Edward Vincent Sullivan (September 28, 1901 – October 13, 1974) was an American television host, impresario, sports and entertainment reporter, and syndicated columnist for the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate. He was the creator and host of the television variety program Toast of the Town, which in 1955 was renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. Broadcast from 1948 to 1971, it set a record as the longest-running variety show in U.S. broadcast history. "It was, by almost any measure, the last great American TV show", said television critic David Hinckley. "It's one of our fondest, dearest pop culture memories."
Sullivan was a broadcasting pioneer during the early years of American television. As critic David Bianculli wrote, "Before MTV, Sullivan presented rock acts. Before Bravo, he presented jazz and classical music and theater. Before the Comedy Channel and The Tonight Show, Sullivan discovered, anointed, and popularized young comedians. Before there were 500 channels, before there was cable, Ed Sullivan was where the choice was. From the start, he was indeed 'the Toast of the Town'." In 1996, Sullivan was ranked number 50 on TV Guide's "50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time".
Sullivan was born on September 28, 1901, in Harlem, New York City, to Elizabeth F. (née Smith) and Peter Arthur Sullivan, a customs house employee. His twin brother Daniel was sickly and died when he was two. Sullivan was raised in Port Chester, New York, where the family lived in a small red brick home at 53 Washington Street. He was of Irish descent. The family loved music, frequently playing the piano, singing and playing phonograph records. Sullivan was a gifted athlete in high school, earning 12 athletic letters at Port Chester High School. He played football as a halfback, basketball as a guard and track as a sprinter. With the baseball team, Sullivan was a catcher and the team's captain, leading the team to several championships. Sullivan noted that, in the state of New York, integration was taken for granted in high-school sports: "When we went up into Connecticut, we ran into clubs that had Negro players. In those days this was accepted as commonplace; and so, my instinctive antagonism years later to any theory that a Negro wasn't a worthy opponent or was an inferior person. It was just as simple as that."
Sullivan landed his first job at The Port Chester Daily Item, a local newspaper for which he had written sports news while in high school and which he joined full-time after graduation. In 1919, he joined The Hartford Post, but the newspaper folded in his first week there. He next worked for The New York Evening Mail as a sports reporter. After the newspaper closed in 1923, he bounced through a series of news jobs with the Associated Press, the Philadelphia Bulletin, The Morning World, The Morning Telegraph, The New York Bulletin and The Leader. In 1927, Sullivan joined The New York Evening Graphic, first as a sports writer and then as a sports editor.
In 1929, when Walter Winchell moved to The Daily Mirror, Sullivan was named the New York Evening Graphic's Broadway columnist. He left the paper for the city's largest tabloid, the New York Daily News. His column, "Little Old New York", concentrated on Broadway shows and gossip, and Sullivan also delivered show business news broadcasts on radio. In 1933, Sullivan wrote and starred in the film Mr. Broadway, in which he guided the audience around New York nightspots to meet entertainers and celebrities. Sullivan soon became a powerful force in the entertainment world and one of Winchell's main rivals, setting the El Morocco nightclub in New York as his unofficial headquarters against Winchell's seat of power at the nearby Stork Club. Sullivan continued writing for the New York Daily News throughout his broadcasting career, and his popularity long outlived that of Winchell. In the late 1960s, Sullivan praised Winchell's legacy in a magazine interview, leading to a major reconciliation between the longtime adversaries.
Throughout his career as a columnist, Sullivan had dabbled in entertainment, producing vaudeville shows with which he appeared as master of ceremonies in the 1920s and 1930s, directing a radio program over the original WABC and organizing benefit reviews for various causes.
In 1941, Sullivan became host of the Summer Silver Theater, a variety program on CBS, with Will Bradley as bandleader and a guest star featured each week.
In 1948, producer Marlo Lewis convinced CBS to hire Sullivan to host a weekly Sunday-night television variety show, Toast of the Town, which later became The Ed Sullivan Show. Debuting in June 1948, the show was originally broadcast from Maxine Elliott's Theatre on West 39th Street in New York. In January 1953, it moved to CBS-TV Studio 50 at 1697 Broadway, a former CBS Radio playhouse that in 1967 was renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater (and was later the home of the Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert).
Television critics gave the new show and its host poor reviews. Harriet Van Horne alleged that "he got where he is not by having a personality, but by having no personality." (The host wrote to the critic, "Dear Miss Van Horne: You bitch. Sincerely, Ed Sullivan.") Sullivan had little acting ability; in 1967, 20 years after his show's debut, Time magazine asked, "What exactly is Ed Sullivan's talent?" His mannerisms on camera were so awkward that some viewers believed the host suffered from Bell's palsy. Time in 1955 stated that Sullivan resembled "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," the magazine concluded, "instead of frightening children, Ed Sullivan charms the whole family." Sullivan appeared to the audience as an average guy who brought the great acts of show business to their home televisions. "Ed Sullivan will last", comedian Fred Allen said, "as long as someone else has talent." Frequent guest Alan King said, "Ed does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else in television." A typical show would feature a vaudeville act (such as acrobats, jugglers or magicians), one or two popular comedians, a singing star, a figure from the legitimate theater, an appearance by puppet Topo Gigio or a popular athlete. The bill was often international in scope, with many European performers appearing along with the American artists.
Sullivan had a healthy sense of humor about himself and permitted and even encouraged impersonators such as John Byner, Frank Gorshin, Rich Little and especially Will Jordan to imitate him on his show. Johnny Carson also performed a fair impression, and even Joan Rivers imitated Sullivan's unique posture. The impressionists exaggerated his stiffness, raised shoulders and nasal tenor phrasing, along with some of his commonly used introductions, such as "And now, right here on our stage ...", "For all you youngsters out there ..." and "a really big shew" (his pronunciation of the word "show"). Sullivan never actually spoke the phrase "really big show" during the opening introduction of any episode in the entire history of the series. Jordan portrayed Sullivan in the films I Wanna Hold Your Hand, The Buddy Holly Story, The Doors, Mr. Saturday Night, Down with Love and in the 1979 television movie Elvis.
Sullivan played himself, parodying his mannerisms as directed by Jerry Lewis, in Lewis' 1964 film The Patsy.
Sullivan inspired a song in the musical Bye Bye Birdie and in 1963 appeared as himself in the film.
In 1954, Sullivan appeared as a cohost on the television musical special General Foods 25th Anniversary Show: A Salute to Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Sullivan was quoted as saying: "In the conduct of my own show, I've never asked a performer his religion, his race or his politics. Performers are engaged on the basis of their abilities. I believe that this is another quality of our show that has helped win it a wide and loyal audience." Although Sullivan was wary of Elvis Presley's image and initially said that he would never book him, Presley became too big a name to ignore; in 1956, Sullivan signed him for three appearances. Six weeks earlier in August 1956, Sullivan and the show's producer Robert Precht (who was also Sullivan's son-in-law) were in a near fatal car accident near Sullivan's country home in Southbury, Connecticut, and missed Presley's first appearance on September 9, when Charles Laughton introduced Presley. After Sullivan came to know Presley personally, he made amends by telling his audience, "This is a real decent, fine boy."