Posthumous Portrait

In the basement bar of the Hotel Scribe, Parisian headquarters for the Allied press corps during World War II, TIME & LIFE Correspondent Noel F. Busch met another TIME correspondent. A newcomer, hired overseas, he had never even seen his home office and he was curious about it. How, he asked Busch over a drink, had TIME ever begun, anyway?

"Well," began Correspondent Busch, "it seems that Harry Luce and Briton Hadden . . ."

"Wait," said his companion, "I've heard about Luce, but who was Briton Hadden?"

This week, in Briton Hadden: A Biography of the Co-Founder of TIME (236 pp.,Farrar, Straus, $3), Busch, a first cousin of Hadden and now a LIFE senior writer, tells what manner of man Brit Hadden was. The informal portrait, lit with humor, shows a husky, mustached young man with intense grey eyes, enormous curiosity and vitality, and a huge capacity for work, play and horseplay. In his life & time (and the extravagant, turbulent '20s were all the time he had) his impact on U.S. journalism was as forceful as any man's.

So Little Time. Almost from his birth in Brooklyn, Feb. 18, 1898, Hadden's career as an editorial prodigy progressed, according to Busch, "with the speed and directness of an arrow." As a moppet he entertained his family with such epic poems as The Mouse's Party, which ran to 142 stanzas because its author was out to outdo The Ancient Mariner. At Brooklyn's Polytechnic Prep, he put out a handwritten gossip sheet called The Daily Glonk. But he did not really want to be an editor; he yearned to be another Ty Cobb. Though an inept ballplayer, Hadden modeled his batting style and his energetic walking style after his hero, and affected a side-of-the-mouth Brooklyn accent that he thought suitable for ballplayers. Elected editor of the weekly Record at Hotchkiss School, he wistfully wrote his mother: "I'd rather get one 'H' [in baseball] than be editor of all the papers in the world."

At Hotchkiss the precocious editor found a rival to test his hotly competitive nature; in print, he was soon pummeling the writings of Henry Robinson Luce, editor of the Hotchkiss Literary Monthly. Their friendly competition turned to collaboration on the Yale Daily News, where Hadden was chairman and Luce managing editor. On graduation their classmates picked Hadden as "most likely to succeed" and Luce as "most brilliant" of their class ('20).

At Yale, and as young artillery lieutenants at Camp Jackson in World War I, they dreamed and schemed about a paper or magazine that would make the world better informed about what it was doing. "People talk too much about things they don't know," Hadden would complain. What was needed, they agreed, was a medium that would organize the chaotic flow of news so that even a man from Mars could understand it. After graduation from Yale, they went their separate ways for seasoning. Luce went to Oxford and then to a reporter's job on the Chicago Daily News, and Hadden decided to work on the old New York World for a year. When Editor Herbert Bayard Swope tried to refuse him a job, Hadden said sternly: "Mr. Swope, you're interfering with my destiny." He went to work on the World's city staff.

So Little Money. Later, during a joint hitch on the Baltimore News, Cub Reporters Luce and Hadden finished blueprinting their plans for TIME which they had begun in earnest at Camp Jackson. By stock subscriptions ranging from $500 to $20,000, they raised $86,000 and launched TIME with a staff of 25, including, says Author Busch, "three muddleheaded debutantes." The question whether Hadden or Luce was responsible for TIME, Busch concludes, "was as idle as a controversy about whether it is the steel or the flint that produces fire. Both were responsible."

In the beginning years, Hadden was TIME'S editor, Luce its business manager; later, by agreement, they switched jobs. Editor Hadden liked to liven things up by scoffing in print at advertisers' wares, tartly tell his hard-to-come-by readers in the letters columns: "Let Subscriber Goodkind mend his talk." A brilliant and painstaking editor, he emitted yelps of delight at a writer's bright phrases, and despairing grunts when his plump red pencil (a special batlike one, three-eighths of an inch thick) had to be used to jab life into dull ones. He insisted on the use of a few stock phrases ("As it must to all men, Death came . . .") as a trademark. The double-jointed adjectives and inverted sentences of the early days of TIME were tricks that he and Luce, both Greek scholars, had learned from Homer. Hadden applied them so brilliantly that the double-distilled result was hailed as a "new" style, and became TIME'S prose pattern, changing gradually as the magazine matured.

Hadden often pretended ignorance, if he thought a story unclear or inadequate. Once, reading of the death of a general, a survivor of the Crimean War, he demanded a big story and shifted into Brooklynese to tell an editor why. "It ain't duh general, it's duh war," he growled. "Tell 'em what duh Crime was!"

Gay and gregarious, Hadden preferred the company of ragamuffins to that of stuffed shirts, liked to give and go to parties, once wound one up by setting out with an air rifle for a rat hunt in a friend's apartment. While editor of TIME he still played baseball in Central Park, or got up at 6 a.m. to play catch with his apartment janitor. But he had sublimated his ambition to be a baseball star into a desire to make $1,000,000 before he was 30. He also hoped one day to own the New York Yankees, or at least to throw out the first ball at an opening game. (He made the $1,000,000.)

So Many Plans. After four years and according to plan, Luce took over as editor and Hadden shifted to business manager. There, thanks to Luce and Circulation Manager (now president) RoyLarsen, he found things in such good shape that he was bored. As one outlet for his restless energy, Hadden started Tide (later sold), partly, says Busch, for the purpose of heckling TIME. By the late '20s TIME (circulation: 200,000) was so profitable that the partners could plan further expansion. Luce had advanced the idea for FORTUNE, and in his little notebook Hadden had jotted down ideas for a handful of other magazines.

One night, Hadden went home with a cold, and it turned into a streptococcus infection that put him in the hospital. As he wasted away, Luce called on him every night to keep him abreast of TIME'S doings. Hadden, kept up by blood transfusions, still remembering the early days of the magazine, sometimes found it hard to realize TIME'S success. One evening, as Luce outlined the magazine's first big advertising campaign--to cost $20,000--Hadden asked in alarm: "My God, Harry, have we got that much money?"

A few days later, as it must to all men, Death came to Briton Hadden on Feb. 27, 1929.

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