BLAIR INTERVIEW - PART II

WASHINGTON ISLAND, WISCONSIN -

BLAIR INTERVIEWS -   This is the second part of several installments of a taped interview from February 1994 with Clay and Joan Blair.   In Part I, Clay had taken a position with Curtis Publishing after having been a Washington correspondent for Time Magazine.   Despite efforts to right the ship, Curtis Publishing was about to go under, and Clay had become greatly disillusioned with the corporate situation.   He had already worked on fiction, and now he was anxious to get back into writing.  -  DP



PART II

I had left Curtis with a parachute – a brass parachute -   but with enough funds to write a

book.  And so, I went back to where I had left off in 1949, with notes, to write a novel.  

I had started out at Columbia, then went into journalism, then I decided to come back to that and write a novel.   And a lot of publishers were anxious for me to write about Curtis, the sinking of the Saturday Evening Post and all of that.  I did.  I wrote a novel called The Boardroom, which was published by Dutton in 1969. 

The publishing company died instantly after it was published.   I started this novel.   In the middle of it I moved back to Washington, in 1967.  I worked on this novel in Greenwich for about two years.  I had a difficult time with it, then I moved back to a Washington DC suburb, Potomac, MD, still working on the novel. 

 

I had tremendous difficulty distancing myself from the chaos and the likes of Curtis Publishing to write a book about it, to get separation from the subject.  So, I was leading a very reclusive life, working on this novel.   I needed a typist.  I had a typist in Greenwich, and I had to go find a new one.  

That’s where she comes in!   (Refers to Joan, who is also present.)

Q - The difficulty you had was primarily because of the closeness?  

Having the deadline removed also made a difference.   First, I wrote just for my own self and records, a complete non-fiction book about Curtis, a long document in around 1965-66.  I didn’t publish that book.  One of the provisions that I had in my brass parachute was that I wouldn’t write about it.  

So I did write about it, but didn’t publish it.  The novel came as a made up story. Curtis was still limping along.  They had done all of the things I had recommended, selling the paper mills.   Now, they were broken up, bought out by other publishers, each of the magazines.   The whole company was broken up piece-meal.   This was my program, put into effect much too late.  Maybe we would have had a chance, maybe not.   In any case, I was sitting in Greenwich as the thing was going down the abyss.   The novel wasn’t contractually prohibited, a fiction book, so I knew I could do this.   I filed away the non-fiction account, which is now with my papers in Wyoming.  

When I was at Curtis, even before, I had copies of my files, and then the stuff from Curtis.  All of my correspondence.  I ran a study group on how to dismantle the company.   Hundreds and hundreds of documents, and all these books I wrote.  All my papers, 257 boxes.  All the Army stuff has gone to the U.S. Army Military History Institute, at Carlisle, PA.   The army papers are there.  We did three army books.

The other books are at the American Heritage Center at Laramie, WY, 82701.    Mostly (the Laramie Center) had to do with Western stuff, native American, Wyoming books, mining, and so on.  An incredible place.  It is a museum archives.   They have the papers of a lot of journalists, Hugh Downs.   They also have ADM Kimmel’s papers from Pearl Harbor.   At one point, they embarked on mid-century journalists.   And that’s how I got there. 

I was moving, and said, “I’ve got to get rid of this stuff,” when, sure enough, the phone rang.  Would you leave your papers to the university, and I said, I sure would. And we’ve been sending our papers to them ever since.  People have used our papers, but we’ve never been there ourselves. 

Q - We’ll back up a bit to where you needed a typist.

Joan -    I had graduated from college in 1951 from Washington Univ.  (St. Louis), and I was recruited by the CIA.  I was recruited and went to Washington for about six months, and they sent me to Japan, where I met and married David (first husband), who was also in the CIA.  

We were there about two years and came home in the summer of ’54, I’d guess, then we went to Holland for three years.  Then in 1961 back to Japan for about 2 ½ years. Then we were in Hong Kong for about three years.   Then in ’66 we came back to the states, to Washington.  We had a house in McLean, VA.  When we came back the last time, David went to Viet Nam.  I suddenly realized I wanted a divorce, and I came up to the island with the kids, and I told Daddy I wanted to get a divorce.

I went back to Washington, and I needed to get a job - needed to learn typing.   And a friend said she had a friend who was a writer and he needs somebody to type his manuscripts.   So I really did start out as a typist.  That’s how that started.   It was the Boardroom novel.

Clay -  To complete the link-up, we both got divorced, moved in 1968 to Washington, by which time we finished The Boardroom.  Joan was very interactive with the ideas, the collaborative efforts, even though her name wasn’t on the cover, not at first.

Q – What about research?  

Joan - The Archbishop we did from analysis, the newspapers, not a whole lot of research. 

Clay -   When I was in Greenwich, I got plugged into this dissident faction of the Catholic church, a strong liberalization where Pope John XXIII, the Vatican, liberalized the church, and I was deeply involved in all sorts of movements at this time, and it was reflected in the things I did at the time at the Post.  Things like Montessori that was really an outgrowth of the liberal church.   Montessori, as opposed to the traditional Catholic parochial school.   And so I had known a lot of dissident priests in Greenwich that had been in combat with the Vatican for promoting liberalization issues.

Of course, I was a Catholic – a disenchanted Catholic – and this book, The Archbishop, had a lot of that in it.    I drew on all that stuff I’d been involved in.  

Joan  -  We’d try to think up plot lines of things we could write about.   Then, a few months later, we’d read in the papers - there it was - the things we thought were so far out.  

Q - Why did you depart from the successful current event, popular subject matter?   Why didn’t you stay with that, the topical novel, and go into the technical, historical writing?

Clay - I wrote a non-fiction first about Curtis, then worked for about a year on the childhood, teenage years…then The Boardroom.   The Archbishop was the next project, also quite topical.  There was quite a deal going on in Washington, an open revolt, a dissident priest element there, too. 

Joan -  Then while you were doing that, the James Earl Ray thing was going on, and we would go off and work on the James Earl Ray thing.

Clay  - Really?  In the middle of The Archbishop? 

We were in Washington when the James Earl Ray thing was going on.  This was a non-fiction project.   We were asked to cover the trial.  

 

Joan  - They wanted an instant book. 

Clay -   No, they wanted the trial, and preliminary to the trial we started doing research on his life.  And the background for the trial research about the mid-west, his friends, the prisons and all of that.   And at the trial in Memphis or wherever that was.  And there was no trial.   He pled guilty at a hearing. 

 

So we had all this research, but no place to go, and so the publisher said, “Let’s see what you’ve got.” And that’s how we published the book.  I used the publisher’s office, and, quite literally, wrote it there in ten days.   It’s just a question of sitting down and writing it.  Put the trial transcript in the back.   An instant book.

(tape:    February 8 - side #2)

Joan -  But I was never in Memphis. 

 

Clay -  It did alright, made a little money. 

Joan -  It was right in the middle of The Archbishop book.   For Bantam World.    That’s when World died. 

Clay - They presold the paperback, and it farmed out to the hardback, subsidized the hardback.  World collapsed in bankruptcy, and that book barely got published in hardback. 

 

Joan -  That woman who ran the book store sold lots of copies, she just loved it. 

Clay -  That was as topical as you could possibly be.

The next was Pentagon Country, a Bantam deal (with McGraw-Hill), and they had great faith in the novel’s future, trying to make us into best-selling novelists. Which is actually where I wanted to be.  We had a very good relationship.

This was an anti-Viet Nam book.   We went to the Pentagon, and they showed us the basement, the storeroom where they had all of the stuff stored since Civil Defense days.  Gigantic.

Pentagon Country:  This was about a Navy Captain with two sons, one an officer, one who sets himself on fire.   That came out in 1971 at the height of the Viet Nam protest movement when Nixon snuck out in the middle of the night and observed them .

None of the novels set the world on fire - but you don’t remember that (part).  Actually, we got discouraged about the novel career.  Then we had a big discussion about what to write next with Mark Hill.

Joan -  He asked you, “Weren’t you in the war?   WWII?” 

 

Mark said, “Why don’t you do something about submarines?”

Clay -  This started serious history. 

Joan – That was Victory.   

Clay - Also had a novel on submarines?  Yes.  That was just a little flip-back thing, not important.    But we put our time in on Victory.  That was in ’71.   That was a whole whirlwind, going to Washington, getting documents.  We’d never done anything like this, a sense of real history, using primary documents, interviews of war people.

Joan -  We interviewed as many living submarine skippers as we could from WWII.  We drove all around the country, interviewing these people on tape.  Hours and hours and hours, every interview was hundreds and hundreds of hours, weeks and weeks, time in the Navy archives, looking at patrols.   In those days they were great.  They gave us a Xerox machine and said, “Here.”    And they declassified things for us.

Clay -  We Xeroxed with our little machine 15,000 pages.

Joan -  We bought our own paper, but it was wonderful.  Nowadays they charge you 25 cents a page, up to 30 cents a page, to Xerox.   Can’t do that anymore.

Clay -  The research process was about a year, I think.   I had trips back to Washington every month.  If you add all that in, I think it would be a full year, but not all at once.

Q - How many pages?

Clay  -   1100  pages.   

Joan  -  It was a biggie.  But it was the smallest of the biggies.  They went on from there.  (laughs)  We thought that was pretty big at the time.

Clay  -  We finished this book –

Joan -  We started in ’71 and we didn’t actually finish until -  ’74.  

Clay  -  Yes, but we did Survive in there, too.  (Holds up copy of Silent Victory).  This was 1072 pages. 

This book was published in 1975, and it was tremendously well received.  It was a classic book.  It was used at the Naval Academy.  It’s a definitive book of that element of the war.   Nobody could ever…it’s a work of madness.

Joan  – No, that wasn’t a work of madness.    This is. (She refers to their latest project.)

Clay – You forgot what a work of madness is!

Joan – Oh no!  

Clay  -  It was a work of love, actually.    ‘Cause when we began to look at this thing, to write the story, we didn’t know what we were going to write.  And then we realized, there was no history of this war.   

So that’s what we did.   It was very well received.  There was the Book Club.

There had been some novels, and some non-fiction done on submarines in WWII, but nothing definitive.   

Exhaustive, totally complete.   With all the disputations between commanders.  Everything.

Q -   How did you develop your style with such a complex book, lots of interviews?  How do you divvy up the workload, the research?

Joan -  When we go to do research, Clay will just take one part, I’ll take another.  For the interviews we’d tape them all.  I’d transcribe the tapes.  Very time consuming.   Takes forever.   And then, Clay has it all in his head, organizes it in his head, writes it all down, and then I’d type it.   

Q -  How do you do that, Clay? 

Clay -  I don’t know.   I just don’t know that.  

Q -   At some point, you got away from the typewriter.  And you went to the legal pad.

Clay  –   Yeah.  I had to do that.  The reason for it was, we had so many sources, so many folders.   I was typing at a little tiny table that the typewrite sat on.  We had a door desk.    And I had all this stuff spread out all over the place.   I was working, just to write one paragraph, I was using five or six different sources.  And I found I was reaching over and dropping the damn things on the floor, and all that, so finally I decided to give up the typewriter, and I had all the files…I could write in long hand, put them back, and they wouldn’t fall out on the floor.  

And that was, pure and simple, the only reason I did that.   Nothing mysterious about it.   And, I never went back (to the typewriter).

Well, that’s not true, because I did Survive! on the typewriter.

Joan -  You typed Survive?  I don’t remember that. 

Clay  -  Yeah.  You might have typed the finished version.  But I didn’t write it in long hand. 

Anyhow, that book was very well received, and it established… I mean, unwittingly, really, I don’t think we ever sat down and said,  “We’re… now we’re going to become military historians.”

Joan -  No, no.   Just one same sort of war thing (leading) into another.

Q  -  (Reads blurb from the dust jacket of “Silent Victory” to Clay for comment)…The Forgotten War… regarding our lousy torpedos…that there will never be a rival book…little did he know there would be another one!

Clay -  (laughs)

Q -  Did you leave anything out? Was your book complete?   Did you leave anything out?

Clay  -  Not that I know of!  

Joan - We had the code-breaking.  We were the first ones to write about code-breaking.

Clay -  That’s right.  Code breaking was the big thing with submarines, because they could break the code and find out where the Japanese convoy was, and send a submarine to the convoy.  And that’s how we …

Joan  - And nobody had written about it.  All the skippers had signed a pledge that they would never reveal the secret, and, I don’t know…

Clay -  But I knew about it, being on a boat. 

Q  -    And now, 25 to 30 years later…   It was classified then?

Clay -   It was.  We really wrote the first thing about Japanese code breaking in the war, as related to operations.  

You know, break the code, send a submarine here, blah, blah.  And there was a lot of problems with that, because we’re dealing with …the navy always wanted to sink a carrier, and anytime they found out about a carrier, they (U.S.) would send a submarine.   And it was very difficult to rendezvous and navigational errors on both sides … and so our submarines were a lot of times chasing around the Pacific, after these phantom things.  But, anyway, we were the first to bring all of that to light.    Torpedo problems.   All that stuff.

END PART II  -   Dick Purinton

Clay and Joan Blair Interview - Part I

Joan and Clay Blair, Feb. 1994

Washington Island, Wisconsin -




In February of 1994 with my daughter, Evy who was a college English major at the time, I had the opportunity to interview Joan and Clay Blair over the course of two wintry afternoons.  I have vivid memories of these occasions, first because they gave us a great deal of their time, with trust in my amateurish interview skills, and second, because if they had known how I blew the tape recording they would know it was the work of an amateur.  


I recently came across a cloth bag with my sketch notes and several cassette tapes of an interview I did with them, and I decided, despite some major flaws in my method, to begin to transcribe those conversations.  With major gaps
in the interview due to my ineptitude, I still believe the content is of great enough interest, given the subjects, the breadth of the topics, and the lapse of time, to be important enough to reproduce for others to read.


Joan Blair is a daughter of Jean and Paul Rutledge, close friends of Arni and Mary Richter for years, but most importantly to us, Doctor Paul was the island doctor.  He left a successful practice in Kirkwood, MO, a St. Louis suburb, for the rural and distinctive life of island doctor.   He was much loved by island people for his care and concern.  He also delivered babies, and he did so for two of our children, Hoyt and Evelyn, at a time when a doctor still had the desire to do so, over the increasing threats of malpractice suits.   On one of the first occasions I met Joan, at a cocktail party, I confided I had read Silent Victory, some 800 detailed pages, but at my reading speed I found it to be "a rather long slug."  I hope she forgave me later and kept my comment to herself!  


Joan is an island resident as of this writing, and she is an active member of several island organizations.


On one of the first occasions I heard Clay speak, he appeared at a Door County zoning hearing on behalf of the Ferry Line, an effort to obtain a permit to expand ferry operations to year around at Northport.  Clay modestly recited the demanding, technical nature of his work, and he explained that it required utmost concentration.  He also noted that he and Joan lived but a few hundred feet from the island ferry dock, and that his work was not impaired in the least by regular coming and going of our ferry boats and vehicular traffic, and he doubted that folks living near Northport (our mainland dock) would be bothered, either.  


In later years, Clay served on the island school board (as did I).   He was an instrumental committee member in the Island Rec Center's formative years, and he and I served for approximately eight years on a committee to explore and develop ideas for a performing arts center.   All the while, he and Joan worked tirelessly on one complex writing project after another.


Clay D. Blair Jr. died in December of 1998 after suffering a heart attack.  He and Joan had continued with their work right up to that time, interrupted it seemed, only by brief periods of required medical recuperation.  A World War II veteran as well as noted military historian, Clay was buried at Arlington Nation Cemetery. 


IN the years since the interview, I had forgotten the scope and depth of their work, and how important their combined efforts were in the recording and interpretation of major events in our nation's history.   Clay was a top-notch journalist who became a leading writer of detailed military history, and Joan was indispensable with her research, the organization of volumes, boxes of information, and the transcribing of endless interviews.  I also had not fully appreciated the importance of their working relationship until I recently began transcribing the several cassette tapes I had made of my interview with them.    


Now for the confession of a want-to-be journalist:    some time after the 1994 interview I was dismayed to discover I had recorded the second session over the top of the first tape, thereby losing valuable material about Clay's younger days, service in the Pacific aboard the submarine SSS Guardfish in WWII, their return to the States via Panama Canal to New Orleans, and his embarkation on a career in journalism.   Upon reviewing these tapes now some 17 years later, I found their contents still timely.   Clay and Joan's insights about their lives as researchers and writers describe an Olympian effort, creating a major body of work that will continue to be valued.


This is Part I.  Rather than edit down the material, I have chosen to present the interview pretty much as transcribed directly from the tapes, with some obvious gaps due to my tape recorder malfunction, and the occasional difficulty of interpreting precisely what words were spoken.
  -  Dick Purinton

PART I - CURTIS PUBLISHING

[The taped interview picks up during Clay’s time with Curtis Publishing Company. He had just left a position as Time Magazine Washington correspondent.]

The (Saturday Evening) Post was getting into serious financial trouble, not a story I’m going to get into…except to tell you that.   And the other thing was, I had a much adored son, about three years old, and he was run over and killed in front of our house, and that had a great impact on me.  And I was looking for a different scene as a result of that...it was a horrible impact.   

 

And the Post people were looking for new talent.  They were losing money and all that.  First they said, “Would you come up here and spend a month and tell us what’s wrong with this magazine?”  

And I said “Yes” and spent a month.  I sat in an office as if I was doing a report, and I wrote a report, telling them what was wrong.   And they were very impressed with it, so they invited me to be an assistant managing editor, with the promise I would become editor.  My appeal to them was youth.  I was about 35 years old, a scuba diver, had written books, I had done all that stuff.  They were all older people…older than the hills, they really were… and (they) had that view.  I was very young and was go-go-go, and I was broke, so I was offered this job, that I would be editor in several years. 

They were all retiring out.  I received $135,000 a year, which was a lot of money in that day.   That would be like…I don’t know... a huge amount of money today.  

 

This happened because of my misfortunes, and so we moved lock, stock and barrel to Philadelphia.   I went from Asst. Managing Editor to Editor in about a year, and in another year, I was Manager.   This was not how they had it planned.  They let many people go, it was a blood bath, and I rose up the corporate [ladder].    I tried to change the Post into a news magazine.   The magazine hadn’t changed in years: old, stodgy, unbelievably reactive, rather than active.   They were too far off for news, and I worked out a deal to work faster.    

 

We were shipping magazines to the west coast on freight cars, and we changed the train, closed the lead time down to about a week.  We hired people from Newsweek to change this thing to a timely, meaningful publication.  

That didn’t work, either, and there was a huge political battle within the company, with the stockholders - all the corporate stuff you can imagine.  I became head of all of the magazines:  Ladies Home Journal, Holiday, American Homes, Jack and Jill - the most popular magazine ever.    We had acres of trees, two printing plants.  We had the biggest printing plant in the world.

That’s what was wrong.  They had made the decision to go for facilities, rather than decentralization and flexibility, and they got stuck into this thing where they had to use their own trees, their own paper making, their own printing companies to make their…to justify their events.    Life Magazine was being printed in about five different places at that time (names them) and that’s where we should have been.  I wanted to sell it all:  the paper companies in Canada, the printing companies - we had one right across from the Liberty Bell - and wanted to move the whole damn thing to New York, lock, stock and barrel. 

All of this was very heady stuff for a 35-year old, but they wouldn’t do any of the things I proposed, and the whole thing went down the tubes.  And finally, when we were trying to sell off all of these parts, the whole thing went “Boom!” 

I couldn’t stand it any more.  It was a Fortune 500 company.  We had 12,000 employees.   About 600 were in editorial.  We had a huge circulation company.   I had no time for writing, just running the corporation, fighting boardroom battles, and I was still editing.  A weekly magazine, mind you.  I was very busy.  

 

Q - Have you ever thought it would be good to be back on the desk? 

    

I thought it would be good to retire, then return to writing, but the whole thing blew up, and I’m out on the street, not with a good parachute.   We were married, six kids, living in Greenwich at the time, a typical Greenwich building upscale life.  I had an apartment in New York, a limousine, all of that, great perks.    But the thing was hopeless.  The fundamental thing was that the families that owned it never produced another publisher.  They were all drunks, had no interest in the magazine. 

The accountants got hold of the company.   They couldn’t do editorial, and so they build this huge empire, extra, outside of editorial, and that’s what destroyed the company.  They had a chance to buy ABC, but they thought it was a fad that wouldn’t last.  They could have had it for about $10 million.  Holy smokes!  But that was the kind of management: unimaginative, bad. 

This is a huge, long story, and I certainly won’t go into it further, but it was hard.  It was relentless, back stabbing, trench warfare, people in the departments - typical boardroom strife, the creative vs. the mechanical, the accountants.  And of course, I was the editorial leader, committed to save this thing.   

I was never very fulfilled in the job.  I was a writer, and although I did it well, and I held my ground and won a lot of battles, and became a true player - you have to or you’ll get killed -I didn’t really approve of it, didn’t like it, because the business ethic wasn’t the high standards I learned as a Henry Luce journalist. 

There was an attitude in Time-Life that we were like priests, I don’t mean to stretch this too far, but we were dedicated, we were clean, idealistic, and this was all a reflection on his astounding personality, his religion.  And he was essentially editorial, too, although he had business people with him.  And then, being thrown into it on my own like that at Curtis.  They just did things I wouldn’t think of doing, and I condemned that, those people on the business side, and I found a lot of it odious.  

    

I introduced a compromise.  I would not run a piece on General Westmoreland that was favorable, in order to get advertising from GM.   We were getting GM ads.  I was pressed to do it every day, from one person to another. 

Return to writing books... 

 

I left Curtis Publishing in 1965, and I decided I would not ever get back into the corporate scene.     I wasn’t fairly used,  I was used and abused.  And I did my share of abusing, too, no question about that.   It was odious, and I didn’t ever want to go back to that corporate … again, we had so much contact with Madison Avenue, which is basically sleaze … they were a bunch of carnies, at least they were in those days…and they’d pull any kind of a deal to get an account.   Here we were conveying that, it was a constant battle to do so to be clean.  All magazines were being pushed.  I was just a foolish knight on a white horse… and I would never do that again. 

I had enough money I could start out as a writer.   No more of that (corporate world).  I even quit subscribing to a magazine.  I became a book writer.   

End Part I -  Dick Purinton