Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (79 page)

He was heartbroken that CBS wouldn’t allow him to extend the program into its twenty-fifth year. But as the clips and specials and DVDs keep getting viewed, the show finds its way into living rooms decades beyond cancellation, much less two more seasons. It appears
The Ed Sullivan Show
will have a longer life than the showman himself did.

For someone who felt so long frustrated in his desire for national renown, launching short-lived radio shows again and again, trying abortively to break into film, and finding a rough early road in television, he succeeded surprisingly well. He pushed and shoved and cursed and worried, and he managed to propel the name Ed Sullivan on a continuous course through the decades. He achieved the fame he hungered for, and then some.

Yet his fame, whether it lasts or recedes to the vanishing point, is incidental to his greatest accomplishment. His legacy for posterity, stored in the Library of Congress as befitting the archive it is, is the complete collection of Ed Sullivan shows. Taken in their entirety, the one thousand eighty-seven episodes, spanning twenty-three seasons, are an incomparable cultural document.

For someone of a later age to ask: What was it like? What was the nature of American culture between 1948 and 1971? Their answer lies on those videotapes. The twenty-three seasons of live performances fully capture American tastes and views at a defining moment, both in the history of broadcast and in national history. They reveal the very birth of television, from its technical infancy to its first maturity, from a period when commercials were performed live onstage to the era when demographics began to rule the medium. They also reflect the American Zeitgeist, from the dawn of the country’s status as a world power to the era when the Baby Boom generation first exerted its influence. That the library of shows offers such a telling panoramic record of both these arcs makes it more than worth the considerable shelf space it occupies in the national archives.

Many television shows, of course, can be said to reflect American tastes or reveal something of their time period. But
The Ed Sullivan Show
transcends its compatriots because of the catholicity of Ed’s vision. The Sullivan show was everything. His formula was vaudeville expanded to its furthermost edge, then beyond. It was opera and rock ’n’ roll, boxing and ballet, slapstick and social consciousness, the Vienna Boys Choir and the Woody Herman Orchestra, dramatic Bible readings and psychedelia, blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles, Fred Astaire, Tiny Tim, Richard Burton, Duke Ellington, John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl
Sandburg and Karl Wallenda, Eugene O’Neill, and Rodney Dangerfield, Jason Robards and Jessica Tandy, Mort Sahl and Janis Joplin and Michael Jackson, Cole Porter and Walt Disney and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Salvador Dalí and Elvis Presley and Margaret Truman and Van Cliburn and Frankie Avalon, and—the list exhausts itself, the list breaks the very definition of a list because all the items on it could not appear on a single list. Yet they did. Some ten thousand performers graced the Sullivan stage.

The Ed Sullivan Show
stands alone, too, because its impresario was such an inveterate newshound, with one eye cocked toward the latest headline and one moist finger hoisted in the air, always ready to proceed with cautious boldness wherever his audience was ready to go, and sometimes where they weren’t. He was a man of the moment,
that
week, wanting the show to be as newsworthy, and as news making, as the best of his Broadway columns. This made his program, unlike most other popular long-running shows, an immediate sonar ping reflection of its season. Each episode was a curio snapshot of its moment.

Cementing the show’s status as an archive of its time was Sullivan’s intuitive knack for reaching, some might say pandering to, the mass audience. He called to get the evening’s ratings every Monday morning, like a penitent bowing down to his deity, and he lived by those numbers. Because he reached so many viewers for so long, he created a show that influenced the tastes of the mainstream audience for decades. Magnifying his influence was the then-limited nature of the media universe. There was very little competition in his day: no cable television, no Internet, no movie rental. He was routinely watched by some thirty-five million people a week, year after year—a staggering number by comparison to later eras, when changes in media distribution fractured audiences into small slivers focusing on mutually exclusive material. His audience size during the ratings “slump” at the show’s end would have made the program a resounding success in later decades. Sullivan was one of the only games in town, which greatly amplified his role as a cultural tastemaker, and correspondingly amplifies the show’s position as a cultural archive.

It was an archive of his own life as well. For most of the show’s years there was some kind of circulatory system between him and his audience, allowing him to see as they saw, feel as they felt. If he had a genius, it was his ability to understand his viewers. He walked among his audience as an equal, and they saw that. He was at their service, his goal was to please them, yet he wasn’t separate from them; as he shaped the program in rehearsal each week his tastes were all but identical to theirs. So while the show was a reflection of his time, it also reflected Sullivan himself, how he saw the world, what he believed in.
The Ed Sullivan Show
was a self-portrait. Now, his body of work sits quietly on the shelf, finally freed from the constraints of ratings or sponsors, ready to provide an inimitable portrait of its time, and, if you know his story, the man himself.

To view his life in another way, his greatest achievement was temporal, completely of the moment. In this alternate view, likely the one he took himself, his life’s most significant moments took place every Sunday night between 1948 and 1971, and then they were gone. The Sullivan show had a unique quality, one that stood in
marked contrast to the many shows it competed with. Because he structured it to offer something for every member of the family, the show brought the entire family together. It was a shared experience. This communal, ritualistic togetherness gave the program, and Sullivan’s life, its greatest meaning.

Few television viewers in later decades, used to programs geared for their specific interests and armed with a remote control, would sit through
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Fully half the hour or more every week was not intended for them. Yet during most of the years the program ran, entire families sat together and watched it, each member bored in turn, each member aware of and influenced by the others’ reactions. The glow of the cathode-ray tube fell upon a group sitting together, laughing, sighing, or gawking together, not on one or two viewers nurturing an already-established niche interest.

As Ed garbled his syntax and glanced nervously at the cue cards, bonding went on. Sister saw brother take an interest in the Cassius Clay interview, and brother saw sister’s eyes light up while watching Elvis. The older folks enjoyed seeing ancient vaudevillians like Sophie Tucker. Everybody endured opera, because Ed had access to the biggest opera stars, and he was determined to showcase the best of every field, whether it be ballet or football or acrobatics or film.

Sullivan’s grandson Rob Precht, who as a teen often spent time with his grandfather, sometimes wondered how Ed wanted to be remembered. Rob very clearly saw his grandfather’s desire for renown, but he also saw something else. It was almost a sense of “ministering” to his audience, Precht recalled. “
I definitely think he had a sense that he was talking to Americans, he was watching out for them, he was giving them entertainment, he was showing them diversity. If you pressed him, in his more lucid days, I would not be surprised that if he were asked, What do you want to be remembered for? He would say, yes, fame, but also, bringing people together.”

It was clearly the central paradox of his life. He was a confirmed loner, distant from the countless people he knew, even removed in family gatherings, yet he was the producer of a program that brought the entire clan together like few others.
The Ed Sullivan Show
was the ultimate family show, produced by a man who had little patience for the rituals of familial togetherness. “He found family life entirely overrated,” Precht recalled. “He did not, on a personal level, enjoy family life … but, the way he connected to people was to be this family man on TV.”

Somehow, the calculus worked. The master showman, gifted at manufacturing the pixie dust of entertainment, created a convincing fictional image of himself as the ultimate Uncle Ed. He wasn’t a family man, but he played one on television. Yet on those Sunday evenings between 1948 and 1971, the result wasn’t an illusion; the television family man brought people together in real life. The entire family sat and shared, while he connected to them, as much as he was able, through the camera’s eye. It was television, but it was real.

Sources

One of the CBS executives I interviewed for this book, Irwin Segelstein, pointed out the difficulty of re-creating the past by talking to its participants. “One of the problems with what you do for a living,” he said, referring to writing a biography, “is that everyone gives you a version of what took place from their narrow, self-congratulatory point of view.”

That may be true, and certainly the passage of time changes memory, but the fact remains that I owe a heartfelt thanks to everyone who shared their recollections for this book. The scores of people—family members, performers, Sullivan staffers, and others who knew him personally—who shared their memories for this book added immeasurably.

First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to Betty Sullivan Precht, who generously spent hours on the telephone with me, and whose candor so greatly enriched this portrait of her father; and to her husband, Bob Precht, the Sullivan show’s producer, who not only shared his invaluable recollections, but also provided me with a list of phone numbers, and, finally, reviewed the manuscript and made suggestions; also, to Rob Precht, Sullivan’s grandson, for his nuanced and insightful sense of his grandfather.

I owe a special thanks to those Sullivan staff members who shared their thoughts; their behind-the-scenes insight on the show and Sullivan helped immeasurably: Susan Abramson, Bill Bohnert, Vince Calandra, Emily Cole, Vinna Foote, Barbara Gallagher, Verna Grafeld, Bernie Illson, Kathy Kuehl, John Moffit, Sistie Moffit, Russ Petranto, Peter Prichard, Jim Russek, and Mary Lynn Shapiro.

Equally important were the memories of performers and others who knew Sullivan or his times intimately, including Carl Ballantine, Carol Burnett, George Carlin, Jack Carter, Mike Dann, Larry Epstein, Phyllis Diller, Eric Fettmann, Connie Francis, Bill Gallo, Shecky Greene, Sherry Hackett, Will Jordan, Jane Kean, Andrew Lazlo, Preston Levi, Ray Manzarek, Jackie Mason, Jean Moore, Paul Winchell, Walter Podrazik, Joan Rivers, Irwin Segelstein, Andrew Solt, and Bruce Spizer.

Adding particular insight was Ed Sullivan’s collection of personal papers, some eighteen boxes of correspondence, contracts, and miscellaneous Sullivania stored at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, in Madison, Wisconsin. The days I spent at Madison proved invaluable. Also essential was the time I spent catacombed at the Library of Congress, reviewing the library’s collection of
The Ed Sullivan Show.