Between 1934 and 1936, the founder of Time Inc., Henry Luce, was devising the idea of publishing a weekly magazine inspired by great European illustrated magazines such as the British London Illustrated News, the German Berliner Illustrite Zeitung, or the French Vu. A new journalistic language was born, and Time Inc. believed there was a potential market for this way of “telling stories with photos.”
To this end, he secretly created an “experimentation department” that was soon dissolved because none of its members could agree. Several prototypes were made, and all were rejected by Luce. But when the then editor of Time and Fortune seemed to discard the idea, in 1936, after a two-month honeymoon in Cuba, now 90 years ago, he wrote a famous “prospectus” whose first paragraph said that Life would be a magazine to “see life; see the world; witness great events; contemplate the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; see strange things: machines, armies, crowds, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; see the work of man: his paintings, towers, and discoveries; see things thousands of kilometers away, things hidden behind walls and inside rooms, dangerous things to reach; the women men love and many children; see and delight in seeing; see and be surprised; see and learn.”
The text was reviewed and approved by the poet Archibald MacLeish, director of the English literature department at Harvard University. A text so impactful that its enemies said: if the magazine fails, at least he could make a living as a creative in an advertising agency.
It would be a weekly magazine of about 48 pages of journalistic content and as many of advertising; printed on rotary presses and on coated paper with about 200 photos per issue, it would be sold for 10 cents and mailed for three dollars a year. Less than half the cost of the copies and subscriptions to the other two group magazines, Time and Fortune, aimed at high-income audiences.
There was also no agreement on the magazine’s title: one was Dime (a nickel of 10 cents) the price at newsstands; others were Picture, Flash, See, Spectator, Candid, Eye… until Henry Luce said: the magazine’s name will be known the day its first issue is published. And so Life was born. Its first photograph on the inside pages showed a gynecologist with a newborn and this phrase “Life begins.” Something that was repeated when the last issue of the magazine was published in 1972 “Life ends,” plus a tiny word that a workshop foreman slipped in at the bottom right corner of the cover which was Goodbye.
The success was overwhelming; 380,000 copies of the first issue were printed and sold out in hours at all newsstands in the country. A success that almost broke the magazine because the big advertisers were promised not to increase advertising rates during the first 12 months ($1,200 for a full page). The idea was to sell 200,000 copies annually, but after four months they were already selling a million copies, and in its first year one and a half million.
The secret of the Time-Life group was its staff of journalists (“writers and photographers”) and great managers. By the mid-1950s, they received about 8,000 job applications for their magazines, and 550 were hired. They always bet on beginners, not veterans: “We don’t hire journalists. Our staff consists of promising young amateurs.”
Luce was obsessed with the personnel selection process, and each candidate went through countless filters to ensure they were the right person. Once inside, they were almost untouchable. That’s why Luce resisted firing people: “If they fail, it’s because we failed first by admitting them.”
Proofreaders, not writers, were responsible for any errors. Three errors meant being fired. Every word of a ready-to-publish original was marked with a black dot meaning it had been verified as valid. Only one or two articles were published with a byline. Signing, signing was only done for letters to the editor.
The elevator operators knew that Life employees arrived in this order: at 9 the errand boys (copy boys), at 9:15 the librarians, at 9:30 the secretaries; at 9:45 the proofreaders, and at 10 the editors.
In the profile files, there were three types of folders; factual information, folders with favorable data about the person, and folders with unfavorable notes, all endorsed with names and surnames of the sources.
Photographers knew that a “story told in photos” did not need captions. The photos were enough and spoke for themselves. Retouching photos was forbidden. Knowing nothing about a subject guaranteed that the writer would not use incomprehensible expressions for a layperson.
When some photos and texts accidentally ended up in the trash, Luce established one of his famous internal rules: the cleaning department that emptied the editorial trash bins was required to keep all that garbage for two weeks before dumping it into the cleaning trucks. Life employed up to 250 full-time journalists and hundreds of freelancers (external collaborators).
Alfred Eisenstaedt was one of its first staff photographers, and his photos illustrated 87 magazine covers. The legendary Robert Capa died working for the magazine.
The original idea was to publish exclusive photo reports and a selection of the best photos of the week which, in its early days, meant reviewing more than 5,000 images from national and foreign agencies. Life acquired the graphic rights of the Associated Press.
If we leaf through those first issues today, the first thing that surprises is that it included reports with very long texts by great writers such as the American Ernest Hemingway or the British Evelyn Waugh, and exclusives with extensive excerpts from memoir books of former presidents and prime ministers. Serials that skyrocketed sales to infinity.
Sir Winston Churchill’s “war memoirs” would be the biggest bestseller in its history. The person in charge of negotiating that great world exclusive was the director of the Time-Life office in London.
Over five years, Life paid one million dollars (20 million today) for a world exclusive that was edited (selected, cut, and rewritten ruthlessly and mercilessly) by one of the best journalists of the weekly, the methodical and patient Jay God who became close to and respected by Churchill.
God soon discovered hundreds of errors in the original typed by Churchill’s six secretaries who for years dictated from memory and from bed The Second World War, a book that won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.
The Life editor showed up at Churchill’s home, and from the first moment, they got along. He was always received in pajamas, lying in his bedroom, surrounded by manuscripts, typewritten transcriptions, press clippings, and books. When he saw that God mastered that story better than he did, Churchill surrendered and gave him carte blanche to review and extract the chapters that were published for years in the magazine. In fact, all experts agree that without that monumental editing work, that book would never have won the Nobel.
Churchill had signed a contract in London to publish between 1948 and 1954 the six volumes of his war memoirs with Casell & Co. When the directors of this prestigious British publishing house saw the first excerpts in Life, they were so impressed that they proposed that the same journalist review the entire work. Henry Luce refused, and legend has it that he replied “there is no one in the world who can edit better texts and verify errors than the journalists of Time-Life.”
This serial would also be published in The New York Times and 39 other newspapers worldwide, including La Vanguardia of Barcelona, which published excerpts of the 153 chapters of those memoirs in six installments between April 1948 and December 1953.
On January 24, 1965, at 90 years old, Churchill died. The queen decreed that his funeral would be the first “state funeral” outside the royal family since 1935. Also, Elizabeth II wanted to personally preside over the exequies held on Saturday, January 30, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, attended by about 6,000 dignitaries representing 112 countries. At 9:15 the Big Ben bells tolled for mourning and did not ring again during the day of his funeral.
As soon as the Time-Life office knew how the funeral would be, the New York editorial staff panicked. Life’s “deadlines” were Fridays. It was then decided to delay the deadline to early Sunday morning so that the magazine would be on sale nationwide the following Monday. And for that, a plane was chartered that flew from New York and landed in London on the morning of the funeral.
It was a “deadline” at 33,000 feet in a DC8 that flew at almost 1,000 kilometers per hour from London to Chicago where the presses awaited to print millions of copies with 21 full-color pages. These were exclusive images captured on the ground by a team of 17 photographers who used 70 rolls of negatives to cover Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral.
This “aerial newsroom” included almost 40 Life professionals (editors, writers, proofreaders, photographers, layout artists, and lab technicians). At Chicago airport, a caravan of cars awaited them that went directly to the workshops, and within a few hours, the national printing and distribution of a weekly that sold out at newsstands began.
The rest is history. Life reached nearly nine million copies sold (for an audience of 48 million people), but the advertising hemorrhage caused by television competition made its decline and final death as a weekly irreversible in 1972. The more it sold, the greater its losses. Between 1969 and 1972, accumulated losses were nearly 50 million dollars. Its advertising rates were too expensive: a full-page color ad cost $50,000 when that amount could pay for one minute of television.
In 1964 Henry Luce ceased to be CEO of Time-Life and died of a heart attack in 1967 at age 68. The first two calls to the widow were from President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey.
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