The Publisher (43 page)

Even before the first issue appeared, it was becoming clear that
Life
would be an enormous popular success—a result of effective advertising, extensive press coverage, the reputation of the company, and the popular hunger for pictures that Luce had cited as a reason to create
Life
. “It is at once dumbfounding and deeply gratifying,” Luce wrote in a letter to potential subscribers months before publication,

And saying

There were 235,000 subscribers by the time the first issue appeared—almost the entire guaranteed circulation before any newsstand sales, for which requests were also growing fast. Shortly before publication, the circulation manager announced that because of the frenzied, anticipatory interest “every dealer is to receive the same number of copies of
Life
that he receives of
Time.”
“One dealer in New York who sells two copies of
Time
a week placed an order for 250 copies of
Life,”
Pierre Prentice, the circulation manager, wrote. “All the dealers are … mad that we were not able to supply them with more copies of
Life.”
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Nothing, however, truly prepared Luce and his colleagues for the public response to
Life
when it finally went on sale. Some images collected by the editors at the time suggest the character of the magazine’s first weeks: a used-book shop with a sign pasted in the window—“Life Wanted, Good Prices Paid;” a classified ad in the
San Francisco Examiner
in December 1936—“LIFE magazine, 1st edition; 2; $3.50 each. Phone VA1. 5927. afternoons;” a drugstore in Detroit with a copy of
Life
in the window below a sign—“Sold Out
But
Read It
Here;
heavily marked up distribution lists from newsstands in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Keyport, New Jersey, from dealers who were saving copies of
Life
for regular customers (the Keyport dealer rationed copies by selling the magazine to each customer only on alternating weeks); and a cartoon in an advertising magazine showing a group of businessmen around a table, one of them sputtering, “W-w-what’s that! You say you saw an unsold copy of this week’s ‘Life’ at a newsstand on 42nd Street?” A Los Angeles dealer wired Time Inc.: “First issue of LIFE caused heaviest demand … of any publication ever known. Clean sell-out. We lost thousands of sales, and still a heavy demand.” It was not an idiosyncratic response. All two hundred thousand newsstand copies sold out the first day, some of them in the first hour. Dealers from around the country wired their distributors that they could sell five hundred more copies (Cincinnati), one thousand more (Lansing, Michigan), fifteen hundred more (Worcester, Massachusetts), five thousand more (Cleveland). “The demand for LIFE is completely without precedent in publishing history,” the overwhelmed Prentice wrote. “If we could supply the copies,
the dollar volume of our newsstand sales of LIFE this month [December 1936] would be greater than the dollar volume of sales of any other magazine in the world. There was no way we could anticipate a bigger newsstand business the first month than magazines like Collier’s and Satevepost have built up in thirty years.”
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But popularity in this case did not mean success. Time Inc. paid a significant price for the overwhelming demand for
Life
. Part of the price was ill will—the anger of customers at the shortages. There were conspiracy theories that the scarcity was artificial to force prices up; that tying the distribution of
Life
to
Time
was a “racket” to lift
Time’s
circulation; that the company was favoring some newsstands unfairly over others; and more broadly, a belief that only incompetence could account for the vast shortages, which continued for many months. Prentice quickly abandoned the practice of tying
Life
allotments to copies of
Time
sold, and he deliberately underserved some of the news dealers whom critics had charged (falsely, Prentice insisted) that the company was favoring. But the more important problem of
Life
’s fantastic popularity was a financial one. Production of the first issue of
Life
, projected originally at 250, 000, grew to nearly twice that by the time of publication—demolishing the careful financial estimates that had allowed the company to project a modest profit. With subscription and newsstand prices fixed more or less indefinitely, and with advertising prices fixed for a year, every copy sold above the projected 250,000 contributed to what soon became an enormous deficit. Losses quickly rose to fifty thousand dollars a week, and Luce predicted a $3.5 million loss in 1937.
²⁹

Within the company a debate emerged over how to deal with this seemingly catastrophic triumph. Luce himself appeared for a time to prefer limiting circulation, perhaps to reduce the deficits, perhaps because he was uncomfortable with the rapidity with which his “work-in-progress” was becoming a national phenomenon. But most of his colleagues urged him to swallow the losses in what Charles Stillman, a Time Inc. financial officer, called “an atmosphere of
complete and serene confidence”
and to grasp “the chance of a lifetime.” Larsen backed Stillman; and Luce soon gave in and agreed to increase production as fast as possible, and to raise advertising rates as high as possible. By the end of 1937, a year after
Life’s
birth, circulation had reached 1.5 million—more than triple the first-year circulation of any magazine in American (and likely world) history—while the losses continued to grow.
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Increasing supply to keep up with demand required an almost Herculean effort. The production of
Life
was constrained by a serious shortage of paper, an inadequate number of presses, and serious fire hazards
in the gas-heated presses already in use, which were running dangerously almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The challenge was complicated by the uncertainty, laced with incredulity, about how high the demand for
Life
would rise. Every increase in production was overmatched by the increase in demand. Could
Life
’s popularity be sustained? How far would the demand extend? In an effort to answer those questions,
Life
staged an experiment in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the initial supply of 475 copies had sold out rapidly on the first day. A few weeks later, Worcester received 2,000 copies, which also sold out immediately, then in subsequent weeks 3,000, 4,000, 9,000, and finally 11, 000. In every case the entire run sold out in a few hours. Extrapolating from these numbers, the circulation staff began to believe that
Life
might reach a circulation of up to 6 million. That prediction proved unrealistic in the magazine’s first decade; some of the demand for
Life
in its first months was surely a result of a short-term consumer frenzy driven by the scarcity itself. But it was clear nevertheless that the appetite for the magazine was not even close to being satisfied.
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In the end
Life
ran a deficit of three million dollars in 1937—driven in part by the company’s almost ten million dollars of investments in production capacity and more than five hundred new employees in New York and Chicago. Time Inc. quickly outgrew its once-lavish quarters in the Chrysler Building as soon as
Life
began, and the company soon moved into its own building in the new Rockefeller Center. The result of this rapid and dramatic growth in expenses was that Time Inc. as a whole—accustomed to robust profits—cleared less than two hundred thousand dollars that year. “We are poor again,” Luce wrote to his colleagues in mid-1937. “We are no longer a rich company…. So what’s to be done about it? What’s to be done about it is, obviously, to get rich again.” One way to do that was to continue to raise
Life’s
advertising rates for new customers, which the company had done repeatedly since the first months of publication. By the end of 1938 the rates were the highest of any magazine in the country—almost 20 percent higher than those of their closest competitor, the
Saturday Evening Post.
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Many advertisers balked at the high rates, still uncertain about
Life
’s potency as an advertising medium. Luce was concerned that readers did not give serious enough attention to the magazine and thus to the advertisements, that they did little more than simply flip through the photographs. Larsen believed that the problem was
Life
’s unconventional audience—a readership that had no distinctive characteristics (income group, gender, special interests)—and that advertisers were not certain
whom they were reaching. To help the company and its advertisers understand the magazine’s readership, Luce recruited a group of prominent survey researchers and statisticians, George Gallup and Elmo Roper among them, to measure the impact of
Life
and, most of all, to determine how many people were actually reading it. This “Continuing Study of Magazine Audiences” (CSMA)—funded by
Life
but technically independent—concluded in early 1938 that
Life’s
impact was far larger than its circulation suggested; that there were as many as fourteen readers on average for every issue published; that the total readership of
Life
, therefore, was not the 1.8 million people who actually bought the magazine, but more than 17 million people—the “pass-along” readers—who actually saw each issue. Although rivals disputed the CSMA findings,
Life
used them vigorously to persuade advertisers that the magazine was an unparalleled advertising venue. Over time the notion that
Life
’s readership went far beyond its formal circulation became a powerful assumption not just at Time Inc. but through much of the publishing world.
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By early 1938
Life’s
circulation growth seemed to have lost momentum. “We’re having trouble selling 2,000,000 copies a week,” Billings wrote in his diary. “Hence, we have to pick material that will sell that last 100,000 copies [to get circulation up to the two million guarantee to advertisers].” Luce worried that
Life
might be losing its novelty, that it was already growing tired and predictable. As always when he sensed editorial weakness, he made his presence felt. “We have to get more and more remarkable pictures,” he complained. “We have got to have sound reading matter…. LIFE lacks humor.” To Billings such periods were agonizing, not just because he found Luce’s presence intimidating but also because Luce’s interventions rarely provided useful advice. “Luce came in, sat down, looked at layouts over for 30 minutes,” Billings wrote of a meeting with Luce to discuss “the form and patterns” of
Life
. “Then he got up and said, ‘I can’t help you—you’ll have to work it out for yourself.’” Luce’s intrusions were particularly unsettling to Longwell, whom Billings described as “a bundle of nerves and tall talk” and who, when Luce expressed his concerns, “yowled and yammered and swore and shouted—and plainly showed his frustration.”
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Early in 1938 Joseph Thorndike, the
Life
editor responsible for coverage of the movies, learned of a controversial documentary titled
The Birth of a Baby
, which included an actual childbirth. Even by the prim standards of its time, the film was deliberately unsensational. It was intended to be instructive to new mothers, and it was sponsored by the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the American Association of Obstetricians,
Gynecologists, and Abdominal Surgeons, and other medical and social service organizations. Despite its impeccable credentials and the mostly good reviews it received, the film faced strong attacks and extensive local efforts to ban viewings. Thorndike proposed that
Life
publish images from the film as a “public service” and as a challenge to narrow-minded censorship. Luce deferred to Larsen and Billings, who together decided to proceed, and they publicized the event heavily. At the same time they tried to cushion themselves from criticism. They wrote to all subscribers shortly before publication assuring readers that the story would be “wholly and sincerely frank” and “something which the public, and all the public, ought to see.” The story as it appeared in the April 10, 1938, issue was understated to a fault, accompanied by lifelessly unimpeachable text—or, as the advertisers put it, “an altogether wholesome spirit.” The layout was “a long series of small pictures,” Billings wrote, “so as not to sensationalize the birth scenes.” The mother giving birth was so shrouded in fabric that she was virtually invisible in the photographs. The entire story was bound loosely in the middle of the magazine so offended readers could remove and discard it, or hide it from their children. Despite all these precautions the story created a modest firestorm of criticism; and even though the U.S. Post Office had approved its distribution through the mails, publicity-seeking local prosecutors in dozens of cities, including New York, tried to ban the issue from the newsstands (largely in response to pressure from Catholic organizations). Larsen decided to exploit the controversy and arranged to have himself arrested by publicly selling one of the banned issues to a detective in the Bronx. The charges were quickly dismissed, but not before generating valuable press coverage for
Life
. A Gallup Poll revealed that 76 percent of the public approved of the article, and the April 10 issue sold out immediately. But the more important result of the controversy was to make
Life
once again a center of national attention. It brought to an end the brief lull in circulation growth. Beginning within weeks of the “Birth of a Baby” issue, subscriptions and newsstand sales were rising again. Circulation passed 2 million by midyear and continued to grow. A year later it was more than 2.5 million and finally making a profit ($950,000 in the first half of 1939).
“Life
has definitely turned the corner,” Larsen wrote in late April 1938: “Now is the time to snowball its success trend.”
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