The Swans of Fifth Avenue(29)

Cigars. He didn’t smoke them anymore, but they were still part of who he was: the rich smell of tobacco in his clothes, the slimy feel of the palm leaves in his hands, the small rings declaring “La Palina.” The brand of cigars his father and his uncle Jake had founded and turned into a thriving business. The business he, Bill, was expected to go into as a youth, and he had, learning it from the bottom up, rolling the cigars himself along with the laborers in the beginning, because that’s how his father had first started out. But then he’d heard about this new thing called radio, back in the twenties, and one summer, when he was left in charge of the business in Philadelphia while his uncle and father were on a buying trip to Cuba, he’d approached one of the local radio stations about sponsoring a show—The La Palina Hour. Some bad singer, he recalled, was the star of the show, but it didn’t matter. People listened; people listened to anything broadcast in those days. Sales went through the roof, and he realized there was a lot more to this radio business than he’d thought.

How did he know? Instinct. Gut instinct, from deep within that stomach he so carefully attended. He couldn’t analyze it, not if he tried—and he’d been begged to try, many times over the decades. He just knew. He wasn’t the only hungry person out there. Everyone was hungry for something—food, for sure. But sometimes it was for laughter, sometimes for tears. Sometimes to recognize themselves, sometimes to be jolted into awareness of something novel and even frightening. Hungry for other people, mostly, and radio did that; it brought people together, made them feel less lonely. And so he figured out this radio thing, bought a struggling little network of a few stations around Philly—Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. He got rid of the Phonographic right away.

And what he, Bill Paley, did was realize fairly quickly that the money was in advertising, not in forcing the small affiliate stations to pay for the programming, the way it had been. He would offer the programming for free, in return for advertising time on each station, and the advertisers would pay for the privilege. And that’s how it worked, even in television. Once he figured out the system, he was eager to move on and let others run it. He still had a hand in programming—he knew what people wanted, and he always felt the privilege of that knowledge—and he’d been lucky enough to figure out that network news could be a powerful force during the war. He’d been damned lucky to have had Ed Murrow already in Europe when war broke out, ready to assume the ultimate mantle of “right man at the right time.”

But the running of the company, the day-to-day demands, he left to others. Oh, he was in the office all day, signing papers, attending to big decisions, paying surprise visits just to keep people on their toes. He was still Mr. CBS, the face of the company, and he sure as hell knew how to live that life.

With Babe on his arm, of course.

Babe.

He still couldn’t think of her, after how many years now—they’d married in ’47 and it was ’58, so eleven. Eleven years now. And he still couldn’t think of her without shaking his head at his luck. He didn’t have to be told—as he was daily, by total strangers, even—how lucky he was to be married to her.

How lucky he was that Barbara Cushing Mortimer, the ultimate Boston shiksa, had said “yes” to him. A Jew from Chicago.

Bill opened the small refrigerator—of course, a Frigidaire—and pulled out several packages of thick white butcher’s paper; he unrolled each and surveyed the contents. Pastrami? Thin Genoa salami? Slices of Angus beef, bloody red at the center?

He chose the Genoa salami, wrapping the other packages up tenderly, putting them to bed back in the refrigerator. Then he opened a jar of brown deli mustard.

Cognizance of his Jewishness was right up there with his cognizance of his stomach. It was always in his thoughts, his plans, his schemes. Not paramount, and not in any sort of religious sense. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been to temple. But every time a door closed, the slam he heard was a word, and the word was Jew. Real or imagined, there it was. Clubs he could never join. Schools his children could never attend. Women he could never have.

Yet one of those women had said yes. Was it love that prompted this act of bravery on Babe’s part? Or was it money, all his piles of money?

Yes. No. Maybe.

Bill Paley was nothing if not pragmatic, and so was his wife. It was that pragmatism that drew them together in the first place. Oh, God, yes, Babe was beautiful and stunning and fabulous and all that—she lived up to her advertising, that was for sure. But when they met, she newly divorced, he nearly so (well, that counted, right? His intention was to be divorced, anyway. He’d just not gotten around to telling his first wife), whatever passed for physical attraction between them was utterly trumped by shared pragmatism. With her society pedigree, she could get him into places he couldn’t go alone. And he could give her financial stability for her children, and entrée into something more exciting than that staid society she was groomed for. Radio and television, the entertainment industry. This was new, and exciting, and Babe was curious.

He noticed that right away about her—her curiosity. He appreciated it, to a point. He also had no intention of having a second marriage like his first, a marriage in which the wife taught the husband, and didn’t care who knew it; in fact, took pains to let others see how much she had taught him, how much more she knew about art and politics and all the rest. That had been Dorothy Hearst Paley’s fatal flaw, one she recognized too late.