ON WALL STREET, TRADERS AND BROKERS REFERRED TO RCA simply as Radio, as in “How much Radio did you buy today?” When pronounced out loud, that five-letter word became a magic mantra. Anything associated with it turned to gold. A product called the Radio Flyer didn’t have a radio and didn’t fly. It was actually a hand-pulled red wagon and just so happened to be named after the two most exciting new technologies of the day. People loved it, and it became a huge seller.
Curiously, David Sarnoff never cared to own much Radio. He considered stocks too risky. Granting options to management was not yet a common practice, and so what little RCA shares he owned, he had to buy on the open market. He remembered quite well the poverty of his childhood, and he wasn’t inclined to gamble his money away. Besides, he made a more-than-comfortable salary, and he was able to indulge in anything he wanted through his unlimited expense account. At the snap of his fingers, the grandest limousine would take RCA’s general manager, its most important vice president, to the fanciest restaurant in town. Most often, he chose Delmonico’s, a hot spot for business bosses since the Gilded Age. Holding court at his regular booth, Sarnoff would negotiate and bond with associates. “I’m not a millionaire,” he would say, “but I live like one.”
Sarnoff’s financial conservatism caused him to miss out on quite a ride. RCA’s stock was on a trajectory never before seen, rising more than 10,000 percent in the five-year period from its debut on the New York Stock Exchange in 1924 to the peak of the market, when it would split five for one. An investment of $10,000 could morph into $1 million in a flash. Owning shares in Radio was an absolute must, or you risked appearing the fool in cocktail party conversation. The biggest party thrower of them all, F. Scott Fitzgerald, sunk the royalties from his novels This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby into Radio, and for a time parlayed those proceeds into yachts, vacation homes in Europe, and the best food and drink for his friends at all-night wingdings. It didn’t seem to matter that the price of Radio was being manipulated by a new class of hypesters and con artists who could be heard jabbering on radio itself to spread misinformation that would goose the price. In the words of a popular dance song, Radio was “hotter than hot, newer than new, meaner than mean, bluer than blue. Gets as much applause as waving the flag!”
All this posed a problem for the government. How can you go about investigating a company that makes so many people so rich and happy? As the stock took off, neither the FTC nor Congress could seem to remember why they were probing RCA’s business tactics in the first place. No one but RCA was really making any profits in the radio business, but everyone who had anything to do with radio kept issuing stock that only went up, up, and away. By one count, more people were investing in radio stocks than actually owned radios. During this preposterous period of speculation, the harsh complaints about the radio combine subsided to a dull roar. Unceremoniously, all the charges against the cartel were dropped, at least for now.
Amid the frenzy, Sarnoff developed a relentless work routine. He labored harder and longer than anyone else at the company, and he led by example. Any employee who failed to show this kind of dedication and loyalty was not welcome to work at RCA for very long. His staff knew that only one piece of paper was to cross his desk at a time. He would render a decision on the matter at hand, make some notes, and then methodically move on to the next order of business.
Once, when an employee stepped out of line, Sarnoff issued a written reprimand. “This is not the way RCA functions. It is a company of clean desks, orderly files, and prompt return of telephone calls, particularly those of the general manager.” He was forming a cult of personality, and it was working very well.
In addition to his management duties, Sarnoff continued to brainstorm about the future. One of his favorite subjects—the future of radio programming—began as a series of internal memos dating back to 1922. The novelty of radio was wearing off, Sarnoff wrote, and programming needed to improve greatly because “the broadcasting station will ultimately be required to entertain a nation.” Not only would this endeavor be expensive, but it would call for specialists in talent and public taste. The engineers, managers, and technicians at RCA were not qualified to do the job well.
“Let us organize a separate and distinct company,” he wrote, “to be known as the Public Service Broadcasting Company or the National Broadcasting Company or American Radio Broadcasting Company, or some similar name.”
As Sarnoff envisioned it, the business model of the company had to be one of a nonprofit organization. To defray the cost of producing news and entertainment shows, he suggested that RCA, GE, Westinghouse, and all of their licensees contribute 2 percent of their radio revenue to the venture. Better programming, after all, could only lead to sales of more radios. Perhaps it could even be run like a university, with an endowment. He didn’t favor the idea of taxing the public to support programming, an idea that was being put into practice for the government-owned stations in England and other European countries, but from his memos, Sarnoff clearly viewed broadcasting as a public service of the highest order. Since the public owned the airwaves, radio was a national resource not to be compromised, akin to a great public library or a museum.
Apparently, one of these memos found its way to an AT&T executive named Walter Gifford, then the company’s vice president of finance and a member of RCA’s board of directors. Although AT&T was originally one of the pillars of the combine, the corporation was starting to behave in strange ways. For instance, in 1924, AT&T suddenly decided to sell all of its RCA stock, and Gifford resigned from the RCA board without offering a plausible explanation for this action. Sarnoff suspected that the telephone colossus was moving to compete with RCA.
What happened next was one of the most fascinating and consequential power struggles in the history of business. Yet because it took place behind the scenes, in offices and boardrooms, the press failed to report a single shred of it, and so the public was unaware that this bitter clash between two monopolies was even going on. When the battle was over, the American broadcasting business emerged, taking on the overall shape it would maintain for the rest of the century, during which time it would rise to become perhaps the single most influential industry of its day.
The entire episode was centered on a very personal fight between Sarnoff and Gifford, who was promoted to the presidency of AT&T in 1925. AT&T was already the world’s largest public utility, an industrial behemoth with 350,000 employees and an uninterrupted record of paying dividends to its shareholders for more than two decades. Ma Bell was also a domain of discreet anti-Semitism. The company certainly didn’t permit blacks, women, and most ethnic immigrants to join its executive ranks, but it seemed especially wary of Jews.
As far as Sarnoff knew, he was the only Jewish executive in the entire communications industry, and so he was always particularly sensitive to anti-Semitism. Jews at this time simply didn’t enter mainstream corporations in tradition-bound industries. Instead, they were mostly found working in marginal businesses like garment shops or running outright disreputable ventures such as motion picture studios. The only way that they could become legitimate was to create their own power from scratch and use it as a blunt instrument against the establishment.
In one dramatic story of this type, Harry Warner of Warner Brothers was outraged over a dispute with a Bell System executive stemming from the licensing agreement for talking-pictures technology used in The Jazz Singer. Suspecting the clash was rooted in anti-Semitism, Warner stormed into the office of a top Bell executive.
“Give me the name of one Jew who works for your company,” Warner demanded.
Looking horrified, the executive replied, “What do you think—it’s the policy of our company to be anti-Semitic?”
“No. Just give me the name of one Jew working for your company.”
“Realistically, I don’t think I can produce one.”
“If it’s a policy of your company not to employ Jews,” Warner said, “it’s a policy of my company not to do business with you.” With that, he marched out of the room.
The executive was so embarrassed by the confrontation that he directed his attorneys to settle the contract dispute right away. The discriminatory hiring practices, of course, didn’t change any time soon.
Sarnoff, too, knew that he would be trampled if he didn’t fight force with force. Just six years older than Sarnoff, Gifford was a New England native, with all-American Protestant roots that reached back for generations. He was a graduate of Harvard, he dressed in pinstripes, spoke with an upper-class tone, and certainly didn’t appreciate this brash businessman—a high school dropout, no less—muscling in on what he felt was rightfully his. Gifford revealed his plan in internal AT&T memos: Ma Bell would not only enter the broadcasting business but dominate it, adding broadcasting as its second monopoly. One corporation alone would control wired communication in America as well as wireless communication.
Gifford’s first move was to start WEAF (for Wind, Earth, Air & Fire), a high-watt radio station in New York. His business model was simple: any company could rent airtime at fifty dollars per ten minutes. When you called someone on the telephone, you paid for the time you used; why not with radio? Gifford called it “toll broadcasting.” Come down to the station, say whatever you want into the microphone, and pay by the minute. Lots of companies took him up on the offer, among them a real estate company hawking co-op apartments, the department stores Macy’s, Gimble’s, and Wanamaker’s, as well as American Express. These were the first paid commercials ever broadcast. To fill in the small gaps of time between the ads, Gifford would have people sing, play piano, and give lectures, but nothing too fancy.
Sarnoff was outraged. Radio was to be a public service, not a forum for crass commercialism. At a high-profile radio conference in Washington, D.C, organized by commerce secretary Herbert Hoover, Sarnoff denounced AT&T’s actions and urged everyone to join him in his indignation. As it turned out, Hoover himself was Sarnoff’s staunchest ally. “If a speech by the President is to be used as the meat between the sandwich of two advertisements,” Hoover proclaimed at the conference, “there will be no radio left! How can we allow so great a possibility for public service, for news, for entertainment, for education, to be drowned in advertising chatter?” And so it was settled, and a resolution was drafted: advertising on radio was to be prohibited.
There was only one problem. Neither this conference nor the Commerce Department really had the authority to prohibit commercial speech. In fact, the Supreme Court soon ruled that the Commerce Department as it existed had no authority over radio whatsoever, a ruling which led to the formation of the separately chartered Federal Radio Commission.
In the meantime, AT&T not only went on with its new business but also strung together twelve other stations to join WEAF in what became the first broadcast network. Until then, broadcasting had mainly been a local affair, and programming among different stations was never synchronized. Since the technology of relaying programs through the airwaves from one station to another was still on the drawing boards, AT&T simply sent the programming and the commercials over its phone lines, where sister stations would pick up the signals and broadcast them from radio towers to their local audiences.
Sarnoff thought this was essentially his idea, and now Gifford was perverting it. To add insult to injury, AT&T delivered a handsome new cabinet radio to President Coolidge, signaling that it would soon enter radio sales as well.
Sarnoff bad-mouthed Gifford and AT&T at every turn, but not in the press, only privately to other executives in the radio combine. His remarks quickly made their way to Gifford’s ears. Gifford realized that RCA had objections to what he was doing, but he believed that they could be worked out amicably. He called a meeting with RCA chairman Owen Young and said there would not be a settlement in this matter until RCA fired its “Jewish” general manager.
As luck would have it, Sarnoff was working under two executives, Young and General Harbord, who never displayed even a hint of prejudice. They were livid over Gifford’s suggestion. They would go to the mat for their rising young star and fight AT&T to the death if it were necessary, rather than give in to such outrageous pressure. There was one catch: Young and Harbord left it up to Sarnoff to come up with a way out of this mess.
To Sarnoff, it was the chance of a lifetime. Here he was, David, fighting a real-life Goliath. He was pretty sure that what AT&T was doing—using one monopoly to gain another—was illegal under antitrust laws. But he saw only two options: One, he could launch a lawsuit in court against AT&T, which would bring this unseemly brawl into the public spotlight and lead to appeals that could last for years. Or two, he could submit the case to binding arbitration. The original 1921 patent-sharing agreement between AT&T and RCA contained a provision for arbitrating any disputes privately, in total secret, before an impartial referee, usually a retired judge, but there would be no appeals. If RCA lost, it would lose its very future, and the decision would be final.
It was a terrific gamble, yet Sarnoff was eager to take it, and Young and Harbord backed him up. When it was proposed to AT&T, Gifford agreed to go the binding arbitration route as well. He certainly didn’t want laundry this dirty aired out in public either. The hearings went on for several months, and when they were over, the arbitrator ruled against AT&T on all counts. Everyone involved was stunned. RCA’s victory was so total that Harbord and Young actually felt bad for Gifford. Sarnoff, of course, was triumphant. It was his biggest achievement yet. Now AT&T was forced to come to the negotiating table and settle the whole affair within the provisions of the ruling.
When the RCA executives went to shake Gifford’s hand, however, and start the attempt to get over hard feelings, Gifford presented them with a legal hand grenade. He had secretly hired the services of John Davis, the losing presidential candidate from the 1924 race and the main author of the Clayton Antitrust Act. Under Gifford’s guidance, Davis drafted a memo arguing that RCA itself was an illegal operation, that all the agreements that led to the creation of the radio combine amounted to restraint of trade. And if RCA shouldn’t really have existed in the first place, how could this binding arbitration be held as valid?
This was an act of corporate terrorism of the first degree. Gifford’s actions were so low-down and dirty that the Young-Harbord-Sarnoff triumvirate at RCA viewed them as an attempt to give AT&T a little edge in the settlement talks. How could one monopoly call another monopoly illegal? It made no sense. The only logical conclusion to this twaddle would be to break up AT&T as well, and who would ever consider something quite that absurd? Was Gifford trying to blow apart two industrial empires at once? Certainly, no one who went to Harvard could be that reckless.
The RCA team was correct. It really was just a shameful bargaining ploy. Still, Sarnoff and company were rightfully terrified that Gifford would feed the Davis memo to the clueless press. In the end, what everyone wanted was for the settlement talks to be over as soon as possible. Even Gifford himself was growing tired of the whole matter, and he sent an underling to the negotiating table. RCA, of course, sent Sarnoff.
The final settlement turned out to be a rich dessert for RCA; a piece of chocolate cake with whipped cream and a bright red cherry on top. AT&T sold RCA its flagship station WEAF for $1 million, granted RCA rights to transmit on its phone lines for a modest licensing fee paid to AT&T, then signed an agreement to exit broadcasting altogether. The New York Times treated this historic turning point as a ho-hum announcement, summarizing it in seven paragraphs, without even a hint of the strife that preceded it.
Shortly after the deal was done, RCA’s new broadcasting network became known as the National Broadcasting Company. Initially, NBC consisted of the former AT&T chain of stations. That became known as NBC Red after a second network was put together soon after, using the newer and more versatile wireless relay technology. Originally formed from RCA’s flagship stations in New York and Washington, GE’s state-of-the-art broadcasting center in Schenectady, plus the Westinghouse stations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, and Springfield, Massachusetts, the wireless network became known as NBC Blue. The color choices came from the red and blue grease pencils RCA used to mark up giant maps around the office. On July 22, 1926, the formation of the company was duly ratified, with GE and Westinghouse as minority shareholders. RCA was in control, and the official charter carried the signature of David Sarnoff.
After that time of struggle and hard work, there was no way that NBC was going to be a nonprofit public service, as Sarnoff had originally envisioned. The new company, without debate, would generate its own revenue, lots of it, from selling advertising time. Sarnoff would no longer even utter a peep about his high-minded principles. And by now, Hoover was busy organizing his presidential campaign, and so he too seemed to forget his original indignation over the airwaves being filled with “advertising chatter.”
Sarnoff had found his true calling. He never did become the electrical engineer he hoped to be as a teenager. Although he certainly could be called a visionary, his record of predicting the future was rather spotty, just like everyone else’s. But no one was better at figuring out what motivates people, and his instincts for using that knowledge to get exactly what he wanted were unsurpassed. Sarnoff was a businessman in the truest sense. As his reward for almost single-handedly founding NBC, Sarnoff was promoted to executive vice president and given a raise, to $60,000 per year.
For David Sarnoff, born in the shtetl and obsessed with work every day since, the time to celebrate had arrived at last. A party was scheduled for November 15, 1926, at the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, on Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, then spelled with a double hyphen to signify the 300-foot corridor that linked the original properties of cousins John Jacob Astor and William Waldorf Astor. That corridor became known as Peacock Alley because every evening thousands of people dressed up just to strut back and forth between the two properties. A magnificent Victorian structure with turreted corners and sweeping penthouse views, the hotel would soon be demolished to make way for the Empire State Building. On this chilly night in 1926, the Waldorf’s Grand Ballroom, with its huge crystal chandelier, sparkled with tables set in silver. The chefs prepared the trademark Waldorf Salad for 1,000 guests.
NBC’s black-tie coming-out party brought together the entire spectrum of society’s movers and shakers, from the new jazzy cultural elite to the old fossils of the upper crust. The blue-blooded Wall Street financiers, the New York press barons, the Washington power class—all were in attendance. Arriving in his private limousine, gallantly stepping out into the searchlights in his new tuxedo, was David Sarnoff. On his arm was Lizette Sarnoff, looking stunning with her hair upswept, diamonds earrings sparkling along with her eyes, dressed in a floor-length gown designed especially by a Fifth Avenue couturier.
The affair began in decidedly stuffy fashion, as the four-hour entertainment program reflected Sarnoff’s highbrow vision for what broadcasting should become. After a short speech by newly appointed NBC president Merlin Aylesworth, the 100-piece New York Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Walter Damrouch, played pieces by Wagner, Liszt, and Schumann. Titta Ruffo, considered the world’s the most powerful baritone, led the Metropolitan Opera Company in a rendition of the “Drinking Song” from Hamlet. No alcohol was served, however, this being the height of Prohibition.
The festivities at the Waldorf were broadcast live to the audiences of twenty-five radio stations, including those of the new NBC Red and NBC Blue networks, plus outlets in Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Portland, Maine. At scheduled breaks in the New York program, some of the affiliates chimed in with their own entertainment for the ballroom guests and the entire radio network. From Chicago, soprano Mary Garden sang classic arias. From Independence, Kansas, Will Rogers was on hand to do his impersonation of Silent Cal, the taciturn, drawling president. Back in New York, the vaudeville team of Weber and Fields offered up some more humor, but only for ten minutes, as Sarnoff thought that comedy was a frivolous waste of important airtime.
Later in the evening, the music turned lighter, with some bits from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pinafore, followed by Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes.” Finally, shortly after midnight, Vincent Lopez and his orchestra broke out into some swing, broadcast direct from his Casa Lopez nightclub.
For Sarnoff, the only damper on the evening was that very few people dancing at the Waldorf and probably no one tuning in over the airwaves knew of his role in creating NBC, but the way this man was smiling and eating and dancing and rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, it was certain that it wouldn’t be long before the secret was out. “Radio,” said the Washington Post the next day, “has put aside its swaddling clothes and has become a potential giant.” The new medium of network broadcasting stood alone in the spotlight.
In the summer of 1928, with RCA’s dominance over radio apparently secure, General Harbord took a temporary leave of absence to campaign for his friend Herbert Hoover, whose presidential run was in full swing. In Harbord’s absence, Sarnoff was named acting RCA president, signaling that his succession to the top spot wasn’t far off. Now Sarnoff would be able to wield the full power of the radio monopoly to initiate deals with anyone he saw fit. During this time, he initiated three transactions, completed in rapid order, that transformed RCA into the wider media kingdom of Sarnoff’s self-imagined manifest destiny.
The most straightforward deal was with the General Motors Corporation. To Sarnoff, the idea of becoming the exclusive provider of radio technology for the mammoth automaker was irresistible, in large part because he so loved the analogy that RCA was to radio what GM was to cars. Shuttling back and forth between Detroit and New York, he negotiated the formation of a new company, the General Motors Radio Corporation, owned 51 percent by GM and 49 percent by RCA. Under the plan, GM’s factory in Dayton, Ohio, would manufacture new dashboard sets, under patent license from RCA.
A much more complex deal involved the phonograph. For more than a decade, there had been a raging debate over which invention, the radio or the record player, was the superior way of listening to music. The radio was quickly gaining on its far older rival, but the phonograph was improving too. In 1926, the inventor of sound recording, Thomas Edison, unveiled his latest creation, a phonograph record that held an unprecedented forty minutes of music. “The phonograph is reclaiming its own,” declared Edison, by now a cantankerous old man. “The radio is a commercial failure and its popularity with the public is waning. No dealers have made any money at it. It is too complicated. As for its music, it’s just plain awful!”
Sarnoff wanted to settle this dispute once and for all. The best way to do that, he surmised, would be to unify both technologies under one corporate roof and in one home entertainment cabinet. By the late 1920s, the Victor Talking Machines Company held one of the most valuable, recognizable, and best-loved brands in the world. There was a real fear inside RCA that if the Victor Company were to start making its own radios, it would quickly zoom to number one. More than anything, the public adored Victor’s trademarked dog, a white terrier named Nipper, who sat listening with a raised ear to an old-style phonograph speaker. The public would buy anything with that dog on it.
Sarnoff proposed a high-stakes financial gambit. He would offer a big block of RCA’s stock to Victor shareholders, confident that no investor could resist ownership in the soaring shares of Radio. The transaction involved months of tangling with the various interests of thousands of shareholders of both companies, but it was finally completed by the spring of 1929.
The acquisition came with an extra special benefit. In addition to owning Victor’s technology and its recording label, which came complete with a roster of stars, and, of course, Nipper, who would be put to immediate work under the new RCA Victor brand, the company took possession of Victor’s manufacturing plant in Camden, New Jersey. Situated on the Delaware River, across from Philadelphia, the redbrick building with the tall clock-tower was, in Sarnoff’s view, the ideal spot not only to manufacture combined radio-phonograph systems but also to build a world-class research and development laboratory that could churn out patents for all sorts of new communications technologies. Soon all of RCA’s scientists and engineers would be based at the complex in Camden.
With the General Motors and Victor deals in progress, the next transaction was by far the most intriguing of the three, as it had the biggest effect on Sarnoff personally. With the era of talking motion pictures now beginning, Sarnoff wanted RCA sound systems installed in theaters nationwide. He initiated a search for a movie company with which he could form an alliance. One of his colleagues introduced him to a fast-rising financial whiz named Joseph P. Kennedy, who in recent years had gained control of a minor film production and distribution company called Film Booking Office, or FBO. The two men were about the same age, and in meetings at restaurants and in telephone conversations, they discovered they had a lot in common.
Sarnoff told Kennedy about his impoverished, immigrant background and his self-propelled rise to power. Kennedy related his own similar story about how his family had escaped the Irish potato famine, although he himself was a second-generation American, born into an already wealthy Boston political family. Among his cronies, Kennedy was known to make the occasional anti-Semitic remark, but Sarnoff didn’t know that or the details of Kennedy’s earlier success using inside information and collusion to manipulate stocks, a practice that was unethical but not yet illegal. “It’s so easy to make money in the market,” Kennedy told one of his colleagues, “we’d better get in before they pass a law against it.”
Kennedy had a magnetic personality, showing a broad smile that telegraphed how much he enjoyed being with you. By the way he confided in you, he seemed to be a man you could trust. Kennedy knew all the tricks for keeping negative information about himself out of the press and getting positive information in. During Prohibition, the newspapers didn’t report how Kennedy operated a liquor importing business from his home office in Brookline, Massachusetts. When his wife, Rose, expressed shock at a newspaper story that simply revealed that they were millionaires, he told her it was news to him as well. Kennedy appeared to be the very model of what Sarnoff himself wanted to be—and was in fact becoming—someone who could rise above his humble background to take his place as a great leader.
In October of 1928, Joe Kennedy took the train to New York to plot the deal with David Sarnoff. They met for dinner at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. Over drinks and steaks, they outlined how RCA would invest $400,000 to finance FBO’s expansion into producing feature films. Kennedy, in return, would merge FBO with Keith-Albee-Orpheum, a company that was converting its chain of vaudeville theaters into movie houses that would be equipped with RCA sound systems. The new company, with David Sarnoff as chairman of the board, would be called Radio-Keith-Orpheum, or RKO. For arranging the merger, Kennedy received a fee of $150,000 plus stock in the new company, which he then turned around and sold at the height of the market for an estimated $8 million. The deal transformed Kennedy from a successful scoundrel into one of the richest men in America, a status that came with unqualified respect.
Sarnoff’s new association with Kennedy did wonders for his social life. He and Lizette were invited to join Joe and Rose at their vacation villa in tony Palm Beach, Florida, a haven of the rich and famous. The Sarnoffs were impressed by the family life of their new friends. Rose and her domestic staff were raising Joe Jr., Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Bobby, and soon Jean and Teddy. The Sarnoffs had three sons of their own, Robert, Edward, and Thomas, so commitment to family became one of the favorite topics of discussion among the two couples.
In New York, where Kennedy established a residence away from his family back in Boston, Sarnoff was amazed at how Joe always seemed to have a beautiful young woman on his arm. It was one reason Kennedy was attracted to the movie business in the first place. His torrid tryst with box-office beauty Gloria Swanson was hardly a secret, although his long-running affair with his personal secretary was much better hidden. Here was a man who was able to compartmentalize his life to an extraordinary degree. “Kennedy imparted to Sarnoff a philosophy of living that he never forgot,” wrote RCA executive Kenneth Bilby. “More important than the substance of the individual, according to Kennedy’s doctrine, was the appearance that the individual projected.”
Sarnoff was certainly no stranger to the practice of inventing one’s own myth, of manipulating public opinion, of justifying any means necessary by pointing to the noble result at the end, but he never before saw this prophetic message—perception is reality—expressed so eloquently through words and deeds. “History could be frozen in a heroic configuration,” added Bilby. “Long before the words image making had entered the lexicon, Sarnoff had learned their meaning, and their importance, from his Boston friend.”
Taking the cue from Kennedy, Sarnoff also experimented with extramarital relations. Unlike Kennedy, however, he was caught and confronted, not by the press, of course, but by Lizette. “He wounded her deeply because of the philanderings that accompanied his march to fame and power,” Bilby wrote, but David and Lizette were committed to staying together, and “the marriage proved to be the bedrock of his life.” Fooling around simply didn’t suit who Sarnoff was.
His ego was best gratified by the glory of building RCA into the first electronic media conglomerate, and the next order of business was something that was now beginning to get considerable press attention, a technological leap that had been looming on his horizon for years, and he now turned to focus on it almost exclusively. Sarnoff needed a plan for controlling the new art of television, which he envisioned supplanting radio and becoming, as one of his early memos put it, “the ultimate and greatest step in mass communications.”