Heir Apparent?

A jolly giant comes to CBS

Just two weeks after sacking his last heir apparent, CBS's founder and chairman, William Paley, has found yet another -- the fifth CBS president in ten years and the third in less than four years. Paley's newest anointed: Thomas H. Wyman, vice chairman of Pillsbury Co. The new chief executive was wooed by a deal that sounded like the signing of a major league pitching star -- a $1 million bonus plus a three-year contract for $800,000 annually.

Wyman, 50, has spent a nervous career waiting for several top jobs. From 1965 to 1975 he was an executive at Polaroid and was once thought to be the likely successor to Founder Edwin H. Land.

In 1974 he was named by TIME as one of 200 future American leaders. He left Polaroid to head Green Giant Co. Under his direction, the Chaska, Minn., food processor bounded from $293 million annual sales to $485 million in 1978, when it merged with Pillsbury. The 6-ft. 3-in. Wyman, a Phi Beta Kappa at Amherst College (he wrote his senior thesis on the poetry of William Butler Yeats), scarcely concealed from friends and executive recruiters that he was tired of being No. 2 at Pillsbury.

Uneasy lies the head of the heir apparent at CBS, however. Paley, 78, suffers from the virus so common among corporate founding fathers: an inability to turn over control of the firms they built to younger managers. Nonetheless, Wyman insisted last week, "I don't have the kind of anxiety that everyone feels I should have."

Last month Paley axed John Backe, 47, who had earned industry-wide respect in his three years, seven months at CBS. Wyman was apparently dickering with the company before Paley ousted Backe. Backe reportedly heard that Paley had begun looking for a successor and asked CBS board members for a vote of support. When they failed to give it to him, he resigned.

In past years Paley balked at giving real authority to three other presidents: Frank Stanton, Charles Ire land and Arthur Taylor, all of whom were well regarded for their managerial talents. Stanton was forced to retire, Ireland died after less than a year on the job, and Taylor was fired. Said former CBS Programming Chief Michael Dann last week: "The presidency of CBS is not known as the softess couch in town." But Wyman may have reread Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innis-free": "And I shall have some peace there." qed

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