Oct. 26, 1990— Not merely in declining health but
something worse for him—growing irrelevancy—longtime CBS chair,
philanthropist and socialite
William S. Paley died at age 89 of kidney
failure in New York City.
For nearly six decades, this son of a Jewish cigar-maker was the broadcasting equivalent of the 19th-century robber
barons: leveraging an initially small operation into a multi-unit empire, charming
when he could get his way easily and ruthless when he couldn’t, then late in
life lavishing cultural institutions with sizable donations that burnished his
reputation (in his case, money given to the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum
of Broadcasting, renamed the Paley Center for Media in his honor).
With an assist from his father, Paley assumed control
of CBS in 1928. Contrary to the myth he created, he did not initially see the value
of the financially ailing radio stations he was buying, but had to be persuaded
to make the transaction. Two decades later, the same pattern of coming around
reluctantly to a new medium repeated itself when he had to be convinced that TV
would not threaten his radio interests but complement them.
In terms of vision, Paley was no match for RCA/NBC
archrival David Sarnoff, who as early as 1916 had predicted in a memo
that music, news, sports, and even lectures would be someday be broadcast
through "radio music boxes." But NBC’s “General” inadequately
defended his network against Paley’s 1950 “talent raids” that brought Jack
Benny, Amos 'n' Andy, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, and Burns and Allen over to
CBS.
Paley built his empire through charisma yet maintained
it through caprice. He responded to the passionate advocacy of talented figures
but could also leave them so guessing about his intentions that he alienated
them. One example was newsman Edward R. Murrow, who became a CBS star
with his reports from London early in WWII but left the network over its
wavering commitment to the news.
Murrow’s was just case of someone who enjoyed the media
mogul’s warm companionship only to see him turn cold. Another such figure was In
Cold Blood writer Truman Capote, who would not only enjoy holidays
abroad with Paley and his second wife, the glamorous socialite Barbara or “Babe,”
but once even had them once transport his beloved bulldog to Europe on their private
jet, according to an interview with Kansas FBI agent included in George Plimpton’s
1997 oral biography, Truman Capote.
That all changed in 1975, when the author retailed
scandalous gossip about Paley in a notorious Esquire preview of his projected novel Answered
Prayers. The CBS head’s claim that he had fallen asleep while reading the
article was almost surely false, but it deprived Capote of the attention he
craved—and then he followed it up by never having anything to do with the
writer again.
Before Capote fell out with his friend, he colorfully
put his finger on the acquisitive instinct that dominated Paley from youth to
old age: “He looks like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.” An
avid modernist art aficionado, Paley collected female conquests as much as he did
modernist paintings. He could be generous, even gallant (financially supporting
an old love, actress Louise Brooks, when she fell on hard times), but also cold enough to drive another to suicide.
It was Capote’s revelation of another liaison by Paley
(thinly fictionalized as “Sidney Dillon,” a “conglomateur, adviser to
Presidents”) in a hotel room that precipitated the end of their friendship and
darkened the last days of Babe Paley, who was dying of cancer at that point.
Like an aging monarch, Paley was unwilling to
relinquish his power and perquisites, successively forcing out a pair of men most
felt were being groomed to take the helm from him: Frank Stanton, CBS president for 27
years, then anointed successor Thomas Wyman. But the September 1986 coup against
Wyman proved disastrous, as Paley’s ally, Laurence
Tisch, subsequently embarked on cost-cutting measures that undercut the “Tiffany Network” aura of class it had taken the chairman years to cultivate.
By the end of his life, this once-vital corporate titan
owned less than nine percent of stock in the company he had built, so he could
not influence events as he once did. By then, too, Sally Bedell Smith’s
biography In All His Glory had questioned his pretension to business
visions while exposing his aloofness and cunning.
But, if he wasn’t what he wanted the world to think he
was, Paley had managed for years to sustain a media empire that, unlike the one
overseen by Rupert Murdoch, did not debase Americans’ cultural tastes or undermine
their belief in verifiable fact.
