Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine by Isaiah Wilner

From the Publisher

Here is the tale of The Man Time Forgot: the story of Briton Hadden, the genius behind Time magazine, and his betrayal by Henry R. Luce. The true story of their tortured friendship has never before been told.

Friends, collaborators, and childhood rivals, Hadden and Luce are not yet twenty-five when they start the nation's first newsmagazine at the outset of the Roaring Twenties. Millionaires at thirty, together they lay the foundation for a media empire. But their partnership is explosive and their rivalry ferocious, inspired by envy as well as love. When Hadden dies at the age of thirty-one, Luce begins to bury the legacy of the giant he was never able to best.

In this groundbreaking biography, Isaiah Wilner offers the first full account of the birth of Time. He paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose mind dreams of everything, from the weekly newsmagazine to Life, Sports Illustrated, and the radio quiz show, and he presents a major reappraisal of the most significant media figure of the twentieth century.

The story travels from the tomb of Yale's storied secret society, Skull and Bones, to high-society Europe and South America, following the friendship of two brilliant and opposite souls who inspire one another to the pinnacle of earthly success. The young men emerge from the crucible of the Great War with an idea—Hadden's idea—that shapes the way Americans will think about the world. By making the news accessible, and amusing readers as it informs them, Hadden's Time sets the course for modern journalism into the twenty-first century.

Isaiah Wilner brings to life this remarkable story inThe Man Time Forgot, a book as stylish, passionate, and provocative as Briton Hadden himself.

The New York Times - Charles McGrath

Wilner got the idea for The Man Time Forgot in 1999, when he was a junior at Yale and himself the editor of The Daily News, and his book is very much a young man's production, with a sometimes ungainly prose style and an occasionally shaky grasp of history…But in other ways the book's "gee whiz" quality seems not at all unsuited to its subject, not least in reminding us how young these fledgling editors were when they got started.

The New Yorker

When Briton Hadden died, in 1929, at the age of thirty-one, he had earned a million dollars, invented the radio quiz show, coined the terms “socialite” and “pundit,” and seismically changed American journalism by conceiving of the weekly news magazine Time. He also left behind extensive notes about magazines that became Life and Sports Illustrated. While Henry Luce is the name most closely associated with the Time empire, this illuminating biography reveals that Hadden was the “presiding genius” at the fledgling publication. Friends and rivals first at Hotchkiss and then at Yale, Hadden and Luce were close and competitive, though Hadden always came out ahead during his lifetime. Wilner makes a convincing case that, after Hadden’s death, Luce assiduously downplayed his colleague’s essential role in founding and shaping one of the most successful magazines in history.

Publishers Weekly

Many who think of Time as a staid pillar of establishment journalism will be surprised to learn that, at its birth in the 1920s, it was an edgy, controversial upstart. Journalist Wilner revisits its development through this scintillating biography of Time's founding editor, Briton Hadden, a Promethean figure whose contributions were, the author suggests, erased from the corporate history after his early death in 1929 by jealous cofounder Henry Luce. Hadden, Wilner contends, came up with the then novel idea of the "news-magazine," a national publication presenting the news (largely cribbed from the New York Times) in a highly organized, easily digestible format for America's busy middle classes. He was also the originator of "Timestyle" journalism-news as a pageant of outsized personalities, punchy narratives, colorful details, Homeric cadences and sly, urbane drolleries, where "heroes and villains strode through the world, raising voices, slamming fists, firing guns"-which readers found enthralling and critics shallow and misleading. In Wilner's telling, Hadden himself is a Fitzgerald character: a hard-drinking, perpetually carousing Jazz Age icon, his outward ebullience masking an inward despondency. The result is a perceptive psychological study and cultural history, with a touch of ink-stained romanticism. Photos. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Wilner's debut restores the legacy of Briton Hadden, co-creator of Time magazine, whose partner Henry R. Luce systematically downplayed his contributions after Hadden died, at 30, of a mysterious infection. The author became interested in this subject while editing the Yale Daily News, housed in New Haven's Briton Hadden Memorial Building. (As an undergraduate at Yale, Hadden had been an editor, then chairman, of the News.) Reading the work of his eminent predecessor, Wilner was struck by its style: "rhythmic, compact, it practically jumped off the page-much like the impish voice of the early Time." A student essay about Hadden won Wilner access to the Time Inc. archives, where he found a trove of material. He also interviewed many relatives of Hadden, Luce and other Time staffers, and he appears to have read every issue of the magazine, from its debut in March 1923 until Hadden's death, in 1929. His solidly researched narrative follows both men from 1898-when Hadden was born to money, Luce to missionaries-but focuses on the years during which their stories merged, beginning in prep school at Hotchkiss and continuing to Yale and Time. Each was a ferocious competitor, Hadden always finishing a close first in their professional sprints. As Wilner portrays him, Hadden was furiously energetic and creative; he worked hard, drank harder and appears to have viewed each day as his personal Roman candle. The author believes that Luce and Hadden, though competitive, were also deeply attached-"love" is a word he uses to characterize their relationship. This did not prevent Luce from removing his friend's name from the Time masthead following Hadden's death (it was not restored until after Luce died,in 1967) or from, in Wilner's word, "burying Hadden's role in history." The author does an excellent job of re-creating the tension, pain and jealousy attending Time's birth and of showing how the weekly magazine has affected the profession of journalism and the packaging of news. An intriguing and depressing tale, related with great skill and compassion.

Product Details

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

The Man Time Forgot

HarperCollins

All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-06-050549-4

Prologue

In January of 1929, the creator of Time magazine lay dying in a
Brooklyn hospital bed. He was thirty years old. Briton Hadden did not
look like a man with only a few weeks to live. His family had decided
not to tell him of his dire condition. But the doctors believed he stood
almost no chance. Hadden, who had only just begun the creative
revolution that would transform journalism in the subsequent
century, had drunk and partied his way to his deathbed.

In the giddy and rebellious decade just ending, a time when
youth shattered old rules of behavior, a time that saw the emergence
of jazz, modern literature, and transcontinental flight, Hadden had
influenced popular culture in ways that would permeate the American
mindset, changing the way people thought and acted in the twentieth
century. By the age of twenty-five, he had created the first magazine
to make sense of the news for a broad national audience. By the age
of twenty-seven, he had invented a writing style that brought great
events to life, informing a wide group of Americans. By the age of
thirty, he had made his first million dollars.

"Anyone over thirty is ready for the grave," Hadden had
proclaimed during theheady years of his quick rise to influence. A
muscular man with a barrel chest and a square jaw, he looked more
like an athlete than an editor. But there were signs of eccentric
genius in his intense face: the gray-green eyes that twinkled when he
laughed, the pencil-thin mustache that drew attention to a
mischievous smile. He had lived fast all the way, dancing to
"Hindustan" at the Plaza, hosting outrageous cocktail hours that
mixed ministers with call girls, shocking friends by showing up for
parties in an asbestos suit and stamping out cigarettes on the arm of
his jacket.

In a hurry to achieve all he had dreamed, Hadden had rushed
about with his coat collar up, chewing gum, chain-smoking, and
swinging his cane. When he talked, he often barked. When he liked a
joke, his raucous laugh shot through the room as if fired from a
machine gun. Writers called him "The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang"
because he growled and stamped his feet when they used a word he
didn't like, but it was all part of his act-a beautiful insane act that
swept people up within his orbit and filled them with the magic of his
grand persona. People loved Hadden; they admired him. The
dramatist Thornton Wilder called him "a prince."

Now almost thirty-one, Hadden was wasting away of an unknown
ailment. Doctors had diagnosed him with an infection of
streptococcus, and they guessed that the bacteria had spread
through his bloodstream to reach his heart. Hadden, a lover of
animals, believed he had contracted the illness by scooping up a
wandering tomcat and taking it home to feed it a bowl of milk, only
to be attacked and scratched. Now Hadden was losing strength.
Without penicillin, his doctors were all but helpless, and they were
beginning to consider desperate measures-a direct infusion of the
antiseptic Mercurochrome, perhaps, or a massive series of blood
transfusions.

In this dark hour, the most frequent visitor to Hadden's bedside,
aside from his devoted mother, was a tall, thin man with slightly
hooded eyes framed by a pair of thick, bushy eyebrows, a receding
line of straw-colored hair, and an open, angelic face. Equally as
attractive as Hadden, he also looked his diametric opposite. Hadden's
business partner, Henry R. Luce, was penetrating where Hadden
was witty, analytical where Hadden was creative, organized and
careful where Hadden was spontaneous and reckless. They had been
drawn together as only opposites can be almost since the moment
they had met. Their rivalry was legend, and so was their friendship.

Conjoined by mutual brilliance, a passion for the news, and the
love for a good fight, they had competed ardently and at times bitterly
for fifteen years. They had drawn intellectual sustenance from each
other. At Yale, in the secret society of Skull and Bones, their fellow
club mates had drawn a picture of them on horseback, dueling with
lances, because each was the greater warrior for facing the other.
During the Great War, at a dusty training camp in South Carolina,
they had brainstormed the idea that would shape their lives and those
of millions more. Believing people nationwide were outrageously
ignorant, they resolved to create a magazine that would make sense
of the news for the average American. A few years later, they quit
their jobs to launch Time, the first newsmagazine. Publishers predicted
failure, but within a few years the awkward upstart was growing
faster than all of its competitors.

Hadden and Luce launched their magazine in a time when a
young nation stood open to the influence of adventurers and
iconoclasts, people with new ideas of how the world should be run
and the courage, ambition, and drive to make their dreams reality. It
was Hadden, Time's creative genius and editor, who would shape the
style in which Americans think about and tell the news. In doing so,
he set the foundation for the newspaper and magazine chains, radio
and television networks, cable stations and Internet sites that have
come to occupy a prominent place in the national culture.

Hadden told the news just as he viewed it-as a grand and comic
epic spectacle. He hooked readers on the news and sold them on its
importance by flavoring the facts with color and detail, and by
painting vivid portraits of the people who made headlines. Hadden's
entertaining writing style proved so popular that it quickly spawned
imitators. As the rest of the media took up Hadden's style of
narrative reporting, journalists transformed themselves from mere
recorders into storytellers. The burgeoning national news media
acquired a grip on the American imagination and a power
unprecedented in public life.

That achievement alone would qualify Hadden as one of the few
seminal publishers in American history. But that was not all Hadden
did. Within a year of printing the first issue of Time, he created the
first radio quiz show. Three years after that, he began publishing a
trade magazine about advertising that took business reporting in a
new direction. In the last year of his life, he dreamed up the idea for
a magazine devoted exclusively to sports, which later became Sports
Illustrated. Sniffling with the first hints of illness, he talked excitedly
of his idea for a new picture magazine, which he hoped to call Life.
Hadden's ideas were so influential that a single page from one
notebook found among his things after his death would serve as a
virtual road map for the next half-century of the company he
founded.

Luce called Hadden an "original" and was deeply influenced by his
ideas. Throughout their many battles, whether for the editorship of the
school paper or for creative control of Time, it was Hadden who won.
Luce, who couldn't stand to lose, had been forced to content himself
with second place for more than a decade. He had worked as
Hadden's deputy in both prep school and college. During the founding
of Time Incorporated, Hadden had acted more "on the originality side,"
as one friend put it, while Luce had served as the creative "brake."
Luce had continued to live in Hadden's shadow ever since. For years,
when Luce walked in the door of the New York Yale Club, the waiters
would greet him as "Mr. Hadden," because Luce ate there on Hadden's
account.

But Luce was a dogged competitor, capable of acquiring new
talents, and each time they raced Luce finished a hair closer. In
recent years, Luce had pressed Hadden for control of the company.
Offended by Luce's desire for power, Hadden had been further
depressed by a string of romantic failures. In his final few years, he
had turned to the bottle, driven drunk through town, picked fights in
speakeasies, and spent nights in jail. Finally it seemed that the
brighter of two brilliant candles was about to flicker out. "It's like a
race," Hadden had once said of their strange friendship. "No matter
how hard I run, Luce is always there." Now Luce was at Hadden's
deathbed, ready to slog out the final grueling lap of their rivalry.

For several months Luce had been developing a plan to publish
the company's second major product-a business magazine to be
called Fortune. Hadden was opposed. Believing the business world to
be vapid and morally bankrupt, he had devoted the last few years to
lampooning businessmen in print, even when they happened to be
Time's own advertisers. Luce was adamant. He kept coming to
Hadden's bedside, discussing draft articles and mock-ups. Hadden,
true to form, had been drawn into a series of lengthy arguments. Day
after day, Hadden and Luce had yelled at each other-so loudly that
Hadden's nurse could hear them from behind the closed door.

From the perspective of Luce and others at the company, Hadden
was out of his head. "He's a sick man," Hadden's cousin told Luce. An
executive later reflected, "He was too sick to know and comprehend."
Luce was going ahead without Hadden; it wasn't necessary to fill him
in on every detail. But there Luce was at Hadden's bedside,
insistently pressing his case. Luce would stay for an entire hour, and
when he finally got up to leave Hadden would be visibly exhausted.
The doctors, believing Hadden was wasting his precious energies,
came to fear the moment of Luce's arrival. But Luce continued to
visit, and Hadden's condition continued to deteriorate.

As Hadden lay near death, too weak to speak above a whisper,
he and Luce had their decisive conversation. No one else would ever
know what transpired that January day in that Brooklyn hospital
room. It was only known that Luce came by and sat behind a closed
door. But the story that later circulated among Time's employees was
that Luce brought up the major financial matter that lay between
Time's young founders. Together, Hadden and Luce held slightly
more than half of the voting stock in Time Incorporated-just
enough, together, to maintain control. Singly, however, each of them
owned less than 30 percent of the voting stock. If Hadden died, Luce
could lose control of the company-unless somehow he got his hands
on Hadden's stock.

In that moment it was nearly certain that Hadden would die, and
that he would die holding the shares his successor desperately
needed to keep control of Time. Given his ambitions, Luce would
have been foolish not to ask for those shares. One rumor passed
along by Luce's detractors was that he broached the question as
Hadden lay dying-an awkward matter that would have abruptly
shocked Hadden with the full gravity of his rapidly deteriorating
condition. Luce, of course, told a different story. He claimed he did
not ask Hadden for his shares; in fact, there was never any "open
recognition" between them that Hadden was dying. But if this were
the case, it would be difficult to explain what happened next.

A few days later, Hadden took a decisive step. He asked his
roommate, a young lawyer named William J. Carr, to draw up a will.
Carr, who didn't have much experience with estates, took out a piece
of paper and simply wrote, "I, Briton Hadden, declare this to be my
last will and testament." He must have strained to hear his friend,
who was speaking so quietly by then that he could hardly express his
desires at all. Clinging to life but fast approaching death, Hadden
forbade his family from selling his stock in Time Inc. for forty-nine
years. When Carr handed Hadden the will, he felt too weak to sign
his name, but he managed to guide his hand to the line. There
Hadden scrawled an "X." In settling his estate, Hadden prevented
Luce from gaining immediate control of the company they had
founded together.

Hadden's heart gave out one month later-six years, almost to
the hour, since he had sent the first copy of Time to press. It was
four A.M. in New York, three A.M. in Chicago, where the latest issue
rolled off the press, too soon to mention Hadden's passing. The next
week, a short notice led off Time's National Affairs section: "Creation
of his genius and heir to his qualities, Time attempts neither
biography nor eulogy of Briton Hadden. But there will be privately
printed, within the year, a book about him which will be sent to all
who ask."

That book was not printed for more than twenty years. Within a
week, Luce removed Hadden's name from the masthead of the
magazine. Hadden's name would not return until after Luce's death
nearly forty years later. Within a year, Luce violated Hadden's death
wish by negotiating a deal with his bereaved family to purchase
Hadden's shares in Time Inc. at a bargain-basement price. Freed
from Hadden's shadow, Luce quickly grew into his talents, becoming
the most influential magazine publisher in history and for decades the
most powerful media mogul in America. Employing his editor's post
as a lectern, Luce became the missionary of the media, an imperialist
who consistently urged Americans to spread democracy and
capitalism throughout the globe.

As he traveled the world, delivering hundreds of speeches about
everything from his childhood in China to his years at Yale, Luce
repeatedly claimed credit for Hadden's ideas. In all of his talks before
a public audience, Luce mentioned Hadden's name only a handful of
times. If asked to discuss Hadden, Luce would downplay his partner's
role, saying Hadden died just as Time was "beginning to see the light."
When a friend who deeply missed Hadden gently brought him up in
conversation, Luce sniffed, "Time was his monument, and he done it."
By the time Luce died in 1967, Hadden was nothing but a faint
memory.

Now, nearly eighty years after his untimely death, Hadden is all
but erased from history. One recent book described him as a
"footnote" in the faded past of the company he brought to life. Luce's
face has been printed on a postage stamp and his achievements
have been chronicled in multiple biographies, while Hadden has been
the subject of a single book, commissioned by Luce. Long out of
print, it was derided by the writer's own brother as an "affront to the
memory of Briton." Considering the magnitude of Hadden's
achievements, it seems natural to ask why he has all but vanished
from the historical record.

For more than half a century, the answer to this question has
been kept under lock and key in the archives of the company Hadden
and Luce founded together. Recently I was permitted to view these
records. Suddenly a world long hidden from view lay bare, revealing
the extraordinary story of a tortured friendship that ignited a media
revolution. The following narrative describes how two young men
transformed the way we make sense of the world around us. It is the
story of perfect opposites who formed an epic partnership, of a
rivalry so ferocious as to create the best of friends. It begins with
their birth, on opposite sides of the world, at the dawn of the
twentieth century.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Man Time Forgot
by Isaiah Wilner
Copyright © 2006 by Isaiah Wilner.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---