Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (54 page)

A cameo appearance on the Sullivan show by baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who broke the sport’s color line in 1947. Sullivan revered Robinson. (Globe Photos)

Later in the month Bill Haley and the Comets—one of the very first rock ’n’ roll bands—romped on “40 Cups of Coffee” and “Rudy’s Rock” (with the sax player running through the audience blowing his horn) on a show with Barbara & Her Dog, who performed novelty math tricks. As the weather turned warm, the Corps de Ballet danced a segment of “Czardas” on the same bill with comedian Dewey “Pig-meat” Markham. In mid summer Burt Lancaster performed a comedy sketch with Barbara Nichols, dancer Gene Kelly danced a soft-shoe with Ed—just kidding around—and the Cypress Garden water-skiers showed off their aquatic skills on location. A few weeks later the Everly Brothers harmonized on “Bye, Bye Love” and Ed (on film) appeared at a premiere of the new movie
The Prince and the Showgirl
along with Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, and Robert F. Kennedy.

When the dizzying 1956–57 season concluded and the Nielsen ratings were tallied, Ed found he had succeeded past any reasonable expectation.
The Ed Sullivan Show
was television’s number two—ranked program, behind only the perennially top-rated
rated
I Love Lucy.
Close to forty million people a week watched his Sunday showcase. A few years earlier he had used tributes to moguls like Samuel Goldwyn and Darryl Zanuck to boost ratings. Now, on small screens in living rooms across the country, he held a comparable stature. Producing a program at its zenith in its ninth year, he was fully in command: of his show, of his place at the network, and of his position as a cultural tastemaker.

With bandleader Benny Goodman during a rehearsal for the Sullivan show in the 1950s. (Globe Photos)

Not that his eminence as an impresario meant he had grown correspondingly polished as a master of ceremonies. If he was marginally more at ease onstage in 1957 than in 1948, in essence he remained the same monotone show host, continuing to fumble and sputter despite his overly cautious approach. Sullivan’s malapropisms became show business lore. The talent agents forced to wait outside the stage door in the “Wailing Wall” area during rehearsal traded stories of Sullivan’s missteps, and they had no lack of material. Comedian Jack Carter was introduced, variously, as John Crater, Jack Carson, John Kerr, and, once, Carson McCullers. A performing troupe from New Zealand was called “the fierce Maori tribe from New England.” Famed clarinetist Benny Goodman was lauded as a trumpeter, Roberta Peters became Robert Sherwood, and Ed once introduced Robert Merrill by saying “I’d like to
prevent
Robert Merrill.” Citizens of Miami regularly sent letters correcting his pronunciation of their city’s name—he pronounced it “My-am-ah”—and he always referred to Baltimore as “Ball-tee-more.” He never went through a show without garbling syntax, and polysyllabic words could be mangled to unintelligibility.

Other entertainers took great sport with the showman’s stilted stage presence. “
Ed Sullivan is the only man who can brighten up a room by leaving it,” quipped Joe E. Lewis. Jack Benny asked, “What would happen, Ed, if you weren’t here to introduce the acts? As a friend, let me give you some advice. Don’t ever stay home to find out.” Henny Youngman observed, “In Africa the cannibals adored him. They thought he was some new kind of frozen food.” (Eddie Cantor, an almost lone dissenting voice, wrote in his 1957 memoir that Sullivan had “
a sense of showmanship second to no one in the business.”)

Pop singer Connie Francis remembered dreading being called over to shake Ed’s hand after a performance. “
You never knew what he was going to say,” Francis said. “He was so funny—he didn’t mean to be funny. I think the average guy watching television said, ‘I could speak better than that.’ ”

In dress rehearsal, Ed once called over singer Jack Jones to chat, considered a major career boost among performers. “
Wasn’t your father Allen Jones?” Ed asked the singer. “He still is,” Jones replied, getting a big audience chuckle. After rehearsal, Sullivan told Jones that he liked the humorous exchange and wanted to recreate it in that evening’s broadcast. During the show Sullivan called over Jones as planned, but Ed goofed up the setup question, asking: “
Isn’t
your father Allen Jones?” And all Jones could say was “yes,” which fell flat. After the show Ed was furious. Jones tried to explain: “But Mr. Sullivan, you didn’t say it the way you said it during rehearsal.” “Don’t tell me!” Ed retorted. “You should have said ‘
He still is!
’ ” Sullivan refused to book Jones for a long time afterward.

“
Sometimes you wondered,” recalled comedienne Carol Burnett, of the showman’s many fumbles. Causing many of these stumbles and stutters was nerves. Even as an established star he battled stage fright, and several Sullivan staffers said that he remained nervous onstage throughout the run of the program. Many veteran performers, of course, suffer stage jitters despite a long career, yet manage to transcend it. With Ed, turning on a camera never stopped prompting a profound dampening. The feisty, opinionated Broadway gossip with a quick left jab became almost funereal, careful to the point of caricature. And he was loath to attempt a change. His sponsor’s ad agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt, occasionally suggested he liven up his stage presence, maybe develop an act or tell a few jokes. Ed rejected them summarily. “
You don’t screw with success,” he said.

Paradoxically, his antistyle endeared him with the audience. Being maladroit made him far more likable. Viewers felt they were getting the real thing; clearly this man was anything but a slick salesman. Ed was just Ed. He wasn’t part of that alien tribe known as entertainers, or so it seemed, but instead appeared far closer to an audience member. One night he introduced an actress in the audience by saying “she’s currently
starving
on Broadway”—perhaps a Freudian slip, given his own hungry struggle as a young Broadway columnist—and then realized his mistake. The audience began to laugh, and he began to laugh with them. Everyone enjoyed a hardy chuckle at Ed’s awkwardness. To think, just four hours earlier this man had taken complete dictatorial control over the show, issuing ultimatums, slashing comics’ well-honed gags, stepping on toes at will. And here he was on camera, as nonthreatening as the average uncle Charlie.

Sullivan’s need to keep his feisty, combative nature off camera was not shared by the man he so envied and admired through the years, Walter Winchell. After some coaxing, Winchell launched his first television show in 1952, pushed into it as radio faltered in the face of TV’s bounding growth and Walter’s own radio show fell from the top ten. His debut was a telecast of his radio gossip show, with Winchell poised near the typewriter and the set decorated as a busy city newsroom. He projected an intense, on-the-edge energy in his broadcast, just as he always had in his radio show. He even wore his fedora on the air, as if attempting to recreate central casting’s idea of a hard-bitten newshound. It was the same persona that he and Ed had projected as they ran up and down Broadway in the 1930s: know-it-all, tough, jazzed up from a second cup of joe. Ed, off the air, was still essentially the same: acerbic and willing to lead with his elbows if necessary; it was only when the camera blinked on that he became the living room’s monochromatic supplicant. Yet Walter didn’t adapt. Unwilling or unable to fit into the cooler environment of 1950s television, he was a character in the wrong play.

His gossip, always an affront to polite society, now traveled in territory the public wouldn’t enter. In his debut television season he announced that President Truman had once belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—a ludicrous charge that Truman angrily dismissed. After suffering abysmal ratings—at one point he was rated 111th—ABC canceled his simulcast television-radio show in 1955. He approached NBC about a television program, offering to host the
Comedy Hour
opposite Sullivan in that show’s waning days, but was turned down. He also queried CBS, and as word leaked that he might get a show, Sullivan emitted howls of protest, or so Winchell claimed. Network executive Hubbell Robinson released a statement that CBS had not in fact mentioned Winchell’s proposed show to Sullivan. This prompted Walter to shoot an angry note to Robinson: “
Dear Hub, This is BULLSH!”

Desperate to get back on television, he organized his own sponsors and re-approached NBC, succeeding in getting
The Walter Winchell Show
signed for thirteen weeks in the fall of 1955. His choice of format revealed a telling irony: it was a variety show that Walter hosted without lengthy introductions—a veritable copy of the Sullivan show. Having so long been ahead of Ed in the public’s eye, Walter was reduced to imitating him. Adding ignominy, after a respectable start the show’s ratings quickly began to plummet. Oddly, even in his variety show he maintained the storied Winchell edge, wearing his fedora and tossing cigarette butts onstage. The show’s director, Alan Handley, noted how out of place Walter seemed. “
He couldn’t integrate himself into a TV show, and we couldn’t feel superior to him the way we could to Sullivan.”
The Walter Winchell Show
was canceled within three months of its debut.