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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."