Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (61 page)

In February, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks performed a lighthearted routine, sharing the bill with Henry Fonda, who read two of Lincoln’s speeches, and torch singer Peggy Lee, who smoldered through her 1942 hit “Why Don’t You Do Right?” Later that month Lucille Ball saw top billing, reprising the tune “Wildcat” that she had just performed in her Broadway debut. In that same show Rowan and Martin satirized diet doctors.

Ed, true to form, mixed lowbrow with high art this season. In his broadcast from Chicago he toured both the stockyards and the Chicago Art Institute, presenting jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman playing with the city’s Fine Arts String Quartet. That same show, Charlton Heston read Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy conversed about Vikings.

There was virtually no straight theater this year, a change from past seasons, though scenes from Broadway musicals were still staged. For a tribute show to Broadway duo Lerner and Lowe, Richard Burton rendered a scene from their
Camelot.
(Bob Precht had to keep calling Burton’s hotel to ensure he was sober enough to go on.) As usual, there were plenty of film clips: John Wayne appeared to promote
The Alamo
and Sal Mineo plugged
Exodus.
Having grown up with vaudeville, Ed booked the genre’s aging stars even though the general public had largely forgotten them; this season the show featured Smith and Dale, who had played the Palace in its heyday, now doing one-liners in their seventies.

One of the oddest moments this season was an appearance by Salvador Dalí, the Spanish Surrealist painter. “Tonight, on our stage, Salvador Dalí figures in what we’re pleased to call an historic moment in art,” Ed said, holding a pistol that shot paint pellets. “Dalí believes that the most unusual patterns in art may be produced by this gun.” Dalí, in a dandyish pinstriped suit that complemented his flamboyantly upturned mustache, fired the paint gun at several large canvases, creating original art before an audience of millions, then signed a canvas with a theatrical flourish.

Salvador Dalí on the Sullivan show, 1961. Sullivan touted the painter’s appearance as “an historic moment in art,” as Dalí shot paint pellets at a canvas for a live television audience. (CBS Photo Archive)

That Ed had begun sharing booking decisions with Bob didn’t mean he had gone soft. Sullivan the lion had occasion to roar in January, when Nat “King” Cole, a favorite of Ed’s who appeared thirteen times, refused to yield to the showman’s song choice. The mellow crooner wanted to perform his new tune, “Illusion.” Ed said no— only established material could be performed on his show, he said. The two came to loggerheads, and, in a highly publicized spat, Ed canceled the singer’s appearance.

“
I feel my integrity as an artist has been questioned,” Cole told a reporter after the cancellation. Ed retorted: “We don’t intend to have the show used as a vehicle for plugging a record that’s not even been released.” Having gotten himself into a lather about the issue, Sullivan drove the point home: “We don’t think this is a good song; if we’re wrong we’ll be the first to admit it.”

Up until then the two had enjoyed a perfect partnership. Ed, who took pride in championing black performers, found the ideal entertainer in Cole, whose butterscotch-soft persona made this groundbreaking effort comparatively easier. Cole’s many Sullivan show appearances helped him land
The Nat King Cole Show
in 1956, the first network variety show hosted by a major black star. (No national sponsor would support the show, reportedly fearing a southern boycott, and several NBC affiliates in the north and south declined to carry it; it was canceled after thirteen months.) After Sullivan and Cole’s spat they never repaired their friendship, and the singer never again appeared on the show. However, after Cole’s death in 1965, Ed booked his widow Maria Cole as she launched a comeback in her singing career.

The Sullivan show’s ratings for the 1960–61 season were strong—Nielsen indicated the show dominated its Sunday time slot. Among some one hundred programs in prime time, the Sullivan show ranked fifteenth, one step down from last season, yet clearly holding a coveted spot. The show was withstanding the Western onslaught, which continued apace: five of the top six programs that season were set in the Old West. But the once highly ranked Western running opposite the Sullivan show,
Maverick
, was now homesteading outside the top twenty.

As the season began, and the ratings pointed to the year’s success, Ed huddled with his lawyer Arnold Grant and his MCA management team. It was time to renegotiate his compensation package. A few months before, Ed had written a letter to CBS head Bill Paley as a first move in the negotiation process. Pointing out that a recent Sullivan show garnered a remarkable fifty-nine-percent audience share, Ed wrote: “
I am looking forward eagerly to the Nielsen report, which should show an even more astounding share of audience.” He also sent along a Canadian ratings report, which, Sullivan noted, “shows your oldest show topping the Canadian market.” In case all the facts and figures didn’t suffice, the showman added a dose of sugar: “I always have held you in affectionate respect and even helped straighten out your golf game!”

Sullivan didn’t need to do much sweet-talking. “
Paley
loved
Ed Sullivan—he loved hits,” recalled Mike Dann, a CBS programming head in the 1960s. The new contract reflected that affection. Its terms stretched over an astonishing thirty-five years, stipulating various pay levels over that period. Given that Ed signed the agreement at age fifty-nine, the network was in essence agreeing to reward him handsomely until the end of his days. While he continued to produce the show, his
salary would be $1 million per year, with increases in the years ahead. When he ceased production or when the show was canceled, the network guaranteed him a minimum of $100,000 per year. In the event the show was canceled in the next two years, CBS would make an additional payout to Sullivan. The program’s production budget was upped to $73,000 per show.

He was, finally, being paid as a superstar. It had taken a long time, in view of the show’s twelve-year run and its dominance during most of those years. It was as if there had been a lingering trace of the original CBS attitude of selling the show “with or without Sullivan.” But his new pay level (which he didn’t release to reporters as he had in 1954) put that era well in the past. Still, in the years ahead Sullivan never stopped intimating that network management didn’t appreciate him, though with his new contract those complaints rang hollow.

As Ed emerged from negotiations, there was talk—for the first time—of using reruns in the summer. It had always been a point of pride for him that the show kept creating fresh programs all year long. He himself took a brief summer vacation, using his “break” to produce on-location segments, but substitute hosts kept the show going. Producing nearly fifty new programs a year had given him a competitive edge against the better-financed
Comedy Hour.
In mid season, Ed wasn’t willing to answer reporters’ questions about whether he would create new shows all summer, claiming that nothing had been decided. But in the summer of 1961
The Ed Sullivan Show
ran six weeks of reruns. Additionally, within a few years Ed began taping a number of shows on Monday nights in front of a studio audience, to allow himself and the staff a rest on certain weeks.

Despite his new generous pay package, the showman was in no danger of mellowing. Toward the end of the season, the Federal Communications Commission conducted two weeks of hearings in New York City, investigating the current state of television. The hearings produced substantial hand-wringing. FCC chairman Newton Minnow decried the “wasteland” of TV programming, and many of those testifying pointed to what they saw as the villain: ratings, and the need for programmers to lower their standards in service to them.

Nonsense, said Ed in his testimony. Ratings were “
dictated by the people” and “present an accurate picture of what the people prefer.” Television is necessarily a wasteland, he said, because the round-the-clock demands of the medium make it impossible to maintain consistent quality. He threw cold water on the comments of David Susskind, a television producer who had launched an erudite public affairs talk show in 1958, and who noted that TV had few such shows. “Nobody in television has been given so many opportunities by all kinds of networks as David Susskind and nobody has had more flops than David Susskind,” Ed said, proving he could lead with his elbows even when he wasn’t being attacked.

Moreover, he opined, there was hypocrisy on the part of newspaper commentators. Some who demand opera on television “would be bored to death by it,” he claimed. He complained that
The New York Times
, when he presented an opera series, had barely covered it. In truth, the newspaper
had
previewed it, and Ed was forced to concede this. (In fact, after prodding he acknowledged that the paper’s coverage of his show was “wonderful,” which, after the initial barbs by critic Jack Gould, it unquestionably had been. Since the mid 1950s the
Times
had treated Sullivan’s nearly every move as newsworthy.) But Ed’s point at the hearings was clear:
he had only disdain for those whom he saw as ivory tower types, expecting television to elevate the masses without regard to market realities. Television, in his view, was as rough-and-tumble as the athletic fields of Port Chester. You either scored or you didn’t, and complaining was simply proof that you couldn’t make the grade.

Ed’s roundhouse at David Susskind was only a warm-up for the bare knuckles spirit he brought to that season’s encounter with talk show host Jack Paar. It may have been inevitable that Paar and Sullivan would feud; television was hardly big enough for two such sensitive egos. Paar, who had considerable success in the 1950s as a comic—including numerous Sullivan show appearances—became host of the
Tonight Show
in 1957. His skills as a witty and idiosyncratic conversationalist turned the show into a hit for NBC. Like Sullivan, Paar could be mercurial and at times petulant; in 1960 he staged a twenty-five-day walkout after NBC cut one of his jokes from the tape without his consent. (The joke made reference to a “water closet,” or toilet, and so was considered too risque for television.)

On March 5, a little known Canadian singer on her way up named Joan Fairfax appeared on the Sullivan show, earning $1,000—on the low end of the show’s pay scale, which went up to $10,000 for headliners. The next night she sang on Paar’s show for $320, which was union scale. It was unusual that a performer appeared on another program so soon after Sullivan’s. His show’s contract usually forbade it; Ed didn’t want an act he helped popularize to lift anyone else’s ratings. But Fairfax had been bumped from an earlier Sullivan show, and was honoring a Paar commitment made long before the schedule change. A few days later, Ed was leafing through fan mail—he remained highly attuned to viewer comments—and came across a reference to Fairfax performing on both shows.