Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (50 page)

Bob, having completed a tour of duty in the Navy during the Korean War, studied Russian and worked in the Navy’s security division in Washington, D.C. In the mid 1950s he and Betty made frequent visits up to New York to visit Betty’s parents, which created an opportunity for Precht. Ed’s connections opened the door to the new field of television, which Bob found glamorous and potentially lucrative. “
It was very tempting,” he recalled, and all the more so because the couple now had two young children.

In 1956 he made the career change. With his interest in current events, Bob hoped for a position in the news division, but Sullivan’s influence opened no doors there. So Ed asked Marlo Lewis to hire him as a production assistant. Since Lewis had branched out, working on other CBS programs as well as the Sullivan show, Bob apprenticed with several shows, including a soap opera, children’s programs, and the courtroom drama
The Verdict Is Yours.
Precht also began working on the Sullivan show, sometimes working directly with Ed to help assemble the weekly program. Despite his lack of experience in show business, the son-in-law demonstrated a competency and professionalism that quickly proved his value beyond his family connection. When Ed took the show on one of its many location broadcasts, Bob was usually there as assistant producer.

For the show on August 5, 1956, Bob accompanied Ed to McGuire Air Force Base in Trenton, New Jersey, for a remote broadcast. After the show the Air Force flew them back to the Bridgeport, Connecticut airport, where they were picked up by Ralph Cacace, a handyman-caretaker at Sullivan’s estate in Southbury. With a little luck, Bob and Ed hoped to be home not long after eleven o’clock.

Around midnight, Betty and Sylvia began to wonder why they were running so late, Sylvia hoping out loud that nothing was seriously wrong, Betty speculating that the plane was probably late getting in. By the time the clock inched past one in the morning, the two were seriously worried, too concerned to sleep. With little to say, they waited, Betty half resting on the couch. She felt intuitively that this was more than a routine schedule delay. The minutes stretched out in the quiet house, the heavy silence broken only by the solemn ticking of a nautical clock on the fireplace mantle.

When the phone rang shortly after two
A.M.
Betty felt the breath rush out of her body. Ed and Bob had been in a serious car accident and their condition was unknown, said the police department caller. A squad car was dispatched to rush Sylvia and Betty to the hospital. As the two raced across Connecticut in the back seat of a police car, Sylvia sobbed in great heaves as Betty held onto her. Betty also held onto
a reassuring thought: her husband and father must be alive and conscious, otherwise who would have given the police their phone number? The police driver pulled into a hospital emergency entrance, only to realize he had made a terrible mistake: it was the wrong hospital. Betty hurriedly got out and called the correct hospital, holding her breath while the nurse provided details about Ed and Bob’s conditions. They were seriously injured—but they were alive. As the car sped to the right hospital, Sylvia had something of a breakdown, nearing total hysteria.

Ed had been driving Bob and Ralph Cacace in his new Lincoln along the narrow twists and turns of Naugatuck Valley Road. They were only about twelve miles from home when the driver of a 1953 Pontiac, heading the opposite direction, fell asleep at the wheel; he was a twenty-two-year-old X-ray technician headed home after a late shift. Swerving suddenly into the oncoming lane, his car collided head-on with Sullivan’s. Ed was knocked unconscious and—some of the details remain unclear— apparently thrown from the car.

When he regained a bleary half-awareness he was lying by the side of the road on a piece of tarpaulin, sirens blaring in the distance and a light shining in his eyes. His chest, to the extent he felt it, seemed to be caved in, and he tasted blood in his mouth. A young girl in a party dress held his hand, seemingly unconcerned that Sullivan’s blood was staining her outfit; her name was Sue Miles and she lived nearby. A man whom he would never meet held Ed’s head in his lap. The light shining in Ed’s eyes came from a flashlight held by a doctor’s assistant. “
Hey, doc, come here quick, this one’s Ed Sullivan,” he said. “I don’t know who he is,” the doctor replied. “After a wreck like this they all look alike.”

The ambulance crew worked on extricating Bob and Cacace from the car, which was totaled. Sullivan, laboring to breathe, gave the girl his number and told her to phone Sylvia and Betty. “
Tell them it’s nothing serious,” he gasped as she hurried off. The size and heft of the Lincoln had saved them, otherwise they likely would have died in the crash. Sullivan had a fractured rib and a mass of cuts and bruises all over his body. Bob, riding in the front seat, had a broken arm and ankle and deep facial cuts. Cacace suffered chest injuries and a skull fracture. The other driver sustained a fractured hip and jaw. The news was bad, yet considering the nature of the collision it could have been worse. Sylvia and Betty maintained an anxious day-and-night vigil, but were buoyed by the news that Bob and Ed were expected to recover fully. When Marlo Lewis visited, he was horrified by the sight of Ed lying under an oxygen tent looking “
frail and concave, like a scarecrow with the stuffing ripped out.” Sonny Werblin assigned two of his talent agents to the hospital to ensure that Ed’s needs were taken care of.

The crash was a national news item, though there was confusion about how serious it was. Ed made light of it, telling reporters he expected to be home soon and would resume his broadcast the following Sunday; a near-death experience wasn’t going to keep him off the air. But his physician quickly vetoed that idea and original press reports were corrected: the show would go on with a substitute host. On Wednesday came the announcement that he would go home after a couple more days; that, too, was soon amended. Due to complications of his bronchial condition—probably exacerbated by his pack-a-day cigarette habit—he required additional hospital time. Ed was released on August 13, seven days after being admitted, and taken to his Southbury home for an expected three- to four-weeks’ rest.

But the accident traumatized his system more than he realized. On August 21 he was re-admitted to the hospital for what his doctors referred to as lung congestion; only after a six-day stay did he return to his Southbury estate to convalesce. Resting, however, soon made him tense and unhappy, and he resumed booking the show as guest hosts—Kirk Douglas, Red Skelton, Charles Laughton—took his place. A few years earlier he had undergone minor stomach surgery for his ulcer, and, defying doctor’s orders and Sylvia’s protests, had missed only one show; when he had resumed hosting ten days later he needed to collapse into a chair between introducing acts. Now he attempted to do the same, lobbying for a return though his condition called for rest.

Through it all the show’s regular watchers produced a titanic outpouring of affection. The show normally received box loads of weekly mail, yet now some 36,000 letters arrived voicing concern for the showman. Having inhabited viewers’ living rooms for so many Sundays, many audience members saw him as a family member. After the program each week much of the studio audience wouldn’t leave, instead approaching the stage and asking a steady stream of questions about Ed’s condition. Priests and nuns wrote to say they included him constantly in their prayers. National newspapers kept up a running report on his condition;
The New York Times
ran nearly weekly updates during his five-week absence.

Even Frank Sinatra, his recent feud with Sullivan apparently forgotten, made a get-well phone call to the showman in mid August, telling the
New York Post
“
I love Ed and I know he loves me.” Eager to make his affection public, within the week Sinatra appeared gratis on the Sullivan show during a program guest hosted by Red Skelton. (He claimed, though, that laryngitis prevented him from singing, so after Skelton read a tribute to him written by Ed, and the singer plugged his new movie, he still had time to dash across town and make an appearance on NBC’s 8
P.M.
show.)

Ed returned to his show in mid September, though whether he was well enough to do so was arguable. Onscreen he appeared wan and had obviously lost weight. To compare the shows before and after the accident is to see that something vital had been taken from him. Into his early fifties he had retained the glow of his Port Chester athleticism, aided by his love of golf and his many days spent outside at the racetracks. He had been a handsome man, ruddy, projecting a confident masculine glow. If there was a single moment when he most markedly began to lose his youthful vigor, it was with the physical trauma of the head-on collision. The crash was the catalyst that accelerated the aging process.

Not that he acknowledged this in the immediate aftermath. In the months ahead he jumped right back into his old schedule, if anything moving into higher gear as he envisioned broadcasts from ever more exotic locations, requiring more travel and more logistical headaches. His only concession was to stop driving; from then on he took taxis, and his friend Joe Moore picked him up for Sunday’s rehearsal. Otherwise he remained in fighting shape, and as always was ready to take on all comers.

The tabloid
Exposed
, which printed gossipy half-invented articles about celebrities, reported on the car crash in a piece entitled “Why Ed Sullivan Needs Bodyguard.” According to
Exposed
, Ralph Cacace, Ed’s Southbury caretaker who was in the car that night, was actually his full-time bodyguard. (That Cacace never accompanied Sullivan in New York, where he spent most of his time, wasn’t reported in
the article.) The showman needed such a protector, the tabloid claimed, because he had become so hated by so many:

The Sullivan family, mid 1950s. From left: Sylvia, Ed, Betty (holding a very young Rob Precht), and Bob Precht, who would later become the producer of the Sullivan show. (Globe Photos)

“
Today, living on his 200-acre farm in Southbury, Connecticut, he’s a lonely man, feared, hated, and envied. He’s built walls around himself, such as his full-time bodyguard. Behind the façade, there’s a mighty unhappy, afraid man—the victim of his own consuming egotism.

“Let’s face it: Sullivan is a Big Man in the American entertainment business, and big guys aren’t liked. The people who knew him when he was on his way up from his $10-a-week job as reporter for a hick-town paper are only a few of those who resent the success that has come to him.”

As
Exposed
reported it, Ed’s ruthless practices—his tendency to push around others, from Arthur Godfrey to Frank Sinatra to Walter Winchell—made him feared across the industry. Even his own sponsors were afraid of him, the tabloid claimed: “They know that behind that frigid smile and glassy eyes there lies a raging blaze of ambition that keeps driving the ex-small-town kid to the top.

“He’s at the top now, but he has bought the Trendex score and the big salary at the cost of
fear.
His march to the top has left a trail of enemies who would gladly sink their teeth in his throat—or a knife wherever they can.”

NBC faced a challenge in 1956: finding a way to compete with Sullivan. Despite its leviathan budget,
Comedy Hour
had failed, and the network’s attempt to hire Ed himself had also come to naught. So now NBC cast around for a fresh challenge to the showman’s vise grip on Sunday night. The decision it made was creative and slightly risky. The network maintained the time slot’s variety format, but to host it they hired a performer who offered a vivid contrast with Ed, Steve Allen.

Allen was a superb choice as an anti-Sullivan. While Ed played the reserved and stiff guardian of the status quo, Allen was witty and irreverent, and at age thirty-five younger and more forward looking than any previous national television host. His owlish mien and thick black glasses frames belied his gift for unpredictable off-the-cuff comedy. When substituting for Arthur Godfrey on
Talent Scouts
he made a point of forgetting contestants’ names, and he poked fun at the sponsor by brewing a cup of Lipton Tea with a package of noodle mix, then dumping the resulting concoction into Godfrey’s ukulele. His sharp taste for farce earned him a following as host of the late-evening
Tonight Show
, among other programs. He was also an actor, having starred in 1955’s
The Benny Goodman Story
, and an author and prolific songwriter. Allen’s cerebral wit and his tendency to tweak the powerful presaged 1960s comics like Mort Sahl and George Carlin. Shortly before launching his show opposite Sullivan’s, Allen wired Ed: “
Dear Ed. Would you lend me ten Trendex points until payday? Love and kisses, Steve Allen.”