Those were the days: on being a journalist in Paris in the '50s.

Thousands of young Americans were flocking to Europe after World War II, and I joined the throng. Late in June 1947, fresh out of college, I went to Paris, planning to stay for the summer. I stayed for 10 years.

Pourquoi Paris? Its name alone was magic. The city, the legendary Ville Lumiere, promised something for everyone--beauty, sophistication, culture, cuisine, sex, escape, and that indefinable called ambiance. "When good Americans die they go to Paris," ran Oscar Wilde's oft-quoted quip. That was certainly not my purpose in going there, but then, what was it? Perhaps, simply, Paris.

Modern European history and literature had been my major at Harvard, and my courses on France had acquainted me with the ancien regime and the Enlightenment, the Revolution, the Napoleonic era, the Third Republic and, most recently, the valiant Resistance during the German occupation. I had grappled with the works of Moliere, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire, and les philosophes, Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, Maupassant, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Zola, Gide, Proust, and postwar intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. Dabbling in art had left me with some notions about Monet, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Braque, and the Surrealists and Dadaists. I had been enchanted by such French film classics as "La Grande Illusion," "La Femme du Boulanger," and "Les Enfants du Paradis," and knew the songs of Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet by heart. Along with the rest of my generation, I had read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and smuggled copies of Henry Miller's salacious novels, and dreamed of retracing their footsteps through Montparnasse, Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and the Boulevard de Clichy. I was further gulfed by the real or exaggerated recollections of GIs and their doughboy fathers of compliant French women--the eternal Mademoiselle from Armentieres.

Air travel was then expensive, and most of us crossed the Atlantic by ship, usually third class. My friend and fellow Harvard Crimson editor, Anthony Lewis, the future New York Times columnist, wangled us passage for $50 each aboard a coal freighter bound for Le Havre. I stuffed some clothes and a supply of Camels into a rucksack and my old army duffel bag, and we sailed from Baltimore. We had been at sea for a week, idly reading and playing chess, when a radiogram advised the captain that a strike had paralyzed Le Havre and ordered the ship to Rotterdam. Both German and Allied bombing had leveled the city. I had served during the war in India and China, agricultural lands that were spared such destruction, and the scene as we docked stunned me. But it was only a prelude to the devastation I would witness elsewhere in Europe.

A Paris

The city, I noticed, had still not recovered from the war. Such essentials as milk, bread, butter, cheese, and eggs were rationed, and even resident foreigners like me had to queue up with citizens at the mairie of their arrondissement to be issued coupons by functionaries--usually cranky old women, many of them war widows. Neglected for years, public and private buildings needed repainting and other repairs. But the French were debrouillards, or manipulators. They got around by bicycle, tricycle, horse carts, rickety trucks and cars, or whatever else moved, including ingenious Rube Goldberg contraptions propelled by kerosene or charcoal engines. Men in shabby suits sported boutonnieres, while women achieved a touch of chic by adding a certain je ne sais quoi to their threadbare dresses. Everything from coffee to penicillin was available on the ubiquitous black market--for a price.

A New Job at Time

After two years as a student, I luckily landed a job as a gofer in Time's Paris bureau, whose chief, John Stanton, called me his "thin brown native boy" Despite my menial status, I was elated to be employed by one of America's top publications, and later became a correspondent. But soon I realized that its subtitle, the "weekly newsmagazine," was a misnomer. Apart from piling up profits, which it did with enormous success, its principal purpose for its founder and editor-in-chief, Henry Luce, was to propagate his personal opinions, without the slightest regard for objectivity, much less balance. A die-hard Republican, he expected Time and its siblings, Life and Fortune, to mirror the party line. In 1952 he granted leaves of absence to a number of his senior associates to help Dwight D. Eisenhower's campaign for the presidency and, following Ike's election, encouraged them to serve as White House aides. Luce defied easy definition, however. Though fiercely anticommunist, he refused to bless the GOP's opportunistic endorsement of Joe McCarthy and, from an early date, ordered his editors to denounce the demagogic senator. As an internationalist, he also rejected the isolationism of many Republicans.

If one trait encapsulated him, it was his Presbyterian zeal. The son of China missionaries, he ardently believed in America's superiority in the struggle between good and evil, and disdained countries that failed to meet his lofty standards. The French fit that mold. No matter how chic, urbane, and creative they might be, to him they were morally permissive and thus unreliable allies. Luce never imposed that view on the bureau, but it filtered down to us, and we tended to treat the French with contempt, condescension, derision, or, at best, amusement. After a while, I began to feel, a Time subscriber might conclude that, by and large, France was a degenerate nation of gourmets, adulterers, leftist intellectuals, and volatile politicians who could not prevent their government from collapsing every few months.

Luce's prejudices seldom intruded into the "back of the book" departments--Medicine, Education, Science, Theater, Art, and Books--which were admired even by readers revolted by Time's political slant. A primary goal of the magazine was to entertain--and it did. The sentences no longer ran backward until reeled the mind, as they had in its infancy: "Pleased as punch was Bobby Jones after sinking the putt" Nor were characters still depicted as "beady-eyed," "pig-faced," or "snaggle-toothed" But much of the jazzy Timestyle minted by Timeditors remained intact. Labeled "tycoons," big bankers and corporation directors invariably "strode" rather than walked into board-rooms. Hollywood executives were "moguls," whose movies attracted "cinemaddicts" A dead hero was the "late great," a mistress a "great & good friend." On the theory that exaggeration sells, a concept dear to tabloids, credibility was sacrificed to readability. Once, when I haggled over a fine point, I was told, "Don't let the facts interfere with a good story."

But whatever the magazine's idiosyncrasies, the company had transformed the traditional craft of journalism into an industry that functioned with assembly-line precision. The collegial procedure, advertised as "group journalism," was supposed to provide Time's audience with the best available expertise, compressed into simple, digestible bites devoid of troublesome nuances and complexities.

A worldwide network of anonymous correspondents would cable long and frequently authoritative dispatches to the headquarters at Rockefeller Center in New York, where they were completely revamped--and inevitably distorted--by skilled wordsmiths into a few silky-smooth, swift-paced, adjective-riddled paragraphs. Assiduous women researchers then placed a red dot over every word to indicate that it had been checked and double-checked for accuracy, yet the final product was filled with errors. Many editors spoofed the system, dubbing it "grope journalism" Frustrated, some of the brightest--Archibald MacLeish, Louis Kronenberger, James Agee, Theodore White, John Hersey, John McPhee--resigned to become prominent authors. Most of the others stayed. The pay and perks were generous, the hours short, the camaraderie congenial. A warm, benevolent paternalism also suffused the company. Staffers could anticipate Luce's condolences on a relative's death or, on the birth of a baby, a silver Tiffany porringer engraved with the inscription: "To Cathy from Harry Luce and all her father's friends at Time Inc." For hundreds of employees and their wives, the organization was an extended family; years after their retirement they would congregate at annual reunions, at which they drank and mistily exchanged memories.

Called Harry by everyone, Luce rejoiced in debate, for which even his most implacable critics respected him. After Eisenhower appointed his wife, Clare, ambassador to Rome, he often visited Paris--and the ritual was always the same. The members of the bureau would assemble in a private room at a fancy restaurant and, my lowly position notwithstanding, I was included. Luce, who dismissed food as "just fuel," sped through the meal, then guided us into a bull session. The complex nuances of a question bored him. Instead, like his magazines, he had a knack for shrinking a broad canvas to a quick sketch. Nothing symbolized Europe's postwar recovery more vividly than did the motor scooter, he once proclaimed--thereby touching off a slew of stories on motor scooters. He was the precursor of television news.

During those days, however, none of this ruffled me. I was in glamorous Paris, gaining experience and having a ball while my chums back home were striving to launch their journalistic careers in Hartford, Dayton, or Seattle.

Unlike the grind that confronted newspaper or wire agency reporters, our rhythm was cyclical. On Tuesday morning the staff of five or six correspondents and assorted assistants sank into sofas in the bureau chief's large office to bat around possible stories.

The heavy hitters usually offered cosmic ideas--"deep dish," we termed them--such as developments in the effort to integrate the European economy, or the problems of the Atlantic Alliance as a result of France's resistance to West Germany's rearmament. Unless we could dig up a fresh angle, the perils of the fragile French cabinet was stale. Groans and moans invariably greeted important but lusterless proposals, like the growing pollution in Burgundy's canals or the prospering lace trade in Brittany. By contrast, a juicy murder, particularly one involving sex, was sure-fire. Our territory ranged from Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg through Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and North Africa; and stringers in those places intermittently weighed in--though we never heard from our man in Gibraltar. We would send the suggestions to New York for approval, and the editors cabled back their preferences the next day.

The deadline for copy was Friday. Some correspondents struggled to turn out a finished piece; others, knowing that it would all be homogenized, just shoveled in whatever they had accumulated. Furiously competing for space, the writers in New York dunned us for cutesy if irrelevant factoids that would get a story into print. One of my tasks was to field their queries, and I often concocted the answers. Asked if Charles de Gaulle wore false teeth, for example, I responded, "Sources here say only molars" Anne Chamberlin, my spunky analogue at Life, was more diligent. Requested to confirm a rumor that the famous artists' model Kiki de Montparnasse had no pubic hair, she polled several of Kiki's former lovers and replied: "Some but not much."

The immense sums at their disposal enabled the editors to schedule more stories than could ever be published, which gave them the luxury of choice; but it was probably the most profligate operation in journalistic history. We would file thousands of words, only to see a miniscule fraction of them run. The "usage cable" we received every Monday contained the score. For the week ending April 23, 1952, for instance, fewer than 300 lines were distilled from 18 dispatches. To boost their morale, the authors of discards were complimented in phrases like "wonderful but killed due makeup problem" or "excellent but out-spaced" The euphemism "held for revival" meant burial in an archive in New Jersey.

Men At Work

At about noon every day, we repaired for martinis to the Crillon Bar, situated in the elegant Crillon Hotel next to the bureau. The bar was a hangout for American and English correspondents; Sam White of the London Standard did all his reporting from a telephone in his exclusive niche in the corner. Louis, le barman, was right out of Central Casting, with his patent-leather hair, unctuous smile, and flaccid handshake. From there we would go on to La Turite or Madame Albert, where we knocked off a bottle of wine each over a four-course lunch. Only our Time colleague, Fred Klein, deviated from this routine. A cranky, reclusive Swiss, he religiously ate alone at the Rompanneau, his newspaper propped against his carafe of wine. Once, when the maitre d'hotel casually remarked on the weather, Klein stalked out and never returned.

After lunch we would stagger back to the office to gather for our daily diversion--gin rummy. An obsessive gambler, Klein arranged the game. The regulars, in addition to myself, included Dmitri Kessel, the Life photographer; the head of the Life team, Milton Orshefsky; and Art Buchwald, the Paris Herald-Tribune columnist. Sometimes visitors from New York joined us, like Gjon Mili, a freelance photographer, and Emmet Hughes, a Fortune editor who was to become Eisenhower's speechwriter. Catastrophe struck in 1952, when Eric Gibbs, a priggish former British army colonel, took over as bureau chief and forbade gin as frivolous. Our afternoons dragged on morosely until one day in May 1954, when we learned that he had died of a massive heart attack while working on a story in Geneva. Klein immediately organized a game--and, as he shuffled the deck exclaimed, "Thank the Lord for our bereavement."

From the book Paris in the Fifties by Stanley Karnow, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in history. Copyright [C] 1997 by Stanley Karnow. Reprinted with permission of Random House Inc.