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On Our Stage Tonight: ED SULLIVAN! |
 ED SULLIVAN ...in a good mood |
His TV show helped start
a national viewing habit
of TheColumnists.com
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This is a slightly modified version of the introduction to a proposed book about "The Ed Sullivan Show" by Gerald Nachman. Nachman has completed six other chapters on the long history of the popular TV variety show. |
Ed and I go back a long way. The first review I ever wrote of anything was of “The Ed Sullivan Show”--or “Toast of the Town,” as it was then called. I was 15 years old and wrote the review in my bedroom on an old typewriter my father brought home from his office.
I have no idea why but something about the show compelled me to put down my opinions about it. I gave the show a mixed notice, my debut as a critic.
Seven years later, in my last year of college,
I was hired as a TV reviewer for the San Jose Mercury-News, my
first newspaper job. Clearly well-qualified for the position,
I had watched TV so rarely in college that I had to rent a television
set at $3 a week in order to start my career as a TV critic.
My first review was of, yes, you guessed it: “The Ed Sullivan
Show.” I peppered my review with wisecracks as I tried to
make my mark as a witty fellow, kidding the dog acts and jugglers
and, of course, the host’s garbled introductions. Sullivan
was always a sitting duck for TV critics.
TV then--it was 1960--was still so new and insignificant (its
“Golden Age” of the 1950s still decades away from being
recognized) that the job of criticizing shows could be left to
a 22-year-old kid who didn’t even own a TV set and who had
never reviewed anything professionally in his life. Most newspapers
then didn’t have their own TV critics, but ran wire stuff
by reviewers like United Press’s Rick DuBrow and the AP’s
Hal Humphrey.
The Sullivan show was 12 years old at the time, about the same
age as network television, whose programming history dates from
1948, the first year that network programs filled up the entire
nightly log. In `47, only a year before Sullivan’s show
debuted, TV truly was a vast wasteland, with shows dropped into
the schedule helter-skelter throughout the day. In between shows,
a test pattern kept us from seeing a blank screen and most stations
signed off by midnight or earlier.
So television, Ed Sullivan, and my video-viewing life all began
the same year. In 1948, I was 10 years old and much more deeply
immersed in radio. I watched TV only occasionally, mainly out
of curiosity, to see what all the shouting was about. But I never
watched it at our house because we didn't have a TV set. Like
most Americans in 1948, I glimpsed Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle,
the Roller Derby, “Masquerade Party,” Arthur Godfrey,
Hopalong Cassidy and “Martin Kane, Private Eye,” in
grainy gray kinescopes on a neighbor’s little round porthole-shaped
screen.
My father, a community theater actor, didn’t
give in and buy a TV set (a massive Packard-Bell console) until
1953, mainly to watch dramatic series like “Studio One,”
“Hallmark Hall of Fame,” and “The Kraft Television
Theater.”
The Sullivan show was an ingrained part of every family’s
weekend ritual in those days: Go to Sunday school, wash the car,
eat turkey dinner at grandma’s, and gather around the big
boxy TV set to watch “Toast of the Town.” Like most
`50’s families, we watched Sullivan’s show while nibbling
cold cuts or a tuna casserole off a card table in our new knotty-pine
“den,” seated at TV tables. My main memory of the show
was seeing the aging vaudevillians Sullivan doted on. My father
loved them, but I'd only heard the names: Maurice Chevalier,
Sophie Tucker, Ted Lewis, Joe Frisco, George Jessel. They had
all been on radio, of course, but now were spotlighted anew on
the Sullivan show--framed, in a sense, given renewed theatrical
life with a regular weekly national stage where hallowed ex-headliners
could strut their stuff for the next generation: Mine.
Sullivan’s show was where most Americans got their rudimentary
education in the fine arts and popular culture, past and present.
Today, no commercial showcase for the arts exists on TV, nor
any that encapsulates show biz history as this show did for 23
years. His show was the great equalizer, relentlessly democratic,
cutting across all age, class, cultural, and ethnic boundaries--classy
one moment (a reading by Helen Hayes) and lowbrow the next (stupid
pet tricks), now ethnic (Nat Cole) and now white bread (Kate
Smith). No act was billed above any other, though an ostensible
headliner led off the show and might return later in the hour.
Sullivan’s innate talent was an instinct for what would
please a national audience, no matter how kitschy or elite.
Sullivan drew no distinction between a Charles Laughton reading
or a performing seal. Whatever worked, got a big hand. Respectable
ratings was all that mattered.
Ed was a middlebrow with highbrow pretensions. He grew up in
a large family--the next to last of six kids, with a twin brother
who died in infancy. His father was an opera lover, his mother
a painter. Uncles and aunts joined the family on weekends to
sing songs round a piano, so Sullivan had an appreciation of,
if not a true love for, the fine arts. He wasn’t as passionate
about the arts as his parents, but he knew it was good for us
viewers, artistic spinach for the soul. As someone noted, it
wasn’t because he cared, or knew much, about classical music
or ballet, but because he was absolutely overwhelmed by `classy’
acts--and without him many of us might never have laid eyes on
Andres Segovia, Margot Fonteyn or Maria Callas. Even if you never
saw another ballet or heard another aria, you knew what you were
missing, and if you happened to love what you saw--well, you
were on your way.
When was the last time a ballerina or diva was glimpsed on CBS,
NBC or ABC, or even on cable? Sullivan broke a lot of ground
for public broadcasting. But no matter how low-down the art form,
such as twirling platters on bamboo sticks, Sullivan felt compelled
to present the greatest plate-spinners in the world. He revered
talent, any talent, maybe because he had none himself, just a
strong hambone sensibility. He craved being on a stage, even
if it just meant standing at the far edge in a dark suit. He
could barely hum a tune, tell a joke, or read a cue card. His
mangled introductions are the stuff of legend (“Now starving
on Broadway…,” “How about a hand for Jose Feliciano--he’s
not only blind, he’s Puerto Rican!,” “Let’s
really hear it for the Lord’s Prayer!”), sprinkled
throughout the shows. Unlike most TV performer-hosts, Sullivan
had no envy, agenda, or hunger for the spotlight--but how he
quivered at the sound of clapping hands!
The show was campy even in its own time, as the mimic Will Jordan’s
early `50s record parody, “The Roast of the Town,”
reveals. When Jordan’s Sullivan announces, “Next week,
on our stage, 17,000 Polish dentists…drilling!”), it
didn’t seem all that preposterous. Ed adored all drill teams.
He pursued the rare and exotic (12-year-old Israeli violin prodigy
Itzhak Perlman, the Moiseyev Dancers), the curious and innocuous
(The Singing Nun from Belgium, Scottish bagpipers, Swiss bell
ringers, an English music hall character, Mr. Pastry, who leaped
over chairs). Sullivan always took care to toss in a patriotic
moment (a crack Marine drill squad, singing firemen) or a moment
of pure pre-Oprahesque uplift (some tragedy-defying figure in
the news).
“When we have a real hero like this, risking his life to
save little children, people should be told.” he once explained
after singling out a fireman on the show who had pulled two children
from a burning building and was part of a band of bagpipers,
“It’s good for firemen, and it’s good for America.”
Whatever was good for Ed was good for America. As one profiler
put it: “Sullivan, although he lives light-years away from
where the grass roots grow, reflects exquisitely the best and
worst of the national character.”
By “worst,” the writer was likely hinting at Sullivan’s
emotional pleas, his nationalistic fervor, his love of apple-pie
sentiments--respect your elders, help a neighbor, give blood,
buy Treasury bonds. He once wrote an ode to moms on Mother’s
Day, but he was hardly alone. Sullivan lived at a time of solid,
unquestioned values--much yearned for today by many and loudly
trumpeted in red-state America. Despite all the social, political,
and cultural upheaval since that era, tens of millions of people
still continue to reside steadfastly in Ed Sullivan’s America,
the America of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, of John Wayne,
Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly & Co., and even hinted
at in Garrison Keillor’s tales of Lake Wobegon, which winks
at homespun populist middle-American middle-class values but
warmly (if secretly) embraces them, too.
That huge chunk of post-Sullivan America wants it all back--a
time and a place where abortion and homosexual marriage and prayer
in the classroom were not issues; the main hot-button issue in
`48 was Communism. The Depression and World War II had been tough,
sure, but at least we were all on the same side, sharing the
same values.
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The Animals, one of the rock groups he never really personally understood. |
“The Ed Sullivan Show” was a kind of Sunday night church bazaar, revealed not just by the kind of acts it presented but by the sentiments expressed in the songs and jokes, and by the values upheld by Sullivan, whose producer’s credo included “keeping it clean”: no revealing décolletage, no risqué jokes, no “effeminate” routines. As host, he became a terrific salesman not just for the show, or for each individual act, or for Lincoln and Mercury automobiles - but for The American Way.
Sullivan’s show was a rich mine of Americana from the `50s and `60s, spanning four decades and two generations; anyone 45 or older still vividly recalls the show, which began in TV’s dark black-and-white ages and continued long after TV’s ultimate media domination, consummated in 1960, when color TV arrived. CBS then ruled the networks and the Sullivan show became a pop culture landmark. Television, “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and baby boomer America came of age together.
It was, of course, basically just a variety show--but not just. “The Ed Sullivan Show” was, it now appears, far more than a TV show, more even than a very good, long-lasting variety hour, more than a mere parade of vaudeville acts. “The Ed Sullivan Show” was a mirror of 1950s America. It stood right smack on the fault line of show business during its most vital and violent upheaval in history, part of both a hallowed but vanishing tradition and the newly emerging `60s pop culture.
The show--though it ran 23 years and featured some 10,000 acts--is now mainly remembered for five acts: Elvis Presley’s first national TV exposure (which it really wasn’t); The Beatles’ first dynamic U.S. TV appearances; for two of its most beloved recurring novelty acts--Topo Gigio, the cuddly stringless mouse puppet that babbled in a weentsy Italian-accented voice (“Kees-a-me, Eddie!”) and an even stranger Spanish ventriloquist, Senor Wences, with a hand puppet created by scrawling a mouth on his fist in lipstick and a head in a box. But finally, of course, the show is most remembered for Ed Sullivan himself, in all of his endearing ineptitude.
There was never a more unlikely TV star in American show business than Ed Sullivan, nor any who loomed larger. Before CBS quite knew what to do with him, or even whether to dump him, Sullivan became a fixture, then a star, then a powerbroker, and finally a legend who walked like a man (sort of). He was both a titan and a joke, TV’s first “reality” star 50 years before glorifying the mundane became a cheesy vogue.
Sullivan was always compared to the other great impresarios of his day and before--Ziegfeld, Shubert, Minsky, Hurok, Barnum--but none of them were on-stage stars. Nobody quite understood why he hosted the show, but nobody else could have made it work or been such a perfect presenter for the acts he hand-selected, because (a) he loved them and (b) he knew America would, too. But after The Beatles he was trapped in a culture war partly of his own devising. The entertainers he had so long championed, and understood, were gone, and a new kind of entertainer, coarser and less polished, singing sentiments he couldn’t understand (literally) were taking over his world.
Before all that happened, though, Ed Sullivan captured the essence of television--of all show business, in fact--for an hour every week for 52 Sunday evenings a year (no reruns, no hiatus). How did he do it, and why it worked so well for so long, spanning two generations, is what intrigued me to look more closely at the phenomenon. Also, at what propelled Sullivan from workaday sportswriter to perhaps the most powerful man in show business, a self-confessed no-talent whose on-camera embrace could make anyone a star overnight after five minutes in TV’s most prime time on the grandest show in America--and all of it live.
Pre-Beatles, Ed Sullivan’s show was a total reflection of the man, who was a mirror of `50s Americana. Everything that Sullivan stood for--his taste in entertainment, his adoration of athletes and headline personalities, his cultural/social values--was visible on his stage in what became a Life magazine of the air. Indeed, landing on the Sullivan show was as good as appearing on the cover of Life or Time; there was no broader, gaudier showcase.
If the show was an electronic Life, it was also the Good Housekeeping of show business, where Sullivan’s imprimatur and pat on the back was a pop seal of approval. If he rejected an act or failed to invite someone back, it was as good as being banned by the FCC or censored by the Hays office. Sullivan had enormous make-or-break power, which he wielded for both good and not so good, rolling out the red carpet Sunday nights for anyone he felt deserved to be spotlighted but caving into the broadcasting blacklist by refusing to book performers suspected of being Commies.
Sullivan relished presenting black performers (despite the grumbling of sponsors) but anyone regarded as even slightly pink was outlawed--not so much because Sullivan disapproved (he wore his liberal sentiments on his sleeve) but because CBS did.
Sullivan capitulated rather than incur the wrath of the network or his sponsors, which would have threatened his show. While never a shrill rightwing jingoist like Walter Winchell, Ed was eager to let us know his true colors were also red, white, and blue.
Sullivan, moreover, was no mere TV front man, a host like Perry Como or Garry Moore, stars who had been awarded a show. Sullivan was the show. It was his idea--and the show was Sullivan. Like a great magazine, or any other corporate success story, the founder shaped the show in his own image. So the story of “The Ed Sullivan Show” is also a biography of Sullivan. While he was handed the hosting duties by CBS, mainly because they couldn’t find anybody better during TV’s own stumbling early dawn, it was Sullivan who, with co-producer Marlo Lewis, fashioned the format, then fought to hold onto the show when CBS seriously considered getting rid of him after a few weeks.
He won over everyone: CBS’s wary founding father William Paley, his first disgruntled sponsor (Emerson radio and TV), the slightly perplexed public, and in time even hostile newspaper critics, such as the leading, wittiest TV critic of the time, John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune. Crosby needled him constantly from the start (“Why, why, why is Ed Sullivan on television?”). Gradually, shrewdly, Sullivan built a seemingly routine variety hour into a showbiz fortress that no rival show could knock off the air for almost a quarter century. Even 40 years after it left the air, due to various cultural forces and a new ABC western, “Maverick,” no prime time entertainment show has reigned as long. (That other immovable Sunday night colossus, “60 Minutes,” has run 38 years, but it’s a news show and not in prime time). Only by surfing 80 channels can you put together your own “Ed Sullivan Show” from bits and pieces of other shows.
Sullivan crafted the show into a massive theatrical enterprise from its ramshackle beginnings as a variety show with a weekly petty cash budget of $1,500. What had been envisioned as a modest video version of the countless radio variety shows before it--shows like “The Kraft Music Hall,” with singers and comics and jaunty banter between host and guests--turned into something far more ambitious. The Sullivan show had singers and comedians, but no banter; it had a host who was not a performer and was, in fact, very much of an anti-performer. And, mainly, it dared to feature magicians, animal acts, opera, ballet, and theater, blending it all together into a cultural smoothie, with the aim of pleasing everyone. Sullivan did not want to bore a single pair of eyes, no matter their age, race, region, class, interests, or sophistication.
To be sure, he also featured his share of one-hit wonders, flashes in the pan, like Johnny Horton (“The Battle of New Orleans”) and Barry Sandler (“The Ballad of the Green Berets”). His nose for news often took him on many a dead-end detour.
The hour was the most democratic on television, another indication of Sullivan’s American-ness. No act was given precedence over any other, with a few famous exceptions--Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, some pop flavor of the week. The biggest names in the business would follow smalltime dog acts and Czech acrobats.
Sullivan knew the subtle ins and out of “routineing” a show, pacing it, his most acute skill. He not only knew what he liked, he knew how long it should run and exactly where in the show it would work best. It was a talent he absorbed as a kid watching vaudeville shows at Port Chester, N.Y.’s Bixby Theatre, a regular stop on the Keith-Albee circuit.
“The Ed Sullivan Show” was always hailed, or ridiculed, as a kind of videoville, i.e., televised vaudeville, which is far too facile a reading of the show. Yes, Ed famously, compulsively and cannily peppered the show with vaudeville acts--but, as he often pointed out, stage vaudeville had the luxury of time whereas he had to edit and alternate acts so viewers were never tempted to change channels, unlike captive patient paying vaudeville audiences. He was often able to jam about 10 acts into less than an hour, unlike leisurely vaudeville bills. Few acts could run beyond seven minutes and each had to prove itself air-worthy during a Sunday afternoon run-through, where Sullivan would often hurriedly and ruthlessly yank an act for reasons of time or flatness. Only hours before airtime he would pull apart a running order to create a faster paced show. Sullivan was a wizard at such show biz calculus.
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who was never this composed while on camera. |
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He was never quite satisfied with things, even during the show’s heyday, and nursed an ulcer much of his life. The host forever fiddled with the format itself--adding hour-long tributes (precursors to A&E’s “Biography” series), or scenes from upcoming movies with rare onstage interviews with TV-shy film stars--a sort of early stand-up talk show. He regularly went on the road to Europe, to inspect new acts and bring culture to the masses here. He even toured the U.S. with the show. He had talent scouts, and relied on tips from anyone, but he explored the planet in search of great acts--trekking to Tokyo to check out a mime or to Paris to review a touted trio of tumblers.
Unlike most office-bound impresarios, Sullivan loved to globe-hop, partly because he was usually greeted as a show biz statesman and basked in the accompanying pomp, greeted everywhere as a visiting dignitary. At home, with the aid of Carmine Santullo, a former shoeshine man who became his lifelong assistant, he worked the phones in his office-apartment at the Hotel Delmonico, where he lived with his wife Sylvia, daughter Betty, and a poodle named Bojangles.
But he spent a third of his time scouting
talent overseas. He bucked red tape in Russia for a Moscow show
and, forever in search of headliners of any kind, once journeyed
to Cuba for a chat with Castro.
If he couldn’t book a big name performer on stage, he would
pack the house with them--seat them on the aisle seat for a celebrity
wave. This allowed Sullivan to stop his own show, wisely breaking
up the rhythm to throw a spotlight on prominent people he implored
to stand up--not just entertainers and athletes (often “in
our town” to plug a book or a movie or show), but priests,
reformers, politicians, writers, artists, heads of state, Boy
Scouts, mine disaster survivors--anyone at all in the news that
week, from Salvador Dali to the Dalai Lama. This had the effect
of, first, showing that Sullivan was on top of the news and,
second, confirming the fact that, should you have any doubt,
“The Ed Sullivan Show” was the only place to be that
night, no matter where you were. Sullivan believed that nobody
who had even the slightest interest in entertainment would choose
to be anywhere else between 8 and 9 p.m. on Sunday.
His own modest story was proof that anybody could make it in
the USA and, if they had the goods, might even wind up on “The
Ed Sullivan Show”--as he had. Ed was the weekly embodiment
of our national Cinderella story that a shambling nobody from
Port Chester, New York, a lower-middleclass Irish Catholic kid
with no visible performing talent, can become a star--and, better
still, a star-maker.
Sullivan saw himself as a show biz Horatio Alger, pulling himself
up from $10-a- week sportswriter to American institution, all
by dint of pluck and luck. He was also TV’s Henry Ford,
discovering how to roll out an assembly line of entertainment
for the masses by building an efficient, smooth running factory
of affordable big-name singers, comics, dancers, actors, jugglers,
divas. Whether you were in the market for dancing bears or prima
ballerinas, “The Ed Sullivan Show” was one-stop shopping.
When he insisted the audience give a performer a "really
big hand," he really meant it--it wasn’t just the glib
glad-handing of a TV host but his honest belief that they deserved
it. The audience was not just applauding the performer, of course,
but also Sullivan, who had booked them--his way of confirming
that he had done a good job that week. He lived in fear of boring
an audience and had a habit, which he was asked to curb, of asking
studio audiences at the end of a show, “Tell me, didja all
have a good time here t’night?” He could never hear
enough applause. Albeit a famous self-confessed no-talent himself,
he needed a performer’s constant approval. High ratings
were nice, and he read them closely in search of microscopic
signs of audience apathy, but the sound of 1,400 hands clapping
fed his showman’s soul and propelled him into the next week.
The show represented the culmination of Sullivan’s newspaper
life--his devotion to athletes, whom he covered as a young sportswriter
in New York and hauled on stage on his show, and his second newspaper
career as a Broadway gossip columnist, where he soaked up backstage
life and accumulated the contacts that would later give him access
to anybody in show business. He lived through three distinct
golden ages in America--the golden age of sports in the 1920s,
which he covered close up; Broadway’s gilded age that included
not just the theater but the glamorous showroom and the mob-run
speakeasies that sprung up during Prohibition; and finally, he
was a leading figure of TV’s golden age, the `50s and `60s.
Decades earlier, he had hosted two variety
shows during radio’s own golden age, but when both programs
failed, he gave up on radio, later vowing to make good when he
got a third on-air chance, on TV, a medium as raw as he was.
It was Sullivan’s very amateurness that gradually proved
his saving grace. He was forgiven his network trespassing during
TV’s own struggle to define what it was, allowing an ambitious
outsider like Sullivan to get his foot in the door. Something
about the nature of TV--its more intimate nature, unlike the
formal strictures of trained invisible voices on radio--welcomed
people with undefined abilities to carve out major careers on
the job: people like Arthur Godfrey, an amiable announcer from
Washington, D.C., whose only visible talent was strumming a ukulele;
like Art Linkletter and Ralph Edwards, go-getters with plenty
of pep and ideas; like Bob Smith, a former carnival barker with
a marionette pal named Howdy Doody; like Lawrence Welk, who barely
spoke the language (Sullivan was tagged the Lawrence Welk of
variety). And, to be sure, like Ed Sullivan, a guy with all the
charisma of a Kiwanis Club program chairman, who had emceed scores
of benefits and banquets, becoming a toastmaster of endless charity
events for the Red Cross and war relief, where the emcee bar
was not set terribly high.
Sullivan symbolized, and opened wide the front door to, the Everyman
Era in American entertainment. TV, because of its cozy presence
as a constant house guest, a sort of Appliance that Came to Dinner,
give rise to the vaguely qualified “host”--the Godfreys
and Dave Garroways, the Jack Paars and Dick Cavetts, the Ted
Macks and Faye Emersons, the Merv Griffins and Mike Douglases,
the Regis Philbins and Phil Donahues, the Hugh Downses and Ed
McMahons, the Charlie Roses and Larry Kings - quasi performers/announcers/personalities
who became major TV stars, forces even. At a time when TV was
up for grabs, anyone who grabbed your attention could become
a star, from Pinky Lee to Bishop Sheen to Julia Child to Dick
Clark to…Ed Sullivan.
Something about the nature of TV--more so than radio, which made
stringent theatrical demands on performers--created an aura of
informality that, in time, inundated American life itself with
a “counter culture.” Sullivan somehow made it OK to
be a guy at the adjoining bar stool, “a face in the crowd”
to quote the title of Elia Kazan’s movie about an aw-shucks
Godfrey-like country singer who becomes a tyrannical TV personality.
Sullivan’s entire manner--the next-door neighbor name, the
hangdog Irish mug, the sluggish manner and slouching body language,
the rambling, mush-mouthed introductions--shattered TV’s
fourth glass wall.
Television’s broad stage could accommodate great theater
like “Playhouse 90,” “The U.S. Steel Hour,”
and “Studio One,” but also left room for an aging ink-stained
newsman to become a huge star. Sullivan was a formal, old school,
hat-wearing. God-fearing, family-loving, traditional-values bloke
who insisted on decorum and professionalism on stage and off,
who flinched at those early-warning sounds of shrieking teenage
rock fans; he seemed one of us. The implicit message, and the
secret of his lengthy tenure and impresario’s contract with
America, was: if Ed Sullivan can host a show, anyone could, and
many did. Alongside “The Original Amateur Hour’s”
dour Major Bowes, Sullivan seemed positively dynamic. But as
he always pointed out, hosting was the least of his chores; producing
was his true talent.
Sullivan perfectly illustrated Andy Warhol’s famous `60s
dictum, the major difference being that Ed had much longer than
15 minutes of fame. Mike Dann, a former CBS vice president of
programming, once said, “If someone walked into my office
and said he wanted to be just like Ed Sullivan, I’d throw
him out. Nobody should want to be like Ed Sullivan. He is all
wrong for television. He just happens to be great.” Other
descriptions were hurled at Sullivan throughout his career, but
the rotten tomatoes and cream pies somehow, over time, turned
into wet kisses and bouquets.
Marshall McLuhan, TV’s first guru, summed up Sullivan’s
non-charisma as ideal for the medium: “Mr. Sullivan has
the perfect television countenance--a mask instead of a face.
It is a corporate image which contains the entire audience within
itself.” Ed Sullivan, like Walt Whitman, contained multitudes.
He was his audience, a microcosm of the millions of Eds
and Sylvias sprawled on their couches across America watching
his show--the people’s show. As a Newsday TV critic wrote
in 1967, “The Sullivan mystique is not skin deep. Its roots
lay right smack in the midst of the American psyche. He appeals
to our real national tastes and to our imagined national tastes.”
It was always a severe mistake to maintain that Ed Sullivan had
no personality--nobody as relentlessly mimicked as Sullivan lacks
personality. His very absence of a standard brash or polished
TV personality was his personality--his gimmick, if you like.
He was a brilliant non-performer, which captured our eye and
ear. If Sullivan had been truly bland he could not have lasted.
He was awkward, yes, and uneasy, but never dull. He learned to
use his deadpan image and, indeed, parlayed it into a persona
as indelible as Jimmy Cagney’s, Cary Grant’s, or Humphrey
Bogart’s (in his 30s, he looked a bit like Bogie). His accumulation
of facial tics, fish-eyed gaze, bodily contortions, non sequiturs,
and snarled sentences was as rich a persona as anyone could wish
for.
An NBC executive once said, “People watch Sullivan so they
can hate him--it’s mass masochism”--much too harsh
an analysis. People never hated him, though they may have laughed
at him or felt sorry for him; one viewer praised him for doing
so well for a man with a steel plate in his head. Mostly, they
identified with him, realizing that he was doing the best he
could; he gave eternal hope to the severely talent-challenged.
Viewers embraced him as a fellow human. Making fun of Sullivan
became a national pastime--everyone knew somebody who could “do”
Sullivan, even if nine times out of 10 they were doing a bad
imitation of Will Jordan’s imitation, or a pale copy of
Jack Carter’s, Rich Little’s, or Jackie Mason’s
Sullivan. Making fun of Sullivan, which comedians regularly did
on the show as a rite of passage, was really an indication of
the public’s great affection for him. We only kid those
we love.
Much as Sullivan enjoyed his late-blooming stardom, he still
believed that helping worthy causes was his duty. Even in his
heyday as a TV kingmaker, he never tired of emceeing charity
events--his way of “performing,” of feeling good about
himself, and of justifying his fluky celebrity life. If he didn’t
host an event, he organized it, and he let himself be draped
with ribbons and plaques at endless tribute dinners. Sullivan,
like Willie Loman, simply liked being liked; indeed, he reveled
in approval.
Sullivan artfully wove his modest toastmaster talents, Broadway
columnist credentials and connections, and booster mentality
into a major show biz career. He was reborn on the night of March
13, 1947, when he was called upon, yet again, to emcee the New
York Daily News’s seventh annual Harvest Moon Ball finals,
a local dance contest that was televised and watched by a CBS
programming executive, Worthington Minor, who later produced
the much-honored dramatic series “Studio One.” Minor
had been searching for a guy to host a new TV variety series.
At the time, Sullivan was a surprisingly dapper fellow with sleek
patent-leather hair who had appeared briefly in two movies, playing
himself, and who had shoehorned his way onto Broadway by producing
a few shows. To Tony Minor, Sullivan seemed a self-assured, almost
suave emcee when the `47 Harvest Moon Ball finals were telecast,
unbeknownst to Sullivan, who claimed he thought he was looking
into newsreel cameras. So to Minor he came across as cool and
confident. TV cameras later terrorized him, causing him to freeze
up. It took him six years on the air to thaw out, even a little.
That’s how it all started in the spring of 1948. By the
time it all ended, in 1971, “The Ed Sullivan Show”
had become a prism through which we can zoom in on America’s
violent pop culture upheaval and the changing taste in entertainment--in
the very definition of what constituted “entertainment”:
in 10 years, the national spotlight had leaped from Patti Page
to Janis Joplin, from moonlit songs about old Cape Cod to wild
sexual yowls. Before Presley’s explosive debut on “The
Ed Sullivan Show,” everyone in America pretty much agreed
what was a great song (“That’s Amore”) and who
was a funny comic (Myron Cohen), which Sullivan’s show only
solidified. But when Sullivan left TV in `71, pop life was a
shambles, fragmented by the cultural/social rebellion of the
`60s. “The Ed Sullivan Show” was both the staging area
and the stunned victim of that revolt. In shows that featured
more and more rock and roll acts and fewer and fewer divas, dancers
and Broadway stars, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
At its peak, from 1954-57, the season-long
ratings average for Sullivan's show was close to 40 per cent
of the total TV audience. It's best year in overall ratings was
the 1954-55 season, in which it attracted an average of 39.6
per cent of the TV audience. The highest it ever went in season-long
ratings was No. 2 in 1956-57. Rumors that the show was "knocked
out" by ABC's stylish James Garner western "Maverick"
are preposterous. The shows only went head to head for 30 minutes
because "Maverick" started at 7:30 p.m. and Sullivan's
show at 8 p.m. "Maverick" did cut into Sullivan's ratings,
but the western was cancelled in 1962 and Sullivan stayed on
the air through 1971, remaining among each year's 30 top-rated
programs through the 1969-70 TV season.
Along the way, the Sullivan show became the gold standard for
what mattered in show business. Ed was the gatekeeper not just
to TV success but, by extension, to success elsewhere, from Las
Vegas to Peoria to Miami Beach. In Carol Burnett’s words,
“If Ed put his arm around you and said you were a really
funny gal, then America put its arm around you and said you were
a really funny gal.” When a favored performer finished,
Ed would gesture him to come over, grinning like a proud papa
after his kid’s recital.
Thus, if you could make it on the Sullivan show you could make
it anywhere, for New York, and specifically Broadway, is where
pop careers were launched. Hit musicals and Tin Pan Alley spun
off songs later recorded and heard/seen on “Your Hit Parade.”
Singers’ and comics’ lives relied on New York nightclub
engagements, heavily publicized by columnists like Sullivan.
Times Square then was the show biz capitol of the universe--not
Hollywood, not Las Vegas, not Nashville--or so Sullivan’s
show made us believe from its opening shout by announcer Art
Hannes: “And now, from New York City, the nationally syndicated
New York Daily News columnist--Ed Sullivan!” Wow. The show’s
intro pulsated with excitement and Broadway sparkle. If a nationally
syndicated New York newspaper columnist was not totally hip and
in the know, who the heck was?
The show was not only important for itself but as a major feeder
to clubs and concert halls around the country. A “shot on
Sullivan” was a booster rocket to the future that a performer
could ride for years. The show did not so much discover talent--that
was left to Steve Allen’s and Jack Paar’s edgier midnight
“Tonight Show” revels--as it did confer status and
confirm stardom already safely achieved. Even performers Ed first
presented nationally on TV usually had proven themselves elsewhere.
In most cases, as the show itself became a hit, and then a habit,
you had to be famous to earn a booking. Sullivan was a keen judge
of talent but rarely a risk-taker, though he took chances on
black performers and a few quirky newcomers. He had an autograph
collector’s heart and a C.E.O.’s head--half fan-club
cheerleader, half Donald Trump. If Ed loved an act he might book
it, but his real discoveries are hard to find. Some of his personal
favorites, notably the Canadian comedy team Wayne & Schuster,
never caught on here despite a record 58 appearances on the show,
more than any other comedy act.
Sullivan, a softie in some ways, was more interested in giving
a boost to performers on the way down than on the way up, stars
he had once loved who were clinging to their legend for dear
life--Buster Keaton, Blossom Seeley, Gene Austin, Harry Richman,
Eddie Cantor. Financially, he also was a soft touch for broke
vaudevillians and broken down boxers. He sparked fighter Sugar
Ray Robinson’s failed hoofing career, booking him seven
times, and helped pay for Bill Robinson’s funeral.
Sullivan’s show was both the birthplace of the rock revolution
and the final resting place of the biggest headliners in show
business during their twilight years. The onetime legends represented
old-fashioned showbiz standards (proven artistry, charm, style)
that Sullivan revered. When they retired or died, his world died
and with it the show’s spirit. Sullivan worshipped showbiz
longevity and he himself outlasted many far flashier stars because
he never pretended to be one. The show was the star. As someone
put it in 1968, “Twenty years! And where are the Berles
of yesteryear? And the Godfreys and [George] Gobels and [Red]
Buttonses? And the Caesars and Cocas, the Philco Playhouses.
And all the little $64,000 questions? Gone, all gone. And still
Ed Sullivan drifts on, immortal.” Drifts? Charges is more
like it.
But if Elvis and The Beatles were a breath of fresh air on Sullivan’
show, once the rockers began to dominate the show (and most of
pop life) they knocked the rarified air out of the unique show
that had been the vision of one man. Once Elvis entered the building
on 53rd Street and Broadway, most of those mellow, beloved headliners
who had dazzled the country were doomed, stampeded by a herd
of funky folksingers and raucous rock stars. To appear hip, and
hold onto his show, Sullivan was forced to book The Lovin’
Spoonful, Jefferson Airplane, the Dave Clark Five, Ricky Nelson,
The Monkees, et al. TV’s supreme impresario had to be dragged
into the `60s kicking and screaming.
Against his better judgment, Sullivan was pushed into booking
rock groups by his new young co-producer and son-in-law Robert
Precht, who nudged aside the show’s co- genius Marlo Lewis.
The sharp, no-nonsense showman with once-unerring taste now invited
into the main tent such freak-show idols as Bob Dylan, The Doors,
and Jimi Hendrix, all of whose appeal bewildered, and irritated,
him. Yet in interviews, Ed invariably boasted about being a newspaperman
with his finger on the public pulse. So even if that pulse suddenly
revealed a wildly erratic beat, he had to hold his nose, grin
through those celebrated clenched teeth, obey his newsmaker instincts,
and make good on his promise to bring hot new acts, however dubious,
to his TV audience.
More bluntly, Sullivan, ensconced in a velvet sinecure with a
seemingly lifetime appointment as Impresario in Chief, had simply
sold out. He gave the public what it wanted instead of, as he
had done for so many years, telling the public what it wanted.
The bold leader had turned follower, if not defector, even panderer.
And of course rock and rollers were not really what the public
wanted at all--they were what the “youngsters” wanted,
the first stirrings of a pop culture driven by demographics and
disc jockeys. Sullivan, like most of the showbiz establishment,
treated rock and roll like a novelty fad, a sort of musical Hula-Hoop.
With his slavish devotion to pleasing The Youngsters--he didn’t
much distinguish between puppets, clowns, and rock singers--Sullivan
found himself, like America’s parents themselves, taken
hostage by teenagers whose taste was largely molded by payola-saturated
DJs and radio station owners whose highly suspect hit lists wagged
the show biz dog. Newly powerful DJs now could manufacture hit
songs, which shows like Sullivan’s were forced to respond
to by booking the songs’ hot singers. Once that happened,
much of the familiar old show biz empire began to crumble. Rock
and roll was not just about music; it was also, famously, about
sex and drugs, also social values, politics, fashion, food, language.
Booking Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones was a dangerous
game: the rockers inflated his ratings, and boosted his legacy,
but they also, ultimately, brought the great show to a screeching
conclusion, smothered by third-rate rock groups. Sullivan’s
single, unwavering standard had always been quality--but how
could he judge the quality of a rock group he didn’t fathom,
let alone enjoy? Now he was forced to take many acts on highly
suspect Top 40 faith.
The impact of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” both pre- and
post-Beatles, resonated far beyond TV or even show business itself.
It was a measure of mid-century America--a direct result of its
time and of Ed Sullivan’s personal history. It arrived at
a moment when New York, and specifically Broadway and surrounding
nightclubs, were in charge. Sullivan had sat through countless
opening nights and supper club floorshows during his rounds of
the city’s most glamorous performing palaces--El Morocco,
the Copacabana, the Empire Room, the Latin Quarter--and knew
when a performer connected with an audience, and with him. He
had even produced a couple of Broadway shows, notably “Harlem
Cavalcade” with Noble Sissle, a warm-up act for the day
when he would bring great black performers for the first time
to lily-white late `40s and `50s television.
Sullivan’s first love was not the former Sylvia Weinstein,
or Broadway, or even Topo Gigio--it was sports, which he wallowed
in all his life. The bull-necked Eddie Sullivan had been a 10-letter
man at Port Chester High School, briefly a semi-pro catcher,
and earned a few bucks as a teenager caddying with the later
golfing legend Gene Sarrazan at a local Westchester country club,
where he met John D. Rockefeller and other tycoons and got his
first taste of how the other half lived, or at least putted.
He covered the greatest, most romantic, period of sports in America,
chronicled by Sullivan and his sports writing comrades (Grantland
Rice was his role model and later crony) during what was later
termed the Gee Whiz Era of sports, which gave way in the mid-1960s
to the Aw Nuts Era, still in play today. Sullivan the sportswriter
helped invent the athletic Paul Bunyons of his day--Ruth, Dempsey,
Grange, Hogan, Rockne, Tilden, Owens, Tunney, DiMaggio, all of
whom he knew and proudly paraded on his show at the drop of a
Yankee cap. He was a huge unembarrassed sports nut during an
era when it was taken for granted that all great athletes were
heroes, no matter how sleazy their off-the-field life. Sullivan
bought into the whole Frank Merriwell/Bill Stern jock iconography
that remains a major part of American sports lore.
Young Ed was a gung-ho 15-year-old stringer for his hometown
paper, covering high school teams before becoming a workaholic
sportswriter for several New York City papers, writing both daily
stories and knocking out a regular column, “Ed Sullivan’s
Sports Whirl.” His sports pieces reveal a savvier, more
incisive writer than the later Broadway columns, where he was
less reporter than rewrite man--repeating jokes, revising press
releases, and retailing anecdotes separated by three dots, after
Winchell. Sullivan never bonded with show folks as naturally
as he did athletes, whom he considered cohorts. Whereas Sullivan
always remained a kind of a stage door Eddie to singers, comics
and actors, he was much more of a soul brother to sports figures.
His TV stage became the ideal dais to preside over a sort of
weekly sports page of the air, a primitive ESPN, sans the cynicism.
Athletes’ exploits were raved about by Sullivan each Sunday
night, when he introduced them in the audience or invited them
on stage for a victory lap, a handshake, and an awkward exchange
with the host at a time when media-shy sports heroes were even
more uneasy on camera than Sullivan.
His main interests were boxing and golf, but he loved even fringe
sports like trotter racing, featuring the annual winning jockey
of the Hambletonian sweepstakes. For viewers, trotting was a
funny, arcane, geezer’s sport (did anyone other than Ed
give a damn who won the Hambletonian?), but Sullivan had grown
up watching the trotters at Yonkers Raceway, later even owned
a few, and became that peculiar little pastime’s biggest
publicist; they even named a harness race for him, “The
Ed Sullivan Pace.” Well, you figured, if trotters (or soap
box derby winners, or horseshoe champs) were featured on “The
Ed Sullivan Show,” it must be a big deal. No, but it was
a very big deal to Ed, who loved sharing his idiosyncratic enthusiasms
with America. Sullivan was a sincere flack for all sports, not
just trotters, gleefully trotting out Look magazine’s All-American
teams as if he was their coach, when all America took such stuff
seriously. After winning a championship, athletes didn’t
announce they were off to Disneyland--instead, they headed straight
for “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Likewise, Miss America invariably began her global tour with
a prim curtsy on Sullivan’s stage, to be followed a week
later by a new world dominoes champ, an Oscar winner, or a Miami
Beach headliner. Today, World Series heroes or Super Bowl victors
might swap a few jokes with Jay Leno or David Letterman, mere
boutique versions of Sullivan’s weekly spectacle, but in
the `50s and `60s all obligatory bows were taken on “The
Ed Sullivan Show”--the biggest game in town, in all of America.
Sullivan’s unexpected switch from earnest sports columnist
to Broadway columnist thrust him into the reluctant role of gossip
monger when The Evening Graphic’s in-house Broadway columnist
Louis Sobel moved to a rival newspaper, opening a prize slot
for Sullivan. It wasn’t one he coveted but was drafted into
it by a desperate editor with a giant hole to fill. During the
1930s and `40s, a Broadway columnist was considered as vital
to a New York tabloid as a city hall reporter.
Sullivan took the job seriously--maybe too seriously. In his
first column, he came on like a reformer, a Broadway Fiorello
LaGuardia promising to clean up the gossip mills. He vowed not
to follow in his fellow keyhole columnists’ shabby footsteps,
peddling smutty stories of philandering celebrities, debutante
gay divorcees, and every manner of whoopie-making. It was an
incredibly gutsy, not to say arrogant and righteous, pronouncement
for Broadway’s rookie columnist, throwing down the gauntlet
to Winchell & Co. his first day on the job. Nonetheless,
The Rev. Sullivan quickly adapted to the racy Broadway lifestyle,
dating chorus girls and singers like Jane Kean, who later had
a serious affair with Winchell. The two columnists’ paths
crossed even in bed.
The competitive nerve that ran deep in Sullivan compelled him
to try to scoop all his rivals, especially when he got to TV,
where ratings were the name of the game, one he played as fiercely
as he ever had high school football. As Alan King, Sullivan’s
go-to comedian, once said, “In a sense, what he was doing
was using his talent as a newspaperman, scooping everyone. When
he heard there was a singing nun in Brussels, he was on the next
plane to bring back Sister Sourie.”
Sullivan even put in a three-year hitch in Hollywood as The Graphic’s
movieland columnist before he got fed up with sunshine, palm
trees, and swimming pools and returned to Times Square, his native
grounds. Sullivan, born in Harlem and raised a short train ride
from Manhattan, was a New Yorker in his bones. He loved the lullaby
of Broadway--the hip-hooray and ballyhoo, the rattle of the subway
trains and taxis, the folks who entertain at Angelo’s and
Maxie’s. He knew all of the Angelos and Maxies, the Texas
Guinans and Tony Pastors. The mythic Broadway world that we now
only know through musicals like “42nd Street” and “Guys
and Dolls” was a neighborhood that Sullivan patrolled nightly.
While he wasn’t in Winchell’s league as a writer, phrasemaker,
philanderer, snoop, or, to be sure, newspaper terrorist, Sullivan’s
early columns were steeped in Broadway lore. He was never feared,
like Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, or Lee Mortimer, nor was he
as beloved as Damon Runyon, Mark Hellinger, or Nick Kenny, but
Sullivan could mount a soapbox with the best of them. His occasional
public outrage and indignation was a favorite literary mannerism
among gossip writers (see also Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper,
Jimmy Fidler, Jack O’Brian), useful for attacking celebrities
who had stepped over some fuzzy moral line, or, even worse, snubbed
them.
But Sullivan was less often angry than miffed, with an easily
bruised skin and an Irish temper that flared and then rapidly
subsided. Unlike Winchell, he held no grudges - except against
Winchell, his lifelong nemesis. He was quick to apologize in
print. He wanted, again, to be well liked, unlike Winchell, who
wanted only to be worshipped and kowtowed to. Sullivan’s
hunger for attention was not satisfied by bringing press agents
and producers to their knees but by cuddling up to them at banquets
and fund-raisers.
Press agents who sucked up to Winchell found in Sullivan more
of an ally, an easy guy to be around. Winchell had his famous
“drop dead” black list for press agents whom he felt
had crossed him, but Sullivan did not enjoy playing God. Though
he relished the role of big shot Broadway columnist, he rarely
used his newspaper column as a blunt instrument, like Winchell
or Westbrook Pegler. He never picked fights, as they did, but
he had his share of public feuds--with Arthur Godfrey, Jack Paar,
Jackie Mason, Hedda Hopper, Joan Crawford, Steve Allen, to name
a few besides Winchell and Pegler.
Pegler was a former sportswriter-turned rabid Red-baiter who
regularly attacked Sullivan for his liberal instincts and mob
friendships, but it was impossible to cover nightclubs without
rubbing elbows with Mafia characters; and columnists love characters.
Runyon, Sullivan’s colleague, elevated gangsters--cleaned
up as whimsical Times Square gamblers--to mythic stature in “Guys
and Dolls.” At least two mobsters (Owney "Killer"
Madden, who ran a favorite Sullivan hangout The Silver Slipper,
and Madden’s henchman Frankie Marlow) were pals of Sullivan,
who wrote a mawkish farewell when Marlow died (“Good bye,
Frankie. And God bless you! Our hearts tell us we have lost a
friend and whole-souled comrade, a pardner, in the complete sense,
an ace”).
So Sullivan had a box seat and front row table at some of the
most glittering periods in American life--from the gilded age
of sports and the entire tough, fast-paced “Front Page”
era of lurid, wacky, anything-goes tabloid journalism, to the
Jazz Age of subterranean jazz joints and glittering boites, to
the Broadway renaissance of the 1930s through the 1960s--and,
to be sure, to television’s own golden age, which he helped
burnish. Born in 1902, Edward Vincent Sullivan was truly a child
of the century. He saw it all, lived it intensely, and reported
much of it--part of the untold back-story that leads into Sullivan’s
beginnings as the fumbling television host of what one TV historian
called “an American archive of 20th Century entertainment.”
As a waiter at Danny’s Hideaway, Sullivan’s favorite
restaurant retreat after each week’s show, once put it:
“He’s a right guy, Ed. He’s America. He will never
be destroyed. The way I feel about my country is the way I feel
about Ed.”
©2006 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Dec. 18, 2006.
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