Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  Those evenings at the Delmonico reflected a larger national mood. In February 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a little known junior senator from Wisconsin, made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he alleged there were communists in the U.S. State Department. He had a list, he said, of two hundred five State Department personnel who were members of the Communist Party; furthermore, he claimed they continued to actively shape U.S. foreign policy. That the list was never actually produced was beside the point. McCarthy had placed a seed in fertile soil. It was a season of fear, and, given world events, not without reason. Communists had taken control of mainland China a year earlier, and the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb six months earlier. Just one month before McCarthy’s speech, Alger Hiss, a low-ranking State Department employee, was convicted of perjury in a case involving his alleged membership in the Communist Party. Hiss continued to maintain his innocence, but that, too, was immaterial. His highly publicized congressional hearings—the first televised hearings, in 1948—suggested that something subversive and pervasive lurked just beyond sight.

  Amid it all, in June 1950, Ed announced in his column that a “bombshell” was on its way, a publication to be distributed to all broadcast networks, sponsors, and ad agencies. Kirkpatrick had told Sullivan, and Ed, by giving advance warning in his column, let readers know he was on the inside track. The two-hundred-fifteen-page book lived up to its billing. Published by Counterattack and entitled Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, the publication warned of a Soviet effort to infiltrate American culture using radio and television. It listed one-hundred fifty-one individuals with “citations” for communist sympathies. The list, shockingly, contained some of the leading lights of stage and screen: Zero Mostel, a comic actor whom Ed worked with on numerous benefits for United Jewish Relief; actor John Garfield, a Sullivan houseguest in Hollywood; playwright Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman was a 1949 Broadway hit; composer Aaron Copland, whose paean to homespun Americana, Appalachian Spring, debuted in 1944; and Hollywood star Edward G. Robinson, whose florid portrayals of mobsters had inspired Ed’s own Big Town Czar. Adding credence to the hysteria trumpeted by Red Channels, within a week of its release communist forces from North Korea invaded South Korea.

  That the luminaries listed in Red Channels were part of a communist conspiracy was an absurd assertion; the most common denominator among the group was support for the New Deal. Even one of its publishers conceded that some performers shouldn’t have been listed. Regardless, the list was read and in many cases treated as gospel by broadcasting executives. Though rarely spoken of in public, the list became a powerful force behind the scenes. And while the “transgressions” of those listed were usually imaginary or close to it, they had no redress once they were unemployed. One of Red Channels’ chief backers was Laurence Johnson, a supermarket executive in Syracuse, New York, whose association with the publication gave him unquestioned power across the television and advertising industries. “If he put the word out on you, you were through,” recalled Mike Dann, who then worked in NBC’s programming department. Dann also remembered the wholehearted enthusiasm that Ed brought to his support of Red Channels. As he understood it, Ed “wasn’t a reactionary, he was square—he was very square.”

  The irony of Ed’s involvement with Counterattack is that he himself had written for a Socialist newspaper in his twenties. The Leader, for which he was sports editor and a columnist, regularly listed all the communist cell meetings in the New York area, and espoused kinship between American and Russian workers; these groups were all part of the international proletariat, as the Leader saw it. (One of the government raiders who ransacked The Leader’s offices in 1919 was a young agent who then went by the name of John Edgar Hoover.) Certainly his writing had been largely apolitical, but then many blacklisted performers had done nothing more serious. Yet Ed’s youthful indiscretion went overlooked—helped, no doubt, by his silence on the topic. In interviews, he always glossed over this period, and in a 1956 article he wrote for Collier’s magazine detailing his early newspaper career, he pointedly omitted The Leader.

  At any rate, the host of Toast of the Town had now thrown himself into the pitched battle to protect America from the communist threat, real and perceived, which was joined by virtually all major American institutions. In December 1950, Ed was a member of an expert panel enlisted to judge an essay contest sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The contestants wrote on the topic “What Strategy Should the V.F.W Recommend to Our Government in Combating the Communist Threat to America?” The other judges on the panel included newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Counterattack publisher Theodore Kirkpatrick, Westbrook Pegler—the columnist whom Ed defied in booking Paul Draper—and Julius Ochs Adler, an executive with The New York Times.

  Despite the depth of his involvement, Ed maintained a level of critical judgment about some of the actions taken in the name of anticommunist fervor. In 1952, the New York Post launched a full-scale assault against Walter Winchell, running a series of articles attacking him from every angle; naturally they enlisted Ed for commentary. In the Post series, Ed remarked, “Long before Senator McCarthy came into the character-assassination racket, there was a guy by the name of Walter Winchell.” The roundhouse punch against Winchell aside, the public denunciation of McCarthy was unusual for someone in Ed’s position. Certainly the description was accurate—reckless character assassination was McCarthy’s forte—but in 1952, the Republican senator was still very much a force to be reckoned with.

  Even Dwight Eisenhower, then a popular war hero running a heavily favored campaign as the Republican presidential nominee, opted to cut a McCarthy rebuke from one of his speeches. Eisenhower’s advisors convinced him to remain mute on the subject, “fearing McCarthy’s retaliation against their candidate,” according to historian David Halberstam. That Sullivan, producing a television program aimed at a mass audience, supported by a public relations—sensitive corporate sponsor, would so openly declaim McCarthy was just short of foolhardy. It was also typical of the contradictions that ran throughout his political attitudes. He cooperated with Counterattack but called McCarthy a character assassin; he was an avid blacklister but professed to voting for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, who stood against the practice. Although he could pander, by telling Paul Draper to dance to “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” his swipe at McCarthy demonstrated he remained a pugilist at heart.

  And that quality would be an essential one in Sullivan’s television career—especially in the early 1950s. Not long after launching his show, his pugilistic spirit would face its greatest test yet.

  CHAPTER TEN

  David vs. Goliath

  BY THE SPRING OF 1950, Ed and Marlo Lewis could point to Toast of the Town as a success. It had been on the air close to two years, and while Ed himself still drew negative reviews, the show was a clear hit. The previous August, New York Times critic Jack Gould had written a satirical piece about the difficulty of taking a vacation without television: “It was toward the end of the evening that one most missed Ed Sullivan … all in all it was pretty nerve racking, never getting the signal when to applaud, and meeting people who were not Ed’s friends.” While Gould meant that tongue in cheek, he also knew his readers would understand the reference. Television ratings for October 1949 published by Variety identified Toast of the Town as the number two show on television, second only to Berle’s Texaco Theater. It even bested Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, whose beloved host benefited from years of national radio exposure. To give the show an extra ratings boost, Ed produced fresh episodes of Toast of the Town year-round, with guest hosts filling in during his three-week vacation—there was no time to rest when an audience was being built.

  Ed and Marlo had, finally, begun to make money from the show. With Ford’s continued sponsorship, CBS knew it had to make a real investment in the program, and the show’s weekly talent budget jumped to sev
eral thousand dollars. It was time for Ed and Marlo to start taking home more than token payment. But how much would it be?

  The two, by Marlo’s account, had signed an agreement before the show launched to split any profits equally. Since there had been precious little profit, the issue had been moot. But by early 1950 the success of Toast of the Town prompted a discussion. One day in April, Ed asked Marlo to have lunch with him in the Delmonico’s dining room to talk about the show’s future. When Marlo arrived he was surprised to find that Ed had also invited his lawyer, Fred Backer. Ed was talkative through lunch, regaling Backer with tales of how he and Marlo had run the show on a shoestring. As lunch ended, though, Ed’s mood took a serious tone. He removed a piece of paper from his pocket, the original agreement between Marlo and him; he paused for a moment, not sure of how to handle the subject. “I don’t want you to misunderstand, but the fact is—I’ve got star status now,” Ed said, according to Marlo. “I’ve worked like a dog, paid my dues … and our deal is not equitable. Lord knows, you’ve done a great job, and we’re a great team. But this old agreement of fifty-fifty doesn’t make sense anymore.”

  At that point Ed’s lawyer took over the conversation. “What Ed is getting at is that he wants to change the deal. It’s no longer fair to him. We want it to read seventy-five percent for him, twenty-five percent for you. That’s it in a nutshell.” Lewis was dumbstruck. He conceded that Ed deserved more for his starring role, but he pointed out that he, like Ed, had worked for almost nothing since the show’s debut. Complicating the issue was the fact that Lewis had quit his job at the Blaine Thompson agency to devote himself to the show. He asked for a few days to think over the matter. Backer agreed, but, he said, “that won’t change our position.”

  While Marlo glared at Backer, Ed reached over and took hold of his arm. As Marlo recalled the meeting—Ed never made reference to this discussion—Ed said, “Come on, Marlo. You’re gonna get rich on this show. Don’t take it so big. I need you, you need me. You gotta remember, I’m a lot older than you, and without my muscle there never would’ve been a show in the first place.” He told Marlo to have his own lawyer get together with Backer and rework the contract. “I’ll see you Sunday, same time, same station.”

  Marlo left the Delmonico in a daze, feeling betrayed and unsure of what to do. Ed, of course, had a point: the show was his, from conception to choice of talent; he created the onscreen product down to the minute, shaping many of the comics’ acts and selecting many of the vocalists’ songs. And Sullivan’s column enabled the show to attract talent long before Lincoln Mercury provided major backing. But Marlo couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being taken advantage of, that the deal was changed only after he invested countless hours. Full of doubts about continuing on the show, he went to see Hubbell Robinson, CBS executive in charge of programming. Robinson, understanding that the Lewis—Sullivan conflict threatened the network’s Sunday night flagship, went to CBS head Bill Paley, who decided to take control of the situation.

  Paley called a meeting at his St. Regis apartment, inviting Sullivan and Lewis along with Robinson and network president Frank Stanton. He kept the meeting light, making no allusion to the contract conflict, instead complimenting Ed and Marlo on the job they had done. Toast of the Town, Paley said, might be just the beginning; he wanted both men to become integral parts of the network. To cement their relationship with CBS, he made each of them an offer. To Marlo, he offered a position as an executive producer for the network; Lewis would work on Toast of the Town and might also produce other shows. To Ed, he offered a five-year contract as the producer of Toast of the Town. Sullivan would not be a CBS staff member, but instead would work as an independent contractor. The answer from Ed and Marlo was unequivocal: we accept.

  Ed’s new contract set his pay at a minimum of $1,500 a week until September 1955. His compensation would increase if sponsorship revenue increased; that is, if the show’s ratings allowed CBS to charge Lincoln Mercury more, then Sullivan would make more. If the program was still on the air in 1955, he would begin to receive a one-percent share of sponsorship revenue in addition to his weekly pay.

  The talent budget was set at $10,000 per show for the first year, increasing to $12,000 over the following two years. The amount wasn’t stated for the contract’s last two years—apparently the network felt it wasn’t reasonable to guess talent budgets more than three years out.

  While the contract specified that both Ed and Marlo would work on Toast of the Town, it clearly placed Ed in charge. Oddly, in the document’s language, Ed was referred to as “Producer,” while Marlo was referred to by his own name. One clause specified that Marlo would be the show’s coproducer, to which Ed insisted upon an amendment; this was handwritten in and initialed by all parties: “Any successor to Mr. Lewis shall be subject to Producer approval.” In other words, Toast of the Town was Sullivan’s show.

  The terms agreed upon, CBS issued a press release, picked up by The New York Times in a terse one-paragraph news item. Reporting that the two had been hired as producers, the paper noted, “They will work as a team, creating new productions and working on existing programs.” The news, for those watching, announced that Sullivan and Lewis weren’t arrivistes anymore; they had earned the blessing of a major network. For Marlo, it was both a relief—a way around what he saw as Ed’s arm-twisting—and a step up; the door was open for him to produce other shows. For Ed, it was a dream come true. He had won the support of CBS. He was no longer a mere columnist; he had achieved what he most hungered for: a solid foothold in broadcasting.

  Rumors started sometime in the spring of 1950 about a monster being created in the NBC studios. It was to be one of the most lavish television shows, perhaps the most lavish show, to date—a jewel in the NBC lineup. It would be a weekly variety program, mixing comedy and music and celebrity, starring the brightest names in show business. The extravaganza would be backed by a budget large enough to fell Rocky Marciano in a single blow: $50,000 an episode by some accounts, still higher by other reports. To be called The Colgate Comedy Hour, it was scheduled to debut that fall. Its time slot was one that the television industry had learned was particularly desirable, when families were most likely to gather around the set: Sunday at 8 P.M.

  In short, NBC decided to end Sullivan’s dominance of Sunday evening. The network had seen Toast of the Town own Sunday night since its 1948 debut. In the 1949–50 season, Sullivan had easily bested NBC’s Sunday evening program hosted by singer Perry Como. (ABC, perpetually third-ranked, wouldn’t have a show in the Top 20 until 1955; a fourth network, Dumont, offered little competition and ceased broadcasting in 1954.) NBC apparently took a look at Toast of the Town and figured, if he can do it, we can do it better. Comedy Hour, by sheer weight of budget, was the network’s move to grab the coveted Sunday 8 P.M. slot. If the public wants a variety show, NBC’s strategy appeared to be, we’ll give them the best variety show money can buy. Sullivan would be buried.

  In a novel approach, Comedy Hour would rotate hosts, each starring for a week. Hosting week one was Eddie Cantor, who was not just wildly popular but almost an institution, having conquered Broadway, vaudeville, radio, and Hollywood as a singer, comedian, and actor; three years later Warner Bros. granted him the ultimate honor, producing The Eddie Cantor Story. Lined up for week two was comedy team Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the suave paesano and the overactive adolescent, whose fame had zoomed skyward since their television debut on Toast of the Town for $200; the duo were paid a breathtaking $100,000 for their first night, and $150,000 per show after that. Week three was hosted by Fred Allen, whose jaunty, cerebral wit had made him a top radio comic for more than a decade. He had, for example, invited boxer Joe Louis on his show to help him train for an imaginary bout with Jack Benny; the final Fred Allen–Jack Benny showdown had been a gargantuan ratings success, near that of the highest-rated Roosevelt fireside chat. The fourth week featured vaudeville–Hollywood comic Bobby Clark, the least famous of the crowd
. However, he was scheduled to alternate with comedic powerhouse Bob Hope.

  These celebrity hosts would emcee live variety revues—showcasing still more big names—that broadcast from a huge New York theater with flashy sets and first-rate orchestras. Comedy Hour, it seemed, planned not only to dominate Sunday night but to push television itself to a higher level.

  CBS, seeing the freight train rushing toward it, told Sullivan there was more money if he needed it. As the network knew, the stakes in this competition were high. In the early days of television, many local stations were deciding which network to affiliate with; each of the networks knew it was vitally important to offer a successful lineup to attract long-term affiliates. Still, Toast of the Town’s budget, even with the infusion from CBS, would hover around $20,000 per program in the early 1950s, far smaller than Comedy Hour’s—which seemed to balloon markedly with every new report.

  In fact, CBS appeared to be hedging its bet. The network, perhaps thinking it needed to work on securing a new night in the face of NBC’s assault on Sunday, poured money into Saturday evening. Set to launch that fall on CBS on Saturday nights was The Frank Sinatra Show, a variety show that guaranteed its star $250,000 for the first thirteen weeks. (The show was canceled after thirteen weeks; Frank sang brilliantly but his ability to work with others proved negligible.)