Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan by James Maguire

Author:James Maguire [Maguire, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307799449
Amazon: B0061C1MVC
Publisher: Billboard Books
Published: 2011-11-23T08:00:00+00:00

As Comedy Hour’s ratings continued to slide, Ed worked behind the scenes to rectify a problem that had long bedeviled Toast of the Town. Between 1948 and 1950, network executives learned from the undisputed ratings of Sullivan’s show and Berle’s Texaco Theater that the variety format was a quick path to profitability. In response, a slew of variety hours were launched. Many, like the Dumont network’s Cavalcade of Stars, had short lives. Yet by the early 1950s a passel of programs were hungry for talent: Comedy Hour, Toast of the Town, Texaco Theater, The Bob Hope Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, All-Star Revue—each had variety schedules to fill. In 1948, Variety predicted that television would run out of performers to present, and that forecast proved prescient. By the early 1950s the competition for talent pushed prices exponentially higher. Where once a Sullivan column mention and $100 was enough to attract guests, those days were now long gone. The relative scarcity of entertainers turned TV talent agents into major players.

The power that talent agents had over Sullivan enraged him. He had a job to do, and in his view they were preventing him from doing it to the best of his ability. As he saw it, Toast of the Town gave early television exposure to many performers, and their agents owed him loyalty. The agents felt differently. To Sullivan’s consternation, they employed a well-choreographed set of maneuvers to push up prices, playing one show off another. If Ed called to request a current hot act, the agent explained that the performer was all booked up—until the price went higher. Or agents refused to even respond to his call until Ed made it clear his bid would go higher. Paul Winchell, a ventriloquist whom Ed booked for a small fee in the show’s earliest days, now expected $2,500—and demanded multiple bookings to appear for that amount. Another popular ventriloquist, Senor Wences, expected a similar fee. A rising young comic named Dick Shawn succeeded in negotiating a guest shot for $10,000 on the condition he get four more appearances at the same price. But Shawn didn’t have enough material and it hurt Sullivan’s ratings.

Most agents first attempted to place their acts with Comedy Hour because of its august pay scale. Ed, with his singular eye for talent, frequently spotted a rising nightclub act or a singer whose music was inching up the charts; after inquiring about their availability, he often got stonewalled, only to see the act sold to Comedy Hour. For this reason, Ed had a fondness for smaller, independent agents, but these representatives didn’t handle the most sought-after performers.

As the competition for talent tightened in the early 1950s, Ed constantly railed to Marlo about what he saw as the lowest form of life, the talent agent. He had a special animosity for MCA agent Johnny Greenhut. “That fat-faced bum with the soft-boiled eyes,” he said to Marlo. “I just made an offer … and Greenhut tells me he has to check to see if David Begelman or Freddie Fields sold them to the Comedy Hour.

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