Ed Sullivan was born in Manhattan New York in 1901. He’s the man who shaped popular culture in America for almost twenty-five years. When he was forty-six years old, The Ed Sullivan Show, originally called Toast of the Town, premiered live on CBS, the year was 1948. Within a few years roughly 50 million people watched it every Sunday night!
At that time, television was so new that the network producers didn’t really know what to do with it. Sullivan modeled his show for the world to see, his show did a little of everything. It had opera singers, rock stars, novelists, poets, ventriloquists, magicians, pandas on roller skates, and elephants on water skis.
At a time when Hollywood saw television as a threat, Ed Sullivan was the first person to persuade movie stars to come on his show and talk about their new movies. He brought celebrities into everyone’s living room. His formula was “Open big, have a good comedy act, put in something for children, and keep the show clean.” Women were not allowed to show any cleavage. When Elvis Presley performed, the camera shot him from the waist up only so as not to show his hip movements. When the Rolling Stones came on the show to play their song, “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” he made them change the words to make it more suitable for television. His show required the performers to act with dignity. It is interesting to note however that this was censorship, done in order to keep the broadcast to Sullivan’s standards of dignity.
Sullivan was a shy man who couldn’t tell jokes or sing or dance. He was a handsome man when he started the show, but unfortunately a car accident in 1956 severely damaged his face and his teeth. Many people said he looked like he was in pain, and he was. He loved talented performers and he personally chose every guest for his show. He spent most of his free time searching for talent in nightclubs, often staying out until 4:00 in the morning. It was Ed Sullivan who discovered the violinist Itzhak Perlman on the streets of Tel Aviv.
Sullivan broke down barriers, even though his sponsors begged him not to, he invited African American performers and celebrities onto his show, including Jackie Robinson, Duke Ellington, Richard Pryor, and James Brown. All he cared about was talent. At the end of his career in 1971, there were twenty different variety shows on television, all appealing to different demographics. He said, “If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers.” Ed Sullivan died in 1974, he was 73 years old.
