CBS's Overnight Star

Like the heroines in its television soap operas, the Columbia Broadcasting System is strongly attracted to interesting strangers. Last week, for the second time in a year, CBS reached far outside its own management ranks to select a new president. He is Arthur R. Taylor, a 37-year-old corporate Wunderkind with no broadcasting experience, who for the past two years has served as vice president and chief financial officer of International Paper Co. Taylor succeeds Charles T. Ireland Jr., who died unexpectedly last month at age 51 after less than a year on the job. Ireland, himself a surprise choice, had come from International Telephone and Telegraph Corp.

The selection of Taylor for the $200,000-plus post again raised questions about CBS management's foresight in grooming its own top executives for broad responsibilities. Most of them are heavily broadcast-oriented, even though in recent years the company has grown highly diversified and now gets more than half of its sales from such nonbroadcast divisions as book publishing, baseball (the New York Yankees), musical instrument manufacturing and motion pictures. Thus, CBS's prime need at the top is financial expertise, a field in which Taylor became almost an overnight star.

The son of a telephone company employee, Taylor was raised in Rahway, N.J., and traces a good deal of his relentless drive to his days in the local high school. "Two of my classmates went to college and ten went to Sing Sing," he says jokingly. Taylor got a scholarship to Brown University, where he took a B.A. in Renaissance history and a master's in U.S. economic history. At one time he planned a teaching career. Instead, at age 25, he went to work as a trainee for The First Boston Corp., an investment banking firm, where he quickly rose to a vice presidency. Hired away by International Paper in 1970, he totally revamped that company's financial management in a series of well-publicized money deals that helped bring his name to the attention of CBS Vice Chairman Frank Stanton.

As CBS's president, Taylor will probably need all the moxie he can muster, since most of the corporation's board remain conservative in money matters. But the young president can afford to bide his time. His two bosses, Stanton and CBS Founder William Paley, are 64 and 71 respectively.

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