Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  This was Ed’s gaudy, buoyant world—of the first book clubs, record charts, opinion polls, IQ tests, and birth-control clinics; a Wasteland with jumping beans—from 1922 at the New York Evening Mail to 1947, when he was discovered as a Daily News columnist who happened to be emceeing the annual Harvest Moon Ball, while a fledging CBS just happened to be trying out its primitive cameras. Serendipity! Like showbiz, sports, or war, like organized labor, organized crime, and organized religion, tabloid journalism had been an agency of upward mobility. But TV would prove to be a trampoline… a flying carpet.

  It’s instructive if not surprising to note how many pioneers of early television, as of early radio, came directly out of advertising, just like the jazz-age novelists: “Pat” Weaver, father not only of Sigourney but of the Today and Tonight shows; Grant Tinker, who invented MTM; and the wonderful folks who gave us the quiz show scandals, after which the networks took the programming away from the ad agencies. William S. Paley bought CBS to begin with, in 1928, because radio advertising had doubled his cigar company sales. No other nation in the world had turned over its airwaves to advertisers, in a tidy-wrap package of mass production and mass persuasion. These men didn’t know exactly what to do with their new toy except to make it spin and sizzle so that the public would sit still staring at it long enough to be stupefied into desiring all the goodies a feverish market might disgorge. Like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, like a Mad Avenue Crusader Rabbit, they wanted to put on a show in their garage. Ed already did so.

  Except with critics and sponsors, Toast of the Town was a hit from its get-go on June 20, 1948. Nobody knew why, nor did they credit Ed. Emerson Radio hated him and CBS shopped the show, with or without the host, to anybody who’d take it. (When, after three months, Emerson bailed out and Lincoln-Mercury took over, Ed was so grateful to the Ford Motor Company that he would log more than a quarter million miles in the next five years as its “ambassador,” landing on Boston Common in a chopper, floating down the Mississippi on a Royal Barge to the Memphis Cotton Festival. From Paris, he sent picture postcards to every Ford dealer in the nation.) But that first Sunday, from a firetrap studio on Broadway, was the prototype for the next 1,087—Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, headliners; Rodgers and Hammerstein, volunteer guests; pianist Eugene List; ballerina Kathryn Lee; singing fireman John Kokoman; boxing ref Ruby Goldstein; Ray Bloch and six of June Taylor’s neediest dancers, calling themselves Toastettes.

  And like every other Sunday to come, Ed had decided how many minutes each of them got at the morning dress rehearsal, after which one audience was chased out of the studio, and another seated for the real thing. Over two decades much changed in the technical production of the hour—it was the first show with a permanent chorus line, the first to introduce celebrity guests from the audience, the first with overhead cams and rear-screen projection, the first to hit the road for remote telecasts, and the first to play with high-resolution cameras, a zoom lens, and videotape—but not the dreaded rehearsal, which was Ed’s initial look at the lineup. As quick as his temper, so, too, was his judgment snappy. If a rehearsal audience didn’t laugh, a wiseguy was gone, and the singer got an extra song. Add a mime; lose the hippo. Ed agreed with George Arliss: when crowds assemble together “their mass instinct is perilously close to intelligence.” Public opinion, he said, “is the voice of God.” What’s amazing in retrospect is how seldom God, Ed, and the mass intelligence missed the Royal Barge to Memphis. If Nat “King” Cole and Dinah Shore got booted off the show because they wanted to plug their new songs instead of singing Ed’s hit parade favorites, well Pearl Bailey rose from a sickbed fever of 103° to perform, and Alan King could be counted on to fill any other sudden holes. King was so reliable he didn’t even have to rehearse, and refused to appear on any program with a rock group.

  Nothing pleased his critics. Fred Allen: “Sullivan will be a success as long as other people have talent.” Joe E. Lewis: “The only man who brightens up a room by leaving it.” Jack Paar: “NBC has its peacock, and CBS has its cuckoo…. Who else can bring to a simple English sentence such suspense and mystery and drama?” Even Alan King: “Ed does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else on television.” But when Fred Allen came back to shoot the wounded—“What does Sullivan do? He points at people. Rub meat on actors and dogs will do the same”—Ed was stung to reply, and did so tellingly: “Maybe Fred should rub some meat on a sponsor.”

  So he looked funny. Even his best friends called him Rock of Ages, the Great Stone Face, the Cardiff Giant, Easter Island, and Toast of the Tomb. He had been, in fact, a handsome man, before an auto accident in 1956 knocked out his teeth and staved in his ribs. In his early days he’d been often mistaken for Bogart. But after the crash there was always about him a shadowy wince, like Richard Nixon’s, or Jack Nicholson’s in the Batman movie, playing the Joker as Nixon. An ulcer didn’t help, despite which he drank and smoked. (Like his old enemy Runyon, he would die from cancer.) Nor did the belladonna he took in his dressing room help: While it expanded the duodenal canal, it also dilated the eyes. Later, hearing problems and arteriosclerosis accounted for some forgetfulness and those famous malapropisms.

  Yet the public loved him, the stars showed up, and his critics couldn’t really attribute the success of the show to his column. Maybe, in the first few years, Sullivan did bully guests into appearing, as Winchell and Louella Parsons and Elsa Maxwell had bullied them onto their radio programs with the promise (or threat) of syndicated clout. But it quickly became obvious that appearing on TV was more of a career-maker than getting mentioned in any newspaper column. This was good news for CBS, and bad news for print journalism.

  And his success isn’t so very complicated. He was the best producer of his era. Television is a producer’s medium, as movies used to be a director’s medium, before the bankers took over, which is why all the best writers for the medium, in order to have some control over their own material and some of the profit as well, turn into executive producers whose names alone are all we see frozen on the screen after each episode of a series program like the sign of Zorro: Steven Bochco. It is also why the writing so often declines in the second or third season of even the best series. The executive producer has gone off to dream up another pilot and to executive-produce another series. But all Ed cared about was Sunday night on CBS, forever, reinventing his show each new season for a tribe of ghostly millions. His other talent was the transparent kick he got out of it, as pleased to be exactly where he was as we’d have been. Like Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd, Woody Allen’s Zelig, or Tom Hanks’s Gump, Ed made every crucial scene, and didn’t put on airs about it. If he had to leave town, he brought back something he knew we’d like because he did: a bicycle, a puppet, a Blarney Stone. From France, Edith Piaf. From Scandinavia, Sonja Henie. From Mexico, Cantinflas. From Italy, Gina Lollobrigida. From the moon, astronauts.

  There used to be more high culture on television because there was less television, and we would watch almost anything, and middlebrows like Ed felt they had some dues to pay. Besides, Ed’s father had loved grand opera and what the twenties had been about was a cross-pollinating of high arts and low: T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx: Freud and Krazy Kat. Maybe as a by-product of all those passionate nineteenth-century Italian tantrums, divas especially had the star quality prized by the celebrity culture Ed was helping to create, even if he had to wait a few years for a Maria Callas to glamorize opera the way Arnold Palmer had glamorized golf. Certainly Roberta Peters, “the little Cinderella from the Bronx,” was a terrific front-page story after her walk-on triumph as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. As was Itzak Perlman, whom Ed discovered on the streets of Tel Aviv. And Van Cliburn, the surprise American winner of a Moscow piano-playing contest. And Rudolf Nureyev, just off the boat from the Evil Empire. Who will ever forget Jan Peerce, singing “Bluebird of Happiness”? Or Joan Sutherland, on stage with Tanya the Elephant?

  Unless you spent the fifties watching The Voice of Firestone and the sixties w
atching The Bell Telephone Hour, you weren’t hearing much serious music anywhere else on commercial television. Ed cut a deal for first refusal rights on anything imported by Sol Hurok. Nobody else on network TV was ever better for serious dance. On no other show save Omnibus could we count on seeing any at all, from Agnes DeMille to Maya Plisetskaya. The Joffrey and the New York City Ballet were around the corner; Jerome Robbins was always available; San Francisco, Denmark, London, Florence, Hungary, and Japan sent companies. The (overrated) Bolshoi was a smash hit. And when Ed went away, who’d step in to hold the middle of that brow? Except for an occasional White House gala, and Eugenia Zuckerman on CBS Sunday Morning, classical music has vanished from network television. Ballet only happens on BRAVO and PBS, though not ever during pledge week when they switch to folkies. Likewise opera, with the added insult of Peter Sellars tarting up Mozart. Symphony orchestras, like regional theaters, local dance troupes, and jazz quarters, have to be subsidized by the oil companies and the feds. Even our libraries are closed after dark. Somewhere along the line to junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers, middlebrows stopped trying harder and ad agencies decided that “elite” culture lacked a desirable demographic profile and America settled for, or maybe even turned into, a greedhead musical comedy.

  Ed gave us Helen Hayes mourning her dead daughter, in a scene from Victoria Regina. And Joshua Logan confessing on stage, ad lib, to his own nervous breakdown. And Judith Anderson as the world’s most difficult mother, Medea. And Oscar Hammerstein tinkling a plaintive rendition of “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” And Richard Burton, when the Welsh vapors took him, declaiming Dylan Thomas. And Sophie Tucker, singing with the Ink Spots. Plus half the cast from West Side Story and the whole tribe of Hair. From the start, Ed and the legitimate theater he covered for his column were allies. As early as 1950, on back-to-back Sunday nights, he brought Member of the Wedding to television, black and white together, and a bit of the Tobacco Road revival. Selections followed from Of Thee I Sing and Guys and Dolls. By 1952, he was even saving shows like the musical comedy Wish You Were Here and the Pulitzer Prize–winning play All the Way Home. But if Ed was good for Broadway, Broadway was better for Ed; his ace in the hole competing with Colgate’s Comedy Hour was all the talent down the block, young and able, tried and true, and almost always available for Sunday morning rehearsals of a little this and a little that from Carousel, My Fair Lady, or Mame. It was on Sullivan’s show that most of the country first heard of Cornelia Otis Skinner; where Yul Brynner visiting from The King and I became a pop-culture icon; where, before their musicals were turned into movies, the American public outside New York first saw Ethel Merman, Carol Channing, and Gwen Verdon. After Guys and Dolls, as if at a benefit for one of the more popular diseases, all the best Broadway musicals showed up, from Brigadoon to Pajama Game, meaning that Gertrude Lawrence, Joel Grey, Elaine Stritch, Stanley Holloway, and Mary Martin also sang and danced in our living rooms. So what if we never saw Beckett or Pinter? Ed just wanted us to clap our hands if we believed in Tinker Bell.

  Hollywood hated TV before TV moved there. It was Ed’s genius to convince a studio tinpot like Goldwyn that TV was free publicity, that clips of forthcoming films would entice millions to neighborhood theaters, that actors on Ed’s stage could promote their careers without dissipating their mystery. Beginning in 1951, long before the rich and famous had “lifestyles,” there were “biographies” of them on Ed. When he decided as a ratings gimmick to devote whole programs to Bea Lillie, Cole Porter, Walt Disney, and Bert Lahr, he inadvertently invented the “spectacular,” by which TV graduated from vaudeville, radio, and Broadway into a humming ether all its own. The result was a steady stream of Bogarts, Grables, Hepburns, and Pecks; a Liz Taylor and a John Wayne. Gloria Swanson appeared to tell an astonished nation that she did, too, believe in God.

  Such intimacy! Such presumption! But celebrity is what a democratic society has instead of aristocrats. We may feel today that we’re no longer safe anywhere from the stars and starlets so ubiquitous on Good Morning America, the Today show, Phil, Oprah, Joan, Geraldo, Entertainment Tonight, Live at Five, the late-night eye witless news and Letterman and Leno, who babble on forever about alcoholism, drug abuse, incest, and liposuction in the weeks before, during, and after their new film opens for the skeptical inspection of teenaged mutant ninja mall mice. But back then it was magic in our living rooms, as if the gods had come down from their pink clouds, the generals from their white pedestals, and the vamps from our fantasies, to schmooze, giggle, and weep. And this same star-making machinery turned “unstar” Ed into an aristocrat himself. You will have noticed that TV news personalities like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and David Brinkley, from a synopsizing of the quotidian on our small screen, get heavier, taking on the gravity of what they report. Their faces become front pages, etchings of all they have seen. History thickens them to a density that exerts a mighty pull on our frayed attention. Through their images we are accustomed to trafficking with the momentous.

  So it was for Ed, too, case-hardened and at last secure in his celebrity, a glaze of so much pleasure rendered, so many heroes of the culture having been consorted with; an odd radiance of well-being; the kind of hum heard only in the higher spheres, as if he had levitated out of other people’s talent into a gravity all his own. They sang hymns to him in Bye Bye Birdie, and almost made a movie of his life, and he did show up in the Hollywood version of The Singing Nun. Not bad for a boy from Port Chester. But there was a difference. Ed was not in his celebrityhood the least bit remote. He was one of us, not so special that we couldn’t have been there, too, ourselves, singing along with Birgit Nilsson, hoofing with Gene Kelly, playing Jack Benny’s straight man or a fourth McGuire Sister. That’s why we forgave him when he found himself suspended in midair by the illusionist Richiardi, or landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in a helicopter, or riding around in a chariot as if in ancient Rome, on the Ben Hur set. If it could happen to Ed, it could happen to anybody. That spinning plate was a flying saucer: I saw you on television.

  A white man wrote “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.” As George Gershwin wrote “Swanee” and Al Jolson sang it. Irving Berlin, who was Jewish, wrote both “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade.” As well as a New York neighborhood, Tin Pan Alley was a wiseguy state of mind. Whatever you wanted, they’d write it: sentimental ballads, comical immigrant medleys, Broadway show tunes, ragtime, even “coon songs.” They also wrote the score for Ed’s home movie of an innocent and consensual America. Creepy to remember, but no other singer appeared on his show as often as Connie Francis. Nor did we lack for Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Gordon MacRae, Patti Page, Wayne Newton, Vikki Carr, Liberace, and Tiny Tim. For the longest time, even black entertainers like Nat “King” Cole and Leslie Uggams sounded as pink and squeaky clean as Pat Boone. It wasn’t exactly elevator music. Ethel Merman and Pearl Bailey could blast through the wax in our ears. What Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan did to standards was what alchemists had tried and failed to do to base metals. When they weren’t stopping the show, Lena Horne and Nina Simone knew how to slow it down and make it think. At least Broadway musical comedies came with dancers like Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Bojangles, and Chita Rivera. Not to mention a peppering of Copa Girls, can can, and all those folk dancers who arrived, as if by cargohold and forklift, from Warsaw, Prague, and Oslo; Mexico, Portugal, and Ireland; Romania and Bali. But each appearance of a “mongrel” music, the distilled sound of an aggrieved subculture outside Ed’s Dream Palace, had a fugitive quality, as if Dave Brubeck and Stan Kenton, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson and Miriam Makeba, Johnny Cash and Odetta, were souvenirs, and Ravi Shankar a kind of curry. When Nashville and Motown learned at last how to plug their own songs on radio, they’d do terrible things to Tin Pan Alley. Rock, of course, would take elevator music down to hell, and Ed’s show with it.

  But without pop standards there would have been no
show. They were more than the punctuation of the program; they were its sculptured space. Anything might happen, but someone always sang. And what got sung was the latest hit. Ed was about hits, and to make sure he had an uninterrupted flow of them, he had entered into a mutual assistance pact with Tin Pan Alley that amounted to a codependency. He needed the top ten. And, by appearing on his show, you stayed in the top ten, the way a book on the New York Times best-seller list will sell enough copies to remain there for months; it must be good. Besides, showing up twice a year on Ed guaranteed a singer year-round club dates, plus constant play on the radio and jukebox. This was less hanky-panky than a synergetic shakedown of mass-communications conglomerates. (If you need hanky-panky, look to CBS Records, with whom Ed had a cozy deal, which is why we heard so much My Fair Lady and so little Frank Sinatra, who belonged to Capitol.) As if to signify this codependence, Ed ordered fancy sets built for every singing act, and no set was ever used a second time. In other words, music video. But you had to go live and couldn’t lip-synch. Because Mary Tyler Moore insisted on synching, she was banished from the show, a sort of premature Milli Vanilli.