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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.