Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (76 page)

To Ed, this was no consolation. He had been canceled and the specials didn’t change that. There was discussion about how to end the show; a big good-bye broadcast was suggested, but Ed didn’t like the idea. He couldn’t face going on to say farewell; it was like announcing he had lost his show. He decided to play reruns for the remainder of the season, so the last new show aired on March 28. The reruns ran until the official cancellation date of June 6, 1971, after which the network was deluged with letters protesting the decision.

Ironically, one of the many letters Ed received was from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was indirectly involved with
The FBI
, the very show that had drawn viewers away from the Sullivan show. The two men had corresponded over the years, and now the Bureau director offered his condolences. “
I was indeed sorry to learn that your show will no longer be seen on television,” Hoover wrote. “Your presentations have always been most interesting and entertaining. Your outstanding contributions over the years will be long remembered.… Sincerely, Edgar.”

The show was over. For many of the staff, working on it had come to seem like working for a well-established family business. Television shows might have runs of three to five years, with staff on the lookout for a new job the entire time; unemployment loomed just one bad Nielsen report away. In contrast, the Sullivan show had appeared virtually permanent. The staff felt as if they had familial ties with one another (and some three decades after cancellation many continued to stay in touch). After every Sunday’s broadcast, when Ed and Sylvia went to Danny’s Hideaway, the production crew gathered at the China Song restaurant next to the theater to compare notes, laugh, and kibitz long into the night.

Most of the staff recalled working on the show as one of the high points of their life. The job was consuming; some worked six days a week, usually all day long on Saturday and Sunday. But the visceral excitement of a live broadcast and the glittering parade of stars more than made up for it. Staff member Susan Abramson remembered
Irving Berlin coming into the office and noticing a painting of a bright blue sky above her desk. Berlin, whose song “Blue Skies” had been a huge hit, looked at the painting with a twinkle in his eye and said to her: “
You know, I could write a song about that.” On another occasion, Duke Ellington told her he was going to compose a tune about her blue eyes. Sistie Moffit, an administrative assistant, recalled that Michael Jackson, then a boy star of Motown, tended to wander off before rehearsal. Assigned the task of watching him, she tied a short rope between her waist and his; many years later she still chuckled about babysitting the singer. “
I dragged him around with me all day.… Michael was such a cute little guy.”

In the immediate aftermath of cancellation, the staff’s disappointment was tempered by knowledge that it had been coming. When the final call came, there was a certain shrug of the shoulders. No one was surprised. (And for several of the crew the show launched them to further success in television.) Still, set designer Bill Bohnert had a lump in his throat as he cleared out his warehouse of props, to be picked up by garbage trucks.

Ed, while not surprised, was absolutely heartbroken. Soon afterward he met his friend, singer Jerry Vale, at Toots Shor’s restaurant. Tears were in his eyes, Vale remembered. “
How about that? I’ve been canceled,” Ed said. “After all these years, they canceled me. I wanted to do twenty-five seasons, but they wouldn’t let me do it.” Vale tried to console his friend, but Ed was inconsolable. That the showman had achieved everything he set out to do, walking into millions of living rooms every Sunday for decades, and having the Ed Sullivan Theater named in his honor, didn’t matter. The show had been his identity, and now he had nothing else to look forward to.

That summer a reporter from
Show
magazine interviewed him at his apartment in the Delmonico. As they sat in Ed’s memento-strewn office, the showman seemed “
in a period of deep reminiscence,” the reporter wrote. “His manner appeared nostalgic, full of pauses and prolonged glances, and with a wee touch of sadness.”

“I feel empty now that the show’s over. Very empty,” Ed said. “It was the excitement, the fun of it, that I miss … meeting celebrities, going out after the show with stars [which in fact Ed rarely did]. It was the thrill of going out onstage in front of a live audience every Sunday at 8
P.M.
All of a sudden, that was over and there was nothing.

“Even after CBS’s decision, I went on thinking, in myself, that I was still doing the show. You see I had put a big part of my life into it, and I don’t think it was just conceit. No, it was a terrific letdown, the news … like getting a slap in your face from your teacher. I brood about it, do a lot of walking. If I’m out and a cab driver stops me and says, ‘Hey Ed, what have you got on Sunday night,’ what can I do but just laugh?

“The people were just getting tired of that old routine. In the course of twenty-three years, I’ve shown everything that vaudeville had ever produced. I think they just felt ‘For Christ’s sake, not again!’ At any rate, the ratings collapsed.”

He expressed regret that he didn’t do more to shake up the show’s format as the ratings slid, like producing more specials. “Like a horse’s ass I didn’t say to myself ‘What the hell am I worrying about? This is what we should do! Specials!’ I just got into the habit of the old routine, I guess.”

The reporter asked Sullivan how his show had lasted so long. “I know a hell of a lot about show business and I know a hell of a lot about performers. On our show my opening act was just like my newspaper leads—the grabber that held people’s interest.
This act would be a good one, and then we’d go to commercials. You grab them instantly. It was just like the makeup of a newspaper—when I was on the
Mail
I used to do the makeup. You know, by putting in your one-column boxes, cuts in here and there, you could make the page interesting to look at. My shows were just like a newspaper—it had sports, drama, movies, celebrities.”

His thoughts often turned to the past. “I think more about the old days than I did before. My wife, Sylvia, tells me I think too much about it. It was an exciting past, especially those early newspaper days when I was running around and meeting all kinds of new people.”

Did Ed mind the ratings game, which so many said turned television into a sea of mediocrity? No, he said, the public will make its tastes known. “It always has and it always will. The ratings game is legitimate. Saying that TV shouldn’t cater to public taste is like saying let’s give up the presidential election because public taste has picked so-and-so.”

Would he retire? “Every time I think of leaving New York and going off to the country … well, I just couldn’t do it.” His plans at this point were unclear. He noted that Sylvia, after many years of marriage, knew to say nothing to him in the days right after cancellation. But after a week, she asked, “Ed, what are we going to do on Sundays now?”

In fact, Ed hadn’t given up the idea of returning to his weekly show. He told the
Show
reporter that if ratings for his fall specials were high enough, the network might be convinced to reinstate the weekly program. He looked over at the reporter with a smile described as sly but charming, and said: “Maybe I can prove to CBS that they’re wrong.” It was classic Ed. Just as after his many canceled radio programs, once again, losing a show simply meant it was time to start planning to get back on the air.

But he wasn’t the hustling thirty-five-year-old newspaperman he had been. Ed’s daily life now bumped along without much sound and fury. As always, he had his habitual 11
A.M.
breakfast of a lamp chop and a glass of iced tea with artificial sweetener. He went out for a shave, same place, same time. He attended a benefit for the Dance Collection at the New York Public Library. He accepted the Brotherhood Award from Temple Ohabei Shalom, one of dozens of awards from Jewish groups he received over the decades. In August he and Sylvia took their perennial sojourn to Cannes, France, along with a few other couples. He had never stopped penning his
Daily News
column, though in reality it shad long been shepherded by his faithful assistant, Carmine Santullo. With his show gone, Ed turned back to
Little Old New York
and began putting more energy into his twice-weekly column.

In September, he appeared on NBC’s
The Flip Wilson Show.
Debuting in 1970, Wilson’s program was the first successful network variety show hosted by a black performer; in its first two seasons it zoomed to television’s number two ranking. Every week, Wilson portrayed comic characters who skewered contemporary life, like Reverend LeRoy, pastor of the Church of What’s Happenin’ Now, and Geraldine, the sassy, liberated black girl who cried, “The devil made me do it!” He was one of the next-generation comics whom
The Ed Sullivan Show
helped launch; Ed had booked him twelve times.

On the Wilson show, Sullivan performed two skits with Wilson and Lucille Ball. In the first, Wilson played Charlie Brown to Ed’s Snoopy (dressed as a WWI fighter ace) and Ball’s Lucy, as the trio philosophized about life. In the second, Ed played an aging hipster who finds himself in the middle of a catfight between Wilson, cross-dressed as Geraldine in a hot pink miniskirt, and a modishly attired Lucille Ball. This latter skit seemed to reflect Ed’s changed circumstances. The last time he had played a comedy sketch with Lucille Ball was in 1954, and it revolved around Lucy and Ricky’s breathless excitement at getting on Ed’s show. Now, dressed in garish purple pants and a hippie-style fringe jacket, he was a player who was past his prime.

Since Sullivan was such a universally known celebrity, he was in demand by advertisers for television commercials. Although he certainly didn’t need the money, he appeared in TV ads for an antacid—an unlikely role, given how his ulcer plagued him and how little antacid had helped. “
I got the feeling he was trying to hold on, to hang onto fame,” recalled his grandson Rob Precht, then in his late teens, who often spent time with his grandfather. “I remember thinking at the time that it was pathetic—I was sad to see him do it.”

An oddity about Ed’s life in this period was that cultural commentators used references to his famously stiff persona in articles about current president Richard Nixon. Typical of the commentary was an Op-Ed piece in
The New York Times
by playwright Arthur Miller: “
For my own taste, Nixon is a god-awful actor; for one thing, his gestures are always at odds with what he’s saying.… It’s a lot like Ed Sullivan, a performer who was so at odds with his own arms that he finally took to clasping his chest.” As remote as these two men were from one another, they did have similarities. Both first became major public figures in the 1950s, and both were largely incapable of projecting warmth or intimacy in their public selves. And, coincidentally, both had their careers canceled at about the same time. Yet the showman, unlike the politician, inspired a reservoir of affection in his audience, despite his wooden stage presence. At no time was this more evident than in the aftermath of the cancellation.

As countless newspaper and magazine homages poured forth in the months after the show’s end, he was bathed in the glow of a newly beloved status. Everything about him that had been lampooned, often with great seriousness—his jerky gestures, the stilted vocal style—was now described endearingly.
Los Angeles Times
TV critic Cecil Smith called Ed’s performance of Snoopy on
The Flip Wilson Show
“
a classic of comedy by anyone’s standards.” The United Press International’s Dick West bemoaned the loss of the show, calling Sullivan “
a powerful stabilizing influence amid the vicissitudes of life. An anchor, so to speak, in a transmutable sea.” Bill Barrett in
The Cleveland Press
, pondering the cancellation, asked, “
What goes next? The Bill of Rights? The gold standard?” It was as if TV columnists’ perception of his stiffness had magically reversed itself and they suddenly decided he was a loveable character. Someone that wooden must be genuine, the consensus seemed to be. Ed had somehow bonded with the audience—now even winning the critics—despite only rarely breaking his distant reserve.