Fox News Attacks the Forces of Goodness

Fox News, in its brief yet oddly overlong, tedious and much-stained career, has attacked Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Jedi knights and Mr. Rogers. I sense a pattern beginning to emerge...

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.

'Bridge of Spies:' Cold War, Warm Hearts

Tom Hanks stars as Brooklyn lawyer Jim Donovan, a Jimmy Stewart type in over his head in 'Bridge of Spies.'

Tom Hanks is terrific as the American constitutional man of honor in “Bridge of Spies,” standing up for the lives of an innocent young man and two spies, one American and one Russian, against the fear, paranoia and hair-trigger national ruthlessness of the nuclear 1950s. I deliberately postponed reading reviews until afterward, but I did catch Dann Gire’s apt reference to Capra. That’s it, it’s heart-tugging Cold War Capra. It’s that utterly absorbing kind of film I call a day-breaker. 

I didn’t realize Spielberg had directed it until I noticed that it had three endings. Bring a discreet hanky.

I’ve been on that bridge — the Glienicker Brücke across the Havel River connecting the Wannsee district of Berlin with the Brandenburg capital Potsdam — but it didn’t look so romantic when I was there the year after the wall fell.

As our bus passed over it, our German guide mentioned casually that this had been “that bridge where they traded the spies,” and all the thrilled American journalists shouted, “Stop the bus! Stop the bus!”

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.

Fascist GOP Sinking in the Moral Quicksand

And thanks to Michael Jones for the meme

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.”

If Murrow Had Worked for Cable News in WWII

If Edward R. Murrow had worked for cable television news during World War II: “Is London being destroyed by German bombs? Looks like it! All up in flames! Wiped right out of existence! A lot of panic out there in the streets that will UNDOUBTEDLY get a lot worse! Buckingham Palace has probably been BLOWN to BITS already, don’t you think, Tiffany? Up next: What’ll Windsor and Wally be wearing at Wimbledon this year?”