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."