The Ed Sullivan Theater

“THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW: RADICAL CONSERVATISM AND THE BIG TENT”

On Sunday, February 9th, 1964, the largest television audience in American history gathered around their TV screens to watch The Ed Sullivan Show.  73.3 million Americans (45.1% of all households) tuned in to CBS that evening to see the first of three scheduled appearances by a new British act, The Beatles.  The Beatles had scored their first #1 hit single in the U.S. only a week previously and Beatlemania had taken the national media by storm.  Ed Sullivan had cleverly booked The Beatles months earlier, when they were all but unknown in America, having released a series of singles that had failed to impact the U.S. market.  Sullivan recalled: “For years we visited London, and on one of our visits to England in late 1963 we couldn’t believe all the commotion at Heathrow Airport … they told us these hundreds of teenagers were awaiting The Beatles.  So I contacted their manager and agreed to pay them … for three shows.” (Pritchard, 140)  The enormous risk Sullivan had taken in offering The Beatles to an American audience had paid off, especially when one considers his distaste for “rock-n-roll”.  His forward-thinking and all-inclusive talent scouting, conservative planning, and endless quest for ratings had earned him a place in the annals of television history.

Edward Vincent Sullivan, born September 28th, 1901, was an unlikely choice of host for what would become the most popular variety show of his time.  In 1948 CBS wanted to produce a Sunday night variety show to counter NBC’s soon-to-debut Texaco Star Theatre, starring Milton Berle.  Previously a boxer, newspaper sportswriter, and vaudeville producer/emcee, Ed Sullivan made his most prominent mark on the entertainment industry as a show business columnist for The New York Daily News.  His credentials and connections within the industry would grant Sullivan a unique synergy as the host of CBS’s new program.  “Ed was an influential columnist; if anyone could convince stars to work cheap, he could.” (Maguire, 123)  CBS head Bill Paley, however, viewed Sullivan as a short-term investment: “Ed Sullivan was hired as a temporary master of ceremonies for a variety program I wanted in 1948 because the programming department could not find anyone like Milton Berle … We planned to replace him as soon as we could afford a professional master of ceremonies.” (Maguire, 122)

Sullivan was hired to a dismal three-year contract to host Toast Of The Town on a scant budget of $375 per show.  The contract stipulated that the show could be cancelled with two weeks’ notice, Sullivan and his partner Marlo Lewis would receive no profit or residuals, and their names would not appear on the billing (so that they could be replaced at any time).  For their first two years on Toast Of The Town, Sullivan and Lewis took home no pay for their efforts, funneling their meager earnings into keeping the show alive.

Toast Of The Town debuted at 9 P.M. on June 20th, 1948 with a diverse lineup that would be indicative of Sullivan’s formula to come.  The bill featured comedy duo Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Broadway producers Rodgers and Hammerstein, ballerina Kathryn Lee, pianist Eugene List, singing fireman John Kokoman, jazz singer Monica Lewis, and boxing referee Ruby Goldstein.

Reviews of the debut program’s talent were overwhelmingly positive, but many critics focused harshly on Sullivan’s on-screen persona.  Sullivan had little acting ability and was immediately criticized for his wooden, deadpan delivery (earning him the nickname “Old Stone Face”), unintentional on-air malapropisms, and awkward mannerisms.  Seemingly of two minds regarding his critics, Sullivan was alternately defensive and self-effacing.  In response to Harriet Van Horne’s assertion in New York’s World Telegram & Sun that “(Sullivan) got where he is not by having a personality, but by having no personality,” Sullivan wrote “Dear Miss Horne.  You Bitch.  Sincerely, Ed Sullivan.”  Yet he would later frequently feature comedians on the program to caricature his “Old Stone Face” persona.  Perhaps it was this very authenticity of character that eventually led to Sullivan’s popularity.  The audience took Sullivan to be an average, relatable American – someone who even the most conservative viewer could project themselves onto.  Sullivan, in his own defense, once wrote: “People often ask me why I don’t smile more when I face the camera … In television, a performer only gets one chance.  There are no retakes.  He either does it right the first time or the sponsor sees to it that the performer forever holds his peace.” (Maguire, 162)

Critics focused on Sullivan’s shortcomings as a host, but failed to credit his singular greatest talent: that of producing his weekly variety show.  His skill at scouting talent and balancing the various high-brow, low-brow, and kiddy fare acts that made up each program’s roster was unrivaled in television and vaudeville history.  “As the show’s producer, he took dictatorial control over every aspect of its production.  In contrast to his persona as the reserved and respectful host, as producer he didn’t care who he offended.” (Maguire, 133)  Sullivan’s methodology was simple.  After choosing and booking the acts for a given week’s broadcast, he would run a full dress rehearsal in front of a live audience on Sunday afternoon prior to the evening’s live broadcast.  Ed stood offstage, carefully watching each act and gauging the audience’s response.  After dress rehearsals concluded, Sullivan would drastically retool the night’s show up until the last minute, canceling some acts, extended or shortening others, changing song selections, forcing lyrical changes, and would otherwise completely alter the show based on his impressions of what would play best to a national audience.  At times, he would even make changes during the show, shuffling the running order to speed up the tempo, cover backstage snafus, or to better set up the closing act.

The naturally competitive Sullivan was interested in one thing only: ratings success.  He instinctively knew that the only way to ensure his place on the air was to continue to hold his audience while attracting new viewers.  “Throughout 1948 Sullivan was testing his formula, his version of updated vaudeville: highbrow and lowbrow, something funny, something for the kids.  The bookings could ever so slightly challenge the audience, but he always included material to soften any edge.” (Maguire, 133)  Sullivan made “variety” the strength of Toast Of The Town.  The show “explicitly promised something for everyone, which meant that nothing would offend anyone, and that everyone would like everything. For tens of millions, it was the Pledge of Allegiance every Sunday night. The show presumed a single national audience, one nation, indivisible; the act of watching made you a citizen.” (Marcus)

By the spring of 1950, Toast Of The Town could safely be viewed as a success after two seasons.  Sullivan and Lewis had begun to profit from the show due to contract renegotiations, advertising sponsorship had stabilized, and reviews of the program had remained favorable.  The program faced considerable competition in the fall season from NBC’s The Colgate Comedy Hour, but ultimately held its own against Colgate‘s high-budget extravaganza.  Sullivan even went so far as to book competitor Milton Berle himself as a guest.

Throughout his Sunday-night tenure on CBS, Sullivan had featured artists and performers whose ethnic, racial, or political backgrounds could be viewed as questionable to many Americans of the time period.  Ed was comfortable with African Americans due to his years spent as a sportswriter and, moreover, knew that talent was far more important than race in the ratings game.  One instance, the appearance of Nat “King” Cole, in November of 1950, proved to be a line previously uncrossed.  “The tall and dapper Cole rhythmically crooned a calypso tune…while four (white) female dancers shook their hips in time to the music…The handsome singer never once glanced at his attractive stage mates…Ed led the applause and brought the singer back out to shake his hand.” (Maguire, 152)  Hate mail poured in to CBS studios, mostly tellingly from southern Lincoln-Mercury dealers (affiliates of the show’s current sponsors), demanding that Sullivan stop featuring black performers – or at least stop shaking hands with them.  Sullivan would do nothing of the sort, sponsors be damned.

Still trying to beat out The Colgate Comedy Hour in the ratings game, Sullivan further stretched Toast Of The Town‘s formula in the 1951-53 seasons by airing a variety of one-hour specials.  He dispensed with variety altogether, scripting and narrating biographies of prominent entertainment icons, the first of their kind on television.  Featured were Broadway giant Oscar Hammerstein, acclaimed film star Helen Hayes, and, most successful of all, film producer Walt Disney.  The fact that Toast Of The Town continued to hold its own against the much higher-budgeted Colgate Comedy Hour prompted Sullivan to remark that “I really believe, immodestly, that I am a better showman and have better taste than most and have a better ‘feel’ as to what the public wants because of my newspaper experience.” (Maguire, 158)

At the end of 1954, Ed Sullivan’s contract with CBS was up for renewal.  Having consistently aired a competitive program on a low budget with ratings success, Sullivan again negotiated for a higher salary, a larger budget, and, in a major personal victory, lobbied to have the show officially renamed The Ed Sullivan Show.

The newly-christened Ed Sullivan Show continued to achieve ratings and critical success throughout the 1955 and 1956 seasons, building to a peak on September 9th, 1956 when Elvis Presley made his first appearance on the show.  His booking on Ed Sullivan was not the first time that Elvis Presley had performed on national television.  He had, in fact, performed on nearly every show competing with Ed Sullivan: he had appeared six times on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s Stage Show (to increasing audiences), then two appearances on The Milton Berle Show (a notable increase in exposure), then once on the new Steve Allen Show, a direct Sunday night competitor.  “After watching Elvis’s shocking leg movements to ‘Hound Dog’ on The Milton Berle Show, Sullivan had pronounced him “unfit for family viewing” (Marcus).  Sullivan quickly changed his mind after learning of the huge ratings garnered by Presley’s appearances and booked Elvis for three shows, self-assured that he would be present to offset the controversial singer’s stage act.

In an odd twist of fate, Sullivan was not in the studio on the night of Elvis’ debut, as he had been hospitalized following a head-on collision while returning home from a remote broadcast at McGuire Air Force Base in Trenton, New Jersey.  (Airing the show from exotic locales had become routine for Sullivan, having envisioned them as a further extension of the “variety” show format.)  In the time elapsed for Sullivan’s recovery, the show aired with a series of substitute hosts, including English actor Charles Laughton, who hosted on the night of Presley’s debut appearance.  Sullivan was able to select the running order of the night’s acts, and opted to bury Elvis in the lineup, with his first segment scheduled only after three other family-friendly acts.  This went against Sullivan’s typical formula of opening with the biggest attraction of the evening.  Elvis’ performances were broadcast remotely from a soundstage in Hollywood and, perhaps fortunately for Sullivan, Presley was nervous.  His first two-song segment, featuring the mid-tempo “Don’t Be Cruel” and the slow ballad “Love Me Tender,” was more or less restrained and tentative.  Appearing later in the hour, the second segment was more raucous.  “Ready Teddy” was the first openly rock-n-roll song performed that evening, leading into “Hound Dog”, at which point Elvis’ dancing became so crazed that the camera operators pulled up to show only the singer’s torso.  “Yet the limited camera angle didn’t dampen the effect – if anything, his facial expression was more potent than even his gyrating hips … The all-girl cheering section sounded like it was on the verge of storming the stage.  Never before had so much female sexual desire been broadcast into so many American living rooms” (Maguire, 195).  Host Laughton noted after Elvis’ second segment: “‘Well, what did someone say?  Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast?” (Gibson).

As the dust settled, the next morning’s ratings reported unprecedented viewership.  60 million people had tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show that evening, representing 82.6% of all households that owned a TV set.  This record remained untouchable until almost five years later, when Sullivan topped himself with The Beatles first appearance on his show.  Elvis Presley producer and historian Ernst Jorgensen wrote in 2006: “‘I have interviewed hundreds of people who saw Elvis at the small-time shows, while Elvis was still at Sun … These people refer to the show they saw and then almost everyone says ‘and then we saw him on Ed Sullivan.’ NOBODY ever says they saw him on The Dorsey Show, Milton Berle, or Steve Allen.‘” (Marcus)

Many viewers were outraged by Presley’s act on the show – even if it didn’t prompt them to change channels or turn off their set.  The New York Times referred to “assaults on the American ear” and printed a lengthy series of letters decrying Elvis’ suggestive and “vile” performance.  (Maguire, 195)  With two more scheduled Elvis appearances in the next few months, Sullivan had to doubly push to assuage the fears of the public and simultaneously retain Elvis’ success and ratings boost for the show.  Sullivan was in rare form on October 28th for Elvis’ second appearance.  He spaced Presley’s songs out in three segments and framed them with a children’s choir, a ventriloquist, a British comedienne, and the full Broadway cast of The Most Happy Fella. Sullivan introduced Presley three times, each time playing up the generation gap between himself and the handsome young singer.  By acting like he didn’t understand the Elvis phenomenon, he allied himself with the reasonable adults in the audience.  Still, Elvis’ act could not be contained for long.  Again closing with “Hound Dog”, his performance was, if anything, more inflammatory than the first.  Again, the show was a huge ratings success, but viewers were more upset than ever: Elvis was hanged in effigy in Nashville and burned in effigy in St. Louis.  For his third appearance on January 6th, 1957, Sullivan simply only allowed Elvis to be shown from the chest up.  Ratings were once again through the roof, and the critical and public backlash was relatively subdued – Elvis had already become a household name.

Ed Sullivan finished out the whirlwind 1956 and 1957 seasons with unparalleled success.  The Ed Sullivan Show was ranked as the second most popular show, behind the perennially top-rated I Love Lucy, and was regularly reaching 40 to 50 million viewers per week.  These victories came without any significant changes to Sullivan’s variety formula or improvements in his stage presence.  Truly, Sullivan had come up with a winning formula.

Still, television’s ever-evolving nature brought new challenges.  The 1957-1958 seasons brought a cornucopia of Western-themed shows (Tales Of Wells Fargo, Wagon Train, Have Gun Will Travel, Wyatt Earp, and Gunsmoke) that took television ratings by storm.  One in particular, ABC’s Maverick, ran in a competing time slot at 7:30 on Sunday nights.  “(Sullivan) had a plan.  If the Western transported audiences to a distant locale, he would transport them to an even more distant locale, to a world more exotic than the dusty west…(he) envisioned transporting the show across the globe.” (Maguire, 207)  He booked acts from Taiwan, Japan, Italy, Vienna, Spain, Korea, and broadcast live from Las Vegas and even the World’s Fair in Belgium.  He scored the season’s biggest artistic and ratings triumph by booking the Moiseyev Ballet from Russia, whose Madison Square Garden performance had been sold out for months, for a full-hour show.  Sullivan also built on the success of Elvis Presley by hiring more rock-n-roll and popular music acts, including The Everly Brothers, The Champs, The Platters, Sam Cooke, Connie Francis, and Buddy Holly And The Crickets.  Still, The Ed Sullivan Show faced a drop in ratings against the fad for Westerns.

In the 1959 season, The Ed Sullivan Show featured Sullivan’s personal travelogues from Alaska, Ireland, the Hawaiian Islands, Jerusalem, and Asia, and drew more heavily on Sullivan’s experience as a reporter and columnist.  Shortly after the rebel uprising in Cuba, Sullivan interviewed Fidel Castro on location in Havana, a journalistic coup.  In September, he aired footage shot during a trip to communist Russia during tense relations with the U.S.  Both were huge ratings successes.

His programs from 1960-1963 were somewhat less adventurous, while still maintaining their contemporary entertainment value and variety flavor.  Rock-n-roll and journalistic travelogues were kept to a minimum, yet ratings remained stable.  Bob Dylan, set to appear on May 12th, 1963 was asking to change his song selection, “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues”, which compared the anti-communist John Birch Society to Hitler.  Dylan simply took his guitar and left, never to appear on the show.

On February 9th, 1964, The Ed Sullivan Show set a ratings record that still holds to this day, when 73.3 million Americans tuned in to see the first appearance of The Beatles on U.S. television.  Before The Beatles performed their first number, Sullivan read a telegram from Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker congratulating The Beatles on their American debut.  A torch had been passed.  Beatles manager Brian Epstein had approached Sullivan before afternoon rehearsals, asking to see Sullivan’s opening remarks about the band.  “‘I would like for you to get lost,’ Sullivan said, without looking up.” (Maguire, 254)  When The Beatles took the stage, the screaming of their female fans in the audience threatened to drown out the band, a reaction making Elvis’ fans of almost a decade earlier seem almost reserved.  In a moment of reflexivity, subtitles of each of the band member’s names appeared on screen: John Lennon’s featured the caption “Sorry, girls: he’s married.”  Very little audible controversy surrounded The Beatles appearance.  Their squeaky clean image and youthful antics came across as almost cartoonishly non-threatening, and the publicity storm of Beatlemania washed away any notions that these four young men from Liverpool, England could be contained.

The combination of The Beatles and The Ed Sullivan had sparked a kind of chain reaction in America.  “The day after that Sullivan show, every boy came to school with his hair combed down as far as he could manage (which, in most cases, wasn’t very far). Some went out and bought Beatle wigs. Or saved up to buy a guitar and then got together with friends to form a band.” (Kaplan)  Two more appearances on Sullivan’s show came and went (also ratings successes) and, within two months, The Beatles held the top five spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, with an unprecedented fourteen of their singles in the top one hundred.  Rumors have since circulated that during their first appearance on the show, literally no crimes had occurred in the U.S. – or that the crime rate had dropped dramatically for one hour.  The Beatles would go on to be featured on The Ed Sullivan Show seven more times throughout the 1960s.

Following the ratings successes of The Beatles, Sullivan began booking more rock-n-roll acts, dismaying some older, more conservative viewers, while pleasing his younger audience.  Sullivan still put on a well-rounded variety show, but as the generation gap in America grew between teens and parents, so did Sullivan’s audience begin to find conflict within his weekly presentations.

Sullivan entered in the 1964-1965 season with a rock-n-roll act booked on the show almost every week.  The season featured The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, and The Supremes.  This last group heavily influenced a young Oprah Winfrey’s perception of the opportunities available to her: “It was December 27, 1964.  I was ten years old when I tuned in to watch The Ed Sullivan Show … and it was a moment that changed my life…. When I saw the Supremes on TV that night, it was magical to me because I had never seen black women on television (although we were called “colored” at the time) or anywhere for that matter who conveyed such glamour and such grace. … And nobody was used to seeing us portrayed the way I saw the Supremes…. And for years I wanted to be like Diana Ross or just somebody Supreme.” (Kooijman)

The 1966-1968 seasons featured more of the same: rock-n-roll and edgy pop acts like James Brown, The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mamas and The Papas, and others were balanced with Sullivan’s standard bookings of current Broadway talent, comedians, and prominent sports figures.  Sullivan censored The Rolling Stones single “Let’s Spend The Night Together”, forcing them to change the lyric to “let’s spend some time together,” which furthered his new, younger audience’s views of him as a sanitizing influence like their parents.  In 1968 he insisted that The Doors change the lyric “girl we couldn’t get much higher” in their song “Light My Fire”.  The band initially agreed, but performed their song as written, outraging Sullivan, who swore to never have the band back.  Jim Morrison, the band’s singer, reportedly replied, “Hey man, so what?  We just did your show.”

On December 10th, 1968, CBS renamed Studio 50, the studio in which The Sullivan Show had resided for the entirety of it’s broadcast history, to The Ed Sullivan Theater.  Around this time a change began to occur.  Sullivan, suffering from worsening intestinal problems, seemed increasingly tired, incoherent, and worn out after over a decade of producing his weekly program.  Audiences and ratings began to slip.  Teenagers loved the rock-n-roll acts that their parents hated, and those same parents loved the more cultural highbrow segments that their teenagers found boring and “square”.  “The problem was that, for Ed’s older viewers, there were now just too many dancing astronauts, strange rock bands, and comedians with a pointed sense of humor.  It wasn’t that the show’s approach had changed, it was that the world outside had changed.” (Maguire, 285)  Television had exploded in America, allowing for more competitive and diverse programming.  At the end of the 1968-1969 season, The Ed Sullivan Show, for the first time in its history, slipped out of the top twenty highest rated television shows of the year, a downward trend from which it would never recover.

No longer with the presence of mind to reverse this trend of ratings slippage, Sullivan continued presenting the most diverse program manageable.  Yet, the concept of a show that could appeal to the entire TV audience was no longer a viable reality given America’s cultural changes.  In March of 1971, the word came down from CBS-TV president Bob Wood that The Ed Sullivan Show was being cancelled after 1,087 episodes and twenty-three years on the air.  After a final live broadcast aired with no pomp and circumstance on March 28th, 1971, a disheartened Ed Sullivan opted to show reruns of the program for the remainder of his contract, with the final show airing on June 6th.  Sullivan didn’t have the heart to face publicly bidding the show farewell.  After producing a series of retrospective specials and hosting the occasional awards show or one-off variety program, Ed Sullivan died of esophageal cancer, shortly after 10 P.M. on October 13th, 1974.  It was a Sunday night.

The Ed Sullivan Show stands as the definitive cultural document of the years 1948-1971.  As a catalogue of culture, it transcends the gap between TV Past and TV Present, due largely to the fact that Ed’s “Big Tent” philosophy was all-inclusive of the years in which the show was produced.  Always searching for the biggest acts, the highest ratings, and the newest artists, performers, and stories, Sullivan both reflected and shaped what was popular in America.  Culture in the United States has scarcely ever undergone such radical changes as it had in those two decades.  Blending a radical sensibility with a conservative presentation, Sullivan was able to give the American public a bill of entertainment than transcended age, race, creed, and gender for over two decades.  The Ed Sullivan Theatre, now the home of The Late Show with David Letterman, stands as a Manhattan monument to “Mr. Sunday Night” and his variety show success story.