Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (46 page)

In contrast to his last contract, this agreement—drafted by Werblin—treated Sullivan like a star. Its language fairly gushed. Stating that Ed had “
built and maintained an outstanding reputation” as a “master of ceremonies, performing artist, and producer,” it continued, “Whereas, CBS Television is anxious to have Artist’s active services for as long a term as possible and to immobilize Artist as a competitor for as long a term as possible.…” To secure those long-term services, the contract stretched as far as the eye could see, no less than twenty years. CBS, having considered selling the show to advertisers without him just a few years before, now never wanted to let him go. Ironically, it was the executive who had offered the show to sponsors “with or without” Sullivan, Jack Van Volkenburg, who sent Ed a letter formally accepting the new terms. “
I just want you to know how happy we all are at completing arrangements for our long-term marriage,” Van Volkenburg enthused.

For the contract’s first seven years, his salary would be $176,000 a year; for the following thirteen years, the network guaranteed him $100,000 a year regardless of whether he produced a show, as long as he didn’t work for a competing network. He was given an expense account and eight weeks of vacation. Ed also negotiated an increase for Marlo Lewis, up to $1,000 a week.

The following fall, the show’s weekly production budget would increase to $50,000. About $24,000 of that was specified as talent budget, which Sullivan could juggle between weeks, spending more on one week and then producing a less-expensive show the following week.

Werblin did particularly well in the deal. Sullivan’s contract with MCA stipulated that the agency would receive ten percent of all his earnings from radio and television “
for the duration of your life.” Additionally, the agency would receive $3,500 from the show’s weekly $50,000 production budget.

Ed happily told reporters about his new contract, so its details were soon widely reported, even down to the salary difference between the first seven years and the following thirteen. As industry observers realized that CBS had offered him a twenty-year contract, the news was clear: Sullivan had made it.

Apart from the money, the showman made one major demand: the program had to be renamed
The Ed Sullivan Show.
It would finish the 1954–55 season as
Toast of the Town
and adopt the new name with the start of next fall’s season.

The contract was everything he had ever wanted. In contrast to his many failed radio shows, he now had a lock on a major broadcast berth—signed after two networks engaged in a bidding war for his services. Most importantly, at age fifty-three he was set to place his name in lights above a top-rated national television show.

Negotiations completed, and the alliance with Werblin formalized, Ed set out to finish off the
Comedy Hour.
But first he had a score to settle. During Sunday rehearsals, talent agents had always roamed the theater freely, watching their star clients perform, kvetching backstage, and socializing with the crew. But no more. In Ed’s view, they had taken advantage of him, so he now forced a petty indignity on them. Henceforth they were denied access to the theater; if they wanted to talk with their clients on Sunday they had to wait in a cramped, uncomfortable area outside the stage door. MCA agent Marty Kummer nicknamed the area “The Wailing Wall,” because performers cried or cursed there after hearing of Ed’s changes or cancellations.

The agents hated having to wait outside, and many “
prayed that Sullivan dropped dead,” Marlo Lewis recalled. Years later, Sullivan claimed that he laid down this edict because Sylvia and Betty had once visited the theater and none of the agents offered to give up their seats to allow them to sit. In truth, Sylvia and Betty virtually never visited the theater, preferring to watch the show on television, and at any rate there were hundreds of seats in the Maxine Elliot. But in Ed’s mind, talent agents were the kind of men who wouldn’t even give a lady a seat.

The minor irritations of talent agents aside, the 1954–55 season was a winning one for Sullivan. The year’s Nielsen figures indicated that
Toast of the Town
had climbed to be television’s fifth-rated show. On top was
I Love Lucy
, followed by
The Jackie Gleason Show, Dragnet
, and
You Bet Your Life
, the humorous game show hosted by Groucho Marx. Incredibly, Sullivan was higher ranked than
The Bob Hope Show
, seventh-rated, and
The Jack Benny Show
, eighth-rated. Milton Berle, who had run just ahead of Sullivan between 1948 and 1950, had fallen to thirteenth.
Comedy Hour
had tumbled out of the Top 20, bested by
Toast of the Town
almost every Sunday.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, playing off Sullivan’s ascendant popularity—and helping promote another CBS property—performed a sketch from
I Love Lucy
on Sullivan’s show. Lucy hears remarkable news, which she reports to Ricky:
“Ed Sullivan is going to do the whole show about us!”
The couple, comically, fall all over themselves in an attempt to remain calm in the face of such a portentous development. When Ed himself rings their doorbell, Lucy emits a trademark shriek, and Ricky is so excited he drags Ed through the living room in a manic attempt at hospitality. Lucy shoves him into an easy chair and manhandles him into crossing his legs so he’ll be more comfortable. Both try to pretend they hadn’t heard the news,
waiting to hear it directly from Ed. Finally, amid great fussing by Lucy, he gets out his invitation: he wants to do a show about them. In response, Lucy and Ricky intone in unison: “
About us?
” Ed as straight man played his part with reasonable aplomb, projecting ease with his role as the all-powerful television producer, if not his role as an actor in a comedy skit. At the end he flashed a big smile, yet he managed to look almost completely away from the camera.

Lucy and Desi felt fondly toward Sullivan after he had pitched in to sway public opinion when Ball’s career was imperiled. In 1953 she had been called to testify about her alleged communist affiliation before a secret session of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Ball admitted that as young woman she had once registered to vote as a communist. But she had done so, she explained, merely to placate her grandfather, a committed socialist. HUAC, satisfied with her explanation, let the matter drop.

However, news of her closed-door testimony leaked to Walter Winchell. In a blind item on his radio broadcast he announced, “
The most popular of all television stars was confronted with her membership in the Communist Party.” Although he didn’t name her, in 1953 that description fit exactly one performer. Suddenly Ball’s phone began ringing nonstop for comment. The
Herald Express
printed a copy of her 1936 voter registration card, proving she had planned to vote for the Communist Party. With the story’s coverage exploding, and Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler writing that Ball had to be “
tracked down and exposed,” the comedienne’s career was in serious jeopardy.

But the momentum of her ever-growing popularity, and the helping hand of several columnists, saved her. Ed weighed in firmly with those who felt the issue should be dismissed—no doubt partially driven by his dislike of Winchell. Since Winchell had ignited this controversy, Ed was happy to douse it. As he wrote in his
Daily News
column, “
It’s a singularly fortunate thing for Lucille Ball that she’s been a weekly visitor to millions of American living rooms.… TV cameras being as revealing as they are, the Jury of Public Opinion is an informed jury as it renders its verdict on a silly thing she did 17 years ago.”

Indeed it was: after the first broadcast of
I Love Lucy
following Winchell’s leak, Trendex figures revealed that Ball continued to star in television’s top-ranked program.

The trappings of fame arrived quickly now. Ed acquired what every successful Manhattan executive was expected to own, a Connecticut estate. He bought Kettletown Farms, a one-hundred-eighty-acre property in bucolic Southbury, with a ten-room house, swimming pool, two lakes, and an orchard. The family’s primary residence continued to be their apartment in the Delmonico, at Park Avenue and 59th Street; the Connecticut estate was a weekend retreat. The problem was finding the time to be there. Ed continued to log miles as a spokesman for Lincoln Mercury, and his
Daily News
column (now syndicated to thirty-five papers) kept calling him to the city.

In his tours for Lincoln Mercury, at every ribbon cutting, store opening, and civic event, the crowds mobbed him like some kind of national folk hero. Benson Ford remarked, “
Wherever he goes, women hold up babies for him to kiss, traffic stops, policemen smile.… Sullivan is a one-man interfaith council, a chamber of commerce, and an unequaled sales force. The crowds love him.” As Ed frequented
his many Manhattan haunts—he remained a night owl, making the rounds of clubs like the Copacabana and Lindy’s—he was met with squads of autograph hounds. He happily obliged them.

On October 10, 1955, the cover of
Time
featured Richard Nixon, the apple-cheeked vice president projecting a confident smile. On the cover the following week was Ed Sullivan, the showman smiling with a similar sense that all was well with the world. Underneath his portrait was a small cartoon of a television, out of which tumbled a crowd of miniature performers and a flurry of dollar bills. Sullivan, noted
Time
, “
is about the longest shot ever to have paid off in show business. It is as if Featherweight Willie Pep knocked out Rocky Marciano with a single punch in the second round.”

The cover story detailed Ed’s rise, from his Port Chester days to, as
Time
portrayed it, the very top of the television industry. The article quoted TV executives about the medium’s potential—its revenues had zoomed to $1 billion annually—then noted Ed’s response to their promises of coming attractions: “
Everything they’re promising to do is something I’ve already done.”
Time
listed the many entertainers whose shows had come and gone during Sullivan’s tenure, including Red Buttons, George Jessel, and Bing Crosby. In the section on his background, Ed took the opportunity to jab his perennial rival: “Winchell’s all through—and I’m an expert on Winchelliana. I’ve followed him like a hawk. He’s a dead duck. He couldn’t be resuscitated by injections at half-hour intervals.” (The powerful columnist was indeed beginning to decline. His first attempt at television in 1952, though lauded by critics, had been canceled. Winchell’s rat-a-tat-tat insistency didn’t translate to the restrained 1950s.)

In the spring of 1955 came the big news: Warner Bros. was planning a film about Ed. As proposed by the studio,
The Ed Sullivan Story
would recount the showman’s journey to national stardom. He had been a flop in Hollywood fifteen years earlier, but now Warner Bros. felt his life warranted a major bio-picture. Moreover, they wanted him to produce the film as well as star.

Studio head Jack Warner professed great faith in the film. “
Mr. Sullivan’s motion picture will be one of the most important forthcoming pictures on our release schedule,” he told reporters. He wasn’t just posturing: the studio budgeted $1 million for the film, which was higher than the average movie budget in the mid 1950s (though plenty of epics and star vehicles had surpassed this level). As with all his projects, Jack Warner’s investment was more than financial: he would oversee the Sullivan film’s production, with his usual firm hand. Warner was a man who felt supremely confident in his opinions. Having grown up in vaudeville—he was a boy soprano who sang between acts—and been a film producer since the medium’s birth, he had an innate sense of the public’s tastes, and in fact had helped mold those tastes. When he barked he expected others to jump, and he was known for his battles with stars like Bogart and Cagney, as well as for steamrolling producers and writers. On the night that
Casablanca
won the Oscar for Best Picture, Warner jumped up onstage to accept it before Hal Wallis, who was the film’s producer, which led Al Jolson to quip, “I can’t see what J. W. can do with an Oscar. It can’t say ‘yes.’ ”