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 See an index of This Month in The Atlantic's History. From the archives: "Notes on the New Journalism" (May 1972) The New Journalist is in the end less a journalist than an impresario. Tom Wolfe presents ... Phil Spector! Norman Mailer presents ... the Moon Shot! By Michael J. Arlen |
Green Days and Photojournalism, and the Old Man in the Room
At Life, in the halcyon days, an apprentice reporter could encounter Henry Luce in his private elevator, and wind up with Margaret Bourke-White on assignment in the jungle by Michael J. Arlen ..... 
went to work for Life in the summer of 1952. I was twenty-one years old, just out of college (where I had majored indistinctly in Greek and Latin, and had stumbled my way through the usual writing courses), and felt that it was about time I had a job. It was June. My classmates were all being drafted, or were trying to shove themselves into graduate schools, or were getting married—often all three things at the same time. I had a rickety deferment of sorts through the Massachusetts National Guard, which I suspected wouldn't last, or last for very long. But I had a wondrous belief in my own invisibility—to the Army or to anyone else—and besides I too wanted to get married, or thought I did on the afternoon I went to see the personnel man at Life.Life was in the "old building" then—one of the original gray-slab Leggo chunks of Rockefeller Center, currently occupied by General Dynamics. There was a wood-carved Mayan bird over the main entrance, which emitted weird whistling sounds on the hour—a demented tropical cuckoo clock—and a large marble information booth in the center of the lobby, called the "fishbowl," where Time-Life people used to meet before going to lunch. I thought it all very grand. In the corridor outside the personnel office, lean purposeful men in white button-down shirts, gray trousers—striped ties loosened, shirt sleeves rolled up—strode back and forth, carrying important-looking things under their arms. Mr. Bermingham, who was in charge of hiring—and presumably firing—seemed undismayed by my lack of journalistic experience; at any rate not visibly dismayed. He said that I might eventually find a place for myself there as writer. He said that they had their own approach to journalism anyway. He asked if I had any special feeling for picture journalism. Oh yes! I said loudly, in my most positive manner. He seemed reassured, if not by much. I began work as a reporter-trainee, which is to say that I was one notch above the mailroom, and decidedly one notch below reporting. For the most part, I shuffled and sorted thousands of pictures. Life received virtually all the wire-service pictures each week, and it was my job to sort them out according to departments—National, Foreign, Sports, Medicine—and take them around to the various reporter-researchers. I'd also gather up the old pictures, for which I was given a supermarket cart; and periodically I'd make courier trips to the airports for incoming packets of film from the overseas bureaus. There were two of us on the job. Sid Paul, the other trainee, had been there first, about a week before me (since some of the men and women in this story are still at work, in a number of instances I have given them other names). He was a few years older than I—thin, crew-cutted, with a moustache, which was rare in those days. He had, clearly, substantial journalistic experience, and made it a point always to carry a reporter's notebook with him "in case something should turn up." He advised me to do the same, which I did for a few days, except that nothing turned up. Sid confided that he was on the edge of breaking "a big gangster story," although he would settle for lesser stuff in the meantime. I remember him coming in, as usual about forty-five minutes late—tossing his raincoat over the desk, joining me briefly at the picture-sorting counter. "Can you handle the pictures for a while," he'd say. "I have a story idea I want to get into Carter." Carter was the soberly efficient young man in charge of the National Affairs reporters—or Newsfront, as it was called. Sid would flail away at the typewriter for a while, then hand me what he had written. "It's the tallest TV tower in the East," Sid would say. "It's a natural for Morse. I'm suggesting they use a helicopter and try for a full page." I admired Sid Paul enormously. He knew all the ropes, all the tricks. He knew who Ralph Morse was. He could see Life stories in TV towers. Also he had a girl, and not just any old college girl—a girl called Francie, who according to Sid, was secretly very wealthy, but worked in a nightclub in order to see how real people lived. I no longer had a girl, or was breaking up with mine, and was firmly convinced I would never find another. When Sid wasn't making me feel dim with his stories about TV towers, he was driving me mad with tales of Francie. "Guess what?" he'd say breathlessly, arriving at eleven in the morning, the pictures already shuffled. "Francie told me she was going to see her mother last night, but I followed her and ... " "You what?" I said. "I followed her, and she went to a restaurant where she met this gangster, this old guy. I know he's a gangster. A big car. Rings all over his fingers. You know the type." "Oh yes," I said. Then: "I'm going to kill her," he'd say thoughtfully. "You're what?" "I'm going to kill her," he'd say. "What would you do?" "Oh, I'd probably do the same," I said. Sid picked up a couple of wire-service pictures off the Newsfront pile. "Hey," he said. "These ought to be going to Sports. They're doing a big takeout on politicians and athletes." "They are?" I said. "Sure," said Sid. "Kauffman is shooting in California." He gathered up the pictures and sauntered off. "Hi, Mait!" he called to an older rather distinguished-looking man who was walking by. Maitland Edey was the assistant managing editor, I knew that much. "Hi, Sid," said Mait. Life was a friendly, first-name sort of place, whose physical layout then was somewhere between that of a well-scrubbed newspaper office and a conservative ad agency. The Newsfront reporters worked in an open area, a "bullpen," as did the reporters in a few of the larger departments, such as Foreign and Entertainment. Writers and editors had small, wood-desk, linoleum-floor offices, which were virtually never kept closed. Sometimes, on a deadline night, a Newsfront writer might close his door. But that was only in an emergency. For the most part, the doors were always open. Everyone sauntered in and out. Everyone was pals.
n August, Sid Paul was promoted to full-fledged reporter in the Military Affairs department. We still saw each other a certain amount—lunches where Sid would fill me in on his various enterprises, and on his still tangled relationship with Francie. But clearly a professional gulf now existed between us. "Just a minute, I have Admiral Vance on the horn," Sid would say as I stopped by his office. "It's rather top secret." I had been shuffling the wire-service pictures and pushing the damn supermarket cart for three months now, and was beginning to feel depressed about it—as if I had been hired and retired without having had a job in between.Then, one day, Tom Cavanaugh, a Newsfront reporter, mentioned that he'd heard there was going to be a reporter vacancy in one of the departments. He didn't know which one. You ought to speak to Marian about it, he said—Marian being Marian MacPhail, chief of the Reporting staff, a kindly, bluff lady, daughter of Larry MacPhail, the sports impresario. I went to see her after lunch, was in fact milling around outside her office, making chitchat with her secretary, Susan O'Reilly, a serious, square-shouldered girl from California who had nearly made the Olympics in the backstroke, and trying to arrange an appointment, which I thought would be the proper way to conduct such important business. "What in the hell are you doing out there?" bellowed Marian. "If you want to see me, come in. If you don't, go away." I went on in, and muttered my information about the new vacancy. "It's in the Religion department," Marian said. "Do you want it? " It all seemed part of a subtle and ironic scheme—first the supermarket cart, now the Religion department, one of the classic backwaters of America's great weekly picture magazine. Still, it was a step up from picture-shuffling. "OK," I said. Marian looked at me. "What in hell do you want to do that for?" "Well," I said in my most mature and corporate manner, "it's a small department and I figure I'll have a lot of responsibility." I had apparently struck a key chord. "Responsibility," Marian said. "Well, I'm certainly pleased to hear that. I'll speak to Bill about it." She stood up. "It's not Newsfront, but I guess it has its merits. First, it's small all right, so you can do things pretty much your own way. Secondly, it's something Mr. Luce is interested in." She added: "I don't know whether that's a help or not." The Religion department of Life was indeed a small, a very small office, tucked away beside a lot of other very small offices on the twenty-eighth floor—the floor below Newsfront and Foreign and most of the important people. Two wood desks. One window. A bookshelf crammed with dusty books. Papers and files all tumbled about. And at the desk by the window—the editor of the Religion department, Bill Thornton. The instant Thornton and I met each other, we must have felt a mutual sense of dismay, although his I think was the more pronounced, and certainly the more plausible. Thornton was a Texan, but perhaps not most people's idea of a conventional Texan. At first meeting he seemed kindly, confused, softspoken, vaguely intellectual, and Catholic, a combination of qualities which had apparently resulted in his being stuffed into the Religion department—clearly not the flagship department of the magazine. Doubtless, Thornton had counted on his new reporter being one of the recently hired hotshots from upstairs—some enterprising, aggressive, and orderly fellow such as Sid Paul, who would rescue him from his own disorder, and rescue his department from neglect. Instead, he had me. Not yet twenty-two years old. Probably wearing my J. Press brown suit, which was several sizes too small for me, but which I had found very natty at college and now wore nearly every day to the office. My hair was fairly long, at least a good bit longer than anyone else had theirs. "I'm glad you're getting here now," he said, with obvious uncertainty. "The last fellow had to leave suddenly, and we have a big story about to close." "That's good," I said, still trying to sound positive. Thornton smiled thinly. I smiled. "I think I better tell you," I said, "that I've never closed a story before." For a moment, Thornton looked sad. Then he recovered. "Oh," he said. "Well, I am glad you told me. Yes. Well. It's pretty simple. You'll learn it fast enough. First off," he said brightly, "I need you to go and interview a couple of people." "Fine," I said helpfully. "I'd like to do that. I've never interviewed anyone before."
n the end it didn't work out too badly, although I was scared as hell about the interviews. Norman Vincent Peale was one. Billy Graham was another. And Father Robert Gannon, who had once been head of Fordham but was now at St. Ignatius on Eighty-fourth Street, was the third. Peale and Graham went OK—they were smooth old pros, and I think if a neighborhood dachshund had shown up with notebook and pencil he would have emerged with a presentable statement from either man. The story, in fact, was on the subject of preaching, and preachers. "Twelve Great Spellbinders," Life called it when it appeared. Portraits by Alfred Eisenstaedt. My job was to pick up a couple of hundred words of "background" from the three remaining Spellbinders, which could be used by Bill Thornton for his "text-blocks," which ran alongside the pictures.First, I had tea with Dr. Peale, who talked about interior goodness. Then, twenty minutes in a hotel suite with Dr. Graham, who spoke about the virtues of young people. Father Gannon was a bit more difficult, because he was a bright, impatient man, who seemed clearly more aware than the others that he was wasting his time on a young nitwit and a blathery story. Also, heady from my relative successes with the Peale and Graham interviews—at least they hadn't thrown me out—I had decided to vary and develop my newfound reportorial manner so as to give my next subject, Gannon, some of the benefits of my gifts. Thus I did most of the talking, or at any rate a whole lot of it. At the end, Gannon led me to the door. "I've certainly enjoyed our conversation," he said. A great compliment, I thought. I went back to Life and wrote it up. "What the hell is this?" Thornton said the next day. "Fr. Robert Gannon, S.J., expressed interest in your views on the ecumenical movement. Is this what I really see before me? Do I see it with my own eyes? Tell me no. Please tell me no." Thornton was evidently flipping out. I must help him more, I thought. Thornton himself went off to do another interview of Gannon, which was probably good for him, being the first time he had been out of the office on a story in several years. The Eisenstaedt pictures had already been taken, processed, contacted, printed—were lying in piles on the spare chair and filing cabinets. The story was then ready to close—that mysterious and dreaded process. "'Spellbinders' is closing tomorrow," said Thornton one afternoon. Casual. Very professional. The captain takes command of his ship. Gone were the vagueness and disorder—only to be replaced, I discovered, by a gentle malaise of anxiety and worry. The next morning we were scheduled to show pictures—with a commentary by the reporter, me—to Ed Thompson, the managing editor. Big Ed. The brusque, roughhewn managing editor from the Midwest, who had been hired a few years back to rescue Life from its too extensive dabblings in Culture and move it into News. Ed Thompson didn't give a damn about the Renaissance Man series. Ed Thompson smoked cigars all day long. He swore aloud. He had been a colonel in the Air Force. He was the best damn picture man in the country, said hotshot Newsfront reporters admiringly. "Are you sure you have all the pictures?" Thornton kept asking. "Better bring the contact sheets. Do you have the contact sheets? Do you have them in the right order?" Yes, I said. I was a bit offended by his anxiety. "What order?" he asked. I showed him. "OK," he said distractedly. Then: "You have the research, right?" "Do I bring it with me?" I asked. "For God's sake, no," said Thornton. "You're supposed know it. Look," he said, "it's very simple. We go in Thompson's office. You start spreading out the pictures. You tell him who is in the pictures. Say it's Billy Graham. You spread out the Billy Graham pictures. You tell him what Graham is doing in the pictures. You explain to him—from the research you already know—what relevance Billy Graham has to the story." "Easy enough," I said. I then stayed up half the night memorizing the research. We were going be a great team. The next morning at ten-thirty, Thornton and I went into Ed Thompson's office. It was an enormous office—model airplanes on the large desk. Award plaques on the wall. One whole wall was covered with cork, and future Life covers were pinned to it; layouts; graphs. Thompson, a large man in a shirt, sleeves rolled up, a rumpled look, a roundish face, was seated at a table beneath the cork looking through color slides. He turned around. "Hello," he said gruffly. "What do you have there?" Thornton stepped forward. "It's the twelve Spellbinders," he said, as if bearing gifts. "Jesus!" said Thompson. I was slightly in back of Thornton, holding a couple of hundred eight-by-ten enlargements. Thompson glanced at me briefly. "Hello," he said. "Let's see those." He reached for the pictures. For some reason, I held them back. Hadn't Thornton told me to spread them out? Thompson reached again. I clutched the pictures tightly. A strange expression came over Thompson's face. Suddenly I lunged forward, past him, and began spreading out my pictures over his desk. "We start with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale ... " I said. "I don't give a damn about Peale!" said Thompson. "We start with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale," I repeated. "Give me those pictures!" Thompson yelled, leaping out of his chair and grabbing at the remaining prints, which started falling to the floor between us. He sat down again. There was silence. "Jesus H. Christ!" said Ed Thompson, the best picture man in America. "Ed, if you like, I can give you a brief rundown," said Bill Thornton, who was down on the floor picking up the prints. Thompson stared at me. He was still clutching about fifty of the pictures to his chest, a prize dearly won. He started to hand them back to me, then thought better of it. "OK," he said. He seemed quite out of breath. "Just leave them here. I'll look at them later." He picked up his cigar. "Come on," said Thornton, and led me out. "You said to spread them out," I reminded him. We were back in our tiny office. One of the messengers brought in the new issue of Jubilee, the national Catholic weekly. Bill Thornton was staring moodily out the window. "Sometimes you have to be more flexible," he said. In the six months or so that I worked for him, I never got to know much of Bill Thornton. He was generally friendly and easygoing when we weren't doing anything, which was most of the time; and friendly and worried on the periodic occasions when we were called into action. "Mait needs a page and two halves," Bill would say, rushing back into the office after some late-afternoon summons from upstairs. "What do we have that's ready? Worker Priests? The Argentinian Bishop?" "How about The Prophet Jones?" I suggested. "Father Divine meets The Prophet Jones. We assigned it last week." "Golly, we did?" Bill would grab up the picture folder and tear back upstairs—then back to the office. "OK," he'd announce dramatically—Hearst's star rewrite man—"I'm set to write. Feed me the research!" "Do you want some coffee, Bill?" I'd ask, always helpful. Bill was already typing from the few pages of research onto the special ruled paper that Life writers used in order to gauge their text-blocks accurately. "I'd better not," he said. "I'm pretty stimulated as it is." It was nearly spring. I continued in the Religion department. Thornton was working, not very surreptitiously, on an original (and unsolicited) screenplay about oil wildcatters. "It's speculative, of course," he would say. "But I think it's a natural for Walter Huston." Our department was in receipt of a few scattered stories, mostly on Southern revival groups and submitted by bureaus, and was engaged long-term on a dim and grandiose scheme about the Shroud of Turin, which required extensive cabling between Don Whitfield in the Rome bureau and myself and not much else. My colleagues upstairs in Newsfront all seemed to be involved in distant and fine-sounding projects. Tom Cavanaugh was in Boston on a story about MIT. Bill Loomis had gone all the way to Detroit with Peter Stackpole, who was photographing the new car models. Sid Paul had departed for the Chicago bureau—a definite promotion. I, and Thornton, were clearly as far out of the mainstream as ever. 
hen one day I ran into Mr. Luce in the elevator. This was not supposed to happen. No one was supposed to run into Mr. Luce in the elevator. In fact, a special elevator was set aside for him, and when he appeared within the building, the elevator door would be unlocked and opened, Mr. Luce ushered inside, the doors closed, and off he would whoosh to the silences and grandeurs of the thirty-third floor. But this one day, tearing back late from lunch as usual, I rushed through the lobby, glimpsed an elevator door closing, lunged past the starter, and there I was inside, the doors closing after me, the elevator in motion, with this tall, spectacled, balding gentleman, who appeared to be scowling and staring at the floor.Presently he looked at me. Probably he thought that if he looked at me hard enough I would go away. I recognized our founder. The editor in chief. "Hello, Mr. Luce," I mumbled, or something like it, attempting to combine my best party manners with Time-Life camaraderie. "Who are you?" he asked. I told him. "Where do you work?" he asked. "The Life Religion department," I said. "Religion, eh?" he said, brightening for the first time. "Lot of big stories in religion," he said. I nodded. He looked at me. "You have any?" I don't know what prompted me to say anything at that point but no, which was the truth, not counting the Argentine priest and a nun's rock collection in Georgia. I said, quite wildly: "Yes. We're planning a big essay on the Jesuits." Luce stared again at me, and I realized why I had said it: two days ago I had come across a large photograph in the Times of Mr. Henry Luce and an important Jesuit monsignor chatting together at a theological gathering. The elevator started slowing down—my floor. Luce suddenly reached out and grasped my arm. "I'm glad to hear that," he said solemnly. "There's a great story there." The doors opened and I lurched out. "Keep up the good work!" the founder called. Back in the office, Thornton, as was his habit lately, was pacing the floor behind his desk—an area of about five square feet—declaiming tentative oil wildcatter's dialogue. There were several boxes of colored slides on my desk. "Shroud of Turin," said Thornton. "Whitfield may be onto something. Send him an encouraging cable." Thornton continued his pacing. "What do you think of the Jesuits as an essay?" I asked. "The Jesuits?" said Thornton. "What have they done lately? You have to remember that this is a news magazine." I began peering through the color slides. Thornton sat down and started typing. The phone rang. "Yes," he said. "Right away," he said. His aide-de-camp voice. He scooted out of his desk toward the door. "Ed," he said. "Probably wants to look at the Argentine priest layout. Make sure it's ready." In about ten minutes he was back. I had the Argentine priest layout ready for him. "I don't want that," he said. He seemed quite red in the face, whether from anger or excitement of some sort I couldn't tell. "Ed told me that he had just had a phone call from Mr. Luce. He said that Mr. Luce was very interested in our essay on the Jesuits. Ed, too, is very interested in our essay on the Jesuits." He paused. "Do we have an essay on the Jesuits?" I told him no. I told him what had happened. "I see," he said. "Well, I told Ed that it was 'in the works.' But I think you'd better do something on it pretty soon. You know, preliminary research. A script. They'll never assign it." I did what Thornton suggested. I read a book about the Jesuits—a quite interesting popular biography by René Fülöp-Miller, which I found in the Time-Life library. I went to one of the local Jesuit offices and obtained a lot of pamphlets which told about the various Jesuit enterprises around the country—notable teachers, picturesque seminaries. I even spoke with a couple of Jesuits—one, a solemn, smooth-talking young man who intoned endlessly about the Jesuit retreat movement, and what a help it was to businessmen; the other, an elderly, bumptious Irishman called Duffy, who had been a missionary most of his life, and spoke glowingly of good works in far-off places. "Ed asked me again about the Jesuit thing," said Thornton. "Better do the script. And play up the retreat movement. I was on one once. It was very inspiring." I wrote the script that weekend—labored over it. Cups of coffee. Torn-up beginnings. I dredged a preamble out of the Fülöp-Miller book: the historic role of the Jesuits, their importance now, and so forth. I listed the various picturable enterprises they were up to, which was difficult, since most of them involved teaching. Of Father Hagerty, the eminent Tulane astronomer, I suggested that we take him out to Lake Pontchartrain on a "moon-drenched night" (I believe that was the phrase) and photograph him beneath the stars. Of Dr. Spaulding, the California geologist, I suggested that we photograph him on a field trip in the Sierras. There were worker-priests in Philadelphia. A Jesuit vineyard north of San Francisco. A labor negotiator in Texas. I threw in a long thing on the retreat movement, which sounded deadly. Also seminaries. Toward the end—it was late at night—I remembered Father Duffy and his missions. I described Jesuits plying the shark-infested waters off Fiji in their sailing canoe. I described Jesuits hiking over the mountains of Central America, ministering to the chicle workers of Honduras. I described Father Archibald, the Alaskan missionary, taxiing his single engine Cessna across the frozen tundra. I turned it in. One copy to Thornton, another to Ray Mackland, the assignment chief. "It's certainly long," Thornton said distractedly. "What do you think we're running here—'True Adventure'? Anyway," he said, "that's done with." General silence. Cables from Whitfield in Rome expressing gratitude at our cables of encouragement. Cables from Whitfield requesting five thousand dollars in order to bribe one of the Knights of Malta. And so forth. One day, a phone call from Mackland's secretary: "Isn't there any place closer than Fiji where Father what's-his-name does, uh, you know ... ?" I said I didn't think so. Silence. One afternoon a senior editor stopped me in the hall. "I hear you have a big story going on the Vatican or something," he said. Silence. Then, one evening, one Saturday, when I was home, the phone rang. It was Marian MacPhail. "I don't know what this is about," she said, "and I certainly don't approve, but Margaret Bourke-White is flying in here Monday from California, and on Wednesday I gather you she are going to some damn place in Central America. You better get a passport and your shots."
Copyright © 1994 by Michael J. Arlen. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; August 1972; Green Days, and Photojournalism, and the Old Man in the Room - 72.08; Volume 230, No. 2; page 58-66. |
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