If you were a die hard Gilligan fan, you ain't gonna like this guy!
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1901-1990
Another fascinating character from the birth of modern day entertainment.
Paley was the son of a cigar store owner who bought a fledgling radio station for advertisement purposes, and put the young Paley in charge. This was the beginning of a beautiful thing....
During World War II, Paley served in the psychological warfare branch in the Office of War Information, under General Dwight Eisenhower, and held the rank of colonel. It was while based in London during the war that Paley came to know and befriend Edward R. Murrow, CBS's head of European news.
Paley quickly grasped the earnings potential of radio and recognized that good programming was the key to selling advertising time and, thus, in turn, bringing in profits to the network and to affiliate owners. Before Paley, most businessmen viewed radio stations as stand-alone outlets, or in other words, as the broadcast equivalent of the local newspaper. The individual stations originally bought programming from the network and were thus considered the network's clients.
Paley changed broadcasting's business model, not only by being a genius at developing successful and lucrative programming, but by viewing the advertisers (sponsors) as the most significant element of the broadcasting equation. Paley provided network programming to affiliate stations at nominal cost, thereby ensuring the widest possible distribution not only for the programming but the advertising. The advertisers then became the network's primary clients and, because of the wider distribution brought by the growing network, Paley was able to charge more for the ad time. Affiliates were required to carry programming offered by the network for part of the broadcast day, receiving a portion of the network's take from advertising revenue. At other times in the broadcast day, affiliates were free to offer local programming and sell advertising time locally.
CBS long owned the Columbia Record Company and its associated CBS Laboratories. It was Columbia Records which introduced the 33 1/3 RPM long playing vinyl disc to successfully compete with RCA Victor's 45 RPM vinyl disc. It was also CBS Laboratories and Peter Goldmark who developed a method for color television. After much bare-knuckled lobbying in Washington by RCA President David Sarnoff and Paley, the FCC gave the nod to the RCA color system and CBS sold the patents to their system to foreign broadcasters PAL-SECAM. CBS was the last of the three broadcast networks to adopt color television, having to buy and license RCA equipment and technology.
Paley was respected not only for building CBS into an entertainment powerhouse, but for also encouraging the development of a news division that went on to dominate broadcast journalism for decades.
"Bill Paley erected two towers of power, one for entertainment and one for news," 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt said in his autobiography, Tell Me a Story. "And he decreed that there would be no bridge between them...In short, Paley was the guy who put Frank Sinatra and Edward R. Murrow on the radio and 60 Minutes on television.
In 1959 James T. Aubrey, Jr., became the president of CBS. Under Aubrey, the network became the most popular on television with shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan's Island. However, Paley's personal favorite was Gunsmoke; in fact, Paley was such a fan of Gunsmoke, that upon its threatened cancellation in 1967, he demanded that it be reinstated somehow, which in turn led to the abrupt demise of Gilligan's Island, which had already been renewed for a fourth season.
During the 1963–64 television season, fourteen of the top fifteen shows on prime-time, and the top twelve shows of daytime television, were on CBS. Aubrey, however, fought constantly with Fred W. Friendly of CBS News, and Paley did not like Aubrey's taste in low-brow programming. Aubrey and Paley bickered to the point that Aubrey approached Frank Stanton and proposed a take-over of CBS. The take-over never materialized, and in 1965, when CBS's ratings began to slip, Paley fired Aubrey.
CBS purchased the New York Yankees from the Del Webb Company in 1964. Paley sold the Yankees in 1973 to Cleveland shipbuilder George Steinbrenner and a group of investors. Acting on behalf of CBS, Paley sold the team at its low ebb for $8.7 million. In April, 2006 Forbes Magazine estimated that the Yankees were worth $1.26 billion. To be fair, it was also under CBS stewardship (from 1964 onward), that the dominant Bronx Bombers fell into mediocrity, not making the playoffs during that stretch.
He was married twice: Two John Randolph Hearst's former wife Dorothy Hart, and to socialite Barbara Cushing Mortimer.
Paley was a notorious ladies' man who was constantly romantically pursuing women outside of his marriage. Indeed, his first marriage ended when his wife Dorothy became aware of an affair when a newspaper published the suicide note written to Paley by a former girlfriend. He provided a stipend to his former lover, actress Louise Brooks, for the rest of her life. In his later years, he enjoyed keeping company with a coterie of devoted lady friends.
Paley died in 1990. He's burried in Nassau County NY.
