The Publisher (29 page)

Luce’s warm relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of the most rewarding of his life, and the only time he had an intimate friendship with a sitting president.
Time
was so sympathetic to Eisenhower that both the magazine’s editors and many of its readers sharply criticized the coverage, to no avail.

Luce was an ardent supporter of the Vietnam War, and in the 1950s a great admirer of Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam. The American Friends of Vietnam, modeled in some ways on earlier organizations supporting Nationalist China, attracted the support of many prominent figures. Luce presides here in 1959 over a meeting of the organization, with Diem seated next to him, waiting to speak.

In the late 1950s, Luce began a passionate affair with Lord Beaverbrook’s young granddaughter, Lady Jeanne Campbell, which drew him into another painful battle with Clare. Eventually, the affair—which Luce at one time had hoped would lead to marriage—ended.

Luce’s warm relationship with Eisenhower left him with an intensified interest in other important politicians. He was particularly drawn to John Kennedy, whom he had known through John’s father for years. Kennedy is seen here walking through the Time-Life building in 1960, during his presidential campaign, after an interview with the Time Inc. editors.

Forty-one years after Luce cofounded Time Inc., he finally handed control of the company over to Hedley Donovan, a former
Fortune
editor whom Luce himself chose to succeed him. They are shown here during a lavish celebration of the transition in 1964.

But the unhappiness was not all on one side. Harry, too, was growing resentful of Brit—of his erratic behavior, of his impatience with organization and detail, and of what Luce sensed was his greater charisma and influence within the organization. “This Hadden-Luce yoke is certainly galling,” he wrote Lila late in 1927. “The differences between us are so great—However I don’t see any way out which seem better than struggling through with it…. This letter should be torn up pronto.” Most of all, he resented Hadden’s contemptuous dismissal of Luce’s ideas. Harry disliked
Tide
, thought it a serious mistake, but did not try to obstruct it. Beginning in mid-1928, however, Luce began developing a plan of his own for a business magazine. He encountered firm opposition from Hadden (even though “bus mag” was the first item on Brit’s own expansion list).
Time
was still too fragile, Hadden argued, to launch another magazine—a concern that apparently had not occurred to him when he himself launched
Tide
. Luce might well have concluded that Hadden was balking because he wanted to block Harry from developing a magazine that Brit had not initiated.
⁶⁶

Before the move to Cleveland, when Hadden had been living at home with his parents, there had been at least some structure to his life. On his own, first in Cleveland and now back in New York, his behavior began to spin out of control. Given his boredom, his restlessness, his apparent depression, and his deep exhaustion, it was not a great surprise to anyone that by late 1928 he was beginning to flag. In December he complained to a friend who had come by to visit, “I’m not well. I don’t know what’s the matter…. I just don’t seem to have any ambition and I feel weak.” He was, one of his colleagues recalled, “just dragging himself to the office. He would come in for most of the week, then phone and say he wasn’t well.” An office assistant warned Luce, “You’d better look after Hadden, or he’ll be dead. He must be really sick.” One day he left the office early claiming he needed rest. He never returned.
⁶⁷

Unable to recover from a flu, very likely because of his exhaustion, he also developed a strep infection and was hospitalized in Brooklyn. A few years later he could easily have been cured. But in the absence of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, doctors had a limited range of treatment—which mostly consisted of blood transfusions. Luce and others on the
Time
staff donated blood several times, and Harry visited Brit as often as he could, although doctors, worried about Hadden’s “nervous condition,” barred visitors for many days at a time. Luce sent regular bulletins to the
Time
staff with reports from the doctors, none of them encouraging. By mid-January, Hadden had grown so weak that he could no
longer even write (and had to dictate a will, which he then signed feebly with an
X
). When Harry talked with him about what was happening at
Time
, Brit became confused, unable to recall anything about the magazine’s recent successes, and was surprised to learn that Herbert Hoover was now president. He was beginning to tell visitors, Luce among them, that “I won’t get well.” Harry had come to fear that too, and in late January, he wrote Manfred Gottfried and implored him to return to the magazine and take over as editor, explaining, as Gottfried wrote in his diary, that “Brit is ill unto death with streptococcus.” On February 27, 1929, in the middle of the night, six years to the day from the publication of the first issue of
Time
, Hadden died.
⁶⁸

Despite the rift that had developed between them, Luce was stunned and distraught. “I don’t know how I’ll get along without him,” he said to colleagues. And how could he have felt otherwise? He and Brit had been friends, rivals, allies, antagonists—but whatever else they were, they had been inseparable and essential partners since they had met at Hotchkiss in 1913. Luce certainly realized that his life would never be the same again.
⁶⁹

Time
marked Hadden’s death with a black-bordered notice in the magazine’s Milestones department—after abandoning an overwrought effort by Hadden’s cousin and
Time
editor, John S. Martin, to write a major obituary. “Death came last week to Briton Hadden,” the notice began, in classic Hadden style. “Creation of his genius and heir to his qualities,
Time
attempts neither biography nor eulogy…. To Briton Hadden, success came steadily, satisfaction never.” A week later the magazine departed from its usual format and ran a full page of letters on the back page containing tributes to Hadden. There was another change in format as well. At the top of the
Time
masthead, there was now only one name: Henry R. Luce.
⁷⁰

W
hat Luce called the “harrowing tragedy” of Brit Hadden’s death may have been the most important event in Harry’s life. It robbed him of a partner and friend with whom he had been inextricably entwined for more than fifteen years, and without whom he would almost certainly not have found himself at the head of a thriving company. It also left him in virtually sole control of Time Inc. Luce had at times yearned for such independence during the last, difficult years of his relationship with Hadden. But now he was frightened that he might not be able to hold the company together. His first concern, therefore, was to keep things as they were—to preserve the system and the editorial product that Hadden had mainly created. He asked John S. Martin, Hadden’s cousin, to take over as managing editor of
Time
. Martin idolized Brit. Luce certainly knew that in giving him control of the magazine he was committing himself to Hadden’s philosophy and style as the model for at least the immediate future. He confided occasionally to his wife, his sister, his father, and even to his board of directors that he was not certain he could sustain the company alone, that he had relied on Hadden’s energy and imagination even more than he had realized, and that without it he feared the company would flounder. But for the most part Luce kept his anxiety to himself and tried publicly to reassure his colleagues and staff that he could maintain stability and continued success.
¹

It did not take long before he began to believe in the image he was
struggling to create. The occasionally timorous Luce of the 1920s, who—although never openly admitting it—often saw himself as the slightly junior partner to Hadden and who exuded practical efficiency more than broad vision, slowly became the proud and even imperious leader whose powerful ideas and convictions became his own, and his company’s, missions. Although he returned, in effect, to his customary position as business manager of the company, he never again conceded full editorial control to anyone else. He had many titles at different periods of his career: president, publisher, chairman of the board. But the one title Luce consistently held was Editor-in-Chief.

In the decades after Hadden’s death, Luce rarely spoke of his former partner. At first, no doubt, he felt the need to establish himself without Brit, to create confidence among his colleagues that he was a worthy leader of Time Inc. His strategy worked. Over time, fewer and fewer people in the company had ever heard of Hadden, and those who remembered him learned to act as if they had forgotten. Luce paid modest tribute to Hadden from time to time. He contributed to the construction of a new building for the
Yale Daily News
in New Haven, which was named for Brit. He supported Hadden’s cousin, Noel Busch, in the writing of a short biography of Hadden. But mostly, he simply moved on, seeing nothing to gain from dwelling on his former dependence on his longtime friend.