June 20, 1948: Toast of the Town premieres on CBS. The host is Ed Sullivan, Broadway columnist for the New York Daily News. The first guests are the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein, and the comedy team of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis (both of whom also sang). In 1955, the program was renamed The Ed Sullivan Show.
In 1947, the Daily News hosted a dance competition titled The Harvest Moon Ball, and had it broadcast on local television. Sullivan was asked to host it. CBS founder and Chairman William S. Paley was looking for a host for a Sunday night variety show, and thought Sullivan would be a good choice.
Paley turned out to be right: As Sullivan's old friend, comedian Jack Benny, once said, "You don't sing, you can't dance, you don't tell jokes, you merely introduce the acts." But he also served as his own talent scout. Ed was progressive in some ways, willing to air rock and roll acts, and black performers of all kinds, when most variety-show hosts wouldn't.
All of it live, coast-to-coast, from CBS Studio 50 at 1697 Broadway, between 53rd and 54th Street in Midtown Manhattan. In 1967, the building was renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Ed grew up watching vaudeville, and would have vaudeville-style acts, including every comedian in the business, from old-timers like Jimmy Durante and George Burns, to the top ones of the time like Alan King and Henny Youngman, to edgy new ones: George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers and Robert Klein.
He had jugglers, acrobats, circus performers. Wenceslao Moreno, a Spanish ventriloquist known professionally as Señor Wences, was a frequent guest. "Easy for you," his doll "Johnny" would say, "For me, is difficult!" And he would speak to a box, and ask, "Okay?" And open it, and "Pedro," a disembodied head, would say, "'S all right!"
Erich Brenn had a talent for "plate spinning," and performed his act on Ed's show many times, to the tune of Aram Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance. Señor Wences liked Brenn's act so much, he copied it, and did it himself on a 1962 show.
He also liked impressionists, and some would even do impressions of him, including Will Jordan, who, from 1954 until his death in 2018, essentially "played Ed Sullivan" longer than Ed did. He noticed that Ed used phrases like, "here on this stage," "on this great stage," and "big show," and rolled his R's. So the centerpiece of his impression became, "Tonight, we've got a rrrreally big shew." Not "show," "shew," which Ed never actually said, except, occasionally, in self-deprecation.
He played Ed in the original 1960 Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie, and in the films I Want to Hold Your Hand and The Buddy Holly Story in 1978, The Doors in 1991, and Mr. Saturday Night in 1992.
But there were, occasionally, issues. In 1956, he said he wouldn't have the hot newcomer of the moment, Elvis Presley, on his show, until rival Steve Allen brought him to his show on NBC. Ed saw Allen's ratings, took the hint, and had Elvis on his show 3 times, the last time showing him only from the waist up, to hide his gyrations. But, at the end of that January 6, 1957 show, Ed told the audience, "This is a real, decent, fine boy." Elvis took it was one of the greatest compliments of his career.
In May 1963, Bob Dylan was scheduled for the show. He wanted to sing his song "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues." The censors, afraid that he would look like a Communist, told him after the 1st rehearsal to drop it. He refused. Ed backed him up. And Ed usually got what he wanted. This time, they overruled him. Dylan never appeared on the show, but he kept Ed's respect.
For his February 9, 1964 show, Ed booked The Beatles, and 73 million people watched. At the time, it was the biggest audience in U.S. TV history. That led to several other British bands being booked, one of them The Rolling Stones.
On October 18, 1964, the show was partly preempted by President Lyndon Johnson delivering a speech from the Oval Office at the White House. So Ed, always conscious of time since the show was done live, had to shorten the show, meaning he had to shorten the acts.
Ed's technique on the show was to introduce the act, then walk to a spot just offstage where he would sit on a stool and watch. On this night, he introduced Jackie Mason, a regular comedian whose humor was based largely on his Jewish identity. Ed held up two fingers, to tell Jackie that he had 2 minutes to do his act.
But Jackie didn't know what the 2 fingers meant, and he went over. Ed kept holding up the fingers, and got madder and madder. The studio audience could see this, and laughed at that, not at Jackie's jokes. "The TV audience couldn't see it," Jackie said, decades later, after he had become a star all over again. "They only knew one thing: This Jew is dying!"
Finally, Jackie decides to use Ed's gestures to his advantage, pointing offstage, and saying, "He keeps showing me fingers, this guy!" Suddenly, the studio audience is laughing at him, and he closes by pointing fingers at everybody, and runs off the stage -- to the other side from Ed.
Ed collared Jackie after the show, and, as Jackie remembered, "I saw a man livid, with violent rage." Ed claimed that Jackie had given him the middle finger. Jackie denied it, saying he'd never even heard of the gesture. Jackie was 36 years old, and had grown up in New York: He knew exactly what it meant. But the surviving videotape is inconclusive: It's not clear that Jackie had made the gesture, or what his intentions were.
Ed banned him from the show. Jackie sued him for defamation of character. After 2 years, they made peace, and Jackie made 5 more appearances on the show. But the damage was done: For 20 years, he was all but unemployable in show business, until starring in a one-man show on Broadway that made him a star again in his 50s.
On January 15, 1967, The Rolling Stones were on, and wanted to sing their song "Let's Spend the Night Together." Trying to avoid a conflict with the censors, Ed's producer, and also his son-in-law, Bob Precht, suggested a slight change: "Let's Spend Some Time Together." The Stones did it that way, but their anger is obvious on the tape.
Eight months later, on September 17, The Doors were on, and were told by Robert Precht -- Ed's producer, and also his son-in-law, married to his daughter Betty -- that the line, "Girl, we couldn't get much higher" from their Number 1 hit "Light My Fire" constituted an advocacy of drug use, and wouldn't be allowed, and they had to change it. They said they would.
They didn't: Lead singer Jim Morrison sang the lyrics exactly as lead guitarist Robbie Krieger had written them, and Precht told them, "We were going to book you for six more Ed Sullivan Shows, and you'll never do The Ed Sullivan Show again!" Morrison had the perfect comeback: "Hey, man, we just did The Ed Sullivan Show." He knew the difference between one and none was bigger than the difference between one and two, or even one and ten.
Ed would frequently get names wrong, especially if they were foreign. At some point, he must have pronounced singer Robert Goulet's name as "GOOL-ett" instead of the correct, French "Goo-LAY," because impressionist Rich Little worked that into his impression of Ed. A frequent guest was Italian opera singer Sergio Franchi (pronounced "FRONG-kee"), and, the 1st time he was on, Ed needed several tries to get his name right.
Ed's memory got worse in the show's later years, and Joan Rivers later suggested that he had developed Alzheimer's disease. Diana Ross recalled that he had trouble remembering the name of her group, The Supremes: "He called us 'the girls.'" After the show was taken off the air, former Beatle Paul McCartney recalled a visit to New York, and said that Ed didn't recognize him, even though The Beatles' appearance is now what the show is best remembered for.
CBS was in a transition in the early 1970s, as a lot of long-time fan-favorite shows were canceled, and a lot of new ones that turned out to be fan-favorites began. In 1971, with the show's ratings having dropped, CBS canceled the show. Ed found out by reading the newspaper. They didn't even have the decency to tell him face-to-face. Three more months of shows were scheduled, but he refused to do them.
The last new episode aired on March 28, 1971. The guests included singer Melanie Safka, impressionist David Frye, and opera singer Joanna Simon, whose sister Carly Simon was about to become a popular singer as well.
Ed Sullivan died of cancer on October 13, 1974, about a year after his wife Sylvia. Betty, his only child, lived until 2014. As of June 20, 2022, son-in-law Bob Precht is still alive, and still controls the show's footage through his company, Sofa Entertainment. (UPDATE: Precht died in 2023.)
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June 20, 1948 was a Sunday. Frank Sinatra only appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show once, on June 28, 1964. But his daughter Tina Sinatra, later a TV producer, was born on the day that the show premiered.
These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees swept a doubleheader from the St. Louis Browns at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. They won the opener, 4-2. Vic Raschi went the distance for the win, and was backed by a home run from Joe DiMaggio. They won the nightcap, 6-2. Red Embree went the distance, and got 2 homers from DiMaggio.
* A doubleheader was split at the Polo Grounds. The St. Louis Cardinals won the 1st game, 7-2. Stan Musial hit a home run. The New York Giants won the 2nd game, 6-4. The Giants hit 3 straight homers in the 8th inning, by Johnny Mize, Willard Marshall and Sid Gordon.
* The Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Chicago Cubs, 6-3 at Ebbets Field. Jackie Robinson went 1-for-4.
* The Boston Braves swept a doubleheader from the Cincinnati Reds, 5-4 and 4-1 at Braves Field in Boston. And the eventual National League Champions did it without either of their aces, Warren Spahn or Johnny Sain: Red Barrett won the 1st game, and Vern Bickford outpitched former double-no-hitter hero Johnny Vander Meer in the 2nd game.
* And a doubleheader was split at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Phillies won the 1st game, 9-0. Dutch Leonard pitched a 4-hit shutout, and Richie Ashburn went 4-for-5. The Pittsburgh Pirates won the 2nd game, 7-5. Ralph Kiner hit 2 home runs.
* The Cleveland Indians swept a doubleheader from the Philadelphia Athletics, 4-3 and 10-0 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Bob Feller won the 1st game, and Bob Lemon pitched a 4-hit shutout in the 2nd game.
* The Boston Red Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 8-3 at Briggs Stadium (later Tiger Stadium) in Detroit. Ted Williams went 2-for-4.
* A doubleheader was split at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The Chicago White Sox won the 1st game, 8-5. The Washington Senators won the 2nd game, 4-1.
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