William S. Paley

• Born: September 28, 1901
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: October 26, 1990
• Place of death: New York, New York

Business executive

In the 1930’s, Paley built the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) on the foundation of news and entertainment programming.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

William Paley (PAY-lee) was born in Chicago to parents who were immigrants from a village near Kiev in Ukraine. His father, Sam, made cigars. When Paley was four years old, the family moved to Detroit, but they returned to Chicago in 1909. The Paleys also had a daughter named Blanche. Paley was a quiet boy who was not successful in elementary school, but he admired the resourceful heroes of Horatio Alger’s novels. Paley adopted the middle initial “S” at the age of twelve; it is assumed that it acknowledged his father’s name. Paley attended Carl Schurz High School for two years and then the Western Military Academy, where he did well and qualified to enter the University of Chicago at the age of seventeen, but he left college after a year.

Paley expressed no particular interest in his religion, but, aware of and sensitive to anti-Semitism, he tended to associate mainly with other Jews, especially at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1922. A few years later, he became fascinated by radio. His cigar-making father sponsored a half hour program for a group of radio stations called United Independent Broadcasters (UIB) in 1925, and Paley, who had little interest in the cigar business, produced the show. He persuaded his father to use family funds to enable him to purchase UIB.

Life’s Work

Paley, the new owner of UIB, increased the number of stations, and by 1929 he was president of a network of forty-nine stations, which he renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).The network was in competition with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which had begun operations four years earlier. The early 1930’s saw the beginning of broadcast ratings, and for a few years NBC held the lead, but Paley adroitly hired several assistants who helped the network to gain strength. One of them, Edward Klauber, impressed upon Paley the necessity of fairness in broadcasting, a lesson that would prove especially important in relation to CBS’s news coverage.

CBS responded early to listeners’ demand for news. In 1933, the network offered three daily newscasts. Newspaper publishers objected and won limits on radio broadcasting from Congress, but CBS rebounded, particularly after 1935, when Paley hired Edward R. Murrow, one of the few employees who also became a personal friend. Murrow hired outstanding reporters who, like Murrow, gained fame with their coverage of World War II. Paley also contributed to the war effort by working for the Office of War Information with the rank of colonel.

Paley’s interest in programming included a keen appreciation of entertainment programs, and he was both generous to first-rate talent and willing to take risks. When he heard Bing Crosby’s singing voice, Paley immediately sought and obtained the crooner’s services, although some of Paley’s associates warned him that the singer was not always reliable. In the early years of CBS, Paley also obtained the services of comedians Jack Benny, George Burns, and Gracie Allen, although they later gravitated to NBC. The two networks continued to attract each other’s stars, and CBS won the ratings battle in 1936 by luring such performers as Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson from NBC.

Paley’s handsomeness and congeniality assisted him in recruiting performers and enticing advertisers. These attributes also made him a favorite with attractive women. He married one of them, the socially prominent Dorothy Hart, in 1932, and they adopted two children. His interest in other women and the fact that he devoted himself so thoroughly to his work brought about their divorce in 1947. Soon thereafter he married another socialite, Barbara Cushing; with her he became the father of two more children. The contest with NBC heated up in 1948, when Paley signed Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the enormously successful performers in Amos ’n’ Andy; Jack Benny; and other media stars.

Paley’s concern about fairness and good taste led to conflicts within the network, and so did his tendency toward neutrality, since newscasters who worked for him wished to express their own strong opinions. Paley gave Senator Joseph R. McCarthy an opportunity to respond to Murrow’s 1954 program analyzing the senator’s tactics in his assault on the communistic influences that McCarthy thought were endangering Americans. In 1961, Paley fired Howard K. Smith for what Paley regarded as the severity of his report on racial conflicts in Birmingham, Alabama. At first Paley resisted Norman Lear’s situation comedyAll in the Family as too coarse and bigoted for CBS, but Paley’s capacious sense of taste led him to back its production in 1971. Thereafter, he was happy that he had done so.

Paley had no knowledge of technology or interest in it, but he understood the importance of employing people who did. Thus the CBS version of color television won out over that of NBC, although its leader, David Sarnoff, was more astute in technology. Except for a three-year period in the 1980’s, Paley remained chief executive officer of CBS until his death in 1990 from kidney failure.

Significance

The career of Paley demonstrates the possibilities and the difficulties inherent in maintaining high standards in a public medium. He strove to make CBS popular with millions of listeners and viewers without compromising his quest for quality programming. The network’s development of an outstanding news department in the 1930’s, with brilliant reporting of World War II and of political and racial news in the quarter century after the war, illustrates his success. Ironically, his ability to attract advertisers, whom he strove to keep from controlling programming, unleashed the forces that eventually impaired news coverage. Eventually the network was charged with blurring the distinction between news and entertainment, and the CBS News staff declined in quality. Although little interested in Judaism, Paley always deplored prejudice against Jews, which he experienced even as a well-known businessman. He contributed generously to Jewish causes and funded the construction of a modern art center in Jerusalem.

Bibliography

Paley, William S. As It Happened: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Paley’s recollections of employing such people as Will Rogers and Crosby in the early years of CBS and Paley’s work with Edward R. Murrow during World War II are highlights of this book. His accounts of later events are more routine.

Paper, Lewis J. Empire: William S. Paley and the Making of CBS. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. A general reader’s biography that illuminates the way Paley’s taste generated the programming of CBS, which was disposed more favorably to entertainment than that of NBC.

Smith, Sally Bedell. In All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. A long, well-researched, and judgmental biography by a media journalist.

Thomas, Dana Lee. The Media Moguls: From Joseph Pulitzer to William S. Paley. New York: Putnam, 1981. Paley is viewed in relation to a line of media giants stretching back to nineteenth century newspapers.