The wills of the wealthy are always revealing, but this one especially so because of a complicated family situation and the growing sense that Paley hadn’t been the world’s nicest man. While family members cautioned that the art deal was not finalized, MoMA director Richard E. Oldenburg said the museum might take possession of the masterpieces as early as this week. One Picasso from 1906, “Boy Leading a Horse” (part of a previous delayed bequest, not the will itself), was estimated by art dealer Richard Feigen to be worth $100 million to $125 million alone. “Together, this is the most important benefaction to any museum in the world that I know of,” Feigen notes. Not surprisingly, Oldenburg says the museum will sell none of the Paley collection, which numbers at least 86 works by Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Renoir and many other masters. The only other institution to receive a direct gift was the Museum of Broadcasting.
Everything in Paley’s private life was a matter of taste and appearance, including his selection of executors. Friends were surprised to learn that Henry Kissinger, to whom Paley drew close in the decade, was among them. Kissinger. Paley recently placed on the CBS b was assigned to organize next week’s public memorial service, which will feature remarks by himself, Frank Stanton (who ran CBS for many years), son William (Billie) Paley, friend Marietta Tree, David Rockefeller and Walter Cronkite.
Paley had six children: two adopted, two step, two natural. He went to pains to make it seem as if all were treated equally, providing generous $15 million to $20 million portions of his property (mostly CBS stock) to each. Adjustments in the will keep the shares even. Stepdaughter Amanda Burden, for instance once borrowed $147,620 from him to buy a home. That amount was deducted from her portion. Similarly, those children who received Paley’s three homes had their value deducted. But a trust established by Paley’s parents, who were quite wealthy in their own right, left millions only to their natural grandchildren, Billie and Kate, not to the older adopted children. And Paley over the years established other trusts, separate from the will, the result of which is greater unevenness than an initial reading would suggest.
Billie Paley, 42, a onetime heroin user who now works as a substance-abuse counselor in Virginia, received the cigar-store Indian that once sat in his father’s CBS office, a symbol of his father’s origins in Chicago’s cigar business. “I’ll sit beside the Indian and relate to my children some of his favorite anecdotes,” he says, noting Paley’s “wonderful zest for life.” As his father lay dying last month, Billie bristled when he overheard a book editor speculating a Japanese restaurant on how fortuitous his death would be for “In All His Glory,” Sally Bedell Smith’s newly published, exhaustive biography; the book portrays Paley as masterful but deeply selfish. The children, all of whom visited Paley regularly in his final days, were particularly angry to see him referred to in the original New York Times obituary as a “cold and ruthless father.” By the time the obit was reprinted the next day, it had been changed to a “cold and remote father.”
Besides family and small cash bequests to a few personal assistants, only Annette Reed de la Renta (a gold snuff box) and Marietta Tree’s British stepsons, Jeremy and Michael Tree ($500,000 each), received gifts from their friend. The rest belongs to the world.
