It was the audience, not the critics, who Sullivan set out to romance, and he succeeded at that in his debut year. As 1948 drew to a close, the Hopper ratings ranked Toast of the Town as television’s third most popular program, ahead of approximately eighty other prime time shows. It was topped only by Berle’s Texaco Theater and Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a televised version of the longtime hit radio show. Additionally, a Pulse survey, reporting on local preferences in various cities, placed Toast of the Town as the top-ranked program in New York and Philadelphia. Sullivan touted his success in his column, writing a note to himself, “Don’t get swell-headed over the Hooper television rating, son.” The show, unlike his many attempts at radio, was finding an audience.
And it was doing so on the cheap. At the end of 1948, CBS reported that it had paid Sullivan $53,500 that year; its reported salary for network president Frank Stanton was $109,000. That CBS would pay its fledgling show host about half the compensation of its president was certainly not true. What the network neglected to clarify was that the $53,500 it paid Sullivan had been the year’s total talent budget for Toast of the Town (the $375 a week for performers, plus $1,000 a week for the orchestra, plus miscellaneous fees, for a half year). Sullivan and his partner Marlo Lewis, after expenses, worked for CBS for free that year.
Although Toast of the Town enjoyed healthy ratings, the critical fusillade directed at Sullivan became a problem. If NBC could hire the multitalented Milton Berle, why was CBS presenting this frozen-faced newspaperman who bumbled through his brief introductions? CBS knew the answer—Sullivan was delivering a ratings triumph at almost no cost—but the program’s sole sponsor, Emerson Radio, saw it differently. Company executives felt embarrassed to be associated with an emcee who generated such critical vitriol.
In February 1949 Marlo Lewis got a call from Ben Abrams, Emerson’s president; Lewis’ ad agency handled the account. “Frankly Marlo—Sullivan stinks! Even from here, and holding my nose. He stinks!” Emerson was canceling its sponsorship, effective immediately. When Lewis reminded him he had agreed to a long-term commitment—the agreement had been oral, not written—Abrams retorted that CBS had taken advantage of Emerson by aligning his company with a show hosted by an amateur. The network made a tentative attempt to enforce the agreement, but to no avail. Toast of the Town had lost its sponsor.
Sylvia heard the news before Ed. She was home by herself the day the call came. Assuming that Emerson’s cancellation portended the show’s cancellation, the call was a major blow. “You can’t imagine how sick I was,” she said. For Ed, the loss of sponsorship called to mind his radio programs, none of which survived past nine months. Now his luck with television, with his show at the nine-month point, appeared all too familiar. He fell into a pitch-black mood. Of that evening, Sylvia recalled: “We were out having dinner, and some fans came over to compliment the program. We both felt so empty we just sat there with sinking hearts.”
CBS was flummoxed. Toast of the Town had attracted an audience, but it had been a hard sell to advertisers, and was now looking like a money loser. The network felt pressed to rectify that. With the search for a sponsor now urgent, the word was put out, quietly, that CBS was soliciting advertisers for the show “with or without Ed Sullivan.” The network had specifically kept Sullivan’s name off the show for this possibility; according to his contract he could be replaced at any point.
When Ed heard about the “with or without Sullivan” offer, he erupted into a rage. He had produced a ratings win for the network while subsidizing the cost himself, and now they were about to jettison him? His daughter Betty recalled his response to this news as “making him more of a fighter,” and indeed he sprang into full battle mode. He stormed the halls of CBS, entering the office of network president Frank Stanton, voice at full volume, demanding to know what was going on. Stanton and network chairman Bill Paley reassured him, claiming they hadn’t agreed to sell the show without him. The offer, they said, had come only from one executive, Jack Van Volkenburg. The “with or without” proffer was rescinded and Sullivan was given an apology. Nonetheless, CBS retained the right to replace him at any time.
The show’s high ratings meant it didn’t have to wait long to find a new sponsor—and a far more prestigious one. Benson Ford, grandson of Henry Ford, enjoyed Toast of the Town immensely. Soon after Emerson Radio’s cancellation, the Ford Motor Company’s ad agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt, contacted CBS. Ford agreed to sponsor the show for thirteen weeks beginning March 27. For Ed the news was profound validation; the show had attracted one of the country’s largest corporations. And, in addition to promoting its Lincoln Mercury line on the program, Ford would tout Toast of the Town in all its nationwide print advertising for the automobile line—reminding readers to tune in Sunday night at 8 P.M.
If that alone wasn’t manna from Heaven, Ford was throwing its corporate weight behind not just the show but, remarkably, Sullivan himself. Due to Benson Ford’s enthusiasm for Ed, Kenyon & Eckhardt developed plans to make him the spokesperson for Lincoln Mercury. Ford would pay him $25,000 per year to travel across the country, city by city, attending community events and giving speeches, promoting the automobile line. When he wasn’t on press junkets he would hold press conferences by phone with groups of editors. In short, he was to be the face of Lincoln Mercury. He would become so associated with the boxy sedans that buyers called him about problems and concerns they had with their new Lincoln Mercurys.
(Over the next two years he would log so many miles for Ford that in February 1952 he wrote an exhausted letter to a Lincoln Mercury executive, claiming his physician had forbidden him to keep traveling: “As a result of this session with the doctor, who long has warned me against what he terms ‘idiocy,’ I have come to this firm conclusion—that a weekly TV show and a five-times-a-week column are as much as I can handle well. I do not want to be a promotion man in the field because it takes too damn much out of me, completely disrupts my home life, and certainly reduces the time I should devote to a big league TV show.” Ford agreed to a lighter schedule.)
Ford’s sponsorship prompted CBS to increase Toast of the Town’s talent budget to $2,000 per episode—still just a fraction of Milton Berle’s budget but a quantum leap from $375. Marlo and Ed discussed how to spend the money, in particular, what share they themselves should take. Ed, according to Marlo, argued that all of it should be spent on the show. “My problem is that I can’t keep squeezing the talent. We’ve got to pay them more.… I hate to say this, but you and I will still have to wait before we can take anything for ourselves.” Lewis agreed. Later that year, the Ford sponsorship allowed Sullivan and Lewis to start taking home modest paychecks.
In addition to the vote of confidence from Ford, Ed received validation from an unusual source in this period. Sometime in late 1949 or early 1950, he took a rare trip home to Port Chester. All of his siblings had remained there; his mother had died in 1929 and his father was now eighty-nine. His older sister Helen, who worked as a factory foreman, had become the family conduit to Ed. When someone needed something, usually financial help, the request was funneled through Helen to Ed. His salary as a Daily News columnist and his success as a vaudeville producer made him the affluent sibling.
He may have made the trip home because he knew his father was dying, for Peter was seriously ill and would die in April 1950. This was likely the last time Ed saw his father, from whom he had remained estranged. Even at age eighty-nine, Peter had never once met Ed’s daughter Betty, who was now nineteen years old.
Television had made it into the Sullivan home in Port Chester, and Ed’s father, with great mental confusion, mentioned that he had seen Ed’s show. “Ed, you were in that little box there!” he exclaimed. “How did you get in there?” He could not, even after considerable explanation, understand how his son’s image had appeared in his living room.
By the late 1940s, Ed’s Daily News column traveled far afield from its roots as a gossip chronicle. Nearly in his twentiet
h year of writing five columns a week, he turned Little Old New York into a stream of consciousness compendium of his opinions and observations. Anything could now be commented upon, from the low price of whale steaks in Vancouver—good for housewives, he observed—to the fact that marijuana was sold openly on Seventh Avenue. He explained the code used by tugboats sailing off Manhattan (“one long blast is ‘right your rudder’ ”) and covered the glory days of Yankee demigod Joe DiMaggio. As always, his blind items took a darker turn; he included rumor of an unnamed producer who paid $5,000 to hush up a morals charge. Ed even dispensed advice to the underworld: “Tip to mobs: don’t try to heist the shipment on the West Side docks. You’ve got to get hurt.” Broadway and Hollywood remained leading players, as he reported that A Streetcar Named Desire was one of the few plays with a busy box office, and he whispered updates like “the Humphrey Bogart stork checks in January” and “Before she filed [for divorce], Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan had a friendly hour’s confab at Warner’s.”
He gave ample coverage to the funeral for Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the storied black tap dancer who died in November 1949. Robinson and Sullivan had had a long friendship, and the dancer was one of the first performers Ed booked on his television show. The funeral for Robinson, a larger-than-life folk hero in New York City before earning Hollywood fame, was attended by scores of public figures, including Mayor O’Dwyer, Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, and Ethel Merman. According to The New York Times, approximately five hundred thousand people lined the streets as the flag-draped hearse drove slowly from the church service in Harlem to Times Square to the cemetery in Brooklyn. Robinson had made a small fortune as a performer, yet he died destitute. The pastor who eulogized him explained that he had but two vices, “ice cream and gambling.” Ed, along with composer Noble Sissle (his partner in the Broadway show Harlem Cavalcade), took charge of the funeral arrangements, partially funding it and soliciting contributions for the rest. Adam Clayton Powell, New York’s pioneering black Congressman, thanked Sullivan in his eulogy to Robinson, and Ed also delivered a eulogy at the service.
Aside from show business events like Robinson’s funeral, or Broadway–Hollywood news, Ed’s column now most often spotlighted politics. At times he covered the intersection of politics and show business, as when he reported in the summer of 1948 that Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante donated large sums to the new state of Israel, a favorite cause of Ed’s. But more often now he put aside show business to write about politics itself. He analyzed the 1948 Dewey–Truman presidential race at length, clearly leaning toward the Republican Dewey, a shift from when the young columnist was a cheerleader for Franklin Roosevelt. Truman, he observed, appeared “grayer and plumper,” and seemed “pretty grim over the coldblooded disinterest in his own party.” Indeed, Truman faced an all-but-certain loss in the fall election. Which would be good for the country, Ed opined. “Can you imagine the cleanup job J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI will do if former DA Tom Dewey gets in? Truman group has handcuffed Hoover, while the henchmen loaded the boodle.”
The political development that most concerned Ed was the rise of the Soviet Union. He dissected the internal power struggles of the U.S.S.R. down to the minutiae: “The Russian conflict is between Stalin’s group … versus forty-nine-year-old Andrei Zhdanov and Zhukov’s Red army officer clique, arch foes of U.S. and England … They tell me that even in the Russian embassies in this country, the current bitter communist rift has split apart Russians, with each spying on the other.” As the Cold War settled in, he warned constantly of the threat Russia posed to the United States. He supported those who called for increased defensive measures, as he wrote in July 1948: “GOP leaders, burning at the call for a special session of Congress, first will ask President Truman why the Air Force hasn’t a single assembled atom bomb? It would be two weeks for one to be assembled, if Russia pulled a Pearl Harbor in Europe.”
Ed reported what he saw as the growing influence of communist subversives in the United States. “Commies in this area bolder now that all books of twelve Commie leaders destroyed,” he wrote shortly after his show debuted. A few weeks later, “Commies in this area have labored overtime, through the years, to bag [boxer] Joe Louis. At one big political rally in Harlem, the Commie speaker suddenly pointed to Louis and screamed: ‘Even the heavyweight champion of the world isn’t permitted to play golf at white clubs. Isn’t that so, Joe?’ … Louis rose to his feet and said, ‘No, you’re wrong again. I play golf with Bob Hope, Hal LeRoy, Lou Clayton, Ed Sullivan, Bing Crosby, and I play at the top clubs in the country’ … Only time on record that golf flogged communism … Have you noticed the sudden silence of local Commies? Not a pink peep out of them for weeks.”
In late 1949, the anticommunist fervor Ed supported came into conflict with his role as a television producer. He booked Paul Draper, a dancer known as “The Aristocrat of Tap” for his ability to adapt his flashing feet to any genre, from samba to classical. Scheduled for January 1950, the Draper booking created controversy almost as soon as it was announced.
Mrs. Hester McCullough, a Connecticut housewife and anticommunist crusader, had declared that Draper and harmonica player Larry Adler were communist sympathizers. It appears her charge was based on nothing more substantial than Draper and Adler’s high-profile support of third-party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, the 1948 nominee of the Progressive Party. (Wallace, a former vice president under Roosevelt, was a constant target of red-baiters in the late 1940s due to his left-of-center beliefs.) Prior to a 1949 performance by Draper and Adler in Greenwich, Connecticut, McCullough had launched a letter-writing campaign, aided by Hearst columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote as “Cholly Knickerbocker.” With Knickerbocker’s support, she demanded the concert be canceled, asserting that performers with communist sympathies were traitors. Draper and Adler denied her charges, issuing a statement picked up by the Associated Press that they were not and never had been communist sympathizers, and that their allegiance stood solely with the United States. The two performers filed suit against McCullough and played their concert as planned, which went well.
That Sullivan decided to book Draper after this much controversy was a clear risk. It’s probable that he knew Draper had lost nightclub bookings after his support of Wallace’s campaign—which Ed himself had vehemently opposed. Yet Ed knew Draper and had worked with him, booking him on numerous occasions for his local variety shows, and Draper and Adler played many USO shows during the war. Ed knew the dancer well enough to know that McCullough’s claims were groundless. And Draper was a perfect performer for the modestly funded Toast of the Town: his tap brilliance played well on television, yet he wasn’t well-known enough to command a large paycheck. At any rate, it appeared that Draper had successfully stood up to McCullough, having filed suit against her and performed as planned. Furthermore, any action by a Hearst columnist (a group that included Winchell) was likely to produce an equal and opposite reaction by Ed.
Soon after Draper’s Toast of the Town appearance was announced, a full assault began. Cholly Knickerbocker, now aided by conservative Hearst columnists Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky, demanded that Ford Motor Company cancel the appearance. Ford, its ad agency Kenyon & Eckhardt, and Ed circled the wagons, holding tense meetings about how to handle the issue. One sticky problem: Draper had filed suit against McCullough; if Ford canceled Draper’s television appearance, would they themselves be faced with legal action?
The decision was made to go ahead with the Draper booking, but Ed dressed it up beyond reproach. He directed the dancer to perform to “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and, right after Draper’s performance, the camera cut to Benson Ford in the audience, no more wholesome representative of mainstream America, clapping with gusto. But the other side was not to be appeased. Hearst’s New York Journal-American decried the show with banner headlines, and the Hearst columnists led a letter-writing campaign that sent nearly thirteen hundred angry letters to Ford. Some were duplicates, with large numbers coming fro
m the same post office, but the meaning was clear: Ford had stepped into a public relations quagmire. Worried meetings were again convened between Ford, its agency, and Sullivan, after which Ed wrote a letter, supposedly to the head of Kenyon & Eckhardt, but in reality to be distributed as a press release:
“I am deeply distressed to find out that some people were distressed by the appearance … of a performer whose political beliefs are a matter of controversy … You know how bitterly opposed I am to communism and all it stands for … If anybody has taken offense, it is the last thing I wanted or anticipated, and I am sorry … Tell everybody to tune in again next Sunday night, and if I can get a plug in, it will be a great show—better than ever.”
It was a strategic retreat—after the battle was done—but Ed had, in essence, learned his lesson. Booking a performer with even an imagined shadow over his credentials was profoundly hazardous. Never again would he do so. The show and its success were primary; nothing would ever challenge that as his guiding precept. While he had been a bellicose Cold Warrior before the Draper incident, he now redoubled his efforts. Soon after the controversial booking, he let it be known that he checked each show’s lineup with Theodore Kirkpatrick, a former FBI agent and now coeditor of Counterattack, which billed itself as “a newsletter of facts on communism.” If Sullivan thought a musician or comic might be considered a communist sympathizer, he invited Kirkpatrick, a self-appointed expert on such matters, to meet with the performer in Ed’s suite at the Delmonico. Ed made it clear that Toast of the Town would be above even the suggestion of subversive taint. “Kirkpatrick has sat in my living room on several occasions and listened attentively to performers eager to secure a certification of loyalty,” he wrote in June 1950. “On some occasions, after interviewing them, he has given them the green light; on other occasions, he has told them ‘Veterans’ organizations will insist on further proof.’ ”
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan Page 24
