Trivia / The Ed Sullivan Show

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: A lot of the classic Sullivan trademarks, like pronouncing "show" as "shew", knuckle-cracking, and clumsy body language, were actually invented by comedian Will Jordan for his Sullivan impression, heavily exaggerating a few little tics in Sullivan's fairly bland stage presence. Sullivan thought Jordan's impression was Actually Pretty Funny and had him on as a frequent guest, then Jordan went on to make a career of playing Sullivan in movies, TV shows and music videos.
• Colbert Bump:
  • The Beatles and Elvis both caused mutual Colbert Bumps, with the show and the musicians both becoming more popular after their appearance. The show introduced the musicians to a wider audience and they in turn gave the show relevance to the youth of the day. Appropriately enough, the Ed Sullivan Theater would later go on to host The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
  • The Broadway musical Camelot had received mixed reviews and its future wasn't clear when its stars Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet appeared on Sullivan's show to perform some of their songs; the musical saw a massive boost in ticket sales immediately after, and ended up as a long-running hit.
• Dear Negative Reader: Sullivan had an habit, especially in the early years of the show, of sending angry rebuttals to critics who complained about his lackluster hosting style and questioned why he was out there instead of a more competent emcee (the fact that Sullivan also produced the show was not common knowledge at first). The most infamous instance was when Harriet Van Horne wrote that "he got where he is not by having a personality, but by having no personality". His polite reply: "Dear Miss Van Horne. You bitch. Sincerely, Ed Sullivan."
• Dueling Works: Several shows on rival networks tried to dethrone CBS's Sunday evening cornerstone:
  • In the early 1950's, The Colgate Comedy Hour on NBC was a very strong competitor, even managing to surpass the "big shew" in ratings for a while, but eventually Ed Sullivan prevailed. ^note Interesingly, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the most popular of the Colgate hosts, were guests on the June 20, 1948 premiere of Toast of the Town.
  • In 1956, NBC gave dethroning Sullivan another try by scheduling Steve Allen's new variety show directly against him. They gave up by the 1959-1960 season, when they rescheduled Allen to Mondays at 10, but their show still managed to snag Elvis Presley before Ed Sullivan could.
  • Also in 1956, NBC debuted The Walter Winchell Show, which was fitting since Winchell and Sullivan were Arch-Enemies as newspaper columnists; that one only lasted 13 weeks due to Winchell having trouble booking big stars, who didn't want to alienate Sullivan and many of whom were still mad at Winchell for gossip he printed about them in the past. His only big score was John Wayne, who told reporters "Walter's been nice to me for years. It's about time I kissed his ass."
  • In 1964, The Hollywood Palace stepped up as ABC's answer to Ed Sullivan and proved to be a modest success, lasting until 1970, one year before Sullivan got cancelled himself.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Topo Gigio is an Italian mouse puppet who made regular appearances on the show, but became a superstar in Latin America thanks to his long running variety show which had various incarnations beginning in the 1960s up to at least the 1980s.
  • Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster holds the house record for most appearances with 58 shows.
  • British bands, especially The Beatles, were warmly welcomed on the show.
• Missing Episode: The November 28, 1948 episode is the earliest to survive, the preceding ones all predating CBS having the ability to produce kinescopes. A few other episodes after that are also missing, but overall the show has a pretty good survival rate by 1950s-60s live TV standards: current rights owner SOFA Entertainment is said to own 1,087 hours worth of Ed Sullivan footage.
• No Budget: In the intial 1948 contract with CBS, the show was only given $375 per week for talent (which was set to increase to $650 in 1949, then $900 in 1950), plus $1,000 per week for the orchestra, dancers and additional production staff (the technical staff and studio was provided free). This meant Sullivan often had to cajole performers into appearing for little or no pay on his show in exchange for plugs in his newspaper column. The budget did eventually increase to $20,000/show by the early 1950s, but even that was dwarfed by the $100,000/show NBC gave to the rival Colgate Comedy Hour, forcing Sullivan to get creative with strategic bookings and celebrity tributes to compete; after the Colgate show died off and NBC tried to poach Sullivan, CBS increased the budget to $50,000/show and it went up from there as the years passed.
• Screwed by the Network: The show became one of the casualties of The Rural Purge in 1971. Although Sullivan was angered enough with CBS to refuse to do a proper finale, he hosted occasional specials for them until his death three years later.
• Troubled Production:
  • Sullivan was noted for his short temper that caused arguments with numerous acts. The likes of Jackie Mason, Buddy Holly, Jim Morrison and Bo Diddley got blacklisted from the show due to arguments over personal slights or refusal to adhere to Sullivan's censorship. Even those that got on well with Sullivan noted his poor memory, frequently botching names during their introductions and forgetting old faces (it was rumoured that Sullivan had gained symptoms of dementia later in his life).
  • The preparation for the June 20, 1948 premiere was fraught with problems (though the broadcast itself reportedly went well):
    • CBS was very sluggish in preparing for the premiere, not getting to work before Texaco Star Theatre debuted on NBC on June 8, and the production crew had no access to the studio before the morning of the premiere.
    • The chosen venue for the show, the Maxine Elliot Theater, was much too small to properly accomodate a TV production (though the show broadcast from there until it moved to Studio 50 in 1953). While CBS did spend $12,000 to renovate it, it still left a lot to be desired: the stage had been quickly relaid with a unlevel grainy surface that made it hard to dolly TV cameras about, the master control room was set up in a small changing room with no line of sight to the stage and the orchestra had to sit in a small room backstage with bandleader Ray Bloch receiving cues via headphones.
    • A New York skyline backdrop had been built in a separate warehouse, but it had to be disassembled to fit through the theater's doors, then hurriedly renovated when it turned out it didn't fit the stage.
    • The theater lights were found to be too bright for the TV cameras and the only solution was to turn most of them off and use a spotlight as required, which required finding a spotlight and a spotlight operator at very short notice. Fortunately, the theater's head stagehand just so happened to know a veteran spotlight operator who was available and could rent out a spotlight.
    • A fire inspector declared that the theater violated so many fire codes that he could not allow a show to be mounted there. Fortunately, the chief of the FDNY happened to be a personal friend of Sullivan, so a compromise could be worked out where firefighters would stand around backstage in case of a fire and the foilage would be preemptively sprayed (the resulting chemical bath gave several performers headaches that afternoon).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Bob Dylan was slated to make his first nationwide television appearance on the show in 1963, but walked out when a CBS executive told him he couldn't sing his intended song, "Talkin' John Birch Paranoia Blues", due to its then-controversial references to communism. Ironically, for all his famous demands to musical performers regarding lyrics or songs, Sullivan himself had no problem at all with the song and defended Dylan and his song choice to CBS. But it was all for naught; Dylan would never return to Sullivan's show.
  • The Cowsills only made two appearances out of a contracted ten because of an incident behind the scenes. Sullivan loved the Rhode Island family band, and had been responsible for the generous contract himself. Unfortunately, during their debut October 1967 performance of "The Rain, The Park & Other Things", singer Bill Cowsill's microphone malfunctioned and his lead vocals were not heard until the first chorus. Although they did a successful second take, their father and manager Bud was furious. He attacked Sullivan's producer and son-in-law backstage and that was enough for Sullivan to null their contract. He understood that the incident was not the band's fault, and gave them one more slot on his Christmas show a few months later, but they never played on Sullivan again after that. The members of the band believe that if their father had not acted the way he did, it would have changed their entire career trajectory.
• Writer Revolt: There have been a few incidents of performers going against Sullivan's wishes:
  • Bo Diddley made an appearance on November 20, 1955. He was supposed to perform "Sixteen Tons", but played his eponymous hit instead due to misreading the cue card. Sullivan got furious and banned him from future appearances.
  • Buddy Holly, for his second appearance on January 26, 1958, was asked to switch out "Oh, Boy!" for another song, but refused due to having already told his hometown friends that he would perform his hit. This, combined with the rest of the Crickets being absent from the afternoon rehearsal, made Sullivan mad enough to cut his set from two songs to one and attempt to sabotage his performance by turning off the microphone on his guitar amp. Holly fought back by singing and playing as loud as he could to show the audience that the technical fault wasn't his. In spite of this, he was invited back for a third appearance. ^note Sullivan also butchered "Holly" into something like "Holland" while introducing him; while he had notorious difficulty with names, it might've been done on purpose.
  • When The Doors performed "Light My Fire", they were told to change the line "Girl, we couldn't get much higher" due to its drug reference. The band eventually relented, and performed it accordingly in rehearsal, only for Jim Morrison to sing the original line on the air. ^note However, despite what the movie might claim, Morrison didn't emphasize the line; he sang it normally like he did on the recorded version.

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