Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  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.

  Livid, he called MCA agent Marty Kummer, who he had worked with to book Fairfax, shouted a stream of profanities in his ear, then fired him. As Ed looked into the issue he realized that a number of his favorites, notably comics Myron Cohen and Sam Levenson, were appearing on both his and Paar’s show for very different pay scales. And that, improbably, was what angered him: that Paar could book the likes of Sam Levenson for union scale while the Sullivan show had to pay $2,500. But the pay disparity was unavoidable: the Sullivan show was a ratings powerhouse with huge sponsorship revenue; the Paar show was a distant also-ran in the ratings. Ed himself had taken advantage of similarly disparate pay levels when he booked performers to appear for little after they saw hefty paydays on Comedy Hour. Paar’s show, while never as underfunded as Sullivan’s had been, was not a big-budget affair. It was successful by the then-limited standards of late-evening television, but the Tonight Show was far from the franchise it later became.

  Yet Ed decided to treat Paar as an arch competitor. He issued a dictum to all talent agents: any performer you book on Paar for $320 will be paid no more than that on my show. It had the effect he knew it would have: many performers and agents suddenly forgot that Paar existed. Within days Myron Cohen canceled his upcoming Tonight Show appearance. Paar, whose first resort was usually histrionics—though entertaining histrionics—responded by reading a long open letter to Ed on his program: “Ed, I don’t have the money to pay performers. This show is a low-budget freak that caught on because performers want to come on and want time to entertain people without the monkey act and the Japanese jugglers waiting in the wings.” After his audience’s laughter subsided he challenged Ed to a duel: he would ask NBC for the Sunday time slot opposite Sullivan, so that for one evening they would produce competing variety shows, with the winner decided by the ratings.

  Ed, deflecting the challenge, quipped, “I think Paar owes me $320. It’s the best show he’s had in weeks.” Then he proposed his own duel. He would come on Paar’s show and debate him, with one stipulation: there could be no studio audience—Sullivan knew that Paar could play to a crowd far more effectively than he could. Over the next few days the NBC host tweaked Ed for requesting to ban the studio audience, yet he countered with generous terms: Sullivan could speak first and last and bring his own moderator. Paar asked only that, “some time be given to the issues that he had raised. I don’t want to be given four minutes and then eight acrobats come on in the middle.” For Paar, whose ratings were dwarfed by Sullivan’s, the mini-farce was a Nielsen booster. The longer he kept it going the better. For Sullivan, for whom this kind of thing wasn’t his shtick, it was quickly becoming an embarrassment, especially when the national media started covering the conflict round by round. No real issues existed between the two men, except Ed’s irrational insistence on pay parity.

  Ed agreed to have a studio audience present for the debate, and after some minor jousting the event was scheduled for the Tonight Show broadcast on March 13. That afternoon Ed and Bob Precht met with Paar’s producer at the office of publisher Bennett Cerf, whom Ed had chosen as the moderator. In mid meeting Sullivan realized Paar had changed the rules, or at least that’s how Ed saw it. The NBC host now wanted a discussion, not a debate—though clearly the agreement had been to debate. To be sure, the difference between a debate and a discussion on a talk show was negligible, but what Ed feared was a freewheeling back and forth. Knowing he was no match for Paar’s verbal wit, Ed had agreed to a debate with a plan to read prepared remarks. He wanted no part of a discussion.

  He issued a press release at 3:30 P.M., saying it was a debate or nothing. “I am ready to go on tonight and debate. If Paar wants to change his mind before 4 P.M., I will go on. Paar can now put up or shut up and his deadline is 4 P.M. I have no further comment.” NBC retorted with its own release claiming that Sullivan had thrown in the towel—provoking an angry response from Ed: “Paar is a welcher. He is a hell of shadow boxer, but I think he chokes up when he realizes that the time has come to stand up and debate.” Paar replied in turn, claiming that Sullivan “would not agree to a free and open discussion of the issues, the only condition I made and the only democratic way of clearing up the whole mess.” On his show he opined, “Ed Sullivan proved to be as honest as he is talented.… Ed Sullivan is a liar. That is libel. He must now sue and he must go to court—not like Winchell and Hoffa [two previous Paar combatants], who sue just to save their face.”

  The squabble had gone on far too long—many were now calling it
ridiculous—and Ed wanted out. He issued a final statement that he was going to Miami to emcee a show for crippled children, asserting, “This controversy, as Paar’s behavior proved last night, is clearly a misuse of the airways and has become objectionable to the public. Consequently I will have nothing more to say on the subject.” In the aftermath, Life magazine’s cover showed two puppets, Sullivan and Paar, slugging it out. The accompanying article was composed of photos of the puppets in absurd poses, and the captions quoted the men’s actual words, which fit the silly photos all too well.

  The irony of the feud was that Ed initiated it just a few months after signing his new contract with CBS. He was the producer of a ratings giant, a star of a major network who had just signed a lucrative contract extending until the very end of his days. But he had picked a fisticuffs with the host of an also-ran show who didn’t threaten him in any way.

  It was as if Ed, having found the fame he always had hungered for, could not let go of the pugilistic side of himself that helped him achieve it. He needed someone or something to struggle against, even if he had to invent it out of whole cloth. The word that critics most often used to describe him was “wooden,” because he showed the public only his stiff emcee persona. Yet his unguarded reactions were almost always uncontrollably visceral. Real woodenness was beyond him.

  As Ed took his European vacation that summer the Cold War took a turn toward the frigid. On August 12 East German leader Walter Ulbricht signed the command to close the border between East and West Berlin; the next day construction of the Berlin Wall began. It was exactly the type of event that inspired Ed, who saw the show as a vehicle for reflecting world affairs, regardless of the mixed response this had generated. He immediately flew to Berlin and met with U.S. military authorities. Would they authorize a Sullivan show to entertain the troops stationed in Germany? After getting agreement he began assembling a cast of stars for an October program.

  Jack Paar, perhaps inspired by the impending Sullivan show, scrambled to launch his own Berlin Wall show. He succeeded in getting there first, but the Paar program became a minor fiasco. He filmed it literally within the shadow of the wall, commandeering a squad of some fifty American soldiers as a chaperone. The flurry of troop movement not authorized by senior military officials caused grave concern. With White House approval, the Defense Department launched an investigation; the fear was that massing such a force so close to the wall could have sparked an international incident. Two Army officers were censured for cooperating with Paar.

  In contrast, the Sullivan show in October was a major public relations victory. Taped in front of an audience of six thousand American troops in West Berlin’s Sportspalast, headliner Louis Armstrong blew through—appropriately—“When the Saints Go Marching In.” Accompanying the jazz trumpeter was Sullivan’s typically eclectic mix: Metropolitan Opera star Roberta Peters; classical pianist Van Cliburn; comic-magician Bob Lewis; pop chart powerhouse Connie Francis singing her hit theme song to MGM’s Where the Boys Are; comedians Rowan and Martin; and a troupe of French cancan dancers called The Bluebell Girls. Ed asked audience member Lieutenant General Albert Watson to take a bow.

  Connie Francis, who had become friends with Ed, suggested that they visit the communist sector of Berlin. “We looked at that wall and I said, ‘Ed, we’ve got to get to the other side,’ and he said, ‘Yes we do—tomorrow we’ll go.’ ” Ed and Sylvia accompanied Francis on a tour bus that traveled through East Berlin, during which no pictures or questions were allowed. At the sight of the city’s gloom, “He was just as distraught as I was,” the singer recalled.

  On a lighter note, Ed accompanied Louis Armstrong out to West Berlin nightclubs for the trumpeter’s local performances. As production assistant John Moffit recalled, one night Ed returned to the hotel giddy from having downed several drinks. The hotel had asked all of its patrons to leave their shoes outside their room doors, to be polished by hotel staff. “Ed was going around and tying all the shoelaces together, laughing and chortling away,” Moffit remembered.

  The broadcast was such a success that Ed reprised it the following fall, December 1962, taking a show to the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, again booking Louis Armstrong and Connie Francis. Like the Berlin Wall show, this program enabled Ed to thrust The Ed Sullivan Show into the international spotlight. The Cuban missile crisis—bringing America and the Soviet Union to an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff—had unfolded just several weeks earlier. Production assistant Vince Calandra remembered the atmosphere of fear as they flew down; because of the recent tension the Air Force provided an escort of four fighter jets. “It was scary!” he recalled. Armstrong, again choosing a song with great appropriateness, played “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

  The Louis Armstrong-Connie Francis pairing was typical of Ed’s approach to music in the 1961–62 season. The old guard was very much in residence, yet it was increasingly leavened with the new sound. Just a few weeks after the Berlin show Ed booked Duke Ellington for a duet with Armstrong, the two giants interpreting “In a Mellow Mood”; on that same show, sugary pop crooner Paul Anka trilled a jazzy version of “Jingle Bells.” (In a similarly unlikely cultural stretch, Anka later shared the bill with poet Carl Sandburg.) In November, the very square Steve Lawrence, a Sullivan favorite, shared the bill with Ray Charles, who laid down a rollicking rhythm and blues sound that had rarely been heard in middle-class households. Two months later, suave Robert Goulet (whom Ed mistakenly introduced as Canadian) glided over the Cole Porter standard “What Is This Thing Called Love?” on the same night that soul singer Jackie Wilson squeezed the emotion out of his Top 40 hit “The Greatest Hurt.” That hour also found the Marquis Chimps doing a tumbling act and smoking cigarettes, a booking that may have been a nod to sponsor York Cigarettes.

  That winter, pop duo the Everly Brothers—performing in Marine uniforms during their short enlisted stint—harmonized on “Crying in the Rain” in the same hour trumpeter Al Hirt jazzed up Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” For every booking of vanguard artists like Fats Domino, Dion, and Chubby Checker there was an equal and opposite booking of Johnny Mathis or the McGuire Sisters. For every appearance by folksingers—now on the increase—such as The Highwaymen, who sang “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” or the fresh-faced The Brothers Four, who harmonized on “This Land Is Your Land,” there was a counterweight, like 1940s star Kate Smith belting out “Climb Every Mountain” or balladeer Billy Eckstine getting intimate with “What Kind of Fool Am I?” During these seasons in the early 1960s it was still possible to entertain both teens and their parents without alienating either group.

  Broadway continued to star; that spring Ed presented a scene from the long-running hit West Side Story, in an hour in which Liberace performed a tribute to vaudeville, dancing a soft-shoe to “Me and My Shadow.” And Ed seemed to be on a mission to book every classic jazz act, spotlighting Sarah Vaughn, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, the Woody Herman Orchestra, and their contemporaries.

  In June, Ed wrote one of his many letters to New York Times critic Jack Gould; a Times editor noted that no entertainer wrote as many letters to the paper as Sullivan. Civil rights was coming to the forefront of national consciousness and Gould had written a piece about the role of black performers on television, noting that it was minimal. But he left out the Sullivan show’s contribution. After Ed’s letter, Gould issued a correction: “In the past year he has offered thirty-three Negro acts, involving one hundred two individuals and an expenditure of $201,000 in fees. Herewith apologies to Mr. Sullivan for omitting his admirable record.”

  On a related note, the first Sullivan show of the next season was interrupted by a CBS News bulletin: James Meredith, a black college student, had been admitted to the University of Mississippi, an historic first. An angry mob of two thousand had converged on the campus to block the special Sunday registration. In the ensuing riot, two died, twenty-eight federal marshals were wounded, and one hundred sixty were injured. Ed followed the
events closely; his support for the civil rights movement was wholehearted. The following June, at a $100-a-plate dinner in honor of four civil rights leaders, he presented an award to Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Ed’s lifestyle after his recent pay increase was not perceptibly different than when he had signed his first lucrative contract in the mid 1950s. And this itself had not been markedly higher than when he first moved into the Delmonico in 1944. Ed and Sylvia’s apartment was surprisingly modest, given his income. The staffers who visited often remarked that its décor made it hard to believe its inhabitants were affluent, with the exception of a handful of original oil paintings Sylvia had collected.

  The furniture was a homey mixture of Italian and French, with antique satin drapes in the living room and sitting room, where Sylvia played games of mah-jongg with her friends when not volunteering for charity concerns, which she did frequently. Ed conducted much of the business of the show from the Delmonico, and his office was littered with show business memorabilia: a copy of Time with his face on the cover, photos from the show—Cole Porter, Humphrey Bogart, Ella Fitzgerald—and a picture frame that was a gift from Jerry Lewis. (Lewis had sent his own photo in the frame, which Ed removed and replaced with a photo of himself on the golf course.)

  Working quietly amid the clutter, the hundreds of books, and the scattered newspapers, was almost always Ed’s man Friday, Carmine Santullo. A quiet, sweet, unassuming man, who virtually worshipped Ed, Carmine handled the incessant stream of phone calls, among countless other duties. After working with Sullivan for decades he could anticipate his response to any request. “Carmine was Ed’s Nubian slave,” recalled Sullivan show secretary Sistie Moffit. He did most of the legwork for Ed’s Daily News column (still published twice weekly), and many said he all but wrote it, though Ed made a point of insisting he wrote it himself.