Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (2 page)

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 Evening 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 Sullivan 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 showtime. 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 seventy 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, in his early twenties he lived above a tavern, 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 hundred-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 Home, to whom he wrote an uncharacteristically short missive:
“Dear Miss Van Home. 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 seven hundred and two Polish dentists who will be out here in a few moments doing their marvelous extractions.…” The audience roared and Ed laughed along, although 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 canceled. But Sullivan ran nonstop 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.

The story of Ed Sullivan’s life is one of the core stories of the birth of mass communications in the twentieth century. His unlikely tale—where he came from, what forces molded him, how he in turn influenced his audience—is the story of the education and fulfillment of a pioneering showman who largely invented the rules of a new medium as he went along.

Television, of course, has been a force of oceanic power and influence in American culture, and he, in the small screen’s frontier days, proved remarkably adept at harnessing this power. That a mass audience would follow one man’s vision of cultural life for nearly a quarter of a century was testament to his odd, almost unconscious genius at sensing and gratifying his audience’s desires. It was as if he possessed some hypersensitive awareness that allowed him to feel an audience’s every fidget and thrill, what transported them, what might offend them. In the early years of his variety show, which was always broadcast live, he sometimes changed the running order
during the broadcast
, sending stagehands scrambling, because he sensed the audience might be drifting away.

More accurately, he didn’t need to rely on sensing the audience’s desire—he
knew
its desire. He was the audience itself, a middle American Everyman, needing no focus group because his sense of what worked and what didn’t—honed through producing countless vaudeville shows in Depression-era New York—fell in lockstep with the larger public taste. This experience, and his intuition (and a constant scan of the hit charts) kept him in perfect harmony with what viewers wanted, making the twenty-three seasons of his show a perfect cultural mirror of his time.

A central paradox of his life was that he was simultaneously the ultimate establishmentarian and an agent of social change. As the great guardian of the status quo, he ran his national showcase with a puritan’s nose for what might offend, using his total control over the program to bar the slightest suggestion of a blue joke, keeping fabric backstage to cover up female cleavage. The audience, which in his earliest days was allowing a large noisy box into the sanctum of the family living room for the first time, quickly grew to trust him. They understood that he would guard their sensibilities with all of his being. This audience trust granted him a major power. Any performer invited on the show had earned a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval. As comedienne Joan Rivers said, “
If he put his arm around you, you knew you had made it. The power he had was enormous.”

And yet this guardian of middle America, this Minister of Culture, exerted a subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—disruptive force on the American living room.
The Ed Sullivan Show
was based on Ed’s belief in the “Big Tent,” the variety show as all-inclusive three-ring circus, with elephants and movie stars and jazz singers and football heroes all sharing the same bill. In his view, America was one big family every Sunday night at 8
P.M.
He offered something for everyone, all blended together with his signature formula that, in theory, kept the divergent voices from being too discordant. Central to this formula was that Ed always wanted to stay one
step—but only one step—ahead of where the audience was willing to go. As the longtime newsman that he was, he had a reporter’s hunger for the hot scoop, the act whose appeal was as fresh as that day’s headlines. Therein lay the destabilizing influence of his supposedly staid Sunday night variety show.

In the course of his push and pull with his beloved audience he presented sights and sounds that helped cause a crack in the cultural dam. In the 1950s, when black faces were invisible on television, they were a constant on the Sullivan stage, and he enraged his sponsor by hugging jazz chanteuse Sarah Vaughn. Ed’s urban sensibilities meant that his trove of Manhattan nightclub discoveries, most notably the rich vein of Jewish comedy, was exported to small towns across the country. In the largest sense, his program demonstrated that everything could be integrated; his appreciation for high art, learned as a boy from his music-loving mother, pushed him to offer a highbrow’s cornucopia of ballet, opera, and legitimate theater on the same stage with slapstick and pop crooners. And finally, and most revolutionary, he used his trusted national showcase to allow into the American living room the great flaying id itself—rock ’n’ roll—that unwashed legion of guitar twangers, the Pied Pipers of sex and antiestablishmentarianism, which, by the mid 1960s, appeared ready to fell the walls of Jericho. This became a bedrock element of the Sullivan offering. As one reviewer noted, the showman was “
one of the fathers of rock ’n’ roll.”

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 eighteen to thiry-four 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 thirty-five. In the late 1950s he published a book called
Christmas with Ed Sullivan
, a collection of reminiscences by his “friends”—from Walter Cronkite to Lucy and Desi Arnaz—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, and 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.