Whatever Happened to Time Inc.?

Twenty-four years ago this week, I went to the Time & Life Building, at Rockefeller Center, and took the elevator to the wood-panelled thirty-fourth floor. There, I interviewed N. J. (Nick) Nicholas, Jr., who was Time Inc.’s president, and Gerald Levin, who was then Nicholas’s little-known sidekick. A few days earlier, the two of them had agreed to merge the publishing company, co-founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, with Warner Communications, the Hollywood entertainment company that was controlled by Steve Ross, a street-smart New Yorker who made his first fortune operating funeral parlors and parking garages.

At the time, you may recall, Time and other media companies felt besieged. During the previous few years, Rupert Murdoch had bought Harper & Row, his great rival Robert Maxwell had nabbed Macmillan, Bertelsmann had purchased RCA Music, and Sony had acquired CBS Records. “We see Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, Bertelsmann, and Sony coming into our market and raising hell,” Richard Munro, Time’s chairman, said in announcing the merger. “We see this as an opportunity for an American company to get competitive.” Nicholas expanded upon the same theme. “There will emerge on a worldwide basis, six, seven, eight vertically integrated entertainment conglomerates,” he told me. “At least one will be Japanese, probably two. We think two will be European. There will be a couple of American-led enterprises, and we think Time is going to be one.” Levin backed up his boss: “This is not a transaction done for the purposes of 1989, or even the nineteen-nineties,” he said. “It is for us to be positioned for the next century.”

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