Big As All Outdoors

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A recurring nightmare haunts TV men. The nightmare scene, set in any American living room, begins and ends quickly when Mom or Pop or Junior or Sis snaps off the TV set with the dreaded verdict: "There's nothing on tonight."

The industry this year passionately hopes to make such a verdict impossible. Millions of dollars--and thousands of individual careers--are at stake as the net works, film makers, admen and sponsors gamble seven nights a week to keep Americans glued to their 32 million TV sets. Like circus barkers pulling in a crowd, TV spokesmen shout about the wonders to come. They promise the finest opera, the best ballet, the most gripping drama, the newest movies, the funniest comedians and dozens on dozens of full-color, star-studded Spectaculars--a monster extravaganza planned to make U.S. living rooms jump with the most concentrated entertainment the world has ever seen.

And this is only the beginning. In his 20th-floor office on Manhattan's Madison Avenue, CBS President Frank Stanton (Ph.D. in Psychology, Ohio State '35) cries: "Not even the sky is the limit. The potentials of television are as big as the potentials of American society--and I do not feel like setting a limit on that." In Rockefeller Center, NBC President Pat Weaver (Phi Beta Kappa, Dartmouth '30) grows ever more expansive: "Television is as big as all outdoors. The whole country can visit the Vatican and La Scala at once. Our horizons are boundless!"

What's New? One prominent TV personality, hard at work this week on his 379th consecutive program (The Ed Sullivan Show, Sun. 8 p.m., CBS), is not quite sure what all the shouting is about. Says Ed Sullivan, calmly: "Everything they're promising to do is something I've done already." Opera? Ed has presented Metropolitan Soprano Roberta Peters 21 times, oftener than any other performer on his show. Ballet? Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn and the Sadler's Wells Ballet troupe made their first U.S. TV appearances with Sullivan (whose show was known as Toast of the Town until last month). Drama? Ed has given his viewers excerpts from more than 50 Broadway hits, including the smash successes Pajama Game, The Member of the Wedding, South Pacific and Don Juan in Hell. Movies? Sullivan's show pioneered in showing pre-release snatches of films (as in this week's Guys & Dolls, starring Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons and Frank Sinatra, with music by Frank Loesser). Comedians? Ed has ransacked the U.S. and Europe for funnymen; Victor Borge, Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis all made their TV debuts on the Sullivan program. Spectaculars? Ed is convinced that the basic idea came from such Toast of the Town biographies as those of Oscar Hammerstein II, Bea Lillie, Cole Porter and Walt Disney. Sullivan boasts that his show was the first to 1) have a permanent chorus line, 2) originate outside Manhattan, 3) introduce celebrities from the audience.

Cardiff Giant. Sullivan started on TV in 1948. Where Milton Berle and Arthur Godfrey had their time of glory and then fell back exhausted, Ed has thrived and grown stronger in the heat of conflict. The battleground of TV is strewn with entertainers who could not quite stay the course--Red Buttons, Wally Cox, George Jessel, Ed Wynn, Ray Bolger, Bing Crosby. Sullivan is the first to admit that any one of these entertainers makes his own talents seem dim indeed. On camera, Ed has been likened to a cigar-store Indian, the Cardiff Giant and a stone-faced monument just off the boat from Easter Island. He moves like a sleepwalker; his smile is that of a man sucking a lemon; his speech is frequently lost in a thicket of syntax: his eyes pop from their sockets or sink so deep in their bags that they seem to be peering up at the camera from the bottom of twin wells. Yet, instead of frightening children, Ed Sullivan charms the whole family.

The blasts of the critics in his early days on TV would have broken the spirit of an ordinary man. But Ed Sullivan is a fighter and, like most good fighters, a hungry one. Hungry, that is, for fame, national recognition, the deference of headwaiters and the friendship of the great. He burns up energy as a jet burns up fuel, but the only damage it has done is to give him an ulcer. The crises and satisfactions of his life can best be described in his favorite cliches of sport and Broadway. Ed "plays the game hard"; he "hates to be pushed around"; he thinks "the public is always right." He spent most of his youth 25 miles from Broadway, but the gleam of its bright lights was always in his eyes.

Royal Barge. Sullivan is about the longest shot ever to have paid off in show business. It is as if Featherweight Willie Pep knocked out Rocky Marciano with a single punch in the second round. No one has any ready explanation, although many have tried. Fred Allen cracks: "Ed Sullivan will last as long as someone else has talent. He has a natural feeling for the mental level of his audience, which is subterranean." Dave Garroway argues that Sullivan is a good master of ceremonies "because he tells the facts and then gets out of the way." Even Sullivan is mystified. He once asked a show-business friend: "What have I got?'" Replied the friend: "I don't know, but you've got it."

In effect, no one likes Ed except his 35 million viewers and his ecstatic sponsor: the Lincoln-Mercury Dealers. The dealers speak of Ed with reverential awe. Dealer Paul Pusey in Richmond reckons that Ed "does two-thirds of our selling job for us."

Nearly every major meeting the dealers attend finds Sullivan on hand with a load of entertainers. To further the cause of Lincoln-Mercury, Ed has addressed steelworkers before their blast furnaces in Pittsburgh, landed on Boston Common in a helicopter, gone down 20 ft. in a Navy diving suit and sailed up the Mississippi in a barge before 75,000 spectators at the opening of the Memphis Cotton Carnival. His identification with his sponsor is so strong that any Lincoln or Mercury buyer who is dissatisfied with his car is apt to drop Ed a complaining line. (Within ten days after such a complaint, the local district manager is on the phone or the car owner's doorstep, solicitously asking what he can do to help.)

Late to Bed. Ed and his wife Sylvia have lived in hotels for most of their married life. For the past twelve years home has been a small four-room apartment--office, living room, two bedrooms and kitchenette--in Manhattan's Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue. Last year Ed bought a 2OO-acre dairy farm in Southbury, Conn., where he can occasionally relax, as fond parent and grandfather, with his 24-year-old daughter Betty and her two children (Robert Edward, 1 1/2, and Carla Elizabeth, 3 weeks), while Betty's husband, Lieut, (j.g.) Robert Precht Jr., is on a tour of sea duty.

Ed goes to bed late and rises late. Usually he prepares his own breakfast--an unappetizing bowl of strained oatmeal and a glass of milk which, he hopes, are good for his ulcer--and eats in the white-walled living room decorated with two portraits of his tall, attractive wife and a Renoir landscape that Ed gave Sylvia this year for their 25th wedding anniversary. Then he lights the first of the day's many cigarettes and is ready for the phone calls that his secretaries, Carmine Santullo and Jean Bombard, have been holding at bay all morning. When Ed is not scheduled to deliver dealer pep talks in Akron or Denver, he often makes three-day flying trips to Europe, as he did last week for a film interview with Gina Lollobrigida in Paris. Last year he traveled 175,000 miles looking for new talent. He does all the booking on his show. Many of his leads come from entertainers who have been on his program ("They play everywhere, and see all the new acts"), while his aide, Mark Leddy ("He knows every animal act there is"), constantly scouts the furred, feathered and four-legged field.

Touch and Emotions. After whipping up a new show every Sunday night for seven years, Ed has formulated some definite theories. Each program must contain 1) something children will like, 2) comedy. As for the acts themselves, Ed says, "The best ones are those where two different kinds of people play against each other: if Lily Pons and Pearl Bailey do a duet, Lily sings it straight while Pearl clowns it up." His added ingredient is a shrewd combination of news and human interest. When Arthur Godfrey fired Baritone Julius La Rosa, Ed had the young singer on his show the same week ("There's nothing personal in it--if Arthur got fired, I'd hire him"). The human interest touches are usually emotional. Sullivan presented Helen Hayes shortly after the tragic polio death of her 19-year-old daughter, Mary MacArthur; Broadway Director Josh Logan (South Pacific), who had suffered a breakdown, spoke feelingly on Ed's show about the problems of mental health. Observes Ed: "It's things like these that people remember about a show, things that touch their emotions. They're far more important than the acts."

Old Smiley. Ed stays away from his show until Sunday afternoon when the first camera rehearsal begins. The physical production of The Ed Sullivan Show is in the hands of Co-Producer Mario Lewis, Director-Choreographer Johnny Wray and Musician Ray Bloch, who have been at work since the previous Monday. Ed comes onstage to a burst of applause from the audience of 500 crowded into the balcony (because of the demand for tickets, Ed's is one of the few shows that admits an audience to rehearsals; they must leave the theater later to make way for a completely new audience when the show goes on the air). Ed waves and strains a smile, squinting up against the battery of floodlights--lavender and blinding white. Then he sits before a stage monitor, turning his back on the acts, and watches the rehearsal on the screen.

After a dinner break, Ed comes back before air time to warm up the new theater audience. Again he leans into a gale of applause. "How are you all?" he asks. "How many are here from out of town?" He recoils from the forest of hands, crying: "Wow! New Yorkers can't even get seats!" He waggles a finger at his people onstage. "Heads will roll." The audience loves it. Ed continues: "Everybody in the audience is honor bound to be happy. So look happy!" They do. "In 30 seconds, Art Hannes is going to introduce me and he will be absolutely astonished that I showed up. They didn't think old Smiley would do it!"

Knights & Ladies. Ed got his lusty start 53 years ago when he and his twin Daniel were born in Manhattan to Peter and Elizabeth Smith Sullivan. Ed's father was a stern, moody man with a minor post in the U.S. Bureau of Customs.

The Sullivans' tenement apartment was in a part of Harlem that was already going to seed. Ed's twin, who was small and puny next to his larruping brother, died in his first year. The dead twin still looms symbolically in Ed's imagination. Whenever he was whaled by his father or switched by the nuns at his parochial school, Ed would sob passionately that everything would have been different "if only Danny were here." Even today Ed mystically attributes his excess of energy to some supernatural source of supply fed him by the dead twin.

When Ed was five, another of the six surviving children died, and his parents decided that Manhattan was no place to raise a family. They moved to Port Chester, an industrial town on the Connecticut state line, ringed by such suburban garden spots as Greenwich and Rye. As a boy, Ed gave his interest to reading and sports. His favorite author was Sir Walter Scott, with his romantic yarns of knights, ladies, tournaments, good and evil. Ed had no doubt about where the knights and ladies lived and where good and evil flourished. The place, naturally, was Manhattan and he dreamed of getting there.

Into the Big Time. Ed got another hungry look at a world he was to love when he worked as a caddy at Rye's Apawamis Club, where, after toting golf bags for 18 holes, he would compare tips with a fellow caddy named Gene Sarazen. who also grew up to make a name for himself. At Port Chester High School, Ed won eleven major letters but got "frightening" grades in everything except English. He also landed his first newspaper job: high-school correspondent for the Port Chester Daily Item.

Like his father, Ed never made it to college. He got part-time jobs at factories, played semi-pro baseball (catcher), before finally becoming the sports editor of the Item at $12 a week. Ed next moved to the Hartford Post and at last made the grade as a Manhattan sportswriter on the New York Evening Mail, where he says he coined the phrase "Little Miss Poker Face" for Tennis Champion Helen Wills. In his early days as a reporter, Ed was frequently mistaken for a rising young actor named Humphrey Bogart, who also had high cheekbones and a deadpan expression.

During the roaring 1920s, Ed turned up on the noisiest and brashest of Manhattan's tabloids, the scandal-shrieking Evening--Graphic, where Walter Winchell was beginning his labors in the vineyard of gossip. The meeting of Sullivan and Winchell was explosive. Out of their four years together on the Graphic grew a feud that lasts to this day. Says Ed: "Winchell's all through--and I'm an expert on Winchelliana. I've followed him like a hawk. He's a dead duck. He couldn't be resuscitated by injections at half-hour intervals."

Gossip Monger. In 1926, Ed saw an attractive brunette sitting at a nightclub table with some friends of his. He joined them and met 20-year-old Sylvia Weinstein. He promptly invited Sylvia to a heavyweight fight between Jack Sharkey and Harry Wills. It was the first prizefight Sylvia had ever seen, and she recalls that she tried hard to like it. Three and a half years later, Ed and Sylvia were married in the rectory of a Roman Catholic Church in West Orange, N.J. Sylvia has remained a Jew, but their daughter Betty has been raised a Catholic. Meanwhile, Winchell left the Graphic for the Daily Mirror, and Louis Sobol replaced him as Broadway columnist. When Sobol joined the Journal-American, Sports Editor Sullivan inherited the Broadway assignment. "I didn't want the job, but it was either take it or be fired. I took it, but determined never to rap anyone the way Winchell does. I don't think I have the right to pass final judgment on other people's behavior."

When the Graphic folded in 1932, Ed and his column moved into the Daily News. He has been there ever since, but his syndicated column (35 papers) now appears two times a week instead of five. Though at war with Winchell, Ed--like a good general--learned a great deal from his enemy. Winchell emceed a stage show at Manhattan's Paramount, using the pressure of his column to line up good acts at a nominal cost. Ed did the same and earned $3,750 for a one-week stand. He was always available as a master of ceremonies for charity benefits, and this practice paid its first dividend when the News had Ed take over the job of running its annual Harvest Moon Ball.

Red Light. In 1947, CBS television carried the Harvest Moon affair. NBC's Worthington Miner, then a CBS executive, watched the show and decided that Ed "seemed relaxed and likable with none of the brashness of a hardened performer." This was just the kind of man CBS wanted as M.C. of a projected Sunday-night variety show. When Toast of the Town went on TV, Ed was so petrified with stage fright that he aroused a strongly maternal feeling in his audience. One fan wrote: "It takes a real man to get up there week after week--with that silver plate in his head." So many others warmly congratulated him for his triumph over facial paralysis, a twisted spine and other dire but imaginary ills that Sullivan has about given up protesting that he has always been sound of wind and limb.

But the Manhattan critics were not moved to sympathy. They practically ordered Ed off the air. He responded by firing off a waspish letter after each review, dissecting the critic's writing, speculating about his (or her) neurotic problems, and offering to meet him in Central Park with shotguns at ten paces. Says Ed, with satisfaction: "They really burn after they get one of my letters. Jack Gould called up blazing about a letter I wrote, and I asked him: 'What are you so hot about? I just put my opinion of you in a personal letter. You spread your opinion of me all over the Sunday Times.' "

The Second Major. In his first year on TV, it looked as if the decision would go to the critics. Ed's sponsor, Emerson Radio, dropped him after 26 weeks. Then he heard that CBS was offering Toast of the Town to prospective buyers--with or without Ed Sullivan. Ed's salvation came from Detroit, where the Ford Motor Co. grabbed the show. Mercury General Sales Manager Joe Bayne, an old radio veteran who had worked with Major Bowes in the heyday of his Amateur Hour, says: "It took us less than 20 minutes to decide on Ed Sullivan. It was crystal clear. Ed was a second Major Bowes. Bowes used tc muff the English language. Ed does too. But the thing about the two of them is their genuineness and truthfulness. So we said, 'We'll buy Sullivan for 13 weeks.' " The 13 weeks has lengthened into seven years. Contemplating his handiwork, Bayne remarks: "Every period since then we've put more money into the show, and, to tell the truth, it's millions of dollars a year. I don't know if it's worth it any more, but there you are: Sullivan is Mercury, Mercury is Sullivan."

Magic Hours. Ed's own struggle for survival is inescapably linked with the greater war the networks themselves are fighting for control of a billion-dollar empire. All other forms of mass entertainment have been enfeebled by the burgeoning rise of TV. Except for heavyweight-championship bouts, TV practically owns boxing; it has cut heavily into the attendance at baseball games, and each year the colleges squabble more fiercely about how much or how little TV should be allowed. Radio, though it still has 3,410 stations and 120 million receivers, trails far behind TV as an attention-getter and moneymaker. The Hollywood studios reeled for a time under the impact of TV. Movies will still be made but, thanks to TV, they are already far fewer and far different (e.g., CinemaScope, VistaVision, stereophonic sound).

This year the TV networks are riding high, with sponsors bidding feverishly for prime time--those magic evening hours between 7:30 and 10:30. In this sellers' market, CBS and NBC are in the fortunate position of wartime butchers. At times the steak offered is obviously horsemeat, but if the man in the white apron says it's steak, steak it is.

But while the triumphant networks lord it over admen and sponsors, a celluloid cloud looms threateningly in the West. If TV's entertainment remains mostly live, Manhattan will be its source and Broad way its inspiration. Should TV go to film, the bulk of the industry will shift to Hollywood--as radio did before it. Some pessimists see the day not far off when 70% of TV shows will be movies (currently, about 35% is filmed).

Bad Spot. Each network firmly believes it has a host of loyal followers who sit before the glowing tube and never tune to another channel all evening long. Therefore what precedes and follows each program becomes terribly important. A show that has a small audience, even if it has a contented sponsor, is a network liability. NBC last year dropped the veteran Voice of Firestone, despite the advertiser's willingness to pay its way, because the network thought the show's low rating ruined all the programs that followed it. Explains an executive: "A bad show in an evening line-up is like a bad spot in an apple. Cut out the spot--or the firm meat around the spot is infected too."

Similarly, a network tries desperately to undermine its rival's strong shows. Ed Sullivan's show, since it begins at 8 o'clock, has long been the key to Sunday evening dominance. In succession, NBC has challenged it with the Philco TV Playhouse, the Lambs Club Show and the Comedy Hour. NBC's Weaver is as baffled as everyone else by the riddle of Sullivan's popularity. Currently, he subscribes to the theory that Ed has never lost his appeal because he didn't have any to start with. Says Weaver: "He doesn't do anything on a stage. He's not a performer. Ed just knows the trick of putting together a variety show and it's a good staple. We were after him to switch to NBC, and twice I thought we had him. We knocked him galley-west for a while with the Colgate comedy show, but we've been lousy opposite him the last two years. This season we've got Martin & Lewis. He can be taken."

Burning Issue. Ed agrees that he has a fight on his hands. In his last 75 shows, according to Trendex ratings, he has beaten the NBC opposition 66 times and lost nine decisions. Seven of those nine defeats were administered by Martin & Lewis. "But we've handled big names before," says Ed confidently. "They threw Jimmy Durante at us first and when I overhauled him, they threw in Frank Sinatra and Milton Berle. We've always had tough competition."

The network way of doing things is often frustrating to viewers who would like to watch both Ed Sullivan's show and Martin & Lewis. But that is the way competitive TV works. If NBC has a top-rated show, CBS will put an equal attraction opposite it and vice versa. Since the networks believe that once a viewer tunes to another channel he may never tune back, the moral is: don't let him get away.

So each night viewers must make the decision whether to watch Robert Montgomery Presents, or Studio One, I Love Lucy or Medic, Disneyland or Arthur Godfrey, George Gobel or Gunsmoke. Shrewd Pat Weaver made these decisions even more difficult by spotting his 90-minute Spectaculars in places calculated to do the most audience harm to rival CBS. This year, NBC is back with 47 more Spectaculars, and CBS is replying in kind. Some TV families, rent with quarrels about which show to turn to, have ended in the divorce court.

The Challenge. One canker of doubt, however, is disturbing all the hallelujahs about the glorious new TV season. Its name: The $64,000 Question. The instant, smash success of the quiz show dreamed up by Lou Cowan has brought a flood of imitators promising to give contestants everything from a producing oil well to a quarter of a million dollars. The industry is quivering with the unmistakable impulse of a new "trend." NBC's Weaver, instead of planning new telecasts from Mars or from the bottom of the sea, has been closeted with Question's sponsor (Revlon), promising them the moon if they will move the show to NBC. And CBS's Stanton is equally busy trying to keep the show on CBS. Instead of becoming memorable as the year TV came of age, this season may go down in history as the one in which TV took the same dismal turn as radio and lost itself in an endless morass of giveaway shows.

Sullivan can view the current uproar without too much concern. Last month he started on a 20-year contract with CBS that guarantees him $176,000 a year for seven years for producing his show. During the following 13 years, he does not have to produce anything but will draw $100,000 annually for his promise not to create a show for a competing network. In February, Ed moves his program to Hollywood for two months while he stars in that ultimate tribute to a living celebrity, a Warner Bros. film biography called The Ed Sullivan Story.

But Ed thrives on challenge. He is ready to fight fire with fire if this becomes the year of the big-money quiz shows. Says he: "The nice thing about my program is that it has room for everything. If what people want are giveaways, then we'll add giveaways, too."

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