The show was over. For many of the staff, working on it had come to seem like working for a well-established family business. Television shows might have runs of three to five years, with staff on the lookout for a new job the entire time; unemployment loomed just one bad Nielsen report away. In contrast, the Sullivan show had appeared virtually permanent. The staff felt as if they had familial ties with one another (and some three decades after cancellation many continued to stay in touch). After every Sunday’s broadcast, when Ed and Sylvia went to Danny’s Hideaway, the production crew gathered at the China Song restaurant next to the theater to compare notes, laugh, and kibitz long into the night.
Most of the staff recalled working on the show as one of the high points of their life. The job was consuming; some worked six days a week, usually all day long on Saturday and Sunday. But the visceral excitement of a live broadcast and the glittering parade of stars more than made up for it. Staff member Susan Abramson remembered Irving Berlin coming into the office and noticing a painting of a bright blue sky above her desk. Berlin, whose song “Blue Skies” had been a huge hit, looked at the painting with a twinkle in his eye and said to her: “You know, I could write a song about that.” On another occasion, Duke Ellington told her he was going to compose a tune about her blue eyes. Sistie Moffit, an administrative assistant, recalled that Michael Jackson, then a boy star of Motown, tended to wander off before rehearsal. Assigned the task of watching him, she tied a short rope between her waist and his; many years later she still chuckled about babysitting the singer. “I dragged him around with me all day.… Michael was such a cute little guy.”
In the immediate aftermath of cancellation, the staff’s disappointment was tempered by knowledge that it had been coming. When the final call came, there was a certain shrug of the shoulders. No one was surprised. (And for several of the crew the show launched them to further success in television.) Still, set designer Bill Bohnert had a lump in his throat as he cleared out his warehouse of props, to be picked up by garbage trucks.
Ed, while not surprised, was absolutely heartbroken. Soon afterward he met his friend, singer Jerry Vale, at Toots Shor’s restaurant. Tears were in his eyes, Vale remembered. “How about that? I’ve been canceled,” Ed said. “After all these years, they canceled me. I wanted to do twenty-five seasons, but they wouldn’t let me do it.” Vale tried to console his friend, but Ed was inconsolable. That the showman had achieved everything he set out to do, walking into millions of living rooms every Sunday for decades, and having the Ed Sullivan Theater named in his honor, didn’t matter. The show had been his identity, and now he had nothing else to look forward to.
That summer a reporter from Show magazine interviewed him at his apartment in the Delmonico. As they sat in Ed’s memento-strewn office, the showman seemed “in a period of deep reminiscence,” the reporter wrote. “His manner appeared nostalgic, full of pauses and prolonged glances, and with a wee touch of sadness.”
“I feel empty now that the show’s over. Very empty,” Ed said. “It was the excitement, the fun of it, that I miss … meeting celebrities, going out after the show with stars [which in fact Ed rarely did]. It was the thrill of going out onstage in front of a live audience every Sunday at 8 P.M. All of a sudden, that was over and there was nothing.
“Even after CBS’s decision, I went on thinking, in myself, that I was still doing the show. You see I had put a big part of my life into it, and I don’t think it was just conceit. No, it was a terrific letdown, the news … like getting a slap in your face from your teacher. I brood about it, do a lot of walking. If I’m out and a cab driver stops me and says, ‘Hey Ed, what have you got on Sunday night,’ what can I do but just laugh?
“The people were just getting tired of that old routine. In the course of twenty-three years, I’ve shown everything that vaudeville had ever produced. I think they just felt ‘For Christ’s sake, not again!’ At any rate, the ratings collapsed.”
He expressed regret that he didn’t do more to shake up the show’s format as the ratings slid, like producing more specials. “Like a horse’s ass I didn’t say to myself ‘What the hell am I worrying about? This is what we should do! Specials!’ I just got into the habit of the old routine, I guess.”
The reporter asked Sullivan how his show had lasted so long. “I know a hell of a lot about show business and I know a hell of a lot about performers. On our show my opening act was just like my newspaper leads—the grabber that held people’s interest. This act would be a good one, and then we’d go to commercials. You grab them instantly. It was just like the makeup of a newspaper—when I was on the Mail I used to do the makeup. You know, by putting in your one-column boxes, cuts in here and there, you could make the page interesting to look at. My shows were just like a newspaper—it had sports, drama, movies, celebrities.”
His thoughts often turned to the past. “I think more about the old days than I did before. My wife, Sylvia, tells me I think too much about it. It was an exciting past, especially those early newspaper days when I was running around and meeting all kinds of new people.”
Did Ed mind the ratings game, which so many said turned television into a sea of mediocrity? No, he said, the public will make its tastes known. “It always has and it always will. The ratings game is legitimate. Saying that TV shouldn’t cater to public taste is like saying let’s give up the presidential election because public taste has picked so-and-so.”
Would he retire? “Every time I think of leaving New York and going off to the country … well, I just couldn’t do it.” His plans at this point were unclear. He noted that Sylvia, after many years of marriage, knew to say nothing to him in the days right after cancellation. But after a week, she asked, “Ed, what are we going to do on Sundays now?”
In fact, Ed hadn’t given up the idea of returning to his weekly show. He told the Show reporter that if ratings for his fall specials were high enough, the network might be convinced to reinstate the weekly program. He looked over at the reporter with a smile described as sly but charming, and said: “Maybe I can prove to CBS that they’re wrong.” It was classic Ed. Just as after his many canceled radio programs, once again, losing a show simply meant it was time to start planning to get back on the air.
But he wasn’t the hustling thirty-five-year-old newspaperman he had been. Ed’s daily life now bumped along without much sound and fury. As always, he had his habitual 11 A.M. breakfast of a lamp chop and a glass of iced tea with artificial sweetener. He went out for a shave, same place, same time. He attended a benefit for the Dance Collection at the New York Public Library. He accepted the Brotherhood Award from Temple Ohabei Shalom, one of dozens of awards from Jewish groups he received over the decades. In August he and Sylvia took their perennial sojourn to Cannes, France, along with a few other couples. He had never stopped penning his Daily News column, though in reality it shad long been shepherded by his faithful assistant, Carmine Santullo. With his show gone, Ed turned back to Little Old New York and began putting more energy into his twice-weekly column.
In September, he appeared on NBC’s The Flip Wilson Show. Debuting in 1970, Wilson’s program was the first successful network variety show hosted by a black performer; in its first two seasons it zoomed to television’s number two ranking. Every week, Wilson portrayed comic characters who skewered contemporary life, like Reverend LeRoy, pastor of the Church of What’s Happenin’ Now, and Geraldine, the sassy, liberated black girl who cried, “The devil made me do it!” He was one of the next-generation comics whom The Ed Sullivan Show helped launch; Ed had booked him twelve times.
On the Wilson show, Sullivan performed two skits with Wilson and Lucille Ball. In the first, Wilson played Charlie Brown to Ed’s Snoopy (dressed as a WWI fighter ace) and Ball’s Lucy, as the trio philosophized about life. In the second, Ed played an aging hipster who finds himself in the middle of a catfight between Wilson, cross-dressed as Geraldine in a hot pink miniskirt, and a modishly attired Lucille Ball. This latter sk
it seemed to reflect Ed’s changed circumstances. The last time he had played a comedy sketch with Lucille Ball was in 1954, and it revolved around Lucy and Ricky’s breathless excitement at getting on Ed’s show. Now, dressed in garish purple pants and a hippie-style fringe jacket, he was a player who was past his prime.
Since Sullivan was such a universally known celebrity, he was in demand by advertisers for television commercials. Although he certainly didn’t need the money, he appeared in TV ads for an antacid—an unlikely role, given how his ulcer plagued him and how little antacid had helped. “I got the feeling he was trying to hold on, to hang onto fame,” recalled his grandson Rob Precht, then in his late teens, who often spent time with his grandfather. “I remember thinking at the time that it was pathetic—I was sad to see him do it.”
An oddity about Ed’s life in this period was that cultural commentators used references to his famously stiff persona in articles about current president Richard Nixon. Typical of the commentary was an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by playwright Arthur Miller: “For my own taste, Nixon is a god-awful actor; for one thing, his gestures are always at odds with what he’s saying.… It’s a lot like Ed Sullivan, a performer who was so at odds with his own arms that he finally took to clasping his chest.” As remote as these two men were from one another, they did have similarities. Both first became major public figures in the 1950s, and both were largely incapable of projecting warmth or intimacy in their public selves. And, coincidentally, both had their careers canceled at about the same time. Yet the showman, unlike the politician, inspired a reservoir of affection in his audience, despite his wooden stage presence. At no time was this more evident than in the aftermath of the cancellation.
As countless newspaper and magazine homages poured forth in the months after the show’s end, he was bathed in the glow of a newly beloved status. Everything about him that had been lampooned, often with great seriousness—his jerky gestures, the stilted vocal style—was now described endearingly. Los Angeles Times TV critic Cecil Smith called Ed’s performance of Snoopy on The Flip Wilson Show “a classic of comedy by anyone’s standards.” The United Press International’s Dick West bemoaned the loss of the show, calling Sullivan “a powerful stabilizing influence amid the vicissitudes of life. An anchor, so to speak, in a transmutable sea.” Bill Barrett in The Cleveland Press, pondering the cancellation, asked, “What goes next? The Bill of Rights? The gold standard?” It was as if TV columnists’ perception of his stiffness had magically reversed itself and they suddenly decided he was a loveable character. Someone that wooden must be genuine, the consensus seemed to be. Ed had somehow bonded with the audience—now even winning the critics—despite only rarely breaking his distant reserve.
Indeed, the response to his first special seemed to verify that absence made the heart grow fonder. Aired in October 1971 (four months after the last regular show), The Sullivan Years: A Kaleidoscope featured Ed presenting a library of highlights from the show back to the 1950s. The public flocked to it; the program dominated its Sunday night time slot and scored a jaw-dropping Nielsen rating. The one-night special, however, was what the show itself had not been. The Ed Sullivan Show, to the detriment of its ratings at the end, had never been backward looking. Or rather, it had been backward looking, fully contemporary, and forward-looking, simultaneously. The Kaleidoscope special presented Sullivan’s signature compendium of rock bands, saloon crooners, comics, athletes, and trained animals. But its retrospective approach put it all into soft focus, carefully exorcising the socially charged elements the show itself had presented of late.
Ed became a kind of celebrity on call. In January he flew to Las Vegas to host CBS’s Entertainers of the Year Awards, where he was roundly mock-insulted by comic Don Rickles: “I spoke to the wax museum. They’re accepting you Friday.” This broadcast’s ratings ran just behind those of television’s current number one show, All in the Family. A month later he was an award presenter at the Grammy Awards, broadcast on ABC. The Friars Club, a show business fraternal society, elected him as their Abbot, succeeding in a line that went back to George M. Cohan. And that September he appeared on ABC’s 25 Years of Television, receiving a special achievement award along with Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, and Milton Berle.
He also attended a number of funerals, including that of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, whom he had long lauded for breaking the sport’s color line. In February 1972, Walter Winchell died. (Critic John Crosby eulogized Winchell by observing, “He was truly a fourteen-carat son-of-bitch.”) After Winchell’s death, Ed, having accepted Walter’s invitation to sit on the board of the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, was elected its president. It was fitting: Runyon had been the archetypical chronicler of 1930s New York café society, and now Ed, one of the era’s few survivors, was custodian of his namesake fund.
The Ed Sullivan Show remained on peoples’ minds. A year after cancellation, a man in Nebraska named Werner Hensley wrote a letter to The New York Times mourning the program’s end, chiefly because he had been training a frog for eleven years in anticipation of a guest shot. “We would have made it if the cheek puffing hadn’t taken an extra year of work,” Hensley claimed.
The network hadn’t forgotten it either; CBS commissioned Sullivan to produce an all-comedy special culled from previous shows. Broadcast in February 1973, Ed Sullivan Presents the TV Comedy Years ran opposite Marcus Welby, MD, a Tuesday night hit aimed at older viewers. The Comedy Years special, even more than the previous Kaleidoscope, was in contrast to what Ed had always produced. Instead of his all-inclusive approach, Comedy Years was an example of what was later called narrowcasting, the practice of focusing on a niche audience. The special gave short shrift to younger stand-ups like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, instead presenting comics from the show’s earliest days, including Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, Red Buttons, and Jimmy Durante. By focusing on a single audience, older viewers, the program handily won its time slot and ranked fifth for the week.
CBS realized it had found a formula. The library of Sullivan shows contained an ocean of material—one thousand eighty-seven episodes spanning twenty-three seasons—presenting performers of every stripe. If a show was edited together from elements that appealed to a specific audience, without the contrasting elements, a ratings win was likely. Making it still more appealing, Sullivan Productions owned all the programs; producing such a broadcast was simply a matter of calling Bob Precht.
Eager to repeat the success of the Comedy Years special, a month later CBS commissioned another special, Ed Sullivan’s Broadway. For this tribute to the Great White Way, the showman strolled through the streets of New York, dispensing Broadway anecdotes as he introduced Sullivan show excerpts from theater classics. He also read blurbs from his column, which were original reviews from the period. Like the prior month’s special, the Broadway retrospective garnered impressive ratings. It was now established: by choosing one audience among the several the program had reached, the Sullivan show could once again be a ratings powerhouse.
But suddenly, Ed didn’t care. The day of the broadcast, March 16, he suffered a shock from which he never recovered. Sylvia had checked into Mount Sinai hospital for a routine procedure a few days earlier. At age sixty-nine, she appeared hale and healthy, and looked far younger than her years. She enjoyed traveling as they always had; just the week before she and Ed had returned from a jaunt to Miami Beach. In a recent society column spotlighting the two of them at dinner, the columnist commented on how attractive she continued to be. Since she was in the hospital the day that Ed Sullivan’s Broadway was broadcast, she ordered a television set into her room to watch Ed. But, unexpectedly, she died that morning of a ruptured aorta. CBS News broadcast the announcement of her death shortly before that evening’s Sullivan special. Sylvia’s sudden death was a devastating blow to her family.
Ed fell into a bottomless grief. The show had been his identity, and it was gone, and now Sylvia, his lifelong companion, was also gone. Co
mpounding the loss, she had become his protector and caretaker, handling many of the details of his daily life as his mental faculties lessened. Several people helped Ed as his Alzheimer’s progressed, but none more so than Sylvia, recalled Joan Rivers, who knew Ed personally and professionally (Sullivan was the godfather of Rivers’ daughter Melissa). “She took care of him like a hawk,” Rivers said. “She was his Nancy Reagan.” In the weeks after her memorial service, led by Rabbi Arthur Buch and with a eulogy by Bob Precht, Ed drifted into an emotional no-man’s zone. With little to look forward to, his sadness and sense of emptiness became overwhelming. “My grandfather just disintegrated,” remembered Rob Precht.
Jack Benny, hearing of Ed’s bereavement, offered to fly in from California to spend some time with him. But Ed waved him off. He had heard, he claimed, that Benny himself “was not feeling too well, so why knock yourself out.” When a reporter from Variety called, Ed explained that he would be “just keeping himself very busy with the column.”
He did in fact keep plugging away at Little Old New York, reporting and commenting on show business and current events, with a good deal of help from Carmine Santullo. With Betty and Bob Precht living in Scarsdale, New York, Carmine became his sole daily companion. Ed also became closer with his older sister Helen, who still lived in Port Chester, and with whom he had stayed in touch through the years.
He had always been a loner, despite a vast network of contacts and long professional relationships. Now he seemed to retreat still further into himself. He continued his nightly rounds of Manhattan’s nightclubs, but refused to let anyone go with him. His friend Jerry Vale remembered checking with Ed about a social outing, being rebuffed, and growing worried. “He went to Danny’s Hideaway once, and I decided I was going to follow him,” Vale recalled. “I followed him to the restaurant, I waited for him to get through, and he came out, and he walked from 48th Street up to his apartment on 59th. I followed him in my car. He was walking and I followed him very slowly, to make sure he got home okay. I was a very good friend of his and I wanted to see him do well.” Vale described the depth of Ed’s depression in this period: “When Sylvia died and the show went off, he was a beaten man.”
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan Page 49
