Before writing this week's cover story on the hot war for ratings points among the three commercial television networks, Associate Editor Gerald Clarke staged his own offensive to obtain appointments with the top official at each. After loosing a barrage of phone calls and an enfilade of promises to "go anywhere any time" to meet them, Clarke finally managed to interview CBS's Paley and ABC's Pierce in Manhattan, and helped arrange a breakfast in Beverly Hills between NBC's Silverman and Correspondent James Willwerth. That triple play represents the first time all three executives have granted interviews for a story on their industry.

Some journalists who cover TV consider Paley, 77, a particularly elusive subject, but Clarke discovered the chairman of CBS to be gracious and cooperative. Their 1 1/2-hour meeting took place in Paley's office, a "wonderfully opulent but understated room," according to the TIME visitor, with paintings by Picasso and Rouault and a chemin defer table from Paris now used as a desk and, for this occasion, a tape recorder. "I asked Paley if he minded if I used my tape recorder," says Clarke. " 'No,' he replied, 'as long as you don't mind if I use mine.' Later, he asked me to send him a transcript, explaining that he had pressed his pause button and lost the first 15 minutes." Happily, Clarke had not hit his pause button too.

A continent and several worlds away, Correspondent Willwerth relied on only his pen and notebook as he grilled Cover MICHAEL DRESSLER Figure Robin Williams, the otherworldly star of ABC's Mark & Mindy. "He was a pleasure," says Willwerth, "shy, thoughtful, complex, deeply concerned with his art. He is most revealing when talking about the value of 'staying bozo' as a defense against the harsher realities of life on earth." Willwerth, however, almost came unbozoed when he accompanied the comedian to a yoga class, where Williams invited him to, well, look at the world from a different perspective. "Taking notes was impossible," jokes Willwerth. "The ink in my ballpoint pen wouldn't run uphill." The journalist now sees television from a different angle. Says he: "At night I watch only the specials; during the day I watch the executives outmaneuver each other."

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