Bill in his Nantucket guest house. Behind him are some of his favorite artworks by Howard Finster
When Bill Paley was returning from active duty in Vietnam in the 1970s, he faced a choice. The most obvious course was to return to his prominent New York family and study the film or music business en route to a career in media like his father, CBS founder William S. Paley. Or he could drop out. “I could go through all the doors that had been opened for me, or I could seek my own path,” he says, “and the latter seemed to me a bigger adventure."
So he started building boats. “It was the farthest thing away from my upbringing,” he says of his time living on a 57-foot schooner and learning how to warp wood and run lines. But he enjoyed the freedom of hanging out with other transients in the marinas, as well as the craftsmanship of creating a floating work of art. “Everything is custom crafted and the learning is very deep,” he says. “There are no straight lines.”
The same could be said of Bill’s life. A whiff of cigar smoke lingers in the air as he lounges on the couch in his Nantucket home, an unassuming gray shingled house on the quiet main street of ’Sconset. In a blue Hawaiian shirt, faded jeans and boat shoes, Bill displays little of his upbringing in the fashionable social circle headed by his father and his mother, style icon and Vogue fashion editor Barbara “Babe” Paley. After his stint as a boat builder, Bill’s own restless career has included turns as a restaurateur, an addiction counselor and an Internet consultant. But the most unlikely turn occurred last year when he returned to his family roots to revive his grandfather’s cigar business
Smoke Signals
Samuel Paley immigrated to Chicago from the Ukraine, working his way up from reading stories to the cigar rollers in the factory to starting his own company, La Palina, in 1896. Last year Bill revived the name for his own line of cigars, which have as much to do with the craftsmanship he learned as a boat builder as with his parents’ finely ingrained sense of quality. “I think by osmosis I have developed an eye for art and design and balance,” he says. “Hopefully, it carries over to my cigars. If you produce the finest product, people will come for it.”
As a teenager, Bill watched his father and uncles smoke Montecristos at their home in the Bahamas. He took up the habit himself in Vietnam, working as a photographer for the military, smoking cheap cigars with wooden tips (“So you could have both hands free”)—but he didn’t fall in love until he took a trip to Havana in the 1980s and discovered Cuban cigars, whose rounder, smoother taste instantly clicked with him. “Suddenly I got the taste for them. The more I learned about them, the more I realized how little I knew.”
