The trend was clear as the 1953–54 season concluded. Comedy Hour’s elephantine budget no longer guaranteed it Sunday night dominance. Under pressure from Sullivan, and suffering from creative exhaustion, the show’s ratings were headed inexorably downward. Although Comedy Hour held the lead over Toast of the Town in the fall of 1953, by the spring of 1954 the two shows’ ratings were running a dead heat. And, as always, Toast of the Town’s Nielsens pulled far ahead in the summer, as Ed continued to produce fresh shows while Comedy Hour ran reruns. If nothing else, he would outwork his NBC competitor.
One Sullivan maneuver that season was especially revealing of how Ed chipped away at Comedy Hour’s ratings. In the fall of 1953, CBS show host Arthur Godfrey was one of the country’s most beloved broadcasters. Some forty million people listened to his morning radio program, and two of television’s top ten shows were his: Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts was the third-ranked show, behind only I Love Lucy and Dragnet; and Arthur Godfrey and Friends was the seventh-ranked show, right behind The Bob Hope Show and the The Buick-Berle Show. With his butterscotch voice and easygoing charm, Godfrey was responsible for twelve percent of CBS’s annual revenues. He delivered his own ads in a folksy, intimate style, refusing to stick to the copy, talking to viewers like old friends—when he chatted about Lipton Tea, listeners felt he sipped it every day.
Godfrey used an ensemble format, in which a regular troupe of clean-cut young singers interacted week after week. For the audience, he and his performers became a surrogate family. Godfrey played the genial uncle as his viewers, largely female, bonded with each of the personalities. So on October 19, 1953, when Godfrey summarily fired one of his singers during a show, millions of his fans were shocked, even horrified. Dismissed was Julius La Rosa, a cherub-faced ingénue whose vocal talents were modest, but who inspired fierce matronly love in fans. Right after La Rosa finished crooning a song, Godfrey informed viewers, “That was Julius’ swan song with us.” Afternoon newspapers blared the news in headlines across the country.
With Walt Disney in the early 1950s. Sullivan’s tribute show to Disney in 1953 helped him compete with the heavily financed The Colgate Comedy Hour, but years later the two men would vie for ratings in the same Sunday night time slot. (Globe Photos)
As the news coverage snowballed, the reason for the firing was clouded in confusion. Godfrey claimed that La Rosa wanted to be released from his contract; rather than announce this in a press conference, he explained, the host decided to tell viewers on the air. La Rosa disputed this, and Godfrey, in a move he soon regretted, explained that the singer had “lost his humility,” and so needed to be fired. La Rosa conceded that he had lost his sweet deference; at age twenty-three he was getting six thousand fan letters a week and fielding constant offers from record labels. Nevertheless, fans were dismayed to learn that Godfrey had fired someone because he couldn’t stand another star in his stable—was there a controlling egoist under that vanilla charm? The day after Godfrey’s remark about “humility,” the word appeared in numerous national headlines, and comedians soon began using it for laughs. The incident even generated its own moniker, as commentators dubbed it the La Rosa Affair. To date, this was the biggest news story in television.
For Ed the story offered an obvious opportunity. He immediately called La Rosa and invited him to his Delmonico apartment. Heartbroken over being fired, the singer came with his lawyer and his priest in tow. Ed offered him $5,000 per show for a series of guest appearances on Toast of the Town, which La Rosa gladly accepted. Marlo professed amazement at the amount Ed offered the young singer. “He’ll be worth it,” Ed said, “Just wait and see.”
He was right. La Rosa’s appearance on October 25, within the week of his firing on Godfrey, was Sullivan’s highest-rated show since his 1948 debut, earning a jaw-dropping 76.6 Trendex rating. Its viewership dwarfed that evening’s Comedy Hour starring Lauren Bacall, and even topped the season’s highest rated Jerry Lewis–Dean Martin show. Ed kept exploiting the La Rosa controversy over the next several weeks. The November 29 episode of Toast of the Town would undoubtedly have run a distant second to Comedy Hour without the publicity sparked by Ed’s booking of La Rosa. That night Comedy Hour was hosted by Eddie Cantor, with guest stars Frank Sinatra and Eddie Fisher; Fisher had just been offered the unheard of sum of $1 million by Coca Cola to be their national spokesman. Ed’s lineup that evening reflected his smaller budget: La Rosa; Dr. Ralph Bunche, a black Harvard professor and civil rights activist, winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize; Sophie Tucker, a popular vaudevillian now in late career; Sam Levenson, a young comic still on his way up; Joe E. Lewis, an aging cabaret comic; the AU-American college football players; and The Harmonicats, a mouth-organ trio whose 1947 hit “Peg O’ My Heart” sold 1.4 million copies. It was a solid lineup, but it paled by comparison to the Sinatra-Fisher—Cantor triumvirate. Yet that night’s Toast of the Town earned a 54.8 Trendex rating, clearly besting Comedy Hour’s 40.1.
Ed’s adept use of the controversy displayed once again how he used his newsman’s nose for current events to turn a small budget into a ratings winner. He kept it up by booking a raft of former Godfrey regulars, like Pat Boone and the McGuire Sisters—performers who hadn’t reached their later popularity but whose status as Godfrey alumni boosted ratings. CBS was uneasy about Sullivan’s continued one-upping of Godfrey; it was a skirmish between two of the network’s top-rated shows. But Ed rebuffed suggestions by CBS executive Hubbell Robinson that he stop. With the ratings it produced he saw it as a natural strategy. “There’s nothing personal in it,” Ed explained. “If Arthur were fired, I’d hire him.”
One other incident with Godfrey revealed a side of Ed rarely glimpsed by the public. When Godfrey was hospitalized after hip surgery, Sullivan guest hosted his show. The camera captured a man never before seen on television. He danced and sang a tune with the Little Godfreys, accompanied two singers on the zither, warbled a duet with Frank Parker, then topped it off with a soft-shoe routine. It was all light-hearted fun. A reviewer from Variety was aghast: “Why Sullivan can come in strange surroundings and enjoy himself and yet appear so uncomfortable on his very own show is something of an unknown. It’s to be hoped that some of the gold dust carries over from that Wednesday night to Sundays.”
It didn’t. On his own show the effort was too important, too much of a high-stakes struggle, for him to enjoy himself. The self he displayed on the Godfrey show was closer to his Broadway columnist persona, capable of clowning around, comfortable with spontaneity and humor. But that side of Sullivan was stowed backstage when he hosted Toast of the Town. He attempted to explain this in the preface to a 1951 book called The TV Jeebies, a slender volume that described the new medium’s countless pratfalls:
“People often ask me why I don’t smile more when I face the cameras on ‘Toast of the Town.’ In television, unlike any other visual medium, a performer gets only one chance. There are no retakes. He either does it right the first time or the sponsor sees to it that the performer forever holds his peace.… There are literally thousands of tubes, resistors, condensers, and other strange devices in the maze of technical equipment that must not fail. Even the performers can bring on a bad attack of the TV Jeebies with their strapless gown slipping their moorings, ad-libbed jokes that are a bit too salty for television, acts that run over their allotted time and a hundred others things that just couldn’t happen but sometimes do.… In television you get just one chance.”
As Comedy Hour’s ratings continued to slide, Ed worked behind the scenes to rectify a problem that had long bedeviled Toast of the Town. Between 1948 and 1950, network executives learned from the undisputed ratings of Sullivan’s show and Berle’s Texaco Theater that the variety format was a quick path to profitability. In response, a slew of variety hours were launched. Many, like the Dumont network’s Cavalcade of Stars, had short lives. Yet by the early 1950s a passel of programs were hungry for talent: Comedy Hour, Toast of the Town, Texaco Theater, The Bob Hope Show,
The Jackie Gleason Show, All-Star Revue—each had variety schedules to fill. In 1948, Variety predicted that television would run out of performers to present, and that forecast proved prescient. By the early 1950s the competition for talent pushed prices exponentially higher. Where once a Sullivan column mention and $100 was enough to attract guests, those days were now long gone. The relative scarcity of entertainers turned TV talent agents into major players.
The power that talent agents had over Sullivan enraged him. He had a job to do, and in his view they were preventing him from doing it to the best of his ability. As he saw it, Toast of the Town gave early television exposure to many performers, and their agents owed him loyalty. The agents felt differently. To Sullivan’s consternation, they employed a well-choreographed set of maneuvers to push up prices, playing one show off another. If Ed called to request a current hot act, the agent explained that the performer was all booked up—until the price went higher. Or agents refused to even respond to his call until Ed made it clear his bid would go higher. Paul Winchell, a ventriloquist whom Ed booked for a small fee in the show’s earliest days, now expected $2,500—and demanded multiple bookings to appear for that amount. Another popular ventriloquist, Senor Wences, expected a similar fee. A rising young comic named Dick Shawn succeeded in negotiating a guest shot for $10,000 on the condition he get four more appearances at the same price. But Shawn didn’t have enough material and it hurt Sullivan’s ratings.
Most agents first attempted to place their acts with Comedy Hour because of its august pay scale. Ed, with his singular eye for talent, frequently spotted a rising nightclub act or a singer whose music was inching up the charts; after inquiring about their availability, he often got stonewalled, only to see the act sold to Comedy Hour. For this reason, Ed had a fondness for smaller, independent agents, but these representatives didn’t handle the most sought-after performers.
As the competition for talent tightened in the early 1950s, Ed constantly railed to Marlo about what he saw as the lowest form of life, the talent agent. He had a special animosity for MCA agent Johnny Greenhut. “That fat-faced bum with the soft-boiled eyes,” he said to Marlo. “I just made an offer … and Greenhut tells me he has to check to see if David Begelman or Freddie Fields sold them to the Comedy Hour. …They’ve even got the little punk agents pulling the same stunt. Everybody’s ‘checking’ to see if an act is available.… You know where that bunch of flesh peddlers would have gone over big? Down at the levee at the auction block, raffling off slaves to the highest bidder!” And then there was George Wood at William Morris. “It’s the old story—George is going with a young broad and he wants to impress her,” Ed explained to Marlo. “He thinks she’d look great in a shiny new Mercury convertible. He didn’t come out and ask for one, but I got the message.… I’ll call the factory and order one for him. We’ll have to pay for it out of our talent budget.”
The chief problem was that Toast of the Town had no agency dedicated to it. The William Morris Agency had a tight relationship with Texaco Theater, and MCA was joined at the hip with Comedy Hour. But Toast of the Town’s smaller budget meant it was left to fend for itself, working with both agencies and others as a leftover outlet for acts who couldn’t be sold to the highest bidder. Ed knew he had to change this to continue to be competitive. He began cultivating a relationship with Sonny Werblin, president of MCA’s New York office, considered the king of talent agents and a fearsome dealmaker. The two entered into negotiations, and, after some haggling, came to an agreement. In effect, Sullivan hired Werblin as his own personal agent, his representative in charge of negotiations with CBS.
As the five-year contract Ed had signed in 1950 approached its expiration date, Werblin was in place to be Sullivan’s advocate with the network. At one level, Werblin’s representation of Ed could have been seen as a conflict of interest. It positioned MCA as the lead talent representative for two direct competitors, Comedy Hour and Toast of the Town. But apparently Werblin, seeing Comedy Hour’s ratings erosion in the 1953–54 season, understood it was time to shift his alliance. Or perhaps he simply saw the value of riding two horses.
Given his reputation as an über-agent, his representation of Sullivan would almost certainly result in a big raise for Ed, as well as a larger talent budget for Toast of the Town. Marlo, however, pointing out that Werblin would take a hefty cut of Ed’s salary for representing him, urged Ed to go directly to CBS head Bill Paley. With no agent as a middleman, you’ll make more money, Marlo told Ed.
But Ed saw a much larger potential in working with Werblin. With the MCA executive as his advocate, he could expect to get choice access to the MCA talent pool. In essence, the deal would provide Ed with the raw material to produce the best program he was capable of. Short-term, it might mean a smaller salary increase, but with Comedy Hour fading, and Werblin lending MCA’s muscle, Sullivan saw a chance to take his star to an entirely new level.
In the early 1950s, a young New York comic named Will Jordan started including a Sullivan impression in his nightclub act, invariably breaking up the room with his hunched shoulders, his I’ve-just-sucked-a-lemon facial contortions, and his version of Ed’s signature arms-crossed gesture.
The audience response landed him gigs on local television shows, notably that of Steve Allen, an offbeat wit who later hosted a show opposite Sullivan’s. Allen took great delight in Jordan’s skewering of the stone-faced host, often inviting the comic to perform it. Jordan, always looking for a bigger venue, played up his television success to longtime Sullivan friend Joe Moore, and at Moore’s suggestion Ed tuned in to one of Jordan’s local television appearances.
The showman liked what he saw. Despite his vituperative letters to critics who roasted him for his stiffness, he was eager to find some way to counteract the perception of his stilted stage persona. Booking this impressionist who so mercilessly lampooned him would, Ed hoped, deflate reviewers’ barbs. He would negate the critics by agreeing with them—you bet, I am stiff, and let’s all have a good laugh at it.
For Jordan’s first appearance in March 1953, Sullivan booked him opposite a Jerry Lewis–Dean Martin Comedy Hour, hoping the chatter about a Sullivan impressionist on his own show would draw viewers. But the comic didn’t go over too well. “I did Sullivan as he really was—and it bombed,” Jordan recalled. Overawed by his first appearance on national TV, “I was afraid to do more.” The tepid audience response left Ed unimpressed.
Jordan kept including his Sullivan shtick in his nightclub act, continually riffing on the showman’s persona. Over months of club dates his impression grew ever farther away from the original man—and ever more entertaining. Nightclub audiences loved it, and Hy Gardner, a New York Herald-Tribune columnist, called Ed to tell him he should book Jordan. Ed was skeptical, but he trusted Gardner, so in June 1954 the comic played the Sullivan show again.
This time Jordan let loose, playing a wildly exaggerated character that took Sullivan’s persona to the extreme. “I rolled my eyes up and showed the whites of my eyes, stuck my tongue under my upper lip, and made a monster face,” he recalled. As he moved his shoulders with spastic stiffness, he satirized the host’s verbal style: “Tonight on our rilly big show we have 702 Polish dentists who will be out here in a few moments doing their marvelous extractions.…” The audience roared, and as they laughed the camera periodically cut to Ed, chuckling along—see, the camera shot said, he’s a regular guy.
Ironically, while the audience easily recognized Sullivan in Jordan’s imitation, the comic himself knew that almost all the impression’s details were invented—the knuckle cracks, shoulder shakes, eye rolls, full-body spins; none of these were actual Sullivan mannerisms. “This is the only time I know of where so much of the character is not the real person,” he said. Jordan’s hyperstretched version of the showman became an audience favorite; Sullivan booked him twelve more times. Over the years, Jordan became typecast as the comic who imitated Ed Sullivan. The impressionist would play him through six d
ecades, including in 1978’s The Buddy Holly Story, 1991’s The Doors, and 2003’s Down with Love.
Most lasting of Jordan’s inventions was the phrase “really big show,” or, as he played it, “rilly big shew.” Not only had Ed himself never said that prior to Jordan, when Ed tried to mimic Jordan’s imitation of himself, he goofed the line, voicing it as “truly big show.” Only later, after numerous appearances by Jordan and other Sullivan impressionists—all of whom used “really big show”—did the phrase become the showman’s own stock setup, the idiom most identified with his onstage persona.
When Ed used the phrase “really big show,” he was, in fact, imitating his imitators. It was a kind of comfort for him. Instead of being alone in his natural, awkward onstage self, the parade of Sullivan impressionists he booked—Jack Carter, John Byner, Frank Gorshin, Jackie Mason, Rich Little—gave him a role to play. By turning him into an endearing set of idiosyncrasies, they enabled him to be the stock character known as Ed Sullivan. He could take refuge in playing this one-dimensional caricature, however limited a resemblance this sketch bore to the man himself. Certainly it included no sign of the glad-handing Broadway gossip, or the shrewd producer who aligned with power player Sonny Werblin, or the volcano who stormed the halls of CBS. But no matter. The audience understood and liked this cartoon figure. In time, the caricature became the public image of Ed Sullivan, which he was perfectly happy with. He often tossed off a “really big show,” and he kept his trademark arms-crossed gesture long after he learned to avoid other tics.
He took immense pleasure in the fact that these comedians went on other programs and imitated him. It delighted his competitive spirit, knowing that a troupe of impressionists was out there reminding audiences of him and his show. Comics learned that having a good Sullivan impression was a quick way to Ed’s heart, and stand-ups across the country began practicing “rilly big shew” to help them land a booking.
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan Page 28