Ed didn’t hesitate. “I’ve done plenty of benefits for those boys and the Chief’s a good friend of mine,” he told Marlo. Ed placed a quick call and worked out a compromise: the fire department would station men with extinguishers around the backstage area during the performance, and any foliage would be sprayed prior to broadcast. (When the foliage around the set was sprayed, the resultant chemical bath gave some of the performers headaches that afternoon.) Ed asked how everything else was, and Marlo, not wanting to spook him, told him everything was fine.
When Ed arrived that afternoon he made a bravura entrance, saying hello and shaking hands with everyone, the performers as well as the technicians and stagehands. The morale of the cast and crew seemed to brighten as he announced that tonight would be a “blockbuster of a show.” Then, as he had for countless Loew’s State shows, he took a seat on a stool near stage right and began working out details with a pad and pencil: who would appear when, how long they would be given, what material they would perform, and when to introduce the celebrities in the audience. He had the performers run through the program in its entirety, then directed a round of changes, making adjustments to timing and entrances. After watching the comedy duo Jim Kirkwood and Lee Goodman, Ed felt their cerebral routine didn’t stand up next to the high-voltage vibrancy of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. He told them to edit their act down to three minutes; the duo felt they couldn’t do that, so he cut them altogether.
When the rehearsal concluded, Sullivan and the performers gathered onstage for a photo, the performers along the back row and the June Taylor dancers—who would shimmy in a short nightclub number to introduce Ed—kneeling in plumed costumes up front. As the camera flashed, Jerry Lewis appeared bored, staring off to his left in mid yawn. Dean Martin, oblivious to the photographer’s efforts, chatted with Marlo Lewis’ younger sister, who would sing that night. Ed, looking dapper in a double-breasted jacket, stared down and to his right, unsmiling, intent, lost in thought.
The preparation done, there was nothing to do but wait; this was live television and the broadcast wasn’t until 9:30 P.M. (The show soon moved to 8 P.M.) These hours of waiting were excruciating for Ed. He had wanted this for most of his adult life, craving this kind of an opportunity since he made his first film in New York in 1932. Yet his past gave him little encouragement. He was certainly a veteran showman, having produced his first variety revue some fifteen years back, and having lived and breathed show business since then. But each of his attempts on the airwaves had failed, miserably so; five radio shows launched, five short-lived radio shows canceled. A critic had described his one major onscreen effort, in Big Town Czar, as “unconvincing”—and he had been playing himself. The note that he wrote to Betty and Sylvia described how he felt in the days before the show—“anxious and distracted”—yet now, waiting in his tiny dressing room upstairs at the Maxine Elliot, that anxiety coalesced into a gut-churning terror.
A half hour before the broadcast, Marlo Lewis walked into Sullivan’s dressing room and was horrified by what he saw. Ed’s face was a colorless white and his eyes were glazed over. A plastic tube hung from his mouth, attached to a small rubber syringe he held in his hand; the apparatus was directed into the dressing room sink. The two men’s eyes met in the dressing room mirror, and Ed downplayed the unusual scene. “It’s nothing,” he said, his speech garbled, “I’m just pumping my stomach—acid’s too high, ulcer’s killing me.” He motioned Marlo to take a seat while he finished the procedure, which took a few minutes longer. Ed swallowed a large dose of Belladonna, a commonly prescribed ulcer medication. (Belladonna can cause blurry vision, which Lewis felt contributed to Ed’s mangled introductions—he may have had a hard time reading cue cards; the drug can also result in drowsiness and mental confusion, possibly adding to the host’s difficulties onstage; and in older adults it can cause memory loss, which Ed suffered greatly from in his later years.) Within a few minutes the emcee seemed to recover partially from his ulcer attack, though his hands continued to shake in jittery tremors. Marlo, uneasy and wanting to reassure Ed, said only that everything would be great, then informed him of the camera cue before leaving him alone.
Precisely at 9:30 P.M., Ray Bloch struck up a drumroll, and deep-timbered announcer Art Hannes intoned: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Columbia Broadcast System is proud to present its star-studded revue, the Toast of the Town, with the nationally known newspaper columnist … Ed Sullivan!” No tape of that first show exists, but by all accounts it went well. A standing room-only audience crammed the Maxine Elliot, clapping as six showgirls pranced onstage to introduce Ed. True to his newsman’s formula, he presented his splashiest attraction first: the studio audience screamed with laughter as Jerry Lewis played the antic high-energy clown to Dean Martin’s suave man-about-town. After Ed interviewed Rodgers and Hammerstein about their 1943 hit Oklahoma! and their upcoming production, South Pacific, they received an affectionate ovation; then Kathryn Lee, a ballerina in the duo’s show Allegro, pirouetted and twirled around the onstage piano. Pianist Eugene List rendered Chopin, fireman John Kokoman crooned, and Monica Lewis jazzed up a nightclub number, forgetting the microphone hidden in her bouquet and sending it skidding across the stage with a hand gesture. Ed, in a set that looked like a boxing ring’s corner, chatted with fight referee Ruby Goldstein about the Joe Louis–Jersey Joe Walcott title bout. As he introduced the acts and spoke with some of them, he fidgeted uneasily, always looking away from the camera, his hands visibly shaking. (He may have developed his signature arms-crossed pose—unusual for an emcee—to hide his trembling hands.) CBS, in its haste to get the show on the air, hadn’t found a sponsor, so any commercial breaks were for the network itself.
The size of the television audience for this first broadcast is unknown. The television networks at that time were capable of broadcasting only to cities in the eastern part of the country, in an area running from Richmond to Boston. Not until January 1949 did a coaxial cable connect these cities with a Midwestern area that extended to Chicago, and coast-to-coast broadcasting didn’t begin until September 1951. Before 1951, viewers in nonconnected cities watched Toast of the Town on kinescope, which was a grainy copy shot directly from the television screen, sent from station to station by mail. (As Mike Dann, an NBC programming executive in the 1950s, recalled: “When somebody asked ‘How’d the show go last night?’ you said, ‘Just great, it came out clear—you could see it.’ ”) At the time of the show’s first broadcast in June 1948, there were some five hundred thousand televisions in the United States. Given that ratings reports soon showed Sullivan handily winning his time slot, most of the TVs on the east coast were likely tuned to CBS that evening; assuming three to four viewers per set, perhaps approximately a million viewers watched.
Three days after its debut, a review in Variety praised Toast of the Town, but said that it suffered by comparison to Berle’s Texaco Theater, which had also just debuted. Berle “brought to his emcee role one of the best showmanship lifts yet given a television show,” the trade publication opined, concluding that “Vaudeo—the adaptation of old-time vaudeville into the new video medium—came of age last Tuesday night in a performance that may well be remembered as a milestone in television.” Variety reported that Berle’s NBC show benefited from an enviable Tuesday night time slot and a budget of $10,000 per show. As for Toast of the Town, the reviewer wrote, “With a top talent array, the new CBS offering couldn’t help but be entertaining.… It lacked [the] sparkle of the Texaco show, chiefly because Sullivan, as an emcee, is a good newspaper columnist. He’s affable enough and certainly has enough showbiz knowhow to lend authority to his job, but he doesn’t have the comedy touch of Milton Berle.”
The second Sunday’s Toast of the Town followed the formula of the first. To headline, Ed booked The Ink Spots, a black rhythm and blues vocal quartet who had just ended a long engagement at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and whose hit “If I Didn’t Care” currently backed a Lucky Strike cigarettes radio ad. Also a
ppearing were Irving Berlin, preceded by a song-and-dance routine featuring his songs; famed ballroom dance team Raye and Naldi (Mary Raye had danced with screen idol Rudolph Valentino in 1925’s smoldering Cobra); singing policeman Peter Hayes; big band songstress Nan Wynn; and ventriloquist Paul Winchell with his hand-carved dummy Jerry Mahoney.
Like the debut evening, this program stretched the boundaries of a late 1940s variety show beyond recognition. On no local New York stage would the Ink Spots have appeared with Irving Berlin—presenting a black R&B group with the “White Christmas” composer was counterintuitive, even daring; pairing a big band vocalist like Nan Wynn with a singing cop would have confounded a local audience. On the other hand, Sullivan often booked dancers Raye and Naldi along with a ventriloquist at Loew’s State, so the evening’s bill presented comforting combinations even as it stretched the genre. His show was often called vaudeville, and it did resemble this venerable form, but the evening veered sharply from traditional vaudeville as Sullivan felt his way toward reaching a television audience.
Ventriloquist Paul Winchell recalled the technical difficulties of mounting that evening’s show. During rehearsal, Ed, from the control room, told Winchell that his dummy’s voice was too soft. To compensate, the ventriloquist spoke Jerry Mahoney’s part louder, yet it still didn’t project enough, so he tried it even louder. But, still, Ed told him the dummy’s voice wasn’t coming through in the control room. “I panicked,” Winchell said. “I became convinced that my aspirations for this new medium were totally over.” He began to suspect that for some reason ventriloquism couldn’t be broadcast on television. Finally, Winchell looked up and saw that every time he spoke Jerry Mahoney’s part, the boom operator moved the microphone toward the dummy—which of course moved the microphone away from the real sound source. In other words, the production crew was pretty green.
His panic about the microphone snafu was part of an almost debilitating stage fright. “What I remember most was how scared I was,” Winchell said. Although he had played vaudeville and radio for years, making his television debut felt like jumping off the end of the earth. Ed, sensing the ventriloquist’s nerves, attempted to reassure him. “Look, there’s nothing different about it, don’t pay attention to the cameras,” Winchell recalled Ed saying. “You just do your routine and don’t worry about it. This is not a big bugaboo, we’ll do the shots—you won’t even know it.” Certainly there was an irony to the showman who was himself knock-kneed in front of the camera telling one of his performers to relax. As the ventriloquist recalled from working with Sullivan throughout the 1950s, Ed was as scared as he was.
Despite its terrors, Winchell soon found out that this new medium conquered all. As a result of his debut on Toast of the Town, ad agency Young & Rubicam approached him to launch his own television show on NBC, The Bigelow Show, which debuted that October. And a short time after that, Macy’s department store began selling little Jerry Mahoney dolls.
After Ed’s second night on the air, New York Times critic Jack Gould wrote a piece reviewing both Berle’s and Sullivan’s shows. Berle, he wrote, was proof that television had arrived. “Register Mr. B. as television’s first real smash!” he effused. “The increasing maturity of Mr. Berle’s art was, perhaps, best demonstrated in the likable accord which he established with the other acts on the bill. His wonderful bit of business with the incomparable Bert Wheeler and his blackface routine with Harry Richman brought back nostalgic memories which through the sheer force of personality of all three acquired a 1948 newness and pace.”
Toast of the Town, however, was a weak competitor in Gould’s view. “In terms of lavishness and expense, it is on a par with Texaco Star Theatre but suffers badly if the comparison is extended to such matters as routining and general professional know-how.… For a variety revue, where a dominant personality is so helpful in tying up the loose ends, the choice of Ed Sullivan as master of ceremonies seems ill-advised.… CBS has all the necessary ingredients for a successful program of variety. Once it appreciates more fully the need for knowing hands to guide the proceedings—both onstage and off—it, too, should have an enjoyable hit.”
Ed, who rarely let a jab go by without jabbing back, immediately fired off a long rebuttal to the Times, which the paper printed the following week:
“Your review of my CBS Toast of the Town television show, in last Sunday’s issue, is in error on so many points that I must challenge it.… “From every survey we have been able to make, the CBS Toast of the Town has the biggest audience in television and the most enthusiastic.… Oscar Hammerstein II, a rather experienced hand in show business, has expressed his delighted amazement at our progress in a completely new medium and specifically praised ‘the professional polish, the pacing of the show, and high entertainment value.’ Eddie Cantor, after seeing the show, on a television set, said that we were so far ahead of any program he’s seen that he was dumbfounded at the potentialities of a medium he had disregarded.…
“Your conclusions are at such variance to the expressions of expert showmen, and so opposed to public reaction, that I feel very strongly you are in error.…
“So much for the overall show. As to your opinion of me as master of ceremonies, I won’t challenge that, because difference of opinion makes horse racing. However, I do feel that when you compare me to Milton Berle, you misunderstand my position on the show. They wanted a working newspaperman, sufficiently versed in show business, to nominate acts that could live up to a Toast of the Town designation. As it is a Sunday show, they wanted a certain measure of dignity and restraint, rather than a vain attempt to work with acrobats, tumblers, etcetera, which Berle does brilliantly.”
Despite his assiduous defense, as a series of reviews echoed Gould’s and Variety’s, CBS began to grow embarrassed by its show host. The pans of Sullivan hampered efforts to find an advertiser, and the program remained unsponsored as the weeks went by. The lack of sponsorship money led to another problem: the talent budget, which the CBS contract stipulated at $375 per show, remained at this token level. Since this wasn’t enough to mount the show, Sullivan and Lewis were chipping in to cover expenses. In effect, they were paying to work for CBS.
Three weeks after the debut, an actors’ union, Associated Actors and Artists of America, launched an inquiry into Toast of the Town. The show paid performers so far below customary compensation that the union threatened to ban its members from appearing. Additionally, the union was concerned that Sullivan was using his column as a club, coercing performers to appear for low pay. As the headlines turned negative, a CBS spokesman disavowed all responsibility, explaining that the network “paid a flat fee to Mr. Sullivan and that he arranged for the appearance of the artists.”
Sullivan agreed to sit down with the union. He defended the show by noting that television performance rates had not yet been set, and saying that he knew of other shows that paid less. “Apparently we’re being made the whipping boy for the whole field,” he said. Ed and Marlo opened their books, which placated union officials about the payment issue; Ed said that if his show were to find a sponsor the rates would increase. He denied using his column to twist the arms of performers, saying that he brought “no pressure, direct, indirect, inferential, or practical,” to persuade entertainers to appear. The meeting seemed to settle the issue. Although the union made noises about establishing a separate rate for columnists-hosts, no action was taken. But the union left its options open, noting that it would advise Sullivan at “a later date” about its final decision.
Ed was, of course, using his column to get performers to appear—that was why CBS hired him—but it was more of a carrot than a stick. He wrote no rash of negative tidbits about entertainers likely to have spurned his show invitations. He did, however, trumpet the success reaped by artists who appeared on Toast of the Town, dangling a tantalizing offer of greater exposure. “Ventriloquist Paul Winchell landed a Columbia Pictures project, Jackie Miles a $1500 television spot because of Toast of the Town
clicks!” he wrote in mid July. The following week, “As a result of his Toast of the Town click, Roxy Theatre wants band-poll sensation Illinois Jacquet for the Harvest Moon Show.” (Since Ed headlined this Roxy bill it’s probable that he himself was the reason the theater requested Jacquet.) He also explained in his column, by quoting someone else, why performers needed television exposure regardless of pay. “[MCA talent agency executive] Sonny Werblin defines MCA’s policy on television: ‘We want all our acts to get into television. The fact that there is little money in it at the moment is unimportant. Now is the time for them to learn all about it, and get in on the ground floor.’ ”
Meanwhile, Ed received a ray of sunlight amid the otherwise gray critical response to the show. Variety issued a softer follow-up review of Toast of the Town on July 21, less than a month after its initial critique. The paper may have been influenced by Ed’s highly empathetic eulogy of a recently deceased Variety critic, one of two such lauds he wrote for the reviewer that week. At any rate, the trade publication observed that the show was making progress, and seemed to suggest that Sullivan himself had moved past the sheer terror of his debut. The emcee “kept the event moving smoothly and with a minimum of words. It was his most ingratiating job to date on this series, which seems to be taking on that quickening know-how complexion from week to week. The lighting could still stand improvement.”
The critics, by focusing on Sullivan as host, were critiquing his most visible but least important role on the program. He was the show’s producer, its creator and shaper, the one who molded it into something enjoyed by a mass audience. His talent was as an impresario, not as a show host.
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan Page 22