Theirs Was the Kingdom:
Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest
By John Heidenry
Norton, 701 pages, $29.95
For impeccable instincts about middlebrow American readers there has never been a magazine to rival the Reader’s Digest. Nor has there been a publishing enterprise more crammed with infighting and quirkiness than that created in 1922 by Digest founder DeWitt Wallace, the Horatio Alger hero of American letters.
Wallace’s original editorial idea had roots in common-sense, commercial opportunism: Give busy, positive-minded Americans practical, easy to read, uplifting literature.
As the concept took hold, Wallace turned his creed into an editorial religion and became uneasy about making big profits. But the onetime calendar salesman had a knack for hiring people with seemingly unlimited marketing imagination, as John Heidenry makes clear in this monumental exploration of the Reader’s Digest Association.
One of the most brilliant ideas involved book condensations, one of which ran at the end of each issue of the Digest. The marketing department decided to use the magazine’s solid-gold mailing list to sell bound collections of those “digested” books. In time, condensed-book sales became more lucrative than the magazine itself.
Similarly, the Digest became the first magazine to guarantee advertisers a position adjacent to specific editorial features and to offer regional advertising editions. The Digest pioneered the idea of sponsoring publisher’s sweepstakes. “Mailboxes around the world have not been the same since,” Heidenry reports.
Although a thoroughly American concoction, the Digest itself spread around the world. By the late 1970s the magazine was published in 39 editions in 15 languages, with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 100,000,000 people.
The financial returns were equally stunning. A 1990 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, not long after both Wallaces had died, put the company’s worth at $3 billion. Many analysts thought the figure was low.
The largely conservative influence of the publication was far-reaching as well. The Digest loaned a direct-mail expert to the Eisenhower presidential campaign. The attention the magazine lavished on Richard Nixon, Heidenry argues, may have been “indispensable” to his election as president. Wallace was not averse to letting the CIA use the Digest’s overseas operations as a cover.
The Digest’s homey, formulaic distillations made it the magazine that elites (especially liberal elites) loved to hate. Such characterizations, however, are themselves too simplistic. Over time the magazine published more and more original articles, some of which broke new ground and on occasion even challenged the conservative orthodoxy. The Digest could publish “The Klan: Defender of Americanism” (in 1926) and yet sponsor the 12-year quest that led Alex Haley to “Roots.”
DeWitt Wallace, known to friends as Wally, was also unpredictable. Intensely interested in the magazine, he never read one of the condensed books. He dispensed generous gifts to his staff yet walked around at night turning out office lights.
He and his organization gave little scope to women, who were underpaid and had virtually no chance of advancing. At a party for foreign journalists, Wallace brought in a group of young female staffers to serve as dates for the visitors and advised them in a good-natured way, “If you are going to be raped, you might as well relax and enjoy it.”
The only important female exception was Wallace’s wife, Lila. She encouraged him during the early hard times and remained a force. Senior executives knew the road to promotion ran by her.
The Wallaces made much of their stable, loving marriage. Like a traditionally loyal husband, he was quick to avenge any perceived slight to her; they would dance alone at home. But the marriage was not entirely traditional. They cheated on each other regularly. Lila’s favorite niece was one of her husband’s mistresses.
Nor was the Digest as wholesome as advertised, reflecting, among other things, a preoccupation with sex. Article after article appeared under such titles as “Found: A One-Day Cure for Syphilis” and “What the Sex Manuals Don’t Tell You.” The magazine specialized in off-color humor long before Playboy got into the act.
In the beginning Wallace digested articles from other publications without bothering to pay for them. Later he took a different approach, paying authors big sums to write articles for other publications that then could be “digested” by his.
Wallace refused for many years to run ads in his magazine. But once that policy changed, the usual journalistic conventions about separating advertising from editorial functions were not honored. “In fact, so blurred was the division,” Heidenry writes, “that editors were often drafted as hosts or tour guides for visiting advertisers.”
The Reader’s Digest Association, which offered such efficient reading to its subscribers, was itself highly inefficient. Articles to appear in foreign-language editions were translated into English, edited down and then translated back to the original. About the only publication that seemed to outsell the Digest was the Bible; when the staff tried a condensed version of the Word, it failed.
The bloated organization was full of people wondering what the boss wanted. “There was a saying that a decision was what you made when you did not know what else to do,” Heidenry writes.
The Wallaces were childless (some insiders believed Lila Wallace had had several abortions), which probably contributed to their determination to give away their money:
“They became in a relatively short period two of the most generous and unpredictable philanthropists in the world-and, on occasion, two of the most gullible and exploited.”
DeWitt Wallace was inclined toward the practical: He endowed scholarships at more than 200 colleges and schools and supported the Association for Voluntary Sterilization. Lila gave to the arts, including a gift that would ensure daily fresh flowers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The lack of obvious successors to their publishing kingdom also contributed to palace intrigue in Pleasantville, Wallace’s New York headquarters. Heidenry, who could have benefited from some lessons on condensation himself, gives so much detail on backstabbing that one doubts his claim that he did not use all the anecdotes at his disposal.
The Wallaces wanted the Reader’s Digest Association to remain a private company, managed by trustees and profiting 11 charities they established. But as so often happens in such cases, the Wallaces could not maintain in death the control they had in life.
Bringing the story up to date, Heidenry chronicles the transformation of the Reader’s Digest Association into a public company. He notes that one of the chief trustees, Laurance Rockefeller, helped funnel money through Wallace’s charities to projects on his most favored list. But Heidenry also concludes that, in a way that may have mattered most to him, Wallace’s grip on his media empire remains strong:
“The essential editorial formula of the Digest was and remains, in its very simplicity, impervious to the creative tinkerings of its individual editors.”
