With CBS in the middle of a talent raid that had already tempted away Jack Benny and other NBC stars, Peary was offered a lucrative CBS deal of his own in 1950, after he chafed over NBC's and Kraft's reluctance to let him use his singing voice more often on "Gildersleeve" and to give him more part in the show's ownership than he already had. Radio historian Gerald Nachman, in "Raised on Radio", said Peary and his agents at MCA had negotiated fruitlessly to get Peary a bigger stake in the show's ownership. When CBS began luring Benny (also an MCA client) and others away from NBC, mostly by offering the performers better capital-gains terms against the still-high postwar U.S. taxes than NBC was willing to do, Peary signed with the network.