Audio Book 8: Death Echoes for Bond

You can probably thank Bill Paley for For Your Eyes Only.

During the summer of 1958, CBS commissioned Ian Fleming to write a TV series based on James Bond (partly inspired by the success of the 1954 one-shot CBS television adaptation of Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale).

Fleming wrote outlines for several episodes before CBS dropped the idea. CBS Chairman of the Board Bill Paley’s biographer Lewis J. Paper reported that Paley “…rejected any suggestion that the network make use of Ian Fleming’s stories about James Bond, believing that the American public would have no interest in the escapades of a British spy.” Not Paley’s best moment.

In 1959, working at his home Goldeneye in Jamaica, Fleming adapted four of the TV plots into short stories. Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett noted that “…Ian’s mood of weariness and self-doubt was beginning to affect his writing,” as evidenced in Bond’s internal monologue of thoughts.

The short stories became Fleming’s 1960 Bond book, For Your Eyes Only.

The title story, according to Wiki, was originally called Man’s Work and was “…set in Vermont, where Fleming had spent a number of summers at his friend Ivar Bryce’s Black Hollow Farm, which became the model for von Hammerstein's hideaway, Echo Lake. The name of the villain of the story, von Hammerstein, was taken from General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (1878–1943), one of Hitler’s opponents. Fleming also considered calling the story Death Leaves an Echo and based the story on Rough Justice, which was to be episode three of the television series.”

The other stories in that collection — Quantum of Solace, Risico and The Hildebrand Rarity — are not included in this BBC adaptation, but two later stories are.

The Property of a Lady was written in 1963 as a commission for Sotheby’s for use in their annual journal. Fleming was disappointed in the tale, a bit of business about a double agent who is to be paid by KGB through the auction of Peter Carl Fabergé’s “Emerald Sphere.” Of more enduring interest was The Living Daylights, published in 1962 as Berlin Escape. Bond gets a surprise, and is inspired to bitter moral musings, when he is assigned sniper duty to help British agent 272 escape from East Berlin by killing a KGB assassin codenamed Trigger. 

Bill Paley: Go Broadcast, Young Man

The son of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant to Chicago who’d started a successful cigar company, William S. Paley was, by 1928, a young man looking to make a mark in a young industry, broadcasting.

By 1938, Paley was on the cover of Time Magazine

He’d received a million dollars worth of stock in the Congress Cigar Company, and wanted to use part of it to buy a controlling interest in New York-based UIB, the United Independent Broadcasters, a rival to the industry leader, NBC. But he couldn’t do that without his father’s approval.

“After thinking it over, Sam told his son that he approved of the UIB purchase, that Bill should use $400,000 of his stock funds to buy (Jerome) Louchheim’s interest, and that the family would contribute another $100,000,” wrote Lewis J. Paper in his Paley biography Empire. “Paley was delighted and surprised, but most of all surprised. He had convinced himself that Sam would never release him from the cigar business, and he could not resist asking his father why he had yielded. Sam replied that it was all a matter of good business sense. ‘Well,’ he told Bill, ‘if you succeed, it’ll be a bigger business than what you’re in now; and if you don’t succeed,’ his father added, ‘you will have had a lot of experience which might be very useful in the cigar business and to me, and so, on balance, I think you ought to try it.’”

After some hard bargaining, Paley succeeded in securing 50.3 percent of UIB’s stock for $503,000, the day before his 27^th birthday.

“Paley was no doubt excited when he arrived at UIB’s office on an upper floor in the tower of the Paramount Building in midtown Manhattan. But the reception was something less than he had hoped for. A stocky office boy refused to admit the boyish-looking president, demanding to see credentials and to know the purpose of his visit.”

The purpose of his visit was to run the company for several decades, as soon as he changed its name to CBS.

Bad Meal at Black Rock

The Ground Floor restaurant

In 1965, the new Eero Saarinen-designed building on 52nd Street at Sixth Avenue — swiftly dubbed “Black Rock” — was CBS President Frank Stanton’s baby.

“Consistent with his own taste in art, the furnishings and fixtures reflected a sleek, modern look,” wrote Lewis J. Paper in his book Empire: William S. Paley and the Making of CBS. “Glass, chrome and modern paintings dominated the interior space. Even the location and quantity of plants received careful consideration.

“The only exception to the master plan was (CBS Chairman of the Board Bill) Paley’s office. It continued to reflect his own (and very different) tastes. The French gaming table remained as his desk, rich paneling still adorned the walls, comfortable couches were placed strategically, exquisite paintings hung on the walls, and various artifacts — an old CBS microphone, the cigar-store Indian and later a photograph of Edward R. Murrow — all helped to provide a warmth that seemed even more pronounced because of its stark contrast with the rest of the building.”

But the urbane and sophisticated gourmet Paley had his own baby —a haute cuisine restaurant on the ground floor, eventually to be called The Ground Floor.

“The notion of owning a restaurant had always appealed to Paley, especially as the years went by,” Paper said. “Decades of culinary experience had only added to his knowledge and heightened his interest in planning a restaurant. It would, of course, have to feature the best in everything — from its design to the food to the service. Friends noticed the considerable energy he put into the restaurant — picking a name, shaping the décor and planning the menu.”

The interior design reflected the exterior of Black Rock, but the restaurant’s manager, Jerry Brody, thought that was a mistake. “He felt the building was too cold and stark for a restaurant,” Paper said. “Then there was the cost of the fixtures. Bill Paley wanted the best, but the cost made it that much more difficult for the restaurant to show a profit. All of which might have been overcome if the restaurant became popular, but Bill Paley’s zest for food was not matched by his success as a restaurateur.”

Brody suggested a northern European steakhouse, but Paley said no. It must be French cuisine.

Paley in his apartment foyer with his Picasso, "Boy Leading a Horse"

“He went to France almost every year, knew the food and it would draw the right kind of customers — sophisticated people, those who appreciated the finer things. But all these plans and hopes and expectations could not guarantee results. No matter how much time Paley spent in the kitchen tasting the soups and other fare (which he did almost every day), The Ground Floor did not produce the business that Bill Paley wanted, that he felt he deserved.”

In 1968, restaurant critic Gael Greene described the chilly ambience. “The Ground Floor is a perfect room to end an affair in,” she wrote. “The tables are far enough apart to announce the break in a firm voice, and the ambiance is stern enough to discourage sloppy emotionalism.”

“But Boss Paley mingles with everyday folk in the dining room. Leonard Lyons moves through the grill, antennae clicking off the celebrities du jour – Donald Pleasence, Sloan Simpson, an author or two drinking breakfast. And good grief! Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman tieless, unjacketed, grizzled gray locks to the shoulder, Ben Franklin specs … the oldest hippie in the world. Mostly, though, the grill is lined with youngish executives expense-accounting each other. Restrained, subdued: That is not a bar to get sloppy drunk in … not a room to unlax in.”

“It was a never-ending source of frustration,” Paper wrote. “He knew food, he knew New York City and yet he could not make the kind of mystical connection to customers that he had made with his programming. And those who confronted him with the obvious truth proceeded at their peril.

“There was the time, for example, when Stanton, Fred Friendly and Bill Leonard met with Paley one afternoon shortly after The Ground Floor had opened. Paley asked the three executives if they had eaten at the restaurant. In fact, they had all just eaten there — and thought it was terrible. Neither Stanton nor Friendly dared to speak the truth, though. They mumbled that it was fine, just fine. But Bill Leonard loved food as much as Paley, and the two of them had spent many occasions passing away hours discussing food. Leonard could not compromise the truth on so important a matter, and he blurted out, ‘It was awful. The food was terrible. Fred had a fish dish and got sick. The service was bad and the prices were way out of line.’ As Leonard continued, on and on, the color started to drain from Stanton’s face, and the effect on Paley was obvious. ‘It was as though I had said his mother had been caught with a young man,’ said Leonard. The meeting ended more quickly than anyone had anticipated, and the phone was ringing for Friendly almost as soon as he and Leonard returned to the news offices on West Fifty-seventh Street. Friendly reported that it was Stanton with a message for the deputy news chief. ‘Tell Leonard,’ said Stanton, ‘that he has just set the News Division back 10 years. He’s wrecked everything. All Paley can talk about now is the restaurant.’”

“All he wanted, he told friends in 1965, was a simple place where a secretary could go downstairs and have lunch for seven or eight dollars,” David Halberstam wrote in the Atlantic. “His pleasure was enormous when the restaurant finally opened, and his disappointment equal when it was not a wild success. At one point Paley, puzzled by the lack of its success, turned to the restaurateur running it for him, Jerry Brody, and suggested that they might try a supper club for those who eat around 11 p.m., something that Paley liked to do after an evening of concerts or theater.

“ ‘Bill,’ said Brody, ‘there ain’t no supper business in this town.’

“ ‘No?’ answered Paley, puzzled. ‘Why not?’

“ ‘Because everyone’s home watching the tube.’”

Paley’s restaurant evolved into the Ground Floor Café, the American Charcuterie and then the sixth incarnation of the venerable Rose Restaurant. Today the location offers the haute Asian fusion of the China Grill.

The End of Edward R. Murrow

Broadcast journalism legend Edward R. Murrow

“On April 27, 1965, I was flying over the Atlantic on my way back from a two-day meeting with Hugh Greene, director general of the BBC, and his news chiefs,” recalled Fred Friendly, who was then the head of CBS News, but who had partnered with Edward R. Murrow in high-profile, high-principled news broadcasts during the previous decade.

“We were over the Irish Sea when the stewardess came back with a message for me relayed from Shannon. ‘Your friend Mr. Murrow died today,” she said.

Murrow, who’d developed lung cancer and had lived for two years after an operation to remove his left lung, died in his home two days after his 57th birthday

“The plane was two-thirds empty and it was as good a place as any to be silent for five hours,” Friendly wrote. “When we got near enough to the United States for communication, I asked the pilot to give CBS in New York a brief message to be sent to all bureaus and correspondents. In it, I quoted something Ed said in his last radio broadcast to the English people when he left London after the war: ‘You lived a life instead of an apology.’ My message said that this quotation fit Ed Murrow as much as it did the British people, and that it was something for the profession he left behind to aim for.

“In Remembrance Rock, ‘The Old Abider,’ the term of affection Ed and I had for Carl Sandburg, wrote: ‘…The shroud has no pockets … the dead hold in their clenched hands only that which they have given away.’ Ed Murrow, who slept too little and worked and smoked too much, had always said he wanted ‘to wear out, not rust out.’ He did. He went to the grave with nothing — not even his voice was left at the end — but for a man with no pockets in life, he died the richest man I’ve ever known.

“During the period of Murrow’s service in Washington and his long illness, there was no more attentive a friend than (CBS Chairman of the Board William S.) Paley, and this meant much to Murrow. The chairman traveled to La Jolla, California, to visit him, called him often for advice on news matters and made it clear to Ed, as did everyone in the news division, that his return to CBS as an active broadcaster or as a consultant was both needed and desired.”

“I don’t know which of all the farewells would have pleased him most, but two brief paragraphs from Eric Sevareid’s broadcast of April 27 come closest to what I felt:

“There are some of us, and I am one, who owe their professional life to this man. There are many, working here and in other networks and stations, who owe to Ed Murrow their love of their work, their standards and sense of responsibility. He was a shooting star; we will live in his afterglow a very long time.”

Paley and Murrow: See It No More

CBS journalists Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly in happier days

More than McCarthy finally did in the award-winning, groundbreaking CBS News series See It Now.

Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly had helped end Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s reign of anticommunist terror with their much-applauded 1954 exposé, but their reporting made them a political target.

Nevertheless, they didn’t back down from controversy, but even subsequent seemingly noncontroversial topics for the show — on the fate of small farmers, on Hawaiian statehood — attracted bizarre denunciations and demands for equal time.

The corporate taste for the predictable profits provided by mindless, soothing programming and Murrow’s ethical imperatives about the journalistic responsibilities of the television medium continually clashed.

CBS Chairman of the Board William Paley

The showdown came in the office of CBS Chairman of the Board William Paley in 1958. Paley had long been a principled and hands-off supporter of Murrow’s high-minded journalism, but he had grown weary of the headaches they caused him. And big profits beckoned from the cheap quiz shows (whose corrupt practices, ironically, would eventually give him bigger headaches than See It Now ever had).

Friendly described the scene in his memoir Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, noting that: “…Paley quietly said, ‘But I thought that you and Fred didn’t want to do ‘See It Now’ anymore.’

“ ‘Bill, what I am proposing is a procedure by which we share in the decision about equal time and under which we could continue to do ‘See It Now,’ Murrow said. ‘Of course we want it to continue.’

“The chairman replied with the firmness that goes with final authority. ‘I thought we’d already decided about ‘See It Now,” he said flatly.

“Whereupon enforced calm vanished, and 45-minute scene ensued in which these two commanding figures, the industry’s foremost reporter and its top executive, who had been intimate friends for 20 years, faced each other in a blazing showdown with all guns firing.

“One brief burst of dialogue told it all.

“ ‘Bill,’ Murrow pleaded at one point, ‘are you going to destroy all this? Don’t you want an instrument like the ‘See It Now’ organization, which you have poured so much into for so long, to continue?’

“ ‘Yes,’ said Paley, ‘but I don’t want this constant stomach ache every time you do a controversial subject.’

“ ‘I’m afraid that’s a price you have to be willing to pay. It goes with the job.’

“Nothing else that was said mattered. After seven years and almost 200 broadcasts, “See It Now’ was dead.”

Astute filmgoers will have recognized that conversation, which appears almost verbatim in Good Night and Good Luck, George Clooney’s 2005 outsstanding film about Murrow’s battle with McCarthy. The movie is remarkably faithful to the actual history recorded by Friendly, with David Strathairn, Frank Langella and Clooney’s dialogue frequently an exact reproduction of the words of Murrow, Paley and Friendly.

As the ‘50s faded and the ‘60s soared, Friendly sized up why the prestigious program had died.

“The fatal complication — all the other symptoms could have been treated — was the very strength that made Murrow unique. The man who could decide to do a program about McCarthy or Radulovich, or fly off to see Chou En-lai, or to report on smoking and lung cancer, could only do these broadcasts because of his fortitude and independence, and those same virtues which gave CBS distinction also brought it controversy, enemies and ‘stomach aches.’”

“What Paley and (CBS President Frank) Stanton did not realize at the time, and what we failed to articulate — if in fact we truly understood it — was that Murrow’s independent spirit was the biggest asset the corporate body had. CBS couldn’t afford a platoon of Murrows, but logistically and spiritually, it could certainly support one responsible, universally respected, if not unanimously applauded, reporter who was able and willing to do and say precisely what a corporation could not.”