Robert Hughes on Journalistic Ethics

Time Magazine's legendary art critic tells how he got his job:

First, however, I had my trial run in Manhattan. AT Baker proved to be a bluff, weatherbeaten salt with an office on the 24th floor. Its perforated sound-tile ceiling bristled, porcupine-like, with red and green pencils, which he was in the habit of throwing upward to see if they would stick. They looked like something from the last Venice Biennale.

He sat me down and produced a packet of colour transparencies of the work of someone I had never heard of, a decorative artist named Felix Kelly. Baker pointed out with emphasis and regret that Kelly was a particular friend of Clare Boothe Luce, the widow of Henry Luce, Time’s founder.

Kelly was having a show in San Francisco. I would not, Baker added, be expected to fly over to see it. I could work from the transparencies, which were excellent. Mrs Luce would read my copy closely and with interest.

Felix Kelly turned out to be a stage designer whose speciality was pretty-as-a-picture late-surrealist perspectives — late Dali and eau-de-cologne — punctuated with stranded boats, Roman ruins and tottering, picturesque New Orleans–style tenements, embellished with much wrought-iron lace. I turned in 120 lines of falsely enthusiastic copy — unsigned, of course, in the Time style.

Those were the days. Mrs Luce was gratified and sent a note to Henry Grunwald urging that this new candidate be hired forthwith. And I was, at what seemed to me to be the munificent salary of $20,000 a year, plus expenses.