For the kids, diminutive elephant Baby Opal frolicked, puppeteer Joe Castor painted a portrait along with his marionette, and eight-year-old piano player Joey Alfidi dazzled on “The Minute Waltz” as three beauty pageant contestants looked on admiringly. Johnny Carson did a stand-up routine about a children’s show host with a hangover, and Carol Burnett sang a comic tune called “I Fell in Love with John Foster Dulles.” (Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, was famously dour, but he found Burnett’s bit amusing and requested a copy. When reporters asked him why this young woman was singing about falling in love with him, he smiled and said, “I never talk about my private life in public”) The season’s political guest was Eleanor Roosevelt, who paid tribute to Israel’s tenth anniversary.
But Sullivan’s 1957–58 season, despite its global talent show, big names, and fresh rock ’n’ roll faces, suffered major ratings erosion in the face of the public’s fascination with Westerns. Although The Ed Sullivan Show still ran ahead of ABC’s Maverick, it tumbled from the previous season’s number two spot all the way down to number nineteen. Of the eighteen shows that rated higher, seven of them were Westerns. The Steve Allen Show also contributed to the ratings fall, though Sullivan still ranked far ahead of Allen, who never entered the top twenty. This season was the first in which Sullivan grappled with more than one serious competitor in his time slot; ABC had always run a distant third. Now, the network’s sagebrush and spurs offering was besting Sullivan on certain nights.
Aside from the ratings plunge, June 1958 offered Ed a consolation prize: the show reached its ten-year anniversary. Sullivan was virtually alone in his program’s longevity and clearly alone in its success. All the other members of the class of 1948 were either gone or headed that way. The Milton Berle Show had been canceled in June 1956, and Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts would be cut in the summer of 1958 (though Berle would make two one-year comebacks and Arthur Godfrey and His Friends limped along to 1959). Sid Caesar’s wildly popular Your Show of Shows had come and gone. Two other powerhouses of 1950s variety television, Jackie Gleason and Jack Benny, had run behind Sullivan since the 1955–56 season.
Newspapers, whose television critics had so uniformly panned Sullivan’s debut, now considered it de rigueur to run an article feting the program’s ten-year anniversary. The New York Times opined that, “During these ten years Mr. Sullivan has not improved perceptibly as a performer,” yet still the show was “remarkably successful.” The Times reporter, interviewing the showman in his Delmonico apartment, noted that while Ed was jet-lagged (from his trip to Brussels) and had suffered a terrible bout with his ulcer, he answered questions affably—many reporters were surprised at how conversational the showman could be offstage. Most notably, Sullivan claimed that he looked forward to perhaps five more years as a host-producer, after which he hoped to focus exclusively on producing. He was less equivocal in his New York Journal-American interview, claiming, “I’m going to quit in five years.” As he waxed philosophic about his career, he explained why he booked impressionists to mock his stage persona: “I used to get letters that said I looked as if I took myself too seriously. Unfortunately I have a graver looking kisser than most.”
CBS head Bill Paley, to honor the ten-year milestone, hosted a luncheon to which he invited all the network’s executives, and he directed CBS vice president Larry Lowman to buy an expensive gift for Sullivan. Lowman called Marlo Lewis, who told him that Ed had been eyeing a Renoir oil painting at a gallery on 57th Street, not far from the Delmonico; Sylvia adored it and stopped to look at it every time she passed.
At the luncheon the guests were full of good spirits, as Paley and other top executives, Frank Stanton and Hubbell Robinson, reminisced with Sullivan, Lewis, bandleader Ray Bloch, and director Johnny Wray about the show’s early days. After a couple hours of chatting and eating, Paley presented Sullivan with the gift, wrapped in brown paper. “Ed, here’s something I know both you and Sylvia wanted. I am delighted we could find a way to show you how much we think of you and how happy we are that you are part of CBS.”
Ed unwrapped the Renoir, and, unable to speak, put it in the middle of the table. Everyone looked at it, thinking Sullivan would soon make a comment. But Ed, speechless, reached into his pocket and took out his handkerchief to cover his eyes. He began to cry, softly, and then slumped in his chair, crying more freely. The Sullivan staff members said nothing, as the executives looked on with small smiles, though network president Frank Stanton seemed surprised. Pulling himself together, Ed gestured toward his production staff. “All of us thank you, Bill.” He took a small drink of water, dried his eyes, shook hands with everyone, then took the painting and walked out the door. Afterward, Stanton asked Marlo Lewis, “What was all that about?”
Sullivan’s wellspring of emotion, as Lewis recounted it, came from Ed at long last getting something he had so craved from CBS: personal recognition. When he was struggling in the early years they had offered the show to advertisers “with or without” Ed Sullivan; the show had been underfunded during his battle with Comedy Hour; and even as he prevailed it was only after an offer from NBC that the show was renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. Consequently, he developed a hard defensive shell against what he saw as the network’s lack of appreciation.
In interviews in later years he never passed up a chance to hurl a gibe at CBS executives, using pointed language that left no doubt that he detested them. The network’s executives were “ungrateful, impolite people,” and Frank Stanton was “a hopeless case as a human,” he told Life magazine in 1967. With the exception of Paley, that is. Ed always drew a distinction between the animus he felt toward the network management and Paley himself, whom Sullivan always respected. Now, Paley’s thoughtful personal gift was a sign of something he felt he had seen far too little of, from the one executive whose opinion he held in esteem. He wasn’t merely getting paid like a star, he was being treated like one.
Nevertheless, that summer he let it be known—Paley’s simpatico notwithstanding—that his decisions about his show would not be guided by network management. Or, remarkably, even by his sponsors. Prompting a deep gasp of consternation from CBS and Ford, he announced that in July he would broadcast two programs from Las Vegas, otherwise known as Sin City.
Some of the show’s staff could hardly believe it. Ed … in Vegas? It was as if the parish priest had decided to open a strip joint. In 1958 the gambling mecca was completely unredeemed, the closest thing to pure perdition on domestic soil, an id of greed and sex poking through the staid American superego. That Ed, who forbade cleavage on his show and shot Elvis from the waist up—and always had something for the youngsters—would broadcast from Vegas was unthinkable. A reporter from Variety, echoing a question wondered by many, asked him if Vegas wasn’t a questionable location for The Ed Sullivan Show. “The fact that Jack Benny played a Vegas saloon made it okay for me and my sponsors,” Ed replied. That was patently untrue; the head of Ford’s ad agency, William Lewis, warned that the automaker did not want its name associated with Las Vegas. CBS’s Frank Stanton called the Vegas shows highly inadvisable.
But Ed didn’t care. After a successful ten-year run he was now in a position to lead rather than follow. And Las Vegas’ Desert Inn had offered to put him into a new income bracket in exchange for a Sullivan show. Wilbur Clark, one of the city’s most tireless hucksters, opened the $3.5 million Desert Inn in 1950 with the help of Moe Dalitz and other Cleveland organized crime figures; at some point in the late 1950s, Chicago mobster Sam Giancana also acquired an interest. (In 1967 Howard Hughes decided to buy the Desert Inn rather than move out.) Under Dalitz’s guidance, and fueled by low-interest loans from the Teamsters’ Pension Fund, the Desert Inn became a capstone of Vegas’ growth. Clark, as its public relations man, saw great value in Sullivan.
The Desert Inn hired the ritziest nightclub performers—Sinatra made his Vegas debut there in 1951, later joined by Jerry, Dino, and Sammy Davis. But the Rat Pack, although it attracted a fa
st crowd, couldn’t provide the patina of middle-class respectability that Sullivan could. Clark understood that bringing new dollars into Las Vegas meant burnishing its image, making it an acceptable destination for corporate junkets and—the idea was far-fetched in 1958–middle-brow tourists. Ed, with his position as unofficial Minister of Culture, was uniquely qualified to help with this.
The romancing of Ed by Las Vegas business interests had begun the previous fall, when the United Hotel Corporation of Las Vegas purchased his Connecticut estate. After his car crash, Ed lost interest in his country retreat. In truth, semirural South-bury was never a good match for Sullivan, who continued to enjoy rotating between Manhattan nightspots every evening. As he sold the estate, he explained that he was not made for country living. “The noise was terrible,” he said. “I mean there’d be a cow mooing at four o’clock in the morning.” United Hotel took it off his hands for a handsome sum—$250,000—or more than double what he paid for it in 1954. The deal got sweeter. The Desert Inn agreed to cover all of his living expenses and pay him $25,000 a week for eight weeks, for a contract that stretched over two summers. After Ed broadcast two shows per summer from the hotel, he would stay for additional shows that wouldn’t be broadcast, while a guest host emceed his TV show.
As the grumbles of complaint from CBS and Ford grew into a chorus, Ed confided to Marlo Lewis: “I don’t give a damn what any of them feel about this deal. I’ve busted my back … running from one city to another. I’m tired of traveling. I’m tired of putting on shows for the CBS affiliates. I’m tired of shaking hands with the Lincoln Mercury dealers, signing autographs, hearing people tell me how surprised they are that I can smile—especially when my ulcer is knocking me out and I don’t want to smile. A few weeks in that Las Vegas sunshine will do me a world of good and it won’t hurt anyone else on the show either. And I’m not about to turn down this pot of gold that Wilbur’s throwing at me … and nobody’s gonna stop me from taking it!”
Giving instructions to Carol Burnett in rehearsal, Las Vegas, 1958. Sullivan scandalized CBS by producing a show from Sin City in the 1950s. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
The family show that Ed presented from the Desert Inn was in marked contrast to the hotel’s typical fare. Esther Williams, known as “America’s Mermaid” for the string of MGM hits that showcased her aquatic skills and bathing suit pulchritude, introduced “water babies,” children diving into swimming pools. Williams gave a little girl a piggyback ride in a pool, introduced the AAU synchronized swimming team, and blew a big kiss at the camera (Ed was furious at her for displaying too much cleavage). “Jumping Joe” Monahan performed a trampoline act, Carol Burnett did a stand-up routine about braces, and the Kirby Stone Four sang “Lazy River” (the appearance led to a Columbia Records contract for the vocal group). The show was a hit in Vegas. “People flocked to see it—we had full houses,” recalled Burnett.
The following Sunday’s program was a reprise, with an Olympic diving champion, a ventriloquist and a magician for the kids, and the Four Preps singing “Lazy Summer Night.” Sullivan asked Wilbur Clark to take a bow from the audience. And, as if living in a parallel universe not connected to America in 1958, Ed touted the gambling mecca’s churches and schools as well as its entertainment and casino attractions. Based on his Desert Inn broadcasts, viewers at home might have deduced that Las Vegas was a slightly risqué suburb of Oklahoma City.
As the 1958–59 season began, Ed’s traditional variety format seemed to have grown too small for him. Topping his broadcast produced in Brussels, he began the season by planning shows from Alaska, the Hawaiian Islands, and Asia. He turned his trips into travelogues that he presented along with other acts on Sunday evenings. In his Asian travelogue, the black-and-white footage was like his own home movie, as he played baseball with Japanese schoolchildren, talked about the architecture in Hong Kong—“The most exciting place on the globe,” he called it—and surveyed Istanbul with Sylvia. The beauty of the Turkish city “will make it one of the great tourist spots in the world,” he opined, as the camera panned over ancient minarets, though it’s doubtful he changed travel plans in many American living rooms with that claim.
Part of his wanderlust was a competitive desire to go where Maverick could not. The Western was regularly trouncing him in the Nielsens, even with the ratings jolt delivered by his increased rock ’n’ roll bookings. But his international shows gave him an advantage that Maverick couldn’t claim: they became news events, covered in newspapers across the country. In particular, his Brussels broadcast had generated an untold fortune in free publicity.
His interest in internationalizing the show, however, was about more than ratings. He began envisioning a time when the show would grow into something larger than entertainment. Ed was, after all, a reporter and columnist, and had worked on newspapers since his teens. He never stopped seeing himself as a newshound. One of his personal secretaries recalled that even in the 1960s, if he placed a call he identified himself as “Ed Sullivan, of the News.” (In fact he never gave up his Daily News column throughout his television career.) He had always included some element of current events or public service on the show, like the Eleanor Roosevelt tribute to Israel, or his chat with civil rights activist Ralph Bunche, or—a favorite cause of his—a spokesperson from the Association of Christians and Jews.
Live television, circa 1958: the Sullivan show was broadcast live throughout its twenty-three-year run. (Globe Photos)
In the fall of 1958 he began thinking of expanding the role of current events on the show, and of expanding his own role, too. He wanted to build upon his success as an impresario to become a producer who handled both news and entertainment; he imagined that these two forms could be mingled, which in television at that time was unheard of. He hoped to become, as Journal-American columnist Atra Baer wrote after talking with him, “the Lowell Thomas of variety show business.” Thomas had been an adventurous roving radio journalist who produced stories from Europe in both world wars, as well as from the Middle East and China. Ed’s own international shows were a form of this, yet he hoped for much more.
He began lobbying the CBS news department. While he had no desire to be a network newsman, he wanted to have input, to be called upon to comment on issues of the day, much as he did in the Daily News. His entreaties to the network news division met with no response. At one point Ed invited legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow on the show in an attempt to form a bridge between himself and the news department. Murrow was flattered by the attention—a bevy of showgirls requested his autograph—and he appreciated Ed’s interview. But the door was still shut. Murrow, in fact, in October 1958 gave a speech decrying prime-time television as full of “decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live,” using The Ed Sullivan Show as an example.
As Ed sought to shift his role, it was as if he had outgrown the traditional variety format. At age fifty-seven, he had been producing stage shows for more than twenty-five years. He had clearly mastered the format; indeed he was the master of the format. He had accomplished everything he had set out to do. He had hungered to be a nationally famous broadcast star, and, without being able to sing, tell jokes, or be charming, had done so. But fame, apparently, hadn’t proven to be a high enough mountain. The inner force that had driven him to success was still there. Now that he had achieved what he had always wanted, he saw a bigger vista to conquer.
In December 1958 he announced that CBS had hired him to produce a program apart from his Sunday show, to be called Sullivan’s Travels. He would use his annual summer vacations—he certainly didn’t want to relax then—to produce four to six ninety-minute travelogue-documentaries. His first would be about India, and he planned pieces from West Germany, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro, and other locations. Yet even the Sullivan’s Travels series wasn’t enough—he was interested in serious journalism, insightful coverage and commentary that spotlighted global events.
The network didn�
�t see him in this role, despite having hired him to produce the travelogues. That CBS never invited him to give his opinion in year-end wrap-ups of national and international news was deeply frustrating for him. “Why the hell not!” he exclaimed to Marlo Lewis. “I’ve had thirty years’ experience as an on-the-line reporter. When it involves the news, they won’t call me! But when they hold their drunken station-owner conventions and want to look impressive, they call on me to put on a show!”
However, the fact that CBS had not the slightest whit of interest in his dream didn’t deter him. He had always plunged headfirst toward his goals, regardless of what others thought. And now, as he hoped to enlarge the show’s concept and his own role, becoming the new Lowell Thomas, he pushed forward with the same headstrong motion.
Ed saw a chance to score the definitive news scoop as the rebel uprising in Cuba came to a head in the late fall of 1958. Led by Fidel Castro and Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevera, the rebels appeared to be overtaking the Cuban army, edging ever closer to the capital city of Havana. By late December the situation dominated American news, as more than three thousand people died in house-to-house fighting. Rumors circulated that notoriously corrupt Cuban president Fulgencio Batista was preparing to flee.
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan Page 36