The Delmonico had almost no kitchen, but Ed and Sylvia didn’t need one. They continued to dine out almost every evening in fashionable Manhattan restaurants, most often dining by themselves, though fans and friends invariably stopped by to socialize. As many show staffers recalled, Sylvia loved going out and always dressed with great elegance. At dinner, her tastes were gourmet, unlike Ed, who had little sense of smell or taste and so was always complimenting the chef while putting small packets of artificial sugar into his wine. After dinner the couple might see a Broadway show or a nightclub revue, which Ed reviewed in his column (advertisements for Broadway shows were now in their fourth decade of including one-line blurbs touting his opinion). They often stayed out for late evening drinks at a nightclub, perhaps Danny’s Hideaway or the Copacabana, where Ed still scouted for talent; on certain evenings they were out until 3 A.M. Ed almost never watched television, except for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which he was quite fond of.
The Sullivans were invited to any number of social galas, but usually declined. Ed didn’t like large groups, preferring to socialize with people he knew well. If they were out with a group and Ed didn’t know one person it made him uneasy. However, when he granted one of his many interviews, he invited reporters to the Delmonico and chatted volubly, jumping freely from topic to topic. Some interviewers felt they met a completely different man than the one seen on his Sunday show. He also overcame his natural reserve to attend the innumerable events at which he was given an award. In October 1962, for example, he was honored for promoting international goodwill by the People-to-People Sports Committee. City planner Robert Moses, commending Ed’s spirit to the six hundred guests, said, “if we can continue that spirit into other international affairs we shall be well on the way to brotherhood and peace.”
Ed, out late and usually sleeping late, didn’t eat breakfast until around 11 A.M., ordering room service or having Carmine fix it. Either way, the meal rarely varied: a lamb chop, artificially sweetened pears, and a glass of iced tea. Because his breakfast was late morning, his meals were out of sync with the typical schedule; if he had a business lunch in the early afternoon and wasn’t hungry, he might drop a chicken leg in his pocket, taking it out after midnight for a snack. When he went to lunch and forgot his wallet, not an uncommon occurrence, the restaurant called the show and put it on his tab. To get around town he hailed his own taxi—he disdained limousines, or anything resembling an entourage. Once inside the cab he invariably quizzed the driver: what did you think of last week’s show?
In the 1961–62 season, NBC renewed its attempt to break Sullivan’s vise grip on Sunday night, launching Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, hosted by the beloved Disney himself. Originally debuting on ABC in 1954, the Disney show was one of television’s most successful. When the Sullivan show was the fifth-ranked program in 1954–55, Disney had run sixth; when The Ed Sullivan Show ascended to number three the following year, Disney ranked fourth. After that the programs’ ratings began to diverge, with Disney’s falling further behind. Never before 1961, however, had Disney run opposite The Ed Sullivan Show, and never had it run on NBC, a far stronger network than ABC at the time. That fall, NBC broadcast Disney from 7:30 to 8:30 P.M., opposite the first half hour of The Ed Sullivan Show. It was followed by Car 54, Where Are You?, a situation comedy that was never a major ratings contender.
The Disney show achieved part of NBC’s goal. Although the program trailed Sullivan in the ratings, it pulled his ranking down to number twenty, from the previous season’s fourteen. The effect was temporary. In the 1962–63 season, The Ed Sullivan Show climbed back to number fourteen, while Disney’s ratings remained beneath the top twenty. It wasn’t that Sullivan changed his formula; he could do little in response to Disney except include kids’ fare as he always had. He merely updated it as the culture updated, as he had since 1948. And he now had the help of his son-in-law Bob Precht, sharpening the show’s production values and nudging Ed toward the contemporary.
Central to the 1962–63 season’s success was Ed’s continuing alembic of the new pop sound with the unquestionably square. The square was as milquetoast as ever—Sammy Davis crooned “What Kind of Fool Am I?”—but the new was heading in unforeseen directions. A notable example was the booking of twenty-one-year-old folksinger Bob Dylan, which ran afoul of network censors that May. At dress rehearsal, Dylan sang his song “Talking John Birch Society Blues,” a skewering of the archconservative group’s anticommunist fervor (“Well I was looking everywhere for them gol-darned Reds / I got up in the morning and looked under my bed”). Precht had okayed the song beforehand and Ed had approved it in rehearsal. But the CBS Standards and Practices representative who watched all dress rehearsals—this was live TV, so performances were vetted in advance—vetoed the selection, giving no official explanation. Dylan, rather than choose an alternative, decided not to appear on the show. Both Bob and Ed said they wanted to have him back, but he never returned.
That Dylan was booked at all was a sign that Precht was taking a stronger role in the show’s choices. Ed knew how to follow the pop charts and had a knack for combining current chart climbers with older artists. But Dylan, though signed with Columbia Records, wasn’t on the charts at the time. Not until that summer, when Peter, Paul & Mary turned “Blowin’ in the Wind” into a hit, did Dylan start to become widely known. It was Precht’s youthful approach that was pushing the show toward performers like Dylan who were ahead of the cultural curve.
That fall Sullivan’s comedy bookings took a similarly contemporary turn, when he presented a series of politically pointed segments entitled “What’s Going on Here?” Written and performed by the stars of the popular British satirical revues “Beyond the Fringe” and “The Establishment,” the segments were presented as mock TV newscasts. Before they were aired, a reporter asked Bob Precht how the notoriously irreverent comics would fit with the Sullivan show. “The actors will be free to prepare whatever they like, but Ed will retain editorial control,” Precht said. Ed, in fact, gave them far more latitude than he would have in years past.
In a typical Sullivan mix, the acerbic British comedy team was booked to perform with easygoing comics Bob and Ray, an American duo whose dry wit had been a staple of 1940s radio. But in this case the pairing did nothing to soften the British edge. The English satirists intoned fictional news reports like “Alabama has moved ahead of Mississippi in the race race” and “Fidel Castro is accusing the CIA of launching hurricane Flora. It was last seen heading for Red China.” The furthest extreme of the troupe’s work was a mock news conference about Vietnam. As performed by actors John Bird and Jeremy Geidt, who portrayed President Kennedy and a reporter, the dialogue disintegrated into meaningless government-speak. Lending extra bite, the segment included a clip of Kennedy himself zigzagging through a near duplicate of the comics’ lines. The suggestion that a U.S. president was dissembling on a military effort was unheard of in a major venue at the time.
After the segment ended, Ed attempted to diffuse the effect by telling viewers that the White House had agreed to the use of the Kennedy clip. It was, apparently, all in good fun, but for Ed to watch this material in dress rehearsal and approve it for his national audience meant his approach was changing.
Certainly the politically charged nature of the “What’s Going On Here?” segments was the exception in the show’s early 1960s comedy bookings, though by now many of the show’s comics had evolved past the Henny Youngman—vaudeville school. Their routines tended to involve longer setups and more references to current events, rather than the one-liners and timeless domestic squabbles mined by 1950s comedians. One of Ed’s favorites in this period was Stiller and Meara, a husband-and-wife team whose act was developed in Greenwich Village clubs, and whose Jewish—Catholic combination mirrored Sullivan’s own marriage; Ed booked them a remarkable thirty-six times. He was also fond of Phyllis Diller, an early female stand-up comedienne known for her lighthearted edge, and Jackie Mason
and Alan King, Borscht Belters who could reach Peoria. These comedians’ humor was transitional rather than forward looking, contemporary without being edgy.
This same “era between the eras” aesthetic informed the movie that Ed appeared in that year, Bye Bye Birdie, based on the Tony Award—winning 1961 Broadway musical. In the film’s convoluted plot, Elvis-like singer Conrad Birdie is about to be drafted, but first travels to a small Ohio town to kiss good-bye an adoring teenage fan, an event to be broadcast on The Ed Sullivan Show. Dick Van Dyke plays a songwriter who’s convinced that if Birdie sings his song on the Sullivan show, fame will automatically follow. Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell play teenagers in love, with Paul Lynde and Mary LaRoche as the disapproving parents.
Birdie is all about how rock ’n’ roll and love-lust drives kids crazy, but in the movie’s world these forces are merely catalysts for a lighthearted romp. Protesters converge on Washington carrying signs protesting Birdie’s draft, a scene inspired by the real-life protesters now staging the first few placard-carrying parades in the nation’s capital. Yet in Birdie the protesters are just a bunch of wacky teenagers. The movie was a nod to the emerging youth culture, but its wink at the audience reassured viewers that it was nothing to take seriously.
Ed on film was much smoother than Ed on live television. With a director who had authority over him and with multiple takes, he suffered no fumbled lines and no garbled syntax. A box-office success, the movie paid homage to Ed’s now-iconic status—a guest shot on Sullivan, according to Birdie, was a guarantee of fame. Ed played himself as completely assured of the movie’s main tenet, that is, that Ed Sullivan was a leading promoter of a rock ’n’ roll—crazed youth culture. This referenced Ed’s real-life booking of Elvis and a long train of other nascent pop-rockers, from Buddy Holly to Sam Cooke. While many adults shook their heads in disbelief, his open invitation to these acts gave the new youth sound the Sullivan imprimatur of approval. And in case viewers were in doubt about the Sullivan show’s cultural primacy, the script worked the point hard. Bob Precht, played by the fiftyish Robert Paige, exclaimed, “You know, with a plug like this, this song will sell a million records. Man, what royalties!”
In Birdie, the world that Ed helped wrought is in full flower. The teens all seem brainwashed, thinking with one mind, seemingly zombified by adulation of their rock ’n’ roll hero. The fresh-faced, clean-cut Birdie, an Elvis clone, wears a gold lamé outfit with gold boots, and his singing causes an entire crowd of teens to actually faint with adoration. The movie’s climactic scene, with Birdie-Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show amid wildly enthusiastic teens, is essentially a replay of the real Elvis debut on Sullivan in 1956—but a fully neutered one. Oddly, the movie is a musical about rock ’n’ roll but its music isn’t Elvis-like. Instead it’s a kind of jazzed up full-orchestra sound reminiscent of Bobby Darin. Even Birdie onstage at the Sullivan show plays only lightly strummed folk music. Apparently the filmmakers were attempting a balancing act similar to Ed’s: they wanted to attract both a teen and an adult audience, without offending either one.
Birdie opened in theaters the same month, April 1963, that Topo Gigio debuted on the Sullivan show. A diminutive foam rubber hand puppet, Topo was operated by a team of four Italian puppeteers; he gestured, he danced, his giant ears flopped, his little mouth moved, and he voiced sweet endearments with a loopy Italian accent. Ed, breaking his longstanding rule against taking a lead performance role, developed a routine with Topo. When “The Little Italian Mouse” was a guest, the stage went dark except for a spotlight on Sullivan and the marionette, and the two chatted as confidants, the serious-looking showman leaning in to receive the puppet’s cute replies. They spoke about nothing in particular, yet their tête-à-têtes went on for several minutes. With the Italian puppeteers’ rudimentary English, and Ed’s tendency to fumble his lines, the show’s staff had to be on its toes as the segment veered off script.
Topo revealed an unseen side of Ed. Onstage he operated at a remove, only in rare moments breaking the self-created wall of formality separating him from his audience. But in the Topo segments this wall dissolved. He seemed to lose himself in conversation with the little mouse, chatting intimately with the character as if he were alive. In their affectionate back-and-forth, Ed displayed a vulnerable side of himself that had never been hinted at in his many years of hosting. On its face the Topo—Ed act was a contradiction. Here was Ed, a man whom his critics (and even friends) had called every variation of stiff, who had cursed and elbowed his way to stardom, burning through an ulcer, yet onstage with Topo he was a sentimental ball of sweetness, being childlike for a live audience of forty million viewers.
With the Italian puppet Topo Gigio in the mid 1960s. The cute puppet was the prop that Sullivan had always wanted to soften his onstage persona. (CBS Photo Archive)
The little mouse was the prop he had always wanted. This was what he sought when he hired Patsy Flick to heckle him in 1948, or booked Will Jordan to mimic him in 1953. Topo opened him up. With the little mouse Ed was anything but Old Stoneface; he was tender and soft. Their segments invariably ended with Topo imploring “Kees-a-me goodnight, Eddie.”
Ed grew to love the little character. He enjoyed the act so much he eventually wore it out; his staff was relieved when he finally quit. He booked Topo an astounding fifty times; only one other act received more bookings (Canadian comedy team Wayne and Schuster, fifty-eight times). Sullivan became so identified with Topo that sometimes as he walked the streets of New York a truck driver would yell out “Kees-a-me goodnight, Eddie!”
It’s likely that part of Ed’s motivation for developing the Topo character was the competition from Disney. With the animator’s show offering the younger set a universe of fantasy and delight, spotlighting the little mouse may have helped parents keep the channel turned to CBS. If Sullivan’s plan was to turn Topo into an irresistible character, he succeeded. The foam rubber puppet became a star in his own right, spawning a legion of little Topo figurines and dolls. The United Nations named him their official “spokesmouse.” In 1965, United film studios released a movie starring the diminutive puppet (in which Topo attempts a trip to the moon), and acquired the rights to make one Topo film a year for the next four years.
In late May 1963, Ed and Sylvia were invited to Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel to attend a birthday party for President John Kennedy. The event was a glittering dinner and variety show for six hundred members of the President’s Club, each of whom donated at least $1,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Along with the president and his wife, many of the members of his administration were there: Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, United Nations representative Adlai Stevenson, and Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman.
Ed adored the Kennedys. Other presidents would invite him to the White House; he and Sylvia attended two state dinners hosted by President Johnson, and President Nixon invited the couple to help celebrate Duke Ellington’s seventieth birthday. But these occasions never seemed to matter to him as much as a chance to rub shoulders with the Kennedys. He contributed to JFK’s presidential campaign, and sent a regular stream of birthday notes and letters of encouragement to members of the Kennedy clan. Sullivan was a friend of patriarch Joe Kennedy, who had been a lion of café society in the 1930s; Ed had lauded him in his column for decades. The two men corresponded, and in one letter Ed suggested that musical theater artists Oscar Hammerstein and Moss Hart write speeches for President Kennedy—an idea that Joe Kennedy liked, though it never happened. The elder Kennedy attended Ed and Sylvia’s thirtieth anniversary party in April 1960, and for the event he wrote the couple an affectionate letter that concluded, “All the Kennedys send you and your family our love.”
Joe Kennedy also sent Sylvia a note in October of that year as the presidential election neared, making reference to Richard Nixon’s problems with makeup in the recent presidential debates. “Dear Sylvia, I had read that piece about makeup. I agree with you—how
many more excuses can they find? Incidentally, things are getting better every day. Sincerely, Joe.” In April 1962, Ed sent a letter to Joe Kennedy in which he enthused, “I think that your brilliant young son has wrapped up another term in the White House as a result of his quick and determined handling of Steel.… Poor Nixon is in a helluva spot. Now he can write another book and add an additional ‘crisis.’ ”
Old Blue Eyes and Old Stoneface, at the Eden Roc nightclub, Florida, 1964. The longtime friendship between the two men boiled over into a bitter squabble in the mid 1950s, though Sinatra later made a peace overture. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
President Kennedy, in March 1961, sent a short letter to Sullivan agreeing to tape a promotional message Ed had requested, for an event that encouraged international understanding. The letter from Kennedy was typed and addressed “Dear Mr. Sullivan” but the president scratched out “Mr. Sullivan” and wrote in “Ed.” “The idea for your International Assembly sounds most interesting and it is certainly a much-needed effort in the field of international communications,” Kennedy wrote. “I would be happy to prepare a taped message for your first Assembly.”
In later years, Ed contributed to the Kennedy Library, and received letters of thanks from Ted Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Ted Kennedy’s wife Joan sent Ed a thank-you note in July 1964 with an added postscript: “P.S. Ted and I watch your wonderful show every week and enjoy it so much.”
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan Page 41