Walking the Halls at the Time & Life Building

Some only dropped in. Others stayed decades: boldfaced names and copy-desk grammarians, models

and moguls, poets and astronauts, porters and sculptors, golfers and architects. They were the people who filled the pages, drew in the readers, and made the money that powered the world’s largest magazine publisher during its half-century-plus run at 1271 Avenue of the Americas.

Calvin Trillin wrote for Time for several years in the early 1960s. He overlapped with another famous journalist, John Gregory Dunne, who spent five years with Time—long enough to warn his wife, Joan Didion, who started as a columnist for Life in 1970, to gird herself for the publication’s “perniciously mindless editing.” She heeded his advice and quit soon thereafter. In the early 1960s, John McPhee wrote for Time’s “Show Business” section.

In 1969, U.S. poet laureate and novelist James Dickey judged that year’s Time Inc. employee poetry contest from his home in Columbia, South Carolina. Over the years, Time restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton wrote reviews of the various iterations of the company’s employee cafeteria. She frequently complimented the prices; the food, less often. Frank Deford, who once credited Sports Illustrated with making sportswriting “respectable,” joined that magazine as a staff writer in 1962. He followed a long line of distinguished contributors including A. J. Liebling, who penned a piece on the famous Manhattan boxing gym Stillman’s; Wallace Stegner, who waxed eloquent on Yosemite National Park; William Faulkner, who wrote about the 1955 Kentucky Derby; and John Steinbeck, who delved into his interest in various sports. “Authors, Authors,” a regular one-page feature appearing in Time Inc.’s weekly in-house newspaper, FYI, chronicled recent books penned by Time Inc.-ers. In the summer of 1989, for example, it listed 14 such volumes. Among them were a biography of legendary journalist Ida Tarbell and a book of photos by one

(CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT) Frank Deford—who played for the Globetrotters’ rivals, the New York Nationals, in 1973—in the Time Inc. office; John Steinbeck, who famously penned a “non-essay on sports” for Sports Illustrated in 1965; jockey Eddie Arcaro and his interviewer, William Faulkner, at the Derby, 1955; Sophia Loren cuddling “Eisie”; Time reporter Calvin Trillin interviewing Freedom Rider John Lewis as he boards a bus for Montgomery, 1961; Alfred Eisenstaedt in the photo archives, Time & Life Building, 1986.

of Life’s original photographers, Alfred Eisenstaedt, who had 90 Life covers to his credit, not to mention his famous shot V-J Day in Times Square of a sailor ecstatically embracing a young woman. In 1961, he spent two weeks shadowing Sophia Loren for a Life profile. She called him “Eisie” and said he looked like an obstetrician.