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IMPRESARIO
The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan
Prologue
On an overcast Sunday morning he sat in his robe and hurriedly typed his column. Next to the typewriter sat his usual breakfast – a lamb chop ordered from room service, an artificially sweetened pear, and iced tea – and he ate while he worked.
Sundays were the longest days. He cranked out his New York Daily News column late morning, his driver picked him up early afternoon, then dress rehearsal – in which he pummeled the show into shape – followed by a lengthy production meeting, numerous last minute details, and finally, at eight o’clock…the cameras blinked on and he walked into millions of living rooms. So this morning, his poodle Bojangles (named after storied tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson) went neglected. And he could not so much as glance at his clutter of office mementoes: the caricature of him drawn by Walt Disney, a framed copy of Time magazine with his face on the cover, and, by the typewriter, a photo of his wife, Sylvia, inscribed To Ed with love – till the winds stop blowing.
Sylvia. When he and Sylvia Weinstein began dating in 1926, she told her parents she was seeing a boy named Ed Solomon, who worked as a sports reporter for the New York Graphic. “Oh,” her brother said, “you mean Ed Sullivan." The possibility of a Jewish-Catholic marriage made both families apprehensive – Ed’s much more so – and the romance was on-again, off-again for three years. Now, however, Sylvia and Ed formed a unit. Yes, there had been rumors of Ed and other women, but they never derailed the marriage. The couple went out to eat five nights a week, rotating through their favorite Manhattan nightspots, trendy places like Danny’s Hideaway or Jimmy Kelly’s. Like the show he produced, the marriage was a union of supposedly dissimilar elements that was larger than the sum of its parts. Ed called Sylvia every Sunday night immediately after the show – she watched at home – wanting to know how it had gone, but she understood he wanted only reassurance. Sylvia was a cheerleader, a supporter, tolerant of his moods, a safe harbor in a world filled with critics.
And, on that day in late 1969, she was the wife of the greatest impresario television had ever known. On that evening’s program would be The Rolling Stones, whose lead singer, Mick Jagger, was four years old when Sullivan debuted his program. Throughout all those years he had beaten the odds, the critics, the network executives, the talent agents, the well-financed competition. That so many people across boundaries of age and class were captured for so many years by one individual’s idea of entertainment was a cultural first, and perhaps a last. He created a strange alembic of highbrow and corn pone, Borsht Belt and middle America, shaping it week after week down to the last punch line. And the folks at home, regardless of the critical carping, loved it.
Later that day, as part of his Sunday ritual, he took a walk prior to show time. A little night air on Broadway, invariably running into fans, some pressing of the flesh to get the juices flowing for live TV. Ed walking up Broadway was like a creature in its most natural habitat. It was some 70 blocks uptown, in a Jewish and Irish neighborhood in Harlem, that he had been born. And it was in this very neighborhood, the heart of the theater district, that he had earned his stripes as a gossip columnist, making side money by producing countless vaudeville shows. Over on 48th he lived above a tavern in his early twenties, driving a new Durant roadster and dating flappers. It was on 53rd at the Stork Club that he had, according to Broadway lore, dunked the head of gossip king Walter Winchell into a toilet. With a few exceptions – childhood years in rural Port Chester, a three-year stint in Hollywood – he had lived his entire life within a 100-block area of Manhattan. When he made big money in the mid 1950s he and Sylvia bought a 180-acre estate in Connecticut, but later sold it because, as he put it, he was “temperamentally unsuited to country life.” Clearly, the street he was walking down was where he was meant to be. As he finished his walk and neared the theater, he saw his name up in lights; CBS had renamed Studio 50 the Ed Sullivan Theater. It was everything that he had ever dreamed of.
Yet he remained oddly insecure. He pretended to laugh off the critics but they bothered him terribly. He wrote long harangues back at any reviewer who took sport with him, explaining that it was unfair to suggest a man be put out of a job, that they did not understand the first thing about show business, that the very job they had was almost immoral. Sylvia pleaded with him to merely write the letters then throw them away, but he would send them. He was furious at the critics, for whom acerbic pokes at this famously monochromatic emcee were a given. Like reviewer Harriet Van Horne, to whom he wrote an uncharacteristically short missive: “Dear Miss Van Horne. You Bitch. Sincerely, Ed Sullivan."
Early on, in an act of creative defensiveness, he hired a Yiddish comic from vaudeville to heckle him – to yell comments like “Come on Solomon, for God’s sake, smile, it makes you look sexy” – hoping the resulting exchange would make him appear more natural. Later, he booked a succession of impressionists who skewered his stiff onstage persona. Will Jordan built a career on this, coming on the show and replicating the Sullivan trademark arms-crossed gesture, contorting his face as if he had just sucked a lemon. “Tonight on our rilly big show we have 702 Polish dentists who will be out here in a few moments doing their marvelous extractions…” The audience roared and Ed laughed along, though in truth he had never used the phrase “really big show” in quite that way. Attempting to imitate Jordan’s imitation of himself, he kept mangling the words, only growing comfortable with the phrase later.
His persona as the maladroit master of ceremonies prompted Time magazine in 1955 to call him “about the longest shot ever to have paid off in show business." That may have been true if he was merely the stone-faced host the impressionists lampooned. What many observers missed was his real role: the man behind the curtain, the show producer, the shaper, the impresario who assumed dictatorial control. His talent lay not in being a charismatic emcee – which he certainly was not – but in his ability to understand a changing audience. “Public opinion,” he explained, “is the voice of God." In the end he had understood that voice so well and so long that The Ed Sullivan Show was not just a success but an institution. All of his original competitors, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Eddie Cantor, Jerry and Dino – the list goes on – saw their shows cancelled. But Sullivan ran non-stop from 1948 to 1971, from Harry Truman to Jim Morrison, from the arrival of television to man on the moon. In human terms that’s a generation, but in TV years it’s closer to an epoch.
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