In All His Glory

Description

“He is to American broadcasting as Carnegie was to steel, Ford to automobiles, Luce to publishing, and Ruth to baseball,” wrote The New York Times of William S. Paley—the man who built CBS, the “Tiffany Network.” Sally Bedell Smith’s In All His Glory takes a hard look at Paley and the perfect world he created for himself, revealing the extraordinary complexity of the man who let nothing get in the way of his vast ambitions. Tracing his life from Chicago, where Paley was born to a family of cigar makers, to the glamorous haunts of Manhattan, Smith shows us the shrewd, demanding egoist, the hedonist pursuing every form of pleasure, the corporate strongman famous for his energy and ruthlessness.
 
Drawing on highly placed CBS sources and hundreds of interviews, and with a supporting cast of such glittering figures as Truman Capote, Slim Keith, Jock Whitney, Ted Turner, David Sarnoff, Brooke Astor and a parade of Paley’s humiliated heirs, In All His Glory is a richly textured story of business, power and social ambition.

Praise for In All His Glory

“A sweeping study of the emergence of broadcasting, the American immigrant experience, and the ravenous personal and professional tastes of Paley as he charmed and clawed his way to the top of society.”—Los Angeles Times

“Riveting…packed with revelations, rich in radio and TV lore, sprinkled with intrigues, glitz, and wheeling and dealing at the highest levels of media and government.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“An impressive, meticulously researched work of broadcast history as well as a piquant glimpse inside CBS’s corporate culture.”—Time

“A sweeping study of the emergence of broadcasting, the American immigrant experience, and the ravenous personal and professional tastes of Paley as he charmed and clawed his way to the top of society.”—Los Angeles Times

“Riveting…packed with revelations, rich in radio and TV lore, sprinkled with intrigues, glitz, and wheeling and dealing at the highest levels of media and government.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“An impressive, meticulously researched work of broadcast history as well as a piquant glimpse inside CBS’s corporate culture.”—TimeSally Bedell Smith is the author of bestselling biographies of Queen Elizabeth II; William S. Paley; Pamela Harriman; Diana, Princess of Wales; John and Jacqueline Kennedy; and Bill and Hillary Clinton. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1996, she previously worked at Time and The New York Times, where she was a cultural news reporter. In 2012, Smith was the recipient of the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence. She is the mother of three children and lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Stephen G. Smith.PROLOGUE
 
 
THE Chairman
 
The one they all wanted to see arrived late, as was his custom. To most of them he was “Mr. Paley” or “The Chairman.” To a select few he was “Bill.” But to everyone in the room, he was CBS, “the Tiffany Network,” the tycoon who seemed to have invented the idea of style. Although the party was to honor “60 Minutes,” one of television’s most successful shows, center stage belonged to William Paley, now just a few months shy of his eighty-sixth birthday. On this cool spring evening in 1987, all eyes turned to the man who had led the Columbia Broadcasting System for nearly sixty years.
 
Over a hundred members of New York’s broadcasting and corporate elite circled the ornate Louis XVI Room on the second floor of the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue that night. Executive wives, anxieties masked by smooth skins and firm chins purchased with their husbands’ fortunes, sipped Moët et Chandon, and caught their reflections in the gilt mirrors on the white-paneled walls. Girlfriends and daughters, leggy and sexy in their new short dresses, made small talk, eyes constantly darting to inspect each new arrival. The men, mostly middle-aged and beyond, wore tailored dinner clothes and stood in small knots, balancing their champagne glasses, nibbling pâté, and trading gossip and opinions about their business. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for Fox Broadcasting,” Laurence Tisch, president of CBS, confided to RCA’s former chairman Thornton Bradshaw.
 
Tisch was doubtless the richest man in the room; his fortune, an estimated $1 billion, was double Paley’s. But Tisch lacked Paley’s panache. He was a money man with a shiny bald head and deceptively amiable manner. Andy Rooney of “60 Minutes” would later tell the audience, “I went to work for CBS in 1949 and I have met William S. Paley maybe thirty times during those years and tonight was the first time I ever called him Bill. Funny thing is, I met Laurence Tisch only twice and I called him Larry both times. I don’t know what the hell to make of that.”
 
Paley, whose title was little more than an honorific now, had spent much of the day in his elegant office on the thirty-fifth floor of Black Rock, the CBS headquarters four blocks away on Sixth Avenue. In the late afternoon he had taken a special express elevator to his waiting limousine, a maroon Cadillac Fleetwood with a television and a Sony compact disc player, and been driven to his duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue by Charles Noble, his chauffeur for eighteen years. After an hour with his exercise instructor he dressed for dinner, assisted by his valet, John Dean, once an equerry to Prince Philip. Then Paley had headed out the door, timing his arrival to miss the cocktail hour. The pain from a lifelong back ailment had become so persistent that he could no longer stand comfortably.
 
“After some quick photographs with Tisch and the “60 Minutes” contingent, Paley made his way to one of the Versailles Room’s round dining tables. Standing at his dinner place, he grasped the back of his chair for support. His thick white hair gleamed in the candlelight. (Truman Capote, a onetime friend, said that Paley dyed his hair to brighten it, to make it more blond than gray.) His deep tan had been a Paley signature since the 1920s, when irreverent colleagues began calling him “Pale Billy.” “Purely a trick of transposition,” Time magazine once explained, adding, “He likes hot countries and bright sunlight.” His face was creased with age, his small brown eyes nearly overwhelmed by pouches of skin. But the eyes still glittered with life. His pug nose lent him an air of toughness, somewhat softened by his smile, a slightly crooked little-boy grin that promised mischief and mirth. He was not classically handsome, never had been, but his face was virile and sensuous.
 
Age and a slight stoop had reduced his nearly six-foot stature by several inches, but the dinner clothes (by Huntsman of Savile Row) were impeccably tailored. The small paunch of his later years was gone. On his surprisingly small feet, custom-made evening shoes shone like blackened mirrors, and the air carried the scent of his musky Givenchy cologne (a scent created for him in the 1960s). Despite his advancing years, he appeared nearly as vigorous as twenty years before, when Capote had once murmured: “He looks like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.”
 
Paley, Mister Paley. “He is to American broadcasting as Carnegie was to steel, Ford to automobiles, Luce to publishing and Ruth to baseball,” the New York Times had once written. The New York Daily News had called him “an electronic Citizen Kane.” His reign at CBS, wrote Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, could be summed up as more than five decades of “brilliant brinksmanship, salesmanship, statesmanship, and showmanship.”
 
Once while he was touring in Los Angeles, an aide had been assigned to follow Paley with a chair. When he paused to sit, he didn’t bother to glance back; he knew the chair would be there.
 
Paley had an insatiable appetite for power. But he was not outwardly dynamic in the style of Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca or the late Charles Revson, the tyrannical founder of Revlon. Paley didn’t stride through the corridors in a commanding way or pound tables or bark orders. He was much more subtle. His office didn’t even look as if it was intended for work; it seemed organized for fun, with an antique chemin de fer card table as its centerpiece instead of a proper desk.
 
Like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, who lingered only as a wide smile, Paley was often a shadow presence. He had the disconcerting habit of going away and letting others manage CBS for long stretches of time. But somewhat paradoxically, his absences reinforced his power. No one knew exactly when he might appear—or to what effect. He was rarely absent from programming discussions where he exercised his authority through nuance and calculated obliqueness. Since programming is an instinctive, almost mystical, process, Paley was viewed by many underlings not so much as an executive but an oracle.
 
The nature of his business enhanced his legend. Network television, especially in Paley’s heyday, was fast-moving, highly visible, and glamorous. The industry seemed to carry limitless possibilities—and dangers. Paley’s career paralleled the trajectory of broadcasting through the twentieth century. He came to symbolize its heights and, eventually, its decline.
 
But the Paley legend transcended broadcasting. He was a lion in high society. “Do cozy up to Bill Paley. He won’t be impressed but everyone else will be,” advised Women’s Wear Daily in its tongue-in-cheek list of do’s and don’t’s for strivers in 1987. One rarefied group of New Yorkers, including Ashton Hawkins, general counsel to the Metropolitan Museum, decorator Mark Hampton, and political consultant David Sawyer, once devoted a session of their literary discussion group to an analysis of how Paley compared with Trollope’s Duke of Omnium. The participants delighted in recounting the ways each relished and used his power.
 
Paley’s life remained the subject of intense fascination and ferocious speculation, even after his eightieth birthday. In 1987, People magazine listed him as one of a half dozen “sex symbols for a Corporate Age.” Men were especially intrigued by tales of remedies he took to remain youthful and maintain sexual potency. “Find out about the crushed goat testicles. I hear he eats them to stay young,” said Benjamin Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post. “Monkey glands, he and his friends get injections of monkey glands,” said Arthur Taylor, a former president of CBS. There was never any proof, but Paley certainly was interested in such nostrums. Back in the 1960s, David Adams, then vice-chairman of NBC, sat next to Paley at a broadcasting industry dinner. “All he and the person next to him talked about was this place in Switzerland where you could get transplants of sheep glands,” said Adams.
 
Whatever the source of his energy, Paley grabbed everything he could from life—two beautiful, trendsetting wives, a string of lovers, some exotic, an extensive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, and exquisite homes. All the while he took pains to stay above ordinary mortals. “He kept a cocoon around himself with respect to his personal life,” said Robert Wood, a former CBS-TV president. “You didn’t even think to ask a personal question.” Paley managed to be simultaneously visible and invisible.
 
He cultivated a mystique of privacy but relished his influential role. And Paley was influential. CBS shaped and reflected American society to a greater degree than its rivals. CBS told us in immediate and revealing terms about war, through the voice of newsman Edward R. Murrow in bombed-out London during World War II and later through a succession of grim images from the rice paddies of Vietnam. It instructed us about the abuse of power by Senator Joseph McCarthy and President Richard Nixon. Its newscasts showed a nightly parade of racial tension, generational rebellion, and rising feminism; advances in medicine, science, and technology; images of famine, terrorism, floods, fires, and earthquakes. If CBS News plunged viewers into the hard reality of everyday life, then CBS Entertainment let them escape, laughing with the likes of Lucy and Archie Bunker.
 
The flickering images on CBS represented the soul and sensibility of Bill Paley. In the early days he was practical and enlightened in his choice of CBS programs. He emphasized news shows and made sure his network served the public interest—in large part to keep his burgeoning broadcast empire out of government hands and away from strict regulation. Later, he made a calculated choice to concentrate on entertainment programs that would appeal to a mass audience. After World War II, his second in command devised a plan to transform CBS into a highbrow network aimed at a smaller but more select audience. William Paley declined. Mass audiences meant more—more viewers and more money and more power.
 US

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