James Maguire on Ed Sullivan and the Ed Sullivan Show

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That's OurAmericanStories.com. And today we have the author and journalist James McGuire on to tell us the story of Ed Sullivan. James wrote a book on Ed's life, Impressario, the life and times of Ed Sullivan. And we wanted to hear from him about the life of this TV legend.

James, thanks for joining us. Let's start at the beginning. Where did Ed Sullivan come from? What made him who he became?

Ed Sullivan was born in 1901 in Harlem, New York. Very poor Irish Catholic family. And I mean, I think they did not even have the money for medical care. He had a twin brother who died, you know, very, very young, like shortly after his birth. He also had a sister who died very young as well. I mean, it was it was a desperate, very poor life there in Harlem, New York. His father was known to be someone who really could not get along with people very well. He was a civil servant.

At first, he made almost a middle class wage, but then he got in a number of disagreements with people and his socioeconomic status fell and fell. So when Sullivan's two siblings died, I think the parents just could not take it anymore. They decided, you know, we need to move out of Harlem. We need to move to a little town. So when he was really a very young boy, they moved to Port Chester, New York, which is just north of New York City, maybe, oh, you know, half hour or so.

Really, it's basically a stone's throw away from New York City. It was for him a very way more pleasant place to grow up. And in terms of his life around the house, his mother was very big into opera and music. They played the piano around the house and she played recordings of opera.

It was like there was a lot of explosion of music around the house. You know, that played a big role in him. He dreamed of New York City. He always thought, you know, how am I going to get to New York City? First, he wanted, you know, as World War One broke out, he had dreams of like going overseas and actually becoming a soldier. But he actually wasn't quite old enough to be a soldier. So he went down to the recruiting office and tried to fake it. But they would not let him into the into the army. He was very disappointed about that. He had to go back home. But he did move.

He took a very low level job as a sportswriter in New York City in the 1920s. And that for him was a dream come true. I mean, he wrote about this this show in Manhattan that featured dogs.

It's like a huge dog show. And he saw his byline on the newspaper and he was hooked. And that was always something that drove him. He always really wanted to be famous.

He wanted to be known. And seeing his byline in a newspaper was just, you know, it was addictive for him. And so he had quite a bit of success as a sports reporter. He bounced around from newspaper to newspaper all throughout the 1920s.

It was never hard for him to get a job. He was he wrote about any kind of sports, football, baseball, swimming, golf. I mean, he wrote about it all. The big twist for him that sort of moved him further into the world of entertainment was that he switched from being a sports reporter to being a gossip columnist for a newspaper. And that really suddenly got him into the world of fame in New York City. So he was constantly hanging out and getting to know and writing about celebrities and athletes.

You know, movie stars, radio stars really in the early days and later on movie stars in New York City. So and it gave him, you know, really still more touch of fame. And he loved it. Ed's life was driven by a competitive zeal. Can you tell us about his first major rivalry? There was a gossip columnist in New York City, a guy named Walter Winchell.

His name is unknown at this point, but in the 1930s in America. And Ed and Walter were fierce competitors. The two of them had a fierce competition. And of course, as big as Walter's gossip column was, really it was Walter's radio show. He had a national radio show and Ed saw that and thought, you know, I need to get my own radio show. So he round up some talent and he would interview people on a radio show and it was a complete flop. And the problem was that he wrote a very colorful gossip column, but he himself was not a performer. He was, you know, he had a very sort of a droll, you know, downbeat, you know, delivery. Still, he really wanted to be, he wanted to be famous. And so, you know, the 1920s radio was the domain. So he tried to get another radio show.

And again, it would last like six or eight weeks and it just would not work. You know, he worked the gossip column angle really hard. It's hard to remember exactly how big newspapers were in the 1920s and 1930s. You know, they were far, far bigger than they are now in a world without television and a world in which movies were in its infancy. You know, newspapers were the mass medium. And so being a columnist at that time was really a big deal. And that helped solve and of course, get guests for his radio show. And he had a total of five radio shows finally. And every single one was canceled after a fairly short run. You know, one of the things he did partially to compensate and also as an outgrowth of his gossip column was that he began to organize vaudeville shows in the 1930s in New York City.

And, you know, the important thing to remember about that is that, you know, America was in a depression in those days. And so, you know, people would buy their, they would pay their dime to get in a nickel to get in for the vaudeville show. And they were a very, very demanding audience.

If they didn't like it, you know, if they didn't like a performer, if they didn't like an act, they would certainly let the performer know they're a rowdy bunch. And Sullivan produced vaudeville shows sometimes six nights a week, you know, five, six nights a week for years in New York City. And his vaudeville shows were sort of a precursor to the final television show in that it was a mix. It could be a comedian, a singer, you know, a mime, you know, maybe some sort of a bizarre oddity act, you know, a juggler.

And they would all move really quickly. And Sullivan would emcee those vaudeville shows. Of course, there was live, live theater. And that really gave him a lot of experience in terms of how to put on a show. It taught him a lot.

It also gave him that very, very immediate feedback. You know, he would stand backstage and he would watch the performer on stage. He would watch the audience on stage.

He would see, OK, how is this? How is it the audience really needed this performer? He became, you know, sort of very, very attuned to the idea of what it meant to build an audience. And we're listening to James McGuire talk about the life of Ed Sullivan, a man we all know or have heard of, but don't know the story behind the story. More of the life of Ed Sullivan here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American stories dot com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.

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Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. And we're back with our American stories and with the story of Ed Sullivan. And joining us is James Maguire, who wrote the book Impressario, The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan.

Let's pick up where we last left off with James talking about Sullivan's experience in vaudeville and as a gossip columnist. He's really renowned way before his television years. He was actually quite well known as a gossip columnist. He wrote for a paper of the New York Daily News, which is still publishing daily today.

Still a big paper in New York City. In the 1940s, they even sent him out to Hollywood to sort of, you know, write about, you know, movie stars. And I mean, everyone, you know, Fred Astaire, all the major stars were like, you know, play golf with him. And he really hobnobbed with all these people. He knew them all because they wanted to be in his gossip column. You know, in the days before television, being in a major gossip column like that was really a ticket to get more notoriety.

So everyone wanted to be nice to him because they wanted to mention in his column. In the late 1940s, the very, very beginning of television. And, you know, he had these frustrated, you know, dreams of fame from radio and he had failed so much in radio. And he saw television, he thought, you know what, I am not going to fail in this medium. I failed constantly and I'm not going to fail in television. He actually wrote that in one of his columns before his show debuted, his television show debuted.

He wrote a column about how he had made up his mind. He had failed in radio, but I'm not going to fail in TV. And so, you know, CBS, you know, launched a variety show in 1948. It was called Toast to the Town. They didn't know who to ask to be the emcee of the show.

I mean, there weren't, of course, any television stars because TV had not existed. And here was Sullivan. He was a fairly well-known, actually quite well-known gossip columnist. So they thought, well, let's ask this Sullivan guy. And the thing is, you know, CBS thought that, you know, or they knew that Sullivan could get guests because Sullivan knew all these people because he wrote about them in his gossip column. They gave Ed a $300 a week budget to book guests.

So, I mean, the entire hour of performing was filled with a $300 budget. And so, you know, much of those, that early year or so, Sullivan actually had to pay his, use his own money to pay guests to get on the show, if you believe that or not. One of the reasons CBS was banking on him because he had the power of newspapers, which is sort of ironic when you think about it. A television network was relying on the power of a newspaper, you know, to get guests, which of course, you know, things have really changed now. And that early show, those early shows were really, really rough.

Sullivan, of course, was extremely nervous. I mean, as it was live television, it wasn't recorded. So, like when that camera blinked on, you were talking to the live audience. And at that, in those early days, the live audience was just the New York area. And it wasn't even a nationwide, you know, network at that point.

CBS was not quite nationwide. He was horribly nervous that the show was, you know, slow moving. But the thing that really saved him early on was all those years producing vaudeville shows. He knew how to put on a show and he knew what the audience liked. I mean, he didn't need to guess what the audience liked because in a sense, he was one of them.

He was an everyman. So, if he liked it, they were going to like it. He had a very good sense of what they were going to like. As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the show really did really well. And CBS, you know, was very happy with it.

They had, you know, advertisers and, you know, Ford Motor Company began advertising with it. And CBS realized, you know, they had a hit on their head. Meanwhile, NBC looked at it and they said, oh, a variety show on Sunday night, huh? Well, if this Ed Sullivan fellow is doing that, we can do it far better than this Ed Sullivan guy. He's boring. The thing that they didn't fully realize is that Sullivan himself was, of course, you know, not an entertainer.

He was a very uncle-ed, very slow-measured performer. But the way that he knew how to put on a show, he could balance the various acts on stage. You know, people really loved that. Colgate-Palmolive sponsored the NBC show and they thought, you know, well, you know, we will put so much money into this.

We will just steamroll, you know, the Sullivan show. And, you know, backed by the Colgate-Palmolive's ad dollars, they booked all sorts of big acts. They had Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, which were at the time were like super, super hot.

You know, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin had a very hot nightclub back in New York City. And the NBC show did pretty well. But, you know, Sullivan really dug in his heels and he used all the skills he had learned in all those years at vaudeville. And at the end of like a two-year period, he had really outproduced the NBC show. And so, his ratings were actually beating NBC, even though NBC's talent budget was far greater. It was simply his ability to produce a show really made the show a huge success. And, you know, when CBS first hired Sullivan to do the show, it was called Toaster to Town.

But by the early 1950s, he was able to renegotiate his contract and it would now be called The Ed Sullivan Show. And it was really his show. And he produced it and he chose the acts every week.

You know, he chose what order they were in. Even though he was the emcee of the show, what he was really doing, he was producing the show by choosing the acts, deciding, you know, who was going to be on. You know, with every passing season, he kept his, you know, sort of finger on the pulse of America. He knew who was big and he kept, you know, relating to the culture at large.

And, you know, as TV really became a prime part of American life in the 1950s, you know, everyone was gathered around their black and white TV. He was really, you know, the one who just sort of, he became Uncle Ed to the mass audience. They looked to him as sort of the imprimatur, so to speak, of, you know, what is good. He had a consistent gift.

He never faltered. You know, he always sort of balanced, you know, something really wholesome with something really jazzy. He would have athletes on. He might have a choir on. He'd have comedians on.

It was a mix. And there was always something for the entire family. There was something for little kids, something for the teenagers, something for the grownups. There might be, you know, a Broadway show, might be actually a cat, the live cast from a Broadway show would walk across town and actually perform a scene, you know, in live television. You know, it could be Frank Sinatra. It could be, you know, the larger, you know, the most popular comedians of the day.

Everyone was on The Sullivan Show. And James, you write that he didn't just have his finger on the pulse of entertainment. He was a forward thinker, too.

Tell us about that. He really pioneered black performance. He really believed in, you know, diversity on the air.

And he was way ahead of his time in this regard. And there were, you know, times where some of the sponsors and some of the audience even got upset, like, you know, there might have been an element of racism in the audience, but he refused to, like, bow down to that. And there's this great moment, Ed booked the singer Nat King Cole in the mid 1950s. Nat King Cole, of course, is black. Nat King Cole did this sort of this Hawaiian theme and there were two dancers dancing along stage with him instead of this Hawaiian.

You know, they're all, everyone was in Hawaiian garb. Nat King Cole was very elegantly dressed and they were like white women dancers, you know, swaying their hips along with Nat King Cole's sort of jazzy tune. And in 1955 or the early 1950s, that was actually unheard of for like white performers and black performers to be on stage together was like, oh, my God, I'm sure, you know, much of the audience would have been shocked by that.

But Sullivan refused to, you know, be cowed by that. He constantly booked black performers. It was sort of an historic moment when the singer Pearl Bailey, he gave her a kiss in the cheek one night after she performed. It was like, oh, my God, I outraged the audience, but it just did not matter to him.

He was going to go ahead and do that. I mean, it was something that mattered to him greatly. You know, James, Sullivan took a leap of faith that most of us wouldn't think of as a hard decision, and that was booking Elvis Presley. You know, Elvis Presley was, of course, exploiting on the scene in the 1950s, and Sullivan realized that if he was going to keep his ratings up, he needed to be able to book these really huge ratings. And he looked at Elvis and he was full of hesitation at first because Elvis was a rock and roller. There was something dangerous about about Elvis Presley. And when we come back, we're going to continue with that thought on Elvis Presley and how Ed Sullivan made the choice to head in the direction and embraced a lot of these rock and rollers and how he balanced the old cultural norms with the new ones and how all of that catapulted his show into, well, let's just say the stratosphere. When we come back, more of the life of an unlikely impresario, and in the end, a very likely one as well. And that is, of course, Ed Sullivan and the Ed Sullivan Show.

Find out more of this remarkable life story, this quintessential American story, here on Our American Stories. There's a recipe for getting your car running just right. And whatever you're cooking up in the garage, you'll find what you need at eBay Motors dot com. They have over one hundred and twenty two million car parts and accessories in stock, all at the right prices, and that can help you turn your ride into something really tasty.

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Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. And we're back with our American stories and with James Maguire, the author of Impressario. James, you were just telling us about how having Elvis on The Sullivan Show was a risky move. But Ed did it anyway. What was that all about? On the other hand, Sullivan had to have him on.

And so, what he did is he did his best to balance it out. He had Elvis on multiple times. And it was going to be huge. It was actually quite controversial because the show was so wholesome and Elvis was not known to be wholesome. And the very first night that Elvis was on, it was a huge cultural moment. I mean, there were literally 60 million people tuned in to live television that night.

Which is about a third of the country at that point. What Sullivan did was he instructed the cameraman to only shoot Elvis from the hips upwards. You couldn't see those dangerous swiveling hips that Elvis did.

You could just see him singing. He did his best to sort of sanitize Elvis for the section of the audience that was outraged. And yet still mine him for ratings. After that first show, there was enormous controversy. I mean, people said, oh, that is filth. Ed has lost his way.

Why is this trash on the air? On the other hand, the ratings were so huge that Sullivan had to kind of keep trying to get him on. He had him on again. The second time he booked him, he actually booked a children's choir to sing before him.

It was very sort of religious and very, very sweet and wholesome. And then Ed introduced Elvis and he talked about Elvis and he said, he's a fine young boy. A fine young man was the phrase. He's a fine young man. And it was Ed's way of saying, look, don't be threatened by this guy.

He's okay. Which it was kind of like Ed beginning to go down that slippery slope of, well, the show had been really, really wholesome. But rock and roll is growing and we need to have this on. So Elvis was a big cultural moment and it was almost like the birth of rock and roll in the American living room. When Ed Sullivan had Elvis Presley on television, something changed in America.

Something shifted there. Which brings us to the early 60s. The idea of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan's show in February of 1964. And there's this story that Ed always tried to promote about how he discovered the Beatles.

It's actually not true. He always claimed that he was coming home from London and he saw the Beatles getting off a plane in London and it was a mob scene. He decided right then and there to book the Beatles. In fact, there was a young talent agent who worked in Europe named Peter Pichard that Ed trusted. And Peter said, I think these Beatles guys might be worth booking.

Ed wasn't sure at first. And indeed, the Beatles had really hardly been heard of in America at that point. They had maybe some radio play, but they were not big. And they're certainly really a rock band.

As soft as the Beatles may seem now, they were truly a rock band in their day. And he saw the potential for them. He could see them going up the charts in England.

He thought, okay, it's time to take a chance on these young lads. But he was going to downplay them at first as well. I mean, in that time in 1964, the headliners for the Ed Sullivan show were making simply like $10,000 a night. The Beatles actually got paid $3,500 for three different performances, $3,500 a night for three different performances. And they weren't even the headliners to begin with.

As the show came up, as February of 64, that first show came up, the cultural momentum built so much. It was like, oh my God, the teenagers were beginning to discover who the Beatles were. They came to America. They gave a few interviews. They seemed really charming.

They had long hair. It was pretty outrageous. And that night, February 9, 1964, they debuted.

They played three songs. The crowd went absolutely crazy. The teenage girls could not control themselves. Ed had to restrict the tickets. It was really hard to get a ticket that night.

He made a big deal of giving a few straight tickets to some friends because everyone who had a teenager wanted to get a seat in the auditorium that night. A total of 74 million people watched that first show that night. It was, again, really the night that Ed Sullivan had the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. In a sense, it was like the true beginning of the rock era in America.

We'd have them on live two more times, and then he had a number of recorded performances. But it really changed things. It did create the beginning of a schism in the show. Obviously, the ratings were through the roof. There was a segment of the audience that absolutely really loved the Beatles. There was another segment of the audience that really detested the Beatles.

I read a lot of the reviews in the Washington Post and other serious newspapers. They were outraged. These boys don't know how to make music.

It's just a lot of noise. They need to get a haircut, get a job, and get a haircut. Sullivan, again, he played a similar game that he had done with Elvis. He'd do his best to soften the Beatles' image and be friends with them and have these publicity photos taken. The Beatles are actually nice young boys.

He really played that as much as he could. If anything, it made the show really the dominant cultural platform of the 1960s. It became the kind of platform where if Ed had you on, you were going to be famous, whether it was a comedian or a juggler or certainly a music band, something theatrical.

If you were booked in the Ed Sullivan Show, it meant you were famous. The Beatles helped move that process along. One of the problems was that the show was always the big tent.

It had something for everyone, the kids, the teenagers, the grownups, mom and dad. The problem is as rock became more dominant, the audience couldn't always sit through what the other audience members liked. Rock and roll caused something of a schism in his audience. Even as it jet-fueled the ratings, a big part of the audience was very, very upset by it. The Rolling Stones were getting big right there in the mid-1960s as well.

Ed did his best to sanitize them. Of course, the Rolling Stones had a song called Let's Spend the Night Together. Sullivan insisted that they change the lyrics to Let's Spend Some Time Together, which the Rolling Stones agreed to because they really wanted to be on the show because it was so big. When Mick Jagger actually sang that lyric, Let's Spend Some Time Together, he really played with it very theatrically and rolled his eyes.

He made fun of it for those people who knew what the real lyric was. He almost mocked it, but they wanted to be on the show. One night, he had the Rolling Stones on a number of times. He insisted that they wash their hair before they go on because it pissed Sullivan off that they had long hair. He did not really like these long hair types. I interviewed Joan Rivers, and I read about that he had asked the Rolling Stones to wash their hair.

Joan Rivers was on one of those nights. He insisted the Rolling Stones wash their hair. It was endlessly square. He wanted the ratings, but that square part of him never went away.

No, it never went away. Part of the audience was really square, and part of it wasn't. Imagine 74 million Americans watched the Beatles and their first appearance, and the country then had 192 million people. By the way, even Uncle Walter did not approve. The great Walter Cronkite complained about the music.

He said it wasn't for him, and he did not like the long hair and made notice of it. Thus came the great divide in America. There's Ed Sullivan right in the middle of it.

When we come back, more of this remarkable story about the impresario Ed Sullivan with James McGuire here on Our American Story. There's a recipe for getting your car running just right. And whatever you're cooking up in the garage, you'll find what you need at eBayMotors.com. They have over 122 million car parts and accessories in stock, all at the right prices. And that can help you turn your ride into something really tasty.

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Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. And we're back with our American stories and the final segment with James Maguire and his book Impressario, The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan. James, tell us about the production of the show and what made it so unique for that kind of product. The thing about the show is that it remained live television throughout the run. It ran from 1948 to 1971. It was live television the entire time.

So if there was a mistake, there was a mistake. And Sullivan really ran it so carefully minute by minute. But sometimes he would need to tell performers later in the show, hey, these earlier show performers ran a little long.

You're going to have to cut down your act a little bit if you want to get on the air. George Carlin, the comedian, Carlin is on The Sullivan Show many times. And it would always be very nerve wracking to him because George Carlin would have this routine put together like five or six minutes, carefully constructed routine.

One line led to the next. And he would be booked for like minute 50 in the hour long show. Sullivan would come backstage at around minute 38 and go, well, we're running long. You're going to have to cut two minutes from your act.

And, you know, in the next 10 minutes before he went on the air, you know, George Carlin would have to figure out, OK, how am I going to cut down my act from six minutes to four minutes? So it was I mean, it was really, really nerve wracking for a lot of performers to have to make changes and deal with with live television. Things really took a turn, James, when The Doors performed on the show. And that band was, of course, led by Jim Morrison.

Tell us about that incident. So The Doors, of course, were going to as they became famous, they you know, they were booked, Ed definitely booked them on the show. And again, he didn't like the lyrics. There was a drug reference, you know, something along the lines of, you know, you take me higher. And it sounded to Ed like, you know, someone's doing drugs.

He didn't want that on the air. And so he said, you know, you're going to have to change the lyrics. Jim Morrison and the band kind of hemmed and hawed about it.

And, you know, they really wanted to be in the show because there was so much fame involved with being on the show. Morrison agreed, OK, I will change. I will change the lyrics. And in the control room, they had ways of dealing with with, you know, rock bands. They could change the they could sometimes, you know, turn things down and turn things up, which they would do on occasion.

They would shift the camera angle. So they were they were ready for Morrison, but they expected him to change the lyric as he did. So when it actually came to the live performance, he went ahead, he sang the original lyric as he was written in the song. And he just he refused.

And it was kind of this this classic moment where, you know, this rebellious generation simply was not going to be controlled by the establishment anymore. And, you know, that was a real problem for Sullivan. So the producer of the show went went backstage and said to the, you know, the door as well.

Mr. Sullivan was going to book you boys five more times, but you'll never be in the show again. And, you know, Jim Morrison looked at him and said, look, you know, we did Ed Sullivan. And of course, that was the end of the doors. But it did create a time period where the rock bands were getting edgier.

It was the late 1960s. It wasn't sort of the wholesome, you know, finger snapping Beatles quite as much anymore that, you know, the acid rock was coming up. It really created a problem for the audience. It exacerbated the earlier problem where, like, parts of the audience simply could not handle it. They would not want to stand, you know, sit through the, you know, the rock music.

Obviously, the teenagers loved it. And the Sullivan show was, you know, a big part of a rock band's career in the 1960s was playing the Ed Sullivan show. The problem was, you know, for the older audience who who hated it, it caused a problem for the show. And it's really one of the things that helped bring the show to an end. And that before rock and roll, everyone could sit together and watch this show.

And, you know, you might not love all of it, but it was all going to be OK. Once these harder edged, you know, acid rock bands started getting on, part of the audience said, no, we're just not going to take it anymore. And so that it caused a lot of problems with ratings for the show. And it was almost like the beginning of a trend in television where there was narrow casting before there had been the big tent was really Sullivan's classic formula. But, you know, American culture had began to break into its various niches so that that big tent wasn't working for Sullivan anymore. Finally, you know, CBS say we can't you know, the ratings aren't there anymore. And the show was canceled in 1971.

Ed was hoping it could run for a couple more years. He was really, really heartbroken. His world ended at that point. And he had suffered in those later years in the 1960s, in the later 1960s and early 70s. He suffered what, you know, what appeared to be it was never officially diagnosed as Alzheimer's, but it had the feeling of kind of a dementia. He had a lot of memory problems beyond just what an elderly man might. And he had an extremely lonely period.

And I mean, his family didn't live right next to him. And so as much as they loved him and did their best, it's like he had a for all the glory of the show and the glamour of the show and the enormous fame that the show brought him. And really, in a sense, he attained his lifelong dream was to be famous. He wanted to be famous and he became famous at the very end of his life. I think he was very lonely and I think he felt lost.

James, tell us about Sullivan's final days and also about the legacy he left. In his very final days, he was living in New York City by himself and, you know, very, very lonely. And he contracted esophageal cancer. You know, the doctors knew he was dying. They didn't want to let him know. His family didn't want to let him know because they wanted to keep his spirits up. But they knew, in fact, he was dying.

He was admitted to the hospital. Ironically, he died on a Sunday night, later in the evening on a Sunday night. And it's kind of like the ultimate irony of his life in that he had lived for Sunday nights from 1948 to 1971. Every Sunday night for all those years had been about the show. And then so, you know, he had lived for Sunday nights. And indeed, you know, he died on a Sunday night.

So I think it's something almost poetic about that. There's a few things I would say is the legacy of him is that if you look at the shows, and the shows are again stored at the Library of Congress. I mean, those 23 years from 1948 to 1971 are really an incredible compendium of the brightest lights in American culture in that time period.

The best of Broadway, the best of classical. He booked classical music, the best of rock music, you know, comedians, entertainers of all stripes, athletes. I mean, it's something like, you know, 10,000 performers were on the show over the course of his 23 year run.

And the fact that record exists is an amazing record of American culture in those years. And he was such a news hound and sort of he kept his finger in the pulse. When things changed, he changed with it. He was never booking last year's act.

He was always booking this year's act or maybe even a little bit ahead. And so, the show becomes a complete, you know, sort of cultural repository of what was so special, what was so wonderful and fabulous about American culture in those years. In a sense, his idea of the big tent in which there's something for everyone became outdated for television itself. I mean, television moved into serving narrow slices of the audience. But there is that image of the big tent where we all sat together and watched television as a family. And we shared this communal experience.

It's really very, very beautiful. And you've been listening to James McGuire and his terrific book, Impressario, The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan. And in a way, it's a walk through the 20th century. There wasn't anybody or anything that didn't want to come on that stage and share their talents.

Nobody didn't come there and show up. And what made the Sullivan Show a success ultimately, in the end, led to its demise. Rock and roll became that medium that had at its core separation from the old and the young.

I mean, the infamous Pete Townsend, quote, never trust anyone over 30 and that he hoped he died by the time he was 30. It was at the root of rock and roll. It was rebellion at its essence.

And in the end, Sullivan embraced it. And in the end, the country was fragmenting and the country was being split apart by not only this music, by a new generation hellbent on separating from their family traditions and from American traditions often. I can still see in my head vividly that performance by Jim Morrison. Because it wasn't just edgy. It was dark. And when he sang the lyrics from Light My Fire, he shouted, girl, you can't get much higher.

Shouted it. He reveled in the rebellion and in sticking it to Sullivan. And this was something I think that Ed felt a deep betrayal about. Because here he was trying to advance the careers of these folks and the doors and bands like it. And in the end, they had no respect for him and no regard for his audience. And in the end, Ed died a lonely man, had spent no time on his family, had chased fame, got the fame, but something big was missing. I mean, the end of the book is really tough because he loses his wife and his show at about the same time. And in the end, he lost his life. He had wanted so desperately, by the way, to make it to his 25th anniversary. And he got to 23.

10,000 performers on the show in 23 years, an achievement that no one has matched since. The story of Ed Sullivan. By the way, pick the book up impresario. Go to Amazon.com.

You won't put it down. It's quite a read about ambition and fame and the limits of both and living a good and happy life. Again, the story of Ed Sullivan. The book is impresario. The Ed Sullivan story.

The story of fame and its limits here on Our American Story. Excuse me. Did you know that when you use the Roto app to buy a car, Roto actually finds all the secret available rebates and discounts specific to you. So the price I see is my unique price? That's right.

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Download the Roto app or check out Roto.com. This February, Xfinity Flex is unlocking premium entertainment for you to try every single week. No strings attached. Celebrate during Black History Month with shows like Unsung the Decades. Snuggle up during Valentine's Day with a Lifetime Movie Club pick like Harry and Meghan A Royal Romance. Or crank up the action with Godfather of Harlem from MGM Plus. Get down and funky with the Classic Soul playlist from iHeartRadio. Easily discover new free content each week across the best streaming app. Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. This is Kevin Costner, and if you're an avid traveler like me, you've got to download my new app, Auteo. That's audio with a T. A-U-T-I-O. Enjoy a new way of traveling with stories activated by your location. So when you're driving through a new town, discovering a national park, or just curious about the origin of your city's name, you can listen to a quick three to five minute story, covering our history from the First Peoples to famous places and insights only locals would know.