Abstract
This engaging chronicle of a reporter’s metamorphosis neatly dovetails his 8-year career at LIFE and the demise of the magazine itself in 1972.
What LIFE Story contributes to the history of print media is a riveting slice of a journalist’s daily grind during one of America’s most politically volatile periods.
Had it been published shortly after LIFE folded, Gerald Moore’s story might have served as a cautionary tale for newspapers. For this reader, it raises questions about the diminishing influence of print journalism in the wake of faster, image-heavy competition: Why didn’t editors at the nation’s major metro dailies pay more attention to how LIFE fell vulnerable to televised news? Were they in denial?
To read LIFE Story is to recognize this once preeminent picture magazine as the proverbial canary in the coal mine of mass media.
Moore’s focus, rife with candid accounts of newsroom battles and deadline drama, shifts back and forth between his newspaper career and his eventual role as intimate witness to LIFE’s precipitous fall.
For a former newspaper reporter who came of age shortly after Moore did, this book evokes rich memories of my own stories with a notebook in one hand, a BIC pen in the other, and a single-lens reflex camera hanging around my neck.
In 1966, when the Watts section of LA exploded in race riots, Moore and his LIFE photographer took to the streets of the ghetto every day. They interviewed key players, the community radicals and grassroots organizers, and the angry young men and outspoken politicians, helping to produce vivid portraits in text and images that flashed across 26 of the magazine’s big pages.
A 1967 Presidential candidate, U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy, and movie actor Walter Matthau were subjects of his profiles. He partied with such famous bylines as Nora Ephron, Jimmy Breslin, and Gloria Steinem.
Meanwhile, he notes, his personal life was unraveling. He was drinking to excess and his second marriage fell apart.
His compelling quest for recognition starts in the desert Southwest, where he launched his career as a print journalist. From there, it rambles to the magnetic frenzy of New York.
“In May 1963, feeling both despair and panic about all the life decisions ahead,” he writes, “I sold my beautiful pale-green Volkswagen bug and used the proceeds to finance a summer program at the National University in Mexico City.”
He returns to New Mexico homeless, jobless, and without any prospects. A year later, he lands a daily newspaper gig, and in remarkably short order finds himself on the staff of LIFE.
Moore’s narrative arc drives the story: a serendipitous climb from the relative obscurity of Albuquerque, first as a police officer, then as a US$72.50-a-week reporter, and finally to national prominence as LIFE bureau chief and editor.
Determination, writing ability, and a nose for news impress his editors. He quickly moves from the chore of rewriting press releases to entertainment critic to county beat reporter.
“My mind was on New York and national journalism,” he writes.
Half a century before the digital revolution, Moore’s tools of the trade—a Smith-Corona typewriter, landline phones, and a Kodachrome-loaded Nikon—speak of another era.
Moore writes with a candid sensitivity about his personal and professional life. Whether it’s his wives (he was twice married) or his editors, Moore feels compelled to dissect relationships that guide his decision making. After earning the grudging respect of his hardboiled newspaper editor with an expose of corrupt justices of the peace, ambition leads him to moonlight as a stringer for LIFE. His growing desire for prestige and a bigger paycheck closes the door on newspaper reporting and opens another to the glamor of a national magazine.
America’s preeminent magazine for photojournalism hired him for a full-time gig covering arts and entertainment. The close-up lens of Moore’s memoir is limited to his own success at the magazine. He reported on LSD’s Timothy Leary, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
After Henry Luce bought LIFE in 1936, the magazine developed a reputation for stunning quality by publishing works of Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, among others, and highly acclaimed photographers. LIFE won the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s National Magazine Award in 1967, and once enjoyed more than 8 million readers.
But LIFE’s editors scrambled in vain to keep their old ship afloat.
He writes, Through the 1950s and early 1960s, LIFE held its own but television news grew better and better at covering important news and getting film on the air within hours of an event. Sadly, LIFE and television were competing for the same audience—people who bought mass-market consumer goods: cars, toothpaste, cigarettes, shampoo, booze.
In 1970, the magazine lost US$10 million and reduced its news hole by more than 20%, an especially disturbing turn of events for Moore as the Vietnam War expanded to Cambodia, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State students, and police killed demonstrators down South.
When he resigned months before LIFE’s final issue, there were no regrets. “It had been a great run,” he writes of the magazine’s bittersweet final days. “I had met fabulous people both as colleagues and as subjects in the stories . . . I had accomplished my ambition.”