Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (32 page)

Kean soon began a long-standing romance with Walter Winchell, whom she grew to love. Walter took a much different approach to her in his column. “Winchell, if
he liked you, he would just promote you and praise you every time you opened someplace,” she said. “Ed wasn’t that much of a fan or press agent for people.”

Ed booked Jane and her sister Betty on his television show in 1949, though Kean said by this point any romantic overtures were forgotten. Due to the exposure from their Sullivan show booking, the duo received a series of lucrative engagements in Chicago, Las Vegas, and New York.

In Kean’s remembrance, it was not uncommon for Ed to have affairs. “He was not Simon Pure, let’s put it that way,” she said. Her recollection is backed up by Jack Carter, a comedian whom Ed booked in his postwar vaudeville shows, as well as some forty times on his television show. Over the years the two men frequently had drinks together at Danny’s Hideaway, a popular New York bar-restaurant. Carter recalled that during one of his Loew’s State shows with Sullivan, Ed had an affair with one of the performers, whose name Carter didn’t remember. She was “
an acrobatic dancer with a great body—he was jazzing her,” he said. But Ed was careful to maintain discretion about his liaison. “It was his own private little trick—we knew about it,” Carter said. “It was a quiet thing … if that would have ever gotten out, Winchell would have eaten him alive.”

In the fall of 1947 Ed became chairman of the entertainment committee for the Heart Fund Drive, which presented him with a daunting task. He needed to organize an extensive radio ad campaign, which required writing scripts, lining up voice talent and musicians, and contacting a slew of radio stations—and convincing everyone to work gratis. Mentioning the mountainous workload to performers backstage at his Loew’s State show, one of them, a young singer named Monica Lewis, suggested Ed call her brother, Marlo Lewis.

Lewis, an advertising executive at the Blaine Thompson agency, produced a daily radio show called
Luncheon at Sardi’s.
The thirty-two-year-old adman possessed matinee idol good looks and a correspondingly outsized ego. He tended his appearance fastidiously, always sporting an impeccable coif and visiting the gym constantly; in later years he insisted all his employees visit the gym to stay fit. Lewis projected a natural charisma that some found overbearing; he was described as “
egocentric—very much so” by one colleague. Yet he was grateful to Sullivan for booking his younger sister, and after a little cajoling by Ed agreed to help.

Working for free, Lewis and Sullivan put together a thirty-spot radio campaign. Ed corralled the talent: Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, and others voiced the spots; Marlo Lewis convinced the head of the musicians union, James Petrillo, to allow the striking musicians to record the music, and coordinated logistics such as contacting radio stations. After the spots ran in March 1948, Ed produced a standing room—only variety show with the celebrities at the Capitol Theatre, emceed by Milton Berle.

The partnership of Marlo Lewis and Ed Sullivan was highly successful—the Heart Fund Drive broke the charity’s fund-raising record. To Ed, this suggested a greater possibility, one that stemmed from his perennial desire to break into broadcasting. Lewis, as an ad executive and radio producer, had contacts with CBS management. Sullivan, a veteran show producer and emcee as well as an influential columnist, had the phone number of every star in show business. Could they pool their talents for this new medium of television?

PART TWO
THE BIRTH OF TELEVISION
 

“It used to be that we in films were
the lowest form of art. Now we have
something to look down on.”

— B
ILLY
W
ILDER

CHAPTER EIGHT
A Temporary Job

T
HE WAR, HAVING AFFECTED VIRTUALLY EVERY ASPECT
of American life, slowed the development of a force that would exert a still greater influence: television. After NBC technicians broadcast a sputtering image of Franklin Roosevelt’s opening speech at the 1939 World’s Fair, the nascent medium appeared to be just a step away from the living room. But the war’s global conflagration sucked all the energy from television’s development. Some suggested, darkly, that the war provided an excuse for those threatened by television—newspaper, radio, and film concerns—to suppress the new medium. An anonymous commentator in the
Saturday Evening Post
opined in 1942 that these powerful interests put TV “
as far back on the shelf as they could because they saw it as a threat to the status quo.”

If newspapers and film studios could have united to stop the upstart, they surely would have. But the genie was out of the bottle soon after the war ended. Dominant networks NBC and CBS, followed by ABC and Dumont, began competing to stake out a position in television, offering the first few crudely produced shows. Initially, the public took little notice. Television sets in the immediate postwar years were chiefly located in neighborhood bars; the sets were expensive and the programming so scant that few middle-class families were tempted to buy one.

In the fall of 1947, however, the small screen gave viewers a jolt of excitement: for the first time, the World Series was broadcast on television. An estimated audience of three million people gathered in bars and department stores to watch grainy images of the New York Yankees, led by the mythic Joe DiMaggio, defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose lineup featured Jackie Robinson, who just that year broke baseball’s color line. Advertisers, too, felt a quickening pulse as they contemplated television’s power. Early in 1947, Kraft experimented with a television ad for its new McLaren’s Brand Cheese, which was pricey and hadn’t been selling well. In the ad, an attractive young woman was transported by the delicious taste of McLaren’s. By the ad’s third week on the air, New York stores couldn’t keep the cheese in stock.

“
When somebody got a TV set, they would invite the whole neighborhood in to watch—it became a social thing,” recalled Paul Winchell, a ventriloquist who performed
in Ed’s shows at Loew’s State. “They were so filled with awe that people would say, my God, the pictures are
moving.
”

The big moment came the following summer. On June 8, 1948, NBC debuted the
Texaco Star Theatre
, starring Milton Berle. The comic’s success had been limited on radio, but his humor—direct, immediate, and visual—played perfectly on the small screen. He joyfully took pies in the face, wore wigs, and fell flat on his face at every cymbal crash. His format was the one he grew up in, vaudeville, with a rapid-tempo parade of comics and singers and acrobats, many of whom Berle interacted with. He pretended to perform with the acrobats, mining his own maladroit moves for laughs, and he romped through skits with the comics as one of them. Although there were only five hundred thousand television sets in the country that summer, Berle became an instant phenomenon; within a year his grinning mug graced both
Time
and
Newsweek.
A handful of shows had preceded Berle’s, but none so captured the public. For the first time, people began scheduling their Tuesday nights around a television program.

Berle’s success threw down a challenge for CBS. The network ran a close second to NBC in radio. Now the popularity of
Texaco Star Theatre
suggested that NBC was on its way to dominating television as well, especially given that NBC’s
Philco TV Playhouse
already held a grip on Sunday night, the evening with the largest home audience. To avoid being left at the starting gate, CBS needed to respond—and fast.

Ed and Marlo Lewis had proved to be an effective team. The success of their Heart Fund Drive demonstrated that their strengths were complementary. Ed, with his skill at producing stage shows, and Marlo, with his social ease and talent for handling logistics, formed a partnership that was greater than the sum of its parts. At Ed’s urging, the two of them dedicated their partnership to launching a TV variety show. But the story of how that show came about would diverge into the Sullivan Version and the Lewis Version, with each giving himself primary credit for making the show possible.

Sullivan’s version, which he repeated in countless interviews in later years, became accepted as TV lore, though it neglected Lewis’s role altogether. In Ed’s telling, CBS asked him to host a show after network executive Worthington Miner saw him host the Harvest Moon dance competition in the fall of 1947. On the evening of September 3, Miner was at Harvest Moon to oversee CBS’s live broadcast of the event. Ed, unaware that he was being broadcast live, recalled feeling completely at home onstage; he thought the cameras were filming a newsreel for later use. “
If I had dreamed I was on television, I wouldn’t have been so relaxed,” he said.

He had impressed the right person at the right time. Miner, who had been a highly successful Broadway director, was a plump, owl-faced man whose brainy demeanor belied a demanding nature. Fortunately for Ed, Miner was moving up the CBS corporate ladder that year. In the spring of 1948, he was assigned to create two shows, a dramatic series (the renowned
Studio One
, which debuted that fall) and a variety program. Remembering thinking that Sullivan seemed “
likeable and relaxed” as host of Harvest Moon, Miner recruited him in May 1948 to produce and host a variety show. Remarkably, the very thing Ed had so wanted all these years, a broadcast berth, fell into his lap not through his own efforts, but because of his effortless onstage charm.

Or at least that’s the way Ed recounted it. Mario Lewis’ telling of the story, in contrast, cast Sullivan not as a passive recipient of Miner’s interest but as actively pursuing a TV show.

Inarguably, Ed was drawn to the nascent medium and hungered to be part of it. By his own account, he had conceived of a show about golf called
Pros and Cons
, featuring him interviewing pros about their technique. He pitched the concept to CBS (in one telling of the story Lewis did the actual pitching), but the network turned him down. It wasn’t a bad idea; it tapped the visual nature of television, but viewership hadn’t grown large enough to support programs aimed at niche audiences. Succeeding in these pioneering days required an all-inclusive approach.