The End of the Great Adventure

To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events--to see strange things--machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man's work--his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away; things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed. Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind.

QUOTED countless times through the years, the prospectus--written by Henry R. Luce in 1936--still best expresses the beat of LIFE. That beat will be stilled with the year-end special issue of Dec. 29. But its contribution to the history of journalism remains.

The announcement came after continuing losses--some $30 million since 1969. In the face of soaring costs, why did LIFE continue to publish for four unprofitable years? At a valedictory staff meeting, Hedley Donovan, editor in chief of Time Inc., gave the reason: "We persevered as long as we could see any realistic prospects, within a reasonable time span, of a turn-around in LIFE's economy." Those prospects were extinguished this fall with melancholy prognoses for decreased circulation and advertising pages. These, coupled with postal-rate increases (amounting to 170% over five years) made the end inevitable. At the meeting, the last of LIFE's six managing editors, Ralph Graves, announced his assignment was to help place LIFE employees in other jobs. But he warned, "I won't pretend that any place else is going to be like what we shared together at LIFE."

Shared was the operative word. It applied to the LIFE staff, which was held together by an extraordinary esprit de corps, and it applied to the readers, who had a sense of common participation in human events that nothing else could provide--until the advent of TV. From the start, LIFE took hold of the imagination. Its editors could have been content to let it remain a national scrapbook, but at its heart there was an animal curiosity. As Photographer John Dominis said, "You worked closely with people, individual friends, for three or four weeks, perhaps sometimes three or four months, on a story. They became almost like wartime buddies."

In the weekly battle journalists became something else--students of a new medium. Each week, as they came from their mailboxes or newsstands, Americans experienced the powerful after-effects of a new art called "photojournalism." After LIFE, the Sinclair Lewis mid-American territory of Main Street, insulated and uninformed, passed into fiction forever. Said a first-grade teacher in Cleveland last week: "I remember cutting out the photographs when I was a child and bringing them into school to my teachers. And as a teacher I brought LIFE into the classroom and had the children cut out photographs. It was a teaching tool."

Other national magazines, notably the Saturday Evening Post, provided entertainment and information, but LIFE brought the world home with an immediacy that made the head spin: close-ups of leaders like Hitler and Stalin, Gandhi and Churchill, men who would never again be remote; color plates of modern paintings; the adventures and explorations of science and faith. And, of course, a classic parade of the world's most beautiful women. Sometimes LIFE was criticized for the shock effect of its juxtapositions: the Sistine Chapel right up against a bosomy starlet, Arnold Toynbee alongside Milton Berle. But that was part of the captivating mixture--LIFE at its most lifelike.

In 1938, when the magazine showed a sequence entitled "The Birth of a Baby," LIFE was banned in 33 American cities. A year later, the world was not so easily disturbed. The holocaust in Europe screamed in the headlines and on the radio, but it was to LIFE that millions turned for the full report. There they saw pictures that seemed to enter the collective unconscious: Robert Capa's photograph of a bullet-stricken Spanish Civil War soldier, for example, was a contemporary Goya.

LIFE was the first publication during World War II to show a picture of American dead--a soul-searing photograph of three soldiers lying on the beach at Buna after the invasion. A quarter-century later, the magazine brought another war home: in its pages were the unlined faces of 217 of 242 Americans killed in Viet Nam during the single week of May 28-June 3, 1969. LIFE mourned its own: Capa, unscathed in Spain and in World War II, was killed in Viet Nam by a land mine; Paul Schutzer was shot during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War; Larry Burrows was reported missing last year when his helicopter disappeared in Laos. "Though we did not plan LIFE as a war magazine," Luce had recalled ruefully, "it turned out that way."

Yet LIFE was celebrated for far more than its presence in battle zones. With enormous panache, its editors sent oversized crews to every capital and backwater of the world, searching for the Big Story. By 1953, only five expeditions had reached the massive summits of the Mountains of the Moon in Central Africa; LIFE Photographer Eliot Elisofon's was one of them.

No man had ever set foot on the nine-mile-long island of floating ice at the North Pole--until an Air Force crew set down with standard equipment: rations, shelter and LIFE Photographer George Silk. To cover one papal ceremony, LIFE deployed nearly 100 staff members. For the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, LIFE's editors set a publishing record by rushing color coverage to its readers "only ten days after the event took place in London."

Budgets were large, readers and advertisers rapt, enthusiasm unbounded. Always the magazine echoed Joseph Conrad's obsession, "Before all, to make you see." No event escaped notice; Eric Sevareid of CBS recalled too many times when he had gone for an "exclusive" only to find a LIFE journalist before him. Said he: "I've rarely worked or competed with a LIFE correspondent who wasn't first class at his job."

Yet LIFE's editors were never content with mere news. Early in the magazine's history, Alfred Eisenstaedt helped establish a new art form: the photo essay. Those essays are now acknowledged as masterpieces of their genre: W. Eugene Smith's study of life and death in a Spanish village, Gordon Parks' unflinching closeups of a slum family in Rio de Janeiro, Leonard McCombe's portrait of the career girl.

Showplace. Nor was this enough. By the '50s, LIFE had grown big enough to tell a joke on itself: I'm a writer for LIFE. Really? I'm a photographer for the Reader's Digest. In truth, the magazine had been a showplace for fine writers for more than a decade. Now, it had a fan letter from the Papa of them all. "I'm very excited about the book and that it is coming out in LIFE," said the letter. "That makes me much happier than to have a Nobel Prize. To have you guys being so careful and good about it and so thoughtful is better than any kind of prize." Ernest Hemingway would wait two years for the Nobel: the guys made The Old Man and the Sea a part of literary history in LIFE's Sept. 1, 1952 issue.

Papa was preceded, and followed, by other men of letters, including Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, James Michener, Norman Mailer and James Dickey. Winston Churchill chose LIFE to publish his memoirs, and so did Harry S. Truman, the Duke of Windsor, Charles de Gaulle and Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur. It was with these memoirs that LIFE underlined its growing concern with the lessons of history.

At last week's farewell meeting, Andrew Heiskell, chairman of the board of Time Inc., told the staff: "I would like to just remind you of the things you can be proud of." His list included "the courage and talent of the photographers" as well as "a sales force that had the ability to sell 3 1/2 billion dollars of advertising." Most significant perhaps it included LIFE's determination to bring art and science to the public. LIFE's Picture History of Western Man was once described by Francis Henry Taylor, late director of New York's Metropolitan Museum, as "the most brilliant synthesis of history that a modern publisher has ever undertaken."

Influence. The series, The World We Live In, explored space long before Alan Shepard, reached backward into prehistory for "The Earth Is Born," and sang of the earth's treasures in "Woods of Home" when ecology was an uncelebrated concept. A scrupulous series, the World's Great Religions, was praised by scores of religious leaders. These great series became the cornerstones of a major publishing phenomenon, TIME-LIFE Books. These continuing volumes now assure LIFE a measure of survival. In Hedley Donovan's phrase, "LIFE will go on in many ways and places, not least in its influence on the other magazines and books of Time Inc."

LIFE's final years were journalistically spectacular. One prime example: an investigative series on Abe Fortas resulted in his withdrawal from the Supreme Court. First and last, science enjoyed LIFE's most extensive and memorable coverage, from the birth of that controversial baby to Lennart Nilsson's incredible photography (1965) of a life before birth. Ironically it was scientific explorations that helped to close LIFE. For once a satellite flew, pictures could be swiftly bounced from one part of the world to another. Ten days to bring back the coronation in color? Ten nanoseconds for the next one, beamed to TV sets anywhere on earth.

The Kennedy funeral that welded a nation for a few indelible days, the hoopla of election campaigns, the miracle of a moon landing--all these events were given an instant presence that no magazine could hope to duplicate. Yet, television is not quite photojournalism after all. There is something missing from even the finest TV coverage: perspective, among other things, but the subjects of that prescient phrase, the "shadows in the jungle and on the moon," linger on the page long after they have left the screen or the retina.

In recent years, television's competition for reader attention and the advertising dollar grew ever more formidable, and there was tough competition for magazines of more sharply defined audiences. Look, which appeared as a frank imitation two months after LIFE, shrank its biweekly circulation from 7,750,000 to 6,500,000, and concentrated on metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, it folded 14 months ago.

LIFE's problems were special. Its large page size meant high paper and postage expenses. Closing a picture magazine with heavy use of four-color engravings on a fast weekly schedule was especially expensive. In late 1970 LIFE changed its publishing strategy. Circulation was reduced from 8,500,000 to 5,500,000. At the same time the effective subscriber price per copy was raised by discouraging cut-rate subscription offers. To cut expenses the LIFE staff was substantially reduced.

Editorially, all sorts of ideas were considered for transforming LIFE into something else. But the example of the Saturday Evening Post's disastrous metamorphoses was too close. As Donovan put it last week, such transformations "in midflight" are nearly always impossible; still, "really exciting ideas for something that LIFE might have changed itself into may still be very exciting ideas for a new magazine."

In the ebb and flow of the marketplace, many new publications are doing very well, including Time Inc.'s three-month-old MONEY. Yet nothing will quite take the place of LIFE, and there will be an incalculable sense of loss when its last issue hits the stands. Last week Poet James Dickey echoed millions of Americans when he said, "I can't begin to calculate all the things I have learned from LIFE. I'm not quite the same person I was because of what I saw and read in its pages." The New Yorker's managing editor, William Shawn, mourned a personal loss: "LIFE invented a great new form of journalism. It contributed much to the American community that was valuable, often reaching moments of brilliance and beauty. It's extremely sad to see it go; LIFE was a triumph from beginning to end."

A comment Henry Luce made in the late 1930s in the first flush of LIFE's triumph may have been the most prophetic obituary. Longtime colleagues remember the founder gazing at his new success and musing: "The other magazines, like TIME and FORTUNE, are enduring; they have a permanence about them. LIFE might only last 20 years. It is based on new technology, paper technology, photographic technology. Every issue of LIFE is like bringing out a new show on Broadway." Even the long runs have to close some Saturday night.

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