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IMPRESARIO
The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan
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Excerpt from:
Chapter Sixteen: The Generation Gap
(Since its debut in 1948, the Sullivan show had always reflected the many changes in American popular taste. But as the country moved toward the social turmoil of the late 1960s, the show's reflection of current trends began to alienate its older viewers. This chapter describes the process by which show, with its all-encompassing Big Tent booking policy, navigated in an increasingly divisive time period.)
Something fundamental was changing, or so it appeared by watching The Ed Sullivan Show’s 1968-69 season. Until this season, the show had felt like an updated version of its circa 1950s offering, despite the increased volume and tempo since the Beatles’ 1964 debut. But now, as the tumultuous changes happening outside the theater door began playing center stage, the show felt markedly different. Typifying the season was an act Ed presented in January 1969, the Peter Gennaro Dancers. An acclaimed Broadway performer-choreographer, Gennaro led his troupe that evening in a routine inspired by the headlines. Ed, with speech more garbled than ever before, brought them out with a flourish.
Dressed in a bulky astronaut outfit, Genarro danced as if he were gamboling on a moonscape. Six female dancers rotated around him, dressed in skintight silver polyester, with bare midriffs and tall silver headdresses. Their musical accompaniment was “Strangers In The Night,” but the arrangement was far from the familiar orchestral strains. Instead, the romantic ballad was rendered as if by a computer, the melody burbling forth in a disjointed bleep-blip style, twanged by filtered, syncopated guitars. The astronaut and his silver-clad space nymphs moved likewise, floating or moving herky-jerky like moon explorers buffeted by random lunar winds. As they concluded, Ed led the applause and mentioned that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller had invited him to the Waldorf-Astoria to meet the astronauts, who would attempt the first moon landing that summer.
Gennaro’s routine was enchanting. The problem was that, for Ed’s older viewers, there were now just too many dancing astronauts, strange rock bands, and comedians with a pointed sense of humor. It wasn’t that the show’s approach had changed – though it was making something of a shift – it was that the world outside had changed. In many ways, The Ed Sullivan Show was doing what it had always done: mirroring the culture as it evolved with the times. When Milton Berle’s vaudeville one-liners made him the leading comic in the early '50s, Ed booked him; when Elvis burst on the scene in the mid ‘50s, Ed (reluctantly) presented him; when shifting tastes in the early '60s made Mort Sahl’s socially conscious humor palatable to mainstream audiences, Ed invited him on. Sullivan’s coup in booking the Beatles, for all its headlines, was simply his latest step in staying culturally current. But in the 1968-69 season, as the national mood heated to a boiling point, mirroring the culture meant presenting a mix the show’s older viewers had little interest in watching.
In truth, this shift didn’t happen in just one season; it was a continuum. Surely, Doors lead singer Jim Morrison’s frenzied vocal performance in September 1967 had caused plenty of channels to switch in disgust. Even the wave of relatively well-scrubbed rockers in the mid 1960s, like Herman’s Hermits and the Turtles, had tried the patience of many older viewers. But if there was a single tipping point when the elements aimed at older and younger audiences grew so oppositional they began to tear the show apart, it was in its 1968-69 season. This was, not coincidentally, about the same moment that the culture itself erupted into a generational divisiveness never before seen in American history.
In addition to mirroring social changes that made older viewers uncomfortable, the show’s format was shifting. While still hewing faithfully to its something-for-everyone approach, the program’s booking choices now reflected a desire to reach a younger, hipper audience. America was making the shift toward being a youth-oriented culture, and the Sullivan show was as well, or at least was attempting to.
Opening its 1968-69 season was psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane, who had personified San Francisco’s Summer of Love hippie-fest the year before. Following them that fall was Tiny Tim, the gender-bending ukulele player popularized by Laugh-In, and The Beach Boys performing their homage to psychedelia, “Good Vibrations.” In September the Supremes used the Sullivan show to introduce a new song, “Love Child,” which represented a left turn in the trio’s direction. Unlike their previous hits, this tune was socially conscious, reflecting ghetto life and the legacy of poverty. That evening the Supremes abandoned their sequined glamour to perform in sweatshirts and bare feet. Ed’s introduction may have been the most jarring change. Hearing the 67-year-old showman enthusiastically shout a song title that referred to an illegitimate child – “and now, here’s ‘Love Child!’” – only reinforced the idea that something profound was changing.
Clearly, the musical beat was picking up a different vibe, with appearances by Sly and The Family Stone, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Steppenwolf, who performed their hallucinatory ode “Magic Carpet Ride.” Janis Joplin let loose with a shout-singing rendering of “Raise Your Hand” and “Maybe. ” (In rehearsal Ed introduced the singer as “from Joplin, Missouri,” and although she corrected him, he still introduced her that evening as “From Joplin…”) The cast of the Broadway tribal rock musical Hair – the show was charged with desecration of the American flag, and its use of nudity and profanity sparked a lawsuit that went to the U.S. Supreme Court – sang “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In.”
There was, as always, plenty of material aimed at squarer sensibilities. Ed interviewed retired boxer Sugar Ray Robinson about his picks for the ring’s best fighters, and World Series winning pitcher Bob Gibson strummed guitar. An ensemble called Your Father’s Mustache harmonized on “Take Me Out To the Ballgame,” and vanilla balladeer John Davidson intoned “Didn’t We.” Jim Henson presented his Muppets for the kids. In a nod to former years when the show presented more high art, ballet stars Allegra Kent and Jacques d’Amboise danced a pas de deux, and British actor David Hemmings recited a Dylan Thomas poem.
But it felt like the balance had tipped. For every time Rodney Dangerfield played the regular guy (“I don’t get no respect”), Richard Pryor did one of his offbeat routines, like a bit about what it means to be “cool.” Norm Crosby played his working-class fractured English for laughs, to be followed not long after by Flip Wilson, a black comic who sometimes dressed as a woman. During dress rehearsal in the fall of 1968, comedian George Carlin was asked to eliminate one of two particularly trenchant segments; delivering both would have been too abrasive, Sullivan felt. One of Carlin’s segments skewered archconservative politician George Wallace for decrying “pointy-headed intellectuals” – Carlin’s routine turned the phrase around to refer to the Klu Klux Klan; his other segment referred to Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his boxing license for refusing military induction. As Carlin’s joke described Ali’s situation: “Muhammad Ali, whose job is beating people up, didn’t want to go overseas and kill people. And the government said, ‘If you’re not going to kill them, we’re not going to let you beat them up.’” Of the two segments, Carlin chose to perform the Ali material for that evening’s broadcast, because “it had more resonance in what was wrong with the society than the Governor Wallace pointy-head line.”
In response to the Sullivan show’s more challenging material, many of Ed’s viewers turned the channel. The FBI, a crime drama on ABC that had played opposite The Ed Sullivan Show since 1965, had always run far behind. But during the 1968-69 season, a large portion of Sullivan’s audience preferred the square-jawed certitude of its weekly triumph of good over evil. That season The FBI was 18th ranked, while the Sullivan show tumbled to number 23, its first time outside the top twenty since the Western craze of the late 1950s.
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