Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  Given his feelings of affection for the Kennedys, it was no surprise that Ed found the birthday party for President Kennedy in late May 1963 to be a magical evening. He called it one of the “unforgettable moments” in his many years of outings with Sylvia. Despite its elegance, there was a touch of informality to the evening—the ballroom contained no dais or head table, and the president circulated through the crowd, reportedly shaking hands with almost all the guests. The Waldorf-Astoria had been transformed for the event. A top Broadway lighting specialist, Abe Feder, designed a display to make the hotel’s lobby resemble a palace entryway. The stage was set up as a theater in the round, built around a “Circle of Life” display in the ballroom’s floor. In his keynote speech, Kennedy described the Democrats as “the party of hope,” and, referencing the many Broadway and Hollywood attendees, said that it was natural that performers “should find themselves at home in the party of hope.”

  Although Ed was often tapped to emcee high-profile events, for this evening he was invited as a performer. The program’s variety show was produced by Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the book and lyrics to the Broadway shows My Fair Lady and Camelot; Ed had done a tribute show dedicated to Lerner two year earlier. Ann-Margret, who had appeared with Ed in Bye Bye Birdie, sang “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” and Jimmy Durante, who Ed had known since his speakeasy days in the 1920s, donned a Kennedy wig and crooned “Start Off Each Day with a Smile.” Bob Newhart, a Sullivan regular, performed a stand-up routine satirizing television and the tobacco industry. For the finale, Mitch Miller entered with an eleven-man chorus singing “Together.” Ed was part of the chorus, along with Henry Fonda, Eddie Fisher, Robert Preston, Van Johnson, Peter Lawford, Mel Ferrer, Tony Randall, Donald O’Connor, David Susskind, and Bobby Darin. Henry Fonda surprised everyone by launching into a quick-step tap dance, later confiding to Ed, “I used to be a member of Chorus Equity.” Following the chorus onstage was Louis Armstrong, singing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” after which Audrey Hepburn sang “Happy Birthday.”

  However festive, the party at the Waldorf-Astoria was to be the president’s last birthday. When the charismatic Kennedy was assassinated while touring Dallas in a motorcade seven months later, it threw the country into a shocked state of mourning. For days, television coverage of the tragedy was nonstop; the Sullivan show on November 24, just two days after the event, was preempted. Earlier that day, Jack Ruby had shot and killed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as he was being transported to a nearby jail.

  The following week, Sullivan grappled with how to put on a variety show in a period of national mourning. After extended discussion, he decided to host a show with no comedy. Then, just days later, he reversed himself. He had negotiated with impresario Sol Hurok, who had brought Russia’s Obratsov Puppet Theatre to the United States, for the rights to present a full-hour program of the puppets. A show for the kids seemed appropriate.

  The Obratsov puppet show was a lighthearted affair, though Ed appeared to take no joy in it. At the beginning of the hour, with his always-grave face now looking almost funereal, he announced that he was presenting the puppet program as a tonic for “the nightmare week we’ve been through.” The look on his face that evening was like a headline: the country had fallen into a deep grief, an innate somberness that it seemed nothing could revive. As the calendar inched toward 1964, the gray national mood felt as if it would stretch into the foreseeable future. Was there nothing that could lift America’s spirits?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Beatlemania

  AS ED WALKED ONSTAGE TO BEGIN HIS BROADCAST on February 9, 1964, little about his demeanor revealed what this night was to be. Yet surely he felt it. In retrospect this evening’s show would be a cultural capstone, a black-and-white snapshot that defined the era as much as any of the decade’s moments. Its video footage would be replayed endlessly, as if it were some kind of visual mantra that contained the essence of its tumultuous period. Ed’s mien, however, was hardly different than during the hundreds of Sunday nights he had walked onstage over the last sixteen years.

  As always, he was dressed in his trademark Dunhill suit, with a small white handkerchief jutting from the left breast pocket. His hair was slicked straight back in the same style he had worn it in since his reporter days in the early 1920s, a bit of dark hair dye the only concession to the years. The camera showed his steps to be stiff and measured. As he got to center stage, he managed a momentary smile that did little to brighten his almost cadaverous countenance.

  But the studio audience’s expectant buzz was palpable. As the applause in CBS Studio 50 went on longer than usual, threatening to run away with itself, he waved his arm in a gesture of, okay kids, let’s quiet down. That afternoon at dress rehearsal he had warned the audience—largely teenage girls—to behave themselves. Otherwise, he had half-joked, he would “call in a barber.” Outside the theater at Broadway and 53rd Street there had been a near riot earlier that day, and an extra contingent of New York’s finest had been required to keep order.

  He told his viewers he had just received a “very nice” telegram from Elvis and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, wishing the Beatles—that evening’s headliner, making their American debut—“a tremendous success.” (Elvis, of course, wished the Beatles no such thing. The Fab Four, having just hit number one on the pop charts three weeks earlier, were pushing Elvis off the rock ’n’ roll throne. His resentment and envy of them is well documented; years later, in Elvis’ surprise visit to the Nixon White House, woozy with barbiturates, he explained to the president that it was groups like the Beatles who were leading kids toward drugs. But in 1964, sending this telegram was a good way to keep his name in front of the kids.)

  The crowd, at the mention of Elvis and the Beatles in the same sentence, once again began bubbling over, and Ed again motioned to quiet them down. Veering from his usual practice, he began listing some of the season’s big moments: the singing nun Sister Sourire, the puppet Topo Gigio, the previous week’s duet of Sammy Davis, Jr., and Ella Fitzgerald. He was, as he often did, speaking in code: don’t worry, the teenagers don’t own this show, there’s always something for you older folks, and the little ones, too. For his studio audience, Sullivan’s catalog of the show’s allures was a minor agony, something to endure politely while attempting to keep the dam from bursting.

  Then he said it. He announced that the Beatles would be out onstage shortly. At that point was heard a single female moan, apparently involuntary, almost sexual in its longing. The Beatles. Sullivan ignored it, mimicking himself as he set up the commercial break, after which he would bring on the English group: “If you’re a person who needs to be shown, here’s a rilly big proof from all new Aeroshave shaving cream.…”

  Ed’s decision to book the Beatles came about partially by chance—or so the story goes. In truth, he helped invent a fabricated version of the event, a bit of creative storytelling that became accepted as historical fact.

  According to Beatles lore, on the previous October 31, Ed and Sylvia were waiting for a flight in London Airport. While in London, they had visited Peter Prichard, an easygoing young Englishman who was Ed’s European talent scout, and who also worked for powerhouse British impresarios Lew and Leslie Grade. For Peter, who had performed in English vaudeville as a boy, landing the assignment as Sullivan’s eyes and ears in Europe was a dream job. He met Ed when the showman was auditioning talent agents at London’s Savoy Hotel; Peter was one of several agents Ed invited to come speak to him about their acts. Ed asked Peter to give his appraisal of the other agents’ acts. “I gave him my honest opinion, and I presume he liked it, because he called me in the next day, then he called Lew and said, ‘I’ve got your young man with me, he’s very good—he’s crafty.’ ” Over time, Prichard recalled, he and Ed developed something of a father-son relationship.

  When Ed made one of his frequent trips to Europe, he always visited Peter in London, where they went to the theater together. If Ed heard
of a European performer, he called Peter to investigate; the young agent also flew to Beirut, Russia, and Greece to see acts at Ed’s request. When Ed and Sylvia took their annual vacation in France, invariably staying at the Carleton Hotel in Cannes, Ed invited Peter and his wife to join them for a couple weeks. During their annual French vacations the two sat on the beach and talked for hours, Peter telling Ed about current European acts, Ed regaling the younger man with stories of his reporter days. Peter, who addressed Ed as “Mr. Sullivan” in his presence, held the showman in great regard and always listened raptly. Prichard remembered his friend as “a man’s man, tough, who wouldn’t handle fools easily.”

  As Ed and Sylvia sat in London Airport in October 1963, an English rock ’n’ roll group was returning from a five-day tour of Sweden. The airport was mobbed by frenzied teenagers eager for a glimpse or a word—anything—from these young musicians. By some reports the crowd numbered close to fifteen hundred semicrazed fans. Their manic energy brought the airport to a near standstill—it even delayed Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home as his limousine was pulling into the airport. Ed knew a phenomenon when he saw one. Soon thereafter he called Peter Prichard; did Peter know who they were? Yes, they were called the Beatles, and they were becoming quite the sensation. Trusting his young friend’s opinion, Ed told him to keep track of the band. When they were ready for America he wanted to book them.

  The London Airport story makes for a flattering portrait of Ed: in a moment of serendipity, the veteran showman, always looking for the next trend, spots a rock ’n’ roll band perched on the cusp of international fame. But it’s highly unlikely that Ed was in London Airport on October 31. His twice-weekly Daily News column shows him to be in New York on this date. It’s possible he could have made a trip to London between columns, but he invariably mentioned his foreign jaunts in the Daily News, and this period’s columns included no such reference. And nothing in his show’s schedule called for a trip to London in October. He was in London for a few weeks in September, at the end of his summer vacation, but there was no Beatles airport ruckus then.

  By his own account, Ed first learned of the Beatles by reading the newspapers, not in an airport sighting. Ten months after the Beatles debut on his show, he wrote a letter to British showman Leslie Grade: “You have been misinformed—or understandably have forgotten how I came to sign the Beatles. In late September 1963 when we were taping acts in London, I locked up the Beatles, sight unseen, because London papers gave tremendous Page 1 coverage to the fact that both the Queen’s flight and the newly elected Prime Minister Douglas-Home’s plane to Scotland had been delayed in takeoffs for three hours. The reason: the airport runways had been completely engulfed by thousands of youngsters assembled at the airport to cheer the unknown Beatles!”

  The letter contains a misstatement. The only time both the prime minister and the Beatles were at London Airport was October 31, so Ed was incorrect in his reference to late September. But his statement that he read news accounts of the band before seeing them appears true. He said as much in a 1968 interview with the Saturday Evening Post. The interviewer, noting that Sullivan told him that he learned of the Beatles in the newspapers, quoted Ed’s recollection of seeing the headlines: “ ‘Sylvia,’ he said (Mrs. Sullivan recalls it well), ‘Sylvia, there must be something here.’ ”

  One other thing the letter doesn’t make clear: the news accounts of the Beatles that Ed read were probably the British clippings that Peter Prichard sent him in the fall of 1963. Throughout most of that fall, American newspapers hardly knew the Beatles existed—the band was all but unknown in the United States. And in fact it was a call from the London-based Prichard, along with these clippings, that convinced Ed to give this band a guest shot.

  It’s not surprising that Sullivan booked the Beatles based on news accounts and a tip from Prichard, given how much he relied on newspapers and his talent scouts. He deserves no less credit for understanding the band’s potential. He was agreeing to present a group that, at the time he booked them, had never charted a single U.S. hit—there was an element of risk involved. Moreover, he had long been an adventurous rock promoter. Ever since Elvis he had used his hallowed talent showcase to introduce the latest rock acts to American living rooms, at a time when most adults viewed rock ’n’ roll as akin to a social disease. So the story of the London Airport sighting, with its portrait of Ed as a firsthand observer, does capture the spirit with which he stayed current with the new youth sound, if not the actual fact.

  Still, Ed enjoyed the London Airport anecdote. It was almost true. He had booked the Beatles before any American promoter, he had been in London Airport just a few weeks before the band was, and the airport scene had really happened. It’s just that Sullivan wasn’t there—though at times he claimed he was. (Actually, his version varied based on his mood and what reporter he was talking to.) Just four months after the Beatles debut, he told an interviewer, “We were in London last September. There was a commotion at the airport. We inquired what the cause was and discovered that hundreds of teenagers were at the airport to see the Beatles off.” As he repeatedly put himself in London at the time of the first Beatles airport mob scene—complete with the mistaken September date—it became accepted as fact.

  Peter Prichard, interviewed decades after the purported London Airport sighting, chuckled, and noted, “Well, as I always said, it’s a great press story. What can I say?” The anecdote, he said, sounds like the invention of a public relations expert. “In real life, if it would have happened, he [Sullivan] would have had a photograph of himself there.”

  However, he hastened to add, “I wouldn’t argue with my boss [Sullivan]. After all these many years I wouldn’t want to end up being wrong with him. If that’s what he said he did, then hey.…” In fact, “I would never say aloud that Mr. Sullivan was wrong,” remarked Prichard. “I’ll be seeing him soon—and watch out! Imagine going through the pearly gates and seeing him coming at me.” Prichard laughed, and then imitated the famed Sullivan temper: “ ‘I’ve got to have a word with you!’ ”

  Regardless of the veracity of the airport story, this much is true: in early November 1963 the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, was in America on a twofold mission. He wanted to promote Billy J. Kramer, a young rock singer, and he wanted to replicate the Beatles’ European success in the United States. He had major doubts about this latter task. Epstein knew that English bands had never done well in America—and that included the Beatles. The group had released three singles in the United States, with scant success. “She Loves You” had even been played on Dick Clark’s popular American Bandstandtelevision show in September 1963, yet the tune had cast not even a shadow on the U.S. charts.

  Perhaps now was the time. On October 13, the Beatles had performed on Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, an English variety program that resembled the Sullivan show. With an audience of more than fifteen million, the band’s performance sparked a firestorm of fan interest that London’s Daily Mirror dubbed “Beatlemania.” It was this teenage mania that Epstein hoped to spread to the United States.

  Peter Prichard, hearing that the Beatles manager sought an American television audience, placed a quick call to Epstein: “Brian was a friend of mine, and I said, ‘Don’t do anything until you’ve met up with Mr. Sullivan.’ ” Prichard then sent Sullivan a raft of positive reviews of the Beatles’ appearance on Val Parnell; he also called Ed and said the group was ripe for their American television debut. (These reviews, in fact, were likely the first news reports that Ed read about the Beatles.) As Prichard recalled, “Ed asked, ‘What’s the angle?’ ” meaning, how shall we sell this act to the public? “The angle is that these are the first long-haired boys to play before the Queen,” the agent replied. When Ed expressed interest, “I phoned Brian and said, ‘You’ll be getting a call from Mr. Sullivan.’ ”

  Sullivan met with Epstein at the Delmonico on November 11. They haggled over whether the Beatles would get top bi
lling; Epstein insisted on it, Sullivan refused—the band was virtually unknown in the United States. However, they managed to strike a deal. The Beatles would appear on February 9, and, betting on a ratings bump from the first show, Ed also booked them for the following Sunday’s show, to be broadcast from Miami’s Deauville Hotel. Additionally, he secured the rights to tape a third performance to be aired at his discretion. The fee was set at $3,500 for each live appearance, plus airfare and hotel, with an additional $3,000 for the taped segment. (The show’s budget ledger indicates that each Beatle was paid $875 for the February 9 show, which came to $515 after taxes.) That was about middling for Sullivan guests at the time; the headliners made $10,000 or more, while many acts made in the $2,500 range.

  For Bob Precht, who showed up at the meeting only after negotiations were done, the booking was a source of consternation. He had no problem with the Beatles’ manager; “Brian was a bright guy—he knew what he wanted,” Precht recalled. However, Ed hadn’t consulted him, as per their arrangement. And, although Bob knew who the Beatles were, he wasn’t sure they warranted a guest shot on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  Ed himself wasn’t too sure. In the second week of December, the CBS Evening News ran a report about the Beatles, a short feature produced by one of the network’s London correspondents. Shortly after the broadcast, Ed called CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, who he was friends with. “He was excited about the story we had just run on the long-haired British group,” Cronkite said. But Ed didn’t remember the band’s name. “He said, ‘Tell me more about those, what do they call them? Those bugs or whatever they call themselves.’ ” The newsman himself couldn’t remember the group’s name, having to glance at his copy sheet to remind himself. Cronkite told Sullivan he knew nothing about the band, but said he would contact the London correspondent to give Ed more details.