In All His Glory: The Life And Times Of William S. Paley And The Birth Of Modern Broadcasting – Sally Bedell Smith, 1990 ★★★★★

Ozymandias of the Airwaves

Ephemerality is the very nature of mass media. In that way at least, William S. Paley proved its perfect embodiment.

Paley built a radio and television empire with CBS, “the Tiffany Network,” known for a much-touted, sometimes honored commitment to quality broadcasting. While acquiring new markets and talents was Paley’s defining contribution to CBS’s glory, it was secondary to his baser passions for lucre, women, and fame. Paley got most of what he wanted, but as we watch him on his deathbed, it’s hard not to feel a Calvinistic twinge of regret for his limited vision.

“Bill Paley wanted every last minute from life,” Sally Bedell Smith writes.

There was little in life Bill Paley wanted and didn’t get, with the notable exception of a readable and laudatory biography. Bedell Smith performed half that service with In All His Glory, published the same year Paley died; what I found myself concluding the first time I read this remains truer after a second time around: You will be hard-pressed to find as juicy a book on a hundred more engaging personalities.

Bedell Smith doesn’t push her subject as a visionary or a leader. Often, she notes, especially in later decades when his empire was secure, his presence was felt most by its absence. Paley failed to latch on early to innovations like television and the long-playing record. He didn’t care for the idea of broadcasting in color while his main rival, RCA’s David Sarnoff, made a mint selling color TVs. But whenever an underling’s idea achieved success, Paley swooped in and took credit. “The convenient amnesia of the powerful,” Bedell Smith calls it:

Of course he made the ultimate decisions, and he did have his hand in everything. He worked hard. He was shrewd. But he also drew heavily on the ideas of others. As he has often pointed out, building an organization was one of his first priorities in those early days. Bill Paley relied on a handful of key people to build up the network – and build up Bill Paley.

Bedell Smith’s command of detail, and her judicious use of multiple candid sources, makes In All His Glory a model biography. Too often, I find, even sterling biographers like David McCullough or Ron Chernow use subjects as springboards to delve into the ethos and culture of a distant time. Their books are highly readable, but in a way that often favors their broad knowledge and research over the subject.

Bedell Smith gives ample space in her 600-plus-page book to the rise and fall of radio, the development of CBS News (“organized more by fluke than design” Bedell Smith notes), the fencing personalities around the throne. But Paley, however distant he often made himself from the network’s Manhattan headquarters, stays in focus throughout.

Paley as a young radio maverick. Slow to pick up on radio's possibilities, once convinced he was quick to seize on the value of attracting and nurturing both talent and sponsors. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Paley.

Where Paley excelled was in the art of interpersonal relations, which contributed to some major deals for CBS and very few lonely evenings for Paley himself, even if his wives couldn’t say the same.

“I had had thirteen years of dames,” Paley’s first wife Dorothy told Bedell Smith. “I knew this was his illness. There were always girls. He never stopped. It was absolutely pathological.”

Bedell Smith writes an engaging, immersive story about Paley’s years at CBS – an account that brings broadcasting from its earliest days of live musical performances to the age of cable – but it is in recounting his social life where the book excels. Paley was born Jewish, and spent the rest of his life more or less trying to pretend otherwise. Even as other successful Jews formed their own high-level Manhattan social circle, “Our Crowd,” Paley preferred to court the Mayflower set, a fast-dying clique of Long Island dinosaurs who imagined themselves better than the rest of mankind for the money they inherited.

Back in 1968, The New York Times dubbed them “the gilded people,” already anachronistic then and quickly becoming more so. One British noblewoman who ran with the set described Paley as “100 percent Jew but looking more like good news from Tartary,” nicely encapsulating the jaded, facile, anti-Semitic waters Paley willingly navigated.

Such accommodation to high society would eventually come to bite him in the form of writer Truman Capote, well-described by one Paley intimate as a “rich man’s Pekinese,” who soaked up heartrending gossip from Paley’s second wife, Babe, and then spread it on the pages of Esquire. The Paleys cut off Capote for his betrayal, but the wound went deep. Many knew Paley a cad; Capote made him famous for it.

Before the fall: Bill and Babe Paley pose with Truman Capote while on holiday together in the 1950s. Image from http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/social-history/2010/on-having-met-mr-capote. 

Readers seeking more of a pure history of CBS may be vaguely disappointed. Paley was seen as an “absentee landlord” by network insiders. He often leaned on the farsighted data-cruncher Frank Stanton and other executives to run the shop while he globetrotted.

“He wanted to be running the company, but he didn’t want to do it,” Stanton told Bedell Smith.

Stanton was the first of many “heir apparents” to Paley’s CBS chairmanship who found himself forced out when Paley decided he didn’t want to leave after all, a casualty of a famous age clause at CBS that mandated retirement upon reaching age 65 – with Paley being the famous 20-years-and-running exception.

Stanton’s immediate successor as network president dropped dead of a heart attack following an argument with the chairman. Three other presidents followed, each done in by Paley for failing to show adequate deference.

Paley and CBS President Frank Stanton, at right, pose in front of a new color-television camera in 1951. Image from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1976/01/cbs-the-power-and-the-profits/305304/.

Only a fast-encroaching senescence in his late 80s prevented Paley’s ouster of Laurence Tisch, an outside investor Paley brought in to topple his final designated heir:

There was real pathos in the decline of the aging dynamo. But unlike others who yield to their infirmity and slip from public view, Paley clung to center stage. He loved the visibility and the awe that he still inspired. If it meant risking making a fool of himself, it was a chance worth taking.

Paley had a keen eye, but a wandering focus. He didn’t understand the sitcoms that restored CBS to its former glory in the early 1970s, blanching at the humor of the unreconstructed Archie Bunker. But he soaked up his network’s output anyway, even the little-regarded “CBS Morning News,” which he watched from bed while tucking into a large breakfast.

“He would call me afterwards and ask if the screen graphics should be to the right instead of to the left of the anchor’s shoulders,” Richard Salant, then CBS News president, told Bedell Smith. “He loved the little details like whether the camera should move closer. The complaints were reasonably good and had nothing to do with the substance of the broadcasts.”

Bedell Smith leaves the trail of the network for many long chapters at a stretch, to focus on Paley’s marriages and affairs. She also spends much time on the second wife, Babe Paley.

Author Sally Bedell Smith, in a recent photo. In addition to Paley, she has also written bios of aristocrats official and otherwise, like Prince Charles, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Sally-Bedell-Smith/e/B000APFMGW.

The first time I read In All His Glory, I found this to be the spinach of an otherwise fine meal. Bedell Smith rhapsodizes on Babe Paley’s signature elegance, her high-society upbringing, her surroundings. She even itemizes Babe’s bequests when predeceasing her husband. Yet Babe, however cheated upon, was the key to understanding Paley, something I realized more on a second reading:

Paley wanted a wife without peer to show how successful he was. He wore her like a medal.

Babe offers a kind of showroom mirror to view Paley from, an empire builder in her own right who left nothing in the way of a legacy but gaudy baubles and mixed memories about what it all meant. The break with Capote was the final, cruelest cut. As she lay dying of cancer, an unnamed intimate tells Bedell Smith: “She had not a glimmer of having a soul.” It’s a comment with more than religious meaning.

For Paley, too, the world was all there was, immortality something only worth having if he was around to enjoy it. He built an empire, only to hang on too long and preside over its crumbling, even facilitate it at the end. Relating the diverse lives of the six Paley offspring, Bedell Smith notes: “It was more than faintly ironic that most of the children of such a secular man were drawn to the spiritual life.”

Yet Paley was a man of constant charm, a characteristic Bedell Smith celebrates in a multitude of often-amusing ways. Greeted by one of his record label’s big stars, Meat Loaf, with a hearty “Yo, Bill,” Paley kept his cool. “Good afternoon, Mr. Loaf,” he replied, then engaged in a comfortable discussion while the rocker tucked into a banana and beer.

Paley’s more famous association with CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow is also recounted at length. Paley respected Murrow, and for a time shared his desire to use their broadcast platform in a meaningful way. When Murrow as host of the pioneering news program “See It Now” went after Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954, Paley told him: “I’m with you today, and I’ll be with you tomorrow.” By then, though, Murrow’s opinion-laced approach to news-giving had begun to wilt Paley’s ardor, which continued until a final break later that decade.

Walter Cronkite, like Murrow a famous CBS News newsman, had his own run-ins with Paley over "instant analysis," a habit Cronkite shared with other CBS newsmen for injecting commentary after politician speeches which predated the cable-news punditry of today. Cronkite is seen here at left, with New York City Mayor Ed Koch between him and Paley at a farewell ceremony after Cronkite retired from the network in 1981. Image from https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/walter-cronkite-left-farewell-ceremony-at-new-york-city-news-photo/155668801.

Bedell Smith’s account of that rupture is a fair and balanced one, not overselling Murrow’s white-knight reputation the way others do, while still making clear Paley’s problem with his star had a financial component. It was always so:

From the earliest days, Paley knew how to use principles for profit at CBS. But if principles collided with profits or ran afoul of one of his friends, Paley made exceptions to the rules.

Paley’s willingness to rewrite his story in ways that suited his ego get close attention from Bedell Smith. Back in 1927, while still marketing his father’s cigars, he blanched at the opportunity to run a fledging radio network. “I don’t want anything to do with this pipsqueak radio network, this phony chain,” he reportedly said. Later, many times, Paley would claim the Columbia Broadcasting System his sole creation, but a son of Paley’s predecessor Ike Levy told Bedell Smith differently:

“Bill Paley didn’t found the company. He built it.”

Building CBS was still a feat in itself, which Bedell Smith in her all-encompassing account makes clear. You don’t finish In All His Glory thinking Paley a cad that way. Like she says, he did the work. But like with his marriages, you feel a sad sense of misplaced priorities, and how all-consuming a monster one’s overfed ego can become.