Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  At the end of November, Maria Callas rendered a selection from Puccini’s opera Tosca on an evening in which Ed (on film) interviewed Clark Gable on location; later that hour he showed clips of the 1956 All American football squad. In an early December program, Ed opened with vocalist Rosemary Clooney singing “April in Paris,” followed by the Princeton Triangle Club (men performing in drag), after which comic Myron Cohen spun his Borscht Belt humor. The show ended with the Modern Screen Awards, featuring appearances by Natalie Wood, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and Doris Day.

  In January 1957 Elvis made his third appearance, with comic Carol Burnett and baseball star Jackie Robinson. Later that month jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong shared the bill with vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, followed by two Metropolitan Opera stars performing a scene from Madame Butterfly, on the same evening ventriloquist Senor Wences earned laughs by chattering with his painted hand. In February Benny Goodman and his big band swung through “Just One of Those Things” on the same bill with young stand-up comedian Johnny Carson, who did impressions of Sullivan and journalist Edward R. Murrow. In March Fred Astaire and Jane Powell dazzled through a tap-dance routine on the same bill with a tap duet by Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. In April Olympic weightlifter Paul Anderson hoisted twenty people on a show in which ancient vaudeville team Smith and Dale played a sketch about taxes and Henry Fonda introduced a clip from his new movie Twelve Angry Men.

  A cameo appearance on the Sullivan show by baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who broke the sport’s color line in 1947. Sullivan revered Robinson. (Globe Photos)

  Later in the month Bill Haley and the Comets—one of the very first rock ’n’ roll bands—romped on “40 Cups of Coffee” and “Rudy’s Rock” (with the sax player running through the audience blowing his horn) on a show with Barbara & Her Dog, who performed novelty math tricks. As the weather turned warm, the Corps de Ballet danced a segment of “Czardas” on the same bill with comedian Dewey “Pig-meat” Markham. In mid summer Burt Lancaster performed a comedy sketch with Barbara Nichols, dancer Gene Kelly danced a soft-shoe with Ed—just kidding around—and the Cypress Garden water-skiers showed off their aquatic skills on location. A few weeks later the Everly Brothers harmonized on “Bye, Bye Love” and Ed (on film) appeared at a premiere of the new movie The Prince and the Showgirl along with Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, and Robert F. Kennedy.

  When the dizzying 1956–57 season concluded and the Nielsen ratings were tallied, Ed found he had succeeded past any reasonable expectation. The Ed Sullivan Show was television’s number two—ranked program, behind only the perennially top-rated rated I Love Lucy. Close to forty million people a week watched his Sunday showcase. A few years earlier he had used tributes to moguls like Samuel Goldwyn and Darryl Zanuck to boost ratings. Now, on small screens in living rooms across the country, he held a comparable stature. Producing a program at its zenith in its ninth year, he was fully in command: of his show, of his place at the network, and of his position as a cultural tastemaker.

  With bandleader Benny Goodman during a rehearsal for the Sullivan show in the 1950s. (Globe Photos)

  Not that his eminence as an impresario meant he had grown correspondingly polished as a master of ceremonies. If he was marginally more at ease onstage in 1957 than in 1948, in essence he remained the same monotone show host, continuing to fumble and sputter despite his overly cautious approach. Sullivan’s malapropisms became show business lore. The talent agents forced to wait outside the stage door in the “Wailing Wall” area during rehearsal traded stories of Sullivan’s missteps, and they had no lack of material. Comedian Jack Carter was introduced, variously, as John Crater, Jack Carson, John Kerr, and, once, Carson McCullers. A performing troupe from New Zealand was called “the fierce Maori tribe from New England.” Famed clarinetist Benny Goodman was lauded as a trumpeter, Roberta Peters became Robert Sherwood, and Ed once introduced Robert Merrill by saying “I’d like to prevent Robert Merrill.” Citizens of Miami regularly sent letters correcting his pronunciation of their city’s name—he pronounced it “My-am-ah”—and he always referred to Baltimore as “Ball-tee-more.” He never went through a show without garbling syntax, and polysyllabic words could be mangled to unintelligibility.

  Other entertainers took great sport with the showman’s stilted stage presence. “Ed Sullivan is the only man who can brighten up a room by leaving it,” quipped Joe E. Lewis. Jack Benny asked, “What would happen, Ed, if you weren’t here to introduce the acts? As a friend, let me give you some advice. Don’t ever stay home to find out.” Henny Youngman observed, “In Africa the cannibals adored him. They thought he was some new kind of frozen food.” (Eddie Cantor, an almost lone dissenting voice, wrote in his 1957 memoir that Sullivan had “a sense of showmanship second to no one in the business.”)

  Pop singer Connie Francis remembered dreading being called over to shake Ed’s hand after a performance. “You never knew what he was going to say,” Francis said. “He was so funny—he didn’t mean to be funny. I think the average guy watching television said, ‘I could speak better than that.’ ”

  In dress rehearsal, Ed once called over singer Jack Jones to chat, considered a major career boost among performers. “Wasn’t your father Allen Jones?” Ed asked the singer. “He still is,” Jones replied, getting a big audience chuckle. After rehearsal, Sullivan told Jones that he liked the humorous exchange and wanted to recreate it in that evening’s broadcast. During the show Sullivan called over Jones as planned, but Ed goofed up the setup question, asking: “Isn’t your father Allen Jones?” And all Jones could say was “yes,” which fell flat. After the show Ed was furious. Jones tried to explain: “But Mr. Sullivan, you didn’t say it the way you said it during rehearsal.” “Don’t tell me!” Ed retorted. “You should have said ‘He still is!’ ” Sullivan refused to book Jones for a long time afterward.

  “Sometimes you wondered,” recalled comedienne Carol Burnett, of the showman’s many fumbles. Causing many of these stumbles and stutters was nerves. Even as an established star he battled stage fright, and several Sullivan staffers said that he remained nervous onstage throughout the run of the program. Many veteran performers, of course, suffer stage jitters despite a long career, yet manage to transcend it. With Ed, turning on a camera never stopped prompting a profound dampening. The feisty, opinionated Broadway gossip with a quick left jab became almost funereal, careful to the point of caricature. And he was loath to attempt a change. His sponsor’s ad agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt, occasionally suggested he liven up his stage presence, maybe develop an act or tell a few jokes. Ed rejected them summarily. “You don’t screw with success,” he said.

  Paradoxically, his antistyle endeared him with the audience. Being maladroit made him far more likable. Viewers felt they were getting the real thing; clearly this man was anything but a slick salesman. Ed was just Ed. He wasn’t part of that alien tribe known as entertainers, or so it seemed, but instead appeared far closer to an audience member. One night he introduced an actress in the audience by saying “she’s currently starving on Broadway”—perhaps a Freudian slip, given his own hungry struggle as a young Broadway columnist—and then realized his mistake. The audience began to laugh, and he began to laugh with them. Everyone enjoyed a hardy chuckle at Ed’s awkwardness. To think, just four hours earlier this man had taken complete dictatorial control over the show, issuing ultimatums, slashing comics’ well-honed gags, stepping on toes at will. And here he was on camera, as nonthreatening as the average uncle Charlie.

  Sullivan’s need to keep his feisty, combative nature off camera was not shared by the man he so envied and admired through the years, Walter Winchell. After some coaxing, Winchell launched his first television show in 1952, pushed into it as radio faltered in the face of TV’s bounding growth and Walter’s own radio show fell from the top ten. His debut was a telecast of his radio gossip show, with Winchell poised near the typewriter and the set decorated as a busy city newsroom. He projected an intense, on-the-edge energy
in his broadcast, just as he always had in his radio show. He even wore his fedora on the air, as if attempting to recreate central casting’s idea of a hard-bitten newshound. It was the same persona that he and Ed had projected as they ran up and down Broadway in the 1930s: know-it-all, tough, jazzed up from a second cup of joe. Ed, off the air, was still essentially the same: acerbic and willing to lead with his elbows if necessary; it was only when the camera blinked on that he became the living room’s monochromatic supplicant. Yet Walter didn’t adapt. Unwilling or unable to fit into the cooler environment of 1950s television, he was a character in the wrong play.

  His gossip, always an affront to polite society, now traveled in territory the public wouldn’t enter. In his debut television season he announced that President Truman had once belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—a ludicrous charge that Truman angrily dismissed. After suffering abysmal ratings—at one point he was rated 111th—ABC canceled his simulcast television-radio show in 1955. He approached NBC about a television program, offering to host the Comedy Hour opposite Sullivan in that show’s waning days, but was turned down. He also queried CBS, and as word leaked that he might get a show, Sullivan emitted howls of protest, or so Winchell claimed. Network executive Hubbell Robinson released a statement that CBS had not in fact mentioned Winchell’s proposed show to Sullivan. This prompted Walter to shoot an angry note to Robinson: “Dear Hub, This is BULLSH!”

  Desperate to get back on television, he organized his own sponsors and re-approached NBC, succeeding in getting The Walter Winchell Show signed for thirteen weeks in the fall of 1955. His choice of format revealed a telling irony: it was a variety show that Walter hosted without lengthy introductions—a veritable copy of the Sullivan show. Having so long been ahead of Ed in the public’s eye, Walter was reduced to imitating him. Adding ignominy, after a respectable start the show’s ratings quickly began to plummet. Oddly, even in his variety show he maintained the storied Winchell edge, wearing his fedora and tossing cigarette butts onstage. The show’s director, Alan Handley, noted how out of place Walter seemed. “He couldn’t integrate himself into a TV show, and we couldn’t feel superior to him the way we could to Sullivan.” The Walter Winchell Show was canceled within three months of its debut.

  The next tidal wave to engulf television was just barely visible at the end of the 1956–57 season. Gunsmoke, a radio show since 1952, debuted on CBS-TV in 1955, and by the following year rose to be the eighth-rated show; down at number nineteen that season was Wyatt Earp. With the advent of the 1957–58 season the Western began proliferating like well-watered sagebrush: Tales of Wells Fargo, Wagon Train, and Have Gun, Will Travel were all in the top twenty. Wyatt Earp climbed to number six and Gunsmoke became television’s top-rated show.

  ABC, enjoying success with Wyatt Earp on Tuesday night, made a move to grab Sunday night with still another Western, Maverick. Offering a fresh take on the traditional format, the show starred James Garner as the humorous antihero who was better with a wisecrack than with a six-gun. Debuting in September 1957 in the 7:30 time slot, for its first few weeks it was a straight western, but as it found its comedic voice its ratings started climbing. On November 12, 1957, Maverick’s Trendex rating bested The Ed Sullivan Show’s for the first time.

  Sullivan faced an intractable ratings challenge in Maverick. Against Comedy Hour he could wait for it to present less interesting weeks and then produce specials; against The Steve Allen Show he easily out-scooped and out-produced the witty show host. When the quiz show craze began in the mid 1950s, Time reported that Ed even stood prepared for that: “He is ready to fight fire with fire if this becomes the year of the big money quiz shows. Says he: ‘If what people want are giveaways then we’ll add giveaways, too.’ ” But how could he compete with a Western?

  He had a plan. If the Western transported audiences to a distant locale, he would transport them to an even more distant locale, to a world more exotic than the dusty plains. He had long sprinkled acts from other countries into the show, yet they now came in a torrent. Sullivan’s talent coordinator Jack Babb booked acts from far and wide: Japanese dancers, Taiwanese acrobats, Italian comedy group The Three Bragazzis, Viennese soprano Rita Streich, Spanish magician Rochiardi, singing group the Kim Sisters from Korea, and others.

  But more than bringing international acts to the United States, Ed envisioned transporting the show across the globe. In late 1957 he began planning to produce a program at the Brussels World’s Fair. It would cost an extra $50,000 so Ed romanced his sponsor, Eastman Kodak (Ford was now cosponsoring with other advertisers). He convinced Kodak to foot the bill in exchange for a product endorsement during the show; a Sullivan crew filmed the University of Rochester glee club singing in front of Kodak’s corporate headquarters, to be shown during the World’s Fair broadcast. How this related to the Fair was unclear, but it didn’t matter; Ed had his funding.

  In March 1958 he and a crew took a chartered flight to Belgium, toting a mass of studio equipment. For the Fair broadcast, Ed walked among the many pavilions, presenting the Ukrainian State Dance Group performing a hyperkinetic spear and sword dance, comic Jacques Tati pantomiming a French fisherman, and the London Symphony Orchestra rendering an excerpt from Wagner’s Lohengrin. Making cameo appearances were Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, and William Holden. Lest it all seem too far from home, Ed boasted about the American pavilion and included a section honoring the graves of American soldiers in Belgium. In deference to the fact that the United States was deep in the Cold War, and the Fair’s theme was “A New Humanism”—the term made some viewers uneasy—Ed gave a short homily at the end making it clear he was against communism and in favor of religion.

  The Cold War, however, didn’t keep him from the season’s biggest ratings triumph. In the spring of 1958 Russia’s Moiseyev Ballet was earning hyperbolic reviews as it toured America. Contrary to their name, they were folk dancers, dressed in peasant garb, highly athletic and stylistically muscular. Their Madison Square Garden performance was so anticipated that scalpers sold $8 tickets for $80. Ed haggled for weeks with impresario Sol Hurok for the rights to present the dancers on his show. He dedicated the full hour to the Russian folk performers on the evening of June 29, scoring an artistic and commercial success. (Doubtless part of the appeal was a glimpse of a people that many Americans considered to be their foremost enemy.) Sullivan’s Trendex rating was a healthy 40.3, topping Maverick’s 33.6 and Steve Allen’s 21.4. (Sullivan’s Trendex increased in the second half of the hour, as it usually did after Maverick ended at 8:30.)

  Rock ’n’ roll was the other driving force in Sullivan’s formula for the 1957–58 season. Having discovered a ratings goldmine with his Elvis bookings, he now presented a bevy of pioneering artists. The Everly Brothers, invited for a string of appearances, sweetly harmonized through “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” The Champs romped through “Tequilla,” the Platters doo-wopped “The Great Pretender,” and Sam Cooke crooned “You Send Me.” Riding the brief rockabilly wave, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps had fun with “Dance to the Bop” and the Sparkletones rocked on “Black Slacks.” Connie Francis wept her romantic teen lament “Who’s Sorry Now?” Ed, like many of his viewers, felt that rock ’n’ roll needed a tight leash, and he kept a watchful eye on the new arrivals.

  Everything went well the night that Ed introduced Buddy Holly and the Crickets for their television debut in December 1957. Holly, in his signature horn-rimmed glasses and armed with a Fender Stratocaster, was backed by drums, rhythm guitar, and plucked upright bass. All the band members were clad in tuxedos as they rocked through their recent number one hit, “That’ll Be the Day.” The group followed it up with the rambunctious “Peggy Sue,” which climbed to number five a month after the show.

  When the group came back in January, however, Sullivan and Holly got into a verbal fisticuffs during rehearsal. Ed felt the lyrics to the group’s “Oh Boy” were lewd: “All of my life I been a-waitin’ / Tonight there’ll be no hesit
atin’.” The verse was quaint by rock ’n’ roll standards, yet Irving Berlin would never have penned it. Sullivan told Holly to choose another song. Holly, in a first for a Sullivan guest, issued his own ultimatum: it was that song or nothing. Ed, furious, but unwilling to lose the ratings boost—especially with Maverick submerging his Trendex numbers—relented. Still, he cut the Crickets from two songs to one, and placed the band toward the end of the show.

  In that evening’s broadcast, when Ed listed the Crickets in his opening remarks he pronounced their name correctly, but right before they played he introduced them as “Buddy Hollied and His Crickets!” That might have been merely a Sullivan malapropism, but when the camera cut to the band, both their lighting and sound were low. Holly tried to turn up his guitar, with limited result, then started singing at the top of his voice. As if in retaliation, the band jumped into double time during an instrumental break, allowing them to add a second verse to the song. When the camera cut back to Ed he was clearly livid, and didn’t give the Crickets the customary after-song mention before going to the next act.

  In addition to rock ’n’ roll and many international attractions, Ed continued his all-inclusive Big Tent philosophy in the 1957–58 season. The Glenn Miller Orchestra swung standards, and balladeers Tony Bennett and Nat “King” Cole crooned. George Burns and Gracie Allen earned laughs with their vaudeville-style comedic patter. In January, Ed presented a twenty-two-minute segment of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Long Day’s Journey into Night, starring Frederic March and Florence Eldridge (but Ed insisted that one of the script’s epithets be toned down). Actor Douglas Fairbanks recited the Rudyard Kipling poem “If and famed playwright-actor-singer Noël Coward warbled a medley of his own songs. The cross-dressing men of the Princeton Triangle Club strutted “The Charleston,” and eighty-four-year-old W.C. Handy, considered the father of the blues, made a cameo in a wheelchair.