Fifty years after ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ ended

Today, no one remembers Topo Gigio or Senor Wences. Today, no one thinks the riffs of Alan King are side-splitting gems of comedy. Today, no one would consider it appropriate to film a performer such as Elvis Presley only from the waist up. Today, no one would even think of telling Mick Jagger to cleanse “Let’s spend the night together” into “Let’s spend some time together.” Today, no one thinks it remarkable to have a Black performer on television.

Today, there is no show on television remotely like “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

This is not your usual retrospective on a cultural icon, published on the anniversary of its emergence on the American cultural scene. This is instead a meditation on the end of Ed Sullivan’s variety show, 50 years ago this week.

By June 1971, it was clear that the appeal of mass cultural institutions such as LIFE magazine -- which would survive for only another 18 months -- had faded. “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which you might think of as the LIFE of the air, had flourished when American families watched television together, and when the three television networks craved shows that offered something for all ages.

But times changed, tastes diverged, entertainment options multiplied.

“Its end marked a transition and transformation,” said Glenn C. Altschuler, the Cornell professor whose “All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Changed America” was published in 2003. “An era of mass marketing of popular culture ended and niche marketing began. Entertainment in the 1950s was family entertainment. There was something for everyone.”

And then times changed. Older viewers were heartbroken. So was Sullivan, whose show had been on the air for 23 years beginning in 1948, the first seven as “The Toast of the Town.”

“He was very disappointed,” his granddaughter, Margo Precht Speciale, who is working on an Ed Sullivan documentary, said in a recent conversation. “American tastes changed, and there were other shows that had better ratings. He was hoping to have 25 years -- a personal goal. He didn’t make it.”

But he had made an impression. And unlikely as it may seem today, a man with the stooped posture and reserved personality of Richard Nixon made a difference in American cultural life.

Long before it was fashionable to do so, Sullivan normalized the appearance of Black performers on prime-time television. He had encountered jazz musicians in Harlem in his days as a roving nightlife columnist in Walter Winchell’s shadow, and he introduced artists such as Pearl Bailey and Aretha Franklin to a mass audience. Some 55 years ago, he invited onto the show the young Richard Pryor, whose act dealt with the perils of bad breath and the virtues of “being cool.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that “The Ed Sullivan Show” was an institution -- and that by welcoming Black performers onto his stage, he pushed other American institutions to do the same.

He validated rock ‘n’ roll performers to wary parents and grandparents, first by featuring Elvis Presley, and then by telling a national television audience in 1957, “I wanted to say to Elvis Presley and the country that this is a real decent, fine boy, and wherever you go, Elvis, we want to say we’ve never had a pleasanter experience on our show with a big name than we’ve had with you. So now let’s have a tremendous hand for a very nice person!”

“He exposed people like Elvis and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to an enormous audience at once,” said David Shumway, a professor of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. “Those performances were kind of like the Super Bowl. Everyone watched them, and not just kids. Parents complained about them, but they watched. There was something really exciting about seeing them perform live, because rock really was a visual medium. On this show, rock music wasn’t just sound.”

Topo Gigio, by the way, was an Italian mouse, and Senor Wences was a ventriloquist. But that is almost unnecessary to explain. If you knew that, you read this far. If you didn’t, you abandoned this column paragraphs ago. But if you missed Ed Sullivan on television, you missed a really big show. At least that’s how he would have described it, and that’s how it is remembered.