This would create considerable confusion as to who Ed Sullivan really was. His public face as a stiff but earnest host was actually the far smaller of his two roles on the show. The early critics, new to the sport of television reviewing, mistakenly assumed that his emcee duties were his central role – and panned him accordingly. When Sullivan debuted in 1948, New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby wrote, “One of the small but vexing questions confronting anyone in this area with a television set is: Why is Ed Sullivan on it every Sunday night?” That perception would change over the years. In 1965, New York Times critic Jack Gould, who had once wholeheartedly agreed with Crosby, opined that Sullivan “is unquestionably one of the medium’s great intuitive showman.”
The Ed Sullivan Show was very much his show, his to shape and color as he saw fit. As its producer he not only chose the performers, creating balance and mood by determining their running order, he also took enormous control over their performances. Comedians found their routines reshaped, singers saw their repertoire – or, famously, their lyrics – changed. He told actors which section of a play to reprise, and he overruled his Yale-educated set designer. Even animal trainers, whose chimps and big cats knew their routines by rote, bent to the Sullivan edict. This was not a democracy, nor even a particularly benevolent dictatorship. When opera star Maria Callas refused to sing her famed interpretation of Tosca, Sullivan had made it clear: you’ll sing what I tell you to sing or your performance is cancelled. The diva had met a bigger diva.
On Sunday afternoons he ran the entire show as a dress rehearsal in front of a full house, standing just offstage, watching both the acts and the studio audience, getting a feel for the relationship between the two. He made notes on his yellow legal pad, and after rehearsal those notes dramatically reshaped what the audience would see and hear that evening. No detail was too small to be controlled. He could compromise, and in fact often did. But he was also known for sending performers to “the wailing wall” – an area outside the theater where they kvetched to their agents after Sullivan had reworked or cancelled their acts (and many performers saw their appearance cancelled the day of the show). When the cameras began broadcasting live that evening, much in that hour had been molded by the pucker-lipped host who mangled his lines in the spotlight’s glare.
The show was very personal to him – it was him. Said comedian Alan King, a Sullivan favorite who had the temerity to appear on a rival show: “Ed literally came close to slapping me in the face at Danny’s Hideaway. He called me a traitor…for five years Ed didn’t talk to me.” The showman’s visceral attachment to his program gave him something of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde quality. In the theater, shaping an evening’s show to conform to his vision, Sullivan the raging tyrant could erupt; outside the television studio, the glad-handing newsman chatted amiably. “He was a whole different man offstage,” recalled his friend Jack Carter. “He was very charming.”
Because the show so closely reflected the man himself, the story of his early life and education is an essential part of the Sullivan narrative. The way he produced his odd weekly circus reflected everything he had done and everywhere he had been, from the Victorian parlors of his youth to the decidedly non-Victorian celebrity gossip column he penned for decades. Although early television critics skewered him as an unskilled amateur, in reality no more grizzled veteran of a showman existed in 1948. He had skipped college but earned a rough and tumble Ivy League education in American show business, from the speakeasy cabarets of his twenties to his abortive radio and film career to – especially – his years spent producing sawdust-and-sweat vaudeville shows. And his influential syndicated column made him as much a show business player as chronicler. In fact, his New York Daily News column, with its rapid-fire pastiche of items covering many quarters, was his model for The Ed Sullivan Show. Like a daily journalist, the showman opened big and kept a brisk pace. Quipped one comedian: “You wanna know the day Christ died? It was on the Sullivan show, and Ed gave him three minutes.”