Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (41 page)

Lest the evening get too racy, Sullivan booked the Boy’s Town choir—forty boys dressed in angelic robes harmonizing a church hymn—after which Ed introduced Father Schmidt, a Catholic priest from Boy’s Town. Next, Sullivan presented Buster Keaton, who with Charlie Chaplin had been a comic giant of silent film. His career had collapsed with the advent of talkies but he was making a comeback. Keaton performed a slapstick routine without speaking, in a set made up as a rural fishing hole, complete with a small swimming pool. Every time he attempted a fishing maneuver—
splash
—he fell face first into the water. Ed, offering high art after low comedy, followed Keaton with international ballet stars Andre Eglevsky and Rosella High-tower, who floated through a six-minute classical ballet.

No Sullivan broadcast was without something for the kids, which that evening was Spanish acrobatic duo Montez DeOcha. Midway through their routine, Ed walked onstage to pump up the excitement: “This trick here is a thirty-foot leap in the air by Lolita, and Montez, with his back turned, will catch her—I hope.” The audience chuckled at his tag, but this was live television and there was no net so the chuckle was more anticipatory than humorous. Lolita climbed the ladder and Montez turned his back to her—he would have no way to compensate if she didn’t leap just right. She jumped, bounced on a trampoline and sailed forth some thirty feet in the air, landing in a perfect headstand on top of his upraised arms. He twirled her over his head as Ed led the cheers—“That’s really something, huh?”

Throughout the hour were Lincoln Mercury ads; Ford was
Toast of the Town
’s sole sponsor. As the auto line’s spokesman, Ed always set up the commercials himself, with intros like, “You know, nostalgia has its place, but if you’re thinking of buying a new car, don’t settle for anything less than a great, new, 1951 Mercury.” The Ford ads were ninety seconds long, with sunny images of bulbous sedans driving at moderate speed on clean, wide roads. As each spot concluded, the camera cut to the studio audience, which clapped with great enthusiasm.

By the end of the 1950 fall season, NBC canceled Fred Allen as host of
Comedy Hour.
His intimate, offbeat humor hadn’t translated to television. Absurdly, his popular
characters, which in radio he brought to life in the listener’s imagination, were turned into hand puppets for television. Allen, bitter, quipped about his competitor: “
What does Sullivan do? He points at people. Rub meat on actors and dogs will do the same.” To this, Ed riposted: “
Maybe Fred should rub some meat on a sponsor.” Bobby Clark, too, was soon dropped from
Comedy Hour.
But the challenge to Sullivan remained intractable.
Comedy Hour
’s glittering pay scale ensured that a long list of stars—brighter stars—stood ready to replace Allen and Clark. Bob Hope, Abbot and Costello, Spike Jones, Jackie Gleason: each hosted
Comedy Hour
by the end of the 1950–51 season. Competing against the NBC program was like trying to win some mad carnival game; as soon as Sullivan shot down one target, several more appeared.

Attempting to find a creative alternative, he began presenting shows from remote locations, which strained television’s primitive technical capabilities. In the 1950–51 season, he hosted shows from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Boston. The power went out during the Boston show, halting
Toast of the Town
in the middle of its live broadcast. In the darkened theater were two-hundred wounded veterans from the Korean War; Ed asked the audience to allow them to leave first. In each remote show, he catered to the city itself, spotlighting its native attractions as if he were a visiting politician courting the locals.

Seeking more ways to outpoint
Comedy Hour
, he began offering something beyond the purview of the NBC program: legitimate theater. Ed used the natural resources of Manhattan, culling from among the city’s dozens of current stage productions to present excerpts geared for the television audience.

He chose a scene from Carson McCullers’
The Member of the Wedding
, which won the 1950 New York Drama Critics’ prize for best American play. The scene was one in which Julie Harris sat on Ethel Waters’ knee as Brandon De Wilde leaned tenderly against them. As Marlo Lewis recalled, this broadcast stirred controversy because it involved a black performer having physical contact with a white performer.

Ed mined Broadway throughout the season, presenting a who’s who of stage stars, from Sarah Churchill and Charles Laughton to Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronin. Among the notable performances were James Barton in Erskine Caldwell’s
Tobacco Road
, Flora Robson in Lesley Storm’s
Black Chiffon
, Eva Le Gallienne in Anton Chekov’s
The Cherry Orchard
, and Judith Anderson in Euripides’
Medea.
On the lighter side, Ed booked a medley of songs from Frank Loesser’s
Guys and Dolls
, currently playing to full houses on Broadway. All these stage excerpts, of course, shared billing with contrasting performers on the Sullivan stage. So Anton Chekov was followed by acrobats, Euripides was preceded by a comic, and
Guys and Dolls
shared billing with an animal act.

But it wasn’t enough. When the Nielsen ratings for the 1950–51 season were tallied,
Toast of the Town
was soundly bested by
Comedy Hour.
In its first season,
Comedy Hour
grabbed the number five ranking—impressive given that television now had a full schedule of competently produced programs. And since
Comedy Hour
ran directly opposite
Toast of the Town
, its high ranking necessarily meant fewer viewers were watching Sullivan. Having produced the number two-ranked show the previous season, Ed now tumbled to the fourteenth spot.

In a field of one hundred ten prime-time programs,
Toast of the Town
still sat near the top, but hadn’t won the majority of Sunday evenings. Sullivan’s ratings for the
year were higher because he offered new shows throughout the summer, unlike
Comedy Hour.
But if he was to stay truly competitive, he needed a fresh strategy—some novel way to capture viewers.

While he was rolling out this new strategy, which debuted in the 1951–52 season, he encountered an old rival. The
Comedy Hour
wasn’t the only thing he battled in 1951.

By the early 1950s, Ed began to be, in a sense, two men. On one hand, his immersion in the new world of television meant an entirely new audience knew him only from the small screen. The world he chronicled in his Broadway column existed in a universe far from that of most middle-class viewers. To them he was the avuncular host, the stiff-but-sincere purveyor of opera, comedy, and jugglers. He fully embraced this new world as he began to receive the national notoriety he had long craved. He stopped producing his Loew’s State vaudeville shows. His daily column for the
Daily News
lost its spark as he handed off more of its legwork to his assistant Carmine Santullo. On the other hand, the old Ed still very much existed, the two-fisted gossip columnist, the acerbic New Yorker who was always at least a little dissatisfied. He hadn’t given up membership in the local Broadway tribe. And, as an episode from the early 1950s revealed, he remained fueled by jealousies that had driven him since the 1930s.

In October 1951, famed stage performer Josephine Baker returned to the United States for a series of appearances. A star of black vaudeville as a child, and of Paris’ La Revue Negre at age nineteen, Baker’s buoyant charm and exotic eroticism—she once gyrated through the Charleston clad in only a girdle of bananas—made her a popular figure in France, where she took citizenship. Picasso, for whom she posed, described her as having a smile to end all smiles. Now age forty-four, she had become a symbol of black advancement after succeeding in integrating a whites-only nightclub in Miami, and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) organized a party to celebrate her return to New York.

Baker and her entourage stopped at the Stork Club for a late-evening dinner, which didn’t go as planned. For all its glamour, the Stork’s attitude toward black patrons was decidedly backward. The service she received was, at best, slow, and by her description, contemptuous. The owner, Sherman Billingsley, refused to acknowledge her—unusual for a major star, but Billingsley’s reputation as a racist was well established. Baker claimed Walter Winchell, who used the Stork as his office, “
looked right through me.” Baker ordered a steak, a crab salad, and a bottle of French wine; after waiting an hour she inquired about her food and was told the kitchen was out of both steak and crab salad. One of her fellow diners urged her to call the NAACP to complain. She went to the phone but the attendant claimed to be too busy to dial. Baker dialed the phone herself to report that the Stork had refused to serve her, though when she returned to her table “
a pathetic little steak finally appeared,” as she described it. Angry, she and her party stormed out of the Stork.

What exactly happened at the Stork was unclear; there were various conflicting accounts. Some claimed Baker had visited the club with intent to expose its racist door policy, and had deliberately created a scene—the Stork’s service was always
slow, according to some. At any rate, in the ensuing controversy the NAACP picketed the nightspot and the mayor ordered an investigation. The Baker camp wanted Winchell to denounce the Stork in his hugely influential radio show. But Walter, for whom the Stork was his home away from home, and who was upset at being pulled into the contretemps, instead broadcast a segment defending himself and his civil rights record.

As the incident divided the city into warring factions, Winchell was forced to choose between supporting Baker and his loyalty to the Stork. He not only chose the Stork, he launched a broadside against Baker, printing a fifteen-year-old news item about her offer to recruit a black army for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Worse, he charged her with communist sympathies. Among the chattering classes, the conflict devolved into Winchell versus Baker, and, by extension, Winchell versus civil rights. This was the irony of the conflict: the powerful columnist had a strong civil rights record and often aided black causes.

In Ed’s view, Winchell’s entanglement in the Josephine Baker melee provided a welcome chink in the gossip’s armor. After Baker went on Barry Gray’s radio show to attack Winchell, Sullivan appeared on the program the following night to blast the columnist. Gray’s show broadcast from the front table of Chandler’s restaurant, and a standing room—only audience gathered to watch Sullivan denounce Winchell. “
I thought a shameful thing had been done,” Ed said, claiming that Winchell had attempted to deny Baker’s fundamental right to protest. “I despise Walter Winchell because he symbolizes to me evil and treacherous things in the American setup.” Sullivan said that Winchell had launched a journalistic attack against Baker “recklessly and with great abandon … confident in his power and buoyed by the fact that no New York newspaper except one had taken this thing up, because they didn’t want to give him publicity on it.… I say he’s a megalomaniac and a dangerous one.”

Not satisfied, Ed appeared on Gray’s program a second time. “
I don’t think that Winchell is a great American anymore,” he declaimed. “I think that something has happened to him. I don’t know what it is, but I think the effects of it are evil.” Some of this was far afield from the issue of racism, particularly the charge of megalomania. But Ed, while indulging his own longstanding grudge, gained extra currency by voicing a commonly held opinion of Winchell: his enormous power had no counterbalance. Most performers were afraid of him, as were an array of public figures in several walks of life. These otherwise influential people felt they had no recourse against the off-the-cuff judgments he rendered in his column and on his radio show. Ed knew he tapped a wellspring of tacit approval as he attacked Walter.