Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (34 page)

…Television is sight and sound, similar to the movies but dissimilar in that there are no retakes. What happens at any exact moment on a television stage is written in indelible ink, and not one tear can remove any part of it…

…It is a medium which places a high valuation on pace, on speed. A singer may better eliminate the opening or throwaway number and sock with his or her strongest piece of material … The comic may find it advisable to trim a vaudeville monologue down to its bare comedy essentials and score quickly…

…Quite by the accident of appearing at Madison Square Garden shows this writer sort of got in on the ground floor of television … In radio, I had the same opportunity but wasted it … But I’m not making the same mistake this time, brethren … This time, as a ground-floor tenant, I’m concentrating on a long-term lease from which the television landlords will have to evict me bodily.”

CHAPTER NINE
“Really Big Show”

I
T WAS UNSEASONABLY WARM IN THE EARLY MORNING
of June 20, 1948 as Marlo Lewis parked his car in the alley behind the Maxine Elliot Theater. Tonight was his and Ed’s television debut, yet today was the first day he had access to the theater. There was a lot to do and not much time to do it. But when he opened the large iron backdoor, what he found was alarming.

The stage manager, looking exhausted, gave Lewis a progress report: “
Marlo, you’re going to have a shit-hemorrhage.” Along with several stagehands and technicians, he had been up all night, hacking and sawing and installing equipment in a mad sprint to finish the renovation. It was unclear whether the theater could be readied for tonight’s broadcast. And even if it were, it seemed doubtful the production would appear more professional than a high school play.

Lewis had worked with a CBS set designer to create a stage backdrop, a crudely painted wooden and canvas structure depicting the New York skyline topped with puffy white clouds. A network press release described it, with great imagination, as “
a roof garden with the Manhattan skyline silhouetted against the starlit sky.” Constructed in a CBS warehouse across town, the backdrop had been too big to get through the doors of the Maxine Elliot, forcing the carpenters to take it apart. Yet when they stitched it back together they realized it was too large for the stage. The stagehands and carpenters had worked into the early morning hours to remake and position the structure so that it curved enough to fit. But the resulting backdrop left gaps on both sides of the stage, revealing all the detritus piled backstage.

Three cameramen, attempting to station their equipment on the stage’s edge, discovered that their cameras couldn’t handle the theater’s bright lights. The only solution was to turn off most of the stage lights and set up a dynabeam spotlight to direct light as needed. But this required scrambling to find both a dynabeam and someone who knew how to use it. Fortunately, the theater’s head stagehand (who maintained a peephole between his office and the ladies’ restroom) knew of a veteran spotlight operator, who rented a dynabeam and hurriedly hauled it to the theater.

Ray Bloch and his fourteen-piece orchestra arrived late morning, learning they were to be installed in a storage area backstage. With no line of sight to the stage, the conductor would need to listen to commands over his headphones. As Bloch began rehearsing, a fire department supervisor showed up to inspect the newly renovated facility, issuing the bandleader a $50 fine for smoking his pipe in the theater. After his inspection, the supervisor gave Lewis the bad news: the theater contained so many violations of the fire code that he couldn’t allow it to host a performance. That evening’s show would have to be canceled. Unsure of what to do, Lewis called Sullivan at home, where he was hastily finishing his column.

Ed didn’t hesitate. “
I’ve done plenty of benefits for those boys and the Chief’s a good friend of mine,” he told Marlo. Ed placed a quick call and worked out a compromise: the fire department would station men with extinguishers around the backstage area during the performance, and any foliage would be sprayed prior to broadcast. (When the foliage around the set was sprayed, the resultant chemical bath gave some of the performers headaches that afternoon.) Ed asked how everything else was, and Marlo, not wanting to spook him, told him everything was fine.

When Ed arrived that afternoon he made a bravura entrance, saying hello and shaking hands with everyone, the performers as well as the technicians and stagehands. The morale of the cast and crew seemed to brighten as he announced that tonight would be a “
blockbuster of a show.” Then, as he had for countless Loew’s State shows, he took a seat on a stool near stage right and began working out details with a pad and pencil: who would appear when, how long they would be given, what material they would perform, and when to introduce the celebrities in the audience. He had the performers run through the program in its entirety, then directed a round of changes, making adjustments to timing and entrances. After watching the comedy duo Jim Kirkwood and Lee Goodman, Ed felt their cerebral routine didn’t stand up next to the high-voltage vibrancy of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. He told them to edit their act down to three minutes; the duo felt they couldn’t do that, so he cut them altogether.

When the rehearsal concluded, Sullivan and the performers gathered onstage for a photo, the performers along the back row and the June Taylor dancers—who would shimmy in a short nightclub number to introduce Ed—kneeling in plumed costumes up front. As the camera flashed, Jerry Lewis appeared bored, staring off to his left in mid yawn. Dean Martin, oblivious to the photographer’s efforts, chatted with Marlo Lewis’ younger sister, who would sing that night. Ed, looking dapper in a double-breasted jacket, stared down and to his right, unsmiling, intent, lost in thought.

The preparation done, there was nothing to do but wait; this was live television and the broadcast wasn’t until 9:30
P.M.
(The show soon moved to 8
P.M.
) These hours of waiting were excruciating for Ed. He had wanted this for most of his adult life, craving this kind of an opportunity since he made his first film in New York in 1932. Yet his past gave him little encouragement. He was certainly a veteran showman, having produced his first variety revue some fifteen years back, and having lived and breathed show business since then. But each of his attempts on the airwaves had
failed, miserably so; five radio shows launched, five short-lived radio shows canceled. A critic had described his one major onscreen effort, in
Big Town Czar
, as “unconvincing”—and he had been playing himself. The note that he wrote to Betty and Sylvia described how he felt in the days before the show—“anxious and distracted”—yet now, waiting in his tiny dressing room upstairs at the Maxine Elliot, that anxiety coalesced into a gut-churning terror.

A half hour before the broadcast, Marlo Lewis walked into Sullivan’s dressing room and was horrified by what he saw. Ed’s face was a colorless white and his eyes were glazed over. A plastic tube hung from his mouth, attached to a small rubber syringe he held in his hand; the apparatus was directed into the dressing room sink. The two men’s eyes met in the dressing room mirror, and Ed downplayed the unusual scene. “
It’s nothing,” he said, his speech garbled, “I’m just pumping my stomach—acid’s too high, ulcer’s killing me.” He motioned Marlo to take a seat while he finished the procedure, which took a few minutes longer. Ed swallowed a large dose of Belladonna, a commonly prescribed ulcer medication. (Belladonna can cause blurry vision, which Lewis felt contributed to Ed’s mangled introductions—he may have had a hard time reading cue cards; the drug can also result in drowsiness and mental confusion, possibly adding to the host’s difficulties onstage; and in older adults it can cause memory loss, which Ed suffered greatly from in his later years.) Within a few minutes the emcee seemed to recover partially from his ulcer attack, though his hands continued to shake in jittery tremors. Marlo, uneasy and wanting to reassure Ed, said only that everything would be great, then informed him of the camera cue before leaving him alone.

Precisely at 9:30
P.M.
, Ray Bloch struck up a drumroll, and deep-timbered announcer Art Hannes intoned:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Columbia Broadcast System is proud to present its star-studded revue, the
Toast of the Town,
with the nationally known newspaper columnist … Ed Sullivan!”
No tape of that first show exists, but by all accounts it went well. A standing room-only audience crammed the Maxine Elliot, clapping as six showgirls pranced onstage to introduce Ed. True to his newsman’s formula, he presented his splashiest attraction first: the studio audience screamed with laughter as Jerry Lewis played the antic high-energy clown to Dean Martin’s suave man-about-town. After Ed interviewed Rodgers and Hammerstein about their 1943 hit
Oklahoma!
and their upcoming production,
South Pacific
, they received an affectionate ovation; then Kathryn Lee, a ballerina in the duo’s show
Allegro
, pirouetted and twirled around the onstage piano. Pianist Eugene List rendered Chopin, fireman John Kokoman crooned, and Monica Lewis jazzed up a nightclub number, forgetting the microphone hidden in her bouquet and sending it skidding across the stage with a hand gesture. Ed, in a set that looked like a boxing ring’s corner, chatted with fight referee Ruby Goldstein about the Joe Louis–Jersey Joe Walcott title bout. As he introduced the acts and spoke with some of them, he fidgeted uneasily, always looking away from the camera, his hands visibly shaking. (He may have developed his signature arms-crossed pose—unusual for an emcee—to hide his trembling hands.) CBS, in its haste to get the show on the air, hadn’t found a sponsor, so any commercial breaks were for the network itself.

The size of the television audience for this first broadcast is unknown. The television networks at that time were capable of broadcasting only to cities in the eastern
part of the country, in an area running from Richmond to Boston. Not until January 1949 did a coaxial cable connect these cities with a Midwestern area that extended to Chicago, and coast-to-coast broadcasting didn’t begin until September 1951. Before 1951, viewers in nonconnected cities watched
Toast of the Town
on kinescope, which was a grainy copy shot directly from the television screen, sent from station to station by mail. (As Mike Dann, an NBC programming executive in the 1950s, recalled: “
When somebody asked ‘How’d the show go last night?’ you said, ‘Just great, it came out clear—you could see it.’ ”) At the time of the show’s first broadcast in June 1948, there were some five hundred thousand televisions in the United States. Given that ratings reports soon showed Sullivan handily winning his time slot, most of the TVs on the east coast were likely tuned to CBS that evening; assuming three to four viewers per set, perhaps approximately a million viewers watched.

Three days after its debut, a review in
Variety
praised
Toast of the Town
, but said that it suffered by comparison to Berle’s
Texaco Theater
, which had also just debuted. Berle “
brought to his emcee role one of the best showmanship lifts yet given a television show,” the trade publication opined, concluding that “Vaudeo—the adaptation of old-time vaudeville into the new video medium—came of age last Tuesday night in a performance that may well be remembered as a milestone in television.”
Variety
reported that Berle’s NBC show benefited from an enviable Tuesday night time slot and a budget of $10,000 per show. As for
Toast of the Town
, the reviewer wrote, “
With a top talent array, the new CBS offering couldn’t help but be entertaining.… It lacked [the] sparkle of the Texaco show, chiefly because Sullivan, as an emcee, is a good newspaper columnist. He’s affable enough and certainly has enough showbiz knowhow to lend authority to his job, but he doesn’t have the comedy touch of Milton Berle.”