It was an archive of his own life as well. For most of the show’s years there was some kind of circulatory system between him and his audience, allowing him to see as they saw, feel as they felt. If he had a genius, it was his ability to understand his viewers. He walked among his audience as an equal, and they saw that. He was at their service, his goal was to please them, yet he wasn’t separate from them; as he shaped the program in rehearsal each week his tastes were all but identical to theirs. So while the show was a reflection of his time, it also reflected Sullivan himself, how he saw the world, what he believed in. The Ed Sullivan Show was a self-portrait. Now, his body of work sits quietly on the shelf, finally freed from the constraints of ratings or sponsors, ready to provide an inimitable portrait of its time, and, if you know his story, the man himself.
To view his life in another way, his greatest achievement was temporal, completely of the moment. In this alternate view, likely the one he took himself, his life’s most significant moments took place every Sunday night between 1948 and 1971, and then they were gone. The Sullivan show had a unique quality, one that stood in marked contrast to the many shows it competed with. Because he structured it to offer something for every member of the family, the show brought the entire family together. It was a shared experience. This communal, ritualistic togetherness gave the program, and Sullivan’s life, its greatest meaning.
Few television viewers in later decades, used to programs geared for their specific interests and armed with a remote control, would sit through The Ed Sullivan Show. Fully half the hour or more every week was not intended for them. Yet during most of the years the program ran, entire families sat together and watched it, each member bored in turn, each member aware of and influenced by the others’ reactions. The glow of the cathode-ray tube fell upon a group sitting together, laughing, sighing, or gawking together, not on one or two viewers nurturing an already-established niche interest.
As Ed garbled his syntax and glanced nervously at the cue cards, bonding went on. Sister saw brother take an interest in the Cassius Clay interview, and brother saw sister’s eyes light up while watching Elvis. The older folks enjoyed seeing ancient vaudevillians like Sophie Tucker. Everybody endured opera, because Ed had access to the biggest opera stars, and he was determined to showcase the best of every field, whether it be ballet or football or acrobatics or film.
Sullivan’s grandson Rob Precht, who as a teen often spent time with his grandfather, sometimes wondered how Ed wanted to be remembered. Rob very clearly saw his grandfather’s desire for renown, but he also saw something else. It was almost a sense of “ministering” to his audience, Precht recalled. “I definitely think he had a sense that he was talking to Americans, he was watching out for them, he was giving them entertainment, he was showing them diversity. If you pressed him, in his more lucid days, I would not be surprised that if he were asked, What do you want to be remembered for? He would say, yes, fame, but also, bringing people together.”
It was clearly the central paradox of his life. He was a confirmed loner, distant from the countless people he knew, even removed in family gatherings, yet he was the producer of a program that brought the entire clan together like few others. The Ed Sullivan Show was the ultimate family show, produced by a man who had little patience for the rituals of familial togetherness. “He found family life entirely overrated,” Precht recalled. “He did not, on a personal level, enjoy family life … but, the way he connected to people was to be this family man on TV.”
Somehow, the calculus worked. The master showman, gifted at manufacturing the pixie dust of entertainment, created a convincing fictional image of himself as the ultimate Uncle Ed. He wasn’t a family man, but he played one on television. Yet on those Sunday evenings between 1948 and 1971, the result wasn’t an illusion; the television family man brought people together in real life. The entire family sat and shared, while he connected to them, as much as he was able, through the camera’s eye. It was television, but it was real.
Sources
One of the CBS executives I interviewed for this book, Irwin Segelstein, pointed out the difficulty of re-creating the past by talking to its participants. “One of the problems with what you do for a living,” he said, referring to writing a biography, “is that everyone gives you a version of what took place from their narrow, self-congratulatory point of view.”
That may be true, and certainly the passage of time changes memory, but the fact remains that I owe a heartfelt thanks to everyone who shared their recollections for this book. The scores of people—family members, performers, Sullivan staffers, and others who knew him personally—who shared their memories for this book added immeasurably.
First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to Betty Sullivan Precht, who generously spent hours on the telephone with me, and whose candor so greatly enriched this portrait of her father; and to her husband, Bob Precht, the Sullivan show’s producer, who not only shared his invaluable recollections, but also provided me with a list of phone numbers, and, finally, reviewed the manuscript and made suggestions; also, to Rob Precht, Sullivan’s grandson, for his nuanced and insightful sense of his grandfather.
I owe a special thanks to those Sullivan staff members who shared their thoughts; their behind-the-scenes insight on the show and Sullivan helped immeasurably: Susan Abramson, Bill Bohnert, Vince Calandra, Emily Cole, Vinna Foote, Barbara Gallagher, Verna Grafeld, Bernie Illson, Kathy Kuehl, John Moffit, Sistie Moffit, Russ Petranto, Peter Prichard, Jim Russek, and Mary Lynn Shapiro.
Equally important were the memories of performers and others who knew Sullivan or his times intimately, including Carl Ballantine, Carol Burnett, George Carlin, Jack Carter, Mike Dann, Larry Epstein, Phyllis Diller, Eric Fettmann, Connie Francis, Bill Gallo, Shecky Greene, Sherry Hackett, Will Jordan, Jane Kean, Andrew Lazlo, Preston Levi, Ray Manzarek, Jackie Mason, Jean Moore, Paul Winchell, Walter Podrazik, Joan Rivers, Irwin Segelstein, Andrew Solt, and Bruce Spizer.
Adding particular insight was Ed Sullivan’s collection of personal papers, some eighteen boxes of correspondence, contracts, and miscellaneous Sullivania stored at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, in Madison, Wisconsin. The days I spent at Madison proved invaluable. Also essential was the time I spent catacombed at the Library of Congress, reviewing the library’s collection of The Ed Sullivan Show.
Additionally, the New York Public Library’s microfilm collection enabled me to read Sullivan’s newspaper writings back to 1919, from his teenage reporting for the Port Chester Daily Item to his last days at the New York Daily News.
Ed Sullivan’s life was written about voluminously in periodicals after his television show’s debut, and I was able to review countless periodicals with the help of two sources: the New York Public Library, which keeps a file of clippings going back to the 1950s, containing everything from Time and Newsweek to Life and Editor and Publisher, as well as many regional newspapers; and the Center for American History, in San Antonio, Texas, which mailed me a thick file of Sullivan-related news clippings.
Among the many books I consulted, a few deserve special mention. Of particular aid were three earlier books about Sullivan and his show: Always on Sunday, Ed Sullivan: An Inside View, written in 1968 by CBS press agent Michael David Harris; A Thousand Sundays: the Story of The Ed Sullivan Show, written in 1980 by Jerry Bowles; and Prime Time, a memoir written in 1979 by Marlo Lewis, who worked with Sullivan to launch his television show. Also helpful was Neal Gabler’s superb Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity. Few books have so captured the culture of New York in the 1930s and 1940s.
Of the myriad books on television history I used, none were as helpful and as complete—and as entertainingly written—as Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television, by Walter Podrazik and Harry Castleman.
Selected Bibliography
Books
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Barnouw, Erik. The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States from 1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.
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Harris, Michael David. Always on Sunday, Ed Sullivan: An Inside View. New York: Signet Books, 1968.
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Learner, Laurence. King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989.
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Leonard, John. A Really Big Show: A Visual History of the Ed Sullivan Show. New York: Penguin Group, 1992.
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Levy, Shawn. King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan Page 51