Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  When The Colgate Comedy Hour debuted on September 10, it sparkled with all the transporting brilliance its massive prepublicity had promised. Eddie Cantor was as charming as he had been in vaudeville in 1925 or Hollywood in 1935, weaving a story line between the show’s variety acts, interacting with each as he sang, danced, and told jokes; the show culminated with Cantor in blackface singing one of his signature hits, “Ain’t She Sweet.” The following week, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin turned the small screen into a spirited night at the Copacabana, mugging and cracking wise through a lighthearted romp of an hour. Suddenly television had a new hit, and critics labored to find enough superlatives to laud it.

  In contrast, Toast of the Town experienced a ratings collapse. Ed had been sanguine that summer, telling Marlo not to worry. “For the most part, all they’ve got are the same old clowns doing the same old shtick. Eddie Cantor will clap his hands and sing ‘Susie’ and talk about Ida and the five daughters. Fred Allen will fall back on his old radio material.… Sure we’ll take it on the chin a few times. Martin and Lewis and Hope will win their rounds the first time out. But I’m not worried one bit about the rest of ’em.” However, his show’s ratings tumble clearly required him to counterpunch if he expected to stay on the air.

  The weakness in Comedy Hour was those weeks when its less-popular hosts emceed; when Fred Allen or Bobby Clark took the stage, Toast of the Town surged back in the ratings. Ed exploited this advantage to its fullest. In October, against a Bobby Clark Comedy Hour, he booked Margaret Truman, the president’s daughter, who aspired to a career as a classical soprano. The twenty-six-year-old singer had performed only on local television, which to Ed presented an opportunity. He took her to lunch at the fashionable restaurant Sardi’s and asked her: would you like to make your national TV debut? When she agreed, Ed paid her $2,000 and touted it as her professional debut. Headline writers obliged, providing waves of free publicity. For that evening’s performance the backstage area was thick with secret service agents, who insisted that Sullivan (who was frisked by the agents) give his dressing room to Margaret for security reasons; several hours later they reversed themselves after deciding a nearby alley posed a risk, and the dressing rooms were switched back. The attendant publicity lifted Sullivan to an easy ratings win against that evening’s Comedy Hour.

  Two months later, Margaret Truman was again thrust into the news. After Washington Post music critic Paul Hume panned one of her recitals, President Truman dashed him off an angry letter that was reprinted in many national newspapers: “I’ve never met you, but if I do you’ll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below. Westbrook Pegler, a guttersnipe, is a gentlemen compared to you.” Ed, sensing a ratings spike in the petty tempest, offered Margaret $3,000 for a return appearance, allowing him to trounce a Bobby Clark Comedy Hour. After her performance, the president called Sullivan to thank him for the gracious way he had presented his daughter.

  In the late fall, Ed began to go after Eddie Cantor. He again used his newshound’s instincts to exploit headlines. Roberta Peters, an understudy in a Metropolitan Opera production of Don Giovanni, stepped into the lead role and earned a full-throated standing ovation. The almost fairy-tale story of the young coloratura—from a modest home in the Bronx—triumphing at the Met made headlines across the country. Ed instantly booked her to reprise her Don Giovanni role opposite a Cantor Comedy Hour the following Sunday, riding the publicity for a ratings boost. Peters proved so popular that Ed booked the opera singer forty-one times over the years.

  In another effort to dislodge Cantor, Ed booked Milton Berle against one of Cantor’s Comedy Hour nights. CBS executives must have been flabbergasted to present NBC’s biggest star, unless they laughed along with Sullivan as the Trendex ratings proved it worked. Showcasing the competition’s heavyweight was not only counterintuitive, it sent a signal. Due to the gaping budget disparity between Toast of the Town and Comedy Hour, it didn’t look like Sullivan could win the ratings battle—the NBC show could hire bigger names week after week. But the Berle booking revealed he was willing to try most anything.

  Berle was electric that evening. As Sullivan introduced him, Berle bounded onstage and pumped Ed’s hand. “Thank you, Ed Solomon,” he said, as the emcee faded offstage. Without taking a breath, Berle whirled into a comedic tornado, interrupting himself, ad-libbing, inserting jokes within jokes, making fun of himself, and scolding the audience for not laughing enough—“these are the jokes, let’s face it”—although the laughter was almost continuous. As he bobbed and weaved, the camera had to swivel to keep him in the frame. His punch lines were like short jabs, with few of his setups longer than five or six words; as a boy named Milton Berlinger he had grown up in vaudeville, and his style was straight from the Keith-Albee circuit.

  He took great pleasure in pointing out that his own hit show ran on a competing network. “You know what CBS means? Catch Berle’s show”; “I only have two words to say to each Mercury Lincoln dealer—buy Texaco”; “Wait a second—What are these cameras here?—Is this show televised? Gee, I didn’t know that Sullivan’s show was televised”; “C’mon now, if you’re going to applaud, applaud all together!… (looking skyward)…. Oh Milton, you’re wonderful!”

  Berle brought onstage a young trumpet player named Leonard Souse, who acted as a straight man, and then he produced his own trumpet. “Don’t laugh,” he said, “I used to be with Dorsey.” “Tommy or Jimmy?” asked Souse, to which Berle responded: “Fifi.” Souse riffed through a showy version of “Blue Skies,” after which Berle danced an impromptu classical ballet, mock-pirouetting around the stage and pulling up his pants legs to reveal tall black socks.

  Ed came back onstage to join Berle, attempting to smile with limited success. “There’s the camera, Eddie,” Berle instructed, placing his body in front of Sullivan’s to shield him from the painful sight. They horseplayed with each other, each jostling to monopolize the camera’s eye, as the audience roared.

  Bantering back and forth, Berle handily one-upped Sullivan, throwing a final barb as he exited the stage: “Eddie, you know we made a pact, I said I’d never become a columnist, and you said you’d never become an actor—well, you’ve kept your promise.”

  Following Berle’s raucous act that evening was the ever-mellow Nat “King” Cole, in a booking that displayed Ed’s audacity in pushing the era’s racial boundaries. The showman gave the singer a big introduction: “And now let’s hear it for the calypso blues and Nat … King … Cole!—Let’s hear it for Nat!”

  In a tropical set with palm trees and a painted island backdrop, the tall and dapper Cole rhythmically crooned a calypso tune, his silky voice as smooth as an ocean breeze. Four female dancers shook their hips in time to the music, their long skirts flowing with the Caribbean groove.

  While highly pleasant for many audience members, Ed surely knew that the performance prompted dark stirrings in living rooms across the land. White women onstage with a black man—moving their hips in time to his voice, no less—was, at the very least, the height of exoticism in November 1950. And to some viewers it proved that America was becoming a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Helping make this mixed-race performance palatable was Nat “King” Cole’s milquetoast charisma and his ability to cover himself with a blanket of profound deference. The handsome singer never once glanced at his attractive stage mates. Even so, that Ed booked this number revealed an odd fearlessness in a man who was otherwise hypersensitive to his audience’s comfort level. He was exporting a sight that hitherto had been seen chiefly in Manhattan nightclubs.

  Not that Cole gave the slightest indication that what had just gone on was revolutionary. As he performed his own fade-out, doffing his hat and singing ever more softly while strolling offstage, his smile beamed large and genial. Ed led the applause and brought the singer back out to shake his hand.

  In case Ed harbored any doubt about how some of his viewers regarded such performances, the show received regular waves of h
ate mail to this effect, which continued through the decades. The southern Lincoln Mercury dealers—and they were far from alone—furiously insisted he stop shaking hands with and hugging black performers, but he never gave in to their demands. “I’ll never forget when Ed kissed a black girl” on the air, recalled Mike Dann, who worked in NBC’s programming department in the 1950s. “Ed was certainly not a racist—particularly if [the performer] was good.”

  Sharing the bill with Cole that evening was vocalist Nanette Fabray, recreating a number from the recent Broadway show High Button Shoes. Clad in a full-length bathing gown, she sang the up-tempo tune on a beach set decorated with ocean-side dressing huts. In mid song, she and her four dancers shimmied out of their gowns to reveal summer jumpers, and a verse later they removed their jumpers to reveal 1919-era bathing suits. For all the outfits’ modesty, there was a lot of well-turned gam on display as the dancers posed and strutted. Fabray wrapped it up with a coy smile amid great clapping and cheering.

  Lest the evening get too racy, Sullivan booked the Boy’s Town choir—forty boys dressed in angelic robes harmonizing a church hymn—after which Ed introduced Father Schmidt, a Catholic priest from Boy’s Town. Next, Sullivan presented Buster Keaton, who with Charlie Chaplin had been a comic giant of silent film. His career had collapsed with the advent of talkies but he was making a comeback. Keaton performed a slapstick routine without speaking, in a set made up as a rural fishing hole, complete with a small swimming pool. Every time he attempted a fishing maneuver—splash—he fell face first into the water. Ed, offering high art after low comedy, followed Keaton with international ballet stars Andre Eglevsky and Rosella High-tower, who floated through a six-minute classical ballet.

  No Sullivan broadcast was without something for the kids, which that evening was Spanish acrobatic duo Montez DeOcha. Midway through their routine, Ed walked onstage to pump up the excitement: “This trick here is a thirty-foot leap in the air by Lolita, and Montez, with his back turned, will catch her—I hope.” The audience chuckled at his tag, but this was live television and there was no net so the chuckle was more anticipatory than humorous. Lolita climbed the ladder and Montez turned his back to her—he would have no way to compensate if she didn’t leap just right. She jumped, bounced on a trampoline and sailed forth some thirty feet in the air, landing in a perfect headstand on top of his upraised arms. He twirled her over his head as Ed led the cheers—“That’s really something, huh?”

  Throughout the hour were Lincoln Mercury ads; Ford was Toast of the Town’s sole sponsor. As the auto line’s spokesman, Ed always set up the commercials himself, with intros like, “You know, nostalgia has its place, but if you’re thinking of buying a new car, don’t settle for anything less than a great, new, 1951 Mercury.” The Ford ads were ninety seconds long, with sunny images of bulbous sedans driving at moderate speed on clean, wide roads. As each spot concluded, the camera cut to the studio audience, which clapped with great enthusiasm.

  By the end of the 1950 fall season, NBC canceled Fred Allen as host of Comedy Hour. His intimate, offbeat humor hadn’t translated to television. Absurdly, his popular characters, which in radio he brought to life in the listener’s imagination, were turned into hand puppets for television. Allen, bitter, quipped about his competitor: “What does Sullivan do? He points at people. Rub meat on actors and dogs will do the same.” To this, Ed riposted: “Maybe Fred should rub some meat on a sponsor.” Bobby Clark, too, was soon dropped from Comedy Hour. But the challenge to Sullivan remained intractable. Comedy Hour’s glittering pay scale ensured that a long list of stars—brighter stars—stood ready to replace Allen and Clark. Bob Hope, Abbot and Costello, Spike Jones, Jackie Gleason: each hosted Comedy Hour by the end of the 1950–51 season. Competing against the NBC program was like trying to win some mad carnival game; as soon as Sullivan shot down one target, several more appeared.

  Attempting to find a creative alternative, he began presenting shows from remote locations, which strained television’s primitive technical capabilities. In the 1950–51 season, he hosted shows from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Boston. The power went out during the Boston show, halting Toast of the Town in the middle of its live broadcast. In the darkened theater were two-hundred wounded veterans from the Korean War; Ed asked the audience to allow them to leave first. In each remote show, he catered to the city itself, spotlighting its native attractions as if he were a visiting politician courting the locals.

  Seeking more ways to outpoint Comedy Hour, he began offering something beyond the purview of the NBC program: legitimate theater. Ed used the natural resources of Manhattan, culling from among the city’s dozens of current stage productions to present excerpts geared for the television audience.

  He chose a scene from Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, which won the 1950 New York Drama Critics’ prize for best American play. The scene was one in which Julie Harris sat on Ethel Waters’ knee as Brandon De Wilde leaned tenderly against them. As Marlo Lewis recalled, this broadcast stirred controversy because it involved a black performer having physical contact with a white performer.

  Ed mined Broadway throughout the season, presenting a who’s who of stage stars, from Sarah Churchill and Charles Laughton to Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronin. Among the notable performances were James Barton in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, Flora Robson in Lesley Storm’s Black Chiffon, Eva Le Gallienne in Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, and Judith Anderson in Euripides’ Medea. On the lighter side, Ed booked a medley of songs from Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, currently playing to full houses on Broadway. All these stage excerpts, of course, shared billing with contrasting performers on the Sullivan stage. So Anton Chekov was followed by acrobats, Euripides was preceded by a comic, and Guys and Dolls shared billing with an animal act.

  But it wasn’t enough. When the Nielsen ratings for the 1950–51 season were tallied, Toast of the Town was soundly bested by Comedy Hour. In its first season, Comedy Hour grabbed the number five ranking—impressive given that television now had a full schedule of competently produced programs. And since Comedy Hour ran directly opposite Toast of the Town, its high ranking necessarily meant fewer viewers were watching Sullivan. Having produced the number two-ranked show the previous season, Ed now tumbled to the fourteenth spot.

  In a field of one hundred ten prime-time programs, Toast of the Town still sat near the top, but hadn’t won the majority of Sunday evenings. Sullivan’s ratings for the year were higher because he offered new shows throughout the summer, unlike Comedy Hour. But if he was to stay truly competitive, he needed a fresh strategy—some novel way to capture viewers.

  While he was rolling out this new strategy, which debuted in the 1951–52 season, he encountered an old rival. The Comedy Hour wasn’t the only thing he battled in 1951.

  By the early 1950s, Ed began to be, in a sense, two men. On one hand, his immersion in the new world of television meant an entirely new audience knew him only from the small screen. The world he chronicled in his Broadway column existed in a universe far from that of most middle-class viewers. To them he was the avuncular host, the stiff-but-sincere purveyor of opera, comedy, and jugglers. He fully embraced this new world as he began to receive the national notoriety he had long craved. He stopped producing his Loew’s State vaudeville shows. His daily column for the Daily News lost its spark as he handed off more of its legwork to his assistant Carmine Santullo. On the other hand, the old Ed still very much existed, the two-fisted gossip columnist, the acerbic New Yorker who was always at least a little dissatisfied. He hadn’t given up membership in the local Broadway tribe. And, as an episode from the early 1950s revealed, he remained fueled by jealousies that had driven him since the 1930s.

  In October 1951, famed stage performer Josephine Baker returned to the United States for a series of appearances. A star of black vaudeville as a child, and of Paris’ La Revue Negre at age nineteen, Baker’s buoyant charm and exotic eroticism—she once gyrated through the
Charleston clad in only a girdle of bananas—made her a popular figure in France, where she took citizenship. Picasso, for whom she posed, described her as having a smile to end all smiles. Now age forty-four, she had become a symbol of black advancement after succeeding in integrating a whites-only nightclub in Miami, and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) organized a party to celebrate her return to New York.

  Baker and her entourage stopped at the Stork Club for a late-evening dinner, which didn’t go as planned. For all its glamour, the Stork’s attitude toward black patrons was decidedly backward. The service she received was, at best, slow, and by her description, contemptuous. The owner, Sherman Billingsley, refused to acknowledge her—unusual for a major star, but Billingsley’s reputation as a racist was well established. Baker claimed Walter Winchell, who used the Stork as his office, “looked right through me.” Baker ordered a steak, a crab salad, and a bottle of French wine; after waiting an hour she inquired about her food and was told the kitchen was out of both steak and crab salad. One of her fellow diners urged her to call the NAACP to complain. She went to the phone but the attendant claimed to be too busy to dial. Baker dialed the phone herself to report that the Stork had refused to serve her, though when she returned to her table “a pathetic little steak finally appeared,” as she described it. Angry, she and her party stormed out of the Stork.

  What exactly happened at the Stork was unclear; there were various conflicting accounts. Some claimed Baker had visited the club with intent to expose its racist door policy, and had deliberately created a scene—the Stork’s service was always slow, according to some. At any rate, in the ensuing controversy the NAACP picketed the nightspot and the mayor ordered an investigation. The Baker camp wanted Winchell to denounce the Stork in his hugely influential radio show. But Walter, for whom the Stork was his home away from home, and who was upset at being pulled into the contretemps, instead broadcast a segment defending himself and his civil rights record.