Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (37 page)

Ed claps largely and exhorts the audience to keep cheering, after which he sets up an Emerson Radio skit. Mom, Dad, sister, and brother, after some comic hijinks, realize they need a radio in every room. Announcer Ray Morgan explains the easiest solution—buy Emerson—then presents the evening’s climactic sales offer. With a flourish, he reveals the top of the Emerson line: a television. It’s an imposing piece of furniture in a mahogany case, with an eighteen-inch speaker, costing $349.50 “plus installation” (a month’s salary for many workers). As the commercial ends the audience claps wholeheartedly.

Ed then introduces audience members Nicholas Joy, a Broadway performer, and—to wild applause—Baltimore Colts player Billy Hildebrand. The mention of the Colts sets up a dance number by the team’s drum majorettes, six lithesome young women in short skirts and knee-high white boots, who twirl batons and march around the stage. They’re joined by six June Taylor dancers, dressed in similarly short skirts, who perform a mock-football number, tossing a pigskin around as they strut and shake. The melding of the twelve dancers creates a blur of flashing female limbs on the small stage, a mélange of high stepping and waving. The group finishes in a tight formation with the Colts’ pennant prominently displayed.

Ed, now appearing almost relaxed, concludes the show by introducing a Baltimore city official who solemnly presents him with a key to the city. Amid applause and cheers, Sullivan thanks viewers—“You’ve been the most wonderful audience in all the world”—and the orchestra breaks into the bouncy
Toast of the Town
jingle.

Whatever the show’s charms, the critics weren’t seeing them. In December, a piece by John Crosby of the New York
Herald-Tribune
seemed to encapsulate the year’s reviews. “
One of the small but vexing questions confronting anyone in this area with a television set is: ‘Why is Ed Sullivan on it every Sunday night?’…in all respects it’s a darn hard question, almost a jackpot question, and it seems to baffle Mr. Sullivan as much as anyone else.…

“After a few bars of music, Mr. Sullivan, who is introduced as a nationally syndicated columnist, wanders out onstage, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if imploring the help of God.…

“One entertainer I know who gets from $1,500 to $2,000 a week in nightclubs was talked into doing his cherished routines—he only has three—on the show for $55. Mr. Sullivan is a persuasive fellow. If he has any other qualifications for the job, they’re not visible on my small screen. Sullivan has been helplessly fascinated by show business for years.… He remains totally innocent of any of the tricks of stage presence, and it seems clear by now that his talents lie elsewhere.”

Sullivan, livid, wrote Crosby an enraged rebuttal. “
Public opinion, I’m certain, would agree that I’ve contributed more to television in its embryonic state than you have contributed with your reckless and uninformed backseat driving. You belt away at performers and producers as a means of earning a weekly salary. At least I give them a gracious introduction and a showmanly presentation that enhances their
earning power. Your column acquires a tremendous importance. When it’s employed to recommend that a man be thrown out of his job it becomes quite an evil instrument.” And Ed went a step further in private. On a copy of a similar Crosby review a year later, he handwrote a comment: “
I’d like to meet this fella some dark night when I’m learning to drive the largest Mack truck made!”

As vehemently as he disagreed with Crosby or any of the reviewers who criticized him or the show, when he was through firing back, Ed often took their words into account. He did this throughout the run of the show, making booking changes or altering the production in response to a critical barb. After critics roasted his wooden stage presence, he attempted to warm up his onstage persona by hiring Patsy Flick, an old Yiddish vaudeville comic, to heckle him. When Ed walked onstage to introduce an act, Flick would shout out “
Come on, Solomon, for God’s sake, smile. It makes you look sexy,” or, “Did you look dat vay when you were alive?” Ed did a similar bit with Gertrude Berg, star of the popular television series
The Goldbergs.
Berg bantered from the audience in a heavy Yiddish accent, calling him Solomon; Ed got laughs by answering in his own attempt at a Yiddish inflection.

The critics, however, were unimpressed, and in truth Ed’s back and forth with hired hecklers didn’t fundamentally alter his stiff stage persona. The parade of negative reviews kept coming, as did the showman’s acerbic letters written in rebuttal. Sylvia pleaded with Ed to simply write the letters and throw them away, but he was too angry for that. Especially blistering was his retort to Harriet Van Home, New York
World Telegram & Sun
television and radio critic, who wrote, “
He got where he is not by having a personality, but by having no personality; he is the commonest common denominator.” In response, he wrote her an uncharacteristically short missive: “
Dear Miss Home. You Bitch. Sincerely, Ed Sullivan.”

It was the audience, not the critics, who Sullivan set out to romance, and he succeeded at that in his debut year. As 1948 drew to a close, the Hopper ratings ranked
Toast of the Town
as television’s third most popular program, ahead of approximately eighty other prime time shows. It was topped only by Berle’s
Texaco Theater
and Arthur Godfrey’s
Talent Scouts
, a televised version of the longtime hit radio show. Additionally, a Pulse survey, reporting on local preferences in various cities, placed
Toast of the Town
as the top-ranked program in New York and Philadelphia. Sullivan touted his success in his column, writing a note to himself,
“Don’t get swell-headed over the Hooper television rating, son.” The show, unlike his many attempts at radio, was finding an audience.

And it was doing so on the cheap. At the end of 1948, CBS reported that it had paid Sullivan $53,500 that year; its reported salary for network president Frank Stanton was $109,000. That CBS would pay its fledgling show host about half the compensation of its president was certainly not true. What the network neglected to clarify was that the $53,500 it paid Sullivan had been the year’s total talent budget for
Toast of the Town
(the $375 a week for performers, plus $1,000 a week for the orchestra, plus miscellaneous fees, for a half year). Sullivan and his partner Marlo Lewis, after expenses, worked for CBS for free that year.

Although
Toast of the Town
enjoyed healthy ratings, the critical fusillade directed at Sullivan became a problem. If NBC could hire the multitalented Milton Berle, why
was CBS presenting this frozen-faced newspaperman who bumbled through his brief introductions? CBS knew the answer—Sullivan was delivering a ratings triumph at almost no cost—but the program’s sole sponsor, Emerson Radio, saw it differently. Company executives felt embarrassed to be associated with an emcee who generated such critical vitriol.

In February 1949 Marlo Lewis got a call from Ben Abrams, Emerson’s president; Lewis’ ad agency handled the account. “
Frankly Marlo—Sullivan stinks! Even from here, and holding my nose. He stinks!” Emerson was canceling its sponsorship, effective immediately. When Lewis reminded him he had agreed to a long-term commitment—the agreement had been oral, not written—Abrams retorted that CBS had taken advantage of Emerson by aligning his company with a show hosted by an amateur. The network made a tentative attempt to enforce the agreement, but to no avail.
Toast of the Town
had lost its sponsor.

Sylvia heard the news before Ed. She was home by herself the day the call came. Assuming that Emerson’s cancellation portended the show’s cancellation, the call was a major blow. “
You can’t imagine how sick I was,” she said. For Ed, the loss of sponsorship called to mind his radio programs, none of which survived past nine months. Now his luck with television, with his show at the nine-month point, appeared all too familiar. He fell into a pitch-black mood. Of that evening, Sylvia recalled: “
We were out having dinner, and some fans came over to compliment the program. We both felt so empty we just sat there with sinking hearts.”

CBS was flummoxed.
Toast of the Town
had attracted an audience, but it had been a hard sell to advertisers, and was now looking like a money loser. The network felt pressed to rectify that. With the search for a sponsor now urgent, the word was put out, quietly, that CBS was soliciting advertisers for the show “with or without Ed Sullivan.” The network had specifically kept Sullivan’s name off the show for this possibility; according to his contract he could be replaced at any point.

When Ed heard about the “with or without Sullivan” offer, he erupted into a rage. He had produced a ratings win for the network while subsidizing the cost himself, and now they were about to jettison him? His daughter Betty recalled his response to this news as “
making him more of a fighter,” and indeed he sprang into full battle mode. He stormed the halls of CBS, entering the office of network president Frank Stanton, voice at full volume, demanding to know what was going on. Stanton and network chairman Bill Paley reassured him, claiming they hadn’t agreed to sell the show without him. The offer, they said, had come only from one executive, Jack Van Volkenburg. The “with or without” proffer was rescinded and Sullivan was given an apology. Nonetheless, CBS retained the right to replace him at any time.

The show’s high ratings meant it didn’t have to wait long to find a new sponsor—and a far more prestigious one. Benson Ford, grandson of Henry Ford, enjoyed
Toast of the Town
immensely. Soon after Emerson Radio’s cancellation, the Ford Motor Company’s ad agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt, contacted CBS. Ford agreed to sponsor the show for thirteen weeks beginning March 27. For Ed the news was profound validation; the show had attracted one of the country’s largest corporations. And, in addition to promoting its Lincoln Mercury line on the program, Ford would tout
Toast of the Town
in all its nationwide print advertising for the automobile line—reminding readers to tune in Sunday night at 8
P.M.

If that alone wasn’t manna from Heaven, Ford was throwing its corporate weight behind not just the show but, remarkably, Sullivan himself. Due to Benson Ford’s enthusiasm for Ed, Kenyon & Eckhardt developed plans to make him the spokesperson for Lincoln Mercury. Ford would pay him $25,000 per year to travel across the country, city by city, attending community events and giving speeches, promoting the automobile line. When he wasn’t on press junkets he would hold press conferences by phone with groups of editors. In short, he was to be the face of Lincoln Mercury. He would become so associated with the boxy sedans that buyers called him about problems and concerns they had with their new Lincoln Mercurys.

(Over the next two years he would log so many miles for Ford that in February 1952 he wrote an exhausted letter to a Lincoln Mercury executive, claiming his physician had forbidden him to keep traveling: “
As a result of this session with the doctor, who long has warned me against what he terms ‘idiocy,’ I have come to this firm conclusion—that a weekly TV show and a five-times-a-week column are as much as I can handle well. I do not want to be a promotion man in the field because it takes too damn much out of me, completely disrupts my home life, and certainly reduces the time I should devote to a big league TV show.” Ford agreed to a lighter schedule.)

Ford’s sponsorship prompted CBS to increase
Toast of the Town
’s talent budget to $2,000 per episode—still just a fraction of Milton Berle’s budget but a quantum leap from $375. Marlo and Ed discussed how to spend the money, in particular, what share they themselves should take. Ed, according to Marlo, argued that all of it should be spent on the show. “
My problem is that I can’t keep squeezing the talent. We’ve got to pay them more.… I hate to say this, but you and I will still have to wait before we can take anything for ourselves.” Lewis agreed. Later that year, the Ford sponsorship allowed Sullivan and Lewis to start taking home modest paychecks.