The Ed Sullivan Show

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ed Sullivan Show debuted on CBS on the 20th of June, 1948, with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performing alongside Broadway composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II previewing the score to South Pacific. That night set the template for what would follow across more than two decades: a single Sunday hour that could hold a rock 'n' roll singer and an opera diva, a circus act and a Shakespearean monologue, a puppet mouse and the biggest bands on earth. Ed Sullivan was a New York entertainment columnist, not a performer. He rarely sang, almost never told jokes, and by his own admission talked far too much in the early years. Yet somehow he became the man who decided who mattered in American culture. How did a newspaper columnist turn a television slot into a national institution? And what does it tell us that the show was cancelled not because it failed, but because it succeeded with the wrong audience?

• 2. One Night, Every Sunday

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  From the 20th of June, 1948, through to the 28th of March, 1971, the show occupied CBS every Sunday night from 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern Time, one of the few entertainment programs in history to hold the same weekly slot on the same network for more than two decades. The format traced its roots directly to vaudeville, and Sullivan made a deliberate point of booking ex-vaudevillians even as that tradition faded. Classical musicians, opera singers, comedians, ballet dancers, circus acts, and popular recording artists all shared the same hour. In a June 1958 interview syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association, Sullivan reflected on how the pace had changed: in the early days acts might run a leisurely ten minutes each; by the late 1950s they were lucky to get two or three. He was candid about his own early performance, watching old kinescopes and cringing: "I look up at me talking away and I say 'You fool! Keep quiet!' But I just keep on talking." The show's primary sponsor from 1948 through 1962 was the Lincoln-Mercury Division of the Ford Motor Company, and Sullivan read commercials for Mercury vehicles live on air throughout that period. The program originated from CBS-TV Studio 51 at the Maxine Elliott Theatre before moving permanently to CBS-TV Studio 50 at 1697 Broadway, which was renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater on the occasion of the program's 20th anniversary in June 1968.

• 3. The Kingmaker

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  Performers in the 1950s and early 1960s regarded an appearance on Sullivan's program as a near-guarantee of stardom. The show's cultural weight was large enough that the 1960 Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie built its entire plot around a teenage girl's chance to kiss a rock star live on the Sullivan stage, and the song "Hymn for a Sunday Evening" has her family speak of the program in worshipful tones. Sullivan appeared as himself in the musical's 1963 film adaptation. The Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster appeared 67 times, a record for any performer. Itzhak Perlman made his first appearance before an American public on the show in 1958, when he was 13. Topo Gigio, described as Sullivan's "Little Italian Mouse" puppet sidekick, debuted on the 9th of December, 1962, and returned many times. Ventriloquist Señor Wences made his first appearance on the 31st of December, 1950. For many years, the family ritual of gathering around the television to watch Sullivan on Sunday night became, as the source puts it, almost a U.S. cultural universal, placed by observers alongside the annual television broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz as a shared national experience.

• 4. Elvis, the Beatles, and the Record Books

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  On the 9th of September, 1956, Elvis Presley made his first appearance on the show despite Sullivan having previously vowed never to allow Presley on the program. Sullivan biographer Michael David Harris documented how Sullivan signed Presley only after rival host Steve Allen had the singer on the 1st of July and trounced Sullivan in the ratings. Sullivan was recovering from a near-fatal automobile accident that night, so Charles Laughton guest-hosted, and music journalist Greil Marcus later wrote that Sullivan's choice to have Elvis appear after Laughton's introduction was an attempt to make Presley seem less prominent. Popular mythology holds that CBS shot Presley only from the waist up to suppress his dancing, but in fact his whole body was shown in the first two shows; the waist-up restriction applied only to his third appearance, on the 6th of January, 1957. That first broadcast earned a 43.7 rating and was watched by a record 60.71 million people, representing an 82.6 percent share of the television audience. That percentage share remains the largest in the history of American television. The 28th of February, 1964, broke a different record: the Beatles' first live appearance, on the 9th of February, drew an estimated 73 million viewers, a record for U.S. television at the time, broken three years later by the series finale of The Fugitive. Sullivan had first noticed the Beatles at Heathrow Airport in late 1963, witnessing how their fans greeted them on return from Stockholm, and told his entourage it was "the same thing as Elvis all over again." Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, turned down Sullivan's initial offer of top dollar for a single show; instead the band appeared three consecutive Sundays in February 1964, for a minimal fee, in exchange for top billing and two spots on each program. Their final live appearance was on the 14th of August, 1965, though the group continued sending promotional film clips to air exclusively on Sullivan's program, including "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" from 1966, and "Penny Lane", "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "Hello, Goodbye" from 1967.

• 5. Breaking the Color Line

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  Sullivan confronted the racial politics of American broadcasting directly from the beginning. In an NEA interview he described a meeting with sponsors at the show's launch in 1948 when Southern dealers asked whether he intended to put Black performers on the air. He told them yes, they pushed back, and he told them he wasn't going to change his mind. The list of Black artists who appeared over the show's run is extensive: Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, B. B. King, Nina Simone, the Supremes, the Temptations, and Stevie Wonder, among many others. The Supremes were a particular favorite, appearing 14 times and described by Sullivan affectionately as "The Girls"; over five years they performed 15 of their hit singles as well as Broadway showtunes. The group's March 1970 appearance served as the platform to introduce their new lead singer, Jean Terrell, to a national audience. Soul singer Otis Redding had been booked to appear on the show in 1968 before his death in a plane crash in December 1967. Sullivan's record was not without complication; the source notes he featured rock musicians "not without censorship" and on at least one occasion scheduled Fats Domino at the end of the show in case he needed to cancel a guest. When Sam Cooke was cut off mid-performance of "You Send Me" as the show's allotted time ran out on a live broadcast, Sullivan rebooked him for the 1st of December, 1957, for a complete uninterrupted performance of "For Sentimental Reasons", which the source describes as an overwhelming success.

• 6. Controversy and Defiance

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  On the 20th of November, 1955, Bo Diddley appeared on the show having agreed to sing Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons". At 8:39 p.m., as Sullivan went into a commercial, Diddley walked over to musical director Ray Block and announced he had changed his mind. He performed his own eponymous single instead. The aftermath lasted over an hour backstage, with Sullivan, producer Marlo Lewis, Diddley, and his manager engaging in what a reporter present described as a heated verbal confrontation; two scheduled acts were cut to accommodate the longer running time of Diddley's number. In September 1967, The Doors appeared and were told their frontman Jim Morrison had to censor the lyric "girl, we couldn't get much higher" from "Light My Fire" because network executives believed it referred to drug use. Morrison agreed backstage and then sang the original line without hesitation during the live broadcast. According to guitarist Ray Manzarek, the band was told they would never appear again; Sullivan reportedly refused to shake the band's hands afterward. Morrison's reported response was: "Hey man, we just did The Ed Sullivan Show." Manzarek later gave differing accounts of whether Morrison's use of the original line was defiant or accidental. Sullivan apparently concluded the damage was done and relented on the word "higher" entirely; Sly and the Family Stone later performed their 1969 hit "I Want to Take You Higher" on the program. Jackie Mason's confrontation with Sullivan on the 18th of October, 1964, had a different resolution: Mason was accused of giving Sullivan the finger on live television during a segment where Sullivan was signaling him about time. Sullivan terminated Mason's contract; Mason filed a libel suit at the New York Supreme Court, which he won. Sullivan publicly apologized when Mason returned to the show two years later in 1966.

• 7. The End of an Era

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  CBS cancelled The Ed Sullivan Show on the 16th of March, 1971, as part of what the source describes as a mass cancellation of advertiser-averse programming. The show's viewers had aged with it; younger audiences were moving away, and sponsors found the show's median viewer age unattractive. In 1970, Sullivan's compilation special Ed Sullivan's Swinging Sixties drew widely negative reviews. The final original telecast, numbered episode 1068, aired on the 28th of March, 1971, with guests Melanie, Joanna Simon, Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass, and Sandler and Young. There was no proper finale. Sullivan continued producing one-off specials for CBS until his death in 1974, including an Ed Sullivan Show 25th-anniversary special in 1973. In 1990, television documentary producer Andrew Solt formed SOFA Entertainment and purchased the exclusive rights to the complete library from Sullivan's daughter Elizabeth and her husband Bob Precht. The collection runs to 1,087 hours of kinescopes and videotapes. Starting in 1991, SOFA Entertainment began re-releasing the archive through network specials, a syndicated half-hour series, and home video compilations including The 4 Complete Ed Sullivan Shows Starring The Beatles and All 6 Ed Sullivan Shows Starring The Rolling Stones. In 2002, TV Guide ranked the show No. 15 on its list of the 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.