As It Happened: A Memoir

by William S. Paley

This is a landmark memoir, the first of its kind by a giant of the communications media. It is the intimate and straightforward story of a surviving original, the life and growth of an extraordinary man and the company he built, CBS.

In this book, William S. Paley reminisces about his personal life and his life with CBS - from the celebrities of the entertainment world to the business and political leaders of America to the journalistic controversies still in the news.

Paley brought CBS when it was a small, struggling company called United Independent Broadcasting and he was a young man still in his twenties. Within months he had begun a transformation which shaped CBS into one of the world's greatest communications empires. And still he found time to enjoy the "Roaring Twenties" in Paris, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York.

A brilliant and creative businessman, dealing for high stakes, Paley foresaw the cultural and informational impact of radio, and later, television. With an uncanny eye for spotting entertainment talent, he "discovered" for radio Bing Croby, Kate Smith, Will Rogers, Frank Sinatra, and Paul Whiteman; and those he did not discover, he lured to CBS: Jack Benny, Amos and Andy, George Burns, Red Skelton, and a host of others.

But this book covers more than radio and television - it is about the tastes and trends of our times, written by the man who helped to create and refine many of them. William S. Paley is CBS. His life touches on virtually every major event of the past fifty years. This is a fascinating and revealing work about a man who, perhaps more than any other, brought the great events of our times to us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Journalism

418 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's really no reason to read this unless you're fascinated by William Paley or his fashion plate wife Babe the Blue Ox, or the history of CBS up to the mid-70s. I only read it because Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., in his fabulous book Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America, used Paley and this memoir as exemplars of a certain type of striving.

When I was at St. Paul's School, the word most of us would have chosen to describe Paley's memoirs is "pathetic." "Pathetic" is the kindest thing we had to say for people who tried too hard to be "attractive," who tried too hard, that is, to be like people who didn't have to try to be anything: people like us, people who already were. There was always a touch of vindictiveness in the way we tossed off that word "pathetic"...

I guess the title is meant ironically, because what's apparent (after you read some obits of Paley, which you always should as you're reading a person's memoirs) is how much happened which Paley is not including. "As a matter of taste I will not write about my intimate person relations," he writes in the preface, which translates to the English: I fucked a lot of women. Generally the worse a cheater a man is, the more anodyne his explanation of how his marriage ended. "As with many men, the war was an opportunity to reflect on the course of my life from a distance. One of my conclusions was that my marriage was no longer a success. I thought it would be best for both Dorothy and me to divorce and to go our own ways."

Also excised completely from the Paleys' life history is Truman Capote who had offended them with a chapter from his unfinished roman a clef Answered Prayers.

Paley writes a lot about acquiring art. He had become friends with Picasso, Matisse and Derain and bought lots of post-Impressionist and modern works. "Although I pursued no conscious pattern in buying paintings, but only followed my taste in selecting them, I have been told by artists and other collectors that they can see a pattern and a kind of taste that is a sign that one person put the collection together. That is the sort of comment about style which pleases a collector."

His descriptions of interior decor are just as self-serving, as he praises the "studied casualness" of his CBS office, their Manhattan apartment, their Long Island mansion, their winter retreat in the Bahamas, and the "understatement" of his bespoke suits from London.

In his early forties Paley served in the Psychological Warfare Division for the Allies in Europe, and this provides one of the few genuinely interesting anecdotes of the book:

General Lord startled me one day...while talking on the phone with General Patton, who was complaining bitterly that his army was running out of ammunition. Lord said that there must be some mistake - ammunition was on the way. When he put down the phone he said, "I had to say that. As a matter of fact I'm not sending him ammunition, I'm just sending him gasoline." Shocked, I asked why. He said, "Well, as long as he keeps chasing the Germans, they'll run. If he ever stops, they'll turn on him. Therefore, I think it's more important for him to keep on chasing than for him to have ammunition." I thought, "My God, what a chance this man is taking." As it turned out, Lord did get enough ammunition to Patton in time to protect him if the Germans had turned. But for a critical period of time, Patton had pushed the Germans back many miles in one of the great chases of the war without the ammunition needed to protect himself.

[Juliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Want an understanding of technology and innovation in the twentieth century? Then read the autobiography William Paley, founder and chairman of CBS, As It Happened: A Memoir. Bill Paley learned the art of business from his father who owned a cigar factory. Still a young man in his twenties, Paley took some of his business windfall and invested the money into radio creating CBS Studios. This is a fascinating history of innovation in America--radio to television to music are all covered from the twenties up to through the seventies. Paley was inventing the business as he went along--and he writes of making quick and early mistakes.

This is a good book to read after Tim Wu's Master of the Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. While Wu's book covers the entire industries and wave and changes of innovation in control, it is then interesting to get Paley's perspective from heading one of the most powerful information empires. You really see through this book how much control Paley did have over media--luckily as he describes in the book he had ideas about fairness and neutrality. Although there are a few times in the book I cringed a bit to realize how much control he had.

During his lifetime a few things that Paley accomplished:
*rise of radio
*rise of television (and he tried to get color tv from the beginning)
*television--mass medium or educational content? and how do you mix both
*WWII--went to Europe and helped `
*major collector of art--picassos, matisse, etc.
*Columbia Records and record club

[Peter Mayeux · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covers early history of CBS. It covers Paley's time working for his father's cigar factory in Chicago and also working in early American radio programming, building eventually to CBS programming and then directorship. Several personal experiences are also included in the book.The development of television technology is also discussed. There are lots of photos of network executives and stars of radio and early television. There is an extensive discussion of strategies to create successful TV programs. Several sections of the chapters are pitches with accolades for CBS News. There are several sections in the book where CBS is placed up agai2ggggg3gnst competing networks and, of course as always,2 CBS wins since it's written by a CBS executive. There are several photos in the book that emphasize various times in Paley's life. There are also two appendix that detail the development of CBS News and CBS television. This may be helpful for researchers.

[gargamelscat · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very rich man who enjoyed to the fullest all that the riches he earned could bring, without apology.

An interesting enough account of his life with the exception of the latter years on the CBS corporate structure.

A notorious womaniser (Louise Brooks!) he is up front in the preface about skipping that part of his life.

Narrowly missed WW1 but was an honorary colonel in WW2 as part of the allied propaganda unit in Europe and North Africa. Mentioned in Ivone Kirkpatrick's memoir (BBC propaganda unit) as being a hard-nosed aggressive negotiator looking for access to BBC broadcast capacity for US efforts.

Rubbed shoulders with a lot of celebrities - but have to question his people judgement skills (Randolph Churchill! gets a warm mention).

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

1979 memoir by the founder of CBS was somewhat interesting but ultimately disappointing. Seemed mostly to be a defense of himself. Not much insight on the impact of radio and TV on society.