Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show: from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And today we have the author and journalist James McGuire to tell us the story of Ed Sullivan. James wrote a book on Ed’s life, Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan, and we wanted to hear from him about the life of this TV legend. James, thanks for joining us. Let’s start at the beginning. Where did Ed Sullivan come from? What made him who he became?

Ed Sullivan was born in 1901 in Harlem, New York, a very poor Irish Catholic family. And I mean, I think they did not even have the money for medical care. He had a twin brother who died, you know, very, very young, like shortly after his birth. He also had a sister who died very young as well. I mean, it was, it was a desperate, very poor life there in Harlem, New York. His father was known to be someone who really could not get along with people very well, but he was a civil servant. At first, he made almost a middle-class wage, but then he got in a number of disagreements with people, and his, his, you know, socioeconomic status fell and fell. So when Sullivan’s two siblings died, I think that the parents just could not take it anymore. They decided, ‘You know, we need to move out of Harlem. We need to move, you know, to a little town.’ So when he was really a very young boy, they moved to Port Chester, New York, which is just north of New York City, maybe, oh, you know, half an hour or so. Really, it’s basically a stone’s throw away from New York City. It was for him a very, you know, way more pleasant place to grow up. And in terms of, you know, his life around the house, there was very big into opera and music. They played the piano around the house, and she played, you know, recordings of, you know, opera. There was, like, there was a lot of explosion in music around the house. You know, that played a big role in him. He dreamed of New York City. He thought, ‘You know, how am I going to get to New York City first?’ He wanted to, you know, as World War I broke out, he had dreams of, like, going overseas and actually becoming a soldier. But he actually wasn’t quite old enough to be a soldier. So he went down to the recruiting office and tried to fake it, but they would not let him into the, into the Armies. He was very disappointed about that. He had to go back home, but he did move. He took, like, a very low-level job as a sportswriter in New York City in the 1920s, and that for him was a dream come true. I mean, he wrote about this, this show in Manhattan that featured dogs—it was like a huge dog show—and he saw his byline on the newspaper. And that he was full, and that was always somebody that, that drove in him. He, he always really wanted to be famous; he wanted to be known, and seeing his byline in a newspaper was just, you know, it was addicting for him. And so he had quite a bit of success as a sports reporter. He bounced around from newspaper to newspaper all throughout the 1920s. It was never hard for him to get a job. He was, he wrote about, you know, any kind of sports: football, baseball, swimming, golf. I mean, he wrote about it all. The big twist for him—they sort of moved him further into the world of entertainment—was that he switched from being a sports reporter to being a gossip columnist for a newspaper, and that really suddenly got him into the world of fame in New York City. So he was constantly hanging out and getting to know and writing about celebrities and athletes—you know, movie stars, radio stars really, in the early days, and later on, movie stars in New York City. So, and it gave him, you know, really a still more touch of fame, and he loved it.

Ed’s life was driven by a competitive zeal. Can you tell us about his first major rivalry?

There was a gossip columnist in New York City, a guy named Walter Winchell. His name is unknown at this point, but in the 1930s in America, Ed and Walter were fierce competitors. The two of them had a fierce, fierce competition. And of course, as big as Walter’s gossip column was, really it was Walter’s radio show. He had a national radio show. And Ed saw that and thought, ‘You know, I need to get my own radio show.’ So he rounded up some talent, and he would interview people on a radio show, and it was a complete flop. And the problem was that he wrote a very colorful gossip column, but he himself was not a performer. He was, you know, he had a very sort of a droll, you know, downbeat, you know, delivery. Still, he really wanted to be, he wanted to be famous, and so, you know, the 1920s, radio was the domain. So he tried to get another radio show, and again, it would last, like, six or eight weeks, and it just would not work. You know, he worked the gossip column angle really hard. It’s hard to remember exactly how big papers were, you know, the 1920s and 1930s. You know, they were far, far bigger than they are now. In a world without television and a world in which movies were in their infancy, you know, newspapers were the mass medium. And so, and so, being a columnist at that time was really a big deal. And that helped Sullivan, of course, get guests for his radio show. And he had a total of five radio shows, finally, and every single one was canceled after a fairly short run. You know, one of the things he did, partially to compensate and also as an outgrowth of his gossip column, was that he began to organize vaudeville shows in the 1930s in New York City. And, you know, the important thing to remember about that is that, you know, America was in a depression in those days. And so, you know, people would buy there. They would pay their, you know, dime to get in and nickel to get in for the vaudeville show. And they were a very, very demanding audience. If they didn’t like it, you know, if they didn’t like a performer, if they didn’t like an act, they would certainly let, let the, let the performer know. They, they are a rowdy bunch. And Sullivan, he produced vaudeville shows sometimes six nights a week, you know, five, six nights a week, for years in New York City. And, and his vaudeville shows were sort of a precursor to the final television show. And that it was a mix. It could be a comedian, a singer, you know, a mime, you know, maybe some sort of a bizarre oddity act, you know, a juggler, and they would all, all move really quickly. And Sullivan would emcee those vaudeville shows. Of course, there was live, live theater, and that really gave him a lot of experience in terms of how to put on a show. It taught him a lot. It also gave him that, that very, very immediate feedback. You know, he would stand backstage, and he would watch the, he would watch the performer on stage. He would watch the audience on stage. He would see, ‘Okay, how is this? How is it the audience really need to this performer?’ He became, you know, sort of very, very attuned to the idea of what it meant to build.

And, and we’re listening to James McGuire talk about the life of Ed Sullivan, a man we all know or have heard of, but don’t know the story behind the story. More of the life of Ed Sullivan here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with the story of Ed Sullivan. And joining us is James McGuire, who wrote the book Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan. Let’s pick up where we last left off, with James talking about Sullivan’s experience in vaudeville and as a columnist.

Gossip columnist, he’s really written now, and way before his television years, he was actually quite well known as a gossip columnist. He wrote for a paper, the New York Daily News, which is still publishing daily today, still a big paper in New York City. In the 1940s, they even sent him out to Hollywood to sort of, you know, write about, you know, movie stars. And I mean, everyone—you know, Fred Astaire—all the major stars were, like, you know, playing golf with them. And he really hobnobbed with all these people. He knew them all because they wanted to be in his gossip column. You know, in the days before television, being in a major gossip column like that was really a ticket to get more notoriety. So, everyone wanted to be nice to him because they wanted a, you know, mention in his column. In the late 1940s, the very, very beginning of television, and, you-know, he had these, these frustrated, you-know, dreams of fame from radio, and he had failed so much in radio. And he saw television; he thought, ‘You know what? I am not going to fail in this medium. I failed constantly, and I’m not going to fail in TV.’ And so, you know, CBS, you know, launched a variety show in 1948. It was called Toast of the Town. They didn’t know who to ask to be the, the emcee of the show. I mean, there weren’t, of course, any television stars because TV had not existed. And here was Sullivan, and he was a fairly well-known, quite actually quite well-known gossip columnist. So they thought, ‘Well, let’s ask this Sullivan guy.’ And the thing is, you know, CBS thought that, you know, or they knew that Sullivan could get guests because Sullivan knew all these people because he wrote about them in his gossip column. They gave Ed a $300 a week budget to book guests. So I mean, the entire hour of performing was filled with a $300 budget. And so, you know, much of those, that, that early years, Sullivan actually had to use his own money to pay guests to get on the show, if you believe that or not. But one of the reasons CBS was banking on him was because he had the power of newspapers, which is sort of ironic when you think about it. A television network was relying on the power of a newspaper, you know, to get guests, which, of course, you know, things have really changed now. And that early show, those early shows, were really, really rough. Sullivan, of course, was extremely nervous. I mean, as it was live television, it wasn’t recorded. So, like, when that camera blinked on, you were talking to the live audience. And that in those early days, the live audience was just the New York area, and that it wasn’t even a nationwide, you know, network at that point. CBS was not quite nationwide. He was horribly nervous that the show was, you know, slow-moving. But the thing that really saved him early on was all those years producing vaudeville shows. He knew how to put on a show, and he knew what the audience liked. I mean, he didn’t need to guess what the audience liked because, in a sense, he was one of them. He was an everyman. So, he, if he liked it, they were going to like it. He had a very good sense of what they were going to like. As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the show really did really well, and CBS, you know, was very happy with it. They had, you know, advertisers, and, you know, Ford Motor Company began advertising with it, and CBS realized, you know, they had a hit on their hand. Meanwhile, NBC looked at it, and they said, ‘Oh, a variety show on Sunday night. Huh! Well, if this Ed Sullivan fellow is doing that, we can do it far better than this Ed Sullivan guy. He’s boring.’ The thing that they didn’t fully realize is that Sullivan, and himself, was, of course, you know, not an entertainer. He was. He was a very, you know, uncle-like, very slow, measured performer. But, but the way that he knew how to put on a show, that he could balance the various acts on stage, you know, people really loved that. And Colgate-Palmolive sponsored the NBC show, and they thought, ‘You know, well, you know, we will put so much money into this. We will just steamroll, you know, the Sullivan Show.’ And, you know, backed by the Colgate-Palmolive ad dollars, they, they booked all sorts of big acts. They had Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, which were, at the time, were like super, super hot. They had, had a, you know, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin had a very hot nightclub back in New York City. And the NBC show did pretty well. But, you know, Sullivan really dug in his heels, and he used all the skills he had learned in all those years at vaudeville. And at the end of, like, a two-year period, he had really outproduced the NBC show, and so his ratings were actually beating NBC, even though NBC’s talent budget was far greater. It was simply his ability to produce a show that really made the show a huge success. And, you know, when CBS first hired Sullivan to do the show, he was called Toast of the Town. But by the early 1950s, he was able to renegotiate his contract, and it would now be called The Ed Sullivan Show, and it was really his show. And he produced it, and he chose the acts every week. You know, he chose what order they were in. Even though he was the emcee of the show, what he was really doing, he was producing this show by choosing the acts, deciding, you know, who was going to be on. You know, with every passing season, he kept his, you know, sort of finger on the pulse of America. He knew who was big, and he kept, you know, relating to the culture at large. And, you know, as TV really became a prime part of American life throughout the 1950s, and everyone was gathered around their black-and-white TV, he was really, you know, the one who just, who sort of he was. He became Uncle Ed to the mass audience. They looked at him as sort of the impresario, so to speak, of, you know, what is good. Yeah, he had a consistent gift. He never faltered, you know, he always sort of balanced, you know, something really wholesome with something really jazzy. He would have athletes on. He would, he might have a choir on. He’d have comedians on. It was a mix, and there was always something for the entire family. It was something for little kids, something for the teenagers, for the grownups. That might be a, you know, a Broadway show. It might be, actually, a cast—the live cast from a Broadway show—would walk across town and actually perform a scene, you know, on live television. You know, could be Frank Sinatra, could be, you know, the larger, you know, the most popular comedians of the day. Everyone was on The Sullivan Show.

And James, you write that he didn’t just have his finger on the pulse of entertainment. He was a forward thinker, too. Tell us about that.

He really pioneered black performers. He really believed in, you know, diversity on the air. And he was, he was way ahead of his time in this regard. And there was, you know, times where some of the sponsors and some of the audiences even got upset, like, you know, there might have been an element of racism in the audience, but he refused to, like, bow down to that. And there’s this great moment: Ed booked the singer Nat King Cole in the mid-1950s. Nat King Cole, of course, is black. Nat King Cole did this sort of this Hawaiian theme, and there were two dancers dancing along stage with him in sort of this Hawaiian, you know, they’re all, everyone was in Hawaiian garb. Nat King Cole was very elegantly dressed, and there were like white, white women dancers, you know, swaying their hips along with Nat King Cole’s jazzy tune. And in 1955, or the early 1950s, that was actually unheard of for, like, white performers and black performers to be on stage together. It was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I’m sure, you know, much of the audience would have been shocked by that. But, but Sullivan refused to, you know, be cowed by that. He constantly booked black performers. There’s sort of a, an historic moment when he, the singer Pearl Bailey, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. One night after she performed, he was like, ‘Oh my God,’ the audience, but it just did not matter to him. He was, he was going to go ahead and do that. I mean, it was something that mattered to him greatly.

You know, James, Sullivan took a leap of faith that most of us wouldn’t think of as a hard decision, and that was booking Elvis Presley.

You know, Elvis Presley was, of course, exploding on the scene in the 1950s, and Sullivan realized that if he was going to keep his ratings up, he needed to be able to book these really huge acts. And he looked at Elvis, and he was full of hesitation at first, because Elvis was a rock and roller. There was something dangerous about, about Elvis Presley.

And when we come back, we’re going to continue with that thought on Elvis Presley and how Ed Sullivan made the choice to head in that direction and embraced a lot of these rock and rollers, and how he balanced the old cultural norms with the new ones, and how all of that catapulted his show into, well, let’s just say the stratosphere. When we come back, more of the life of an unlikely impresario and, in the end, a very likely one as well. And that is, of course, Ed Sullivan and The Ed Sullivan Show. More of this remarkable life story, this quintessential American story.