BOOK REVIEW: The Decline and Fall of One Media Giant Into Hands of Another : TO THE END OF TIME; The Seduction and Conquest of a Media Empire, <i> by Richard M. Clurman</i> , Simon & Schuster, $23; 349 pages

“Now a new era of human history has begun,” intoned the corporate bards of Time Warner Inc. back in 1990. “In spirit, if not in fact, we have already entered the 21st Century.”

What the copywriters were hyping was the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications, the result of a series of corporate skirmishes that raged through boardrooms and courtrooms across the United States. When the smoke cleared at last, what we beheld was the single largest media conglomerate in the world.

“At its birth,” writes Richard M. Clurman, an “old-Timer” who put in 20 years at the magazine, “Time Warner had the aspiration and potential--more than any single company--to dominate the information and entertainment markets of America, and perhaps the rest of the world.”

Clurman is not shy about hyping his own gossipy account of the Time-Warner merger, variously characterizing the saga as “the stuff of a Warner Bros. melodrama,” “a corporate interfaith marriage” and “a tale strewn with crooks, broken hearts and broken lives.”

But the book lives up to its claims. Clurman breathlessly narrates the courtship rituals, the covert negotiations and the courtroom battles that attended the merger. He shares all the dirty little secrets, personal and corporate, that attached themselves to the major players in the high-stakes poker game. And he gives us odd, comical and illuminating anecdotes and details of the kind that once enlivened the pages of Time itself.

The merger negotiations were so secret, Clurman reveals, that the deal-makers used code names: Warner was dubbed Wonder and Time was Tango. And when the deal was finally struck in the boardroom of Time Inc., not a single photographer could be found in what Clurman calls “the birthright company of photojournalism”--remarkably, the building guards managed to find a free-lance photographer on the sidewalk outside and pressed her into making a photographic record of the ceremony.

“I don’t know what to do to make you guys smile,” said the unflappable photographer as she assembled the executives for the historic shot. “How about the word money? “

But the cutting edge of Clurman’s book is the distaste, the distrust and the sheer morbid fascination with which the gentry of Time Inc.--”intellectuals, litterateurs and stylish businessmen”--regarded Warner chieftain Steven J. Ross, the former “funeral parlor greeter” who literally invented Time Warner as a global media conglomerate and pocketed a couple hundred million dollars in the process.

Clurman delights in painting Ross, the self-made movie mogul, as a charming rogue, a social climber, a street-smart alley fighter who inspired astounding loyalty in his cohorts, a big spender who paid himself and his buddies lavishly, a big roller in Hollywood, Vegas and Wall Street, “a master of promotion sizzle and ballyhoo” who came to believe the tall tales that he told about himself.

What made Ross such a grotesque in the eyes of the “Timeincers,” as Clurman insists on calling them, were his “un-Timely habits”--he never earned a proper college degree; he is coarse and combative; he “sees every movie but never reads a book.” And, as Clurman insistently reminds us, Ross and his Hollywood cronies were Jews in a world of “Ivy League WASPs.”

“This is like a meeting of the National Conference of Christians and Jews,” quipped one participant in the first encounter between executives of the newly merged company.

To make sense of Clurman’s book, one has to grasp the eccentricities of Time itself, which more nearly resembled a cloistered order than a publishing company. Clurman reminds us that founder Henry Luce decreed that Time Inc. was to be “a journalistic enterprise operated in the public interest,” and the men and women who passed through the vast network of Time-Life publications--including this reviewer--were invited to regard themselves as the members of an elite.

The elaborate traditions of the Luce empire produced what was called “the Time culture,” a cherished collection of myths and rituals that were already in disarray when Steve Ross and the Hollywood barbarians appeared at the gates of Rockefeller Center. But Clurman’s book is best understood as an intimate chronicle of the decline and fall of that antique and peculiar culture--and it is the “old-Timer’s” sense of tragic loss that gives “To the End of Time” its almost apocalyptic overtone.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Life Force” and “Moon Over Minneapolis” by Fay Weldon (Viking) .