he was beset by bad news. One of his friends from Yale, Harry Davison, had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and had been rushed off to the West, where the dry climate was supposed to help with recovery; Luce was aware that tuberculosis was often fatal and was distraught—in part, no doubt, because Davison was an important
Time
supporter and a member of its board of directors.
(Davison eventually recovered fully.) He learned that one of his Chefoo friends, the Englishman Harold Burt, with whom he had traveled in Europe in 1920, had committed suicide. He reproached himself bitterly for not having contacted him recently: “Suppose he had received a cheerio letter from his nursery companion,” he lamented. But the greatest blow was probably the death of Nettie McCormick, Harry’s unwavering patron and surrogate parent since his childhood. Only days before her death he had written her warmly about his relationship with Lila and his hopes that she would attend the wedding (not mentioning that he was still not entirely confident that it would occur). The letter never reached her and was returned unopened. Days later he was in Chicago serving as a pallbearer at her funeral.
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These worries and losses, combined with his lonely stressful life in New York, made him even more obsessive in the way he thought and wrote about his relationship with Lila. His own anxiety contributed to his complaints about her behavior and values, his efforts to improve her, and to his fears that he would lose her. It also brought to the surface a clearly harbored but seldom expressed darkness in his understanding of his life. In an uncharacteristic letter to Lila in the fall of 1923 he described himself as “sick at heart” and laid out for her an “egoistic parade of my troubles”—a litany of resentment, ambition, envy, and insecurity. He described life in America, from his earliest days at Hotchkiss, as a grim “struggle for existence,” made all the more difficult because of a series of injustices: “the disgrace [a family divorce] which disrupted my mother’s family” and cut him off from his distinguished (distant) cousin Elihu Root; his paternal grandfather’s financial setbacks and failures; his own father’s demeaning existence as a fund-raiser (“begging for money for which he got no credit”); and his realization that the McCormick family—and even his beloved patroness, Nettie McCormick—had, as he put it, “played me for a sucker,” making him think he was in effect a member of their family when he was in fact “the poor well-deserving protégé” who had become not a family member but a family project. (He was not mentioned in Mrs. McCormick’s will. Unsurprisingly, the estate passed on to her own sons.)
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The great, redeeming event in this dark narrative of his life was, as he saw it, his election to Skull and Bones, a “trifle,” he conceded, but an “honor that I probably took in with absurdly ludicrous seriousness,” not because of the friends he made or the connections he acquired, but because of its validation of him as a man of importance. Receiving an honor so coveted by so many others—“nice boys with nice families
… wanting that so badly” and not getting it “for one reason—because
I
got it”—was “as evil and human a delight as probably even Mr. Satan had, but I had it and I couldn’t but have it.” But Skull and Bones was far from enough. Harry needed to achieve it all—the wealth, the fame, the influence that others had been handed by birth but that he would have to acquire by sheer effort. “The main thing is to win and nothing is justified except in that perspective…. I have got to rise to the ordinary level of the ordinary upper-class bourgeois. Then and only then can I begin the great march, the great knight-erranthood, of achieving my knighthood, my rank among the good and faithful.” A few days later he wrote again—perhaps afraid that he had revealed too much—and asked Lila not to take the letter seriously. “Don’t think about it much. I don’t think about it. If I did, I would have been beaten long ago.”
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All of this—the ambition, the resentment, the fear of failure—made his still-uncertain marriage into a kind of lifeline. He loved Lila, to be sure, but he also needed her both as validation of his rise to respectability and as an entrée into the social world he coveted. As her return from Europe approached, his letters became more ardent. “You can think of this pilgrimage to the boat [to mail a letter to Lila] as a pentecostial [
sic
] march to the shrine of you, there to confess—everything!” And to his great delight, Lila too—despite having spent months with her mother away from Harry—became more impassioned as their reunion drew near. “Paris looked so appealing,” she wrote of her last days before returning to America, “and [the city] reproached me sadly for being so anxious and glad to leave her.” Later she wrote emotionally, “I cannot understand why Heaven rewards one of its most impractical miserable sinners with a husband who is among the most capable men of his generation on this continent. May Heaven make up the deficiency on my side and thus reward you.” Lila’s arrival in New York, and her obvious joy at being reunited with Harry, seemed to dispel his remaining doubts. Having kept an almost morbid secrecy about their relationship for over three years, he now began to talk openly about it. Lila, in turn, started spending more time in New York, and more unchaperoned time with Harry. Her family even seemed to warm up to the prospect of their marriage, perhaps in part because of the signs of
Time’s
progress and because Harry began paying himself, at Frederick Haskell’s insistence, more than five thousand dollars a year. Early in the fall they announced their engagement, and for the next several months—until the wedding day, December 22, 1923—they were awash in the details of planning the
event, the honeymoon, and their home together after they were married.
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