All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….
—Karl Marx
EACH WEEK SINCE October 1988, I’ve delivered myself of a five-minute “media criticism,” a sort of sermonette, on CBS Sunday Morning. A dozen times in those eight years a stranger has stopped me on the street, at a movie, or waiting in line for a glimpse of Matisse to ask: “Do you write your own stuff?” To which I have learned to reply, passively-aggressively, “Well, they didn’t hire me for my looks.” But at least it’s a human question. More often and more mystifying is the suspicious stare, the abrupt nod, the pointed finger, and the accusation: “I saw you on television.” After which, nothing. Not “I liked what you said,” or “You’re full of crap,” or “How much do they pay you?” Just “I…saw you.” And then the usual New York vanishing act, like Shane. This used to bother me a lot, as if the medium lacked substance, or I did, or the spectral street, maybe even Matisse. Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder whether what such strangers really seek on the surprising street is assurance. The problem is epistemological. They saw me on television. I am real. Television might also be. After almost half a century of looking at the ghosts in our machines, we are agnostics about reality itself.
Never mind docudramas, re-creations, staged news, creative editing, trick photography, computer enhancements, or commercials that sell us cars by promising adventure and sell us beer by promising friendship. Our dubiety about television probably started with the quiz show scandals in 1959. Oh how they wept, like Little Mermaids. That’s one of the things I remember most about television in the fifties. Nixon cried in his Checkers speech. Jack Paar cried about his daughter. And Charles Van Doren cried because he’d been caught. So did Dave Garroway cry on the Today show because he was upset about Van Doren, the English instructor-son of a famous poet-professor, who’d parlayed his 21 winnings into a job as a “guest host” on Garroway’s very own program. And because Dave was upset, so was his chimp, J. Fred Muggs. Who says men don’t have feelings? “A terrible thing to do to the American public,” cried Dwight D. Eisenhower on finding out that Van Doren, Patty Duke, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and even Major John Glenn, before he ascended into space and the Senate, had all been fakes. This was some months before Ike lied to us himself about those U-2 overflights. Nor had Ike been exactly aboveaboard about the CIA in Guatemala and Iran. But big government and big business have always been more creative than big TV, e.g., Watergate, Abscam, Chappaquiddick, Iranamok, BCCI, S&L, Whitewater, and the Gulf of Tonkin. As Reagan apparatchik Elliott Abrams once told Congress: “I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about.”
Enough fifties nostalgia. As much as we may have loved Lucy, what we did to our children was Howdy Doody and Captain Video. When John Cameron Swayze died recently, we ought to have been reminded of how bad TV news used to be back when his Camel News Caravan was “hopscotching the world for headlines,” before he went on to pitch Timex (“takes a licking and keeps on ticking”). Even the Golden Age of TV drama was full of home-shopping Ibsens like Paddy Chayevsky and greeting-card Kafkas like Rod Serling, of bargain-basement Italian neorealism and kitchen-sink Sigmund Freud, where everybody explained too much in expository gusts, yet all were simultaneously inarticulate, as if a want of eloquence were a proof of sincerity and an excess of sincerity guaranteed nobility of sentiment, like a bunch of clean old Tolstoy peasants. And how clean were they, really? So clean, you never saw a black face, not even on a railroad porter. So clean, that Chayevsky’s own family in The Catered Affair had to be Irish instead of Jewish, as the butcher in Marty was somehow Italian. So clean that when Serling wanted to tell the story of Emmett Till, a black Chicago teenager lynched for whistling at a Mississippi white woman, U.S. Steel Hour turned it into a pawnbroker’s murder in a Thornton Wilder sort of Our Town. So clean, that the Mars candy-bar company would not allow a single reference on Circus Boy to competitive sweets like cookies or ice cream, and The Alcoa Hour was so solicitous of a good opinion about aluminum it wouldn’t let Reginald Rose set a grim teleplay in a trailer park, and, most famously, the American Gas Company insisted on removing any mention of “gas chambers” from a Playhouse 90 production of Judgment at Nuremberg.
A better beginning for any discussion of American television’s childhood and prolonged adolescence in the Age of Faith is the original Mr. Ed. They didn’t hire him for his looks.
From 1948 to 1971, every Sunday night at eight o’clock, a man who couldn’t sing, or dance, or spin a plate entertained fifty million Americans. Never before and never again in the history of the republic would so many gather so loyally, for so long, in the thrall of one man’s taste. As if by magic, we were one big family. And what a lot of magic there was, as well as animals and acrobats, ventriloquists and marching bands, David Ben-Gurion, Brigitte Bardot, and the Singing Nun. All by himself on CBS, hand-picking every act, Ed Sullivan was a one-man cable television system with wrestling, BRAVO and comedy channels, Broadway, Hollywood and C-SPAN, sports and music video. We turned to him once a week in our living rooms for everything we now expect from an entire industry every minute of our semiconscious lives. Such was his Vulcan mind meld with his audience, one thinks of Chairman Mao.
Tiresome as the Boomers are, celebrating from their electronic nursery the nitwitticisms of Leave It to Beaver, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and Happy Days, they have intuited a truth about television as a timeline in our secret lives. It’s as if this reservoir of images, consumed since childhood, stored on memory tape, amounts to something like the “pottery clock” of the archeologists, like clam-bed fossils and dinosaur teeth, Irish peat bog and California bristlecones, rings of trees, layers of acid, caps of ice, and the residue of volcanic ash. We carbon-date ourselves. I was ten years old when I first saw Sullivan, in 1949, talking to Jackie Robinson on a tiny flickering screen in my uncle’s Long Beach, California, rumpus room. I was twelve when I realized that he’d be around forever, or at least a lot longer than your average stepfather. We were living then—after the rooms above a bowling alley in Washington, D.C., a ranch in New Mexico, a northern Wisconsin fishing lodge, and a southern California Cubist sort of pillbox through whose portholes blew breezes of orange rind, petroleum, and cow dung—in Queens, New York, behind a tavern, lullabied to sleep each night by Johnny Ray on a jukebox, singing “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” On the portable Zenith my mother really couldn’t afford, except that her latchkey children needed something warm to come home to after PS 69, there was Ed, chatting up Margot Fonteyn before she became a dame. As the following year he’d chat up Audrey Hepburn, before or after, I can’t remember which, he laughed out loud when an Automat ate Jackie Gleason. I was probably too busy to sit still for longer than Crusader Rabbit. I had my socialist newspaper, the Daily Compass, and my toy telescope to look at Sagittarius at night from the apartment house rooftop for signs of Velikovsky’s multiple catastrophisms. At least a mock-heroic Crusader Rabbit made fun of the internal contradictions of the ruling class. Ed on the other hand… how could he have been back there in California and right here in Queens? And around, too, later on with Elvis in 1956, when I was flunking volleyball and puberty rites in high school? As, like the FBI, he’d find me wherever I went, in Cambridge, Berkeley, even Greenwich Village, chatting up Buddy Holly, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward, Stevie Wonder, Sonny and Cher, Cassius Clay, Eskimos, and Beatles. Ed was my first inkling that henceforth all of us everywhere would simultaneously experience everything that is shameful or heroic about our country on one big headset; as if, in a nomadic culture, the TV screen were the windshield of our mobile home, and all America a motor lodge.
There were only three channels to turn to at the start, duking it out for the most desirable hour of the television week. Ed’s prime-time competition took the high road (Philco Playhouse, and Steve Allen) and the low (Bowling Stars and The Tab Hunter Show). Jimmy Durante, Perry Como, Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Sir Francis Drake, Bill Dana, Dragnet, National Velvet, Jamie McPheeters, Broadside, Buckskin, and Wagon Train came and went while Ed stayed put. James Garner in Maverick beat him two years running in the ratings, then collapsed from nervous exhaustion. Back in the days when corporations owned entertainers like trademarks or tropical fish—when Arthur Godfrey belonged to Lipton Tea, Milton Berle to Texaco, Bob Hope to Pepsodent, Dinah Shore to Chevrolet, and Jack Benny to Jell-O; when Kraft, Lux, Revlon, G.E., Westinghouse, Magnavox, Budweiser, Armstrong Circle, and Johnson Wax all had Theaters; Bell Telephone, Twentieth-Century Fox, and U.S. Steel had Hours; Philco, Schlitz, and Prudential had Playhouses, Geritol an Adventure Show Case, DuPont its Show of the Month, Hallmark a Hall of Fame, Twin Toni a Time, Firestone a Voice, and Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts—Colgate Palmolive spent $50 million on a Comedy Hour to knock Ed out of his Lincoln-Mercury. But he won his time period every week until Colgate bought a slice of him themselves.
Like Eddie Lopat, the crafty Yankees southpaw, Sullivan seemed to throw nothing but junk, and still they couldn’t hit him. How did he do it, this spinning of the public like a plate?
They were making up TV as they went along, by accident and some sort of bat sonar, without focus groups, market surveys, “Q” ratings, or Betsy Frank at Saatchi & Saatchi. “A door closing, heard over the air,” wrote E. B. White at television’s dawn, “a face contorted seen in a panel of light, these will emerge as the real and true. And when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face, the impression will be of mere artifice.”
Imagine at any moment in those prime-time years a six-room suite on the eleventh floor of Manhattan’s Delmonico Hotel, where Ed and his wife, Sylvia, seem to have lived forever, with a Renoir landscape, a small Gauguin, autographed snaps of Cardinal Spellman and Ella Fitzgerald, and an original Disney cartoon in which Ed plays golf with Donald Duck. He gets up at 11:00 A.M.; breakfasts invariably on artificially sweetened pears, iced tea, and a room-service lamb chop; reads the papers and makes hundreds of telephone calls, dialing them himself. He puts on one of his Dunhill suits—numbered like his shirts and ties, so that he can tape a new introduction to an old rerun without looking as though he’d dropped in on his own program for a surprise visit from Kurdistan—and a pair of buckled loafers. (His favorite shoes were a gift from George Hamilton, whose feet he once admired.) He lunches invariably between 3:30 and 4 P.M. at Gino’s on Lexington Avenue on roast chicken from which he detaches and pockets a drumstick, which he’ll nibble later on. (From a childhood bout with scarlet fever and a high-school football injury, he developed permanent sinus trouble: America’s tastemaker can’t smell or savor his own food.) He hasn’t a manager, an agent, a chauffeur for his limo, or even a limo. He likes to talk to cabbies about his show and to Lincoln-Mercury dealers. On his way to the studio, he will carry his own change of clothes on a wire hanger in a garment bag. After a movie screening or a Broadway play, he’ll supper with Sylvia at the Colony, Le Pavillon, or La Grenouille. They order sweet wine, which Ed improves with hoarded packets of Sweet ’N Low. And then they are off to the Yonkers harness races and the frantic nightlife of the clubs.
We aren’t talking about a Rupert Murdoch, a Michael Eisner, a Ted Turner, a Barry Diller, a John Malone, an Aaron Spelling, or any other morning star pedaling his epicyle in a Ptolemaic universe of hype according to which the very heavens buzz in eccentric orbits around the need of a vacuous public for gas. Ed is a regular guy. Except… he’s made somehow of air.
Almost from their first date, a heavyweight prizefight, Ed and Sylvia were self-sufficient, a mollusk of a marriage. They never ate in. Nobody cooked. The only domestic help they needed was the hotel maid. Isn’t this odd? Not just the single chop for breakfast, the drumstick in the Dunhill pocket, the Sweet ’N Low for wine, but this peculiar weightlessness, as if the Delmonico were an aquarium: artificial sweetening; artificial light. As in a Hollywood movie or TV action-adventure series or experimental novel, nobody had to wash a dish or make a bed. Till she was twelve their daughter, Betty, never ate with them; she ate at Child’s with a paid companion. Days and nights always had this floating quality, like the dream life of athletes and gangsters, actors and comics, showgirls and sports, hustlers and swells; of songwriters, gag writers, and ragtime piano players; of men who gambled and women who smoked; guys and dolls. Ed and Sylvia were children of the roaring jazz-age twenties, that nervy postwar adrenaline-addicted Charleston state of mind confabulated in New York by admen, poets, and promoters, and then nationally syndicated by Broadway columnists like Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, Louis Sobol, and Ed himself—men who had gone to newspapers instead of college.
Newspapers and Broadway: together as Ed came of age, they were inventing twentieth-century American popular culture. Whatever else might go on behind the shades of a Puritan-genteel New England, a Calvinist-Victorian Heartland, a Pentecostal small-town South, or the desert-western wastes—and probably a lot more did go on than anybody guessed, except the expatriate novelists—Broadway was the big time and the hot ticket, where they dreamed for us all those imperial city dreams of license, celebrity, and scandal; of crossing race, class and gender boundaries into the demimonde and the forbidden; a floating operetta; a rilly big shew.
Or so we were told by the columnists. Because the newspapers moved to Broadway, too, and magazines like Vanity Fair, Smart Set, and The New Yorker. Broadway was invented by Variety, the showbiz daily, and by Runyons and Winchells who covered the theater, nightclubs, and crime waves the way they covered sports. The columnists had all been sportswriters, anyway, before they went to Broadway; they reported the neon night as if it were one big game, in a permanent present tense, with its own peculiar slanguage of ballpark lingo, stage idiom, underworld argot, immigrant English, fanspeak, black-talk, promoter hype, and pastrami sandwich. That’s about all they reported, too. They certainly didn’t report the political corruption and the racism that have always been the big city’s biggest stories, not even the real-estate swindles attending the construction of the IRT subway that brought those crowds to Times Square to begin with. What they wrote, in a Broadway Babel pastiche of “suckers,” “bogus,” “lowdown,” “scoop,” and “who sez?” were press releases for a saloon society of singers like Caruso, fighters like Dempsey, and mobsters like Lansky; a fictitious twenties where the long legs of the chorus girls went on forever and all the gangsters were as cute as Gatsby.
If not from novels like The Big Money and Ragtime, then surely from biographies like Neal Gabler’s Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity and Jimmy Breslin’s Damon Runyon, or such dazzling social histories as Jackson Lears’s Fables of Abundance (on advertising as the “folklore,” “iconography,” and “symbolic universe” of market exchange) and Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (on the convergence of “formalism” and the hard sell, of “avant-garde innovation and media smarts” to create “an egalitarian popular and mass culture”), we ought by now to suspect that some of this was fantasy: the raffish flipside of Tin Pan Alley songs about Easter bonnets and grand old flags and of Hollywood films about home towns full of nuclear families. While the ad agencies that gave us Aunt Jemima for pancake mix and Rastus for Cream of Wheat may have been entirely WASP, the songs were composed and the movies produced mostly by the children of immigrants, who marketed these American myths as a form of wish-fulfillment—as if the melting pot were a centrifuge for spinning cotton candy, from which we’d all emerge uniformly pink and squeaky clean. Later, after a twist of the color-adjustment knob to achieve the perfect Aryan fleshtone, TV sitcoms would be pink fables, too. As much as the popular culture craves velocity and sensation, it’s also a state of longing.
But everybody drank too much and wrote fiction or ad copy (what Jackson Lears, wittily, calls “Capitalist Realism”). In the era of photojournalism and jazz-age novels, Edward Steichen and J. P. Marquand worked for J. Walter Thompson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for Bannion, Collier. Sherwood Anderson was a copywriter before Winesburg; Dorothy Parker wrote underwear ads for Vogue; Maxfield Parrish painted General Electric calendars and Jell-O ads; Joseph Cornell designed perfume double-spreads for Harper’s Bazaar and House & Garden; Alexander Woollcott plugged Muriel cigars; Georgia O’Keeffe pushed Dole pineapples, and Rockwell Kent, Steinway pianos. (Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson also got their start in advertising. So did Philip Rahv, in southern California, before coming east to coedit the Partisan Review. Allen Ginsberg was in market research correlating supermarket sales of toiletries with the money spent on ads by his toothpaste and baby-powder clients when he wrote “Howl.” For that matter, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells all flacked for Harrod’s department store, James Joyce sold ad space for a Dublin newspaper—“What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete!” recalled Leopold Bloom in Ulysses—and Bertolt Brecht wrote radio jingles for a German car company.) Even reportage of the time verged on the fictitious. From Breslin, we learn that while Damon Runyon’s father, in a wild American West, had reported the truth about that gloryhound, George Custer, his son didn’t report it about such gloryhounds as Pershing in Mexico and Patton in Europe. Runyon’s famous and shameless rules for the journalism of his time were: Never bite the hand that feeds you, and Go along to get along. Pistol-packing Winchell hardly stirred from his reserved table at the Stork Club, except to tool around town in a squad car listening to cop radio. Most of what he needed for the columns that let him bed down with showgirls and ruin the careers of homosexuals got leaked to him by eager publicists or confided to him by that matched pair of sinister buddies, J. Edgar Hoover and Lucky Luciano.
This was Ed’s gaudy, buoyant world—of the first book clubs, record charts, opinion polls, IQ tests, and birth-control clinics; a Wasteland with jumping beans—from 1922 at the New York Evening Mail to 1947, when he was discovered as a Daily News columnist who happened to be emceeing the annual Harvest Moon Ball, while a fledging CBS just happened to be trying out its primitive cameras. Serendipity! Like showbiz, sports, or war, like organized labor, organized crime, and organized religion, tabloid journalism had been an agency of upward mobility. But TV would prove to be a trampoline… a flying carpet.
It’s instructive if not surprising to note how many pioneers of early television, as of early radio, came directly out of advertising, just like the jazz-age novelists: “Pat” Weaver, father not only of Sigourney but of the Today and Tonight shows; Grant Tinker, who invented MTM; and the wonderful folks who gave us the quiz show scandals, after which the networks took the programming away from the ad agencies. William S. Paley bought CBS to begin with, in 1928, because radio advertising had doubled his cigar company sales. No other nation in the world had turned over its airwaves to advertisers, in a tidy-wrap package of mass production and mass persuasion. These men didn’t know exactly what to do with their new toy except to make it spin and sizzle so that the public would sit still staring at it long enough to be stupefied into desiring all the goodies a feverish market might disgorge. Like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, like a Mad Avenue Crusader Rabbit, they wanted to put on a show in their garage. Ed already did so.
Except with critics and sponsors, Toast of the Town was a hit from its get-go on June 20, 1948. Nobody knew why, nor did they credit Ed. Emerson Radio hated him and CBS shopped the show, with or without the host, to anybody who’d take it. (When, after three months, Emerson bailed out and Lincoln-Mercury took over, Ed was so grateful to the Ford Motor Company that he would log more than a quarter million miles in the next five years as its “ambassador,” landing on Boston Common in a chopper, floating down the Mississippi on a Royal Barge to the Memphis Cotton Festival. From Paris, he sent picture postcards to every Ford dealer in the nation.) But that first Sunday, from a firetrap studio on Broadway, was the prototype for the next 1,087—Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, headliners; Rodgers and Hammerstein, volunteer guests; pianist Eugene List; ballerina Kathryn Lee; singing fireman John Kokoman; boxing ref Ruby Goldstein; Ray Bloch and six of June Taylor’s neediest dancers, calling themselves Toastettes.
And like every other Sunday to come, Ed had decided how many minutes each of them got at the morning dress rehearsal, after which one audience was chased out of the studio, and another seated for the real thing. Over two decades much changed in the technical production of the hour—it was the first show with a permanent chorus line, the first to introduce celebrity guests from the audience, the first with overhead cams and rear-screen projection, the first to hit the road for remote telecasts, and the first to play with high-resolution cameras, a zoom lens, and videotape—but not the dreaded rehearsal, which was Ed’s initial look at the lineup. As quick as his temper, so, too, was his judgment snappy. If a rehearsal audience didn’t laugh, a wiseguy was gone, and the singer got an extra song. Add a mime; lose the hippo. Ed agreed with George Arliss: when crowds assemble together “their mass instinct is perilously close to intelligence.” Public opinion, he said, “is the voice of God.” What’s amazing in retrospect is how seldom God, Ed, and the mass intelligence missed the Royal Barge to Memphis. If Nat “King” Cole and Dinah Shore got booted off the show because they wanted to plug their new songs instead of singing Ed’s hit parade favorites, well Pearl Bailey rose from a sickbed fever of 103° to perform, and Alan King could be counted on to fill any other sudden holes. King was so reliable he didn’t even have to rehearse, and refused to appear on any program with a rock group.
Nothing pleased his critics. Fred Allen: “Sullivan will be a success as long as other people have talent.” Joe E. Lewis: “The only man who brightens up a room by leaving it.” Jack Paar: “NBC has its peacock, and CBS has its cuckoo…. Who else can bring to a simple English sentence such suspense and mystery and drama?” Even Alan King: “Ed does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else on television.” But when Fred Allen came back to shoot the wounded—“What does Sullivan do? He points at people. Rub meat on actors and dogs will do the same”—Ed was stung to reply, and did so tellingly: “Maybe Fred should rub some meat on a sponsor.”
So he looked funny. Even his best friends called him Rock of Ages, the Great Stone Face, the Cardiff Giant, Easter Island, and Toast of the Tomb. He had been, in fact, a handsome man, before an auto accident in 1956 knocked out his teeth and staved in his ribs. In his early days he’d been often mistaken for Bogart. But after the crash there was always about him a shadowy wince, like Richard Nixon’s, or Jack Nicholson’s in the Batman movie, playing the Joker as Nixon. An ulcer didn’t help, despite which he drank and smoked. (Like his old enemy Runyon, he would die from cancer.) Nor did the belladonna he took in his dressing room help: While it expanded the duodenal canal, it also dilated the eyes. Later, hearing problems and arteriosclerosis accounted for some forgetfulness and those famous malapropisms.
Yet the public loved him, the stars showed up, and his critics couldn’t really attribute the success of the show to his column. Maybe, in the first few years, Sullivan did bully guests into appearing, as Winchell and Louella Parsons and Elsa Maxwell had bullied them onto their radio programs with the promise (or threat) of syndicated clout. But it quickly became obvious that appearing on TV was more of a career-maker than getting mentioned in any newspaper column. This was good news for CBS, and bad news for print journalism.
And his success isn’t so very complicated. He was the best producer of his era. Television is a producer’s medium, as movies used to be a director’s medium, before the bankers took over, which is why all the best writers for the medium, in order to have some control over their own material and some of the profit as well, turn into executive producers whose names alone are all we see frozen on the screen after each episode of a series program like the sign of Zorro: Steven Bochco. It is also why the writing so often declines in the second or third season of even the best series. The executive producer has gone off to dream up another pilot and to executive-produce another series. But all Ed cared about was Sunday night on CBS, forever, reinventing his show each new season for a tribe of ghostly millions. His other talent was the transparent kick he got out of it, as pleased to be exactly where he was as we’d have been. Like Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd, Woody Allen’s Zelig, or Tom Hanks’s Gump, Ed made every crucial scene, and didn’t put on airs about it. If he had to leave town, he brought back something he knew we’d like because he did: a bicycle, a puppet, a Blarney Stone. From France, Edith Piaf. From Scandinavia, Sonja Henie. From Mexico, Cantinflas. From Italy, Gina Lollobrigida. From the moon, astronauts.
There used to be more high culture on television because there was less television, and we would watch almost anything, and middlebrows like Ed felt they had some dues to pay. Besides, Ed’s father had loved grand opera and what the twenties had been about was a cross-pollinating of high arts and low: T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx: Freud and Krazy Kat. Maybe as a by-product of all those passionate nineteenth-century Italian tantrums, divas especially had the star quality prized by the celebrity culture Ed was helping to create, even if he had to wait a few years for a Maria Callas to glamorize opera the way Arnold Palmer had glamorized golf. Certainly Roberta Peters, “the little Cinderella from the Bronx,” was a terrific front-page story after her walk-on triumph as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. As was Itzak Perlman, whom Ed discovered on the streets of Tel Aviv. And Van Cliburn, the surprise American winner of a Moscow piano-playing contest. And Rudolf Nureyev, just off the boat from the Evil Empire. Who will ever forget Jan Peerce, singing “Bluebird of Happiness”? Or Joan Sutherland, on stage with Tanya the Elephant?
Unless you spent the fifties watching The Voice of Firestone and the sixties watching The Bell Telephone Hour, you weren’t hearing much serious music anywhere else on commercial television. Ed cut a deal for first refusal rights on anything imported by Sol Hurok. Nobody else on network TV was ever better for serious dance. On no other show save Omnibus could we count on seeing any at all, from Agnes DeMille to Maya Plisetskaya. The Joffrey and the New York City Ballet were around the corner; Jerome Robbins was always available; San Francisco, Denmark, London, Florence, Hungary, and Japan sent companies. The (overrated) Bolshoi was a smash hit. And when Ed went away, who’d step in to hold the middle of that brow? Except for an occasional White House gala, and Eugenia Zuckerman on CBS Sunday Morning, classical music has vanished from network television. Ballet only happens on BRAVO and PBS, though not ever during pledge week when they switch to folkies. Likewise opera, with the added insult of Peter Sellars tarting up Mozart. Symphony orchestras, like regional theaters, local dance troupes, and jazz quarters, have to be subsidized by the oil companies and the feds. Even our libraries are closed after dark. Somewhere along the line to junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers, middlebrows stopped trying harder and ad agencies decided that “elite” culture lacked a desirable demographic profile and America settled for, or maybe even turned into, a greedhead musical comedy.
Ed gave us Helen Hayes mourning her dead daughter, in a scene from Victoria Regina. And Joshua Logan confessing on stage, ad lib, to his own nervous breakdown. And Judith Anderson as the world’s most difficult mother, Medea. And Oscar Hammerstein tinkling a plaintive rendition of “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” And Richard Burton, when the Welsh vapors took him, declaiming Dylan Thomas. And Sophie Tucker, singing with the Ink Spots. Plus half the cast from West Side Story and the whole tribe of Hair. From the start, Ed and the legitimate theater he covered for his column were allies. As early as 1950, on back-to-back Sunday nights, he brought Member of the Wedding to television, black and white together, and a bit of the Tobacco Road revival. Selections followed from Of Thee I Sing and Guys and Dolls. By 1952, he was even saving shows like the musical comedy Wish You Were Here and the Pulitzer Prize–winning play All the Way Home. But if Ed was good for Broadway, Broadway was better for Ed; his ace in the hole competing with Colgate’s Comedy Hour was all the talent down the block, young and able, tried and true, and almost always available for Sunday morning rehearsals of a little this and a little that from Carousel, My Fair Lady, or Mame. It was on Sullivan’s show that most of the country first heard of Cornelia Otis Skinner; where Yul Brynner visiting from The King and I became a pop-culture icon; where, before their musicals were turned into movies, the American public outside New York first saw Ethel Merman, Carol Channing, and Gwen Verdon. After Guys and Dolls, as if at a benefit for one of the more popular diseases, all the best Broadway musicals showed up, from Brigadoon to Pajama Game, meaning that Gertrude Lawrence, Joel Grey, Elaine Stritch, Stanley Holloway, and Mary Martin also sang and danced in our living rooms. So what if we never saw Beckett or Pinter? Ed just wanted us to clap our hands if we believed in Tinker Bell.
Hollywood hated TV before TV moved there. It was Ed’s genius to convince a studio tinpot like Goldwyn that TV was free publicity, that clips of forthcoming films would entice millions to neighborhood theaters, that actors on Ed’s stage could promote their careers without dissipating their mystery. Beginning in 1951, long before the rich and famous had “lifestyles,” there were “biographies” of them on Ed. When he decided as a ratings gimmick to devote whole programs to Bea Lillie, Cole Porter, Walt Disney, and Bert Lahr, he inadvertently invented the “spectacular,” by which TV graduated from vaudeville, radio, and Broadway into a humming ether all its own. The result was a steady stream of Bogarts, Grables, Hepburns, and Pecks; a Liz Taylor and a John Wayne. Gloria Swanson appeared to tell an astonished nation that she did, too, believe in God.
Such intimacy! Such presumption! But celebrity is what a democratic society has instead of aristocrats. We may feel today that we’re no longer safe anywhere from the stars and starlets so ubiquitous on Good Morning America, the Today show, Phil, Oprah, Joan, Geraldo, Entertainment Tonight, Live at Five, the late-night eye witless news and Letterman and Leno, who babble on forever about alcoholism, drug abuse, incest, and liposuction in the weeks before, during, and after their new film opens for the skeptical inspection of teenaged mutant ninja mall mice. But back then it was magic in our living rooms, as if the gods had come down from their pink clouds, the generals from their white pedestals, and the vamps from our fantasies, to schmooze, giggle, and weep. And this same star-making machinery turned “unstar” Ed into an aristocrat himself. You will have noticed that TV news personalities like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and David Brinkley, from a synopsizing of the quotidian on our small screen, get heavier, taking on the gravity of what they report. Their faces become front pages, etchings of all they have seen. History thickens them to a density that exerts a mighty pull on our frayed attention. Through their images we are accustomed to trafficking with the momentous.
So it was for Ed, too, case-hardened and at last secure in his celebrity, a glaze of so much pleasure rendered, so many heroes of the culture having been consorted with; an odd radiance of well-being; the kind of hum heard only in the higher spheres, as if he had levitated out of other people’s talent into a gravity all his own. They sang hymns to him in Bye Bye Birdie, and almost made a movie of his life, and he did show up in the Hollywood version of The Singing Nun. Not bad for a boy from Port Chester. But there was a difference. Ed was not in his celebrityhood the least bit remote. He was one of us, not so special that we couldn’t have been there, too, ourselves, singing along with Birgit Nilsson, hoofing with Gene Kelly, playing Jack Benny’s straight man or a fourth McGuire Sister. That’s why we forgave him when he found himself suspended in midair by the illusionist Richiardi, or landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in a helicopter, or riding around in a chariot as if in ancient Rome, on the Ben Hur set. If it could happen to Ed, it could happen to anybody. That spinning plate was a flying saucer: I saw you on television.
A white man wrote “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.” As George Gershwin wrote “Swanee” and Al Jolson sang it. Irving Berlin, who was Jewish, wrote both “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade.” As well as a New York neighborhood, Tin Pan Alley was a wiseguy state of mind. Whatever you wanted, they’d write it: sentimental ballads, comical immigrant medleys, Broadway show tunes, ragtime, even “coon songs.” They also wrote the score for Ed’s home movie of an innocent and consensual America. Creepy to remember, but no other singer appeared on his show as often as Connie Francis. Nor did we lack for Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Gordon MacRae, Patti Page, Wayne Newton, Vikki Carr, Liberace, and Tiny Tim. For the longest time, even black entertainers like Nat “King” Cole and Leslie Uggams sounded as pink and squeaky clean as Pat Boone. It wasn’t exactly elevator music. Ethel Merman and Pearl Bailey could blast through the wax in our ears. What Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan did to standards was what alchemists had tried and failed to do to base metals. When they weren’t stopping the show, Lena Horne and Nina Simone knew how to slow it down and make it think. At least Broadway musical comedies came with dancers like Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Bojangles, and Chita Rivera. Not to mention a peppering of Copa Girls, can can, and all those folk dancers who arrived, as if by cargohold and forklift, from Warsaw, Prague, and Oslo; Mexico, Portugal, and Ireland; Romania and Bali. But each appearance of a “mongrel” music, the distilled sound of an aggrieved subculture outside Ed’s Dream Palace, had a fugitive quality, as if Dave Brubeck and Stan Kenton, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson and Miriam Makeba, Johnny Cash and Odetta, were souvenirs, and Ravi Shankar a kind of curry. When Nashville and Motown learned at last how to plug their own songs on radio, they’d do terrible things to Tin Pan Alley. Rock, of course, would take elevator music down to hell, and Ed’s show with it.
But without pop standards there would have been no show. They were more than the punctuation of the program; they were its sculptured space. Anything might happen, but someone always sang. And what got sung was the latest hit. Ed was about hits, and to make sure he had an uninterrupted flow of them, he had entered into a mutual assistance pact with Tin Pan Alley that amounted to a codependency. He needed the top ten. And, by appearing on his show, you stayed in the top ten, the way a book on the New York Times best-seller list will sell enough copies to remain there for months; it must be good. Besides, showing up twice a year on Ed guaranteed a singer year-round club dates, plus constant play on the radio and jukebox. This was less hanky-panky than a synergetic shakedown of mass-communications conglomerates. (If you need hanky-panky, look to CBS Records, with whom Ed had a cozy deal, which is why we heard so much My Fair Lady and so little Frank Sinatra, who belonged to Capitol.) As if to signify this codependence, Ed ordered fancy sets built for every singing act, and no set was ever used a second time. In other words, music video. But you had to go live and couldn’t lip-synch. Because Mary Tyler Moore insisted on synching, she was banished from the show, a sort of premature Milli Vanilli.
Well then, rock. Ed passed on Elvis the first time around in 1955, at a loose-change price of five thousand dollars. In July 1956, however, a terrible thing happened to him on his way to the Trendex ratings. Elvis appeared on Steve Allen’s brand-new Sunday show directly opposite Ed. The Monday news was Ed, 14.8; Elvis, 20.2. To reporters calling for his reaction Ed said, “I don’t think Elvis Presley is fit for family viewing.” But that afternoon he was on the phone to Tom Parker, striking a fifty-thousand-dollar deal for three spots. And, contrary to what you think you remember, when Elvis showed up for the first of these, in September, we saw all of him. Having been burned in effigy in St. Louis, hanged in effigy in Nashville, and banned, at least his lower body parts, in the state of Florida, the full-frontal Elvis didn’t seem so awfully shocking. It was the second Elvis appearance that got shot from the waist up only, because producer Lewis had heard a rumor that a playful Elvis had taken to hanging a soda-pop bottle in the crotch of his trousers. Ed actually decided to like Elvis after a press conference in which a reporter asked if he were embarrassed when “silly little girls” kissed his white Cadillac. The King replied: “Well, ma’am, if it hadn’t been for what you call those silly little girls I wouldn’t have that white Cadillac.” Like Trendex, this was something Ed could appreciate.
But did any of us appreciate what else was going on? With an Elvis, Ed not only opened the gates to the ravening chimeras and barbaric hordes of rock; he had also unlocked the doors to the attic, the bedroom, and basement of the Ike culture. After a long sedation, all that sexual energy seemed to explode. It may have been acceptable to cross-pollinate the races and classes in Times Square. It was something else again when long-haired, poor white Southern trash insinuated a rockabilly/hubcap-outlaw variant of R&B and “dirty dancing” into the ears, hearts, and glands of the Wonderbread children of a bored and horny suburban middle class. What Elvis meant, along with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the motormouth Beats, was that the sixties were coming, an animal act that rattled everybody’s cage and couldn’t be contained on any consensus television program that doled out equal time to competing but acceptable subcultures in a median range of American taste. Some chairs were going to be broken, some categories, some heads, and some hearts.
By the time rock got to Sullivan, the world was changing and so was television, and not, so far as he could see, exactly for the better. He loved Motown, especially the Supremes, in whom he seems to have found a dreamy mix of gospel and Tin Pan Alley. Rock, he merely put up with, because Bob Precht insisted: Even the Dave Clark Five (fifteen appearances) was no threat to Pearl Bailey (twenty-three), Theresa Brewer (twenty-seven) or, impossibly, Roberta Peters (forty). As for the Beatles, they were cute kids, if only they’d left their deranged teenyboppers back in Liverpool. The story goes that late in 1963 Ed and Sylvia, wandering through Heathrow Airport, ran into forty thousand screaming nym-phets. What was up? “Beatles,” an airline employee said. Ed: “Well, can’t you get some spray?” But as the New York Times once explained, “whatever Lolita wants, Sullivan gets.” That Christmas he agreed with Brian Epstein on three shows at four thousand dollars each. The rest was more compelling as pop history than as network television. In oddly Edwardian suits, with freshly laundered moptops, on their very best behavior, the Beatles were looked at by 74 million Americans in a single squat. What frightened Ed were the shrieking groupies—including, in his own studio, the daughters of Leonard Bernstein and Jack Paar. After the Beatles, he refused to let anybody into the theater under age eighteen without a parent or a guardian. Which didn’t keep fans of the Stones from pushing Mick Jagger through a plate glass window in 1967, or the Doors from misbehaving after they had promised not to. (Told they’d never appear again on the show, Jim Morrison said: “Hey, man, we just worked the Sullivan show. Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.”) And the worst sign of an approaching apocalypse was when Herman’s Hermits came to town. A high-school student hung around backstage with a borrowed press pass, and then left by the stage door, where he was mistaken for a Hermit. The mob tore at his clothes. Fighting free into street traffic, he was killed by a passing car. To have died for Herman’s Hermits—What was wrong with these people?
What was wrong was that his audience, in the studio and at home, had gone to civil war. Parents and their children not only watched different TV programs on different sets in different rooms of a house divided, but these children seemed to live on different planets with alternative gravities, under bloody moons like Selma and Saigon. Pop music was no longer edifying, and not even harmless. For every Woodstock, there seemed, alas, an Altamont. Children of Ed Sullivan, flower-smoking media Apaches like Abbie Hoffman (a revolutionary Dennis the Menace who said that he’d prefer to overthrow the U.S. government by means of bubble gum, “but I’m beginning to have my doubts”) and Jerry Rubin (the poisoned Twinkie who announced, “Sirhan Sirhan is a Yippie!”) took over campuses and parks, the Stock Exchange, and evening news. No wonder Ed looked tired, even sullen, toward the end: Where was the coherence?
Elvis, the Beatles, and the Doors signified the confusion to come of politics and culture. The juvenile delinquents had their own tribal music, and it wasn’t “Sentimental Journey.” Rock was political—and hair, and sex; even whales. This confusion perceived itself to be in a profound opposition to a tone-deaf, anal-retentive, body-bag establishment. To a child of the sixties, Ed’s last decade, they had the guns and we had the guitars. If the seventies belonged so depressingly to disco, just waiting for the eighties were metalheads and punks, shape changers and androgy-nous shamans who would scrawl graffiti and sometimes swastikas all over the walls of the malls. Rap and hip-hop would tell us things about the mythical America that Tin Pan Alley had done its best to cover up. By the end of the eighties, no less than Harvard University would publish a book on the Sex Pistols. We each listen now to our own musics, on wavelengths designer-coded for age, color, class, sex, and sneer, through Sony Walkman headsets, on skateboards, Rollerblades, and Harleys—when we aren’t tuned in to hate radio. Do we miss Ed and his consensus? Sure we do, like Captain Kangaroo and Ferdinand the Bull and the Great Pumpkin and all the other imaginary friends of our vanished childhood.
Ed was a democrat and a fan. From Harlem, Port Chester, and Broadway; from the ballpark, the saloon, and the tabloid, all he cared about was talent, no matter what it looked like, where it came from, or how he pronounced it. Forget the feuds with Arthur Godfrey, Frank Sinatra, Jack Paar, Steve Allen, even Walter Winchell. What we saw on his screen was an encompassing, the peculiar sanction of the democratic culture. By being better at what they did than everyone else who did it, however odd or exotic, anyone could achieve his show, but nobody inherited the right. Ed’s emblematic role was to confirm, validate, and legitimize singularity, for so long as the culture knew what it wanted and valued, and as long as its taste was coherent.
During the Cold War, he was absolutely typical. When the blacklist hit the entertainment industry, he was as craven as the times and as his own network. (At CBS, the Ed Murrows were few and far between. They fired Joseph Papp as a stage manager because he refused to talk about his friends to a congressional committee.) Attacked in 1950 by Hearst columnist Cholly Knickerbocker for booking dancer Paul Draper and harmonica player Larry Adler, both of whom had been accused of unspecified “pro-Communist sympathies,” Ed, through his sponsor’s ad agency, apologized to the public: “You know how bitterly opposed I am to Communism, and all it stands for…. If anybody has taken offense, it is the last thing I wanted or anticipated, and I am sorry.” Draper and Adler had to leave the country to find work. When conductor Arthur Leif refused to tell the House Committee on Un-American Activities whether he had ever been a member of the Party, Ed dismissed him from the orchestra pit right before a performance of, ironically, the Moiseyev Dance Troupe, fresh from Moscow. Again in 1961, folksinger Leon Bibb was dropped from the show when he wouldn’t apologize for his political past to American Legion Post No. 60 in Huntington, New York. Bibb, too, had to leave the country. Sean O’Casey was dumped from a St. Patrick’s Day tribute in 1960, for left-wing anticlericalism. Bob Dylan dumped himself, in 1963, when he wasn’t permitted to sing “The Talking John Birch Society Blues.” Throughout a disgraceful blacklist period, Ed submitted performers’ names for vetting to the crackpot Theodore Kirkpatrick, editor of Counterattack and author of Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, a report slandering half of the entertainment industry, from Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copeland to John Garfield, Uta Hagen, Lena Horne, Burl Ives, Zero Mostel, Dorothy Parker, Howard K. Smith, and Orson Welles.
But then there was the other American obsession: race. At Harry Belafonte, Ed drew a line against the blacklist. From his earliest newspaper days Ed had been a brother. In his column he attacked New York University for agreeing to keep its one black basketball player on the bench in a game against the University of Georgia. When his friend Bojangles Robinson died, he paid anonymously for a funeral at the Abyssinian Baptist Church and organized a parade afterward to the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn with an all-star cast of foot soldiers that included Berle, Merman, Durante, Danny Kaye, and W. C. Handy. When Walter Winchell savaged Josephine Baker, who had been refused service at his favorite Stork Club watering hole, Ed declared a war on the Mirror columnist that wouldn’t end till a memorable night in 1952 at that same club, when Ed hustled Winchell into the men’s room, pushed his head down a urinal, and flushed him—as if to signify and celebrate the triumph of TV over Hearst. And, obliging though he had always been to his sponsor, Ed was contemptuous of those Ford dealers in the South who objected to his hugging of Ella Fitzgerald on camera, his kissing of Diana Ross and Pearl Bailey. With Louis Armstrong, he’d go anywhere in the world: Guantanamo, Spoleto. From Duke Ellington to Ethel Waters there wasn’t an important black artist who didn’t appear on Ed’s show, just like famous white folks.
But as television expanded—let a hundred channels bloom!—the culture fell apart. It was as if the magic once so concentrated in a handful of choices had managed somehow to dissipate itself, like an expanding universe after the Big Bang, into chaos, heat death, and fractals. By the end of the sixties there were twenty variety shows on TV, and that wasn’t counting the bloody circus of Chicago 1968, the porn movies from Vietnam and Götterdämmerung in Watts. Instead of Irving Berlin, Joan Baez; instead of Broadway, Newark. None of this was Ed’s fault. For more than two decades he had not only kept the faith but he had every week renewed it, telling us what was funny, who was important, and how we were supposed to feel about the world he monitored on our behalf. But that world had detonated, concussing even our own homes, where we went in separate furious sects to separate electric altars, alien dreamscapes, and bloody creepshows.
Where’s the coherence, much less the consensus, when the people who watch The X-Files on Fox and the people who watch ice hockey on Sports Channel and the people who watch the News Hour on PBS don’t even speak to the people who watch Guns N’ Roses on MTV? Of the nation’s 95.4 million TV households, 70 percent have more than one set and 11 percent have four or more. Who needs Ed when we can become famous for nothing more compelling than having already been on television? How amazing that such a show ever existed at all: such innocent bonds, such agreeable community, so much Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and Port Chester. Can you imagine a prime-time variety hour like Ed’s trying to make the nation feel more like a family, seeking some gentle like-mindedness in, say, fin-de-siècle Vienna, the world capital of dessert and alienation? Freud! Herzl! Schnitzler! In our studio audience, take a bow: Ludwig Wittgenstein! Instead of June Taylor Dancers, Gustav Klimt’s witchy women, combing their Secessionist nerve-strings, whipping us with their hair. After too many Strauss waltzes, twelve-tone music. After too much operetta, psychoanalysis. After an overmuch of puffy pastry, blood in the Sacher torte. History mit Schlag! Or, more daunting yet—a Toast of the Town for the Weimar Republic with Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya singing Hindemith golden oldies, Thomas Mann in a bully pulpit, and Rosa Luxemburg battered to death with a revolver butt on her way to prison, dumped in a canal. Behold the poet-dompteur: Wearing his signature steel-rimmed spectacles and his cute little leather cap, direct from the Black Forest where he ate Rilke like a mushroom—Bertolt Brecht. Let’s hear it for the Reichstag fire! Not to mention Adolf and his laughing gas.
Ed had Liza Minnelli on his show—he even had her mother!—and held out as Joel Grey for twenty-three years, but life stopped being a cabaret.
Sometimes late at night, in the rinse cycle of sitcom reruns, cross-torching evangelicals, holistic chiropodists, yak-show yogis, and gay-porn cable, surfing the infomercials with burning leaves in my food-hole, I think there must be millions like me out there, all of us remote as our controls, trying to bring back Ed, as if by switching channels fast enough in a pre-Oedipal blur, we hope to reenact some Neolithic origin myth and from the death of this primeval giant, our father and our Fisher King, water with blood a bountiful harvest and civility.