Word: sullivane
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cardiff Giant. Sullivan started on TV in 1948. Where Milton Berle and Arthur Godfrey had their time of glory and then fell back exhausted, Ed has thrived and grown stronger in the heat of conflict. The battleground of TV is strewn with entertainers who could not quite stay the course-Red Buttons, Wally Cox, George Jessel, Ed Wynn, Ray Bolger, Bing Crosby. Sullivan is the first to admit that any one of these entertainers makes his own talents seem dim indeed. On camera, Ed has been likened to a cigar-store Indian, the Cardiff Giant and a stone-faced monument...
...blasts of the critics in his early days on TV would have broken the spirit of an ordinary man. But Ed Sullivan is a fighter and, like most good fighters, a hungry one. Hungry, that is, for fame, national recognition, the deference of headwaiters and the friendship of the great. He burns up energy as a jet burns up fuel, but the only damage it has done is to give him an ulcer. The crises and satisfactions of his life can best be described in his favorite cliches of sport and Broadway. Ed "plays the game hard"; he "hates...
Royal Barge. Sullivan is about the longest shot ever to have paid off in show business. It is as if Featherweight Willie Pep knocked out Rocky Marciano with a single punch in the second round. No one has any ready explanation, although many have tried. Fred Allen cracks: "Ed Sullivan will last as long as someone else has talent. He has a natural feeling for the mental level of his audience, which is subterranean." Dave Garroway argues that Sullivan is a good master of ceremonies "because he tells the facts and then gets out of the way." Even Sullivan...
Nearly every major meeting the dealers attend finds Sullivan on hand with a load of entertainers. To further the cause of Lincoln-Mercury, Ed has addressed steelworkers before their blast furnaces in Pittsburgh, landed on Boston Common in a helicopter, gone down 20 ft. in a Navy diving suit and sailed up the Mississippi in a barge before 75,000 spectators at the opening of the Memphis Cotton Carnival. His identification with his sponsor is so strong that any Lincoln or Mercury buyer who is dissatisfied with his car is apt to drop Ed a complaining line. (Within ten days...
...shrewd combination of news and human interest. When Arthur Godfrey fired Baritone Julius La Rosa, Ed had the young singer on his show the same week ("There's nothing personal in it-if Arthur got fired, I'd hire him"). The human interest touches are usually emotional. Sullivan presented Helen Hayes shortly after the tragic polio death of her 19-year-old daughter, Mary MacArthur; Broadway Director Josh Logan (South Pacific), who had suffered a breakdown, spoke feelingly on Ed's show about the problems of mental health. Observes Ed: "It's things like these that...