Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  In December, his experience at a charity event was painfully coincident with his current fortunes. The Loyal League Philanthropies asked him to emcee an awards banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria, attended by about eight hundred people. Ed presented an award to the owner of a clothing store chain, Mortimer Janis, for his efforts on behalf of underprivileged children. Shortly after Ed handed him the award, Janis, sitting at the dais, collapsed. A nurse tried to revive him but to no avail. He died of an apparent heart attack. In the numberless such events that Ed had hosted over the decades, such a mortal calamity had never happened. It appeared to be some form of omen.

  Bill Gallo, a Daily News cartoonist who had sometimes met Ed for lunch in earlier decades, ran into him on the street. “I saw him on Broadway, very forlorn—believe it or not, no one recognized him, he just looked so goddamned sad and puffy.” To cheer him up, Gallo organized a luncheon in his honor hosted by the Boxing Writers Association. Ed got up and gave a speech, and then began to relate anecdotes, traveling back through the decades. “It was nonstop stories,” Gallo recalled, “about the Dempsey—Tunney fight, the Firpo fight, golfing with Joe Louis.…”

  Notwithstanding his shaky mental state, the entertainment industry kept calling him. In January 1974, the seventy-two-year-old showman was invited to be master of ceremonies for CBS’s Entertainers of the Year Awards, taped in Las Vegas with guests Carol Burnett, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Sonny and Cher. Producing the show were Bob Precht and John Moffit, the Sullivan show’s director, who decided to videotape Ed’s lead-ins for fear he couldn’t handle the live audience. But the night before, as they taped Ed reading his cues from a TelePrompTer, he kept fumbling his lines. He spoke in a small, weak voice, often stopping to ask, “Bob, who’s this? I can’t read it.” As Moffit recalled, “Bob finally threw up his hands and said, ‘John, we’re not going to get it, he’s tired, we’ll do the best we can tomorrow.’ ” The evening of the show, a huge audience—including a very concerned Precht and Moffit—filled the Caesar’s Palace ballroom. The show’s brassy music began pumping, and as the announcer gave Ed a rousing introduction, the audience began to cheer and scream with wild enthusiasm.

  “Ed came out onstage,” Moffit remembered, “straightened himself up, walked across the stage, and said,”—in a big bold voice—“‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen! Tonight, from Caesar’s Palace…’ and it was the old Ed, the old warhorse, he got it together, the crowd brought him up, and all of a sudden this weak old man was the old Ed Sullivan for one hour.”

  During his Las Vegas trip, Ed had dinner with comedian Shecky Greene, whom he had gotten to know over the course of booking him six times. After Sylvia’s death the two became good friends. Greene remembered Sullivan as a cantankerous host who not infrequently found reason to curse at him. Before one broadcast, Greene requested that Sullivan introduce him as a German comic (though Greene wasn’t), and Ed complied. Shecky, in a fake German accent, did a routine in which he explained Ed had been on the air so long “because he has no talent—he doesn’t sing, he doesn’t dance, he doesn’t do anything.” As soon as he walked offstage, Ed accosted him, storming, “You son of a bitch—I’ve got more talent in my little finger than anyone I’ve ever had on this stage!”

  Despite their rows, Greene was enormously fond of Sullivan, especially as they grew closer after Sylvia died. “I loved him,” Greene said. “I thought he was some kind of guy.” The comedian recalled how mentally confused Ed was in this period. Although Sylvia had died several months before, when he and Sullivan spoke, Ed invariably told him, “Sylvia and I were talking about you the other night.”

  The night of their dinner together in Las Vegas, Shecky told Ed the story of his decision to skip an airplane flight after one of his comedy performances—a decision that saved his life when the plane crashed. Ed so liked the anecdote that he asked Greene to repeat it; he wanted to use it in his Little Old New York column. But even transcribing an anecdote was difficult in Ed’s current state. “He got cocktail napkins, a lot of them, and he was writing one line at a time, and [the ink] kept spreading,” Greene recalled. As written in Ed’s column the story lacked coherence. “When he put it in the paper, people called me and asked, ‘What was that about?’ He never put in the punch line.” (By one account, the Daily News was growing restive with Ed’s tenure and wanted to ease him out, but Carmine begged them to let him stay a little longer.)

  Those close to him saw a surprising change. Ed had always enjoyed being out in public, delighting in the attention. John Moffit once gave him a ride across town during which Ed leaned out the window and directed traffic the entire time, playfully bossing the other drivers. He had always been famously accessible to fans, signing autographs with great care, asking a fan’s name then writing a sentence dedicated to him or her. Now he turned away from the public. One night as he was finishing dinner at an Italian restaurant in midtown with his grandson Rob Precht, then in his late teens, Ed noticed a group of fans waiting outside the door. “My grandfather very abruptly turned to me and said, ‘I’m not going to deal with them.’ ”

  Still, despite his deepening depression, Sullivan might surprise his grandson with flashes of his former spirit. On one occasion during these months, Rob was walking Ed home late in the evening, going up Park Avenue toward the Delmonico, when he spotted two figures walking toward them who were obviously prostitutes, dressed in tight miniskirts and high heels. Rob felt a twinge of anxiety as they approached, thinking, “I hope they don’t recognize him and start to engage him in conversation—he’s frail, and sad, and I want to spare him any inconvenience.” But as the ladies neared, it was Ed himself who decided to say hello, bellowing out “Hello, girls, how are you?” The women were momentarily startled, then seemed to realize who he was, at which point Rob guided his grandfather by the elbow toward home.

  In May 1974, Sullivan was hospitalized for a problem related to his long-standing ulcer condition. He was released at the end of the month with instructions to come back for daily visits. However, he began skipping visits, making it in perhaps once a week. That summer, having spent very little time in churches throughout his life, Ed was seen praying at St. Malachy’s Church in midtown.

  On September 6, an X-ray revealed bad news. Sullivan’s doctor checked him into Lenox Hill hospital and called his family, who decided not to tell him the full nature of his illness. Ed had inoperable cancer of the esophagus, and his doctor told his family that he wasn’t expected to live much longer. “We had consulted with his doctors and it was felt that if he were told the truth, it would severely dampen his spirits and make him totally depressed,” Bob Precht said. “It was best he didn’t know. Right up until the day he died, his spirits were fine and he believed he was going to get well.”

  He spent five weeks in the hospital. Bob and Betty visited regularly, and Carmine Santullo was there constantly. On September 28, his seventy-third birthday, he was given two parties: one by the nurses, relishing their celebrity guest; the other by his family, at which he ate cake and ice cream and talked about looking forward to getting back to work. In fact he hadn’t left work. He continued to write his column from his hospital bed, piecing together Little Old New York from press releases delivered by Carmine.

  On the afternoon of October 13 his doctor called the Prechts; Ed’s condition had worsened dramatically. They immediately drove to the hospital, sitting at his bedside while he lay unconscious. At 7:30 P.M., when Carmine arrived, they left. Carmine sat with him through the evening as Ed remained unconscious.

  It was a Sunday night. Since 1948 he had lived for Sunday nights, and now he was dying on one. But not until the show was over. Shortly after 10 P.M., as the evening’s program would have been finished, and Sylvia would have been picking him up for dinner at Danny’s Hideaway, he stopped breathing.

  The funeral, on October 16, was a celebrity affair. Held on a rainy autumnal day, with some three thousand people crowded into and right outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the event dr
ew both mourners and those seeking a glimpse of the famous. The crowd outside, most carrying black umbrellas, watched a long line of limousines deliver entertainment, sports, and political figures to the front door. Cardinal Cooke led the service, and the attendees included Mayor Abe Beame, former Mayor John Lindsay, Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz, restaurateur Toots Shor, boxer Jack Dempsey, vaudevillian Peg Leg Bates, comedian Rodney Dangerfield, and Metropolitan Opera star Rise Stevens. Classical pianist Van Cliburn praised Sullivan for his “faithfulness to the serious arts.” CBS head Bill Paley called the showman “an American landmark.” Walter Cronkite, who first met Sullivan before World War II, said, “Ed had a remarkable quality of toughness in pursuing what he saw as right. He was an Irish grabber and I think that’s admirable.”

  Ed had updated his will in March 1973. He left virtually all of his estate to Betty, with $10,000 going to Carmine, and a smaller amount left to his siblings. He noted in his will that he made no bequest to charity because he had done so much for charitable concerns during his life. He was buried next to Sylvia in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

  The day after he died, the Daily News printed Ed’s last column, which he had written in his final days at Lenox Hill hospital. He composed that edition’s Little Old New York much as he had written the column for the last forty-two years, using a series of ellipses to connect disparate items, one bit flowing into another, a stylistic invention he borrowed from Walter Winchell in the early 1930s. Because he believed he would soon leave the hospital, the column was its usual all-inclusive mix, spotlighting events across myriad fields:

  “Bennett Cerf’s widow, Phyllis, partied [sic] Sinatra after Garden blockbuster … Mia Farrow okay after appendectomy … Richard Zanuck and Linda Harrison derailed … French President Giscard d’Estaing holds press conference on 24th to outline France’s policy in foreign affairs … Dionne Warwick packing Chicago’s Mill Run theater…

  President Ford’s ex-press sec’y, J.F. TerHorst, guest speaker at Nat’l Academy of TV luncheon at Plaza on Thursday … Hal (“Candide”) Prince’s backers got another $217,500 from his three hits: “Fiddler,” “Cabaret,” and “Night Music”…David Frost and Lady Jane Wellesley a London duet … Nirvana Discotheque, a $250,000 shipwreck, to reopen as Nirvana East restaurant … The Jimmy (Stage Deli) Richters’ fifth ann’y … Cardinal Cooke presents special awards to couples married 50 years, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Jan. 12 …”

  The tidbits flowed continuously, seemingly without end, providing something for everyone in a rapidly moving one-column parade. Ed was gone, but Little Old New York, as it always had, kept bustling on.

  At Yonkers Raceway, 1967. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  Epilogue

  FAME IS WHAT EDWARD VINCENT SULLIVAN DESIRED, and fame is what he achieved. In his lifetime, there were few public figures who spent as many hours in as many American living rooms as Ed Sullivan. He was known, and in many cases revered, by the tens of millions of almost ritualistic viewers who gathered each Sunday to watch his weekly circus. He is forever memorialized as the monochromatic purveyor of a wildly polychromatic mélange, a graven-faced emcee who turned hosting a lively showcase of high and low art into a remarkably sober task. That this compressed icon of Ed Sullivan bore only nominal resemblance to the flesh-and-blood Ed Sullivan is of little import. Certainly, the vituperative, epithet-hurling Stork Club habitué, the Fidel Castro interviewer and earnest blacklisted the rock ’n’ roll patron saint and strict moralist, the producer who was tyrannical and sentimental, shrewd and irrational, petty and generous, was only glimpsed at moments on screen. But no matter. He is stored for the millennia with his name atop the marquee, as he so hungered for.

  Reruns and retrospectives of The Ed Sullivan Show—his beloved creation that he placed at the center of his life—have continued to fuel that fame. The show has never fully gone off the air. After cancellation of its original run in 1971, it became a bottomless source of clips, the ultimate trove for television and documentary producers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ed was seen swinging his right arm and pointing to any number of acts. In 1980, a “Best of Sullivan” series appeared in syndication, broadcasting edited thirty-minute versions of the one-hour show periodically throughout the decade.

  The showman’s return to major network success came on February 17, 1991, in a broadcast, appropriately, on CBS on Sunday night. The program was produced by Andrew Solt, a television and film producer who had often mined the Sullivan show for clips, and who bought the complete library from the Sullivan family in 1990. Called The Very Best of Ed Sullivan, the two-hour show was a decisive ratings victory for the network. It was the second-highest-rated program for the week, and helped CBS win the February sweeps for the first time since 1985. The network commissioned three more retrospectives, each of which was a Nielsen booster.

  Solt also produced a series of one hundred thirty half-hour Sullivan shows, which went into syndication in various outlets, including Ed Sullivan’s Rock ’n’ Roll Classics, played on the cable channel VH1, and a “Best of” program shown on the TV Land cable channel. PBS stations began airing Sullivan shows in 2001, typically on Saturday nights, broadcasting them regularly until 2004. Additionally, Solt produced a series of DVDs, including The Best of Broadway Musicals, Unforgettable Performances, and Rock ’n’ Roll Forever. Bootleg copies of the show do a healthy trade: Sullivania is sold continuously on eBay, further distributing not just show tapes but also photos of Ed with performers, ticket stubs, and, occasionally, odd items like a plaque awarded to the showman in the late 1960s.

  He was heartbroken that CBS wouldn’t allow him to extend the program into its twenty-fifth year. But as the clips and specials and DVDs keep getting viewed, the show finds its way into living rooms decades beyond cancellation, much less two more seasons. It appears The Ed Sullivan Show will have a longer life than the showman himself did.

  For someone who felt so long frustrated in his desire for national renown, launching short-lived radio shows again and again, trying abortively to break into film, and finding a rough early road in television, he succeeded surprisingly well. He pushed and shoved and cursed and worried, and he managed to propel the name Ed Sullivan on a continuous course through the decades. He achieved the fame he hungered for, and then some.

  Yet his fame, whether it lasts or recedes to the vanishing point, is incidental to his greatest accomplishment. His legacy for posterity, stored in the Library of Congress as befitting the archive it is, is the complete collection of Ed Sullivan shows. Taken in their entirety, the one thousand eighty-seven episodes, spanning twenty-three seasons, are an incomparable cultural document.

  For someone of a later age to ask: What was it like? What was the nature of American culture between 1948 and 1971? Their answer lies on those videotapes. The twenty-three seasons of live performances fully capture American tastes and views at a defining moment, both in the history of broadcast and in national history. They reveal the very birth of television, from its technical infancy to its first maturity, from a period when commercials were performed live onstage to the era when demographics began to rule the medium. They also reflect the American Zeitgeist, from the dawn of the country’s status as a world power to the era when the Baby Boom generation first exerted its influence. That the library of shows offers such a telling panoramic record of both these arcs makes it more than worth the considerable shelf space it occupies in the national archives.

  Many television shows, of course, can be said to reflect American tastes or reveal something of their time period. But The Ed Sullivan Show transcends its compatriots because of the catholicity of Ed’s vision. The Sullivan show was everything. His formula was vaudeville expanded to its furthermost edge, then beyond. It was opera and rock ’n’ roll, boxing and ballet, slapstick and social consciousness, the Vienna Boys Choir and the Woody Herman Orchestra, dramatic Bible readings and psychedelia, blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles, Fred Astaire, Tiny Tim, Richard Bu
rton, Duke Ellington, John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl Sandburg and Karl Wallenda, Eugene O’Neill, and Rodney Dangerfield, Jason Robards and Jessica Tandy, Mort Sahl and Janis Joplin and Michael Jackson, Cole Porter and Walt Disney and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Salvador Dalí and Elvis Presley and Margaret Truman and Van Cliburn and Frankie Avalon, and—the list exhausts itself, the list breaks the very definition of a list because all the items on it could not appear on a single list. Yet they did. Some ten thousand performers graced the Sullivan stage.

  The Ed Sullivan Show stands alone, too, because its impresario was such an inveterate newshound, with one eye cocked toward the latest headline and one moist finger hoisted in the air, always ready to proceed with cautious boldness wherever his audience was ready to go, and sometimes where they weren’t. He was a man of the moment, that week, wanting the show to be as newsworthy, and as news making, as the best of his Broadway columns. This made his program, unlike most other popular long-running shows, an immediate sonar ping reflection of its season. Each episode was a curio snapshot of its moment.

  Cementing the show’s status as an archive of its time was Sullivan’s intuitive knack for reaching, some might say pandering to, the mass audience. He called to get the evening’s ratings every Monday morning, like a penitent bowing down to his deity, and he lived by those numbers. Because he reached so many viewers for so long, he created a show that influenced the tastes of the mainstream audience for decades. Magnifying his influence was the then-limited nature of the media universe. There was very little competition in his day: no cable television, no Internet, no movie rental. He was routinely watched by some thirty-five million people a week, year after year—a staggering number by comparison to later eras, when changes in media distribution fractured audiences into small slivers focusing on mutually exclusive material. His audience size during the ratings “slump” at the show’s end would have made the program a resounding success in later decades. Sullivan was one of the only games in town, which greatly amplified his role as a cultural tastemaker, and correspondingly amplifies the show’s position as a cultural archive.