Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  His own image would be the most manufactured of all. Within the confines of the television screen he appeared as a wooden but sincere emcee, everyone’s Uncle Ed, a believer in the Boy Scouts and the American Way, who probably went home to a big wood-paneled den after the show to spend time with the youngsters, as he called anyone under age thirty-five. In the late 1950s he published a book called Christmas with Ed Sullivan, a collection of reminiscences by his “friends”—from Walter Cronkite to Lucy and Desi Arnaz—suggesting he lived in a world of big warm holidays where everyone gathered ’round the hearth. In reality he was a loner and a driven careerist who was typically too busy to bother with a Christmas tree until 9 P.M. Christmas Eve. In his view, family life was greatly overrated, as were close personal friendships, and he took precious little time for either. He had elbowed his way into television based on the power of his gossip column, which could be surprisingly salacious, and he was every bit as profane as the column’s yellowest tidbit—possessing a sailor’s salty vocabulary, a volcano’s sense of decorum, and a pugilist’s belief in diplomacy. These qualities, however, were kept far offstage (most of the time). And since he presented himself as Uncle Ed on television, so he was seen in the public’s eye. He carved his own image with as much skill as he built every Sunday’s show.

  This would create considerable confusion as to who Ed Sullivan really was. His public face as a stiff but earnest host was actually the far smaller of his two roles on the show. The early critics, new to the sport of television reviewing, mistakenly assumed that his emcee duties were his central role—and panned him accordingly. When Sullivan debuted in 1948, New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby wrote, “One of the small but vexing questions confronting anyone in this area with a television set is: Why is Ed Sullivan on it every Sunday night?” That perception would change over the years. In 1965, New York Times critic Jack Gould, who once had wholeheartedly agreed with Crosby, opined that Sullivan “is unquestionably one of the medium’s great intuitive showmen.”

  The Ed Sullivan Show was very much his show, his to shape and color as he saw fit. As its producer he not only chose the performers, creating balance and mood by determining their running order, he also took enormous control over their performances. Comedians found their routines reshaped, singers saw their repertoire—or, famously, their lyrics—changed. He told actors which section of a play to reprise, and he overruled his Yale-educated set designer. Even animal trainers, whose chimps and big cats knew their routines by rote, bent to the Sullivan edict. This was not a democracy, nor even a particularly benevolent dictatorship. When opera star Maria Callas refused to sing her famed interpretation of Tosca, Sullivan made it clear: you’ll sing what I tell you to sing or your performance is canceled. The diva had met a bigger diva.

  On Sunday afternoons he ran the entire show as a dress rehearsal in front of a full house, standing just offstage, watching both the acts and the studio audience, getting a feel for the relationship between the two. He made notes on his yellow legal pad, and after rehearsal those notes dramatically reshaped what the audience would see and hear that evening. No detail was too small to be controlled. He could compromise, and in fact often did. But he was also known for sending performers to “the wailing wall”—an area outside the theater where they kvetched to their agents after Sullivan had reworked or canceled their acts (and many performers saw their appearance canceled the day of the show). When the cameras began broadcasting live that evening, much in that hour had been molded by the pucker-lipped host who mangled his lines in the spotlight’s glare.

  The show was very personal to him—it was him. Said comedian Alan King, a Sullivan favorite who had the temerity to appear on a rival show: “Ed literally came close to slapping me in the face at Danny’s Hideaway. He called me a traitor … for five years Ed didn’t talk to me.” The showman’s visceral attachment to his program gave him something of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde quality. In the theater, shaping an evening’s show to conform to his vision, Sullivan the raging tyrant could erupt; outside the television studio, the glad-handing newsman chatted amiably. “He was a whole different man offstage,” recalled his friend Jack Carter. “He was very charming.”

  Because the show so closely reflected the man himself, the story of his early life and education is an essential part of the Sullivan narrative. The way he produced his odd weekly circus reflected everything he had done and everywhere he had been, from the Victorian parlors of his youth to the decidedly non-Victorian celebrity gossip column he penned for decades. Although early television critics skewered him as an unskilled amateur, in reality no more grizzled veteran of a showman existed in 1948. He had skipped college but earned a rough-and-tumble Ivy League education in American show business, from the speakeasy cabarets of his twenties, to his abortive radio and film career, to—especially—his years spent producing sawdust-and-sweat vaudeville shows. And his influential syndicated column made him as much a show business player as a chronicler. In fact, his New York Daily News column, with its rapid-fire pastiche of items covering many quarters, was his model for The Ed Sullivan Show. Like a daily journalist, the showman opened big and kept a brisk pace. Quipped one comedian: “You wanna know the day Christ died? It was on the Sullivan show, and Ed gave him three minutes.”

  The story of his life, like the television show he produced, formed a perfect mirror of his time. Born with the century’s birth in 1901, the seasons of his life flowed in tandem with the seasons of American life: running away to join World War I, coming of age in the giddy 1920s, finding his voice as a popular Depression-era columnist, pitching in during World War II, pioneering in the dawn of television, grappling with McCarthyism, becoming an unofficial Minister of Culture in the conformist 1950s, ushering in the rock ’n’ roll era—including its seminal moment, the Beatles’ 1964 U.S. debut—and, finally, seeing changes in television that presaged the medium’s defining ethic on into the twenty-first century. If the century itself had written a diary from an American perspective, he could well have been its protagonist.

  As his show combined dissimilar elements—jazz with rock ’n’ roll, boxers with ballerinas—so he himself carried a mass of contradictions. He was, at one time or another, a melancholic introvert, a frustrated performer who craved a mass audience, a columnist for a socialist newspaper, a Red baiter, a peacenik who led a tour of the Soviet Union, a small-town boy, an urban sophisticate, a street fighter who played by his own rules, a Puritanical moralist, a racetrack habitué, an opera promoter, a single-minded bully, a tender sentimentalist, and a self-contained egoist whose greatest joy came from pleasing others, that is, his tens of millions of viewers.

  Fame and his long-frustrated hunger for it was a central theme of his life, as this man who could neither sing, dance, nor tell jokes strove tirelessly to thrust himself center stage, in newspapers, vaudeville, film, radio, and finally, television. This hunger, his own gut-devouring desire to put his name atop the marquee, was his primary psychic gasoline. Yet while he became hugely famous, he remained—again, the contradictions—a regular Joe, transporting his own wardrobe, speaking as an equal to doormen and network executives alike. He carried his fame, as one associate described it, “like it was built-in,” never indulging in the smallest moment of pretentiousness. He eschewed an entourage or the requisite limousine, instead taking cabs, invariably quizzing the driver, “What did you think of the show?”

  Approaching the stage door after his preshow walk, Sullivan stamped out his cigarette and was immediately surrounded by autograph seekers. These admirers would be in tonight’s studio audience, a mix of young couples in their Sunday best, some older folks, a few servicemen in uniform, and teenage rock fans. The Sullivan show was one midtown Manhattan event that never attracted the tuxedo and evening dress crowd. It was only a couple of hours before showtime yet he took the time to sign several autographs, as he would again after the show. He never stopped being willing—happy—to sign autographs. During a tour with Frank Sinatra,
while the singer avoided the crowds, Sullivan stood for lengthy periods not just signing but asking fans how they wanted them inscribed. When it came to his audience, his energy appeared boundless.

  In truth, the sixty-eight-year-old producer was feeling his years. In the old days he never would have taken a nap after dress rehearsal, as he now did. Privately, his family saw signs of senility; the forgetfulness had become frequent. So tonight after the show, dinner at Danny’s Hideaway, a short Courvoisier at the Colony, then home.

  As the guard let him into the theater, there it was. The nerves. He still felt the butterflies after all these years. But there was no time to worry. On to room 21, his dressing room, where the makeup artist worked her magic, during which the celebrities he would introduce from the stage stopped by. Then, several last-minute changes with show staffers and a flurry of details; tonight he would perform a humorous sketch with the Italian hand puppet Topo Gigio—were his lines ready? As always, he touched up his introductions; he would rewrite many of them four to five times the day of the show, sending his assistant scurrying to the copy machine to remake the master script.

  Then, at 7:50 P.M., backstage went dark. The telephone bell was turned off. He stood in the wings, where he could hear the studio audience. He was in his own world at this point, focused on his introduction and the myriad aspects of the show, unaware of the last-minute movements of stagehands. All across America, people were expecting to see him: tens of millions of people, sitting in their living rooms with the TV tuned to CBS—the teenagers, the parents, the little ones. And then it was eight o’clock sharp.

  “Tonight, from the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway … The Ed Sullivan Show … and now, live from New York … Ed Sullivan!…”

  PART ONE

  A SHOWMAN’S EDUCATION

  “I have no spur to prick the sides

  of my intent, but only Vaulting

  ambition, which o’erleaps itself.”

  — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  from Macbeth

  CHAPTER ONE

  Twins

  East Harlem in 1901 was a volatile mix of Irish, Jews, Italians, and blacks, many of them living with multiple generations squeezed into cold-water tenements. The Irish weren’t fond of the Italians, neither group liked the Jews, and all three looked down on the blacks. Yet for most of them it was a step up from where they had come from, and they managed to coexist, if not always peacefully. The streets of Harlem had begun to see their first few motor cars, like the puttering steam-powered Locomobile, but much of the traffic still cantered forth on horse-drawn wagons and carriages. Throngs of bicycles competed with pushcarts selling hot potatoes or sweet cakes for 2 cents, weaving among pedestrians who spoke a polyglot of tongues. Despite the neighborhood’s collection of sweatshops and sulfurous iron factories, it was not a ghetto. It took pride in being solidly working class, however slight the distinction.

  For Peter Sullivan, guiding his horse-drawn milk wagon through the Harlem streets in the predawn darkness, the great city of New York had become a dream deferred. A proud man who felt cheated by the roll of life’s dice, he spent most of his days in a moody funk. Peter broke his taciturn reserve usually only for a fit of temper or a snort of disappointment. He had come to the city hoping for a better life for himself and his family, but he had fallen short.

  The plan had been a simple one. In the late 1890s, he and his wife Elizabeth left their hardscrabble farm life in upstate New York when Peter landed a patronage job as a city clerk. New York’s Tammany Hall political machine ran the city with a wink and a nod, a few bucks here and a little grease there, and the city’s Irish ward heelers consolidated their political influence by doling out patronage jobs to members of their own tribe. For Peter, taking a low-level clerkship was an opportunity to vault into the middle class. Farming in the small upstate town of Amsterdam had been hand to mouth, a season-by-season gamble at avoiding the creditor’s knock. Working in the U.S. Customs House in lower Manhattan provided a steady salary.

  Had Peter been another sort of man, the job might have been his first step up the bureaucratic ladder. But he lost his reappointment to the Customs House. The patronage system required him to write a thank-you note to the ward heeler who secured him the job, a kind of loyalty oath. Peter refused. He was smarter than the party hack and he knew it. Guided by his inflexible moral absolutes, he felt it was wrong to write the petty bit of fawning. That proud decision would be the beginning of downward mobility for him. Out of work, he managed to find one of the better jobs open to an unskilled Irishman, saloon manager. But that, too, proved short-lived. Being a saloon keeper required a rough-and-ready bonhomerie, a good cheer, and an easy word that Peter lacked. Casting around for a post that would suit him, he became a milkman. Guiding a slow-moving delivery wagon through the streets of Harlem required him to get along with no one, save his horses.

  Central to his resentment was that, unlike his brothers, he hadn’t been able to complete his education. Peter’s parents, Florence and Margaret O’Sullivan, had emigrated from County Cork, Ireland, fleeing the ravaging famine of the mid 1800s in which more than a million souls starved. Florence and his brother John and their families made the journey together. Stopping in London on their way to the New World, the O’Sullivan brothers decided to Americanize their surname; they would now sign their name as Sullivan. Despite this effort at assimilation, Florence and Margaret’s circumstances were only marginally better in their new home. They settled in the fertile valley around Amsterdam, New York, but the family farm took years to rise above subsistence level. Peter, as the oldest son in a family of eight, was forced to leave school and go to work to help support his family.

  As the family’s fortunes improved, Florence was able to send his younger sons to college. Two of Peter’s younger brothers, Charles and Daniel, were honor students in college, and another, Florence Jr., became a noted attorney in New York City. Peter possessed the intelligence to have joined them had he been allowed to finish school. He was a gifted mathematician and—when he deigned to speak—a passionate debater about the issues of the day; he ardently supported workers’ rights and railed against industrialists like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. More than anything, though, as his son Ed recalled, Peter felt frustrated by not having achieved more. He was a failure in his own eyes.

  If Peter was darkness and clouds, then his wife Elizabeth, called Lizzy, was sunshine and warmth. While Peter, ten years her senior, was an iron-willed believer in corporal punishment, viewing compromise as weakness, Lizzy was gentle and encouraging, and usually handled her children with a soft touch. Years later Ed wrote, “My father was, in every sense, the head of the family, but my mother was its heart.” The difference was clear simply by looking at them: Peter had a solid frame and a square, firm jaw; Lizzy was slender, with flowing brunette tresses surrounding her comely face. With Lizzy, Peter had married above his station. Although her mother had been a poor Irish squatter’s daughter, her father, Edward Smith, was a man of means, a landholder in upstate New York. Lizzy’s family imbued her with a genteel Victorian sensibility, and she was educated in the arts. She loved music, especially the light operas of the late 1890s, and was an amateur painter.

  In the early fall of 1901, Peter and Lizzy were expecting a new arrival in their Harlem flat on East 127th Street. The baby would join Helen, born in 1897, and Charles, born in 1899. When Lizzy gave birth on September 28, she and Peter were met with a surprise: twin boys. Edward, husky and healthy, and Daniel, small and sickly. The lucky one, christened Edward Vincent, was a robust, squalling infant, crying at the top of his lungs to be fed. Young Danny, however, was a worry; he seemed hardly to have made it into this world.

  As the months wore on, nothing that Lizzy did succeeded in helping the child gain weight. She tried feeding him a mixture of light barley, water, and milk, yet he only grew sicklier. The family’s tenement apartment wasn’t the best place to nurse a sick infant, and though his weight kept falling, he apparently
was never admitted to a hospital. In the middle of the night on July 19, Danny died at home. The cause was listed as infant marasmus, emaciation due to malnutrition, possibly caused by problems in the child’s digestive tract. Two days later the family made a mournful trip up to the town of Amsterdam to bury their ten-month-old son in the family plot.

  The death of his twin brother would haunt Ed throughout his childhood. Later, he recounted that when he was “whaled” by his father—a common occurrence—or given the switch by nuns at parochial school, he would imagine that his life would have been different “if only Danny were here.” Much later in life, Sullivan attributed his high energy level to Danny’s premature death, as if the surviving brother had been supernaturally granted the energy of his deceased twin. One Sunday evening, while hosting his show in front of a television audience of some thirty-five million people, Ed noted a location in New York from which one of his guests hailed. For a moment, he seemed to lose himself in thought, then confided, “That’s where my brother Danny is buried.” (And if Danny’s problem had been a gastrointestinal defect, it was surely shared by his brother, who was plagued by such problems throughout his adult life.)

  The Sullivans soon had another child. Lizzy greeted the girl with a renewed maternal instinct, naming her new daughter after herself. But young Elizabeth, like Danny, was also colicky and cranky. Again, Lizzy was up nights trying to comfort her, but, like Danny, nothing seemed to help. On the morning of August 1, 1905, the twenty-month-old girl died in the Sullivans’ apartment. The cause, similar to Danny’s, was listed as gastroenteritis. The family was forced to make another gray journey to upstate New York to bury Elizabeth. Lizzy, having lost two children in three years, was in a panic of grief. Normally good-natured, she now made a non-negotiable demand.