The Ed Sullivan Show
From a 1967 TV Guide
THE BUMBELING BARNUM OF SUNDAY NIGHT
You have to catch Ed Sullivan off camera to see what's kept him on the air for 19 years
BY ROBERT HIGGINS
It’s The Ed Sullivan Show, of course, and it’s the most successful program in TV history. This Sunday, June 18, it blithely sails into an unprecedented 20th year on CBS. Like it (and, week in and week out, 30 million Americans do) or lump it (and most critics do from time to time), The Sullivan Show is as much a part of America’s Sunday nights as cold mashed potatoes and leftover roast.
The success of this success show rests squarely on the shoulders of Sullivan himself. Yet years ago nobody would have given you a nickel for his chances. With good reason. Critic John Crosby once stated: “What, oh what, is Ed Sullivan doing on the air?” Sullivan has wondered too. He once asked a showbusiness friend: “What have I got?” “I don’t know,” the friend answered, “but you’ve got it.”
After 19 years, nobody’s going to argue with that. Only what does Ed Sullivan have? Some answers start to come when you watch him throw his show together. No bumbling Barnum there. That Sullivan is a toughminded, often despotic, brass-knuckled Captain Marvel. He books all the acts himself, but usually doesn’t see hide nor hair of them until Sunday afternoon at dress rehearsal. But he’s done his homework: like clipping a comic’s 15-minute act down to the required four or five with uncanny editing know-how (“They always look as if I’ve slapped them in the face, but I’m usually right’).
At dress, he screens each act with a protective glare ready to snip out any blue material (“An audience will forgive a bad act but never bad taste”). He then juggles the show’s running order with what he calls “a newspaper make-up man’s feel," something Sullivan’s 40-some years as a newspaperman and syndicated columnist have taught him something about. And although his “dictatorial attitude,” as one aide puts it, hasn’t made some actors fall in love with him, Sullivan takes full responsibility for a show’s hitting or missing. “No alibis," he says. “If it doesn’t work, it’s my fault. Only don’t tell me how to run my show.” Few dare. Sullivan once asked Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, how much Elvis would want for a return engagement. When Parker came up with a couple of dos and don’ts Sullivan would have to follow if he wanted Presley, Ed snarled: “Give Elvis my best — and my sympathy,” and slammed down the phone.
Get Sullivan away from the klieg lights, however, and another Ed appears. He's warm, often witty, thoroughly likable. Nibbling on his customary chicken-leg (just one) and white-wine lunch, Sullivan, 64 now, looks at least 10 years younger. His eyes are a bright, steel blue and the famous bags. (“People say they give me character. Who the hell wants character?”) hardly seem noticeable. His wit is as dry as a good martini (on the harness races he attends most every night: “They start at 8. My horse starts at 8:10”), and his laugh is full and fully enjoyable. More important, however, you’re introduced to a man endowed with values which, in show business anyway, sometimes seem to have gone out of style with candlepower footlights. That’s the Ed who'll tell you how much he admires professionalism: “I’m absolutely in awe of people who do things well”; his deep-felt respect for heroics: “Men who deliver under pressure are the lionhearts of today”; his disdain for the dishonorable: “Dishonor is the most contemptible thing in life”; and his love of kindness: “If people aren’t kind, they’re nothing. The rest comes out of a machine.”
These, in fact, are the two essential Ed Sullivans. First there’s the tough, battling Broadway pro and, second, the warm, almost Old World moralist. As Bob Precht, Sullivan’s producer and son-in-law, puts it: “I’ve often wondered how a man with Ed’s Old World manners and values has managed to survive in the sniping, murderous world of Ed Sullivan/ continued
Broadway.” It’s a valid question. Tracing Sullivan’s life, however, you realize how the two Ed Sullivans fit as perfectly as an old pair of gloves. You also realize how one man nourished the other and made for one of the most rousing success stories in show business.
Sullivan was born one of seven children (Ed had a twin, Daniel, who died in his first year) to Peter and Elizabeth Smith Sullivan in Manhattan’s Harlem just about the time the neighborhood started going to pot. His father was a stern, moody man with a 12-dollar-a-week job with the Customs Bureau. His mother, Ed remembers, was a “gentle, sensitive” woman given to painting and music. The Sullivans felt Harlem was no place to bring up kids, so when Ed was 5 the family moved to Port Chester, N.Y.
There Sullivan was to get his first taste of heroes—if slightly on the sly. “My mother would give me money for piano lessons,” Sullivan says, “but I'd take the money and go to the movies to see William S. Hart.” As influential as such vintage good guys were to be in later years, he should have spent more time in school. He was a poor student (“except in English”). No matter, Sullivan says. In high school he won 10 letters in sports, which interested him more. Sullivan’s sister, Helen, now Mrs. Piercy Culyer, says: “As an athlete Ed always came back the hero. A bit battered but always the fighter. It was indicative of things to come.”
Indeed. And, back then, Sullivan’s admiration for the fighters of the world was intensified through reading the classics, “like ‘Ivanhoe.’” Ed says, “T loved the beautiful ladies and romantic heroes.” He was an innovator too, Helen says. Once when a snowstorm left Ed and Port Chester High’s football team stuck for transportation to a championship game, the imaginative Sullivan bought a car on a small deposit, piled everybody aboard and took off. Sister Helen is still a bit dismayed by that performance. Says she: “Things like that just weren’t done in our day.” Says Ed: “I had to keep that car moving. If I’d ever stopped, they’d have asked me to pay for the damn thing.”
The Sullivans never did have money. But Helen says, “We were rich in other ways.” They were, too, certainly in the values instilled in them by their parents. Sullivan’s admiration for professionalism and quality stems, Helen says, “from our uncles, who’d gather in the parlor on weekends and discuss the important people of the day. We heard about successful people,” she goes on, “people of quality, from the time we were able to understand.” Sullivan’s enthusiasm for “quality” was, in years to come, to establish a bond with his father, to whom he had never really been close. The elder Sullivan was a devotee of opera, and just before he died in 1950 he saw Ed introduce Met singers on Toast of the Town, as his show was then called. “All he said was, ‘That’s wonderful, Edward. Wonderful.’ I think it pleased him more than anything I ever did.”
Television, however, was a long way off during those days in Port Chester. And the Sullivan children were learning other values. “We were taught to respect the rights of others,” Ed says. Helen adds: “We never heard mean comments about people being different. A person’s blood, color or race was never discussed in the house.” But Ed learned to respect the rights of others the hard way. “As a young boy I stole a Tootsie Roll from Mr. Genovese’s store,” he recalls. “Mother marched me back and told Mr. Genovese, ‘Edward thoughtlessly picked this up by mistake,’ and handed him a penny. I was so embarrassed I never stole anything ever again.”
As a teen-ager Sullivan got his first newspaper job with the Port Chester Daily Item. The paper wanted someone to cover local sports and Ed was the natural choice. “Through reading,” he says, “I came to love words and language.” Although an uncle later offered to send Ed through college, he refused. “I was too interested in becoming a newspaperman by that time,” he says. Sister Helen, however, offers: “Ed was too anxious to get into the ‘action’”; and the action, of course, was in New York.
During the 1920’s Sullivan showed up on New York’s Evening Graphic and in 1926 met an attractive brunette through some friends of his. Her name was Sylvia Weinstein, and three and a half years later they were married. Ed’s early lesson about “respecting the rights of others” came in handy and Sylvia says she and Ed “have never had a problem about religion.” Sullivan stayed Catholic, Sylvia Jewish, while their daughter, Betty, was raised a Catholic. After 37 years Sylvia, a gracious, still-attractive woman, says their marriage has been so idyllic (“Most important, we've never been bored”) that she once playfully suggested that Ed cook up a scandal to take the glitter off the match. “Not that our marriage has been all sunshine and roses,” she adds. “When Ed first started out, he had his pressures and tensions. He wasn’t always the easiest man to live with.”
Probably not. Money was a problem, and the problem led Ed right into the greener pastures of vaudeville and eventually TV. Although Sullivan was making $375 a week on the Graphic, there was a child to support (“She would have to go to school somewhere”), and the Sullivans, who were to become habitual swank-hotel dwellers, have never been known to count their pennies. (“We’ve never believed in hanging on to it for tomorrow,” Ed says.) When the Graphic folded in 1932, Sullivan moved to the New York Daily News (where he’s been ever since) and used the pressure of his column to front vaudeville shows, and found he could make $3700 for a one-week stand. He was always good to emcee a charity and this led to the News’ handing him the job of emceeing its annual Harvest Moon Ball dance contests. Worthington Miner, then CBS-TV general manager, caught Sullivan at this affair in 1947 and signed him to emcee Toast of the Town.
“When the first show went on the air,” Ray Bloch, Sullivan’s long-time bandmaster, remembers, “I can’t say I thought very much of it.” Neither did the critics. But Sullivan had learned long before how to fight his battles. He didn’t take the pans lying down. A chief Sullivan foe was the New York Times’ Jack Gould, who did a serious comparison between Ed and, of all people, Milton Berle. Sullivan fired off a scathing letter to Gould, and when Gould called to say, “How dare you!”, Ed replied: “What are you so hot about? I just put my personal opinion of you in a letter. You spread me all over the Sunday Times.”
Sullivan can well afford to be haughty. A very conservative guess of his worth is something like five million. And, according to Ray Bloch, he parts with a lot of it much too easily. “He’s such a kind man,” Bloch says. “He’s always handing out money to washed-up fighters.” “He worries so about people,” Sylvia Sullivan says, “even those he’s not always gotten along with. He can’t keep a grudge.” Ray Bloch agrees: “He'll blow up at somebody and then forget it. After the Jackie Mason blowup on the show (Jackie Mason did not intentionally give Ed Sullivan the middle finger; he claimed he was merely making fun of Sullivan's gestures.), he ran into Jackie at an airport and said, ‘Hi, Jackie. When’re you going to be on the show again?’—just as if nothing had happened.”
Sullivan associates this generosity with his mother, whom he adored. “Mother was so nice and kind to everybody,” he says. “I’m much more like my mother than father. Mother was more loving.” So, according to Sullivan’s family and close friends, is Ed. Only it’s a little hard to tell at times. Sullivan says it’s because he’s “terribly, almost painfully shy.” The shyness, he explains, accounts for the bumbling Barnum on-camera. “I dread that much exposure,” he goes on. “Big affairs of any kind. Banquets. I can go out with close friends and not feel shy at all. But if there’s one person in the group I don’t know, if I feel someone is just a little bit hostile, I clam up. It’s a terrible feeling.” The stone-face “facade,” as Ed calls it, is a defense against this shyness. Ray Bloch agrees. “People think he’s cold,” Bloch says. “It’s only a front. There’s an exceptionally warm man underneath.” And there is. “I once did my show playing a clown,” Ed says. “I loved it. Behind makeup I could always be myself. But without it, I often feel I’m just a baggy-eyed old man.”
Sullivan is far more than that. He’s still, in many ways, the Irish scrapper from Port Chester whose values the world of show business—to say nothing of the world itself—could profit by. Yet, at 64, the years have taken their toll. “He’s mellowed a lot,” says daughter Betty. “He used to get angry and feel deeply about things. He doesn’t as much any more.” She concludes: “He’s a nice human being. If you can leave that impression behind, you’ve accomplished something.” Few would disagree. But Sullivan’s accomplishments don’t end there. “Sometimes when I’m flying over the country,” he says, “I realize how many people I reach every week. On the Port Chester Item, I was getting through to maybe 3,000. Now it’s 30 million. That’s quite a jump, isn’t it?” It is indeed.
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