W
illiam S. Paley became president of the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, when he was twenty-six, and he ran the company until 1983, when he retired and assumed the title of “founder chairman.” Already a wealthy man when he and his family bought Columbia (the Paleys were cigar manufacturers), he was deeply attached to the style of living that enormous amounts of money make possible, and he cultivated a taste in fine art, fine furniture, fine clothing, and fine food. He married two striking and intelligent women-Dorothy Hart Hearst, whom he divorced in 1947, and Barbara Cushing Mortimer, called Babe, whom he married soon after his divorce and who died in 1978—in a time when it was expected of striking and intelligent women of a certain class that they would devote themselves to the comfort and adornment of their husbands’ lives. He was, on social occasions and on most business occasions, a charming man who disliked unpleasantness and preferred to let others act as the
agents of his disapproval, and as radio and then television grew to become the most influential and lucrative communications media in the history of the world, he had a personality equipped to extract a full measure of satisfaction from the power and prestige his position afforded him—something that was not lost on those who knew him. “He looks,” Truman Capote once remarked, “like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.”
Sally Bedell Smith’s biography of Paley,
In All His Glory,
came out in 1990, the year of Paley’s death. The book epitomizes the reaction most people have to a life like Paley’s: it is written for two audiences—one that would like a peek at the glamour of Paley’s world, and another that would like to confirm its intuition that someone other people find so glamorous must actually be a person of rather limited accomplishment. For the first audience, the home furnishings, vacations, distinguished golfing partners, and romantic liaisons in Paley’s life are carefully catalogued. One appendix lists the bequests, mostly of expensive jewelry, in Babe Paley’s will; another gives the dollar value of Paley’s holdings in CBS stock for each year of his life, beginning in 1928. (It increased.) For the audience that wants to see what the legend looks like with the varnish removed, there are stories of coldness to friends and to children, of bad business decisions and of credit stolen from others for good ones, and of personal mythmaking on an imperial scale. First we are asked to admire the cake, and then we get to eat it. This is a common enough form of celebrity biography, and satisfying in its mildly opportunistic way. It’s nice to know how people who strike it rich spend their money, and it’s also nice to feel that if we struck it rich ourselves we’d deserve it a little more and spend the money a little less selfishly. When we read of Babe Paley’s being driven by her chauffeur to Kennedy Airport so that she can pick up the freshly shot game bird she has had flown in from Europe for her husband’s dinner, our disappointment at being financially incapable of this sort of thing is exactly balanced by our satisfaction in feeling morally incapable of it as well.
Smith’s chapters on Paley’s personal life contain many stories like the story of the imported fowl, but the story of the fowl is about
as exciting as most of them get. For Paley aspired merely to live well, and in what he understood to be the best possible taste; and although this aspiration led him, given his means, to excesses, it precluded any genuine folly. He was, with a few significant philanthropic exceptions, much too prudent to waste his money on anything but himself. His single traditional vice, apparently, was philandering, which is neither the most unusual vice for a very rich man to have nor the most interesting.
Smith’s treatment of Paley’s career as a broadcaster is somewhat less breathless than her treatment of his career as a devotee of the high life. Her pages on the business side of Paley’s life are concerned mostly with debunking his reputation as a broadcasting genius. She does concede, as most commentators do, that Paley understood better and sooner than anyone else in broadcasting the importance of programming. (It seems odd that people in broadcasting ever doubted that the choice and quality of programs were important, but they did.) And she believes that he had a genuine instinct for guessing what most Americans wanted to hear and see. But she also points out that Paley went into radio not because he had a precocious sense of its potential, as he later claimed, but simply in order to get some executive training before returning to the cigar business; that he saw no money in television when it appeared, and discouraged efforts to move his company into it; and that during the years—from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s—when CBS assembled its television network and overtook NBC to become the dominant force in the industry, he was generally distracted by the enjoyment of his private life, and by a brief stint in public service, and it was really Frank Stanton, the president of the company (by then Paley had become chairman), who engineered CBS’s triumph.
This part of the cake has been sliced by others, as well—in Robert Metz’s
CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye
(1975) and in David Halberstam’s
The Powers That Be
(1979), a work whose sections on CBS so irritated Paley when he read a version of them in the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1975 that he (and a large staff) composed his own memoir, As
It Happened,
and arranged to have it published a few weeks before Halberstam’s book appeared. What distinguishes
Smith’s book from those earlier efforts is all the stargazing attention it pays to Paley’s personal life. But the stargazing makes a point of its own. For the way Paley lived—the homes, the art collection, even the wives—had as much to do with the success of CBS, and of network television generally, as his business decisions did. There was nothing foreordained about the dominance of network television; it was achieved in defiance of the normal mechanisms of the market and the normal tinkering instincts of politicians. Network television was an empire protected by an image, and it was Paley’s real genius to understand why it was that every enhancement of his private life was also an investment in the continuing prosperity of the company he ran and the medium he helped to establish.
Americans who grew up in the postwar era are so accustomed to television as a fixture in their lives that its presence seems almost a dispensation of nature. Virtually everyone’s memory of it is the same. If you had a set in 1955, it had twelve VHF (very high frequency) channels, all except three of which probably broadcast static—unless, by performing calisthenics with your aerial, you could pick up a network station from a distant city, the ghostly twin of a local channel. The picture was black and white, and if you switched on the set very early or very late in the day, you could contemplate an eerie piece of electronic arcana, now nearly forgotten—a test pattern. Ed Sullivan had already been on the air for seven years.
In 1970 your set had an extra dial, for UHF, the ultra-high frequency spectrum (Channels 14 to 83). This was a piece of machinery required by Congress on all televisions made after 1963, and it was somehow awkward to operate: you always seemed to be dialing past your station. On the VHF dial, there was now an “educational” channel: the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) had begun operating in 1969, the culmination of seventeen years of efforts to establish a national noncommercial network. You mostly watched the commercial networks, though, or an unaffiliated channel that,
when it wasn’t showing sports or old movies, showed network reruns. The colors (color programming began in 1965) were so oversaturated that they seemed radioactive. Ed Sullivan was still on the air.
Today, even the Ed Sullivan impressionists are gone. You watch a sleek cube fed by a cable, and, by keeping your thumb pressed to a remote control, you can skim dozens of channels in a few seconds. One channel plays music videos all day; one broadcasts world news; one has a local talk show (a consequence of mandated “public access”); one or more, for a fee, show recent movies, uncensored; one has a psychic you can call for on-the-air advice; one displays jewelry you can shop for by phone. You can watch programs on which pickup trucks with oversized tires are driven across rows of parked cars, and programs on which naked people discuss sex in a manner so unstimulating as to make you turn back to watch the pickup trucks. There is always sport, and most of the local teams’ games are available. There are (since the arrival of Fox, in 1986) five “over the air” networks, and one or more “superstations,” beamed into the system by satellite. There is still, it’s true, nothing to watch, but you can turn to Channel 3 and put a rented movie in your videocassette or DVD player.
Because we tend to think of technological development as analogous with biological development, we’re likely to assume that changes in our experience of television reflect changes in television technology. It seems like a simple matter of evolution. We had to have black-and-white pictures before we could have color; we had to have twelve VHF channels before we could have seventy UHF channels, and to have national over-the-air networks before we could have cable, pay-per-view channels, and local programming. We lived with broadcasting so that one day we could have narrowcasting. In fact, the development of American television had almost nothing to do with technology. Network television was no more natural or inevitable than any of the other empires that locked the cold war world into place. It was no more accidental, either, but (like those other empires) it considered itself extremely vulnerable to accident, and understood eternal vigilance to be the price of its survival.
One of the problems with scholarship on television is that a technological and corporate history of the medium often brings us no closer to understanding television as a cultural phenomenon—though it is a common assumption of mass-culture scholarship that such an approach must. An analysis of the economics of television still gives us no way to choose among the various slants on the medium people generally take: television is escapist, and television is propagandistic; television reflects what people are thinking, and television tells people what to think; television is too commercial, and the commercialism of television is inevitable; television is run by liberal elites, television is a pawn of politicians, and television is the tool of corporate America. There is also the tendency to express surprise at the obvious—for example, television’s generally patriotic and consumerist biases. These are sometimes taken to have a brainwashing effect: scholars sometimes write as though they had forgotten that no one has ever been forced to watch a television show. It is pointless to blame everything that is wrong with television on capitalism, unless you are prepared to say that America has never produced any commercial culture worth caring about, which is something you would have to be culturally benumbed to believe. Still, where a biographer like Smith, in the interests of keeping her subject vividly before us, asks us to think of what we watched in the network years as largely a function of personality—“the flickering images on CBS represented the soul and sensibility of Bill Paley,”
1
as she puts it—technological and economic histories of the medium remind us that the style, the quality, the content, and even the color of network television programs were determined by forces much too strong for any personality, even an oversized one like Paley’s, to have resisted.
2
Television predates the Second World War. NBC started regular broadcasting in 1939, and although America’s entry into the war delayed the development of national networks for several years, television technology had been quite fully explored by 1945. The return of the troops produced a massive potential audience and, for advertisers, massive consumer demand; and in 1948, when less than half of 1 percent of American households had television sets, national
broadcasting made its real debut. Confronted with an industry poised to proliferate wildly and in need of elaborate technical coordination (standardization of signals and receivers, allocation of stations in the broadcast spectrum, and so on), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed a freeze on the licensing of new television stations in September 1948. The freeze turned out to be a kind of cultural Yalta; it lasted until 1952, by which time 33 percent of American homes had television sets, and NBC and CBS, the companies that had dominated radio broadcasting, and whose affiliates had secured most of the television licenses granted before the freeze, essentially controlled the field—which, along with the less powerful ABC (a company created in 1943 after the government ordered NBC to sell one of its two radio networks), they continued to do for more than thirty years.
The man who had the most to say about the way in which television was to enter the culture was not Paley but Paley’s rival, NBC’s David Sarnoff. NBC was the broadcasting arm of RCA, of which Sarnoff was the president. RCA also had a manufacturing arm, which produced television sets—sets engineered, as it happened, to receive twelve VHF channels and show a black-and-white picture. A color-picture technology had been developed by CBS in 1940; but Sarnoff, though he knew of this achievement, was not interested in color television. RCA had not pursued it, and CBS color technology was incompatible with RCA sets. In 1947, after Sarnoff promised that RCA was working on a color technology that could be used with its own sets, the FCC refused to approve the CBS—or any other—color system. (Several months after the decision was announced, the FCC’s chairman left to become a vice president of RCA.) By 1953, when the commission lifted the ban on the manufacture of color sets, RCA, which had evidently
not
been working on a color picture, had flooded the market: there were twenty-three million black-and-white sets already in use.
The licensing freeze left the UHF market permanently underdeveloped. The networks’ programs were designed to be broadcast on VHF, since their affiliates were VHF stations; and most sets could not receive UHF signals (which, incidentally, transmit color pictures
better than VHF signals do). In 1953 the FCC began licensing UHF stations, but television manufacturers were reluctant to equip their sets to receive the signal—as late as 1960, only 7 percent of the sets in the country had UHF reception—for the simple reason that many set manufacturers owned VHF broadcasting stations (which might possibly explain why the UHF dial was such a nuisance to use). And cable, far from being a recent refinement, is a technology that predates broadcasting itself: transmitting electronic signals through wires is more rudimentary than transmitting them through the air (or through the ether, as the pioneers of radio imagined it). There were subscriber-supported cable systems for radio as early as 1923, and television networks have always used coaxial cable, leased from phone companies, to transmit their pictures to broadcasting stations.
In short, almost the only technologies used by television in the 1990S which could
not
have been used in the 1950s were satellite transmission and the VCR, and even those were not recent inventions. Video recorders went on the market in 1957 (though they were expensive, and did not use cassettes), and Telstar, the first television satellite, was launched in 1962. (The networks undertook to control development in those areas, too, for obvious reasons.) What we might have had for the last forty years is what, almost everywhere, we have had only since around 1990: a mixture of local and national programming and commercial-free pay services on a hundred channels—and all in living color.