Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (63 page)

Ed’s lifestyle after his recent pay increase was not perceptibly different than when he had signed his first lucrative contract in the mid 1950s. And this itself had not been markedly higher than when he first moved into the Delmonico in 1944. Ed and Sylvia’s apartment was surprisingly modest, given his income. The staffers who visited often remarked that its décor made it hard to believe its inhabitants were affluent, with the exception of a handful of original oil paintings Sylvia had collected.

The furniture was a homey mixture of Italian and French, with antique satin drapes in the living room and sitting room, where Sylvia played games of mah-jongg with her friends when not volunteering for charity concerns, which she did frequently. Ed conducted much of the business of the show from the Delmonico, and his office was littered with show business memorabilia: a copy of
Time
with his face on the cover, photos from the show—Cole Porter, Humphrey Bogart, Ella Fitzgerald—and a picture frame that was a gift from Jerry Lewis. (Lewis had sent his own photo in the frame, which Ed removed and replaced with a photo of himself on the golf course.)

Working quietly amid the clutter, the hundreds of books, and the scattered newspapers, was almost always Ed’s man Friday, Carmine Santullo. A quiet, sweet, unassuming man, who virtually worshipped Ed, Carmine handled the incessant stream of phone calls, among countless other duties. After working with Sullivan for decades he could anticipate his response to any request. “
Carmine was Ed’s Nubian slave,” recalled Sullivan show secretary Sistie Moffit. He did most of the legwork for Ed’s
Daily News
column (still published twice weekly), and many said he all but wrote it, though Ed made a point of insisting he wrote it himself.

The Delmonico had almost no kitchen, but Ed and Sylvia didn’t need one. They continued to dine out almost every evening in fashionable Manhattan restaurants, most often dining by themselves, though fans and friends invariably stopped by to socialize. As many show staffers recalled, Sylvia loved going out and always dressed with great elegance. At dinner, her tastes were gourmet, unlike Ed, who had little sense of smell or taste and so was always complimenting the chef while putting small packets of artificial sugar into his wine. After dinner the couple might see a Broadway show or a nightclub revue, which Ed reviewed in his column (advertisements for
Broadway shows were now in their fourth decade of including one-line blurbs touting his opinion). They often stayed out for late evening drinks at a nightclub, perhaps Danny’s Hideaway or the Copacabana, where Ed still scouted for talent; on certain evenings they were out until 3
A.M.
Ed almost never watched television, except for
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson, which he was quite fond of.

The Sullivans were invited to any number of social galas, but usually declined. Ed didn’t like large groups, preferring to socialize with people he knew well. If they were out with a group and Ed didn’t know one person it made him uneasy. However, when he granted one of his many interviews, he invited reporters to the Delmonico and chatted volubly, jumping freely from topic to topic. Some interviewers felt they met a completely different man than the one seen on his Sunday show. He also overcame his natural reserve to attend the innumerable events at which he was given an award. In October 1962, for example, he was honored for promoting international goodwill by the People-to-People Sports Committee. City planner Robert Moses, commending Ed’s spirit to the six hundred guests, said, “
if we can continue that spirit into other international affairs we shall be well on the way to brotherhood and peace.”

Ed, out late and usually sleeping late, didn’t eat breakfast until around 11
A.M.
, ordering room service or having Carmine fix it. Either way, the meal rarely varied: a lamb chop, artificially sweetened pears, and a glass of iced tea. Because his breakfast was late morning, his meals were out of sync with the typical schedule; if he had a business lunch in the early afternoon and wasn’t hungry, he might drop a chicken leg in his pocket, taking it out after midnight for a snack. When he went to lunch and forgot his wallet, not an uncommon occurrence, the restaurant called the show and put it on his tab. To get around town he hailed his own taxi—he disdained limousines, or anything resembling an entourage. Once inside the cab he invariably quizzed the driver: what did you think of last week’s show?

In the 1961–62 season, NBC renewed its attempt to break Sullivan’s vise grip on Sunday night, launching
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
, hosted by the beloved Disney himself. Originally debuting on ABC in 1954, the Disney show was one of television’s most successful. When the Sullivan show was the fifth-ranked program in 1954–55,
Disney
had run sixth; when
The Ed Sullivan Show
ascended to number three the following year,
Disney
ranked fourth. After that the programs’ ratings began to diverge, with
Disney
’s falling further behind. Never before 1961, however, had
Disney
run opposite
The Ed Sullivan Show
, and never had it run on NBC, a far stronger network than ABC at the time. That fall, NBC broadcast
Disney
from 7:30 to 8:30
P.M.
, opposite the first half hour of
The Ed Sullivan Show.
It was followed by
Car 54, Where Are You?
, a situation comedy that was never a major ratings contender.

The Disney show achieved part of NBC’s goal. Although the program trailed Sullivan in the ratings, it pulled his ranking down to number twenty, from the previous season’s fourteen. The effect was temporary. In the 1962–63 season,
The Ed Sullivan Show
climbed back to number fourteen, while
Disney
’s ratings remained beneath the top twenty. It wasn’t that Sullivan changed his formula; he could do little in response to Disney except include kids’ fare as he always had. He merely updated
it as the culture updated, as he had since 1948. And he now had the help of his son-in-law Bob Precht, sharpening the show’s production values and nudging Ed toward the contemporary.

Central to the 1962–63 season’s success was Ed’s continuing alembic of the new pop sound with the unquestionably square. The square was as milquetoast as ever—Sammy Davis crooned “What Kind of Fool Am I?”—but the new was heading in unforeseen directions. A notable example was the booking of twenty-one-year-old folksinger Bob Dylan, which ran afoul of network censors that May. At dress rehearsal, Dylan sang his song “Talking John Birch Society Blues,” a skewering of the archconservative group’s anticommunist fervor (“Well I was looking everywhere for them gol-darned Reds / I got up in the morning and looked under my bed”). Precht had okayed the song beforehand and Ed had approved it in rehearsal. But the CBS Standards and Practices representative who watched all dress rehearsals—this was live TV, so performances were vetted in advance—vetoed the selection, giving no official explanation. Dylan, rather than choose an alternative, decided not to appear on the show. Both Bob and Ed said they wanted to have him back, but he never returned.

That Dylan was booked at all was a sign that Precht was taking a stronger role in the show’s choices. Ed knew how to follow the pop charts and had a knack for combining current chart climbers with older artists. But Dylan, though signed with Columbia Records, wasn’t on the charts at the time. Not until that summer, when Peter, Paul & Mary turned “Blowin’ in the Wind” into a hit, did Dylan start to become widely known. It was Precht’s youthful approach that was pushing the show toward performers like Dylan who were ahead of the cultural curve.

That fall Sullivan’s comedy bookings took a similarly contemporary turn, when he presented a series of politically pointed segments entitled “What’s Going on Here?” Written and performed by the stars of the popular British satirical revues “Beyond the Fringe” and “The Establishment,” the segments were presented as mock TV newscasts. Before they were aired, a reporter asked Bob Precht how the notoriously irreverent comics would fit with the Sullivan show. “
The actors will be free to prepare whatever they like, but Ed will retain editorial control,” Precht said. Ed, in fact, gave them far more latitude than he would have in years past.

In a typical Sullivan mix, the acerbic British comedy team was booked to perform with easygoing comics Bob and Ray, an American duo whose dry wit had been a staple of 1940s radio. But in this case the pairing did nothing to soften the British edge. The English satirists intoned fictional news reports like “
Alabama has moved ahead of Mississippi in the race race” and “Fidel Castro is accusing the CIA of launching hurricane Flora. It was last seen heading for Red China.” The furthest extreme of the troupe’s work was a mock news conference about Vietnam. As performed by actors John Bird and Jeremy Geidt, who portrayed President Kennedy and a reporter, the dialogue disintegrated into meaningless government-speak. Lending extra bite, the segment included a clip of Kennedy himself zigzagging through a near duplicate of the comics’ lines. The suggestion that a U.S. president was dissembling on a military effort was unheard of in a major venue at the time.

After the segment ended, Ed attempted to diffuse the effect by telling viewers that the White House had agreed to the use of the Kennedy clip. It was, apparently, all in good fun, but for Ed to watch this material in dress rehearsal and approve it for his national audience meant his approach was changing.

Certainly the politically charged nature of the “What’s Going On Here?” segments was the exception in the show’s early 1960s comedy bookings, though by now many of the show’s comics had evolved past the Henny Youngman—vaudeville school. Their routines tended to involve longer setups and more references to current events, rather than the one-liners and timeless domestic squabbles mined by 1950s comedians. One of Ed’s favorites in this period was Stiller and Meara, a husband-and-wife team whose act was developed in Greenwich Village clubs, and whose Jewish—Catholic combination mirrored Sullivan’s own marriage; Ed booked them a remarkable thirty-six times. He was also fond of Phyllis Diller, an early female stand-up comedienne known for her lighthearted edge, and Jackie Mason and Alan King, Borscht Belters who could reach Peoria. These comedians’ humor was transitional rather than forward looking, contemporary without being edgy.

This same “era between the eras” aesthetic informed the movie that Ed appeared in that year,
Bye Bye Birdie
, based on the Tony Award—winning 1961 Broadway musical. In the film’s convoluted plot, Elvis-like singer Conrad Birdie is about to be drafted, but first travels to a small Ohio town to kiss good-bye an adoring teenage fan, an event to be broadcast on
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Dick Van Dyke plays a songwriter who’s convinced that if Birdie sings his song on the Sullivan show, fame will automatically follow. Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell play teenagers in love, with Paul Lynde and Mary LaRoche as the disapproving parents.

Birdie
is all about how rock ’n’ roll and love-lust drives kids crazy, but in the movie’s world these forces are merely catalysts for a lighthearted romp. Protesters converge on Washington carrying signs protesting Birdie’s draft, a scene inspired by the real-life protesters now staging the first few placard-carrying parades in the nation’s capital. Yet in
Birdie
the protesters are just a bunch of wacky teenagers. The movie was a nod to the emerging youth culture, but its wink at the audience reassured viewers that it was nothing to take seriously.

Ed on film was much smoother than Ed on live television. With a director who had authority over him and with multiple takes, he suffered no fumbled lines and no garbled syntax. A box-office success, the movie paid homage to Ed’s now-iconic status—a guest shot on Sullivan, according to
Birdie
, was a guarantee of fame. Ed played himself as completely assured of the movie’s main tenet, that is, that Ed Sullivan was a leading promoter of a rock ’n’ roll—crazed youth culture. This referenced Ed’s real-life booking of Elvis and a long train of other nascent pop-rockers, from Buddy Holly to Sam Cooke. While many adults shook their heads in disbelief, his open invitation to these acts gave the new youth sound the Sullivan imprimatur of approval. And in case viewers were in doubt about the Sullivan show’s cultural primacy, the script worked the point hard. Bob Precht, played by the fiftyish Robert Paige, exclaimed, “You know, with a plug like this, this song will sell a million records. Man, what royalties!”