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IMPRESARIO
The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan
Prologue, cont.
The viability of Sullivan’s Big Tent philosophy faded toward the end of his career. His “everyone’s invited” formula, the variety show producer as curator of national culture – combining old, young, black, white, Jewish, gentile – was supplanted by a niche approach, a strategy of creating television shows (or magazines, or most anything) to appeal to narrow demographics, like young affluent suburbanites, or urban blacks in the 18-34 age group. Whether this is good or bad is an open question, though it certainly separates us into distinct, mutually exclusive camps.
Yet while his Big Tent ethos fell into disrepute, one of the concepts he was an original embodiment of would not only live on, but perhaps be the central legacy of the small screen: the television producer as image maker.
He was a supreme imagist. As television is the home of the manufactured world, Sullivan proved to be one of the most talented wizards of this odd alchemy. He knew how to create the special brand of living room magic known as TV, how to produce a really big show, how to weave an hour of fantasy and escape. Using his signature formula, his combination of high and low, he created the bright and shiny bauble known as The Ed Sullivan Show, entrancing a weekly audience for more than two decades. He changed the elements as the national mood changed, but his image of the well-wrapped package of All-American entertainment would spin on, week after week, year after year.
His own image would be the most manufactured of all. Within the confines of the television screen he appeared as a wooden but sincere emcee, everyone’s Uncle Ed, a believer in the Boy Scouts and the American Way, who probably went home to a big wood-paneled den after the show to spend time with the youngsters, as he called anyone under age 35. In the late 1950s he published a book called Christmas with Ed Sullivan, a collection of reminisces by his “friends” – from Walter Cronkite to Lucy and Desi Arnez – suggesting he lived in a world of big warm holidays where everyone gathered ‘round the hearth. In reality he was a loner and a driven careerist who was typically too busy to bother with a Christmas tree until 9 P.M. Christmas Eve. In his view, family life was greatly overrated, as were close personal friendships, and he took precious little time for either. He had elbowed his way into television based on the power of his gossip column, which could be surprisingly salacious, and he was every bit as profane as the column’s yellowest tidbit – possessing a sailor’s salty vocabulary, a volcano’s sense of decorum, a pugilist’s belief in diplomacy. These qualities, however, were kept far offstage (most of the time). And since he presented himself as Uncle Ed on television, so he was seen in the public’s eye. He carved his own image with as much skill as he built every Sunday’s show.
This would create considerable confusion as to who Ed Sullivan really was. His public face as a stiff but earnest host was actually the far smaller of his two roles on the show. The early critics, new to the sport of television reviewing, mistakenly assumed that his emcee duties were his central role – and panned him accordingly. When Sullivan debuted in 1948, New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby wrote, “One of the small but vexing questions confronting anyone in this area with a television set is: Why is Ed Sullivan on it every Sunday night?” That perception would change over the years. In 1965, New York Times critic Jack Gould, who had once wholeheartedly agreed with Crosby, opined that Sullivan “is unquestionably one of the medium’s great intuitive showman.”
The Ed Sullivan Show was very much his show, his to shape and color as he saw fit. As its producer he not only chose the performers, creating balance and mood by determining their running order, he also took enormous control over their performances. Comedians found their routines reshaped, singers saw their repertoire – or, famously, their lyrics – changed. He told actors which section of a play to reprise, and he overruled his Yale-educated set designer. Even animal trainers, whose chimps and big cats knew their routines by rote, bent to the Sullivan edict. This was not a democracy, nor even a particularly benevolent dictatorship. When opera star Maria Callas refused to sing her famed interpretation of Tosca, Sullivan had made it clear: you’ll sing what I tell you to sing or your performance is cancelled. The diva had met a bigger diva.
On Sunday afternoons he ran the entire show as a dress rehearsal in front of a full house, standing just offstage, watching both the acts and the studio audience, getting a feel for the relationship between the two. He made notes on his yellow legal pad, and after rehearsal those notes dramatically reshaped what the audience would see and hear that evening. No detail was too small to be controlled. He could compromise, and in fact often did. But he was also known for sending performers to “the wailing wall” – an area outside the theater where they kvetched to their agents after Sullivan had reworked or cancelled their acts (and many performers saw their appearance cancelled the day of the show). When the cameras began broadcasting live that evening, much in that hour had been molded by the pucker-lipped host who mangled his lines in the spotlight’s glare.
The show was very personal to him – it was him. Said comedian Alan King, a Sullivan favorite who had the temerity to appear on a rival show: “Ed literally came close to slapping me in the face at Danny’s Hideaway. He called me a traitor…for five years Ed didn’t talk to me.” The showman’s visceral attachment to his program gave him something of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde quality. In the theater, shaping an evening’s show to conform to his vision, Sullivan the raging tyrant could erupt; outside the television studio, the glad-handing newsman chatted amiably. “He was a whole different man offstage,” recalled his friend Jack Carter. “He was very charming.”
Because the show so closely reflected the man himself, the story of his early life and education is an essential part of the Sullivan narrative. The way he produced his odd weekly circus reflected everything he had done and everywhere he had been, from the Victorian parlors of his youth to the decidedly non-Victorian celebrity gossip column he penned for decades. Although early television critics skewered him as an unskilled amateur, in reality no more grizzled veteran of a showman existed in 1948. He had skipped college but earned a rough and tumble Ivy League education in American show business, from the speakeasy cabarets of his twenties to his abortive radio and film career to – especially – his years spent producing sawdust-and-sweat vaudeville shows. And his influential syndicated column made him as much a show business player as chronicler. In fact, his New York Daily News column, with its rapid-fire pastiche of items covering many quarters, was his model for The Ed Sullivan Show. Like a daily journalist, the showman opened big and kept a brisk pace. Quipped one comedian: “You wanna know the day Christ died? It was on the Sullivan show, and Ed gave him three minutes.”
The story of his life, like the television show he produced, formed a perfect mirror of his time. Born with the century’s birth in 1901, the seasons of his life flowed in tandem with the seasons of American life: Running away to join World War I, coming of age in the giddy 1920s, finding his voice as a popular Depression-era columnist, pitching in during World War II, pioneering in the dawn of television, grappling with McCarthyism, becoming an unofficial Minister of Culture in the conformist 1950s, ushering in the rock ‘n’ roll era – including its seminal moment, the Beatles’ 1964 U.S. debut – and finally, seeing changes in television that presaged the medium’s defining ethic on into the 21st century. If the century itself had written a diary from an American perspective, he could well have been its protagonist.
As his show combined dissimilar elements – jazz with rock ‘n’ roll, boxers with ballerinas – so he himself carried a mass of contradictions. He was, at one time or another, a melancholic introvert, a frustrated performer who craved a mass audience, a columnist for a socialist newspaper, a Red baiter, a peacenik who led a tour of the Soviet Union, a small town boy, an urban sophisticate, a street fighter who played by his own rules, a Puritanical moralist, a racetrack habitué, an opera promoter, a single-minded bully, a tender sentimentalist, and a self-contained egoist whose greatest joy came from pleasing others, that is, his tens of millions of viewers.
Fame and his long-frustrated hunger for it was a central theme of his life, as this man who could neither sing, dance, nor tell jokes strove tirelessly to thrust himself center stage, in newspapers, vaudeville, film, radio, and finally, television. This hunger, his own gut-devouring desire to put his name atop the marquee, was his primary psychic gasoline. Yet while he became hugely famous, he remained – again, the contradictions – a regular Joe, transporting his own wardrobe, speaking as an equal to doormen and network executives alike. He carried his fame, as one associate described it, “like it was built-in,” never indulging in the smallest moment of pretension. He eschewed an entourage or the requisite limousine, instead taking cabs, invariably quizzing the driver, “What did you think of the show?”
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