The Publisher (41 page)

The idea for what became
Life
magazine came from many sources—so many, in fact, that it would have been surprising had Luce not considered the idea. A picture magazine had been one of Brit Hadden’s many proposals in 1929 for diversifying the company—one he preferred to Luce’s plan for
Fortune
but never pursued. Clare had been imagining a similar project for years, and Harry’s friend John Cowles, publisher of the
Des Moines Register
, discussed with him his own ideas about a picture magazine (which eventually became
Life’s
principal rival,
Look
). By 1935, when plans for the new periodical began in earnest, there were already examples of successful picture magazines both in America and in Europe.
Fortune
itself had helped pioneer the use of serious photography as an integral part of its stories, and it had employed some of the same talented photographers who would later become important to
Life. The March of Time
had also increased enthusiasm within the organization for the use of visual images. (A lavishly illustrated 1936 book celebrating the newsreel—
Four Hours a Year
—became one of the models for the new magazine.) Many American newspapers, including the
New York Times
, had been experimenting since the early twentieth century with “rotogravure” sections that presented dense collections of photographs, usually in Sunday editions.
Vogue, Vanity Fair
, the
Saturday Evening Post
, the
Literary Digest
, and other mass-circulation magazines were making extensive use of photographs by the early 1930s. But using photographs to illustrate a periodical was not the same as making photographs the principal subject of a magazine. Luce and his colleagues had to look to Europe to find successful examples of that.
¹⁰

The most direct influence on the creation of
Life
was probably the
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
(known to most of its readers as “BIZ”). This was not because BIZ was a true picture magazine. For the most part it used photographs to illustrate text, which dominated its pages. But it was a pioneer in laying out multiple photographs—varying the size, shape, and positioning of pictures to enliven the page. And its most influential editor, Kurt Korff, spent some time consulting on
Life
after he fled the Nazi regime in the early 1930s. The Hungarian-born photographer Endre Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa, was also on the staff of BIZ before he, like Korff, fled the Nazis. He, too, moved to the United States, and became a staple of
Life
. But BIZ was only one of many European models. The Anglophiles on the Time Inc. staff, Luce among them, were also familiar with the
Illustrated London News
, whose format was much closer to
Life
’s than was the layout of the
Berliner Illustrierte
. In the London magazine, pictures dominated text. It was more adventurous than BIZ in its layouts, in its use of captions to turn pictures into stories, and in the wide range of subjects, some serious and some frivolous, it chose to attract readers. The most artistically interesting magazine of its time was the Parisian
Vu
, with striking modern typefaces, dazzling cover designs (not unlike those of
Fortune
), and ambitious “photo essays” that told such important stories as the return of the Saar to Germany, the Spanish civil war, and crises in Russia, along with elegant presentations of art, theater, and dance. Clare had cited
Vu
as the model for the photo magazine she proposed to Condé Nast in 1931, and one of the earliest efforts in the planning of
Life
was a largely unsuccessful attempt to lure some of the
Vu
photographers and editors to New York.
¹¹

The idea of picture magazines in the 1930s was not without its critics in Europe. To the socialist Left, the magazines were tools of the bourgeoisie, reinforcing a middle-class view of the world and luring the proletariat into its culture. To intellectual critics of popular culture (among them the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote pessimistically in 1938 that “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture”), the photo magazines were vehicles by which “readers” became “lookers,” and “understanding” became simply “seeing.” That BIZ and other German picture magazines became tools of Nazi propaganda not long after 1932 without losing their popularity further persuaded many critics—in Europe and America—that mass-produced images were dangerously powerful manipulators of culture and society. (Such criticisms augured, and helped shape, the later emergence of a broad critique of “mass culture” in the United States—among
whose leaders was the Time Inc. veteran Dwight Macdonald.) But the appetite for photographs overwhelmed the critics. To publishers, they were becoming irresistible.
¹²

“The talk—everybody in ‘21’ and everywhere else—was saying there ought to be a picture magazine,” Luce recalled of the early 1930s. But despite broad enthusiasm for the idea, the actual creation of
Life
was a slow and difficult process that he almost abandoned at several points. As he had done with
Fortune
in 1929, Luce created an Experimental Department late in 1933 to consider “a new magazine—a weekly or fortnightly current events magazine for large circulation, heavily illustrated.” He moved Martin out of his post as managing editor of
Time
to direct the project. Dwight Macdonald, the restive
Fortune
writer, served as Martin’s “junior colleague.” A few months later, Luce asked Daniel Longwell, the only editor in the company with extensive experience with pictures, to help plan the contents and look of the magazine, as his design of
Four Hours a Year
had made clear. Unlike the slow, relatively quiet planning for
Fortune
, which Luce had undertaken over the objections of Hadden and had tried to hide from him, the preparations for what became
Life
were intense, frantic, and visible to everyone in the organization. Within a few months of the creation of the Experimental Department, the first dummies appeared, using the then-preferred title “Parade.” Reactions were mixed, and Luce began feeling uneasy with the project. “We were being completely fuzzed up by all this arty talk…. a lot of theoretical stuff,” he later recalled. A little more than six months into the planning, he abruptly terminated the project. “No plans have been developed by TIME INC. for any new publication of any sort,” he announced in June.
¹³

For a time it appeared that the project might be abandoned permanently. “Even now they don’t know if they are going to publish it,” Billings wrote, worried that Martin might return to
Time
and displace him as managing editor. Luce himself told colleagues that he was not yet sure they were capable of producing the kind of magazine he was imagining. But in fact work on the project resumed after only a slight pause, largely because of the energy and commitment of Longwell—a passionate supporter of the magazine, who fought to keep the idea alive when many others seemed ready to give up. “A picture magazine is long overdue in this country,” he wrote Luce in September 1935. “A war, any sort of war is going to be natural promotion for a picture magazine.” Having invited Kurt Korff to consult, he found his advice rather obvious: choosing
“a good title—a short one;” avoiding “brown color for printing…. Brown is not a gay color;” and saving “no money on editorial material. Get the best you can.” But his presence and example helped legitimize Longwell’s efforts, and he taught Longwell and others to look carefully at photographs, to choose pictures that were interesting and arresting, whatever the subject.

By early 1936 momentum was once again growing behind the project, driven in part by Luce’s own revived enthusiasm for the idea, which was no doubt attributable in part to Clare and their honeymoon conversations about the project. “Luce was all for the picture magazine,” Larsen observed at the time. “He’s got it in his blood bad.” The growing inevitability of the project was also evident to Ralph Ingersoll, who had opposed the idea during the first round of planning, fearing that it would compete with
Fortune
, but who now prudently changed course and became one of its champions. Ingersoll drew in Archibald MacLeish (who wired back that he was “too enthusiastic about the whole project to make any sense by telegraph”), solicited ideas from members of the
Time
staff, and attempted (ultimately unsuccessfully) to make the project his own.
*
Martin (when he was sober) and Longwell also began laboring again on designing the magazine.
¹⁴

In the meantime Luce and others began working on the practical underpinnings of the project: production and finance, both of which presented at least as many challenges as did the editorial planning. Everyone at Time Inc. expected a successful picture magazine to attract a much larger audience than anything they had ever created before. But publishing the mass-circulation periodical Luce envisioned required a kind of printing for which there was as yet no capacity. High-quality photography needed expensive coated paper, which at the time was available only in single sheets, impractical for a circulation that Luce and others imagined reaching and perhaps exceeding a million copies a week. Using existing photographic printing techniques on rolled paper, of whatever quality, was also impractical because photographic images needed time
to dry and a rotary press would smudge them. But R. R. Donnelley,
Time
’s longtime printer in Chicago, was already experimenting with “heatset printing,” which combined fast-drying ink with a gas-heated printing press capable of producing rapid, clean photographic images. At the same time the Mead Corporation, which had been supplying paper to
Time
for years, developed a new kind of paper—“Emmeline”—which was relatively inexpensive, capable of reproducing photographs well, and adaptable to the large rolls required by high-volume printing. We “presented these to Harry,” a Donnelley executive recounted, “and explained to him what we thought were the speed possibilities…. Harry said, ‘I think this is it. I think this will let me start an entirely new type of publication.’”
¹⁵

The prospective size of the circulation was not only a production challenge but a financial one as well. By the spring of 1936 a consensus had developed within the company that circulation would start out at around 250,000 and gradually grow over the course of several years to a much larger number. The company offered prospective advertisers relatively low rates, consistent with the projected initial circulation, and promised them no cost increases for at least a year. There were tentative predictions of a modest profit of about four hundred thousand dollars in the first year. But everyone understood that their calculations were unreliable and that a circulation significantly above the guarantee would demolish their estimates. The magazine would be priced at 10 cents per issue on newsstands, and less for subscribers—well below the cost of production. Advertising would close the gap, but only barely, and only if circulation remained below 250,000; every copy sold above the guaranteed circulation would be sold at a loss. Luce was aware of the risk, and he considered suggestions for mitigating it—reducing the page count, cutting down the page size, using cheaper paper. But other colleagues opposed these changes. “Never in our history,” one of his colleagues wrote him, “have we come out of any tight spot by a choice of conservatism or economy
in the usual sense of those words
, but always by expenditure of more money and more effort to gain greater income at greater expense.” In the end Luce’s own preference for quality trumped his concern about profit, and he made no significant compromises, betting that moderate circulation growth would protect the company from large initial losses. In the short term, at least, it proved to be a bad bet.
¹⁶

To Luce, however, finding a way to make a profit was a less important and less interesting challenge than working on the content and design of the magazine, and he threw himself into the planning process
with an enthusiasm comparable to his early involvement with
Fortune
. To the occasional dismay of his editors, he spent hours each day in the Experimental Department offices reviewing copy, marking up dummies, and flipping through photographs. Even when he was physically absent, his colleagues felt his presence through the frequent arrival of lengthy memos outlining a new feature or department that he wanted the staff to develop. Like everyone else Luce was struggling to develop a structure for
Life
. “He was constantly changing—tossing things out and putting things in—trying to arrive at the right formula,” one of his colleagues noted. But there was a certain consistency in how he envisioned the project. It would be as broad as possible in its scope, attempting to embrace the totality of the world, not just prominent people and events. Its signature element would be the photographic essay, an extended examination of an event or topic driven by what Luce liked to call “beautiful pictures” with relatively minimal text. And while the magazine would take on some of the most serious issues of its time, it would not shy away from the frivolous, the fashionable, and even occasionally the salacious. If
Time
had been conceived as a digest of the news for busy, literate people, and
Fortune
had been created to serve the interests of businessmen,
Life
was promoted from the beginning as a magazine for everyone. It would, Luce insisted, cut across class, ethnicity, race, region, and political preference and become an irresistible magnet for men and women of all backgrounds. Unsurprisingly
Life
never really attained this lofty goal.
“Life
means more to the educated than to the illiterate,” one of the company’s early advertising executives conceded. But the aspiration to create a democratic periodical was real, and its creators genuinely wanted it to have “mass appeal.” They believed that a broad readership was capable of understanding serious material and was not interested only in what Luce called “grue, sex, nonsense, and mugs.” Those beliefs helped ensure that
Life
, even though it would never appeal to everyone, would eventually reach a much broader audience than all but a few magazines in American history.
¹⁷