A TALENT FOR LUCK

Managing editors of newsmagazines are like vice presidents; they remain in the books, but are rarely heard from once they leave office. There was a notable exception: Henry Anatole Grunwald, who died this month at the age of 82.

Grunwald did not quite experience the Horatio Alger climb often attributed to him. His father was Franz Lehar’s librettist, and this hardly suggests the humble background of a poor boy denied his destiny. Still, the Grunwalds were Jews, thus forced to leave Vienna with very little besides their considerable IQ’s and their less than considerable savings.

Henry went to public schools, learned English by watching movies, shucked most—though not all—of his Viennese intonations, and toyed with the idea of writing for the theater. To that end, he attended NYU, where he was fortunate enough to encounter some great and motivating professors. While there, he got himself a job as copy boy at Time magazine. “I thought I’d stay for a short while,” he recalled, “because it seemed a great place to make free phone calls.”

Time turned out to be something more than that. Although he jettisoned post-graduate ambitions for a life in show business, Henry became involved in another kind of drama—the vocation of major-league journalism. He became a star writer almost immediately, and a senior editor before the age of 30. Such an elevation was all the more remarkable because during that period Luce executives tended to be Ivy League WASPS.

But at Time, talent was all, and Henry’s abilities at shaping news and feature stories could not be denied. One promotion led to another; in his early 40’s he was named Czar of the Back of the Book—Time jargon for the sections devoted to criticism of cinema, theater, art and books, plus science, behavior, medicine and other departments unconcerned with breaking news. At 45 he became Managing Editor. He confessed later that the job often came first, but the marriage to his wife Beverly, a witty writer and great social asset, was strong enough to survive the demands of office, and his three children all became achievers in their own right.

The essayist E.B. White pointed out that the truest New Yorkers are the ones who journeyed from out of town to settle in the City. Similarly, the ones most intoxicated with America are rarely the native-born; they’re the people who fled from foreign tyrannies. These emigrés cherish the benisons of liberty because they’ve experienced the desolation of life without them. From the start, Henry saw the flaws of America. But his large eyes looked deep into his adopted country, and he viewed it as a lover.

Under his aegis Time underwent enormous changes. It was an adrenal, idiosyncratic, China Lobby, conservative publication, essentially aimed at what Eastern politicians call Flyover Country. Henry turned it into an urbane, open-minded magazine with by-lines, sharp essays, pertinent criticism and tough-minded political reportage. In the Grunwald years, his publication offered the most cogent coverage of the Watergate scandal, for example, and broke with tradition with its first editorial, calling for Richard Nixon to resign. Henry wrote that one himself.   

As brilliant as it was, the Grunwald editorship could drive staffers up the wall. He was obsessed with the correct but painful notion that the good is the enemy of the best. Thus his writers were constantly urged to excel their first and second drafts, often in the small hours of the morning. Given the man’s demanding schedule, cinema, theater, book and art critics were surprised to see him turn up at screening rooms, playhouses, and galleries, those oversized, penetrating eyes peering close at objects and images. They were not surprised to see the ME’s marginalia on their writings. Henry never interfered with anyone’s judgment, and indeed had an air of benignity when he made points in the form of suggestions. Still, he was forever reminding reviewers that they had overlooked something, or that their summations could be executed with greater clarity or distinction.  Exasperating as these notes might have been, they served to improve the magazine in ways no one had predicted.

Henry’s various ascents were sometimes accompanied by setbacks: he suffered from various health problems, and he lost Beverly to cancer just when he was flying highest. The last period at Time was marked by loneliness and introspection, even when in 1979 he became the supervisor of all the Luce publications.

Upon his retirement in the early 1980’s, he should have vanished into indulged obscurity, like his predecessors. But no; that was not Henry’s way. He remarried, again happily, to the beautiful Louise Melhado, a hostess who could converse as easily with doormen as with kings. Not long afterward Ronald Reagan appointed him Ambassador to Austria. It was a delicious triumph for the exile, allowing Henry to return to the country that had given the world Adolf Hitler. The Ambassador made no secret of his contempt for the Austrian president, Kurt Waldheim, who had worn a Nazi uniform during World War II. 

Following the second retirement—this one from public life—Henry began a new career, as a writer of books. His distinguished memoir, One Man’s America, was followed by two other volumes. He had become a victim of macular degeneration; gradually his eyesight dimmed. Others hit with this disease have withdrawn from life and society. Henry became more active. He described his affliction in the stoic and oddly lyrical book Twilight (one of the things he said he missed most was the look of women’s faces). He hired a man to read the New York Times on tape, which he listened to on a Walkman while shuttling to lunches and dinners around town. Henry and Louise gave sparkling dinner parties featuring just about every notable in New York; he showed up at board meetings for the Public Library; continued to attend the Metropolitan Opera; and delighted in the progress of his children and grandchildren.

In a sense, Henry Anatole Grunwald was a fortunate man, born at the right time, rising to command just at the moment when civil rights, cultural explosions, political upheavals and international realignments profoundly altered the world. But as Hector Berlioz observed, “The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.” As events shaped Henry Grunwald, so he shaped events.

Henry's insatiable curiosity continued to the end. If his sight was gone, his insight remained; he just trained himself to look in another way. Always interested in faith, but never quite able to call himself a believer, he wrote a widely-praised novel about a Medieval Catholic girl, A Saint More or Less, which was marked by an graceful, austere style. In his last year he worked on a new book—this one about defibrillators. His life had been saved by one of those machines, and he thought the world should know more about them, their history, their inventors, their benefits.

The finale was typical of the man: elegant, warm, witty and vibrantly patriotic. He left instructions for the funeral on his computer under E for Exit, and the authorities at Temple Emanu-El followed those commands to the letter. The overflow crowd heard Haydn, Mozart, selections from Lehar and, finally, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as the American flag-draped casket was borne out. Henry Kissinger, one of the eulogists, had been a career-long friend of Henry’s even though the two refugees had many divergent views. “He had great judgment and an extraordinary serenity of spirit,” said the Secretary; “He was at peace with himself and at peace with his place in the world.” It was a lofty place indeed. We shall not like upon his look again.