[Dixielandjazz] "The Ed Sullivan Show"

[Robert Ringwald]

How many of you remember seeing the likes of Louis and Ella on this show as a kid?  


Ed Sullivan, American Idol-Maker
The Sunday night variety show he helmed for nearly a quarter-century ended its run
40 years ago last month, bringing to a close a unique chapter of television history.
by Gerald Nachman
Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2011
Fans of the nation's top television talent showcases -- "American Idol," "America's
Got Talent" and "Dancing With the Stars" -- may be shocked to learn that, for 23
years, one television show had the combined impact of those three smash hits. That
weekly Sunday night extravaganza, "The Ed Sullivan Show" -- which left the air 40
years ago last month -- regularly created pop idols overnight, introduced unnoticed
and unlikely talent, and featured fading stars who needn't dance to justify their
presence on the show.
Another stunning difference: "American Idol" draws about 30 million viewers for its
grand-finale shows, whereas Sullivan attracted some 40 million viewers nearly every
Sunday night for two decades -- when the country had half as many people as it does
now.
There are more than faint traces of Ed Sullivan's DNA in "Idol," "Talent" and "Dancing."
Viewers who had never been to a Broadway show or a ballet, or heard an aria, encountered
haute culture regularly on Sullivan's show -- right alongside Borsht Belt comics,
Chinese tumblers, dancing poodles, Marine drill teams, or the new middleweight champion
of the world.
If Ed Sullivan had someone on his show, viewers figured, they must be significant.
As Carol Burnett, a Sullivan find, put it, "When Ed Sullivan put his arm around you
and said, 'This is a very funny gal,' all of American said, 'This is a very funny
gal.'"
The show is remembered now mainly for two of its 10,000 acts: the American TV debut
of the Beatles, and Elvis Presley's gyrations, which scandalized a then-easily scandalized
country. But Sullivan's show contributed far more than just those two historic pop
moments during its lengthy reign at a time when all America watched the show every
Sunday with their family, a national ritual and an early example of "appointment
TV." (It remains the longest-running prime-time live entertainment show in television
history.)
Few then had heard of -- not to mention ever seen -- Carol Burnett, the Supremes,
Nat King Cole, Stiller and Meara, Jackie Mason, Eartha Kitt, Sam Cooke, Sammy Davis
Jr., Phyllis Diller, Shelley Berman, Shecky Greene, Teresa Brewer, George Carlin,
Keely Smith, Myron Cohen, Patti Page, et. al. -- when Sullivan escorted them into
our homes on his national stage. His eclectic taste and a lust for the family audience
inspired him to trot out acrobats, elephant acts, ventriloquists, along with the
regulation comics and singers -- plus, and perhaps most rarefied of all, little-known
black performers.
Sullivan's major legacy goes almost unmentioned now -- his trailblazing efforts to
bring black artists to television at a time when it was unusual to see a black face
other than an athlete on the small all-white screen on a major mainstream prime-time
show. A few black megastars were allowed on TV -- Louis Armstrong, Bill Robinson,
Duke Ellington -- but Sullivan regularly, and matter-of-factly, presented black entertainers
he had seen at the Harlem clubs he routinely covered on his Broadway beat for the
New York Daily News -- people such as Pigmeat Markham, Pearl Bailey, Aretha Franklin,
from old-timers like dilapidated Moms Mabley to baby-faced newbies like Richard Pryor.
The show began modestly in TV's infancy, 1948, and ran until 1971, when the rock-and-roll
juggernaut (and "Bonanza") helped drive it off the air. When the show debuted as
"Toast of the Town," Sullivan was an aging Broadway columnist and ex-sportswriter,
nearly 50, with no TV experience and three flop radio shows behind him.
Critics gleefully lambasted Ed's wooden manner and jumbled intros, dubbing him "the
Great Stone Face," "the Toast of the Tomb," "Cod-Eyes," "Mr. Rigor Mortis" and the
"Night of the Living Ed." Observed comic Joe E. Lewis: "Ed Sullivan is the only man
who brightens up a room by leaving it," and Alan King bestowed this backhanded praise:
"Ed Sullivan does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else on television."
New York's leading TV critic, John Crosby, vilified Sullivan, writing that each weekend
he asked himself "the same vexing question: Why is Ed Sullivan on television every
Sunday night?"
Unlike the sleek hosts of today's talent auctions, Sullivan further enhanced his
clunky image by coming up with much-quoted gaffes, such as introducing singer Dolores
Gray as "now starving on Broadway" and saying how pleased he was "to prevent opera
star Robert Merrill." He told a paraplegic war hero to stand and take a bow. He praised
Jose Feliciano as "not only blind, he's also Puerto Rican" (backstage he asked Feliciano
if his guide dog did any tricks). He introduced "the late, great Irving Berlin."
Blanking out once on the Supremes' name, he shouted, "Here they are -- the... the...
the girls!"
For years Ed Sullivan was mocked and mimicked in the media until he wisely turned
it all around by inviting impressionists on the show like John Byner and Will Jordan,
who created the freeze-dried mumbler that people still remember. The mimics gave
Sullivan a lasting identity and over time Ed endeared himself to viewers with his
everyman uneasiness. He was TV's first "reality" star who looked like the mug at
the end of the bar.
Sullivan had his faults -- he was easily riled and got into public feuds he later
regretted with stars and fellow columnists (scuffles with Jack Paar, Dick Clark,
Hedda Hopper, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Jackie Mason). Throughout his marriage
he chased singers such as Phyllis McGuire, Sheila MacRae, Jane Kean and Monica Lewis.
And the FDR Democrat with liberal sentiments caved into the Red scare by banning
from the show blacklisted entertainers such as dancers Jerome Robbins and Paul Draper,
comic Orson Bean, folksinger Leon Bibb and harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler. (He later
apologized privately to a few banned performers.)
When it finally left the air on June 6, 1971, "The Ed Sullivan Show" was chucked
out by CBS as part of a general housecleaning of programs considered not urban enough,
heartland mainstays such as "Lassie," "The Andy Griffith Show," "Green Acres" and
"The Beverly Hillbillies." Sullivan's show came out of New York, and was heavily
New York-centric, but after two decades CBS decided America had seen enough jugglers,
dancing bears, divas, ballerinas, comics and crooners, no matter how famous or even
cutting-edge (Mort Sahl, George Carlin, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones). By '71,
TV had loosened up considerably and variety shows hosted by Garry Moore, Perry Como,
Dinah Shore, Carol Burnett and Sonny and Cher were presenting the same names Sullivan
once had once featured exclusively.
By then, the entire nature of what constituted music, comedy and, indeed, entertainment
and "popularity" itself had changed. The Sullivan show was no longer the gold standard
of show business. Rock and roll, which ironically gave the show a temporary second
wind, led to its gradual undoing as the viewing audience split into factions and
teens rebelled against their parents' idea of entertainment.
Americans today wallow in 500 channels, but when Sullivan's show debuted in 1948,
most of America beyond the big cities was a primitive land, culturally. Only movies
and radio fed the nation's hunger for entertainment. For almost a quarter-century,
Sullivan brought talent of every kind, both raw and refined, to the masses.
For better or worse, "The Ed Sullivan Show" helped shape the nation's cultural taste
and destiny.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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