The Man Time Forgot

A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine

Reveals for the first time a media scandal buried nearly eighty years. In this groundbreaking biography, 28-year-old Isaiah Wilner shows that Briton Hadden, not Henry R. Luce, was the genius behind Time magazine.

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"[Briton Hadden's] precocious rise and then gradual effacement is the fascinating story of Isaiah Wilner's "The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine."

The Time of Their Lives
By Charles McGrath
The New York Times

For a while in the late 20's, two of the great innovators in American journalism worked just a floor away from each other on West 45th Street in New York - Harold Ross of The New Yorker and Briton Hadden of Time. The two men couldn't have been more different - Hadden was well-born, a Yalie and a Bonesman; Ross was a Colorado rube, or at least he pretended to be - and they made fun of each other's magazines. Hadden accused Ross of being a snob, and declared that the old lady from Dubuque was exactly the audience he sought; Ross specifically banned from his magazine the word "tycoon," one of Time's famous buzzwords. Yet the two editors also had a lot in common, and it's hard to imagine that they didn't run into each other all the time at the speakeasy. Both liked to smoke and to drink, and to hang out with chorus girls. Both had an almost visceral appreciation of good writing and a love of facts for their own sake, and both had a distaste for the business side of magazine publishing, especially for the blandishments and half-truths of advertising.

Ross went on, of course, to become legend, while Hadden today is seldom remembered, in part because after his death at the shockingly young age of 31, Henry Luce, his friend and business partner and Time's co-founder, set about writing Hadden out of the magazine's history. It wasn't until after Luce's death, in 1967, that Hadden's name was restored to its place at the top of Time's masthead. His precocious rise and then gradual effacement is the fascinating story of Isaiah Wilner's "The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine."

Hadden and Luce met as sophomores at Hotchkiss in 1913. Luce, the son of missionaries in China, was a scholarship boy, who waited on tables and lived in an off-campus boarding house. Tall and beetle-browed, he stammered and suffered both from clawing insecurity and secret ambition - always a potent combination. Hadden, the son of wealthy Brooklynites, was one of those gilded youths to whom everything comes easily. He was funny, charming, and effortlessly talented. Even so, the two boys struck up a friendship, based on their shared literary interests, and began a pattern of friendship laced with rivalry that lasted until Hadden's death: Hadden was the star, Luce the envious sidekick. It was Hadden who became editor of The Hotchkiss Record, while Luce was an assistant, and later at Yale, which both attended, it was Hadden who first made the staff of The Daily News and then became its editor in 1920, when he was just a sophomore, besting Luce, who never really got over the loss.

Even during their Hotchkiss days, the two had begun talking about a magazine of their own, but Wilner makes it clear that the original idea for Time - a weekly news digest edited for America's growing middle class - was really Hadden's, and it was Hadden, drawing on his schoolboy love for the "Iliad," who invented the magazine's distinctive style, studded with epithets (Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of a physical culture magazine, was always called "Body-Love") and employing a weird inverted syntax. "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind," Wolcott Gibbs famously wrote in a satirical New Yorker article commissioned by Ross. "Where it all will end, knows God!"

The first issue of Time came out in March 1923, shortly after Hadden's 25th birthday and just before Luce's, and in the beginning the magazine was practically self-published, with just a handful of cub writers, assisted by a couple of debutantes helping the two founders, who worked out of a former brewery on East 39th Street. The plan called for Hadden and Luce to alternate as editor in chief, but in practice Hadden, wearing a green eyeshade and wielding an oversize pencil, clung to that job for much more than half the time, leaving Luce to become de facto business manager. Disgruntled, Luce took advantage of a trip Hadden made to Europe in 1925 by arranging to move the magazine to Cleveland - ostensibly to save money but also because he felt more comfortable in the moneyed parlors of Shaker Heights, where he could be a big fish, than he did in New York. He was married by now, to Lila Hotz, a Chicago heiress, and increasingly saw himself not just as a magazine editor but as an entrepreneur and political player.

In 1927, while Luce was in Europe, Hadden, who couldn't stand Cleveland, took advantage by moving the magazine back to New York. There was still no open rift between the two men, but their styles had become very different. Luce, who when he got his chance proved to be no slouch as an editor, was steadier and more serious, with an increasing interest in foreign affairs. Hadden, far more popular with the staff, was brilliant but also playful and mercurial, taking particular pleasure in making up phony correspondence to run on the magazine's letters page.

Like just about everyone who knew Hadden, Wilner seems to have fallen a little under his spell, but he leaves clues that Hadden, elusive and distant at times and at others virtually overflowing with schemes and ideas, may in fact have suffered from what today we would call bipolar disorder. Before he was 30, in any case, Hadden was already a full-fledged alcoholic whose violent temper and dark mood swings more than once landed him in jail for disorderly conduct.

The illness that finally killed him remains a bit of a mystery - a strep infection most likely - but he was in poor health to begin with, and in many ways already worn out. On his deathbed, he was still arguing with Luce about Fortune, which had become his partner's pet project and which Hadden opposed because of his dislike and distrust of businesspeople. He also took pains to arrange a will that kept his share of Time stock from falling into Luce's hands, though within two months Luce had persuaded Hadden's heirs to sell out - just the first of many betrayals and attempts to erase his partner's legacy. He was hardly the first person in publishing to take credit for someone else's idea, of course, and in time he may even have come to believe it, for under his long stewardship, Time gradually grew up, dropping that annoying backward style and actually reporting the news, not just rewriting it. If it wasn't in the beginning, Time certainly became Luce's magazine and a different one from what Hadden dreamed up.

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. (He has only a sketchy idea of how a Linotype machine works, for example, and seems for some reason to think that Coco Chanel shirts were all the rage in the Midwest in the 20's.) 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 - not just Luce and Hadden but, by implication, Ross and DeWitt Wallace, whose Reader's Digest was the third great invention of the period. With their canes and their brand-new mustaches, Hadden and Luce, in particular, seem almost like boys playing dress-up. (Ross, a veteran of World War I, was by comparison a model of maturity.) But none of them entirely knew what they were doing. If they had, they might never have succeeded.

Charles McGrath, formerly the editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The Times.

"Mr. Wilner, 28, struck gold ... A riveting narrative ... richly detailed ... part 'This Side of Paradise,' part 'Citizen Kane.'"

The Masthead Was Missing a Name
By Melinda Beck
The Wall Street Journal

For nearly 75 years, the portrait of a sober young man, in a green eyeshade and shirtsleeves, has watched over the wood-paneled boardroom
of the Yale Daily News, in a gothic building that bears his name.

That's about the only place where Briton Hadden is still remembered. The brash visionary who founded Time magazine with classmate Henry R. Luce in 1923, shortly after they both graduated from Yale, died of a mysterious infection just six years later, at age 31. Luce went on to build their dream into the mighty Time Inc. media empire -- and take all the credit himself, suppressing the contributions of his friend and rival.

That's the provocative premise of "The Man Time Forgot," by Isaiah Wilner. One of a long line of Yale Daily News editors who toiled under Hadden's portrait, Mr. Wilner became curious about the man described by a plaque in the newspaper office as an editor "whose genius created a new form of journalism." He set out to discover why nobody had ever heard of Hadden.

Mr. Wilner, 28, struck gold when he was granted access to a trove of information that Time itself assembled shortly after Hadden's death in 1929, with the intention of publishing its own book about the magazine's early years. But most of that material was deep-sixed in Time's archives in favor of an abbreviated version years later that minimized Hadden's role.

Riveting Narrative

From those old records, letters and interviews, Mr. Wilner has woven a riveting narrative of what he calls "the tortured friendship that ignited a media revolution." His book is a richly detailed account of how the two young men clashed and collaborated, illuminated by reminiscences from their contemporaries and their own letters home. It's part "This Side of Paradise," part "Citizen Kane," with Hadden as a Fitzgerald-like hero, ebullient outside and troubled within, and Luce as the intense, ambitious striver.

Hadden was a Brooklyn blueblood who talked of starting a magazine even as a boy. Luce was born in China to missionary parents who dodged malaria and violent rebels and dispatched him to boarding school at age 10. The two met as teenagers at Hotchkiss in 1913. Luce, a scholarship student, had to sweep the chapel and clean the blackboards; Hadden brought his golf bag. But they collided head-on in journalism.

Briton Hadden, Time's co-founder.

Hadden beat out Luce to run the newspaper, the Hotchkiss Record. Luce took over the school's monthly literary magazine, called Lit, and they baited each other in print, even while Luce served as Hadden's No. 2 on the Record. "Competition was the breath of life to Hadden and that's why he and Luce got along so well," a cousin of Hadden's later said. "Neither one could get ahead of the other."

At Yale, they both endured the grueling "heel" process to join the Yale Daily News. ("I have to come to Rome, and succeeded in the Roman Circus," Luce wrote his parents.) With the gathering war disrupting life on campus, Hadden became the youngest News chairman ever, as a sophomore, when his predecessor enlisted. He was elected again as an upperclassman, despite Luce's efforts to unseat him. Yet the two worked side-by-side, with Hadden writing the editorials and Luce managing the news. "If Harry was disappointed, there were never any signs," a younger News heeler later wrote. "It was always understood among us that Hadden and Luce worked as a team, as they had done at Hotchkiss." The class of 1920 voted Luce "most brilliant" and Hadden "most likely to succeed."

As Mr. Wilner tells it, it was Hadden's burning ambition to start a magazine that would make sense of the news for a broad, national audience and Hadden's voice that shined through it once the two Yale graduates found the backing to launch Time magazine. A hallmark of Timestyle -- inverted sentence structure -- came from Hadden's love of Homer's "Illiad" and was famously parodied by the New Yorker in 1938: "Where it will all end, knows God."

Mr. Wilner claims that Hadden also deserves credit for the groundbreaking traits of Time's approach to presenting the news -- narrative storytelling with vivid writing, multiple adjectives, plenty of color and personal details. But Mr. Wilner goes laughably over-the-top in describing their significance, writing that Hadden's innovations "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 culture."

A Tough Sell

"The Man Time Forgot" is at its best in describing how Hadden and Luce relentlessly worked their wealthy classmates, professors, and Skull and Bones contacts to secure investors -- a tough sell, since they intended to keep voting control of the company themselves. Hadden, likening their pitch to hitting prospects in the groin with the prospectus, would yell "Let's groin him!" when he and Luce went out to make another call. Fellow Bonesman Harry Davison of J.P. Morgan bought 40 shares for a $1,000, as did senior partner Dwight Morrow. Bones and Yale Daily News connections led them to Edith Hale Harkness, who trained her ear trumpet in their direction, listened and said: "That will do boys. Put me down for twenty thousand."

Time's first issue, published March 3, 1923, featuring Joseph G. Cannon, the retired Speaker of the House. From the beginning, Time articles were produced by harried young writers putting their own spin on information gleaned from newspaper clippings -- a formula the magazine would use for nearly 50 years. To build buzz among the young and wealthy, Hadden and Luce hired debutantes to work on the magazine, and the pair recruited Luce's sisters at Wellesley and Hadden's cousin at Princeton to peddle it in their dorms. Hadden asked female friends to run up to newsstands across Manhattan and ask for Time. "Nevahoidovit," the dealers would bark. Then Hadden would hustle over to see if they were interested in carrying this new in-demand publication.

Success built up rapidly in the 1920s, with Hadden as Time's editor and Luce as the business manager, a division of labor determined by a coin toss. They agreed to trade the roles every year, but Hadden held onto the editor's chair until 1927, and Luce grew frustrated.

When they finally switched, Luce made the writing more opinionated. Hadden created a circular for the advertising trade dubbed Tide (punning on "Time and Tide wait for no man"): Though often critical of advertisers, it made them more aware of the magazine than ever. Hadden also dreamed up the idea for a sports magazine and a picture magazine; hence (many years later) Sports Illustrated and Life magazines. "Hadden's ideas were so influential that a single page from one notebook found among his belongings after his death would serve as a virtual road map of Time Inc. during the next half-century," Mr. Wilner writes.

Although Mr. Wilner doesn't use the term, his descriptions of Hadden sound like textbook manic-depression. Hadden lurched between infectious exuberance and periods of gloom, made worse by romantic failures. He drank excessively and pulled pranks, inventing phony letter-writers to stir up controversy. He flew into rages at the office and disappeared for days. He and Luce quarreled increasingly, particularly over Luce's plan to develop a business magazine to be called Fortune, which Hadden opposed, believing the business world to be vapid and morally bankrupt.

Shouting Matches

As his behavior became increasingly erratic, Hadden fell ill with what doctors diagnosed as a streptococcus infection, which evidently entered his bloodstream. (Penicillin, which likely would have saved him, would not be in widespread use for another 15 years.) He spent months in a Brooklyn hospital, growing steadily weaker. Luce paid daily visits that often turned into shouting matches behind closed doors. Time staffers speculated that the dispute had to do with Hadden's shares of the company. With the last of his energy, Hadden drew up a will instructing his family not sell the shares for 49 years. He died on Feb. 27, 1929, a millionaire.

DETAILS

THE MAN TIME FORGOT
By Isaiah Wilner
(HarperCollins, 342 pages, $26.95)
Oddly, "The Man Time Forgot" gives short shrift to the company's forgetting about Hadden. The years after 1929 are dispensed with in the last 30 pages. The facts are stark enough. Within a week of Hadden's death, Luce removed his name from the Time masthead. Within a year, Luce had persuaded Hadden's family to violate his dying wish and sell their shares to him, giving him sole control of the company. In 300 speeches over the next 40 years, by Mr. Wilner's count, Luce mentioned Hadden's name only four times.

The author insists that Luce "betrayed" his longtime friend, but precisely why this happened Mr. Wilner does not much explain. We're left to surmise that the nation's most powerful media mogul, feared by presidents and received around the world, was so jealous, and so insecure, that he couldn't bear to give Hadden even a modicum of
credit. But that doesn't quite fit with the young man we see in the rest of the book, who seems very nearly Hadden's equal. "The Man Time Forgot" also raises the question: Just how much homage is due to a deceased co-founder? Certainly more than Luce gave Hadden. But the history of American business is filled with forgotten co-founders (Steve Wozniak at Apple, Paul Allen at Microsoft, Bruce Scott at Oracle) whose partners went on to build those companies into powerhouses associated with them alone.

History is written by the winners or, in Time's case -- as Mr. Wilner's skillful storytelling makes clear -- the one who survived.

Ms. Beck is the Marketplace editor of The Wall Street Journal.

"Remarkable book.... Mr. Wilner makes his case convincingly.... A classic story. "

Lost to the Sands of Time
By Christopher Willcox
The New York Sun

The remarkable book "The Man Time Forgot" by Isaiah Wilner, appears chiefly interested in setting the record straight on who should be credited with the creation of the world's most successful news magazine. That would be Briton Hadden, the brilliant and mercurial editor who had the misfortune of, first, dying young, and, last, having an insecure and disloyal business partner in Henry Luce.

Mr. Wilner makes his case convincingly on the basis of archival evidence and the testimony of people who knew both men well; it's a classic story of a professional rivalry that ended with the surviving partner (Luce) discounting the contributions of his dead colleague
(Hadden).

All this is probably very important to Hadden's family and any of his friends who may still be alive. And it is certainly a worthwhile footnote in the long history of the world's largest publishing and news conglomerate. But what this reader found most interesting has less to do with settling personal scores and much more to do with the evident decline of a formerly great journalistic enterprise.

It's a safe bet that neither Hadden nor Luce would recognize today's Time magazine, which takes itself and the conventional wisdom it liberally dispenses ever so seriously. It's certainly a far cry from the zingy and irreverent weekly they invented back in the 1920s, or the influential and agenda-setting instrument of power it became by the time it crested under Luce in the 1960s. Long gone are the puns and wordplay, the quirky internationalism, the Eastern Establishment politics, the playful contempt for the self-important, and above all, the optimism and faith in a bright American future. The jingoes and the blithe spirits have all been extinguished, replaced by people who have spent far too much time reading the Columbia Journalism Review. Mr. Wilner doesn't address this change specifically, but his colorful references to the development of "Timestyle" prose speak powerfully to the theme:

Readers cherished the predictable comfort the epithets provided. When they opened Time, they felt a bit like children returning to a favorite storybook. Time's epithets grew more extreme by the year; first Hadden took on the mayor of New York, then a few financiers, and finally several senators. Time dubbed Senator Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota 'the duck-hunting dentist.' James Thomas Heflin of Alabama, a rotund racist who occupied entire sessions of the Senate with invective against 'the Catholic conspiracy,' was known to Time readers as 'Tom-Tom Heflin, who mortally hates and fears the Roman Pope.' If Time stopped using an epithet, readers would beg to see it again, almost as if waving to Hadden, shouting that they understood the joke, they belonged to the elite circle of the young and urbane.

Whatever one makes of the politics of today's Time magazine, it's unlikely that its readers are doing much "cherishing" of anything therein. In fairness, the same could be said for much of the so-called mainstream press. The art of creating an intimate connection with the reader is not something that is easily taught in journalism school or anywhere else. It is an intuitive talent and one that Hadden and Luce possessed to an astounding degree. And the readers obviously responded, making Time and its progeny =97 Fortune, Sports Illustrated
et al. =97 literally billions of dollars.

Like many extremely successful concepts, Hadden's idea was relatively straightforward. The newspapers of his day provided too much information in a format that was too time consuming for the average busy person. Time would do the heavy lifting for its readers by synthesizing the week's most important news in a highly readable narrative form with entertaining and amusing anecdotes and commentary. It was a stunning success almost from the beginning, and its value to its millions of readers only grew as most of the nation's newspapers, especially in the heartland, grew ever more parochial and less interested in the wider world. Even today, an inquiring mind in Oklahoma City or Omaha, Neb., would be hard-pressed to get coherent news of the world from a local newspaper. This, more than any other factor, has probably kept the newsweeklies alive.

Mr. Wilner makes it quite clear that Hadden, far more than the sober Luce, was a magazine man first and a businessman by accident. He delighted in running articles critical of his advertisers, which would probably get him fired at some prominent publications today. He also planted fake letters to the editor to stir things up and was full of other editorial pranks that attracted attention and built the franchise. Most of it worked, and by the time he died of an apparent blood infection at age 30 he had created a journalistic template that would conquer the world.

Much of this book deals with the rather small and distasteful efforts by Luce to diminish the stature of his departed colleague. He reportedly blocked serious efforts to memorialize Hadden's accomplishments in a book, and he failed to even mention his name when interviewed about the earliest days of their venture. It's not a pretty picture to be sure, but, based on the evidence of this book, Hadden would likely be more exercised over the fate of his magazine than his place in publishing history.

"This illuminating biography reveals that Hadden was the 'presiding genius' at the fledgling publication [Time].... Wilner makes a convincing case."

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. 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. 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.

"Scintillating biography [of] a Promethean figure . 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."

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 forAmerica'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.

(Oct.)
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier
Inc. All rights reserved.

"With access to the Time archives and unpublished interviews and correspondence, Wilner offers all the excitement of a new media enterprise launched in the Roaring Twenties by two fascinating figures. "

By Vanessa Bush
Book List

Although Henry Luce is celebrated as the founder of Time magazine, it was actually the brainchild of another man, Briton Hadden, who has been deliberately written out of the magazine's history, according to Wilner. Luce and Hadden met at Hotchkiss prep school, where, as editors of the newspaper, they began a rivalry of competitive ideas on news delivery that continued when they both went to Yale, sparking a lifetime of tension over competition and collaboration. When they were 25, they joined up to realize Hadden's dream, a magazine that condensed the national news of the day in a readable style. Hadden, from a wealthy family, was outgoing and audacious. Luce, from a family of missionaries, was brilliant but circumspect. Luce could never come out of Hadden's shadow. When his more celebrated partner died at 31, Luce immediately began to erase Hadden's legacy.

With access to the Time archives and unpublished interviews and correspondence, Wilner offers all the excitement of a new media enterprise launched in the Roaring Twenties by two fascinating figures.

Copyright (c) American Library Association. All rights reserved

"[The Man Time Forgot] tells a story that has sent shock waves through the American journalism establishment...by proposing that Hadden was the true genius behind Time Magazine and therefore the true genius behind modern American journalism"

Briton Hadden Put in the Spotlight
by Andrew Mangino
Yale Daily News

Sometime on the eve of the Roaring Twenties, two Yale seniors enter Skull and Bones.

The first is Henry Luce '20. He approaches deliberately, his narrow blue eyes directed at the tomb in front of him. He is about to cook a meal for his fellow Bonesmen, during which he will share his sexual history, his thoughts on foreign affairs and his theory of the best route to amassing power and influence in American society. He's smart, he's successful, and he knows it.

Next to enter the tomb is Briton Hadden '20: Chairman of the Yale Daily News, king of what is called the "Yale Democracy." Youthful and endearingly sarcastic, he is looking forward to a conversation with Bonesmen in which he can flippantly mock their self-importance and pseudo intellectualism while still drawing on their insights for Monday's editorial in the News. He hasn't slept in days.

Jump forward 80 years to sometime on the eve of the millennium.

Luce, now dead, has made his eternal mark on time, quite literally. Not only was he the founder of Time Magazine, but he also launched Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Life. Many Americans credit him with inventing modern magazine journalism.

Hadden has much less to show for himself. Dead by 1930, young and burnt-out, he has his name on the Time Magazine masthead and a modest building at Yale named in his honor - the Briton Hadden Memorial Building, which houses the Yale Daily News.

Inside that building, Isaiah Wilner '00 is sitting beneath a mysteriously grinning portrait of Hadden - a modern day Mona Lisa - wondering why no one knows anything about the man in the painting. He is especially curious since a plaque on the bottom floor of the building reads, "Briton Hadden: His Genius Created a New Form of Journalism."

One day, Wilner asked himself a life-changing question.

"If Briton Hadden was such a genius," Wilner wondered, "how come I've never heard of him?"

That question launched Wilner into a journey that continued this week, as he made the final stops on the tour for his debut book - "The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine."

The book tells a story that has sent shock waves through the American journalism establishment since its release earlier this month, sparking both enthusiastic praise and dismissive criticism by proposing, among other not-so-small things, that Hadden was the true genius behind Time Magazine and therefore the true genius behind modern American journalism. And that Luce, from the day Hadden died, actively and successfully worked to suppress his dead partner's memory until Hadden, who outshone Luce while living, became only a footnote in time.

Hadden resurrected?

Though Wilner spent six years researching and then resurrecting Hadden's spirit in his 300-page biography, in some ways, Hadden was already back by 2000 - in the form of Wilner himself.

After all, as Wilner waved his arms energetically and stared at each member of the audience at a New Haven stop in his book tour last week, he said, "This is a story about my two favorite things: relationships and ideas." Hadden, at least according to Wilner's book, might have made the same statement in 1920.

Like Hadden, Wilner served as head of the News while at Yale, entered a career in New York journalism and is possessed by a love of possibilities, theories and people. Like Hadden, Wilner's writing style is ridden with imagery. And also like Hadden, Wilner, on occasion, had a knack for getting himself into trouble.

"I identified with Hadden," Wilner said. "He was the creative genius behind the thing. He was the one with the creative ideas."

But Wilner is quick to point out, in his book and in interviews, that Hadden relied on Luce. They were complements - even if Hadden, with a "magical aura around him," according to Wilner, was the "brighter light."

"Theirs was a life long rivalry - Luce lost the YDN elections [for Chairman], but Hadden let him write half the editorials and felt that Luce was the man to help him achieve his dream," Wilner said. "Luce was a brilliant scholarship boy who just had to get ahead: shy, awkward, but always improving, gaining confidence, learning from Hadden."

When Wilner decided to research Hadden in history professor John Gaddis' "Art of Biography" seminar, he handed in 25-page paper that, years later, became a book that was more than 800 pages before editing.

"Isaiah always struck me as someone who loved writing, did it well, and intended in some way to make it a career," Gaddis said. "I always assumed . that Isaiah would eventually turn it into a book. The topic was too good to pass up, and the fact that no one else had written a biography of Hadden was a real opportunity."

History professor John Merriman, another one of Wilner's inspirations, used to eat hotdogs with him in the Pierson cafeteria and talk about ideas, the news and Yale. He came to know Wilner as someone who "embodied the life of the mind" and was very alert, even if he sometimes "looked wasted" since he had not slept the night before because he had been editing the News.

Wilner must have been alert. It took 80 generations of News editors and reporters before someone decided to explore who the mysterious Hadden was. William F. Buckley '50, a former News chairman, grudgingly admitted that though he saw Hadden's portrait, he never explored who Hadden was even though he knew - and admired - Luce. He said he enjoyed Wilner's book, though he thinks he did not give enough credit to Luce's legacy.

"It was bright and readable," Buckley said. "But you have the sense that he started in with an afflatus and he sort of worked it in through the book. I think that's recognizable even by people who were not familiar with the work of Henry Luce. The strength of Luce was not sufficiently acknowledged in the book."

After all, Wilner is not one who hesitates before letting his inspirations take over. Michael Barbaro '02, a former News editor in chief who reported for Wilner as a freshman before moving on to a post-graduation career at The New York Times, said he inspired those on the paper younger than him to believe in the mission of student journalism - it was Wilner's "gift, beyond his writing abilities." He also managed to sneak cigarettes into the editor's office, Barbaro said.

And in a controversy that made the pages of The New York Times, Wilner's tenure as editor was marred by a controversy during the 1999 aldermanic campaign. Near the end of his term as editor in chief, Wilner was removed temporarily from daily production of the paper for allegedly favoring one candidate -- his roommate - over another in the News's coverage of the race, which he directed.

"I was in all kinds of scrapes when I was in college, and I had a hell of a lot of fun when I was doing it," Wilner said. "I won some, I lost fewer, and I lived to write a book."

Walter Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time Magazine and now President of the Aspen Institute, described one such Wilner victory. "Almost on a whim," Wilner said he sent Isaacson his 25-page seminar paper on Hadden, requesting that he open the Time archives. Isaacson did, thus unlocking the key to Hadden's story.

"I also like writing biography myself, and there's nothing I feel more strongly about than people should be open with their sources for people trying to write serious biography," said Isaacson, who is now finishing a biography of Albert Einstein. "The guy was serious, and I knew they had some of the Time archives under lock and key. That seemed wrong, especially for a journalism enterprise like Time, Inc."

Wilner said he was taken aback by the world he discovered inside the archives. He found, for example, a vault of childhood letters between Hadden and Luce, discovering that their precociousness surfaced at an early age.

Hadden often summoned his "mum" at night to dictate poetry for her to transcribe - he did not yet even know how to write. Luce, who was very religious, tended to preach to other children. And when the duo met at boarding school, they became instant friends - though Hadden, even then, edged out Luce to become editor of the Hotchkiss paper.

"I made an extreme effort to understand Luce from the perspective of Hadden and vice versa," Wilner said. "How did this friendship come about and what was the quality of this friendship? How did it bring about this media revolution?"

A Wrinkle in Time

While in the archives, Wilner said he discovered something disturbing about the Time media revolution: It had been, in many ways, a lie.

As illustrated by a particularly vivid scene in Wilner's book - the Time Magazine 40th Anniversary Gala in 1963 - in Wilner's view, Luce deliberately slighted Hadden to the day Luce died.

"Packed into two rooms was a crowd of rare achievement," Wilner wrote. "There were clergymen and generals, athletes and intellectuals, artists and politicians. There were opera singers and piano virtuosos, architects and cartoonists, a premier and a president. The greatest boxer of all time was there, and it didn't matter if you thought he was Jack Dempsey or Joe Louis, since both arrived."

Luce gave his final speech around midnight, but "at no point during the evening's program did Luce utter the name of the one man who had made it possible for him to stand before the crowd," Wilner wrote, referring, of course, to Hadden.

"He really owed that to his friend, and he let him down," Wilner said. "If this person can't even tell the truth about his own history, how can you trust him to tell the truth about the news? He had 38 years to get the story right."

But Luce's grandson H. Christopher Luce '72 said although he hasn't read the book, he takes offense to everything he has heard about Wilner's reading of his grandfather's persona and work. Christopher Luce said that Hadden, as Wilner discusses in the book but may not emphasize, "led a kind of risqué life" and said that if Hadden, as an alcoholic with a likely case of untreated bipolar disorder, "hadn't died one way, he would have died another."

"I don't know what purpose the author was trying to achieve beyond maybe trying to make a name for himself," the grandson said. "I happen to know the man [Luce]. He was a very confident person, and as we all know, he ran the company extremely well for the rest of his life . We do know what did happen. We don't know what didn't happen."

He said he remembers his grandfather mentioning Hadden rarely and only in passing.

Lance Morrow, a renowned essayist who worked under Luce for several years and is now in the midst writing his official biography, said he read the book and disagreed with all of Wilner's major conclusions, especially the notion set forth in the book that Luce betrayed Hadden on his death bed by defying his wishes regarding Time's direction and stock.

"To conclude that Luce was some sort of imposter is simply to reach the wrong conclusion," Morrow said. "What Wilner has done - and he's done a lot of interesting research - is he has set up what I consider a rather immature Mozart and Salieri scenario . where Hadden was this brilliant poet, this authentic American, this native genius, and Luce this strange, surreptitious kind of character in the background."

Yet John Huey, current editor-in-chief of Time Magazine, said he now admires not only Hadden and Luce, but Wilner too. On Thursday afternoon, he dined with the writer, found him to be a "bright, energetic, outspoken young man" and felt refreshed that someone of his generation was interested in exploring an old media company rather than Google.

Huey said he thinks Luce's repression of Hadden's role in the company might have been necessary to keep the workers inspired and the company afloat, but admitted that it is mostly Luce's spirit that persists among writers and editors - he said there are two portraits of Luce hanging in the Time offices, but there are none of Hadden.

He considered Wilner's book "a good read, and of course of particular interest to all of us over here," even if it happened before his time and occasionally felt like ancient history.

"I thought it was sort of the style of a classic biographer, and for somebody of his youth and inexperience he did a good job of turning out a pretty clear, narrative biography," Huey said. "I found myself self-speculating how they would have lived and how they would have worked it out."

And when Wilner self-speculates about his future, as always, he has larger-than-life plans.

"I really dream of writing a big biography that will capture an entire era and speak to international themes," he said.

On one hand, Wilner is about the details - Hadden's athletic and quirky style of writing, vivid descriptions of Luce and Hadden editing all night in the News building during the World War I, the notebook Hadden carried with him that contained his ideas for future journalistic ventures.

But something about Wilner's jet-black hair and emo glasses, his expressive style of speaking and writing and his easily lit-up eyes makes it clear to those who meet him that for Wilner, above all it is about the big picture.

"When I was writing the book, I think my writing was impacted by Hadden - his narrative storytelling, seeing the news in the mind's eye," Wilner said. "And that's why I was attracted to history: getting people to envision what the events looked and felt like, all in the service of getting across a big idea, which, in this book, is the creation of the national media."

"A fluid and talented young writer, Mr. Wilner document[s] ... that Time really was Hadden's brainchild from the start."

Time's True Progenitor — Luce’s Rival Resurrected
By David Propson
New York Observer

Time Inc. was in trouble. Two men with very different visions for its future fought for control of the company, and even as the company dipped its toe, gingerly, into new media, a big financial downturn was headed its way before the year was out. No, not 2006-things looked far worse for the company in February 1929, when the fledgling media company was also faced with the sudden death of the talented young Yale grad whose name had become synonymous with its flagship magazine. No, not Henry Luce, who would embody Time for later generations. In its formative years, Time's presiding genius was Briton Hadden, who hailed from Brooklyn Heights.

Hadden was one of those gifted sons of privilege who reaped the full benefits of the age before meritocracy. In a world where rich men's dull sons swarmed Ivy League campuses (while mute, inglorious Miltons struggled to escape the Midwest), his eccentric brilliance shone doubly bright. Hadden frequented speakeasies, wore torn sweaters to high-society functions and liked to organize baseball games as a break from intellectual labor. His stubborn refusal to be turned down for a job by New York World editor Henry Bayard Swope-"Mr. Swope, you're interfering with my destiny"-well captures both his delusions and his grandeur. Only a fatal case of streptococcal infection, which killed him at 30, interfered with that destiny, throwing control of Time Inc. to his partner, freeing him to become the Luce of legend.

Luce and Hadden were classmates at both Hotchkiss and Yale before founding Time, and though Luce excelled as a student, Hadden had him licked in everything else. "Brit Hadden,-if ever a class had one big man,-is the big man of our class," Luce wrote his father from Yale. Hadden returned the compliment, for the most part: "It's like a race," he said. "No matter how hard I run, Luce is always there." Most importantly for the two aspiring "journalists" (as they called themselves), Hadden won the editorship of the student newspaper at both schools. At Time's inception, they agreed in principle to alternate the editorship of Time yearly, but Hadden wasn't about to let Luce near his baby. So Luce concentrated on the business side instead.

Their two egos were often too much for Time's cramped quarters, and Isaiah Wilner's The Man Time Forgot is primarily a history of that rivalry. Mr. Wilner aims to restore Hadden to his proper place in publishing history-and to take Luce down a peg. He succeeds admirably in the former, but his preoccupation with the latter mars the book.

A fluid and talented young writer, Mr. Wilner became interested in Hadden while he himself was editor of the Yale Daily News. This is his first book, and it shows: A scarcity of archival sources, the author's hilariously ardent admiration for his subject ("To watch him edit was to watch Babe Ruth at the bat"), and a lack of knowledge of the era detract from an otherwise jaunty account.

Mr. Wilner's chief achievement is to document, for the first time and with evidence from Time's own archives, that Time really was Hadden's brainchild from the start. (Previous, Time-approved histories left this intentionally vague.) Hadden recruited the magazine's initial skeleton crew, determined the editorial content and undoubtedly also played the key role in pitching the idea to investors. But his real innovation was the magazine's unique editorial voice.

Time had no reporters, only contributors who distilled, summarized and interpreted reports from newspapers. Its "unique selling proposition," as we would call it today, was its organization, news judgment and pithy, almost telegraphic writing style, which came to be known as Timestyle. Hadden, a sucker for Ancient Greek, invented epithets like "the bomb-boy of Bolshevism" for colorful characters in the news. Time wrote about "pundits," "tycoons" and "socialites" (words it helped to popularize). Hadden's Homeric fetish also found fruit in Timestyle's famously convoluted grammar. "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind," jibed Wolcott Gibbs in the famous parody.

Mr. Wilner makes the somewhat grandiose claim that the snappy style that Hadden imposed on Time "transformed journalism into something new." But he didn't convince me that Time succeeded because, rather than in spite, of Timestyle. He calls the magazine's prose "easy to read" (it was not), and suggests that part of its appeal was that it "expanded the vocabulary" of the average American.

Perhaps. But journalism of Hadden's era was hardly monosyllabic. Indeed, the early 20th-century American idiom-that of Mencken, George Jean Nathan, even of sportswriters like Grantland Rice-was verbose and extravagant. Only after Hemingway did intelligent men start to write like fourth-graders.

Often, Mr. Wilner doesn't know when he's got hold of a good thing. He makes offhand mention, for instance, that Luce and Hadden took their prospectus to Mencken (whom he refers to, ridiculously, as a "celebrity journalist"). No man had fascinated Ivy Leaguers of their generation more, and the Sage of Baltimore also happened to be the most influential magazine editor of the day. What did Luce and Hadden think of him? Mr. Wilner doesn't say. The reader must look elsewhere (indeed, to books long out of print) to learn that, like most of his contemporaries, Hadden was greatly influenced by the mob-mocking Mencken.

So fond was Hadden, in fact, of the Mencken-discovered Sinclair Lewis that he would run up to businessmen on the street and shout at them: "Babbitt!" Remarkably, Mr. Wilner fails to mention this odd habit, which certainly would illuminate Hadden's skepticism about Luce's new project, Fortune. Indeed, the chief conflict between the magazine's founders came down to their attitude toward Middle America: Luce was, at heart, a bit of a Babbitt himself; Hadden was a smirking elitist who accidentally invented Babbitt's Bible.

Because Mr. Wilner never convincingly places Hadden in his intellectual milieu, the case for his "genius"-rather than his editorial wizardry, say-falls flat. Ditto with Luce's "betrayal." According to Mr. Wilner, Luce "violated Hadden's death wish"-he must mean "dying wish"-by purchasing shares in Time that Hadden had left to his family. But why blame Luce for this and not the family? Also consider what might have happened to Time had Luce not consolidated a majority interest. Condé Nast lost control of his company during the Great Depression, and as a result the great Vanity Fair was shuttered in 1936.

Certainly Luce was no saint, and Mr. Wilner does convincingly document his later reluctance to give Hadden due credit, at least in public. But Luce's work was really only beginning in 1929. He'd set out quite self-consciously to storm the citadels of power, and Time Inc. became his battering ram. Had Hadden lived, Luce might have found one elsewhere (Nast once offered to merge their two companies). But what about Hadden? Could he have kept Time Inc. afloat long enough to launch the other magazines he dreamed of? Or might he have headed to Hollywood instead-or gone insane? We'll never know.

Though The Man Time Forgot would have it otherwise, Briton Hadden remains important today primarily as a chapter in the biography of his friend and rival. Such are the hazards of fortune, to invoke another of the one-word titles that Henry Luce seemed to adore. Or to put it another way: That's life.

David Propson is a writer and editor in New York.

"[Wilner] vividly brings to life this 'tortured friendship that ignited a media revolution.'"

Giving a Forgotten Visionary His Due
By Carl Sessions Stepp
American Journalism Review

Talent sometimes emerges early and expires young. When the creative genius behind Time magazine was in grade school, he told his family, "I'm going to put out a magazine..when I grow up which will tell the truth." By high school, he was running a world news summary in the school weekly, for those "who do not find time to read the detailed accounts in the daily papers."

By 25, this man had masterminded Time magazine. By 31, he was dead, from a virulent blood infection that, in the kind of quirky twist his magazine traded on, he blamed on being scratched by a stray tomcat.

The editor in question was not Henry Luce, the visionary now most associated with Time's empire, but Briton Hadden, Luce's partner, childhood chum and lifelong rival.

"The Man Time Forgot," a first book by a young writer who like Luce and Hadden came to journalism at Yale, seeks to reclaim the limelight for the dimly remembered Hadden.

Using unprecedented access to Time archives, Isaiah Wilner contends that over the years Luce, who outlived Hadden by nearly 40 years, "repeatedly claimed credit for Hadden's ideas" and shoved his onetime partner into historical obscurity.

"Betrayal" is a strong charge, and I don't know that Wilner fully proves the case. But he vividly brings life to this "tortured friendship that ignited a media revolution."

The two were very different, Luce proper and tightwound, Hadden charismatic and saturnalian. Although they are routinely referred to as close friends, the evidence of intimacy or affection seems scant. They were longtime allies, but it's hard to tell whether they actually liked each other.

From the beginning, Hadden dominated. They met in 1913 at Hotchkiss boarding school, where Hadden outmaneuvered Luce to become editor of the paper. Luce settled for the literary monthly. At Yale, Hadden bested Luce by a single vote to head the campus daily. Luce became managing editor.

At Camp Jackson, South Carolina, the two fantasized about founding a periodical to help make sense of the news. Spared military service by the end of World War I, they soon regrouped at the Baltimore News, where they "spent their nights chain-smoking" and hatching their magazine. By 1922, they had raised $86,000 from 69 acquaintances and incorporated. Hadden was president, Luce secretary-treasurer. They agreed to rotate the editorship each year. On a coin flip to see who would edit first, Hadden won.

When Time premiered in March 1923, Hadden clearly was its driving editorial dynamo. He "told the news just as he viewed it - as a grand and comic epic spectacle..flavoring the facts with color and detail..painting vivid portraits of the people who made headlines." Hadden initiated the backward syntax that came to be known as Timestyle, the graphic compound descriptors like "steely-eyed" and "bullet-headed," and the amalgam of fact, analysis and slant. His Time covered personalities as well as events, fashion as well as world affairs, horserace politics as well as issues. It coined and popularized punchy words like pundit, tycoon, socialite, even newsmagazine itself.

Hadden also germinated the ideas that would become Life magazine and Sports Illustrated.

His eccentricities were legend. If a taxi driver didn't name Babe Ruth as his favorite baseball player, Hadden wouldn't get in the cab. But he also had a darker "wild streak" characterized by alcoholism, loneliness, melancholy and a fearsome temper. On his death, friends wondered whether his dissolute lifestyle had kept his body from fighting off the offending infection.

Hadden's death liberated Luce to flourish on his own. Wilner calls Luce "a brilliant editor," less creative than Hadden but an inspired story doctor who improved Time's writing and added depth and breadth.

Wilner also documents Luce's speedy move to consolidate power and credit as Hadden's memory faded. Although Hadden's will left his Time stock to his family with instructions that it not be sold for 49 years, Luce succeeded in gaining the stock "at a bargain basement price" within a year.

In hundreds of Luce speeches examined by Wilner, Hadden's name is mentioned only four times. Luce's son, Henry III, could not recall his father ever bringing up Hadden in conversation. In 1963, at Time's 40th anniversary celebration, Luce never spoke Hadden's name.

Whatever the complexities of their relationship, Luce and Hadden clearly fed constructively on each other. Together they changed journalism. As Time itself might write, they proved again that better than one are two heads.

"This is biography at its best and most compelling."

Time's Lost Man Behind Magazine
By Ellison G. Weist
The Portland Tribune

In the minds of many readers the name Henry R. Luce is synonymous with that of Time magazine. He is credited with creating one of the country's most popular newsweeklies.

This is a misconception Seattle native Isaiah Wilner works hard to correct in his book, The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine.

Wilner's subject is Luce's close friend, rival and partner, Briton Hadden.

Hadden and Luce became acquainted while boarding at the Hotchkiss School and cemented their friendship when they entered Yale University in 1916. Their relationship thrived in their passion for journalism and was tempered by an intense rivalry.

As teenagers they discussed Hadden's childhood dream of a "paper" that could provide a basic world report. Using articles from major newspapers for the publication , they would rewrite a week's worth of events as a single story, provide context and perspective, and in the end change the newspaper content so completely as to make it their own.

In spring 1923, the first issue of Time was printed. Within months the company was incorporated with Luce as secretary and treasurer and Hadden as president and editor.

The two men were temperamentally different. Hadden was frenetic and provocative, a hard drinker with a manic enthusiasm for work. Luce was detailed, calculating and driven by financial success.

Six years later, Time had become a hit and Hadden lay in a Long Island Hospital bed. His death of unknown causes at the age of 31 catapulted Luce into the driver's seat, and for the next four decades he did very little to dispel the notion that he, not Hadden, was the creative genius behind the magazine.

Wilner became captivated by Hadden while editing the Yale Daily News as a junior at the university. As he learned more about the man he wondered why so few people had heard of him. He was granted access to the Time Inc. archives and became obsessed with learning more about the man, the friendship and the magazine.

Readers who hope the book will be a diatribe against Luce will, for the most part, be disappointed. The story is interesting mainly because it answers two specific questions: Just who was Briton Hadden, and how did he come to be forgotten as a publishing pioneer?

The author fleshes out his subject with plenty of detailed description. This is biography at its best and most compelling.

Kirkus Reviews, starred review, Aug. 1, 2006: "Wilner's debut restores the legacy of Briton Hadden.... An intriguing and depressing tale, related with great skill and compassion."

Fortune, October 19, 2006: "Deeply-researched ... Media-watchers will revel in this."

Emonome, October 11, 2006: "First I stumbled upon the title of Isaiah Wilner's book, then I read the first paragraph from the first chapter of the book...And I was hooked. I hate it when authors do that"

History Wire, Oct. 25, 2006: "A well-researched, accessibly-written contribution.... Wilner has created a fine read.... an insightful lesson."

The Jaldous Journal, October 27, 2006: "If you love publishing, history, business and product planning, then check out The Man Time Forgot"

Book Sense: November 2006 Book Sense Notable

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