The Publisher (23 page)

Returning to New York far more prosperous than they had been when they left, both Hadden and Luce traded up. Brit, who had lived in Brooklyn Heights with his parents before moving to Cleveland, now moved into a large apartment on East Tenth Street, which he shared with two friends. Harry and Lila leased a spacious town house on East Forty-ninth Street in Turtle Bay.

By the end of 1927
Time
had finally become what Hadden had somewhat presumptuously called it at the end of 1923: “an established institution.” The magazine was not yet the great national, and even international, phenomenon it would eventually become, but it was stable, profitable, and increasingly popular. The company started the year with more than $154,000 in cash, twice the amount of a year before. Advertising revenue, which had been almost negligible in the first year or so, now exceeded subscription revenue, which itself had increased dramatically as circulation rose above 170,000.
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The magazine itself had changed less profoundly than had its finances, but it too had evolved in a number of ways. The look of the magazine was only slightly different from what it had been in 1923. Photographs, rare in the first few issues, became common by 1924, although their tiny size tended to limit them to portraits. In 1926, after the move to Cleveland, the familiar red border appeared on the cover—made possible by the use of coated stock, which also permitted the printing of color advertisements on the inside and back covers. Issues became fatter,
less because of an increase in editorial content, which the editors determinedly kept more or less steady, than because of the growth in advertising.
Time
was a reasonably attractive magazine by the standards of its era, but somewhat staid. Its three narrow columns and its unvarying typeface—a layout that changed relatively little for more than forty years—made it look more like the serious newspapers that Luce and Hadden sometimes scorned than like the youthful, somewhat sassy magazine it aspired to be.
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The basic structure of
Time
remained largely unchanged as well. The relentless “departmental” organization, the disciplined brevity, the reliance on borrowed sources, and the commitment to giving readers a comprehensive view of the week’s news that could be read in less than an hour all survived the transition from precariousness to success. Not everything stayed the same, of course. Some of the sillier features of the first years gradually fell away: the “imaginary interviews” with historical figures, the “Comings and Goings” of celebrities, the pompously opinionated “Point with Pride” and “View with Alarm” columns, the news “quizzes” that had begun in Cleveland. So did some of the rote reporting dictated by the magazine’s format. News of state governments and foreign nations, for example, became more selective and more reflective of the importance of events and less dutifully in response to the need to fill up all of the magazine’s “departments.”

The more significant changes were a result less of shifts in philosophy than in the character of the editorial process. From a magazine written by a small group of young, like-minded, Ivy League men working inhumanly long hours under tremendous pressure,
Time
slowly became a publication produced by a large staff of professional writers, few of them any longer friends and classmates of Hadden and Luce, trained in what were becoming the settled conventions of the magazine.
Time
was not yet dispatching reporters out into the world to gather news and did not begin to do so until the 1930s. It did have a research department, which had begun with the hiring of Nancy Ford in the first months of the magazine and grew to become a large and very active part of the editorial process. (It was the only nonclerical area of the magazine to hire women, whom Hadden called “young lady assistants,” and for many years it hired only women.) On the whole, however,
Time
continued to rely on newspapers (above all the
New York Times
) and other magazines as the source of its stories—to the increasing dismay of the journalistic community, which had ignored the borrowing when
Time
was obscure and unknown but which sometimes complained loudly once the magazine
was a success. Writing, not reporting, was the most highly valued aspect of
Time’s
internal culture. Partly because the stories were distillations rather than reportage, no story carried a byline, and only the most knowledgeable or observant reader could distinguish clearly among the styles of different writers.
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The emerging organizational culture actually cemented and standardized the style and tone that Hadden, in particular, had imposed upon the magazine through sheer force of will in the magazine’s early days. Most of the writers emulated his tastes—both because they feared his wrath and because they admired his brilliance and wished to absorb it. Indeed, by institutionalizing the style and tone of the early
Time
, the staff was also in some ways expanding and exaggerating the magazine’s peculiarities.
³⁶

The most visible and famous idiosyncrasy of
Time
was its language—sometimes admired, often ridiculed, never as pervasively distinctive as its critics claimed, but a defining element of the magazine nevertheless. In setting out to challenge the norms of journalism, Hadden and Luce wanted, among other things, to confront the sober and, in their view, drab language that was the lingua franca of the newspapers of their time.
Time
, they believed, should be not only concise but also lively, irreverent, and entertaining. Developing a distinctive literary style for the magazine was the first important step toward that goal—and a feature promoted heavily from the start in the company’s own promotional literature. “TIME has given such attention to the development of the best narrative English,” Larsen wrote grandiosely in a letter to potential subscribers, “that hundreds of editors and journalists have declared it to be the greatest creative force in modern journalism.”
³⁷

As with most other editorial innovations in the early years, Hadden took the lead—although Luce was an active partner in the effort. Both had studied Greek at Hotchkiss and at Yale; but while Luce was by far the more serious Greek scholar, it was Hadden who proposed the
Iliad
as a model for the language the magazine should use. He carried a tattered, heavily annotated translation with him to the office and kept a notebook filled with lists of words and phrases that would, he believed, replicate the energy and poetry of Homer. The
Iliad
*
used such phrases as “much-enduring Odysseus,” “wine-dark sea,” “fleet-footed Achilles,” “far-darting
Apollo.”
Time
created its own compound adjectives to describe people in the news: “flabby-chinned,” “snaggle-toothed,” “coffee-colored,” “bandy-legged,” and “trim-figured.” While the
Iliad
referred to “many-fountained Ida,”
Time
wrote of “many-towered Danzig.” In the
Iliad
were inverted sentences such as, “Up to his side he dashed and flanked Great Ajax tight.”
Time
countered with: “Up to the White House portico rolled a borrowed automobile,” or the especially clumsy: “As impossible of fair historical evaluation is [Hoover’s] two-year record as was the battle of Gettysburg at noon of the second day.” And at times the magazine provided long, irrelevant passages that directly (and inelegantly) mimicked the
Iliad
’s lofty language: “The pens and tongues of contumely were arrested. Mocking mouths were shut. Even righteous protestation hushed its clamor, as when, having striven manfully in single combat, a high-helmed champion is stricken by Jove’s bolt and the two snarling armies stand at sudden gaze, astonished and bereft a moment of their rancor” (an introduction to a story on the 1925 Scopes trial).
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But Hadden did not stop with the
Iliad
. He made exhaustive lists of other techniques that he proposed for the magazine. Occupations, origins, and personality types became titles: “Teacher Scopes,” “Governess Ross,” “Editor Mencken,” “England’s Baldwin,” “Demagog Hitler.” Middle names sprouted everywhere, whether or not the subjects in question (or anyone else) ever used them: “Herbert Clark Hoover,” “Samuel Morgan Shortridge,” “Alfred Emanuel Smith.” In 1930 a Smith College professor wrote an article in
Philological Quarterly
about what Lewis Carroll had once called “portmanteau words,” combinations of two distinct terms. Among his most prominent examples were words from
Time:
“cinemactor” and “cinemactress,” “primogenial” (to describe a pleasant young man who had inherited his father’s congressional seat). Hadden’s crudely handwritten style sheet for
Time
writers used other examples of this kind of vivid wordsmithing: “Broadway-farer,” “eccentrician.” In writing about Alabama senator Tom Heflin, Hadden created a verb, “to heffle,” which he defined as “to talk loud and long without saying much.” He also liked heavy-handed metaphors: “eyes big as baseballs,” “ruddy as a round full moon.” Hadden encouraged
Time
writers to use vivid words, whether newly invented or not. People in
Time
were “famed,” not “famous;” “potent,” not “powerful;” “blatant,” not “obvious.” They “whacked” rather than “struck,” “ogled” rather than “looked,” “strode” rather than “walked,” and “smirked” rather than “smiled.” They “irked,” “bumbled,” “vexed,” and “ousted.”
Rhyming and alliteration were popular devices, too, as in the frequent use of “late, great” to describe recently deceased people, or the euphemism “great and good friend” to describe someone’s unmarried lover. Obituaries did not simply report but banally philosophized, with the frequent introduction: “Death, as it must to all men, came last week” to the subject of the notice.
³⁹

At times, particularly in its first years, the magazine’s language was often flip and even sophomoric.
Time
often began a story with an irrelevant cliché or a banal truism. In writing about the divided views of Alaskans,
Time
began: “Some like it hot, some like cold, and some like it in the pot nine days old.” Or, in describing a meeting between the president and a senator, “When a sharp tongue takes to soft words, good nature prospers.” On other occasions stories were introduced with what can only be called pedantry: “There is no more tragic phenomenon in this vale of tears than the deliberate perversion of an idea or philosophy out of its original meaning in order to serve the base purpose of its enemies.” But even as the magazine matured and shed some of its more egregious excesses, writers—in their effort to avoid conventionally informative leads—forced readers to wade through considerable imagery before encountering any real information. “Winter tramped prematurely out of the Northwest last week,” a 1927 story on a Labor Department unemployment report began. “A Montana stockman died in a blizzard. Minnesota lakes were skimmed with ice. Michigan had icicles…. Car radiators froze in Illinois.”

And yet
Time
frequently used these same techniques to real effect, successfully drawing readers into subjects they might otherwise have overlooked, and making people and events more vivid than a more conventional story could have done. A story on the Treasury Department’s woes in 1931, for example, began: “For ten years, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew William Mellon has had fair fiscal weather. Ample taxes from a busy, thriving nation piled up whacking surpluses for him to administer. Under the sun of Prosperity, the public debt melted like a snowman in May. A happy man devoted to his job, Secretary Mellon was kept awake at night by no great problems of government finance.”
Time
could be pompous, irritating, pedantic, even ridiculous. But if that was all it was, it would never have succeeded. To most of
Time
’s large and rapidly expanding readership, even many who were annoyed occasionally by its idiosyncrasies, the magazine was also lively, witty, entertaining, and informative. Perhaps most important,
Time
’s language, however idiosyncratic, was consistent and homogeneous. It presented readers
with a familiar and predictable experience.
Time
boasted often of its “cover-to-cover readers,” of whom there were many, and the magazine’s language was almost certainly an important part of the reason.
⁴⁰

Throughout the 1920s Hadden drilled his writers in the literary formulas he had created for
Time
, using his oversize pencils and his gruff, booming voice to browbeat the staff into meeting his demands. T. S. Matthews, a
Time
writer and editor for many years, described his own early days at the magazine as a period when “all ‘neophytes’ [Time’s word for cub writers] were expected to memorize Hadden’s invented words and phrases and to use them at every opportunity.” But many writers later recalled adopting the style less because of pressure from above than because it was so much a part of the culture of the magazine that it was almost impossible to resist. Even decades later, after years of efforts to wean reporters from some of the excesses of the original Hadden style, Matthews recalled that “the iron had so far entered our souls that the attempt at reform was never successful.” The standardization of style was sometimes stifling to serious writers. John O’Hara, the soon-to-be-famous novelist, spent a few months writing about sports for
Time
in the early 1920s and then fled to
The New Yorker
. Such defections, although usually after longer periods of service than O’Hara’s, were common for many decades. But other writers settled comfortably into the
Time
system, came to value its distinctive kind of writing, and remained for many years.
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“Timese” or “Timestyle”—as the magazine’s writing was often called, sometimes mockingly, sometimes affectionately—was, if nothing else, contagious, and not just within the magazine itself. Words that
Time
invented, retrieved from obscurity, or borrowed from foreign languages became enduring parts of modern English: “tycoon,” “pundit,” “socialite,” “kudos.” For years schools and universities reveled in producing parody issues of
Time
and took special delight in their mastery of Timese. “White-sweatered, good-looking friend of beauty-queen Virginia Clark, James Graham (‘Cheerleader’) Woodford strode into a … meeting breathing fire,” a University of Washington lampoon wrote in 1931. “To the stacccato blast of forty machine guns Hizzoner Pedro de Miguel took office,” a Foreign News story announced in a Naval Academy satirization of
Time
. Hotchkiss, Luce and Hadden’s alma mater, produced an issue of the student magazine, the
Index
, in Timese.
Time
itself encouraged some such parodies. In 1934 the White Company, a manufacturer of trucks and buses, enlisted some of the editors to help them produce a mock issue promoting the company, with a
cover story on “Truck of the Year.” Even mainstream newspapers and magazines reporting on the progress of
Time
or on the activities of Luce and Hadden could not resist mimicking aspects of Timese in their own stories. “Birth of a new species of man of power, the tycoon, was predicted this noon by quick-speaking successful young Henry R. Luce,” a Rochester reporter noted in 1929. An Edmonton, Alberta, newspaper wrote of a Luce appearance in Banff, “No speaker for publication is pleasant, personable, energetic, ex-cub Henry Luce.” Even Harry’s own mother could not resist a gentle poke at Timese in September 1926 when she wrote him about her imminent departure from China: “As
Time
would say, America looms.”
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