Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 5
At one point in the 1960s, according to a story told in David HaIberstam’s mammoth history of twentieth-century media giants, The Powers That Be, William Paley, the chairman of CBS, was puzzled by the failure of a restaurant he had opened in the CBS headquarters building in Manhattan. He suggested to the restaurant’s manager that perhaps they should turn it into a supper club for people who wanted a late dinner after a play or concert. “Bill,” his manager informed him sadly, “there ain’t no supper business in this town.”
“No?” said the man who ran CBS. “Why not?”
The explanation was simple: “Because everyone’s home watching the tube.”
If you were home watching the tube in September 1986, then you saw William Paley, at the age of eighty-four, playing a central role in one of the most dramatic business stories of our time. It was a drama that Shakespeare might have relished, featuring the deposition of an embattled king and the restoration of his legendary predecessor—an episode from the Wars of the Roses enacted in the boardroom at Black Rock, the CBS headquarters in New York City.
When the dust settled, Thomas Wyman, who had succeeded Paley as chairman of CBS in 1983, was out as chairman, president, and chief executive officer. Paley returned as acting chairman, while Laurence Tisch, the chairman of Loews Corporation and owner of 24.9 percent of CBS—a stake worth nearly a billion dollars at the time of the struggle—took over as acting CEO. (In January 1987 the board of CBS made both appointments permanent.)
The return of Paley as chairman of one of America’s most glamorous corporations at the age of eighty-four added a remarkable chapter to a career that already loomed large in the history of American business. I would call it a “climactic” chapter, but who knows? Paley is one old soldier who seems to intend neither to die nor to fade away. Retirement homes are full of ex-CBS executives who thought they would outlast him.
Paley’s story follows a classic American pattern—not from rags to riches but from riches to megabucks. Yet it is not merely the story of a man who took advantage of inherited wealth. It is the story of an entrepreneur who, at a very early age, saw and seized opportunities that were far from obvious to other businessmen.
Paley’s father and his uncle, Samuel and Jay Paley, were immigrants from Russia who established a highly successful cigar company in Chicago in the 1890s. In his teens, working in his father’s factory, Bill Paley learned how to put bands on the cigars and how to mix different blends of tobacco—a perfect apprenticeship for a man who had every reason to expect that he would spend the rest of his life in the cigar business.
In his autobiography, As It Happened, published in 1979, Paley recalls a moment of illumination that occurred as he approached eighteen: “I...recognized