Yet he remained oddly insecure. He pretended to laugh off the critics but they bothered him terribly. He wrote long harangues back at any reviewer who took sport with him, explaining that it was unfair to suggest a man be put out of a job, that they did not understand the first thing about show business, that the very job they had was almost immoral. Sylvia pleaded with him to merely write the letters then throw them away, but he would send them. He was furious at the critics, for whom acerbic pokes at this famously monochromatic emcee were a given. Like reviewer Harriet Van Horne, to whom he wrote an uncharacteristically short missive: “Dear Miss Van Horne. You Bitch. Sincerely, Ed Sullivan.”
Early on, in an act of creative defensiveness, he hired a Yiddish comic from vaudeville to heckle him – to yell comments like “Come on Solomon, for God’s sake, smile, it makes you look sexy” – hoping the resulting exchange would make him appear more natural. Later, he booked a succession of impressionists who skewered his stiff onstage persona. Will Jordan built a career on this, coming on the show and replicating the Sullivan trademark arms-crossed gesture, contorting his face as if he had just sucked a lemon. “Tonight on our rilly big show we have 702 Polish dentists who will be out here in a few moments doing their marvelous extractions…” The audience roared and Ed laughed along, though in truth he had never used the phrase “really big show” in quite that way. Attempting to imitate Jordan’s imitation of himself, he kept mangling the words, only growing comfortable with the phrase later.
His persona as the maladroit master of ceremonies prompted Time magazine in 1955 to call him “about the longest shot ever to have paid off in show business.” That may have been true if he was merely the stone-faced host the impressionists lampooned. What many observers missed was his real role: the man behind the curtain, the show producer, the shaper, the impresario who assumed dictatorial control. His talent lay not in being a charismatic emcee – which he certainly was not – but in his ability to understand a changing audience. “Public opinion,” he explained, “is the voice of God.” In the end he had understood that voice so well and so long that The Ed Sullivan Show was not just a success but an institution. All of his original competitors, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Eddie Cantor, Jerry and Dino – the list goes on – saw their shows cancelled. But Sullivan ran non-stop from 1948 to 1971, from Harry Truman to Jim Morrison, from the arrival of television to man on the moon. In human terms that’s a generation, but in TV years it’s closer to an epoch.