Scenes From A Marriage

By ROBERT MANNING Robert Manning was a TIME writer, editor and foreign correspondent in the 1950s. He was editor of the Atlantic from 1966 to 1980, and now writes for pleasure.

TO THE END OF TIME: THE SEDUCTION AND CONQUEST OF A MEDIA EMPIRE by Richard M. Clurman; Simon & Schuster; 368 pages; $23

The deal to top all deals -- and perhaps the last of them -- in the mad decade of corporate takeovers and mergers was the betrothal on March 4, 1989, of Time Inc., one of the world's most influential magazine- and book- publishing companies, to Warner Communications, the flashy, crap-shooting entertainment conglomerate whose dowry included a major movie studio, Madonna, Batman, Bugs Bunny and Alfred E. ("What -- Me Worry?") Neuman of Mad. After an unfriendly suitor (Paramount Communications) made a play for Time Inc., the publishing firm bought Warner outright, producing not only the world's largest media and entertainment company but the most indebted as well (initially owing $10.8 billion, now $8.7 billion, with interest payments of $3 million a day).

Deals of such magnitude are usually rich in intrigues, soul searching, chess moves and backstabbing. These are plentifully documented in Richard Clurman's intimate, sometimes startling and occasionally amusing chronicle of the courtship and union of what was widely but not altogether accurately perceived to be two disparate American cultures. Clurman's 20 years as staff member and editorial executive at Time Inc. began when Henry Luce was still running the journalism empire he had built, and extended far enough into the company's post-Lucean transition to familiarize Clurman with the new players on the Time Inc. side of the deal.

Clurman presents them as men who, in a desire to make their company larger and raider-proof, and themselves wealthy in the bargain, began the mating dance as macho wooers. But they wound up as swooning maidens in the bed of a former funeral-home greeter and slacks salesman named Steven J. Ross, a man who showed his entrepreneurial streak by renting out idle funeral-parlor limousines and eventually built a string of companies into the Warner Communications cash machine. It stands, says the jacket blurb, as "the only 'acquisition' of its kind, in which the acquired company (Warner) took over the acquiring company (Time)."

The portrait of Ross, Time Warner's new co-CEO, is that of a smooth-talking, high-living gambling man who spins deals as easily as a spider spins webs, the kind of operator who can charm the fangs out of a snake, then peddle its skin as a belt. He is not only the most interesting character in the book but the most likable.

That is not saying a great deal. Assembled by Clurman from extensive interviews with all the principals plus considerable bird-dog reporting (including heavy infusions of unattributed quotes), the characterizations are not at all kind to the Time Inc. executives: former CEO J. Richard Munro; his successor, Nicholas J. Nicholas Jr.; the company's strategist and originator of the marriage plan, Gerald M. Levin; the business czar of all Time Inc.'s publications, Reginald K. Brack Jr.; and editor-in-chief Jason McManus.

Clurman lets them reveal themselves in their own remarks and behavior: Nicholas as a bottom-line type who lusted for the merger (and the promised job of co-CEO) seemingly at any price; Munro as a backslapping cheerleader with a bent toward the banal and the four-letter word (with a grand retirement package awaiting); McManus as a beleaguered figure striving to salvage a degree of authority over the company's magazines and some esteem from his staffers while Brack belittles them by insisting that "the marketplace," not editors and thinkers, "should dictate what a magazine should be."

They are portrayed as men so eager to consummate the transaction that they were careless about protecting what they called "the Time culture" and the company's traditional separation of "church" (the editorial content) and "state" (the business side). They did not cast even a modest glance into shadowy recesses of Ross's past, says Clurman; among the several outside members of the Time Inc. board of directors, including some high-powered business and industrial leaders, only one bothered to meet the man before the deal was made.

The book is a penetrating and, to those who care about journalism, somewhat jarring account of the nuptials. But it is also negligent and in a way unfair to Munro, Nicholas & Co. in its failure to define the situation they inherited and the alternatives open to them. By the time they took over, the company had already become more than a little bit pregnant, a condition brought about by the preceding management team, led by Andrew Heiskell and Hedley Donovan, Luce's anointed successors. It was under that team that the company moved from straight journalism into flirtation with the glitzy world of entertainment, into cable television and the pop culture-oriented PEOPLE magazine (later to be joined by ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY).

The Heiskell-Donovan team chose as their business successors men whose training was essentially in moneymaking, not communication. As the appetite for solid, sobersided journalism was increasingly eroded by television, the cultural acid rain of our time, and by growing public preference for amusement over information, it seems inevitable that the Munro-Nicholas team would travel further along a path already blazed for it: go for the gold.

Clurman found ample evidence for concluding that this odd couple, Nicholas and Ross, would not find happiness together. Almost simultaneously with the book's publication, Time Warner's board of directors, largely though not solely at the instigation of ailing Steve Ross, abruptly sacked Nicholas and installed the more cerebral, smoother Levin as Ross's new co-CEO. Does that mean the media giant will now achieve the greatness its masters predict for it? A onetime consultant to both companies tells Clurman: "The merger may turn out to be one of the most brilliant business moves in their history or the stupidest." To amend a famous parody of early TIME prose: "Where it all will end, knows God!" Or Mammon.