The Life He Led

Ralph Graves, who divides his time between Sarasota and Martha’s Vineyard, is a novelist and a former longtime staffer at LIFE, the legendary weekly picture magazine that enthralled readers from the 1930s through the early 1970s. He joined LIFE in 1948 and was named its top editor in 1969. His most recent book, The Life I Led, shares some of his highly personal memories of his days at LIFE, which was launched by Time founder Henry Luce.

Harry.

Everybody called him one of two things. To the huge bulk of us, if we ever spoke to him at all, he was Mr. Luce. High-level insiders called him Harry, but only after making dead certain in their own minds that that would be permissible. Nobody ever called him Henry—except for one person, President Dwight Eisenhower…

At the time [a moment when Luce felt the major weekly LIFE article needed to be better defined], I still called him Mr. Luce. I had been an editor in the Articles Department for five years and the boss for the last two. It was the best job I had in my 35 years in the company. Not the highest ranking, but the one I liked best. I reviewed our articles and my review confirmed what I already thought and had practiced from the start. The main LIFE article could be about any interesting subject or person or story. The entire world was the subject. The very last thing it needed was a restrictive definition.

Our duel began when Luce and I met for dinner at Manhattan’s prestigious Lotos Club. He was then in his early 60s, medium-tall, trim, wearing heavy, dark-rimmed glasses under the very bushiest gray eyebrows. Luce and I argued and arm wrestled through three long, long dinners. It was good fun for us both. Every time he proposed a limitation on what the LIFE article should be, I was able to mention articles we both admired that did not fit into his restriction. “Well,” he would say, “all right, we have to broaden that a little bit.” Then he would come back with some other restriction or suggestion, always provocative, always stimulating, which I would try to counter with other good articles that shouldn’t be ruled out. The principal result of these meetings was not the definition or nondefinition of the LIFE article, but that Harry Luce and I got to know each other and had a lively time arguing together. From then on we got along very well.

Graves worked with a host of acclaimed photographers during his years at LIFE, from Margaret Bourke-White to Gordon Parks to Alfred Eisenstaedt.

One of the strange relationships at Time Inc. was that Henry Luce, an intense intellectual, got along so well with [the rather childlike] Alfred Eisenstaedt, who shot the best portraits of Luce. The explanation is that they shared an overwhelming curiosity about everything.

Eisie and I did a big color story together on the Florida Everglades. Eisie was a cheapskate. He didn’t cheat on his expense account, as a number of others did, but he took every possible advantage. If you used your own car on a story, LIFE allowed you seven cents a mile. Given this profit-center window, Eisie drove his new car all the way from New York to Florida, and his was the car we used, at seven cents a mile, throughout the story.

But this was a new car, and Eisie, very much in character, took pristine care of it. Back in the 1950s, many of the narrow little roads through the Everglades were dirt and one-track, and they threaded between trees and bushes, some of them thorny, all potentially scratchy to Eisie’s brand-new car. He would not accept scratches, even at seven cents a mile. My most indelible memory of our weeks in the gorgeous Everglades is that I am walking down some narrow dirt road, bushes on both sides, my arms stretched out wide to indicate clearance and looking back over my shoulder toward the car, shouting to Eisie, “It’s okay, keep coming.”

In the process of doing the story, we both learned the difference between an anhinga and a cormorant and a heron, and we did a lot of alligator pictures, and we knew we had to find a roseate spoonbill, as indeed we did.

We also got chiggers, those tiny, nasty red bugs that itch like crazy, worse than poison ivy. My case was far worse than Eisie’s. I think he was just a little bit jealous. Why was I, a young editor, suffering worse than he was?

Graves also had encounters with U.S. Presidents, including one memorable one with the dominating Lyndon Baines Johnson.