The Publisher (26 page)

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The return to New York, for which Hadden had fought so strenuously, did not for long relieve the boredom and restlessness that had plagued him in Cleveland. Friends and colleagues commented frequently on his apparent unhappiness, his almost frantic search for stimulation and excitement, and his erratic and sometimes self-defeating behavior. Shortly after the move, Hadden ceded the editorship of
Time
to Luce. Rotating jobs had been part of their plan from the beginning, but—except for Hadden’s brief absence from editing in 1926, to allow him to spend more time in New York—neither man had really pushed to keep their initial agreement. To Hadden editing
Time
had been a kind of passion, and no other activity related to the magazine had been remotely as satisfying to him. That he agreed to give it up in 1928 was almost certainly a sign of boredom, a search for a new and different challenge. “He wasn’t only losing his interest in
Time
,” Luce claimed years later. “There didn’t seem to be any other interest that was absorbing him.”
⁶¹

Although Hadden was ostensibly taking over the business side of the company, he spent relatively little energy dealing with the routine tasks that Luce had overseen for so long—circulation, advertising, production, staff management. Instead, he often came into the editorial offices late at night and reedited copy that Luce had already approved. He also began searching for other creative projects that might relieve what he quickly came to consider the tedium of his new job. In 1927
Time
had begun producing a small house organ that it somewhat whimsically called
Tide
and that mimicked
Time
’s format and style. It was distributed free to potential advertisers as a kind of promotional brochure. Soon after leaving the
Time
editorship, Hadden decided—despite considerable skepticism from Luce and other colleagues—to transform
Tide
into a real magazine about advertising for paid subscribers. It quickly grew from a small pamphlet into a substantial-looking magazine, with a cover almost identical to
Time
’s (although with a blue, not a red, border) and with “departments” not unlike those in the newsmagazine.
Tide
rarely received letters, so Hadden and his fellow editors wrote them themselves, attributing them to invented people (a practice Hadden had occasionally employed in the early years of
Time
). For a while Hadden devoted himself to
Tide
with something like the same energy and enthusiasm that he had given to the launch of
Time
. But he was not content for long.
Tide
did not flourish in the way Hadden had hoped. In its first two years, its circulation never reached five thousand and it had only fifteen hundred paid subscribers. (The company sold it in 1930, and it became a
modestly successful independent enterprise of the advertising industry that survived until 1959.) In any case a small advertising journal was not enough to satisfy Hadden, and he indicated his frustration by starting to run articles in
Tide
gratuitously attacking the very advertisers—including important
Time
clients—to whom the magazine was appealing. (“When a preacher turns commercial writer and applies the smug platitudes of his old calling to his new job,” he wrote of a prominent automobile-advertising executive, “he should be hailed with raucous laughter.”) In his restlessness Hadden also began thinking of new projects for the company. He devoted a page in his notebook to his ideas for expansion: “bus mag, spt mag, aviation mag, secy mag, letter mag, TIME monthly, women’s mag, daily newspaper,” and many others.
⁶²

In the meantime Luce threw himself into the editing of
Time
. He was a more efficient and organized editor than Hadden. He created a schedule for writers and editors, held regular meetings, had an organized staff critique of each issue every week. (“Don’t hesitate to
flay
a fellow-worker’s work. Occasionally submit an idea,” he wrote.) He was also calmer and less erratic. Despite the intense loyalty Hadden inspired among members of his staff, some editors and writers apparently preferred Luce to his explosive partner; others missed the energy and inspiration that Hadden had brought to the newsroom. In any case the magazine itself—whose staff was so firmly molded by Hadden’s style and tastes—was not noticeably different under Luce’s editorship than it had been under Hadden’s. And just as Hadden, the publisher, moonlighted as an editor, so Luce, now the editor, found himself moonlighting as publisher, both because he was so invested in the business operations of the company that he could not easily give them up, and also because he felt it necessary to compensate for Hadden’s inattention.
⁶³

Outside the office the hard, wild life that Hadden had been leading for years grew harder and wilder. Friends began to note a change in him—he was, one friend later recalled, “increasingly nervous and irritable and hard to get along with. He wanted desperately to have a good time, and yet nothing seemed to give him pleasure.” He complained frequently of boredom and drove those around him to join his frantic search for diversions. Always a heavy drinker, he gradually became a self-destructive alcoholic. He stayed up late, gave or searched for parties almost every night. He began to participate in, or provoke, brawls for which he was periodically arrested and spent nights in jail. He seemed to dread returning to his apartment to sleep alone, which suggested that his boredom and wildness was in part a result of loneliness. He would arrive
at work many mornings bleary-eyed, having gotten only a few hours of sleep—and sometimes none. Hadden had many friends but few intimates. His “ferocious” temperament, one of his longtime colleagues later wrote, hid an uneasiness with normal personal relations, a profound shyness. He had few serious relationships with women and sometimes appeared to be a misogynist. (In 1926, when a member of
Time’s
board proposed appointing a woman director, Hadden replied dismissively that “women are notorious for their inability to see things in perspective, their tendency to exaggerate, their desire to live in a fool’s paradise…. They are conspicuously deficient in such fundamentals as sense of humor, fairmindedness, good sportsmanship and sense of responsibility.”) He seemed to many people to be having trouble in general adjusting to adulthood. (A lifelong passionate baseball fan, he began participating in a youth baseball league in Central Park, even though it was restricted to players under eighteen. He tried to hide his mustache whenever park officials walked by.) According to a later (and unverifiable) account by one of his friends, Hadden began to disappear periodically for days and even weeks, once traveling to a farm in Indiana, on another occasion working on a tugboat, prompting Luce to send staff members out to find him and bring him home.
⁶⁴

Luce had little contact with Hadden any longer outside the office. He spent evenings with his family (his second son, Peter, was born in 1928) or at the kind of establishment social functions that Hadden scorned. At work the relationship between the two partners was rapidly deteriorating. Their friendship had always been a complicated and competitive one, and there had been many periods of tension between them over the years, but the problems had rarely lasted very long. By the late 1920s, however, their ability to recover from disagreements appeared to be eroding. Hadden seemed both contemptuous and envious of Luce—scornful of his bourgeois lifestyle at the same time that he yearned for some kind of stability of his own. In 1926 Yale awarded Luce an honorary M.A. degree—a significant honor for so young a man—for “distinguished accomplishments in a novel and worthy field of journalism.” Luce, of course, was thrilled, although he recognized the effect this would have on Hadden, who might rightly have considered himself an equally plausible candidate. Harry happily attended the Yale commencement with members of his family, in-laws, and friends. But he did not invite Hadden and did not even tell him that he was receiving the degree. Hadden learned of it through reports from others and deeply resented the fact of the award and Luce’s failure to inform him of it.
⁶⁵

Henry Winters Luce, an aspiring missionary, and Elisabeth Root, a YMCA worker, marry in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1897. Less than a year later, they were en route to China.

The Luces occupied this home in Tengchow through the first years of Harry’s life. Elisabeth Luce sits on the porch with Harry, Emmavail, and a Chinese nurse. They shared the house with another missionary family.

Henry W. Luce and his four children posed for this portrait in the family’s second home in Wei Hsien, approximately 1912.
From left to right:
Rev. Luce, Harry, Sheldon, Elisabeth, and Emmavail.

Henry R. Luce in China at three or four, posing imperiously in a chair that his father had used as a child.

Young Harry in 1914, on a farm in Colebrook, New Hampshire, during a summer vacation from Hotchkiss.