Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (73 page)

Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek recalled the unusual way he found out the band was about to play the Sullivan show. All through the Summer of Love, as the summer of 1967 was known, Manzarek made of point of turning the channel to CBS on Sunday night. “
You watched
The Ed Sullivan Show
, if you could, because there was always going to be a rock act on, and there were very few ways to see rock ’n’ roll on television.” As he watched on September 10, he gasped with amazement as he heard Sullivan announce that The Doors would be on—the following week. The band’s manager had neglected to tell them. “We were very excited—it was fabulous,” Manzarek said.

The band showed up at rehearsal, recalled Sullivan staffer Jim Russek, with “
a smugness in their attitude, kind of ‘We’re going to do what we’re going to do.’ ” But the group ran through two numbers, their current hit and “People Are Strange,” without incident. After dress rehearsal Ed briefly visited the band’s dressing room. As he walked in, the band members were goofing around, laughing at guitarist Robbie Krieger’s imitation of the Three Stooges. Ed, taking in the scene, commented, “Hello boys, you know, you’re very good—but you’d look a lot better if you’d smile more.” As soon as he left, the band began imitating his famous stiffness, to general hilarity. Ed Sullivan, telling them to smile more?

A few minutes later, Bob Precht walked in to deliver a message from the CBS Standards and Practices department. “Boys, we’ve got a problem,” he said, explaining that the lyrics to the song “Light My Fire” needed to be changed. The phrase “Girl we couldn’t get much higher” had caught the attention of censors. “You can’t say the word ‘higher’ on national television,” Precht said, because it would be perceived as a drug reference.

The band members were shocked: change the lyric? “To what?” Morrison spat out, quickly growing angry. “I don’t know, you’re the poet,” Precht replied, throwing out a few possibilities. Morrison, who wrote many of the band’s lyrics—including some to this song—was furious at the idea. “Jim had clenched his fist and was about to move on the guy,” Manzarek recalled. But the keyboard player stepped in to assure Precht: “Okay, don’t worry, we’ll come up with something.”

As soon as Precht left the room, Morrison turned to Manzarek: “Ray, what are you talking about?” The other band members all expressed dismay at the thought of changing the lyric. “Wait a minute,” Manzarek said. “This is national television, this is our shot. Tell them anything you have to tell them—then you do what you
want. This is live TV.” The musicians all high-fived one another in anticipation of their moment of anarchy.

During the live broadcast, Morrison, clad in his signature leather pants, Byronic white shirt, and black leather jacket—and appearing in a trancelike state, likely enhanced by his preshow marijuana—sang the original lyric. He performed with an orgiastic fury, ending the song with a piercing, primal scream, followed by an abstracted downward stare. The Sullivan technical crew, over years of dealing with rock ’n’ rollers, had developed a technique of boosting the guitar volume enough to bury the singer’s voice as a censored lyric approached; this had been used with Mick Jagger, among others. But The Doors had brought their own engineer to control the sound board so their performance was uncensored. After their set, Ed clapped with barely veiled disgust, his body language projecting awesome distaste. Just a couple of years ago he would have stormed at them backstage and cursed a sailor’s streak. But those days were behind him. The task of bawling them out was left to Bob Precht.

As Manzarek recalled, “We came back to our dressing room afterward, opened a can of beer, and toasted each other: ‘Yeah! that was good!’ ” In came Precht: “You said it!—You said you weren’t going to say it!” Manzarek tried to backpedal: “You have to understand, sir, we’re just boys, and we’ve done the song this way so many times, and there we were, on national television, and we just got so nervous—it just came out.”

“He knew I was jiving him,” Manzarek remembered. “He said, ‘Mr. Sullivan liked you boys. He wanted you on for six more shows. You know what that would have done for your career? But you know what? You’ll
never
work
The Ed Sullivan Show
again!’ ”

Morrison looked at him, dismissively, and retorted, “Hey man, so what? We just
did The Ed Sullivan Show
.”

Whatever headaches they caused, bookings of rock bands proceeded apace, though many of the acts that season had a softer sound. In late September, Ed interviewed The Mamas and the Papas, who performed in a set decorated in bright paisley splendor, asking them about breakup rumors and their upcoming European tour. In October, Nancy Sinatra, armed with a pink miniskirt and white go-go boots, growled “These Boots Are Made for Walking”; later in the program, Ed introduced the Ladies Auxiliary of the Polish Legion, in the audience. In November, The Turtles sang “Happy Together” on the same program that Joan Rivers, now in late-term pregnancy, did a stand-up routine about her condition (though Ed forbade her to use the word “pregnant”). Later in the month the Beatles, on film, performed “Hello, Goodbye,” sharing the bill with middle-of-the-road pop star Connie Francis, who sang “Going Out of My Head.” In early December, Ray Charles and Billy Preston rollicked on the rhythm and blues “Double-O-Soul,” after which Japanese rock band The Blue Comets (inspired by the Beatles) raced through “Blue Chateau.” On that same show, Ed introduced Ail-American Football team members O.J. Simpson and Larry Czonka.

The December 10 broadcast featured a film clip of the ceremony in which CBS renamed Studio 50, the Sullivan show’s theater, as the Ed Sullivan Theater. In Ed’s eyes this was the ultimate honor, one that touched him profoundly. Ratings could come and go, programs could be canceled, but now he was enshrined in the heart of
Manhattan’s theater district, in the neighborhood that he had worked in his entire adult life. (The Ed Sullivan Theater, at Broadway and 53rd Street, later became home to the
Late Show with David Letterman
.) Hosting the well-attended event was New York mayor John Lindsay. Ed’s friend Peter Prichard, the talent agent, was with him that evening, and he recalled the showman walking among the crowd: “The moment he walked out onto Broadway to walk to the rostrum, Ed knew everybody, every street guy in New York. He was wandering over to say ‘Hi, how are you, nice to see you,’ and we were trying to get him onstage because time was running short.”

There was no small irony to the evening. Ed had been all but booed off the air in the show’s early years because of his maladroit fumbling as an emcee, while his talents in his more significant role—producer—were little understood. It had been his skill as a producer, not his wooden stage persona, that kept the show highly rated for two decades. Yet as he received this most august honor as a showman, he was in fact little more than the program’s emcee. Bob Precht was now the producer. Ed’s son-in-law, of course, was using Sullivan’s formula. But Ed himself was doing little but okaying the choices Bob made in fulfilling that formula. Sullivan certainly retained final veto power; throughout the show’s run, “
There was never a doubt that whatever it was he wanted, he got,” Precht recalled. But with Ed’s slipping mental acuity he was letting go of the reins. And, as the show’s pace moved ever faster, his onstage time, never long in the first place, was cut to a bare minimum. Oddly, Ed was becoming a figurehead on his own show.

As the calendar flipped to 1968, the show’s balancing act between young and old continued, although social commentators, referring to something called the Generation Gap, suggested this was getting harder. According to the new theory, the differences between parents and teenagers had grown so great as to be irreconcilable. But
The Ed Sullivan Show
had always gathered the whole family, and the program remained firmly in denial of the Generation Gap.

In January, Duke Ellington shared the bill with Vanilla Fudge, who played their current hit “You Keep Me Hanging On.” In February, Motown crew Gladys Knight & The Pips performed on the same broadcast as singer Dinah Shore, who had entertained the troops during World War II. In March, new pop sensation the Bee Gees harmonized on “Words” right before Lucille Ball talked with Ed about her newest film,
Yours, Mine, and Ours.
In April, Ella Fitzgerald sang a swing version of the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” shortly before George Carlin did a vaguely subversive routine about a politician on a fictional “Meet the Candidate” program.

The Sullivan show expanded to ninety minutes for one night in April for an eightieth birthday tribute to Irving Berlin, whom Ed had interviewed on radio in 1943. Bob Hope contributed a stand-up routine (“I always thought the Ed Sullivan Theater would be a wax museum,” he cracked), Bing Crosby crooned, and President Johnson sent a taped birthday message. As if to prove that even Irving Berlin could be modernized, Diana Ross and the Supremes accompanied Ethel Merman in a Berlin medley, which veered briefly into the Motown hit “Heat Wave.”

For all the show’s intergenerational offerings, denying the Generation Gap and the other conflagrations now burning right outside the Ed Sullivan Theater was getting harder. Television was evolving, dragged reluctantly into the current day by a changing world. In January 1968, NBC launched
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
, a fresh
take on the comedy-variety format. Network executives didn’t know if viewers were ready for the program’s fast pace and non sequiturs, but the show quickly began climbing toward number one. Over on
Dragnet ’67
, detective Joe Friday chased a demented LSD pusher, who died of an overdose at the episode’s end. And a new rule was instituted for
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
, which ran on CBS right after
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Now a tape had to be sent to affiliate stations before broadcast, due to complaints about the show’s controversial nature—particularly how the comics handled the antiwar struggle at that summer’s Democratic convention in Chicago.

Ed attempts to interrupt Sylvia’s game of Solitaire, February 1967. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Undeniable semaphores signaling these changes appeared on the Sullivan stage by the end of the 1967–68 season. Certainly The Doors’ primal scream and the Rolling Stones’ mockery of the show’s sexual prudery signaled changing times, but still more direct signs were seen as well. In November, Ed presented Victor Lundberg, a surprise spoken-word one hit wonder. He performed his “Open Letter to My Teenage Son,” a bitter condemnation of the antiwar movement (“If you burn your draft card, you’re no son of mine”). In May, Ed gave an audience bow to a newly visible group, a coterie of wounded Vietnam veterans. Comedian Jack Carter, who once included one-liners about beatniks, now told jokes about hippies. Comedy duo Wayne and Schuster did a routine about TV violence. Charlton Heston had given dramatic Bible readings in the 1950s, but now he promoted his new film
Planet of
the Apes
, whose last scene suggested mankind would destroy itself.

And in the greatest signifier of change, the show’s twentieth-anniversary program was rescheduled; presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated, dying on June 6 (just two months after Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s assassination), so the June anniversary was curtailed. Planned as a two-parter, Ed turned the second week into a memorial tribute to Kennedy. Dionne Warwick sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Duke Ellington performed “David Danced Before the Lord,” and actor Richard Harris reprised a scene from
Camelot.

The Sullivan show, which had always been a perfect mirror of American culture—combining corn pone and high art, the Polish Ladies Auxiliary, Borscht Belters, sports heroes, rock ’n’ roll, and Irving Berlin into an hour of diversion and entertainment—was now forced to reflect some unpleasant images.

Still, amid the roiling turmoil,
The Ed Sullivan Show
appeared to be some sort of eternal verity. As the year’s Nielsens were tallied, they revealed that the Sullivan show had held its ground. The live broadcast continued to own its time slot, and of the eighty-some shows in prime time, it was ranked thirteenth, with a weekly audience of around thirty million viewers. The Sullivan show, it seemed, might just last forever.