Alan Brinkley Tells Henry Luce’s Story in ‘The Publisher’ (original) (raw)

Books of The Times

A Magazine Master Builder

April 19, 2010

When Henry Luce graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut in 1916, he received not a single vote in the “most likely to succeed” category. That oversight remains amazing, not only because he would attain such eminence as Time Inc.’s founder and long-reigning autocrat but also because of what Luce, at 18, had already accomplished.

He had arrived in the United States at 14, the son of American Protestant missionaries in China. He had overweening ambitions even then, along with a highly developed sense of his own importance. He had none of the advantages that his classmates’ money could buy, and knew so little about American popular culture that prep school slang was alien to him. Yet he was prepared to struggle past every social, financial and intellectual obstacle that stood between his schoolboy realities and grandiose dreams. By graduation he had found a wealthy mentor, become editor of a campus publication and boastfully labeled it “First in the Prep School World.”

Luce’s success story would be sheer romance if it could surmount one basic problem: Luce himself. On the evidence of “The Publisher,” Alan Brinkley’s graceful and judicious biography, Luce began as an arrogant, awkward boy and did not grow any more beguiling as his fortunes rose. He made up in pretension what he lacked in personal charm, and he was “able to attract the respect but not usually the genuine affection of those around him.”

Still, his fierce determination, grounded in his father’s missionary rectitude and sense of purpose, could never be ignored during his lifetime (he died in 1967), though in recent years it has been. Mr. Brinkley makes a cogent case for why Luce’s story and the sometimes controversial history of his frankly partisan publishing empire deserve to be seen in a new light.

While at Hotchkiss, Luce met his polar opposite and future business partner, the gregarious and fun-loving Briton Hadden. These two were bound for glory, though they stopped en route for stints in the Army and at Yale. By the time they left college, they had penetrated Skull and Bones, Yale’s oxymoronic well-known secret society, and made enough valuable connections to last a lifetime. Or, in their case, to drum up sufficient money and interest to create what they called a “weekly news-magazine”: Time.

“After this week,” Luce wrote in 1923 as Time’s debut drew near, “it’s head-on either to glory or perdition.” Mr. Brinkley does a fine job of capturing the galvanizing excitement of that crucial moment. But he also zeroes in on the either/or aspect of such Luce pronouncements, and that is not an easy task. One of the most impressive aspects of “The Publisher” is its scrupulous attention to both the glory and the folly surrounding Time Inc. Though Luce would grow entirely comfortable using his magazines as mouthpieces, neither he nor anyone else was always certain what he thought.

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Alan BrinkleyCredit...Asiya Khaki

“I am most uncertain of the meaning you intend to convey,” wrote the Luce-friendly (Time helped popularize that kind of hyphenate modifier, now ubiquitous) President Eisenhower, in response to Luce’s vague fulminations about the rule of law.)

What Luce was sure about, right from the first, was what Time should be: cogent, compartmentalized, clear and altogether alliterative. Its language, as Mr. Brinkley entertainingly illustrates, was rooted in the two founders’ classical education and ran amok imitating Homerisms like “wine-dark sea.” Its style was so infectious that Luce’s mother, when preparing to leave China, wrote: “As Time would say, America looms.” And its wit was irreverent, thanks to the influence of H. L. Mencken’s style on Hadden, Time’s first editor.

One of the trickier questions tackled by Mr. Brinkley is whether Time would have endured if Hadden had not died young, in 1929. Without him, the magazine lost both sophistication and flippancy. But it may have become better equipped to survive the Great Depression and World War II under Luce’s steadier, newly powerful hand.

“The Publisher” follows the cultural attitudes of Time, Fortune, Life and eventually Sports Illustrated over drastically changing times. It does not dwell unduly on the gaffes, but they could be awful. (From a “March of Time” radio broadcast featuring “nut-brown little Mahatma Gandhi” in an imaginary encounter with swooning American women: “Oh Mahatma, when are you coming to America? They’ll go wild about you there ... simply wild.”)

The more important Time Inc. missteps found the magazines jovially dismissing the rise of Hitler, admiring the Mussolini charisma and insisting that Chiang Kai-shek, who had the wisdom to cultivate the impressionable Luce, would surely not be dislodged by Chinese Communism. As for Life magazine and its boosterish enthusiasms, Mr. Brinkley shows how the “Life Goes to a Party” feature covered a women’s sit-down strike at Woolworths as the “newest type of camping excursion.”

Luce was so friendless and ambiguous that Mr. Brinkley is often at arm’s length from his subject. What does he mean, for instance, when he says that Luce’s (and Time’s) political support for the Republican Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign was “rooted in an extraordinary personal attraction” that Luce “never explained and perhaps never fully understood”?

As that illustrates, Mr. Brinkley is so well suited to being Luce’s biographer that he sometimes shares his subject’s reticence. Thanks to Luce’s long, troubled marriage to the very public Clare Boothe, there are at least accounts of some surpassingly odd moments, most notably Luce’s one experiment with LSD. He spent part of the time reading Lionel Trilling’s biography of Matthew Arnold.

“The Publisher” has its parched passages, most notably when it ventures into the thickets of Luce’s “big” ideas. It works best when the man is well within sight. But Mr. Brinkley is dauntless in assessing Luce’s most important accomplishments, like his “American Century” essay and other efforts to tell Americans what American life was like. Life magazine had no temerity about devoting a major series in the 1950s to “Man’s New World: How He Lives in It.” Now that Man’s New World is so different from anything Henry Luce could imagine, his life and times are more poignant than they once seemed.

THE PUBLISHER

Henry Luce and His American Century

By Alan Brinkley

Illustrated. Alfred A. Knopf. 531 pages. $35.

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