Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (58 page)

After the interview, Sullivan and his crew bundled back into the taxis for the trek back to Havana, driving through the night to arrive in the city just as dawn was breaking. Finding a street vendor, Ed had him grill as many sausage and cheese sandwiches as he could. Before they got to their hotel, the officer leading the taxi fleet stopped them at the city’s sports stadium. While they sat waiting, a long line of trucks filled with people drove into the stadium, after which bursts of automatic gunfire were heard; when the trucks left the stadium they were empty. It was a chilling moment. Laszlo speculated that this was retribution against Batista loyalists.

The Americans got only a few hours sleep before heading to the airport, which had devolved into near chaos. Surging throngs of Cubans screamed and shoved in a desperate effort to flee the country. Only with the help of a phalanx of Fidelistas were Ed and his crew able to force their way into a waiting area. There, to Ed’s surprise, he ran into George Raft, an actor known for playing gangsters in a string of Hollywood potboilers. Raft was also known for associating with actual mobsters, like Owney Madden, whom Ed himself had socialized with when he frequented the Silver Slipper speakeasy. Raft was distraught and destitute because the Fidelistas had confiscated his casino and his bank account. Laszlo believed that Ed gave him some money. Around 3
P.M.
they boarded the plane, sitting in the crowded cabin until sunset while waiting to take off. As they waited, soldiers boarded the plane to check each passenger’s paperwork, in some cases forcefully removing people. Ed arrived back in New York just before dawn on Friday morning, at which point Laszlo rushed to get the film developed.

For Sunday’s broadcast, Sullivan edited the interview to about six minutes, with footage of the masses cheering Castro. Since Ed’s travelogue pieces were part of the show’s typical fare, the audience might have been prepared for a clip from such a foreign locale. The previous August, for instance, he had flown to Jerusalem and filmed an Israeli talent contest (while there he and Sylvia met with David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister). Still, even in a show known for distant locations and high contrast, the Castro segment felt remarkably disconnected to anything else that evening. Sharing the bill was a scene from the current Broadway play
The Disenchanted
performed by Jason Robards and George Grizzard; comedian Alan King did a bit about suburban house parties; a dog trainer presented a poodle fashion show; a comic named Professor Backwards spelled backwards on a blackboard; Tina Louise, who later played Ginger on
Gilligan’s Island
, made a cameo; and the Little Gaelic Singers from Ireland sang sweetly. Also squeezed into the hour were a juggler, an impressionist, and a four-man acrobatic team, two of whom wore ape costumes. Castro, incongruously, was presented between Alan King and the couture-clad poodles.

However odd the presentation, the Castro interview was a journalistic coup for Ed. While his interview didn’t air first—
Face the Nation
’s Castro segment aired Sunday morning, several hours before his—he had bested the country’s top news agencies in getting a TV interview with the Cuban leader. Edward R. Murrow wouldn’t interview Castro until early February. Some grumbled that Sullivan had only landed the interview because he had offered to pay $10,000 beforehand, but Marlo Lewis claimed the donation was a postinterview gesture on Ed’s part, which is likely.

Yet in either case, despite the journalistic feat the interview proved to be far from the triumph he hoped for. It didn’t propel his ratings higher; his Sunday night audience
came to the show for the Broadway play and the comic, not breaking news from world hotspots. It did nothing to establish him as a newsman in the eyes of CBS; on the contrary, the network gave him an angry dressing-down, telling him to stick to entertainment and leave the news to them. It’s likely the CBS news division was embarrassed, having almost been scooped by the man hired to introduce trained monkeys. The network at that point saw show business and news as mutually exclusive; it wasn’t until decades later that television mingled news and entertainment in the way that Sullivan envisioned.

Additionally, Ed soon received a call from New York’s Archbishop Spellman, who told him that Castro was not what he seemed, and strongly suggested that Ed stop payment on the $10,000 check. Sullivan agreed, and with time, as Castro began to ally with the Soviets, he realized he had made an embarrassing blunder. By the end of 1959 he was castigating the Cuban leader in his column, with more than a hint of regret: “
Castro gets booed by newsreel audiences … what a chance he blew, to become another Bolivar!” And soon thereafter, Ed stopped mentioning him altogether, apparently hoping that his impulsive Cuban adventure would be forgotten.

That Ed, at age fifty-seven, wealthy and successful, would fly to a Third World country in the midst of a revolution to get a story showed that he had still had the fire. His competitive streak was as vital now as when he had rushed headlong into skirmishes on the athletic fields of Port Chester. In truth, though, the show itself was beginning to lose its way, at least in terms of its ratings.

Ed wanted to internationalize it, to broaden its vistas as he himself grew. In March he presented a segment he produced in Ireland, in which he interviewed Irish President Eamon de Valera, kissed the Blarney Stone, and presented Myron Cohen telling Irish and Jewish jokes. The following week he showed his travelogue from Portugal, spotlighting flamenco dancer La Chunga. That summer found him at Italy’s Spoleto Festival, producing a show featuring Sir John Gielgud delivering Shakespeare, as well as a performance by the Jerome Robbins Ballet troupe, an Italian opera star, and actors rendering scenes from Tennessee Williams’s
Night of the Iguana.

However, Nielsen ratings made it clear that this wasn’t what the American public wanted. The one location viewers wanted to travel to during the 1958–59 season was the Old West—the craze had reached a fevered pitch. Of the year’s top ten shows, eight of them were Westerns.
Maverick
, running opposite
The Ed Sullivan Show
, had climbed all the way to the number six spot. In the fall of 1958, Sullivan’s show was ranked number three out of the 124 programs on the air. But over the course of the season, viewers drifted steadily over to
Maverick
, and by the spring of 1959, Sullivan’s Nielsen ranking had tumbled to number thirty.

As he watched the ratings fall, he threw virtually everything and anything onstage in an attempt to dislodge the immovable object known as
Maverick.
His international emphasis, though increased, was just one element among a dazzling array. The 1958–59 season kicked off with the cast from
West Side Story
, celebrating its one-year anniversary on Broadway, performing the number “Cool.” The following week Jackie Gleason played his physical comedy for laughs, sharing the bill with genial
General Electric Theater
host Ronald Reagan and actor Steve McQueen, fresh from the huge sci-fi hit
The Blob.
In October, Ed showcased the Milwaukee Braves,
then playing in the World Series against the New York Yankees. A few weeks later he built a program around a Friars Club roast of himself, in which CBS newsman Walter Cronkite kept trying to detail Sullivan’s history, only to be interrupted by comedians Morey Amsterdam and Jack Carter. In November, actors William Shatner and France Nuyen performed a scene from the musical
The World of Suzie Wong
, one of myriad Broadway scenes that year.

Later that season, Pinky and Perky, a British puppet act, squeaked out the Big Bopper’s hit “Chantilly Lace,” and Ed, clowning around, croaked a few bars of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love”; country singer Johnny Cash shared the bill with vocalist Frankie Laine, who recited “the Gettysburg Address”; Samuel Goldwyn and Sullivan presented citations to major film figures, including Indian director Rajaram Vankudre; Ed visited the movie set of
Anatomy of a Murder
and chatted with Jimmy Stewart in an evening in which Henny Youngman told one-liners accompanied by violin; Bobby Darin sang “Mack the Knife” on the same night that Ed presented the Rhesus monkey Able from the U.S. space program—Able had survived a sixteen-minute suborbital flight.

That summer, a pompadoured Frankie Avalon warbled “A Boy Without a Girl” on a bill in which Duke Ellington swung through “Flirty Bird” and Fred Astaire said “hello” from the audience; Fabian sang “Turn Me Loose” and “Tiger” and the Platters doo-wopped through their recent number one hit, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”; Ed’s Jimmy Cagney tribute presented numerous classic film clips and an interview with the storied actor; to end the season, Sullivan visited Charlton Heston on the set of
Ben-Hur
and took a chariot ride with the actor.

Still, Sunday night viewers could not be lured from
Maverick.
For the first time in his television career, Ed was unable to reach his audience. He had always been one of them, wanting what they wanted, enjoying the things they enjoyed. He may have endeavored to stay a step ahead, but only a step. Now, he wanted to kiss the Blarney Stone, see the cities of Portugal, interview a Cuban revolutionary, and tour Italy. They wanted to be entertained on a Sunday night. His audience was drifting away—the Nielsens indicated that not only was he losing to
Maverick
, but his future on the air might be jeopardized. He had been felled by an upstart trend, and it was unknown how long the Western craze would last. Or, whether the next trend would pull viewers even further from him. His run in television had been unusually long, eleven years. Maybe this was it.

Ed had a choice to make as the curtain fell on the 1950s: would he follow his muse as a globetrotter, or would he be the showman he had always been, eager—hungry—to please his audience? To maintain his stature as a producer, he needed to refocus on his audience, to find some way to bring them back. Given his ratings loss, if he didn’t make some changes, and soon, his show was headed the way of those of Milton Berle and Bob Hope and Sid Caesar, and the many other stars whose television debuts he managed to outlast.

However, just before the 1959–60 season began, forcing him to confront these issues, wanderlust once again called him. His annual late-summer vacation had become a period in which he filmed segments from remote locations, like his interview with Brigitte Bardot in Italy, or the previous August’s trip to Israel. For this summer’s shoot Ed imagined his grandest remote show yet. Gathering his crew, he journeyed to a location that was as far from America as one could get in 1959.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Times They Are a Changin’

O
N
A
S
UNDAY
NIGHT
IN
LATE
S
EPTEMBER
1959, Americans tuned their televisions to the Sullivan show with a profound sense of curiosity. Was it true? Had Ed Sullivan, the guardian of the family living room, America’s unofficial Minister of Culture, really traveled to … the Soviet Union?

Not only was the answer yes, but Ed, oddly, was at his most natural in this unlikely location. For the show he produced in the U.S.S.R., he walked the streets of Moscow and Leningrad with a preternatural ease, introducing American viewers to a world they knew only as an evil empire. He addressed the camera like an old friend, a confidant accompanying him on an exotic journey. But despite his uncharacteristic comfort, his three-week trip to Russia that August resembled an exploration of the far side of the moon. Recent developments had pushed America and the Soviet Union into a horrific standoff.

In late 1957 the Soviets had launched Sputnik, a satellite that orbited the earth; they also announced they had successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile test. America was caught flat-footed. Not only were the Russians now able to hurl an atomic bomb from half a world away, but the United States had never launched either a satellite or an ICBM. Although by 1958 the United States had caught up—after a hurried rocket launch that burned up on the pad, which the international press dubbed “Kaputnick”—the specter of all-out mutual destruction now loomed as a very real possibility.