Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (59 page)

Amid the tension there were efforts at rapprochement, however tentative. In the later years of Eisenhower’s term he hoped for an accord with the Soviets to limit the arms race. His efforts were bitterly opposed by many who saw any softening of U.S.
stance as a mistake. In July 1959 he sent Vice President Nixon to Moscow to open the Moscow Trade Fair, hoping the resulting goodwill would promote a thaw in relations. Little was accomplished. Nixon, a hard-liner in U.S.–Soviet relations, engaged Soviet premier Khrushchev in the infamous “kitchen debate,” a fruitless game of one-upmanship between the two men about which country’s lifestyle was superior. It was at this same trade fair a few weeks later that Ed, in a cultural exchange sponsored by the U.S. State Department, produced his Soviet show.

If Eisenhower hoped the cultural exchange would promote the possibility of normalized relations, Sullivan was his man. The showman had begun the 1950s as a bellicose Cold Warrior, trumpeting the blacklist publication
Red Channels
, and using his
Daily News
column to chide President Truman for not providing the Air Force with a ready supply of atomic weapons. But, based on his Soviet show, he was ending the decade as something of a peacenik. As he explained in his Russian broadcast, “
Our mission to Moscow was to entertain Russians and to confirm their opinion that Americans are nice people.”

In a spirit of détente, Ed arranged the show to spotlight both Soviet and American talent. The program began with a burst of movement, as the Red Army Dancers, peasant-style performers clad in Soviet military uniforms, strutted and kicked in unison, accompanied by a brassy military orchestra. Following them was American accordion wizard Dick Contino rendering popular tunes with bedazzling keyboard technique. Contino was typical of the American performers. Except for Metropolitan Opera star Rise Stevens, the tour’s thirty-eight musicians, singers, and dancers were all lesser known—the production was already wildly expensive without bringing celebrity entertainers.

Between acts, Ed presented his tour of Moscow and Leningrad, narrating the sights. “
I expected a gloomy city, but it isn’t,” he said of Moscow. In fact, his observations seemed to suggest, Russians are surprisingly similar to Americans. As the camera panned a city street bustling with apparently middle-class Soviets, he observed, “Now look at these Russians here—fine decent faces of hardworking people.” A busy Moscow street, “looks like a boulevard in America crowded with people in their Sunday finery, taking their kids to the ice cream stand.” If that didn’t prove how normal life could be in the Soviet Union, Ed included a segment in which he and Sylvia enjoyed a riverboat cruise on a sunny day.

One of the show’s highlights was tap dancer Conrad “Little Buck” Buckner, whose blazingly fast feet flashed in rhythm with a jazz drummer tapping out double-time. They performed outdoors for a Russian audience who looked on as if spellbound. Ed’s show-travelogue moved briskly, from a Russian trained bear to an American plate spinner to Sullivan’s tour of the tombs of Lenin and Stalin, with a camera pan of the long line of visitors. Throughout the program, Ed’s commentary stressed global harmony: “People are people, regardless of the system that speaks for them,” he said.

At one point in the trip, the show’s production staff grew frustrated by the morass of bureaucratic roadblocks. Getting permission to film was slow, and events were rescheduled without advance notice. Ed, in a pique, fired off a telegram of protest to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The next morning he got a call at his hotel from
a mid-level functionary who assured him that his way was now cleared. (Ed sent three more telegrams to Khrushchev in the months ahead. Two were demands to be paid, including one complaining that the Russian ministry refused to release $30,000 for the show’s funding. Sullivan wrote to Khrushchev: “
Unless you intervene sir this can develop into a nasty scandal as Russian artists have never experienced this treatment in the United States.” The debt was paid. Having succeeded with this request, Ed cabled the Russian leader again in November, asking him to “
release the youngsters who participated in the 1956 [Hungarian] revolution.” (This appears to have received no response.)

For the Soviet show’s finale, Ed spoke a few sentences in Russian to greet the large Moscow audience, which roared its approval. For the final number he had opera star Rise Stevens sing “Getting to Know You” in Russian, while all thirty-eight American performers waved flags onstage, with half waving American flags and half waving Soviet flags. Of all the shocking sights that Sullivan presented in his twenty-three seasons, from black and white performers onstage together in the early 1950s to the edges of acid rock in the late 1960s, the sight of an American waving a Soviet flag in 1959 was likely the most unusual.

But his intent was more to reassure than to surprise. Unlike his show at the Brussels World Fair earlier that year, Ed didn’t take the opportunity at the end to condemn communism; the word wasn’t uttered once throughout the program. This show was about similarities, not differences. At the end he signed off: “Long live the United States and the Soviet Union, in peace.”

For Ed’s Soviet show he had been the grand impresario, straddling two continents while sampling the local vodka and promoting world peace. But as the 1959–60 season began, serious business beckoned: Nielsen ratings. The trip had been a cultural and commercial triumph, generating a big ratings spike and a blizzard of national coverage; Sullivan won a Peabody award for the program. Yet maintaining the show’s status as the top-rated talent showcase amid the public’s insatiable hunger for Westerns required more than one special evening. The new season’s first order of business was to attempt to reverse the prior season’s ratings loss to ABC’s
Maverick.

If further impetus was needed to force the showman to focus on the ratings battle, NBC was launching a new variety program opposite the Sullivan show.
The Steve Allen Show
, after losing to Sullivan since its debut, was being moved to Mondays. In its place NBC was putting up
Sunday Showcase
, a revolving-format variety show. Certain weeks would be hosted by Milton Berle, other weeks were to be dramas or musical comedies. Berle was an ingenious choice. Although he had lost his own show, in television’s earliest years his ratings had consistently topped Sullivan’s. NBC was resurrecting a performer with a proven ability to outdraw the stone-faced show host. It was time for Ed to look homeward.

The previous year had been the show’s most internationally diverse, with Ed producing broadcasts from Alaska to Cuba to Ireland to Portugal—France awarded him the rank of “Chevalier” in the French Legion of Honor for segments he produced there. In contrast, this year he would stay home. When push came to shove, he preferred winning to world travel. Indeed, the 1959–60 season was the least adventurous of any he had yet produced. It contained his signature mix of highbrow and low,
with the year’s brightest stars, but nothing in this season would be exotic or surprising. The showman would take no chances in his bid to get back on top. He had always known how to romance his audience, and this year he would do so by serving them comfort food.

He kept rock ’n’ roll to a minimum. That was easy to do: with Elvis in the Army and the British Invasion still years away, the new sound had gone all soft and gooey. Frankie Avalon, armed with a baby face and a number one hit, warbled “Look What One Kiss Can Do.” Bobby Darin—Sullivan staffers recalled him as remarkably arrogant—finger-snapped through “Oh, My Darling Clementine,” and Paul Anka crooned “Put Your Head on My Shoulders.” Theresa Brewer, a prim sex kitten of a vocalist who inspired cartons of fan mail at the Sullivan office before being forgotten, enjoyed numerous guest shots.

Many of the season’s musical bookings, however brilliant the talent, were essentially backward looking. The Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Harry James Orchestras swung through standards. Famed drummer Gene Krupa and actor Sal Mineo appeared with a clip from
The Gene Krupa Story
, starring Mineo. For Easter, gospel queen Mahalia Jackson rendered “Old Rugged Cross.” Louis Armstrong, a Sullivan personal friend who appeared eighteen times over the years, jazzed up “When the Saints Go Marching In.” (Sullivan later invited Armstrong to play golf with him at an elite country club that was whites-only, and the management tried to keep the jazzman off the course; after a tongue lashing by Sullivan they relented.)

That fall, aging nightclub comic Joe E. Lewis did a routine about Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy, who would vie for the presidency a year later. Borscht Belt star Sam Levenson lampooned concerns about the population explosion with jokes like “
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.” Jack Carter did his Sullivan imitation and Henny Youngman intoned, as always, “Take my wife … 
please
take my wife.” Also booked were mild-mannered comic Dick Van Dyke, a regular, and the flippant duo Rowan and Martin, who later starred in the late 1960s comedy show
Laugh-In.

Audiences also saw the choreography of Broadway-ballet legend Jerome Robbins; to accommodate the complexity of Robbins’ dance routine the show used seven cameras—far more than normal—and afforded Robbins two extra days of on-set rehearsal, luxurious by the standards of the Sullivan show. In the classical realm, Ed presented performances by opera stars Giulietta Simionato and Eileen Farrell and virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Cast members from two current Broadway hits,
Bye Bye Birdie
and
The Golden Fleecing
, played scenes from their shows, and Jimmy Cagney stopped by with a preview of his new movie
The Gallant Hours.
Ed interviewed director Billy Wilder and showed clips from Wilder’s
Some Like It Hot
and
The Apartment.
Charlton Heston appeared to plug
Ben-Hur
, and stayed for a dramatic Bible reading accompanied by full chorus. His stentorian Bible recitation was such a hit that Sullivan invited him back to repeat it later in the year. Not everything went according to plan, as when the horses onstage with vocalist Frankie Laine started to relieve themselves, prompting great merriment in the studio audience.

Ed, oddly, booked the Harlem Globetrotters to play a mock basketball game against the Ames Brothers, a four-man vocal quartet, with baseball star Duke Snyder
as referee. The All-American Football squad, fully dressed in helmets and pads, made its perennial appearance. One of the year’s biggest shows was an all-circus broadcast in March, featuring tightrope legend the Wallenda family; four of the aerialists rode bikes across a high wire over a parking lot off Eighth Avenue (Ed used his connections to get a permit from the city). The showman flew to Paris—he couldn’t stay home completely—to film circus acts in the hundred-year-old Cirque d’Hiver. Almost every week there were acrobats or trained animals, notably the trained chimp dressed as Ed who rode a unicycle.

When the season’s ratings were tallied,
The Ed Sullivan Show
was back near the top, at number twelve. Ed’s decision to downplay the international had worked. The public’s fascination with Westerns hadn’t ended—the top three shows were set in the Old West—yet Sullivan’s own sagebrush sparring partner,
Maverick
, had fallen to number twenty. And NBC’s mixed-format variety show,
Sunday Showcase
, had offered only token resistance. With the show’s cancellation after one year, NBC never again tried to compete with Sullivan in the variety format.

Ed received a disconcerting bit of news that season: longtime sponsor Lincoln Mercury, citing the show’s high costs, was bowing out. (Ford Motor Company was reeling after losing $250 million from its launch of the Edsel, a car almost no one bought.) While ratings for the Sullivan show meant sponsors were readily found, the new advertiser inflamed Ed’s ulcer. Filling Lincoln Mercury’s shoes was Colgate-Palmolive, which had sponsored former Sullivan archrival
Comedy Hour.
As one columnist described it, “
The Colgate-Palmolive Company has joined a show it couldn’t lick.”

For Colgate, of course, the shift in shows was simply a business decision. But not for Ed. That Colgate had bankrolled
Comedy Hour
back when the program endangered his survival made the company a mortal enemy in his eyes. For him his show had never been about business; it was personal, intensely so, a reflection of who he was, his tastes, and his attitudes. The showman threw a tantrum at the specter of having Colgate as a sponsor. He lodged a vociferous protest with the CBS management, making it clear he wanted nothing to do with Colgate-Palmolive. In response the network offered him a minor salve that was never disclosed; it may have been an increase in talent budget. Whatever it was, after meetings with network executives Ed pronounced himself reconciled to Colgate’s sponsorship.

Colgate or no, Ed’s ulcer took a turn for the worse during the season. He was in nearly constant pain (and in fact had been for years) and in January he missed two shows; Jackie Gleason had to substitute host. In June he finally conceded, checking himself in for surgery. While recovering, he put aside any thought of taking it easy. He turned his late-summer retreat to Italy into a working vacation, interviewing Sophia Loren and Clark Gable on the set of A
Started in Naples.