Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (60 page)

On its face, the 1959–60 season had been such a good one that Sullivan might have decided to stay the course. It had put the showman back near the top in his twelfth year on the air. Nonetheless, Ed felt it was time to make a critical staff change. Or perhaps producer Marlo Lewis left of his own accord, as he claimed, explaining that he needed time off and planned to write a book. If Lewis did leave on his own, there’s not a single reference to Ed attempting to convince him to stay. Whatever the case,
Marlo’s contract expired in the fall of 1960 and was not renewed. Their parting was by all accounts amicable, though it seemed clear Ed was ready for Marlo to go.

Ed himself, of course, had always been the show’s producer, conceiving of its tone and pacing, choosing the balance of acts, exerting control over the material, forging the show to conform to his vision in rehearsal. Although he and Marlo were billed as coproducers, Ed very much ran the show. But Marlo oversaw the logistics, and with such a mélange of performers coming and going every week—from trained chimps to opera divas—that task was hardly secondary.

The decision that Ed made in filling this principal role was to be a central determinant in the show’s success in the decade ahead, although the extent to which this was true wasn’t clear at the time. The new producer was Bob Precht, Ed’s son-in-law. Having worked as a production assistant on the show since the mid 1950s, he had demonstrated an eye for detail and a set of organizational skills that far surpassed Marlo’s. Bob had produced many of the remote broadcasts in recent years, working closely with Ed on what were some of his father-in-law’s favorite projects. Notably, Precht’s supervision of the Soviet show, handling a crew of eighty during a three-week trip in adverse circumstances, proved him to be a meticulous and tireless administrator.

Whether Bob was ready to step into such a vital job was questioned by some. “
Bob had a
lot
to learn,” recalled Sistie Moffit, an administrative assistant. “And he was coming in with people who had a lot of background and experience. I felt sorry for Bob—we all did.” Certain Sullivan staffers whispered about ill-advised nepotism; some of these murmurs were fueled by fear that Bob would clean house of Marlo loyalists. But Ed’s decision to hire Bob wasn’t nepotism, or at least not purely so. That Precht was his son-in-law had gotten him in the door, but Ed cared too deeply about his show to promote someone to an all-important role merely because he was a relative.

It didn’t hurt that Bob was younger. In the fall of 1960 Ed turned fifty-nine; Marlo was forty-five; Bob was twenty-nine. When Ed began producing the show in 1948 he had been immersed in the Zeitgeist; he not only wrote about all the day’s leading performers in his column, he knew them all personally. But with the passing years he had lost some of that. He had initially missed Elvis, calling him too expensive and unfit for family viewing; only after realizing his mistake did he parlay the rock ’n’ roller to a massive ratings win. It was the kind of trend he wouldn’t have been late to in 1948. And Marlo hadn’t been any more prescient about the Elvis tidal wave. So having a coproducer with a fresh outlook seemed like a good bet—especially when the youthful Jack Kennedy won the presidency that fall, making it feel like the culture had been renewed. Unmistakably, change was in the air.

Ed and Bob formed a partnership far different than that of Ed and Marlo. Or, more accurately, over time they did. Sullivan had no intention of giving up even a small bit of his absolute authority when he promoted his son-in-law. He hired Bob as a sharper and better-organized version of Marlo. But Precht had different ideas. Ed’s daughter Betty had married a man not dissimilar to her father. He would not be the minor tyrant that Ed could be, and he was not prone to Ed’s competitive rages. Yet he could be headstrong, and he was not content with the essentially secondary role that Marlo had played. “
I was aggressive,” Precht said. “If I was to do that job, I wanted to really do the job, I didn’t want to just take orders and put the cameras out.”

That was clear as
The Ed Sullivan Show
began the 1960–61 season, Precht’s first as producer. The show looked and moved differently. It was as if with the turning of a decade it was now a new show, or at least looked like one. During the 1950s the stage sets often appeared token, sometimes assembled hurriedly after Ed booked a news-making act the day before. Bob changed that. He hired Bill Bohnert, a young set designer with an MFA from Yale and an architecture degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bohnert’s fondness for clean, geometric designs gave the show a mod look in keeping with the 1960s; alternately, he created big, showy sets for musical numbers, and realistically detailed backdrops for Broadway and opera productions.

Additionally, the show’s pacing, previously Ed’s exclusive province, was quickened. To help this along, Precht fired Johnny Wray, the show’s director throughout the 1950s, and replaced him with Tim Kiley, who at age thirty-four was already an established CBS staff director. The effect was dramatic: intros and outros were smoother, and the entire program seemed to flow better. Ed himself would still walk out of the camera’s view unexpectedly, leaving viewers looking at the stage curtain, but most of the other camera angles were better coordinated. In a creative touch, the show sometimes opened with a shot of the evening’s performers walking onstage in an eclectic parade, accompanied by contemporary music.

Marlo had sometimes conducted Saturday rehearsals before the Sunday dress rehearsals, especially for elaborate segments. Under Bob’s direction these Saturday rehearsals became part of the show’s weekly life cycle. His improvements did not come without friction. Some of the longtime staffers resented Precht’s changes and the new producer found himself in full-bore arguments. Ed himself, for a period, became more actively involved in the show’s technical minutiae, much to Bob’s chagrin. But with time the new producer carved out his own turf.

Bob, though willing to be unpopular with the staff when necessary, always used a soft touch with his father-in-law—necessarily, because Ed brooked no rebellion among staffers, related or not. Nonetheless, it’s clear from viewing the shows in the early 1960s that Bob diplomatically devised a method to—somewhat—sharpen Ed’s stage presence. The showman’s introductions could be surprisingly ill-focused; he seemed to know what he wanted to say but could stumble through a handful of sentences getting it out. His comments now tended to be shorter and more to the point, though the old syntax-garbled Ed certainly wasn’t gone. (The fact that he wasn’t suave still didn’t matter to sponsors, who sought to make use of his credibility with viewers. Kodak, as had Lincoln Mercury, had Ed perform the voiceover for dozens of their ads, and he often did an extensive live lead-in before cutting to commercial.)

Bob hoped to make still another change, one that went to the very core of the show: he wanted to have a say in bookings. This, of course, was heresy to Ed. The showman’s sense of talent and his intuitive grasp of his audience had always been the heart of
The Ed Sullivan Show.
He had given Marlo the rundown over the phone every week. Sure, Ed accepted tips and suggestions from almost anyone, from cab drivers to family members to those he spoke to during his nightclub prowling. He followed the pop charts, fielded calls from talent agents and show business cronies, read the newspapers, and traveled constantly. But all these sources were funneled down to one producer. It was set in stone: all the artistic decisions of
The Ed Sullivan Show
were made by its namesake.

Yet Bob felt strongly about having input on bookings. He thought about it for weeks before approaching Ed and telling him he wanted to be a producer in the fullest sense of the title. Furthermore, Precht felt the bookings needed some refreshing; using comedian Jack Carter six times in a season was overkill in Bob’s view, however good the comic’s Sullivan imitation. (Carter, who hosted the variety show
Cavalcade of Stars
in 1949, had for years regularly met Ed for drinks at Danny’s Hideaway.) Bob, with his more youthful and liberal worldview, hoped to renew the Sullivan formula.

It’s a measure of the respect Ed had for Bob that they came to a reconciliation on this issue. Perhaps the fact that Bob was his son-in-law helped tip the balance; the two of them spent holidays together, and went out for dinner together with their wives after the show every week. Ed, who had always been too driven to develop close friendships, had something of a close friend in Bob. At any rate, it was agreed: Bob and Ed would consult about the bookings. Which is to say, Ed retained final veto power. “
Ed was the boss,” remembered pop singer Connie Francis, who saw the working relationship between the two men during her twenty-six Sullivan show appearances. “I think Bob Precht had an ‘ES’ carved out on his ulcers.”

If the show’s bookings took no major turn in the 1960–61 season—instead continuing as the perfect mirror of current tastes as they always had—one guest reflected the change of decade more than most. Comedian and political satirist Mort Sahl’s pointed barbs were a major departure from many comics of the era, who still relied on mother-in-law jokes and vaudeville gags. Sahl had offended enough people to receive violent threats for lampooning the 1950s-era House Un-American Activities Committee, the spearhead of McCarthyism and an entity that Ed wholeheartedly supported. Sahl’s left-leaning version of Will Rogers—style populism made him a favorite on the more cerebral
Steve Allen Show
, but Ed had never booked him in the 1950s. His appearance on the Sullivan show, the imprimatur of mainstream acceptance, signaled a change in popular tastes.

In one of his Sullivan show performances, Sahl referred to his army stint during the Korean War, saying that there were “no supplies, no ammunition, no gasoline— but you could buy them.” As his morale fell, “One day I said, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing here.’ An officer heard me. He was going to send me back.” That was considered a terrible punishment, Sahl said, “Although oddly, two officers fought over the right to escort me back.” As punishment, the army sent him to a military psychiatric hospital, where they gave him a little ID tag with his photo, which, he quipped, “I could use if I ever wanted to cash a check at a market.”

The acerbic comic appeared five times on the Sullivan show, three times that season. Ed took the show on the road that fall, visiting cities across the United States. During a San Francisco broadcast, Sahl skewered presidential candidates Kennedy and Nixon; on the same bill, opera star Dorothy Kirsten sang an aria from
Madame Butterfly
in the city’s Japanese Tea Garden and the Dave Brubeck Quartet vamped their jazz classic “Take Five,” which made a recent surprise showing on the pop charts. In December pioneering soul singer Jackie Wilson headlined, flashing his choreographed dance moves and dropping to one knee to croon “To Be Loved”; right after Wilson, Sahl performed, sending up American foreign policy and New York
City cops. In June the comic shared the bill with The Limeliters, a folk music group whose ironic wit had been incubated at San Francisco’s progressive nightclub The Hungry i, as had Sahl’s. (Along the same line, Sullivan presented Odetta, a young black female folksinger who would soon record the protest song “No More Auction Block for Me.” Ed booked her for that season’s Christmas show to sing “Shout for Joy” and “Poor Little Jesus.”)

Most of this season’s comics were far from Sahl’s territory, though even Jack Carter was now telling jokes about beatniks. In November, Ed booked a show headlined by comic Jerry Lewis, vaudevillian Sophie Tucker, and singer Connie Francis, who had just released a Jewish-themed album and planned to sing a cut from it, “My Yiddishe Mama.” However, the singer recalled, “
Sophie had a fit, because that was ‘her song’ and she insisted I not do it.” Tucker enlisted Jerry Lewis in her complaint, and Lewis agreed: Connie Francis should not be allowed to sing “My Yiddishe Mama”—it was Sophie Tucker’s song. The squabble quickly turned into a minor tempest. “Jerry and Sophie were going to walk off the show, and they were really serious about it,” Francis remembered. The singer offered Ed a compromise, telling him she had eleven other songs she could do. But Ed was adamant, siding with Francis: “She’ll do whatever she wants.” Jerry Lewis and Sophie Tucker gave in, performing as planned, with Lewis doing a routine in which he attempted to teach Ed how to be charismatic, playing the showman’s wooden persona for comic hi jinks.