The story of Ed Sullivan’s life is one of the core stories of the birth of mass communication in the 20th century. Where he came from, what forces molded him, how he in turn influenced his audience, is the story of the education and fulfillment of a pioneering showman who largely invented the rules of a new medium as he went.
Television, of course, has been a force of oceanic power and influence in American culture, and he, in the small screen’s frontier days, proved remarkably adept at harnessing this power. That a mass audience would follow one man’s vision of cultural life for nearly a quarter century was testament to his odd, almost unconscious genius at sensing and gratifying his audience’s desire. It was as if he possessed some hypersensitive awareness that allowed him to feel an audience’s every fidget and thrill, what transported them, what might offend them. In the early years of his variety show, which was always broadcast live, he sometimes changed the running order during the broadcast, sending stagehands scrambling, because he sensed the audience might be drifting away.
More accurately, he didn’t need to rely on sensing the audience’s desire – he knew its desire. He was the audience itself, a middle American Everyman, needing no focus group because his sense of what worked and what didn’t – honed through producing countless vaudeville shows in Depression-era New York – fell in lockstep with the larger public taste. This experience, and his intuition (and a constant scan of the hit charts), kept him in perfect harmony with what viewers wanted, making the twenty-three seasons of his show a perfect cultural mirror of his time.