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Steve Jobs changed your life? How about Henry Luce?
My "Time,' "Life' and "Fortune' in Luceland
Patrick D. Hazard
Alan Brinkley's complex and shrewdly documented The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century reminds me enchantingly of my first serendipitous encounters with the Luce empire. In my first teaching job at East Lansing (Mich.) High, mesmerized by my college reading of Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride (1951), I wanted to make my students critical consumers of the new medium of television.
When Michigan State opened its first TV station just across the highway, it needed programs. So my teenagers provided the new station with "Everyman Is A Critic," a weekly hour-long take on some aspect of teenage leisure. The critics included my tenth graders assigned to watch and review an original play by, say, Paddy Chayefsky, or my 12th graders assignment to watch Maurice Evans play Macbeth. Those successful assignments prompted me, in 1954, to write "Everyman in Saddle Shoes" for Scholastic Teacher, which described the successes and failures of such assignments— my first article for a national publication.
The splash generated by that essay led to my receiving a Ford Foundation Fellowship (1955-56) to try out my ideas in New York, then still the center of creative television. And when the editors at Scholastic Teacher heard about my award, they asked me to edit their radio-TV section for the year.
It turned out to be six years. Our little family rented a flat in Flushing Meadows (where the World's Fair was held in 1939-40 and again in 1964-65), and I got in the New Yorker's habit of reading the daily New York Times on the subway into Manhattan, where Scholastic Teacher had its offices across from the Main Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
One Thursday, late in September, I was surprised to read about a media education conference to be held at the Washington Hilton that Saturday. Gotta be there.
Who's that with Ralph Bunche?
As I entered the hotel ballroom I saw two men at the rear in a deep conversation. One was Dr. Ralph Bunche, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The other was an unknown. With the chutzpah only a Midwest prole could dare, I interrupted them: "Hi! I'm Pat Hazard from East Lansing High, and I've got a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study how English teachers should deal with the new medium of television."
There was a stunned silence, as these two celebs decided how to dump this rude rural oaf. Finally the unidentified man said, "Well how's it going, Mr. Hazard?" I went on, and on about my unsuccessful efforts to get an interview with Pat Weaver, the innovative head of NBC-TV.
At this, the mystery man, in a surprisingly friendly tone of voice, identified himself: "I'm Roy Larsen, the publisher of Time, and I'm on the board of directors of the foundation that gave you your grant. How would you like an office at Time to expedite your research?"
Gulp. It was my turn to be speechless. "Meet me at Time Monday morning at nine, sharp," he said.
"Yes Sir," I replied, walking off in a daze.
Newfound courage
Monday bright and early I was at the Time/Life/Fortune skyscraper at 45th and Sixth Avenue, displaying the ID card that Larsen had given me. Before you could say "Henry R. Luce," I was in "my office" on the 36th floor, thinking: What the fuck do I do now?
My eye wandered, until across Sixth Avenue I saw the RCA Building. Hmm! "Courage, Pat!"
I phoned Weaver's number, only to hear once more his secretary's by now freezing voice. "Mr. Hazard," she moaned. "This is the beginning of the fall TV season and Mr. Weaver is very, very busy!"
"Yes, ma'am," I replied with my caricature of faux humility. "It's the beginning of my fall fellowship, and the sooner I ask for Mr. Weaver's counsel, the more effective I can be: Just 15 minutes, whenever." And I gave her Time's magic number— Judson 6-2525— and hung up.
Ten minutes later, a Time secretary hollered, "Is there a Patrick D. Hazard here today? NBC-TV wants him to meet Pat Weaver at 10 a.m."
"Here I am," I squealed. And crossed Sixth Avenue.
Arthur Penn rehearses
What a surprise awaited me. Pat Weaver was on a Bongo Board. (New to me— it's kind of a seesaw for a single person.) He said it helped him think faster. Whatever.
For two and a half hours Weaver explained how he came up with new programming like "Today" and "Tonight" and "Wide, Wide World." He was thrilled by the idea of English teachers assigning original teleplays modeled after scripts by Rod Serling, Gore Vidal and Horton Foote. He called Nancy Goldberg in the PR department, and she cooperated enthusiastically. He introduced me personally to Ed Stanley, RCA's director of public affairs, who was equally enthusiastic.
Weaver made it possible for me to watch directors like Arthur Penn rehearse a play. In short, Roy Larsen made my fellowship not only possible but also productive.
Larsen's people sent me to Chicago to see how Life was printed. And I'll never forget how he arranged for me and the son of the founder of Der Spiegel, Time's German clone, watch the editor, the photo editor, and text editor put together an issue of Life. In short, I found the commercial media talent more humanistic than my graduate school humanities professors, who whined about the media but did nothing positive to improve our common situation.
Boosting Monty Python
The same idealism prevailed in 1968 when I was appointed education adviser for Time-Life Films. I came to New York every Tuesday to mark next week's "The Listener," so the British Broadcasting Corporation could tape the programs we were theoretically interested in distributing. Then a few salesmen and I would screen the black-and-white tapes recorded the previous week. If we liked its potential, we'd ask for a color tape.
Sometimes the boss, Peter Roebuck, disagreed with us judges. One day I got an angry letter saying he wasn't paying me a $1,000 a month to look at crap like "Monty Python"! (Ouch! We started each Tuesday with "Monty" for mental health reasons.) Slyly, we made sure that the Public TV station in Chicago got "Pythons," and they sparked a national fad for PBS.
Bantering with Bronowski
Another fascinating aspect was summer seminars in London mingling with the talent we were peddling. When we previewed the rushes of Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man," he explained how he'd rather write about math (his specialty) or William Blake (his love) than make TV. But the director of documentaries bullied him with the Jewish concept of social responsibility to get his assent. Bronowski had to learn how to "talk" on TV by sitting at the feet of the BBC's best filmmaker.
After his performance, I told Bronowski it reminded me of my favorite Blake aphorism: "He who would do me good must do it in minute particulars." Bronowski's eyes blazed: "Precisely, precisely." Later, at a BBC party, we palavered wee into the night with two Viennese Jews who fled Hitler: Stephen Hearst, director of Radio 3, and Martin Esslin, who invented absurdist drama.
Luce's stable of writers
Brinkley's book on Luce is more than a perceptive biography: It's the clearest description I have yet read of how media were transformed in 20th-Century culture. Brinkley's highly personal explanations of Luce and his collaborators are exemplary in showing how people and media interact. Many significant American writers, like Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald, James Agee and Daniel Bell, all cut their teeth on Luce media. Eggheads at Partisan Review tended to reject Luce media too patly.
This book is intellectually exciting in how it shows the complexity of creating newer media. My exhilarating (if admittedly limited) interaction with Luce media leads me to place more faith in media innovators than in academicians for raising society's intellectual standards. As Brinkley's explanations make clear, our Ivies abandoned the public schools before World War II; the corrupted cashocracy in which we live today stems from these abandonments.♦
To read a response, click here.
When Michigan State opened its first TV station just across the highway, it needed programs. So my teenagers provided the new station with "Everyman Is A Critic," a weekly hour-long take on some aspect of teenage leisure. The critics included my tenth graders assigned to watch and review an original play by, say, Paddy Chayefsky, or my 12th graders assignment to watch Maurice Evans play Macbeth. Those successful assignments prompted me, in 1954, to write "Everyman in Saddle Shoes" for Scholastic Teacher, which described the successes and failures of such assignments— my first article for a national publication.
The splash generated by that essay led to my receiving a Ford Foundation Fellowship (1955-56) to try out my ideas in New York, then still the center of creative television. And when the editors at Scholastic Teacher heard about my award, they asked me to edit their radio-TV section for the year.
It turned out to be six years. Our little family rented a flat in Flushing Meadows (where the World's Fair was held in 1939-40 and again in 1964-65), and I got in the New Yorker's habit of reading the daily New York Times on the subway into Manhattan, where Scholastic Teacher had its offices across from the Main Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
One Thursday, late in September, I was surprised to read about a media education conference to be held at the Washington Hilton that Saturday. Gotta be there.
Who's that with Ralph Bunche?
As I entered the hotel ballroom I saw two men at the rear in a deep conversation. One was Dr. Ralph Bunche, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The other was an unknown. With the chutzpah only a Midwest prole could dare, I interrupted them: "Hi! I'm Pat Hazard from East Lansing High, and I've got a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study how English teachers should deal with the new medium of television."
There was a stunned silence, as these two celebs decided how to dump this rude rural oaf. Finally the unidentified man said, "Well how's it going, Mr. Hazard?" I went on, and on about my unsuccessful efforts to get an interview with Pat Weaver, the innovative head of NBC-TV.
At this, the mystery man, in a surprisingly friendly tone of voice, identified himself: "I'm Roy Larsen, the publisher of Time, and I'm on the board of directors of the foundation that gave you your grant. How would you like an office at Time to expedite your research?"
Gulp. It was my turn to be speechless. "Meet me at Time Monday morning at nine, sharp," he said.
"Yes Sir," I replied, walking off in a daze.
Newfound courage
Monday bright and early I was at the Time/Life/Fortune skyscraper at 45th and Sixth Avenue, displaying the ID card that Larsen had given me. Before you could say "Henry R. Luce," I was in "my office" on the 36th floor, thinking: What the fuck do I do now?
My eye wandered, until across Sixth Avenue I saw the RCA Building. Hmm! "Courage, Pat!"
I phoned Weaver's number, only to hear once more his secretary's by now freezing voice. "Mr. Hazard," she moaned. "This is the beginning of the fall TV season and Mr. Weaver is very, very busy!"
"Yes, ma'am," I replied with my caricature of faux humility. "It's the beginning of my fall fellowship, and the sooner I ask for Mr. Weaver's counsel, the more effective I can be: Just 15 minutes, whenever." And I gave her Time's magic number— Judson 6-2525— and hung up.
Ten minutes later, a Time secretary hollered, "Is there a Patrick D. Hazard here today? NBC-TV wants him to meet Pat Weaver at 10 a.m."
"Here I am," I squealed. And crossed Sixth Avenue.
Arthur Penn rehearses
What a surprise awaited me. Pat Weaver was on a Bongo Board. (New to me— it's kind of a seesaw for a single person.) He said it helped him think faster. Whatever.
For two and a half hours Weaver explained how he came up with new programming like "Today" and "Tonight" and "Wide, Wide World." He was thrilled by the idea of English teachers assigning original teleplays modeled after scripts by Rod Serling, Gore Vidal and Horton Foote. He called Nancy Goldberg in the PR department, and she cooperated enthusiastically. He introduced me personally to Ed Stanley, RCA's director of public affairs, who was equally enthusiastic.
Weaver made it possible for me to watch directors like Arthur Penn rehearse a play. In short, Roy Larsen made my fellowship not only possible but also productive.
Larsen's people sent me to Chicago to see how Life was printed. And I'll never forget how he arranged for me and the son of the founder of Der Spiegel, Time's German clone, watch the editor, the photo editor, and text editor put together an issue of Life. In short, I found the commercial media talent more humanistic than my graduate school humanities professors, who whined about the media but did nothing positive to improve our common situation.
Boosting Monty Python
The same idealism prevailed in 1968 when I was appointed education adviser for Time-Life Films. I came to New York every Tuesday to mark next week's "The Listener," so the British Broadcasting Corporation could tape the programs we were theoretically interested in distributing. Then a few salesmen and I would screen the black-and-white tapes recorded the previous week. If we liked its potential, we'd ask for a color tape.
Sometimes the boss, Peter Roebuck, disagreed with us judges. One day I got an angry letter saying he wasn't paying me a $1,000 a month to look at crap like "Monty Python"! (Ouch! We started each Tuesday with "Monty" for mental health reasons.) Slyly, we made sure that the Public TV station in Chicago got "Pythons," and they sparked a national fad for PBS.
Bantering with Bronowski
Another fascinating aspect was summer seminars in London mingling with the talent we were peddling. When we previewed the rushes of Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man," he explained how he'd rather write about math (his specialty) or William Blake (his love) than make TV. But the director of documentaries bullied him with the Jewish concept of social responsibility to get his assent. Bronowski had to learn how to "talk" on TV by sitting at the feet of the BBC's best filmmaker.
After his performance, I told Bronowski it reminded me of my favorite Blake aphorism: "He who would do me good must do it in minute particulars." Bronowski's eyes blazed: "Precisely, precisely." Later, at a BBC party, we palavered wee into the night with two Viennese Jews who fled Hitler: Stephen Hearst, director of Radio 3, and Martin Esslin, who invented absurdist drama.
Luce's stable of writers
Brinkley's book on Luce is more than a perceptive biography: It's the clearest description I have yet read of how media were transformed in 20th-Century culture. Brinkley's highly personal explanations of Luce and his collaborators are exemplary in showing how people and media interact. Many significant American writers, like Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald, James Agee and Daniel Bell, all cut their teeth on Luce media. Eggheads at Partisan Review tended to reject Luce media too patly.
This book is intellectually exciting in how it shows the complexity of creating newer media. My exhilarating (if admittedly limited) interaction with Luce media leads me to place more faith in media innovators than in academicians for raising society's intellectual standards. As Brinkley's explanations make clear, our Ivies abandoned the public schools before World War II; the corrupted cashocracy in which we live today stems from these abandonments.♦
To read a response, click here.
What, When, Where
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century. By Alan Brinkley. Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 560 pages; $35.00. www.amazon.com.
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