The Publisher (75 page)

Frank Deford, who began writing for
Sports Illustrated
in 1962 and
became one of the magazine’s star writers for decades, described his own first reaction to the first issues when he was an adolescent athlete and fan. “It was a struggle to cozy up to
Sports Illustrated,”
he wrote years later:

In its first year the magazine’s cover stories illustrated why it was so different from conventional sports reporting. Of the three most popular spectator sports, baseball received six covers, football three, and basketball only one. Horseracing, with seven covers, had the most. Mostly, the magazine ranged widely across its chosen fields: yachting, auto racing, bird-watching (twice), skiing, bullfighting, gymnastics, track and field, mountain climbing, ballooning, scuba diving, and dogs. And on February 21, 1955, the magazine ran a cover of a smiling young woman in an unrevealing swimsuit (part of a feature on sports fashion)—an augury of one of the magazine’s most popular and sometimes controversial features of later decades. Little wonder that advertisers, and some readers, had a difficult time deciding what
Sports Illustrated
was, and who it was for. But little wonder too that many readers were dazzled by the range of its stories and the power of its photographs (which were laid out in formats very much like those in
Life
, not surprisingly since most of the founding editors had started there).
²⁰

Luce took particular pride in the quality of the writers he could attract to
Sports Illustrated
, including some who had never been willing to write for
Life
and
Fortune
. The revered
New Yorker
writer A. J. Liebling submitted an elegant essay on Stillman’s Gymnasium in New York City, where many notable boxers were trained. Wallace Stegner wrote an elegy to Yosemite National Park. Budd Schulberg wrote a sympathetic story about an aging prizefighter who was finally making it big. John Steinbeck insisted he could not write for
Sports Illustrated
because
“my interests are too scattered and too unorthodox.” But he wrote a long letter on his eclectic interest in sports that the magazine published anyway. And William Faulkner wrote an extraordinary (and predictably unorthodox) account of the 1955 Kentucky Derby.
²¹

Most articles in
Sports Illustrated
were written by less visible staff writers, but the richness of the prose remained one of the magazine’s most distinctive features. Robert Creamer, for example, wrote a story on the magazine’s second “Sportsman of the Year,” the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Johnny Podres. The article set out not just to describe a great baseball achievement but also to reveal the universality of sport. It was as much about Podres’s family of miners as about his achievement in pitching the Dodgers to victory over the Yankees in the 1955 World Series. The story profiled the grandfather, Barney, who “climbed out of the mines of czarist Russia and came to America,” raised a family, went into the mines of the Adirondacks, and “now … sits in his weather-beaten house in the company village of Witherbee, N.Y. ailing from ‘the silica,’ the miner’s disease, his great hands folded.” It described the father, Joe, who also worked in the mines, but who, having benefited from improved working conditions, played semipro baseball on weekends for years because he had “more time that is his own.” And then Johnny Podres, the son of this hardworking, inconspicuous family, “became the personification, the living realization of the forgotten ambitions of thousands and even millions of onlookers who had pitched curves against the sides of their own houses and evoked similar visions of glory, only to end up at the wheel of a truck or behind a desk in an office.”
²²

Sports Illustrated
was much like
Life
in the initial disparity between its popularity among its readers and its limited appeal to advertisers. Circulation exceeded five hundred thousand in every issue in 1954, rose to six hundred thousand the following year, and climbed steadily through most of its history (to more than three million a week in 2009). It quickly established itself as by far the most famous and influential sports magazine ever published in the United States. Advertising, however, was painfully slow to catch up—particularly in relation to the enormous costs of publishing the magazine, which far exceeded the original estimates. Luce’s instinctive response to problems was to improve the editorial quality of his magazines, and there were constant reevaluations of both content and appearance. But he was also obliged to spend considerable time as well promoting the magazine and denying rumors that it might be shut down (something Luce never contemplated). Not until 1964, ten years after its first issue, did
Sports Illustrated
produce its first
profit. By then, its identity was firmly established. Although its subjects were sports, the outdoors, and other forms of leisure, its readership was comparable to such general interest magazines as
Time
and
Life
. And for Luce, at least, it was a gratifying achievement. It signified his own sense of the extraordinary American success story of a nation of abundance, social unity, and the “pursuit of happiness”—a pursuit that he believed
Sports Illustrated
reflected.

As Luce neared his sixtieth birthday, all of his lifelong idiosyncrasies and habits grew, if anything, more pronounced. A friend who attended a dinner party with Luce in Paris in 1956 gave an account of his demeanor that mirrored descriptions of him from many other people: “Physically he does look like an old man—his head triangular, large high brow, bald on top with puffs of white hair at each side; heavy straight dark bushy eyebrows; blue eyes and plastic [-rimmed] glasses, narrow chin, a face concentrated, released occasionally into a rather elfish, quizzical expression.” He was dressed expensively, but—as was usually the case—somewhat sloppily. He had, his chronicler noted, “a rambling, desultory manner of speaking on politics … it lacked magnetism though evidenced sincerity…. He often did not finish sentences or abandoned them with impatience and started over again.” He was intimidatingly serious, without much humor, a difficult partner in conversation because “he does not let one escape with a frivolity or evasion.” But he left no one unaware of his power, his status as a “great man.”
²³

Other friends and colleagues, all of whom were fascinated by Luce, reveled in gossiping about this unusual man. High-ranking figures in Time Inc. devoted much—and often all—their time in serving his needs: arranging his travels, acting as intermediaries between him and Clare, buying the gifts for friends that Luce himself never remembered to get, and occasionally helping to facilitate his personal and romantic relationships. For someone who had managed his own life without help through much of his childhood and adolescence, he was often strangely helpless in managing his adulthood. Those who served him understood his preoccupation with ideas, projects, and missions, and his impatience with the quotidian affairs of life. They stepped in, often without his knowing it, to protect him from his own distractedness.
²⁴

Distraction was, in fact, among his most prominent characteristics (as his fragmented conversation suggested). He was often coldly silent around others, but he was also at times unstoppably garrulous, talking interminably about whatever was on his mind and rarely allowing others
to interrupt his herky-jerky flow of words. He was inattentive to money, and in stores or restaurants often paid too little (which greatly embarrassed waiters and salesmen) or far too much. He was, and had been for years, fantastically rich, and it was not only the extravagant Clare who was determined to live in great luxury. When Luce traveled he almost always stayed in the largest suite in the most expensive hotel in whatever place he was visiting. But he did this as a mark of status, not really because he himself particularly enjoyed the elegance of his surroundings. Within hours of his arrival his suite was often in amazing disarray—with papers, books, clothes, and food scattered on tables, chairs, sofas, beds, and floors. Even in his own homes, in which he slept (as he had for years) apart from Clare, his bedroom in an otherwise lavishly decorated apartment or house was often almost monastically spartan.
²⁵

Like many famous and powerful people, Luce had many friends but few real friendships. Most of the people he encountered were intimidated by his presence, unable to interact with him as an equal. But Luce’s relative friendlessness was also a product of his personality. He was brusque and impatient, uninterested in small talk or gossip, always pressing for serious conversations even with people who were in no mood for such intensity. Nor was he willing to reveal very much about himself to others. He once said that he did not have a very high regard for “feelings,” that they were “secondary” to thought. “I actually don’t think he let anyone—but anyone—know him,” a longtime friend conceded after many years of conversation and correspondence. He was, she said, “the loneliest man I’ve ever known.” Luce recognized the absence of intimacy in his life, and he tried to fill the void with a series of intense, if never wholly open, friendships with women. His affair with Jean Dalrymple in the late 1940s had been one such effort to achieve real intimacy, but the relationship did not last. He had a longer and more important friendship with a woman he met by chance in Switzerland in 1946.
²⁶

Mary Bancroft was an intelligent, witty, combative woman from a distinguished but broken family, who spent much of her life in failed relationships—two marriages that ended in divorce, and affairs with such celebrated figures as the psychiatrist Carl Jung and the future CIA director Allen Dulles. Unbeknownst to Luce and most others who knew her, she had also served as an effective American spy in Europe during World War II. She met Luce by chance in 1947 at a dinner for visiting
publishers in Zurich, where she was then living. Bancroft was an avid Democrat and liberal, and when introduced to Luce, she said, “So there you are, Public Enemy Number One.” (“I loathed ‘Timese,’” she later explained, and “thought that reading
Time
was actually reading a form of advertising, rather than what I regarded as journalism.”) But she was nevertheless fascinated by Luce, and only when learning of his likely presence had she agreed to come to the dinner. Luce was clearly intrigued by her as well. “Is that any way to talk to a man who invented the American century?” he flirtatiously asked that evening, and then insisted that she sit next to him at dinner. On “that very first evening,” she recalled years later, “I know I felt that here at last was someone I could say anything to … and wouldn’t be hurt in any way as a result.” They met several times again before he returned to New York, and they sustained an intense intellectual and at times emotional relationship that lasted for more than thirteen years.
²⁷

Their friendship was not an easy one. During much of their relationship Bancroft was simultaneously involved in her affair with Dulles (who repeatedly asked her, “Have you turned your friendship with Henry Luce to any practical advantage yet?” and who frowned when she told him no). Bancroft and Luce communicated primarily through letters, and in them they bantered and sometimes fought—over issues of politics and over their own personal problems and crises. They disagreed furiously at times about public figures whom he admired and she loathed: Douglas MacArthur, Richard Nixon, and most of all Whittaker Chambers, whom Bancroft attacked almost obsessively in long, convoluted letters that Harry apparently chose not to answer (although his side of the correspondence has not survived except in a few fragments).
*
When they were actually together, which was not often at first since they were so frequently on opposite sides of the Atlantic, they met in restaurants or hotels (where Bancroft always insisted that Luce book a sitting room for their conversations). They had long conversations that were, on the whole, less searingly personal than their letters were. When Bancroft moved back to the United States, and eventually to New York, their meetings increased but remained intermittent.
²⁸

It was never a sexual relationship. Luce was already involved with Jean Dalrymple when they met. After that relationship ended he carried on a series of other sexual affairs (most of them relatively casual and brief) while continuing his friendship with Bancroft. “I feel no physical attraction between us!” she wrote Luce in 1951. “Every single man with whom I have, or ever have had, a friendship has been, I know, attracted to me and I am convinced that you are not.” But neither was their relationship a purely intellectual one. Luce wrote her with deep affection (“Bless you—and may you never die;” “à Dieu, dear heart;” “I am taking to the boat (via England) an immense treasure—your letters…. Some part of the boat trip … will be devoted to serious study of this course in … the wisdom of love.”) Her letters to him, he told her, were “minor masterpieces,” and he thanked her for being “a bringer of happiness without effort or price or art.” He also taunted her at times: “I was … amused to find you lined up with the conventional goody-goodies. Mary Bancroft a part of the Eleanor Roosevelt claque—ha!” He once asked her “why you are so relaxed about communism” (and received no answer), and he reprimanded her for taking up the causes of “all my ill-wishers.” And yet he reveled in her thoughts: “One thing you and I have in common is that we know the sheer wonder of human existence, the utter amazingness of it.” And he wrote of her “spirit … so wonderfully compounded of the eager and the compassionate…. You see things wonderfully, and your heart beats like four giant motors.”
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