`In All His Glory’ takes a harsh look at the life and times of William Paley

IN ALL HIS GLORY, by Sally Bedell Smith, Simon & Schuster, 783 pages, $29.95.

By all outward appearances, few businessmen this century deserve to stand alongside the much-celebrated William S. Paley, who, at 26, quit his father’s Philadelphia cigar company to buy an infant radio network and then built it into the colossal media conglomerate CBS.

Gutsy risk-taker; visionary; entrepreneurial genius; energetic, iron-willed corporate titan; social lion, and husband of one of the most desirable women in New York — those are all descriptions of Paley, who recently died at the age of 89 from pneumonia and a heart ailment.

Paley, known to reverent CBS troops simply as “The Chairman,” seemingly was charmed for life, suffering his first major defeat only four years ago, when billionaire financier Laurence Tisch, equally iron-willed and 20 years his junior, wrested away control of CBS.

Now, countering the fawning appraisals of Paley’s achievements appearing in the media recently, there is this devastatingly harsh biography by former New York Times media reporter Sally Bedell Smith. It deals his memory a crushing blow.

“In All His Glory,” five years in the research and writing, presents a damning picture of much of Paley’s personal and professional life. Supported by hundreds of interviews with Paley’s social intimates, business associates, employees and enemies, as well as by three conversations with Paley himself, the 783-page volume offers an image of The Chairman not to be gleaned from Paley’s 1979 memoir, “As It Happened,” or from the CBS publicity machine that protected him throughout his career.

Granted, Smith does not deny Paley his enormous due for transforming the tiny Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System radio network, bought in the late 1920s, into the “Tiffany Network.” Nor does she deny that he was a master builder — a remarkably resilient, cunning and ruthless businessman — with a keen sense of what middle-class America wanted in entertainment.

But that said, Smith painstakingly portrays The Chairman as a loathsome man in many respects: shamelessly vain and greedy, and mule-stubborn in fighting ideas from other CBS executives until those ideas proved successful, at which time he claimed exclusive credit. Smith also reports that Paley initially fought the advent of television because he thought it would jeopardize his radio network, and later fought color TV because he thought it would help his chief competitor, NBC, sell color sets for NBC’s parent company, RCA.

Paley, who over the years served as CBS president or board chairman, was a man, says Smith, who fashioned the Tiffany image for his network while quietly pandering to whatever tawdry tastes generated the most revenue; a man eager to rewrite CBS history in his own self-interest; and finally, late in life, a man who handpicked successor after successor, only to eventually force them out when they crossed him or tried to exercise the control he had promised.

On the personal side, Paley comes across as a consummately charming, self-absorbed social-climber who never got over his ambivalence about his Russian-Jewish immigrant roots. Twice married — most notably to Babe Paley, the exquisitely beautiful WASP goddess who presided over the New York social set — The Chairman was nonetheless a lustful hedonist who never let his marital vows halt his countless liaisons with buxom showgirls and actresses, wispy WASPy social lionesses, even the wives of his friends and acquaintances. Yet, he was so possessive and domineering where Babe was concerned that he resented what little time she spent with their own children.

The book, as complete an account of Paley’s life as we are likely to see, is at once disgusting and sad. How could a man with so much wealth and power still want so much more? How could he be so charming, yet so petty, duplicitous and insecure?

Even after five years, Smith isn’t sure. The most likely answer, she believes, comes from early in his life. Young Willie Paley’s mother, Goldie, devoted nearly all her attention to his sickly sister, Blanche.

“Willie sat in the corner burning with jealousy as he watched his mother plait ribbons into Blanche’s braids and cater to her every need,” writes Smith. “He felt rejected and unloved.

“In later years he said he believed (his mother’s) haranguing fueled his ambition as an adult. He was determined, he often said, `to show her,’ to prove himself not only to her but to `anybody else who found fault.”‘

Rich in detail, authoritatively written, “In All His Glory” will catapult Smith to the front ranks of American biographers. Unfortunately for Paley, the price of her success is going to be the public’s memory of him.