The Publisher (42 page)

Many people, Luce among them, had attempted to write a prospectus for the new project, beginning as early as 1933. Most of these initial efforts presented detailed and often technical descriptions of what the magazine would look like and what it would examine. But in June 1936 Luce decided on a different approach—an essentially literary portrait of the magazine that would convey his own ambitions and aspirations and that would excite both potential readers and potential advertisers. To a considerable degree, the prospectus achieved this goal, especially
in its opening paragraphs, which became a minor classic of journalistic writing:

Luce consulted with many people about the prospectus, most importantly Archibald MacLeish, whose poetic sensibility Luce wanted to incorporate into the document. In late June, MacLeish had sent him a draft that included a key phrase that appeared in the final product: “things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to.” Luce adopted those lines, but little else from MacLeish’s draft. MacLeish, in turn, made some important changes in the new draft that Luce created. The version Luce sent back to MacLeish began: “To see life, to see the world, the cockeyed world; to eye-witness the great events in the human comedy of error.” MacLeish persuaded him to simplify the opening phrase and slim down the document, added a few short phrases, but did not substantially change the language. The prospectus itself had an unusually large audience: advertisers, journalists, editors, and current Time Inc. subscribers.
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Choosing a title for the magazine was itself a major undertaking. After abandoning the initial choice of “Parade” in 1934—a name rejected in part because of the difficulty of buying the title from an existing periodical—Luce and his colleagues spent almost two years trying to settle on another title. For surprisingly long they toyed with “Dime,” which was the proposed cover price (and which, of course, rhymed with
Time
), but eventually almost everyone acknowledged that the price would likely change at some point and that publishing both
Time
and “Dime” would be confusing, if not ridiculous. Another early favorite was “Show Book of the World,” which accurately described the goals of the
magazine, but which many of the editors came to believe was too wordy and clumsy. There were many, many others: “Frame,” “Sight,” “Picture, “Wide World,” “Earth,” “Eye Witness,” “Look,” “See,” “Scope,” “Clicks,” “Camorama,” “Snaps,” and “Eyes of Time.” Roy Larsen made what Ingersoll at one point called “a pretty air tight case” for calling the magazine “The March of Time,” which would capitalize on the name recognition (and large advertising budget) for the company’s newsreels. Luce balked at them all.
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In retrospect it seems puzzling that the name “Life” came to the fore so late in the process. Luce himself was certainly aware of Clare’s preference for the title, which stretched back to her 1931 proposal to Nast. “Life” appeared on almost all the lists that the editors considered in 1935 and 1936, and it received support here and there from many of the participants in the process, including Luce’s family friend James Linen (who later joined the company and eventually became its president). It seems likely that the prospectus itself, and particularly its powerful opening phrase, “To see life,” played a role in the final choice. The prospectus was still using “Show Book of the World” as a title, but even before its release, Luce was confiding to friends that he wanted the name “Life”—then the title of a once-popular humor magazine that had fallen on hard times. Luce asked Larsen to inquire about buying it out so that he could use the name, and the struggling
Life
publishers accepted with surprising alacrity, asking only for jobs for some of their employees and the relatively modest sum of $92,000 (much less than Larsen had been prepared to offer). Within a little more than a month, the deal was complete, and by early October the company had committed itself irrevocably, and publicly, both to the name
Life
and to the publication of the magazine.
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The biggest challenge, of course, was finding the right look, style, and content for the magazine they envisioned. Despite all the models of photographic journalism at their disposal, the creators of
Life
felt they were moving in uncharted waters, determined to create something that would be entirely new. Their initial efforts were discouraging. An early dummy was pieced together at the beginning of 1936 as an experiment in “articulating a language of pictures.” It was widely viewed as a disaster: a jumbled mélange of celebrity portraits and underworld scandal with little coherence and even less sophistication. An offensive story about a police hunt for a black suspect, culminating in the suspect’s murder, was entitled “Nigger Hunt.” Several pages were devoted to a group of nudists in San Diego—a salacious appeal to an unsophisticated audience.
But at the same time, it included a five-page spread on the tennis star Don Budge, which seemed to cater to the mostly affluent fans of the game. The second try—a “published” dummy, designed in May 1936 and printed in August—was more respectable in its contents, with striking photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt and Bourke-White, color reproductions of early Christian art, and stories on Katharine Hepburn and the cosmetics titan Elizabeth Arden. But it, too, seemed to most of those who read it to be a drab and lifeless effort. Paul Hollister, the director of advertising at Macy’s and a widely admired graphic designer, was appalled. “It is inconceivable,” he wrote, “that even a dress-rehearsal just for ‘fun’ should have turned out so far short even of where you intended it should turn out as a teaser.” At Luce’s request he took the dummy home, spent a few days cutting and pasting, and sent back a version with the same content but with a design that Luce and others greatly preferred.
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The final trial run, titled “Rehearsal” and printed in September, was better. It included a multipage, vaguely Uncle Remus–like story on “cotton pickin’” that described black workers as “Pappy” and “Cap’n.” But it also included a photo array of the U.S. Open golf tournament, inundated by rain; a gallery of pictures of world events; striking and reasonably tasteful photographs by the well-known commercial photographer Paul Outerbridge of a female nude, which nevertheless caused such a barrage of criticism that real nudity rarely appeared in the actual magazine; a story on a Nuremberg rally in Germany; and the first of many
Life
articles on Chiang Kai-shek. Its design was clean and reasonably handsome, although not particularly lively. Some pages looked like dull filmstrips; others—including one laid out by Luce himself—chaotically random in design. There were sharp criticisms from Ingersoll (“so much worse than the first dummy”), a view likely driven in part by his feeling that Luce was ignoring his advice; and from the prominent journalist Dorothy Thompson (“I don’t think it’s good enough…. unmodern”). Longwell himself conceded that it “is no good yet,” but he believed nevertheless that it was “beginning to be a picture Book … one hell of an invention.” Luce was critical too, but like Longwell he was encouraged, and he decided the time had come for the launch. “We won’t experiment any more,” he said. “We’ll learn to do this in actual publication.”
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In mid-October 1936, only a few weeks before the publication date, Luce decided that the existing
Life
staff was inadequate to the task before them. Martin’s alcoholism and depression were becoming worse, making him more and more unreliable. He was increasingly abusive toward
his colleagues (and especially toward Longwell, a creative if somewhat disorganized editor with limited managerial skills). A few months earlier Luce had named himself managing editor for an “unstated term of months or years,” hoping he could compensate for Martin’s weaknesses. But he quickly realized that this was not a long-term solution to the problem. In late October, after a disastrous lunch during which Martin drunkenly abused Luce in front of other editors, Luce abruptly moved Martin out of
Life
and back to his old job as managing editor of
Time
. He described Martin as “a most able editor and an equally difficult collaborator,” and he evidently hoped—overlooking the addictive and abusive behavior that lay at the heart of Martin’s problems—that once again alone at the head of
Time
, Martin would regain his old form. (Luce refused to do what Larsen and others recommended—fire Martin altogether. That was probably in part because Luce was sensitive about removing Brit Hadden’s cousin and one of the few remaining reminders of Hadden’s once-formidable presence, which in most respects Harry had already allowed to fade.) At the same time he moved Billings out of
Time
, with two days’ notice, into a position he called “collaborator-in-chief” and “alternate managing editor” of
Life
, all the while preserving his own claim to be the real managing editor. Billings, the ablest editor in the organization, moved smoothly and successfully into the work-in-progress that was about to become
Life
—although not without reservations.
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“At 5 o’clock,” Billings wrote in his diary on October 23,

A few days later, as Billings began his new job, Luce gave him his first and most important order: “We’ve been fussing around for six months with theory and philosophy. From now on, to hell with theory and philosophy—you’ve got to get out a magazine.” The first issue, he said, would go to press in two weeks.
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The creation of
Life’s
first issue took place in the midst of so much
haste and confusion that the many accounts of the effort seldom coincide. To Luce the last weeks were a time of consolidation, in which departments were organized, policies implemented, visual and literary style guidelines created. To Billings “everything was rush and confusion … and nothing was really accomplished.” To other staffers it was a period of exhilaration combined with exhaustion. To outsiders—including editors and writers from the other Time Inc. magazines accustomed to their relatively tidy editorial systems—what was happening in the
Life
offices looked like pure chaos. Even so, a great many important decisions were made in these weeks that would shape the character of the magazine for decades. The logo—a simple red rectangle in the upper left-hand corner of the cover with “LIFE” spelled out in austere white letters—replaced earlier experiments that involved a floating logo with a more elaborate typeface. The cover design called for a single black-and-white picture covering the entire page, interrupted only by the logo on the top left and a red band at the bottom providing the date and price—again, a much simpler layout than earlier efforts had displayed. The trim size of the magazine was expanded, to make it slightly bigger than the
Saturday Evening Post, Vogue
, and other large-format magazines—both to increase the space for photographs and to ensure that
Life
would stand out from its competitors when lined up on the newsstands. Departments were established, as they had been during the creation of
Time:
a roundup of national and world events (
Life
on the American [or World] Newsfront); a regular feature on a new Broadway play or a new film or film star (later called Spectacle of the Week and then Movie of the Week); a short-lived President’s Album, chronicling Franklin Roosevelt’s activities; sports; science; and the popular feature Life Goes to a Party. Beginning in the second issue, a long-lasting feature—Speaking of Pictures, named after a casual comment Billings had made to Luce—became the opening piece in every issue, devoted to whatever photographs the editors found especially arresting. Thanks in large part to Billings’s calm and unruffled demeanor, the frantic process of invention finally evolved into the careful assemblage of a first issue, which went to press on November 13 and appeared on the newsstands a few days before the official publication date of November 23, 1936. It was far from perfect, without the consistently crisp and often dazzling visual impact that
Life
would achieve in later years. But it was striking, varied, and entertaining.
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The first cover was an extraordinary Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana—then the largest public-works
project ever undertaken in the United States. Its monumental, turreted facade, wreathed in shadows, was almost abstract in its simplicity—an image that evoked both ancient and modern aesthetics. It gave the first issue a gravity that helped announce that
Life
would be something important. The cover was tied to the magazine’s first major “photoessay,” a portrait (with text by MacLeish) of the community of workers and speculators in the small boomtown of Fort Peck that had grown up around the construction of the dam—men and women drawn to Montana by a New Deal project, but living and working in a setting that represented the on-the-make freedom of the imagined American frontier. It was typical of what became a staple of
Life
—a brief but suggestive image of a place far from the urban, cosmopolitan world in which most
Life
readers lived. Also in the first issue was a lively if condescending portrait of Brazil and its “charming” but “incurably lazy” people; a portfolio of color images of work by the then-popular regional painter John Steuart Curry; a worshipful story (carried over from the final dummy) on the hit Broadway play
Victoria Regina
, starring the “Greatest Living Actress,” Helen Hayes; an equally gushing portrait of the rising movie star Robert Taylor; an Eisentaedt portrait of a San Francisco Catholic school for Chinese immigrants who, “slant-eyed and shy,” were learning “to say
very
instead of
velly;”
an account of a French hunting party (the precursor of the Life Goes to a Party feature, which debuted in the second issue); a two-page set of images (also carried over from the dummy) of black widow spiders, the first in a long line of
Life
nature stories; and an interview with the cuckolded former husband of Wallis Warfield Simpson in the aftermath of his divorce. But perhaps the most memorable image of the first issue was a full-page photograph at the front of the magazine. It showed a doctor, wearing a surgical mask, standing in a delivery room, and holding a newborn baby. Its caption: “Life Begins.”
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