Kindle Notes & Highlights
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April 17 - August 27, 2025
One popular performer was a skilled regurgitator who swallowed live fish and brought them back up at will. Jack Spoons lifted chairs with his teeth while he played the spoons, and Joe Frisco smoked a cigar while doing soft-shoe.
One evening, theater promoter A.C. Blumenthal brought author H.G. Wells, famous for War of the Worlds, to Loew’s State to introduce him to Sullivan. Ed, typing away backstage, was so distracted that when he heard the name, he hardly looked up from his typewriter. Instead, he absented-mindedly said, “Oh, just like the English writer,” at which point Blumenthal had to tell Ed it was the English writer.
“I am the best damned showman on television.… I really believe, immodestly, that I am a better showman and have better taste than most and have a better ‘feel’ as to what the public wants because of my newspaper experience. And I know quicker than anybody else on Sunday nights whether we have done a good performance or not.”
Most lasting of Jordan’s inventions was the phrase “really big show,” or, as he played it, “rilly big shew.” Not only had Ed himself never said that prior to Jordan, when Ed tried to mimic Jordan’s imitation of himself, he goofed the line, voicing it as “truly big show.”
On numerous Sundays, Sullivan told an animal trainer to trim his act by two minutes, only to get a response like, “How am I going to explain that to the lion?”
That same show, Charlton Heston read Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy conversed about Vikings.
For the finale, Mitch Miller entered with an eleven-man chorus singing “Together.” Ed was part of the chorus, along with Henry Fonda, Eddie Fisher, Robert Preston, Van Johnson, Peter Lawford, Mel Ferrer, Tony Randall, Donald O’Connor, David Susskind, and Bobby Darin.
To end their set, Paul said hello in his charming cockney accent
Mellow. That was a word that had never been used to describe Ed Sullivan.
It was a Sunday night. Since 1948 he had lived for Sunday nights, and now he was dying on one. But not until the show was over. Shortly after 10 P.M., as the evening’s program would have been finished, and Sylvia would have been picking him up for dinner at Danny’s Hideaway, he stopped breathing.
His legacy for posterity, stored in the Library of Congress as befitting the archive it is, is the complete collection of Ed Sullivan shows. Taken in their entirety, the one thousand eighty-seven episodes, spanning twenty-three seasons, are an incomparable cultural document.
Fully half the hour or more every week was not intended for them. Yet during most of the years the program ran, entire families sat together and watched it, each member bored in turn, each member aware of and influenced by the others’ reactions. The glow of the cathode-ray tube fell upon a group sitting together, laughing, sighing, or gawking together, not on one or two viewers nurturing an already-established niche interest.
