Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (44 page)

As
Comedy Hour
’s ratings continued to slide, Ed worked behind the scenes to rectify a problem that had long bedeviled
Toast of the Town.
Between 1948 and 1950, network executives learned from the undisputed ratings of Sullivan’s show and Berle’s
Texaco Theater
that the variety format was a quick path to profitability. In response, a slew of variety hours were launched. Many, like the Dumont network’s
Cavalcade of Stars
, had short lives. Yet by the early 1950s a passel of programs were hungry for talent:
Comedy Hour, Toast of the Town, Texaco Theater, The Bob Hope Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, All-Star Revue
—each had variety schedules to fill. In 1948,
Variety
predicted that television would run out of performers to present, and that forecast proved prescient. By the early 1950s the competition for talent pushed prices exponentially higher. Where once a Sullivan column mention and $100 was enough to attract guests, those days were now long gone. The relative scarcity of entertainers turned TV talent agents into major players.

The power that talent agents had over Sullivan enraged him. He had a job to do, and in his view they were preventing him from doing it to the best of his ability. As he saw it,
Toast of the Town
gave early television exposure to many performers, and their agents owed him loyalty. The agents felt differently. To Sullivan’s consternation, they employed a well-choreographed set of maneuvers to push up prices, playing one show off another. If Ed called to request a current hot act, the agent explained that the performer was all booked up—until the price went higher. Or agents refused to even respond to his call until Ed made it clear his bid would go higher. Paul Winchell, a ventriloquist whom Ed booked for a small fee in the show’s earliest days, now expected $2,500—and demanded multiple bookings to appear for that amount. Another popular ventriloquist, Senor Wences, expected a similar fee. A rising young comic named Dick Shawn succeeded in negotiating a guest shot for $10,000 on the condition he get four more appearances at the same price. But Shawn didn’t have enough material and it hurt Sullivan’s ratings.

Most agents first attempted to place their acts with
Comedy Hour
because of its august pay scale. Ed, with his singular eye for talent, frequently spotted a rising nightclub act or a singer whose music was inching up the charts; after inquiring about their availability, he often got stonewalled, only to see the act sold to
Comedy Hour.
For this reason, Ed had a fondness for smaller, independent agents, but these representatives didn’t handle the most sought-after performers.

As the competition for talent tightened in the early 1950s, Ed constantly railed to Marlo about what he saw as the lowest form of life, the talent agent. He had a special animosity for MCA agent Johnny Greenhut. “
That fat-faced bum with the soft-boiled eyes,” he said to Marlo. “I just made an offer … and Greenhut tells me he has to check to see if David Begelman or Freddie Fields sold them to the
Comedy Hour.
…They’ve even got the little punk agents pulling the same stunt. Everybody’s
‘checking’ to see if an act is available.… You know where that bunch of flesh peddlers would have gone over big? Down at the levee at the auction block, raffling off slaves to the highest bidder!” And then there was George Wood at William Morris. “
It’s the old story—George is going with a young broad and he wants to impress her,” Ed explained to Marlo. “He thinks she’d look great in a shiny new Mercury convertible. He didn’t come out and ask for one, but I got the message.… I’ll call the factory and order one for him. We’ll have to pay for it out of our talent budget.”

The chief problem was that
Toast of the Town
had no agency dedicated to it. The William Morris Agency had a tight relationship with
Texaco Theater
, and MCA was joined at the hip with
Comedy Hour.
But
Toast of the Town
’s smaller budget meant it was left to fend for itself, working with both agencies and others as a leftover outlet for acts who couldn’t be sold to the highest bidder. Ed knew he had to change this to continue to be competitive. He began cultivating a relationship with Sonny Werblin, president of MCA’s New York office, considered the king of talent agents and a fearsome dealmaker. The two entered into negotiations, and, after some haggling, came to an agreement. In effect, Sullivan hired Werblin as his own personal agent, his representative in charge of negotiations with CBS.

As the five-year contract Ed had signed in 1950 approached its expiration date, Werblin was in place to be Sullivan’s advocate with the network. At one level, Werblin’s representation of Ed could have been seen as a conflict of interest. It positioned MCA as the lead talent representative for two direct competitors,
Comedy Hour
and
Toast of the Town.
But apparently Werblin, seeing
Comedy Hour
’s ratings erosion in the 1953–54 season, understood it was time to shift his alliance. Or perhaps he simply saw the value of riding two horses.

Given his reputation as an über-agent, his representation of Sullivan would almost certainly result in a big raise for Ed, as well as a larger talent budget for
Toast of the Town.
Marlo, however, pointing out that Werblin would take a hefty cut of Ed’s salary for representing him, urged Ed to go directly to CBS head Bill Paley. With no agent as a middleman, you’ll make more money, Marlo told Ed.

But Ed saw a much larger potential in working with Werblin. With the MCA executive as his advocate, he could expect to get choice access to the MCA talent pool. In essence, the deal would provide Ed with the raw material to produce the best program he was capable of. Short-term, it might mean a smaller salary increase, but with
Comedy Hour
fading, and Werblin lending MCA’s muscle, Sullivan saw a chance to take his star to an entirely new level.

In the early 1950s, a young New York comic named Will Jordan started including a Sullivan impression in his nightclub act, invariably breaking up the room with his hunched shoulders, his I’ve-just-sucked-a-lemon facial contortions, and his version of Ed’s signature arms-crossed gesture.

The audience response landed him gigs on local television shows, notably that of Steve Allen, an offbeat wit who later hosted a show opposite Sullivan’s. Allen took great delight in Jordan’s skewering of the stone-faced host, often inviting the comic to perform it. Jordan, always looking for a bigger venue, played up his television success to longtime Sullivan friend Joe Moore, and at Moore’s suggestion Ed tuned in to one of Jordan’s local television appearances.

The showman liked what he saw. Despite his vituperative letters to critics who roasted him for his stiffness, he was eager to find some way to counteract the perception of his stilted stage persona. Booking this impressionist who so mercilessly lampooned him would, Ed hoped, deflate reviewers’ barbs. He would negate the critics by agreeing with them—you bet, I
am
stiff, and let’s all have a good laugh at it.

For Jordan’s first appearance in March 1953, Sullivan booked him opposite a Jerry Lewis–Dean Martin
Comedy Hour
, hoping the chatter about a Sullivan impressionist on his own show would draw viewers. But the comic didn’t go over too well. “
I did Sullivan as he really was—and it bombed,” Jordan recalled. Overawed by his first appearance on national TV, “I was afraid to do more.” The tepid audience response left Ed unimpressed.

Jordan kept including his Sullivan shtick in his nightclub act, continually riffing on the showman’s persona. Over months of club dates his impression grew ever farther away from the original man—and ever more entertaining. Nightclub audiences loved it, and Hy Gardner, a New York
Herald-Tribune
columnist, called Ed to tell him he should book Jordan. Ed was skeptical, but he trusted Gardner, so in June 1954 the comic played the Sullivan show again.

This time Jordan let loose, playing a wildly exaggerated character that took Sullivan’s persona to the extreme. “I rolled my eyes up and showed the whites of my eyes, stuck my tongue under my upper lip, and made a monster face,” he recalled. As he moved his shoulders with spastic stiffness, he satirized the host’s verbal style: “Tonight on our rilly big show we have 702 Polish dentists who will be out here in a few moments doing their marvelous extractions.…” The audience roared, and as they laughed the camera periodically cut to Ed, chuckling along—see, the camera shot said, he’s a regular guy.

Ironically, while the audience easily recognized Sullivan in Jordan’s imitation, the comic himself knew that almost all the impression’s details were invented—the knuckle cracks, shoulder shakes, eye rolls, full-body spins; none of these were actual Sullivan mannerisms. “This is the only time I know of where so much of the character is not the real person,” he said. Jordan’s hyperstretched version of the showman became an audience favorite; Sullivan booked him twelve more times. Over the years, Jordan became typecast as the comic who imitated Ed Sullivan. The impressionist would play him through six decades, including in 1978’s
The Buddy Holly Story
, 1991’s
The Doors
, and 2003’s
Down with Love.

Most lasting of Jordan’s inventions was the phrase “really big show,” or, as he played it, “rilly big shew.” Not only had Ed himself never said that prior to Jordan, when Ed tried to mimic Jordan’s imitation of himself, he goofed the line, voicing it as “truly big show.” Only later, after numerous appearances by Jordan and other Sullivan impressionists—all of whom used “really big show”—did the phrase become the showman’s own stock setup, the idiom most identified with his onstage persona.

When Ed used the phrase “really big show,” he was, in fact, imitating his imitators. It was a kind of comfort for him. Instead of being alone in his natural, awkward onstage self, the parade of Sullivan impressionists he booked—Jack Carter, John Byner, Frank Gorshin, Jackie Mason, Rich Little—gave him a role to play. By turning him into an endearing set of idiosyncrasies, they enabled him to be the stock character known as Ed Sullivan. He could take refuge in playing this one-dimensional
caricature, however limited a resemblance this sketch bore to the man himself. Certainly it included no sign of the glad-handing Broadway gossip, or the shrewd producer who aligned with power player Sonny Werblin, or the volcano who stormed the halls of CBS. But no matter. The audience understood and liked this cartoon figure. In time, the caricature became the public image of Ed Sullivan, which he was perfectly happy with. He often tossed off a “really big show,” and he kept his trademark arms-crossed gesture long after he learned to avoid other tics.

He took immense pleasure in the fact that these comedians went on other programs and imitated him. It delighted his competitive spirit, knowing that a troupe of impressionists was out there reminding audiences of him and his show. Comics learned that having a good Sullivan impression was a quick way to Ed’s heart, and stand-ups across the country began practicing “rilly big shew” to help them land a booking.

Most compellingly for Ed, these impressionists appealed to his long-held hunger for renown. Being mimicked in front of a national audience meant the entire country knew who he was, and presumably, if the audience was laughing, felt some fondness for him. Bogart was imitated, Cagney was imitated, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart were imitated. For Ed to be mimicked in comics’ routines in 1953 meant he had been inducted into the glorious crowd he had always aspired to join. Will Jordan’s first tentative shoulder hunch was, provisionally, the start of Sullivan’s iconic status. This was fame. This, as much as anything, was what he had always wanted.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stardom

E
VERY
S
UNDAY
AT
THE
M
AXINE
E
LLIOT
T
HEATER
a furious burst of activity began sometime around 7:00
A.M.
With that evening’s broadcast looming, Sullivan staffers hustled with intense focus. Handling myriad tasks was a team of young secretaries who worked all day long on Saturday and Sunday. One, having met with that evening’s singers to get their exact lyrics—the album version couldn’t be trusted—transcribed all the words. She gave the lyrics to director Johnny Wray, who planned camera angles to accent the singer’s words; with just three cameras his choices were limited, yet Wray conceived of new shots for each verse. Another secretary, who maintained the show’s master script, typed and distributed copies to the production staff; this was revised and redistributed constantly. Throughout the morning, Marlo Lewis worked with set designer Grover Cole to plan the logistics of moving sets on- and offstage quickly; everything had to be assembled during commercial breaks.