He hated society, to tell the truth. Even as he yearned for it, collected it, wore it about his neck like a medal. He craved acceptance; he craved the sensation of knowing that he was the most sought after; he and Babe, that is. The Paleys. Mr. and Mrs. The richest, most beautiful, most glamorous couple in New York. That’s what he wanted. He just didn’t want to have to put up with some of the exhausting exercises required to attain his desire, that was all. He left most of it up to Babe, and simply waited for her to tell him what was required of him. Like this evening, for instance. After a long day at work, he’d have to change and go to the Plaza and mix and mingle.
But that was why he’d married Babe in the first place, wasn’t it? Because she knew society, she knew how to navigate it easily, not clumsily; Babe knew where to go and with whom to be seen. Although it wasn’t as if he’d been some rube off the turnip truck when he’d met her; he was already William S. Paley, chairman of CBS. His first wife, Dorothy, had polished the rough edges, shown him how to dress, where to live, introduced him to art, to performers, politicians, artists; he’d selected her for the job, just as he’d selected Babe, later on, and Fred Friendly to run the news division, and countless other employees, even the most admired faces in the land. They were all his employees, wives included; the famous men and women of CBS, whom he could call on whenever and wherever and they’d show up: Bing Crosby, whom he’d discovered, drunk but singing like an angel, and then turned into one of the first radio crooners. Jack and Mary Benny, personal favorites of his; Jack could make him fall down on the floor laughing with just one flick of a wrist and a long, steady slow burn. George Burns and Gracie Allen; Gracie was a doll, literally. A tiny thing with that crinkly little voice, although he didn’t much care for George. Too sly, too condescending. But he had to admit he’d given the cigar industry a boost.
Cigars. He didn’t smoke them anymore, but they were still part of who he was: the rich smell of tobacco in his clothes, the slimy feel of the palm leaves in his hands, the small rings declaring “La Palina.” The brand of cigars his father and his uncle Jake had founded and turned into a thriving business. The business he, Bill, was expected to go into as a youth, and he had, learning it from the bottom up, rolling the cigars himself along with the laborers in the beginning, because that’s how his father had first started out. But then he’d heard about this new thing called radio, back in the twenties, and one summer, when he was left in charge of the business in Philadelphia while his uncle and father were on a buying trip to Cuba, he’d approached one of the local radio stations about sponsoring a show—The La Palina Hour. Some bad singer, he recalled, was the star of the show, but it didn’t matter. People listened; people listened to anything broadcast in those days. Sales went through the roof, and he realized there was a lot more to this radio business than he’d thought.
How did he know? Instinct. Gut instinct, from deep within that stomach he so carefully attended. He couldn’t analyze it, not if he tried—and he’d been begged to try, many times over the decades. He just knew. He wasn’t the only hungry person out there. Everyone was hungry for something—food, for sure. But sometimes it was for laughter, sometimes for tears. Sometimes to recognize themselves, sometimes to be jolted into awareness of something novel and even frightening. Hungry for other people, mostly, and radio did that; it brought people together, made them feel less lonely. And so he figured out this radio thing, bought a struggling little network of a few stations around Philly—Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. He got rid of the Phonographic right away.
And what he, Bill Paley, did was realize fairly quickly that the money was in advertising, not in forcing the small affiliate stations to pay for the programming, the way it had been. He would offer the programming for free, in return for advertising time on each station, and the advertisers would pay for the privilege. And that’s how it worked, even in television. Once he figured out the system, he was eager to move on and let others run it. He still had a hand in programming—he knew what people wanted, and he always felt the privilege of that knowledge—and he’d been lucky enough to figure out that network news could be a powerful force during the war. He’d been damned lucky to have had Ed Murrow already in Europe when war broke out, ready to assume the ultimate mantle of “right man at the right time.”
But the running of the company, the day-to-day demands, he left to others. Oh, he was in the office all day, signing papers, attending to big decisions, paying surprise visits just to keep people on their toes. He was still Mr. CBS, the face of the company, and he sure as hell knew how to live that life.
With Babe on his arm, of course.
Babe.
He still couldn’t think of her, after how many years now—they’d married in ’47 and it was ’58, so eleven. Eleven years now. And he still couldn’t think of her without shaking his head at his luck. He didn’t have to be told—as he was daily, by total strangers, even—how lucky he was to be married to her.
How lucky he was that Barbara Cushing Mortimer, the ultimate Boston shiksa, had said “yes” to him. A Jew from Chicago.