Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (77 page)

Indeed, the response to his first special seemed to verify that absence made the heart grow fonder. Aired in October 1971 (four months after the last regular show),
The Sullivan Years: A Kaleidoscope
featured Ed presenting a library of highlights from the show back to the 1950s. The public flocked to it; the program dominated
its Sunday night time slot and scored a jaw-dropping Nielsen rating. The one-night special, however, was what the show itself had not been.
The Ed Sullivan Show
, to the detriment of its ratings at the end, had never been backward looking. Or rather, it had been backward looking, fully contemporary, and forward-looking, simultaneously. The
Kaleidoscope
special presented Sullivan’s signature compendium of rock bands, saloon crooners, comics, athletes, and trained animals. But its retrospective approach put it all into soft focus, carefully exorcising the socially charged elements the show itself had presented of late.

Ed became a kind of celebrity on call. In January he flew to Las Vegas to host CBS’s
Entertainers of the Year Awards
, where he was roundly mock-insulted by comic Don Rickles: “
I spoke to the wax museum. They’re accepting you Friday.” This broadcast’s ratings ran just behind those of television’s current number one show,
All in the Family.
A month later he was an award presenter at the Grammy Awards, broadcast on ABC. The Friars Club, a show business fraternal society, elected him as their Abbot, succeeding in a line that went back to George M. Cohan. And that September he appeared on ABC’s
25 Years of Television
, receiving a special achievement award along with Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, and Milton Berle.

He also attended a number of funerals, including that of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, whom he had long lauded for breaking the sport’s color line. In February 1972, Walter Winchell died. (Critic John Crosby eulogized Winchell by observing, “
He was truly a fourteen-carat son-of-bitch.”) After Winchell’s death, Ed, having accepted Walter’s invitation to sit on the board of the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, was elected its president. It was fitting: Runyon had been the archetypical chronicler of 1930s New York café society, and now Ed, one of the era’s few survivors, was custodian of his namesake fund.

The Ed Sullivan Show
remained on peoples’ minds. A year after cancellation, a man in Nebraska named Werner Hensley wrote a letter to
The New York Times
mourning the program’s end, chiefly because he had been training a frog for eleven years in anticipation of a guest shot. “
We would have made it if the cheek puffing hadn’t taken an extra year of work,” Hensley claimed.

The network hadn’t forgotten it either; CBS commissioned Sullivan to produce an all-comedy special culled from previous shows. Broadcast in February 1973,
Ed Sullivan Presents the TV Comedy Years
ran opposite
Marcus Welby, MD
, a Tuesday night hit aimed at older viewers. The
Comedy Years
special, even more than the previous
Kaleidoscope
, was in contrast to what Ed had always produced. Instead of his all-inclusive approach,
Comedy Years
was an example of what was later called narrowcasting, the practice of focusing on a niche audience. The special gave short shrift to younger stand-ups like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, instead presenting comics from the show’s earliest days, including Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, Red Buttons, and Jimmy Durante. By focusing on a single audience, older viewers, the program handily won its time slot and ranked fifth for the week.

CBS realized it had found a formula. The library of Sullivan shows contained an ocean of material—one thousand eighty-seven episodes spanning twenty-three seasons—presenting performers of every stripe. If a show was edited together from elements that appealed to a specific audience, without the contrasting elements, a ratings win was likely. Making it still more appealing, Sullivan Productions owned all the programs; producing such a broadcast was simply a matter of calling Bob Precht.

Eager to repeat the success of the
Comedy Years
special, a month later CBS commissioned another special,
Ed Sullivan’s Broadway.
For this tribute to the Great White Way, the showman strolled through the streets of New York, dispensing Broadway anecdotes as he introduced Sullivan show excerpts from theater classics. He also read blurbs from his column, which were original reviews from the period. Like the prior month’s special, the Broadway retrospective garnered impressive ratings. It was now established: by choosing one audience among the several the program had reached, the Sullivan show could once again be a ratings powerhouse.

But suddenly, Ed didn’t care. The day of the broadcast, March 16, he suffered a shock from which he never recovered. Sylvia had checked into Mount Sinai hospital for a routine procedure a few days earlier. At age sixty-nine, she appeared hale and healthy, and looked far younger than her years. She enjoyed traveling as they always had; just the week before she and Ed had returned from a jaunt to Miami Beach. In a recent society column spotlighting the two of them at dinner, the columnist commented on how attractive she continued to be. Since she was in the hospital the day that
Ed Sullivan’s Broadway
was broadcast, she ordered a television set into her room to watch Ed. But, unexpectedly, she died that morning of a ruptured aorta. CBS News broadcast the announcement of her death shortly before that evening’s Sullivan special. Sylvia’s sudden death was a devastating blow to her family.

Ed fell into a bottomless grief. The show had been his identity, and it was gone, and now Sylvia, his lifelong companion, was also gone. Compounding the loss, she had become his protector and caretaker, handling many of the details of his daily life as his mental faculties lessened. Several people helped Ed as his Alzheimer’s progressed, but none more so than Sylvia, recalled Joan Rivers, who knew Ed personally and professionally (Sullivan was the godfather of Rivers’ daughter Melissa). “
She took care of him like a hawk,” Rivers said. “She was his Nancy Reagan.” In the weeks after her memorial service, led by Rabbi Arthur Buch and with a eulogy by Bob Precht, Ed drifted into an emotional no-man’s zone. With little to look forward to, his sadness and sense of emptiness became overwhelming. “My grandfather just disintegrated,” remembered Rob Precht.

Jack Benny, hearing of Ed’s bereavement, offered to fly in from California to spend some time with him. But Ed waved him off. He had heard, he claimed, that Benny himself “
was not feeling too well, so why knock yourself out.” When a reporter from
Variety
called, Ed explained that he would be “
just keeping himself very busy with the column.”

He did in fact keep plugging away at
Little Old New York
, reporting and commenting on show business and current events, with a good deal of help from Carmine Santullo. With Betty and Bob Precht living in Scarsdale, New York, Carmine became his sole daily companion. Ed also became closer with his older sister Helen, who still lived in Port Chester, and with whom he had stayed in touch through the years.

He had always been a loner, despite a vast network of contacts and long professional relationships. Now he seemed to retreat still further into himself. He continued his nightly rounds of Manhattan’s nightclubs, but refused to let anyone go with him. His friend Jerry Vale remembered checking with Ed about a social outing,
being rebuffed, and growing worried. “
He went to Danny’s Hideaway once, and I decided I was going to follow him,” Vale recalled. “I followed him to the restaurant, I waited for him to get through, and he came out, and he walked from 48th Street up to his apartment on 59th. I followed him in my car. He was walking and I followed him very slowly, to make sure he got home okay. I was a very good friend of his and I wanted to see him do well.” Vale described the depth of Ed’s depression in this period: “
When Sylvia died and the show went off, he was a beaten man.”

In December, his experience at a charity event was painfully coincident with his current fortunes. The Loyal League Philanthropies asked him to emcee an awards banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria, attended by about eight hundred people. Ed presented an award to the owner of a clothing store chain, Mortimer Janis, for his efforts on behalf of underprivileged children. Shortly after Ed handed him the award, Janis, sitting at the dais, collapsed. A nurse tried to revive him but to no avail. He died of an apparent heart attack. In the numberless such events that Ed had hosted over the decades, such a mortal calamity had never happened. It appeared to be some form of omen.

Bill Gallo, a
Daily News
cartoonist who had sometimes met Ed for lunch in earlier decades, ran into him on the street. “
I saw him on Broadway, very forlorn—believe it or not, no one recognized him, he just looked so goddamned sad and puffy.” To cheer him up, Gallo organized a luncheon in his honor hosted by the Boxing Writers Association. Ed got up and gave a speech, and then began to relate anecdotes, traveling back through the decades. “It was nonstop stories,” Gallo recalled, “about the Dempsey—Tunney fight, the Firpo fight, golfing with Joe Louis.…”

Notwithstanding his shaky mental state, the entertainment industry kept calling him. In January 1974, the seventy-two-year-old showman was invited to be master of ceremonies for CBS’s
Entertainers of the Year Awards
, taped in Las Vegas with guests Carol Burnett, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Sonny and Cher. Producing the show were Bob Precht and John Moffit, the Sullivan show’s director, who decided to videotape Ed’s lead-ins for fear he couldn’t handle the live audience. But the night before, as they taped Ed reading his cues from a TelePrompTer, he kept fumbling his lines. He spoke in a small, weak voice, often stopping to ask, “Bob, who’s this? I can’t read it.” As Moffit recalled, “Bob finally threw up his hands and said, ‘John, we’re not going to get it, he’s tired, we’ll do the best we can tomorrow.’ ” The evening of the show, a huge audience—including a very concerned Precht and Moffit—filled the Caesar’s Palace ballroom. The show’s brassy music began pumping, and as the announcer gave Ed a rousing introduction, the audience began to cheer and scream with wild enthusiasm.

“Ed came out onstage,” Moffit remembered, “straightened himself up, walked across the stage, and said,”—in a big bold voice—“
‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen! Tonight, from Caesar’s Palace
…’ and it was the old Ed, the old warhorse, he got it together, the crowd brought him up, and all of a sudden this weak old man was the old Ed Sullivan for one hour.”

During his Las Vegas trip, Ed had dinner with comedian Shecky Greene, whom he had gotten to know over the course of booking him six times. After Sylvia’s death the two became good friends. Greene remembered Sullivan as a cantankerous host who not infrequently found reason to curse at him. Before one broadcast, Greene requested that Sullivan introduce him as a German comic (though Greene wasn’t), and Ed complied. Shecky, in a fake German accent, did a routine in which he explained Ed had been on the air so long “because he has no talent—he doesn’t sing, he
doesn’t dance, he doesn’t do anything.” As soon as he walked offstage, Ed accosted him, storming, “
You son of a bitch—I’ve got more talent in my little finger than anyone I’ve ever had on this stage!”

Despite their rows, Greene was enormously fond of Sullivan, especially as they grew closer after Sylvia died. “I loved him,” Greene said. “I thought he was some kind of guy.” The comedian recalled how mentally confused Ed was in this period. Although Sylvia had died several months before, when he and Sullivan spoke, Ed invariably told him, “Sylvia and I were talking about you the other night.”

The night of their dinner together in Las Vegas, Shecky told Ed the story of his decision to skip an airplane flight after one of his comedy performances—a decision that saved his life when the plane crashed. Ed so liked the anecdote that he asked Greene to repeat it; he wanted to use it in his
Little Old New York
column. But even transcribing an anecdote was difficult in Ed’s current state. “He got cocktail napkins, a lot of them, and he was writing one line at a time, and [the ink] kept spreading,” Greene recalled. As written in Ed’s column the story lacked coherence. “When he put it in the paper, people called me and asked, ‘What was that about?’ He never put in the punch line.” (By one account, the
Daily News
was growing restive with Ed’s tenure and wanted to ease him out, but Carmine begged them to let him stay a little longer.)

Those close to him saw a surprising change. Ed had always enjoyed being out in public, delighting in the attention. John Moffit once gave him a ride across town during which Ed leaned out the window and directed traffic the entire time, playfully bossing the other drivers. He had always been famously accessible to fans, signing autographs with great care, asking a fan’s name then writing a sentence dedicated to him or her. Now he turned away from the public. One night as he was finishing dinner at an Italian restaurant in midtown with his grandson Rob Precht, then in his late teens, Ed noticed a group of fans waiting outside the door. “
My grandfather very abruptly turned to me and said, ‘I’m not going to deal with them.’ ”