Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (47 page)

Sullivan’s representative in his negotiations with Warner Bros. was his lawyer Arnold Grant, not his talent agent Sonny Werblin. According to Ed’s contract with MCA, the agency only got a percentage of his radio and television work—film wasn’t mentioned in the contract. Werblin was likely kicking himself for not including film;
it cost him ten percent of Ed’s lucrative movie payday. But Werblin’s oversight was understandable. That Sullivan would be a highly paid television star was already far-fetched; that he would also be a well-compensated film star almost exceeded the boundaries of imagination. Ed’s pay was $100,000, and he retained the television rights to the film.

Ed and Arnold Grant flew out to the coast to sign the paperwork and meet with Warner Bros. executives. While Ed was out there, Sylvia left a phone message for him at Arnold Grant’s office: “
Mrs. Sullivan called about 6:15 last night and said she had purchased a Renoir and would like you to get a $15,000 advance from Warner in order to pay for same.” Ed’s agreement with Warner Bros. however, specified that he wouldn’t be paid until 1957. The studio, apparently seeking to limit its risk, wasn’t going to pay him until after the film was released.

Jack Warner wanted to move quickly on the project. He hoped to get the script written over the summer and begin production on October 1. Warner asked Ed to write a script treatment, and in mid July Ed sent him a six-page synopsis. As he conceived of it, the movie would be a glorified version of his weekly show, a fast-paced array of acts with only a thin narrative about his and the show’s history.

Ed’s letter to Warner told the real story of why this film was being made. “
I believe this will be a tremendous grosser, with a ready-made audience plus the exploitation I can give it on our show.” Undoubtedly, Jack Warner saw the potential. Regardless of how unlikely a film star Ed was, with the showman pushing the movie every week to his audience of thirty million, generating box office success wouldn’t even require an advertising budget. Ed’s earlier alliance with Sam Goldwyn had been based on the then-counterintuitive idea that television and Hollywood could work together; now Sullivan’s own bio-picture was about to be the best proof of that.

Warner all but ignored Ed’s synopsis. He conceived of the film as a dramatic story, not merely an elaborately produced
Toast of the Town.
In mid August he sent screenwriter Irving Wallace to New York to spend a week with Ed and observe him producing the show. Wallace was a good fit for the project. As a short story writer and novelist, he was adept at crafting stories based on current events; he would write a series of best-selling novels based on contemporary trends. Also an experienced screenwriter, he wrote 1950’s
The West Point Story
, starring Jimmy Cagney, as well as a number of TV scripts.

Wallace completed the Sullivan script by late September. Having seen Ed in action, he developed a fictional treatment based on real life. A character named Robbins was inspired by actual CBS executive Hubbell Robinson; Ed’s first sponsor was Grimsley, “
a large florid, booming man,” who owns an appliance firm, much like Ed’s real first sponsor, Emerson Radio; his second sponsor was “the chairman of the board of a leading automotive firm.” The antagonist was Joyce Jekyll, “a feline slob who dips her pen in arsenic and writes TV tattle for a Manhattan daily.”

In Wallace’s story, Ed launches the show despite harsh critical barbs. After an initial period of success, his ratings fall as a heavily financed competing program draws viewers away. Things get so bad that Sylvia leaves him. Finally, the show is about to go off the air—but, at the last moment, Sylvia reappears. She hasn’t left him; she secretly went to Las Vegas to bring back a singer who will revive ratings. The young singer goes on, the Trendex rating jumps skyward, and everything ends happily ever after.

Ed hated it. Sylvia’s disappearance and show-saving last-minute return created dramatic tension, but it embarrassed him. Wasn’t the show his creation? (Wallace, despite the odd story twists, was accurate in depicting how supportive Sylvia was of Ed.) Sullivan told Jack Warner the script needed to be rewritten.

Warner agreed, but he was becoming anxious about the film’s production schedule. He moved the shooting back to February, but even the delayed date required that the script be rewritten quickly—actors couldn’t be hired and acts lined up until the studio had a script. In mid October, Warner dispatched Wallace back to New York to spend a second week with Sullivan, with instructions to turn out a script posthaste. The screenwriter completed his second draft by November 1.

This time Wallace wrote a story line custom-made for Ed’s vision of his show. At the plot’s critical turning point, with the show imperiled, instead of Sylvia stepping in, Ed’s own ingenuity as a producer saves the day. The script shows him breaking precedent by combining jazz and opera in the same program, presenting prerelease Hollywood film clips, producing lavish show business biographies—the first of their kind—and introducing fascinating celebrities in the audience. It portrays him as a driven, competitive showman who assesses the opposition and out-produces it at every turn.

If Wallace’s intent was to create a script that so flattered Ed that he had no choice but to approve it, this was a well-aimed arrow: “
As these acts go on, we go to a series of flash cuts of Ed’s TV audience around the country. We see people phoning neighbors and relatives, excitedly telling them to switch from the opposition to ‘
Toast of the Town
.’ … Ed winds up in a blaze of glory.” At the story’s conclusion, CBS is so overjoyed at Sullivan’s performance they decide to rename the show in his honor—it will now be called
The Ed Sullivan Show.
They inform him of this in the final scene by changing his cue card text without telling him, so he learns of it only as he announces it to a national audience. As he informs viewers of the show’s new name, “Ed looks off into the thunderous ovation.…”

Wallace submitted the new script to Jack Warner, who swiftly approved it and rushed it to Ed by airmail. In his cover letter, Warner preempted any concerns Ed might have, in case the script’s fawning wasn’t enough. “
Naturally, this was done in great haste,” he wrote. “We will have these incidents slanted so we can get some good heart tug and humor.” The studio head closed his letter with a reminder of the pending schedule: “I would like to get your reaction as quickly as possible.”

But Ed wasn’t feeling the urgency. Moreover, despite all the script’s flattery, he didn’t like it. He decided he had to toss out Wallace’s work and write the script himself. As Jack Warner fumed, Ed sat down to work from scratch.

Two things bothered him about Wallace’s script. First, he felt it didn’t fully portray the powerful forces that threatened his television survival. Additionally—contradicting his first concern—he did not want to be depicted as so fiercely competing against these forces.

A long month later, he sent his half-finished script treatment to his lawyer Arnold Grant, to pass along to Warner. As Ed noted to Grant in his treatment, “
The greatest European pictures, ‘The Bicycle Thief,’ ‘The Baker’s Wife,’ were built around a deep, fundamental issue.… For our picture, Hollywood writers have an equally simple and fundamental premise … the powerful and subtle forces that threaten a man’s employment.” In short, Ed wanted the film to dwell still more on how he had
persevered in the face of a critical onslaught—though Wallace’s script already included this element.

As Ed wrote in his synopsis: “So this is the story we have: the story of a guy who worked like a bastard in TV and found his employment jeopardized by the critics, some of the network brass, and others.” Families across the country would relate to this theme, he wrote, because it mirrored their own breadwinners’ struggles in the working world. Ed conceived of two strong characters who were set to undermine him: one was a composite of all the critics who skewered him, and another represented the network brass who didn’t believe in him. As he envisioned it, the movie of his life would portray him as surrounded by challengers on every side.

However, in Ed’s version his own character’s triumph over these obstacles wasn’t due to his competitive spirit, as Wallace had portrayed. Instead, his success was a result of how accurately his show reflected what viewers wanted. He even suggested that the film include interviews from typical American living rooms, with families talking about why they liked the show. Ed’s script was somewhat contradictory: he wanted to include powerful characters arrayed against him, but he didn’t want to be seen as fighting against them. Instead, he portrayed himself as triumphing by transcending them, by going directly to the public.

Wallace’s emphasis on his competitive nature made Ed uncomfortable. Although his column readers knew he was no stranger to confrontation, his television audience saw him as reserved and avuncular. As early as 1951,
Time
pointed out, “
The TV Sullivan is a strange contrast to the bumptious know-it-all of Sullivan’s Broadway column.” Onstage, the audience saw an emcee who was nonthreatening and eager to please, bearing a gift bag of acts that offered something for everyone. He was stilted and awkward, yet safe—perhaps even safer because of his stiffness. His lack of slickness led many viewers to believe he was onstage by happenstance, as if whoever was really in charge had picked him at random from the audience. As a fan letter said, “
We were discussing your program the other night and all of us agreed that my brother Charlie could do exactly what you do.” Families trusted this good-natured uncle enough to invite him into their living rooms every Sunday night. He was one of them. The Warner Bros. script, however, portrayed the
other
man, the one behind the curtain, the competitor, the ambition-driven workaholic. This was a more interesting man, surely a better film subject, but it wasn’t the persona that Ed brought into living rooms on Sunday night. And it wasn’t the persona he wanted splashed on movie screens across the country.

So Ed’s new script included no scenes of him as a competitor, instead emphasizing the show’s allures; the script was close to his original concept of the film as a cinematic version of his TV show. Ed’s treatment had an open-ended quality, interweaving his theme of triumph over great odds with many stars’ performances, from showy Broadway numbers to cameos by sports figures. Rather than finalize his outline, he planned to bring the film together as he produced it, much as he did with his television show.

When Jack Warner realized that Sullivan had completely thrown out Wallace’s second version—and that Ed’s replacement script was just a work in progress—he was apoplectic. In Warner’s view, the production schedule had turned into a series of delays with no end in sight. From his vantage point a troubling specter loomed: with the constant delays, by the time the film was released Sullivan’s ratings might
have tumbled, or worse, the show might be canceled, making his investment an embarrassment. In early December, Warner wired an angry telegram to Arnold Grant: “
We will have to be a magician to put this together. As you know, this is not like putting on a TV show. People expect to see something.… If he is going to try and ad-lib this picture as he does his TV show it won’t come off, nor will we produce it that way.”

Still, notwithstanding Warner’s impatience, the studio bent to Ed’s conception. Sullivan’s script called for a less-fictionalized approach than Wallace’s, using more of the showman’s actual words. So between late November and mid January, Wallace and two other writers labored to develop a script that included all of Ed’s ideas. On January 12 they sent him a draft for his approval. The start of shooting had been pushed back yet again, to March 1, and by this point script approval needed to happen shortly. The studio executive supervising the script wrote to Sullivan: “
We will be most anxious for your reaction—by phone, if possible.”

Instead of approving it, Ed set to work—yet again—rewriting the script. Four days later, he sent a note to Arnold Grant, noting that he had boiled the first five pages down to three, and complaining, “
I don’t think that Irving Wallace will ever be able to write the story.”

Jack Warner, hearing of Sullivan’s plans for still more rewriting, was livid. He canceled the film—that very day. Eight months after the project’s start, both parties signed an agreement to mutually void the contract. Warner Bros. would never release
The Ed Sullivan Story.
When reporters asked Ed why the movie was canceled, he claimed that he didn’t want to interrupt his show’s schedule long enough for filming.

The project had been a train wreck between two controlling men, and one in particular—Sullivan—who could not for a moment relinquish his producer’s role. Given a chance to star in a feature film that glorified his life and career—and be paid $100,000 to do so—he was unable to compromise enough to complete the project.

His controlling nature worked well for him in television. It allowed him to pull together, on the fly, week after week, a highly popular one-hour variety show. That same controlling nature doomed
The Ed Sullivan Story.
He had, remarkably, once again proven to be a failure in film, even with a major studio lending every possible support.