The Publisher (83 page)

On April 16, 1964, Luce announced his retirement as editor in chief—at a moment when, as the
New York Times
reported, Time Inc. was “the largest magazine publishing business in the world.” He offered no reason for his decision, other than “it just seemed like a good moment.” He told reporters that he would continue to work more or less full-time, but on a wider range of projects, few of which he could yet identify other than a possible memoir. For the moment, however, he seemed to revel in the attention he received and the importance that the press attributed to his career and his departure. “The entire Time enterprise,” the
Times
wrote, “might be regarded as reflecting the missionary zeal of its founder for informing and uplifting the human race.”
³⁵

Hedley Donovan, Luce’s successor, received relatively scant attention. “Would Luce really retire?” some of his colleagues asked. Luce had named himself editorial chairman, and there was much speculation about what the title meant. Had he simply promoted himself so he could continue to manage the company more remotely? The lavish dinner Time Inc. held in May to mark the transition provided no answers. It was designed to honor both Luce and Donovan. But most of the speeches passed over Donovan without much notice and focused on Luce’s achievements and legacy. Even Donovan himself felt the need to make the event about Luce. “Harry Luce has worked a kind of managerial miracle in this company,” he said in his own remarks. “These magazines are going to continue, in many important ways, to be Harry’s magazines.” But in the months that followed, and to the surprise of many of the editors, Luce did actually retire from the company. He corresponded frequently with Donovan and other editors, and he continued to write and report for the magazines occasionally. He did not, however, challenge Donovan’s authority and rarely criticized his successor’s decisions—although everyone continued to feel Luce’s presence and almost certainly felt somewhat constrained from moving too far beyond the magazine’s long-established norms.
³⁶

Luce’s brief retirement was a relatively happy time for him. He was not much less active than he had been during his years as editor in chief. He traveled constantly, both in the United States and abroad, still facilitated at every point by Time Inc. employees. He even tried to arrange a trip to mainland China to meet with Mao and Zhou. Richard Clurman, his partner in this effort, wrote enthusiastically: “Your going to China and seeing Mao strikes me as perhaps the biggest potential coup in all of journalism today.” But in the end the trip proved impossible to arrange. He made dozens of speeches on issues he cared about and accepted honorary degrees. He spent more of his time in Phoenix with Clare than he had in the past, and he even began to purchase and renovate a new home in Hawaii, where Clare had longed to live for years. He returned often to New York, where he began, for the first time in many years, to enjoy a social life with friends. His doctors warned him that he was jeopardizing his health—“smoking cigarettes, bounding around the world, etc.”—and predicted that “these things would shorten his life.” Luce responded cavalierly: “I am taking off six years for the abuse that I give myself, but I am adding three or four years for what modern science now knows.”
³⁷

Luce’s principal activity in the years after retirement was working on
his memoir, which friends and publishers had been urging him to write for years. He spent many mornings in Phoenix working on it at a desk in his bedroom. Although he had been a writer all his life, he had never before tried to write a book and seemed to have trouble deciding how to organize so much material and express so many ideas. And so he wrote in discrete chunks, sometimes borrowing heavily from speeches he had made and articles he had written, presumably hoping that he would be able to integrate them at some later point. What he produced was a series of short and sometimes sketchy essays that reflected many of his lifelong interests and beliefs. (Not much in the manuscript was about himself, so calling it a memoir was a misnomer from the start.) He wrote about people he admired (Willkie, Eisenhower, Dulles, MacArthur, Churchill, but surprisingly little on Chiang Kai-shek), and he also discussed people he detested (Roosevelt, Truman, Acheson, McCarthy). He wrote about “prosperity marking a radical change in the human condition,” the “rule of law,” Communism and its inevitable exhaustion, and the “Providential nature of history.” Most of all he tried to explain what America meant and what its role in the world should be.
³⁸

“The United States,” he wrote, “was dedicated to a proposition. That was something unique in the history of nations…. The proposition, of which Lincoln spoke, was that ‘all men are created equal.’ … What is necessary to understand here is that the American Proposition contains, indeed is founded on, truths or hypotheses which are unqualifiedly universal…. It was and is the American task to take the lead in creating a new form of world order.” These were ideas he had been struggling to express during much of his life: in his first political efforts during his years at Yale, in the famous essay in
Life
, “The American Century,” and in his search for a “national purpose.” In the last months of his life he was struggling with them still.
³⁹

Luce’s casual attitude toward his health represented a denial of a number of dangerous events in his medical past: gall-bladder surgery; hypertension; his 1958 heart attack; prostate troubles; osteoarthritis in his shoulder, arm, and neck; and a brief attack of arrhythmia in 1964. Each illness produced fear and anxiety. Each recovery produced relief and increased confidence in his ability to outlive his problems.
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On February 23, 1967, Luce flew back to Phoenix from California with Clare, who had just made a highly critical speech about the United Nations, somewhat softened by Harry’s last-minute intervention. The next morning he slept late, uncharacteristically, and could not hold his
food down once he had eaten. He continued to vomit through the day. Doctors were in and out of the house, but Luce insisted he was not seriously ill. He remained at home that night. The following day he felt no better, and at noon he was taken by ambulance to the hospital. “I seem to be unusually sleepy,” he told his doctor. Clare, in the meantime, went on with her day. “I had a dinner party to go to that night,” she recalled a few years later, “but I grew very uneasy and left about 9 p.m., went home, and called the hospital. He got on the phone at once; he said not to worry—he was all right and watching television. (‘Perry Mason’—which is why I go on watching the darn thing.)” He was up and down late into the night, and at about three o’clock in the morning he went into the bathroom. A nurse heard him yell, “Oh God!” By the time the doctors rushed to his room, he was unconscious. Fifteen minutes later, he was dead—the victim of a massive heart attack. It was February 28, 1967, thirty-eight years to the day from the death of Brit Hadden, and forty-four years almost to the day since he had sat in the shabby little office he shared with Brit in downtown New York, holding the first issue of
Time
magazine and having “this sort of surprising feeling that it was pretty good.”

T
he news of Luce’s death spread rapidly across the vast world of Time Inc. Requests flew out from New York for stories about him, and correspondents from all over the globe flooded the headquarters with anecdotes and remembrances. When Brit Hadden died in 1929, the grief-stricken staff could not even bring itself to write an obituary and inserted instead a small announcement in
Time’s
Milestones section. For Luce, the company violated a forty-four-year tradition of never putting the image of a deceased figure on the cover of
Time
. At the urging of his son Henry Luce III and spurred on by the company’s new leaders who feared alienating the Luce loyalists still among them, Hedley Donovan agreed to put Luce’s image on the cover—a simple pencil drawing (adapted from an Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph) on a plain white background. (
Newsweek
superimposed an image of a similar
Time
cover—using the actual Eisenstaedt photograph—on its own cover the same week.) His picture appeared in newspapers all over the country and much of the world (including in Rome, where one paper reported that “Clare Boothe Luce’s Husband Has Died”).
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Luce’s funeral took place in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, where he had attended services for many years. His pastor and friend, David H. C. Read, conducted the service for eight hundred people at the church—and an additional twelve hundred Time Inc. employees who gathered in the reception area and the auditorium of the Time-Life Building, where they watched the service on a closed-circuit
broadcast. Later that week, at a private ceremony, he was buried on the grounds of his onetime and seldom-visited home in Mepkin, South Carolina, by then a Trappist monastery. His grave was next to that of Ann Brokaw, Clare’s daughter.
²

In his will, Luce left most of his personal property to Clare—the Phoenix and Hawaii houses, their apartment in New York, the paintings she once complained that she did not own. He left the rest to other family members: a property in Morris County, New Jersey, which went to his son, Hank; another in Haverford, Pennsylvania, that Luce had bought for his sister and brother-in-law, which was left to Emmavail. He forgave all debts owed to him by his children. The most important part of his estate, of course, was his more than one million shares of stock in Time Inc. He left 55,000 shares to the Henry Luce Foundation, to which he had already contributed a much larger amount that together totaled approximately half of his holdings. He left 180,000 shares to Clare, in trust. His two sons each received over 71,000 shares. At the time, each share was worth slightly over $100.
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On the day of Luce’s funeral, Time Inc. reported its first-quarter performance. There were record earnings of over $3,000,000, but the officers and the board worried about the softening of the economy and the declining health of some of the company’s magazines. Their greatest concern was
Life
, which had never recovered from the fall in advertising that had begun in the late 1950s. The magazine continued to flourish editorially, and its readership remained enormous—indeed, for a time, it grew. But things had changed. Luce’s idea of turning
Life
into a magazine of “national purpose” in the mid- and late 1960s, a period of almost unprecedented conflict and polarization, proved to be futile. The unstated compact between
Life
and its readers—that the magazine would celebrate American prosperity and consensus—was impossible to preserve in a rapidly changing and increasingly diverse society.
Life
could have survived and even embraced the changing culture, which provided at least as many compelling images (and important writing) as in its earlier decades. The real problem was its finances, which continued to go slowly downhill. Despite its vast circulation, advertisers were finding
Life
too expensive, especially when compared with television, which attracted many more viewers than the magazine did at a not much greater price—part of a broad shift in publishing that doomed many general interest magazines.
Life
struggled on, with many great editorial moments and with continued hope (and denial) into the early 1970s. But
on December 8, 1972, Time Inc. announced that it was terminating what had been perhaps the most popular magazine in American history.

“We persevered as long as we could see any realistic prospects,” Hedley Donovan, Luce’s beleaguered successor, said glumly of the decision. The
Time
story on
Life’s
demise cited a prescient statement by Luce in the heady first years of the magazine in the late 1930s: “The other magazines, like TIME and FORTUNE, are enduring; they have a permanence about them. LIFE might only last 20 years…. Every issue of LIFE is like bringing out a new show on Broadway.” The
Time
editors added: “Even the long runs have to close some Saturday night.”
Life’s
last issue was dated December 29. At the bottom of the cover, in small print, the magazine said “Good bye.”
⁴

Time Inc. soldiered on and, for the most part, flourished. Only two years after the demise of
Life
, the company launched
People
, its first new magazine in twenty years, inspired by the long-standing People section in
Time
and which became a tremendous financial success, the first of many new Time Inc. magazines (more than a hundred by the end of the twentieth century). Few of them reflected Luce’s belief that quality, sophistication, and a broad general readership should be the hallmarks of his publications. Luce had resisted expansion and diversification during his lifetime, but no such inhibitions impeded the company’s growth after his death. The 1990 merger with Warner entertainment created what became now Time Warner, one of the three largest media companies in the United States. It now included film, music, cable television, and many other areas. In late 2000 Time Warner was acquired by America Online, the enormously successful Internet access company. It proved to be an ill-fated merger, but Time Warner survived the fiasco and remained a powerful and successful company, although the magazine division that had launched the company was weakening fast in the digital world of the twenty-first century. Luce’s remaining magazines—
Time, Fortune
, and
Sports Illustrated
—were all experiencing significant revenue declines and editorial cutbacks. The magazines that were flourishing were mostly newer, narrowly focused periodicals, no longer attempting to attract a broad middle-class readership, but trying instead to identify subjects that would attract smaller but more intensely committed interest groups.