Those Were the Days

...The city, the legendary Klle Lumiere, promised something for everyone-beauty, sophistication, culture, cuisine, sex, escape, and that indefinable called ambiance...

...Once, when I haggled over a fine point, I was told, “Don’t let the facts interfere with a good story...

...Luce, who dismissed food as “just fuel,” sped through the meal, then guided us into a bull session...

...But much of the jazzy Timestyle minted by Timeditors remained intact...

...A New Job at Time After two years as a student, I luckily landed a job as a gofer in Time’s Paris bureau, whose chief, John Stanton, called me his “thin brown native boy...

...The French fit that mold...

...The bar was a hangout for American and English correspondents...

...Everything from coffee to penicillin was available on the ubiquitous black market-for a price...

...The sentences no longer ran backward until reeled the mind, as they had in its infancy: “Pleased as punch wasBobby Jones after sinlung the putt...

...During those days, however, none of this ruffled me...

...A warm, benevolent paternalism also suffused the company...

...Its name alone was magic...

...Anne Chamberlin, my spunky analogue at Life, was more diligent...

...The regulars, in addition to myself, included Dmitri Kessel, the Life photographer...

...Requested to confirm a rumor that the famous artists’ model Kiki de Montparnasse had no pubic hair, she polled several of Kiki‘s former lovers and replied: “Some but not much...

...and Art Buchwald, the Paris Herald-Ebune columnist...

...Asked if Charles de Gaulle wore false teeth, for example, I responded, “Sources here say only molars...

...Louis, le barman, was right out of Central Casting, with his patentleather hair, unctuous smile, and flaccid handshake...

...Nor were characters still depicted as “beady-eyed,” “pigfaced,” or “snaggle-toothed...

...Apart from piling up profits, which it did with enormous success, its principal purpose for its founder and editor-inchief, Henry Luce, was to propagate his personal opinions, without the slightest regard for objectivity, much less balance...

...Such essentials as milk, bread, butter, cheese, and eggs were rationed, and even resident foreigners like me had to queue up with citizens at the mairie of their arrondissement to be issued coupons by functionariesusually cranky old women, many of them war widows...

...A Paris The city, I noticed, had still not recovered from the war...

...After Eisenhower appointed his wife, Clare, ambassador to Rome, he often visited Paris-and the ritual was always the same...

...We would send the suggestions to New York for approval, and the editors cabled back their preferences the next day...

...Perhaps, simply, l?aris...

...A primary goal of the magazine was to entertain-and it did...

...For hundreds of employees and their wives, the organization was an extended family...

...To boost their morale, the authors of discards were complimented in phrases like “wonderful but killed due makeup problem” or “excellent but outspaced...

...left me with some notions about Monet, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Braque, and the Surrealists and Dadaists...

...A worldwide network of anonymous correspondents would cable long and frequently authoritative dispatches to the headquarters at Rockefeller Center in New York, where they were completely revamped-and inevitably distorted-by skdled wordsmiths into a few silky-smooth, swift-paced, adjective-riddled paragraphs...

...If one trait encapsulated him, it was his Presbyterian zeal...

...Hollywood executives were “moguls,” whose movies attracted “cinemaddictsl’ A dead hero was the “late great,” a mistress a “great & good friend...

...Only our Time colleague, Fred Klein, deviated from this routine...

...Sometimes visitors from New York joined us, like Gjon Mili, a freelance photographer, and Emmet Hughes, a Fortune editor who was to become Eisenhower’s speechwriter...

...That was certainly not my purpose i:n going there, but then, what was it...

...Along with the rest of my generation, I had read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and smuggled copies of Henry Miller’s From the book Oaris in the Fifties by STANLEY KARNOW, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in history...

...One of my tasks was to field their queries, and I often concocted the answers...

...Air travel was then expensive, and most of LIS crossed the Atlantic by ship, usually third class...

...Our afternoons dragged on morosely until one day in May 1954, when we learned that he had died of a massive heart attack while working on a story in Geneva...

...As an internationalist, he also rejected the isolationism of many Republicans...

...Copyright 1997 by Stanley Karnow...

...Men At Work At about noon every day, we repaired for martinis to the Crillon Bar, situated in the elegant Crillon Hotel next to the bureau...

...Unless we could d.ig up a fresh angle, the perils of the fragile French cabinet was stale...

...Once, when the maitre d’h8tei casually remarked on the weather, Klein stalked out and never returned...

...I had served during the war in India and China, agricultural lands that were spared such destruction, and the scene as we docked stunned me...

...Klein immediately organized a game-and, as he shuffled the deck exclaimed, “Thank the Lord for our bereavement...

...Unlike the grind that confronted newspaper or wire agency reporters, our rhythm was cyclical...

...In 1952 he granted leaves of absence to a number of his senior associates to help Dwight D. Eisenhower’s campaign for the presidency and, following Ike’s election, encouraged them to serve as White House aides...

...salacious novels, and dreamed of retracing their footsteps through Montparnasse, Saint-Germain-desPrks, and the Boulevard de Clichy...

...Sam White of the London Standard did all his reporting from a telephone in his exclusive niche in the corner...

...and stringers in those places intermittently weighed in-though we never heard from our man in Gibraltar...

...Despite my menial status, I was elated to be employed by one of America’s top publications, and later became a correspondent...

...Men in shabby suits sported boutonnikres, while women achieved a touch of chic by adding a certainje ne sais p o i to their threadbare dresses...

...On Tuesday morning the staff of five or six correspondents and assorted assistants sank into sofas in the bureau chief‘s large office to bat around possible stories...

...Nothing symbolized Europe’s postwar recovery more vividly than did the motor scooter, he once proclaimed-thereby touching off a slew of stories on motor scooters...

...I was further gulled by the real or exaggerated recollections of GIs and their doughboy fathers of compliant French women-the eternal Mademoiselle from Armentitkes...

...By contrast, a juicy murder, particularly one involving sex, was surefire...

...Reprinted with permission of Random House Inc...

...After a while, I began to feel, a Time subscriber might conclude that, by and large, France was a degenerate nation of gourmets, adulterers, leftist intellectuals, and volatile politicians who could not prevent their government from collapsing every few months...

...I stayed for 10 years...

...Luce never imposed that view on the bureau, but it filtered down to us, and we tended to treat the French with contempt, condescension, derision, or, at best, amusement...

...For the week ending April 23, 1952, for instance, fewer than 300 lines were distilled from 18 dispatches...

...The collegial procedure, advertised as “group journalism,” was supposed to provide Time’s audience with the best available expertise, compressed into simple, digestible bites devoid of troublesome nuances and complexities...

...But the French were dibrouillards, or manipulators...

...The complex nuances of a question bored him...

...I had grappled with the works of Molikre, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire, and les philosophes, Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, Maupassant, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Zola, Gide, Proust, and postwar intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus...

...Some correspondents struggled to turn out a finished piece...

...Staffers could anticipate Luce’s condolences on a relative’s death or, on the birth of a baby, a silver Tiffany porringer engraved with the inscription: “To Cathy from Harry Luce and all her father’s friends at Time Inc...

...Called Harry by everyone, Luce rejoiced in debate, for which even his most implacable critics respected him...

...but it was probably the most profligate operation in journalistic history...

...Frustrated, some of the brightestArchibald MacLeish, Louis Kronenberger, James Agee, Theodore White, John Hersey, John McPheeresigned to become prominent authors...

...From there we would go on to La Turite or Madame Albert, where we knocked off a bottle of wine each over a four-course lunch...

...Furiously competing for space, the writers in New York dunned us for cutesy if irrelevant factoids that would get a story into print...

...Dabbling in art had...

...Groans and moans invariably greeted important but lusterless proposals, like the growing pollution in Burgundy’s canals or the prospering lace trade in Brittany...

...Our territory ranged from Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg through Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and North Africa...

...He was the precursor of televii ;’i on news...

...Modern European history and literature had been my major at Harvard, and my courses on France had acquainted me with the ancien regime and the Enlightenment, the Revolution, the Napoleonic era, the Third Republic and, most recently, the valiant Resistance during the German occupation...

...Many editors spoofed the system, dubbing it “grope journalism...

...But whatever the magazine’s idiosyncrasies, the company had transformed the traditional craft of journalism into an industry that functioned with assembly-line precision...

...years after their retirement they would congregate at annual reunions, at which they drank and mistily exchanged memories...

...Instead, like his magazines, he had a knack for shrinking a broad canvas to a quick sketch...

...The son of China missionaries, he ardently believed in America’s superiority in the struggle between good and evil, and disdained countries that failed to meet his lofty standards...

...The members of the bureau would assemble in a private room at a fancy restaurant and, my lowly position notwithstanding, I was included...

...We had been at sea for a week, idly reading and playing chess, when a radiogram advised the captain that a strike had paralyzed Le Havre and ordered the ship to Rotterdam...

...Late in June 1947, fresh out of college, I went to Paris, planning to stay for the summer...

...Though fiercely anticommunist, he refused to bless the GOP’s opportunistic endorsement of Joe McCarthy and, from an early date, ordered his editors to denounce the demagogic senator...

...They got around by bicycle, tricycle, horse carts, rickety trucks and cars, or whatever else moved, including ingenious Rube Goldberg contraptions propelled by kerosene or charcoal engines...

...Most of the others stayed...

...My friend and fellow Hamard Crimson editor, Anthony Lewis, the future New York Times columnist, wangled us passage for $SO each aboard a coal freighter bound for Le Havre...

...We would file thousands of words, only to see a miniscule fraction of them run...

...The heavy hitters usually offered cosmic ideas“deep dish,” we termed them-such as developments in the effort to integrate the European economy, or the problems of the Atlantic Alliance as a result of France’s resistance to West Germany’s rearmament...

...THOSE WERE THE DAYS On being a journalist in Paris in the 50s BY STANLEY KARNOW THOUSANDS OF YOUNG AMERICANS were flocking to Europe after World War 11, and I joined the throng...

...When good Americans die they go to Paris,” ran Oscar Wilde’s oft-quoted quip...

...A die-hard Republican, he expected Time and its siblings, L$e and Fortune, to mirror the party line...

...Neglected for years, public and private buildings needed repainting and other repairs...

...The deadline: for copy was Friday...

...others, knowing that it would all be homogenized, just shoveled in whatever they had accumulated...

...But soon I realized that its subtitle, the “weekly newsmagazine,” was a misnomer...

...An obsessive gambler, Klein arranged the game...

...The immense sums at their disposal enabled the editors to schedule more stories than could ever be published, which gave them the luxury of choice...

...Pourquoi Paris...

...The euphemism “held for revival” meant burial in an archive in New Jersey...

...I was in glamorous Paris, gaining experience and having a ball while: my chums back home were striving to launch their journalistic careers in Hartford, Dayton, or Seattle...

...Luce’s prejudices seldom intruded into the “back of the book” departments-Medicine, Education, Science, Theater, Art, and Books-which were admired even by readers revolted by Time’s political slant...

...I stuffed some clothes and a supply of Camels into a rucksack and my old army duffel bag, and we sailed from Baltimore...

...A cranky, reclusive Swiss, he religiously ate alone at the Rompanneau, his newspaper propped against his carafe of wine...

...the head of the Life team, Milton Orshefsky...

...Both German and Allied bombing had leveled the city...

...Assiduous women researchers then placed a red dot over every word to indicate that it had been checked and double-checked for accuracy, yet the final product was filled with errors...

...But it was only a prelude to the devastation I would witness elsewhere in Europe...

...Labeled “tycoons,” big bankers and corporation directors invariably “strode” rather than walked into boardrooms...

...The pay and perks were generous, the hours short, the camaraderie congenial...

...On the theory that exaggeration sells, a concept dear to tabloids, credibility was sacrificed to readability...

...The “usage cable” we received every Monday contained the score...

...Luce defied easy definition, however...

...After lunch we would stagger back to the office to gather for our daily diversion-gin rummy...

...No matter how chic, urbane, and creative they might be, to him they were morally permissive and thus unreliable allies...

...Catastrophe struck in 1952, when Eric Gibbs, a priggish former British army colonel, took over as bureau chief and forbade gin as frivolous...

...I had been enchanted by such French film classics as “La Grande Illusion,” “La Femme du Boulanger,” and LLLeEsn fants du Paradis,” and knew the songs of Maurice Chevalier a.nd Charles Trenet by heart...