In All His Glory; The Life of William S. Paley, The Legendary Tycoon and His Brilliant Circle by Smith, Sally Bedell - 1990

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Anthony Edgeworth (author photograph). 783, [2] pages. Illustrations. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ is price clipped and has slight wear and soiling. Sarah Bedell Smith (born May 27, 1948) is an American historian and author specializing in biographies of American political, cultural, and business leaders, as well as members of the British royal family. She has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair for over 20 years, and is married to Stephen G. Smith, former editor of U.S. News & World Report and current editor in chief of National Journal Daily. Smith spent her early career working as a reporter for Time, TV Guide, and The New York Times, where she was a lead cultural news reporter specializing in television. In 1981, Smith published Up The Tube: Prime-time TV and the Silverman Years, an inside look at the American television industry, its ratings wars of the 1970s, and the meteoric career of Fred Silverman, who famously worked as an executive at all of the Big Three TV networks. She won the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award in 1982, and became a fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in 1986. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Smith's first official biography, In All His Glory, was published in 1990, chronicling the life of William S. Paley, former chairman of CBS. In The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Buckley wrote, "[Smith's] superb and thorough reporting uncovered all the unpleasantness along with the greatness." "He is to American broadcasting as Carnegie was to steel, Ford to automobiles, Luce to publishing, and Ruth to baseball," wrote The New York Times of William S. Paley—the man who built CBS, the "Tiffany Network." Sally Bedell Smith's In All His Glory takes a hard look at Paley and the perfect world he created for himself, revealing the extraordinary complexity of the man who let nothing get in the way of his vast ambitions. Tracing his life from Chicago, where Paley was born to a family of cigar makers, to the glamorous haunts of Manhattan, Smith shows us the shrewd, demanding egoist, the hedonist pursuing every form of pleasure, the corporate strongman famous for his energy and ruthlessness. Drawing on highly placed CBS sources and hundreds of interviews, and with a supporting cast of such glittering figures as Truman Capote, Slim Keith, Jock Whitney, Ted Turner, David Sarnoff, Brooke Astor and a parade of Paley's humiliated heirs, In All His Glory is a richly textured story of business, power and social ambition. From a Publishers Weekly article: A big, riveting biography of William Paley, the Chicago cigarmaker's son who built the CBS television empire and reigned as its chairman until 1983, this blockbuster tears away the layers of self-aggrandizing mythology Paley has woven about himself. CBS television tycoon Paley is portrayed as a narcissist, womanizer and tyrannical father in this well-documented biography, which is packed with TV and radio anecdotes and high-level intrigue. According to PW , this ``often unflattering but never malicious portrait . . . . tears away the layers of self-aggrandizing mythology Paley wove about himself.''.