U.S. JOURNALISTS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 20 October 1942, Page 2

U.S. JOURNALISTS

THE LUCES ROSE QUICKLY

RAISED HORNETS’ NEST THE OTHER l>\Y I cess stories in contemporary jour- | nalism are those of Mr and Mrs j Henry Robinson Luce In an asI tonishingly short time he has graduated from a cub reporter to become America’s most famous editor, says I a writer in the Melbourne “Age.” | In an even shorter period she has emerged from the “society circuit” |of Park avenue and Palm Beach to ! write acidly witty plays and, in the last few months, to get away to a flying start for the title of America’s most famous woman war correspondent. Before the war the fame of Mrs Henry Luce, alias Clare Booth, rested on the authorship of that brilliant piece of acerbity “The Women.” Since the war she has been so busy travelling up and down Europe and Asia to .as she puts it. “see about the war” that she has had no time for play writing. Instead, a series of articles from Italy, France and England; from China, the Philippines, Burma, India and Egypt, have | come from her pen. Since most of j them have been published in one or other of her husband’s magazines, 1 “Time,” “Life” and “Fortune,” which among them have a circulation of 4,232,000, she has been assured of an out-size public. Back in the States now. she is occupied with adding another chapter to her success story. She is to stand for Congress, as a Republican nominee- Her endorsement by the Connecticut State Convention was sweepingly carried by 84 votes to 2. Henry Luce is the son of a Presbyterian missionary; Clare Booth, the daughter of a wealthy New York doctor. Luce was born in China, j and got his early schooling there; j when he came to America he had to j work his way through college. Clare Booth was born in New York, went to an exclusive school, spent her vacations touring Europe with her mother and stepfather. When Luce was earning money for his college fees by waiting on table and doing odd jobs she was gaily active in New York society. NEW STYLE PAPER It was not till he was 14 that Henry Luce was sent to the States to finish off his education, first at Hochkiss school and later at Yale. Then, after a year at Oxford, lie returned to America and got his first newspaper job, as a 16-dollar-a-week reporter on the Chicago "Daily News.” At school, and later at college, young Luce and Briton Hadden, his friend, and later his cofounder of “Time,” had worked together on the school and college

papers. They agreed that most people were very badly informed, and that something should be done about it; what they proposed was a new-style news magazine. As cub reporters together they persisted with their idea, and before they had acquired six months of practical journalistic experience they had decided that they had -‘perfected their invention,” and to the pitying amazement of their colleagues handed in their resignations with the announcement that they were starting a paper of their own. Canvassing their college friends, the two young men set to work to scrape some capital together; it took them nine months of hawking their idea from door to door to collect 86,000 dollars. That, they decided, would be enough, and they announced that the first issue of their “invention” would appear on 3rd March, 1923. Then they set up office in a shabby building on the east side of New York, engaged a staff of three assistants (none of whom had had any professional newspaper experience), bought a set of secondhand furniture, and Encyclopaedia Britannica, and all the daily papers, and set to work to make good their promise. They succeeded; the first number of “Time” appeared on time —and went to 12,000 readers. For their invention they evolved a brand new style of writing and “Timestyle,” with its verbal short-cuts, its inversions and conversions of words and phrases, was born. They also decided that people were more interested in their fellow individuals than in events and movements, so they ruled that emphasis should be laid on personalities. Their formula for success proved a sound one. Inside five years the circulation of “Time” had soared to 219,000, and its youthful editors were planning to launch another new-type magazine—of a de luxe brand this time—when Hadden died suddenly. Luce carried through the project alone, and the first issue of “Fortune” appeared in January, 1930. He went on to experiment with dramatisations of news over the air. and the first March of Time broadcast was done in March of the following year. Film dramatisations followed four years later; to-day the March of Time news reels are screened thirteen times a year in 8000 theatres inside America and 3,000 outside it. Meanwhile Luce was experimenting with plans for a magazine with the emphasis on pictures rather than letterpress, and in 1936 “Life” appeared. It created a sensation, but lost over 3,000,000 dollars in its first year. That was because the advertising rates had been calculated on a 250,000 circulation, and in very quick time ‘‘Life” was being devoured by 1,500.000 readers. Last year its circulation had risen to 3.250.000. FROM CAPTIONS TO PLAY In 1935 Luce married Clare Booth. u that stage, though she had a play running in Broadway, had not as yet started out on her success story. Since leaving school she had done nothing more original than to attend frequent parties, and to get married to a well-known attorney and director of a big clothier firm, the late George Tuttle Brokaw. The Brokaws were wealthy, knew the right people—in the social sense—and the round of parties went on. But after a while society life began to pall; Clare Booth Brokaw decided to get a job, and had little trouble in persuading Conde Nash to let her write the picture captions for Vanity Fair. That led to her first official writing assignment—an article entitled What the Well-Dressed Baby Will Wear. Having one of her own Mrs Brokaw had no qualms j about tackling the topic. Apparently