Television: Mr. CBS

In recent years, nothing has succeeded like CBS. Its shows have dominated television for a decade. Since the beginning of the current season, Nielsen has listed twelve CBS shows among the top 15 in prime time and ten out of ten in the daytime. The company’s stock has doubled in value in the past year. Its income for the most recently reported quarter was 97% higher than it had been a year before.

To the outside eye, this chariot full of gold seems to be hauled by a troika of executives, and there is considerable uncertainty as to who is lead horse. There is handsome, coldly decisive James Aubrey, president of the CBS-TV network, who last week anted up $28.2 million for TV rights for the 1964 and 1965 National Football League regular games, outbidding both NBC and ABC. There is Dr. Frank Stanton, who is president of Columbia Broadcasting System—in which Aubrey’s CBS-TV is only one of seven divisions (CBS Radio, Columbia Records, etc.). Unquestioned boss man is William Samuel Paley. He started CBS. For 35 years he has developed it, shaped it, and saved it when necessary—until 1946 as president and since then, as chairman of the board.

If he cared, Paley could be much more obvious in the national eye. “I have a much less public life than others do in my kind of position,” he says. “Some people stumble and take it as it comes, but I try to hold a reasonable balance between my public and my private life, probably because my private life is so attractive.”

What Money Can’t Buy. It is indeed. From physical condition to family, he has everything money can’t buy. At 62, he has a physique that many a younger man might envy, works out regularly at a gym. He has a connoisseur’s taste but an aristocrat’s reticence about acknowledging it. “Me a gourmet?” he says deprecatingly, when he actually craves things like river pike drenched in crayfish butter and will, under interrogation and a glaring light, admit that one day last summer he drove 75 miles out of his way to patronize a noted Norman chef, eating two complete meals in a gastric feat that might have made Brillat-Savarin wink in his grave.

His wife, Barbara Gushing Paley, is one of the three beautiful daughters of Boston’s great Neurosurgeon Harvey Gushing. She is much more celebrated than he is, always appearing on lists of the ten best-dressed or -coiffed or just looking out from a photograph with a coolly amiable glance that makes men instinctively straighten their ties. Because she reads widely and far more than he has time to, he seems to look to her for literary judgments in much the way he depends on men like Jim Aubrey for first opinions about new gumshoes, comedians and hillbillies. The Paleys have been married for 16 years. Each was married before and contributed two children to the new family, and they have had two more: 15-year-old William Jr. and Kate, 13.

What Money Can Buy. William Samuel Paley has several things money can buy, too, although he is sensitive about being identified with stupefying sums, as anyone might be who owns almost $70 million worth of CBS alone. He says that money on the domestic level has no real significance to him: “It’s just pieces of paper. I’ve been eating three square meals a day for a long time, you know.”

Among the things those pieces of paper have bought is a big 75-year-old house on an 80-acre tract in Manhasset, L.I. Known as Kiluna Farm, it is a house that won’t quit, rambling up, down and on the bias; it looks like ten shingle farmhouses delivered all at once by airdrop. “The floors are sagging, but it’s comfortable,” says Mrs. Paley. The walls are under pressure too. They hold up the massive frames that surround an impressive private art collection.

Paley owns 103 paintings at the moment, of which about 40 are major works. They are mainly by Postimpressionists, and he, with an instinct for the durable, bought most of them cheaply in the ’20s and ’30s. He has a Derain that he found on the floor of the artist’s studio in Paris, covered with dust. Among his Matisses is one that Matisse originally refused to part with, but, says Paley, “I wheedled it out of him.”

Clobbering Friends. In his bedroom, Paley has an Eames chair facing a thing that looks like a tea caddy, with three small Sony TV sets on it. Picking up a remote-control gismo, he flicks CBS, ABC and NBC into life and says, “You see, I can shut one off and watch the other two.” Click. “Or I can shut two off.” Click. “Or I can shut them all off,” he adds, with a particularly satisfied click.

Paley has a double dose of nervous energy and, expending it, there is nothing he would rather do than flail away at a golf ball. He will often ask four or five couples out for the weekend, taking the men guests with him to the golf course, where he competes tensely and excitedly and clobbers them with his 15 handicap. What do the women do while the men play? Paley pauses, never having considered that. “I don’t know what the hell they do do,” he says.

On some Saturday nights, Gauguin’s Queen of the Areois swings away from the wall on a hinge, a concealed projector lights up, a screen drops from the ceiling, and the group watches a new movie. Also a photographer of considerable skill, Paley displays his albums to guests at home. In the kind of company he usually keeps, he is hardly picture-dropping, but a casual flip of the pages turns up some remarkable names and moments: Anthony Eden, thin as wire, stretched out in a bathing suit at Cap d’Antibes during a sojourn with the Paleys in 1953; Pablo Picasso, trying to look rakish and dashing as he stands to be photographed beside Mrs. Paley.

The Paleys have a house at Round Hill in Jamaica, and they are building another house in Nassau. They maintain an apartment in Manhattan’s Hotel St. Regis. And they have a place at Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where Paley tears up the back roads at 80 m.p.h. in his Facel-Vega.

Feeding Ideas. All this could leave an impression that Paley is just another of those jet-winged and rich-born people who make a job of everything but work. He is not—but he was certainly born rich. His father was a prosperous cigarmaker (La Palina), and Paley was educated at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce (“what a farce”). He got interested in the nascent radio business only when, as the boss’s restless young son, he discovered that La Palina could sell a spectacular number of stogies by plugging them over the air. In 1928, 27-year-old Bill Paley bought a chain of 16 wobbly Eastern radio stations for $400,000 and renamed them the Columbia Broadcasting System.

As radio grew, it was CBS’s energetic young president who fed it more new ideas than anyone else. Paley introduced the Columbia Workshop, which broadcast the early works of Thornton Wilder and W. H. Auden. And as World War II began, he initiated the practice of fracturing news programs into brief reports from scattered capitals. After the war—in which he served as colonel in charge of psychological warfare under Dwight D. Eisenhower—he made one of the strongest moves in broadcasting history when he took control of programming away from advertising agencies and outside packagers. From then on, CBS has originated most of its own programs, whereas ABC and NBC still rely heavily on packagers. For better or worse, CBS and Paley take responsibility for what happens on their air.

Stars & Brainflashes. Paley has had his flops. The CBS color TV system, for instance, because it could not be received on black and white sets lost out to RCA. But that is behind him. He found the ideal right-hand man in Stanton, who has streamlined CBS into the trimmest organization in broadcasting. It was Stanton who separated the company into its present divisions and who runs the day-to-day business. “In the creative end,” Stanton says, “I would never make a major decision without involving Paley, but I seldom bother him about housekeeping functions.”

When it comes to creativity, Paley has an instinct for doing what is commercially necessary. Four years ago, when ABC’s mass marketing, quality-be-damned techniques were sending tremors through CBS and NBC, Paley met the challenge by buying away what he considered the mainspring of ABC programming—Jim Aubrey, then ABC vice president and known in the trade as “The Smiling Cobra.” In his new job, Aubrey has gone all out for ratings, often at the expense of prestige. CBS’s supremacy has not been won without some deserved criticism, and NBC can fairly claim to have held out, by contrast, for quality.

But if anyone doubts who runs CBS, the oil-smooth words of CBS-TV’s President Aubrey should put the doubts to rest. “Mr. Paley doesn’t dictate,” says Aubrey. “He leads by persuasion. If you differ with him, by the time you’re through talking with him he has indicated how his point of view had more to recommend it than yours.”