Volume 39, Number 8 · April 23, 1992
Your Time is My Time
By John Gregory Dunne
To the End of Time: The Seduction and Conquest of a Media Empire
by Richard M. Clurman
Simon and Schuster, 368 pp., $23.00
Time was a glorious place to work in the years that I was there, from 1959 to 1964. I was twenty-seven when I was hired, and an ignoramus, vintage Princeton '54, with a degree in history (I had written my senior thesis on Lord Lothian, the Cliveden Set's house Christian Scientist, an appeaser, and later British ambassador to Washington at the time of the destroyer for bases deal, and never cottoned to the fact that he was also, as Time in those days would have it, Nancy Astor's great and good friend). I got my job because a woman I was seeing on the sly, Vassar '57, was also seeing George J.W. Goodman, Harvard '52, a writer in Time's business section who was later to become the author and PBS economics guru 'Adam Smith.' Goodman, I was informed by Vassar '57, was leaving Time for Fortune, which meant that if I moved fast there was probably a job open. I applied to Time's personnel man, a friend, Yale '49, and was in due course interviewed by Otto Fuerbringer, Harvard '32, and Time's managing editor. The cut of my orange and black jib seemed to satisfy him, and the $7,700 a year I was offered more than satisfied me, and so a few weeks later I went to work as a writer in the business section, although I was not altogether certain of the difference between a stock and a bond, and had no idea what 'over the counter' meant.
Review, 8239 words
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