A central paradox of his life was that he was simultaneously the ultimate establishmentarian and an agent of social change. As the great guardian of the status quo, he ran his national showcase with a puritan’s nose for what might offend, using his total control over the program to bar the slightest suggestion of a blue joke, keeping fabric backstage to cover up female cleavage. The audience, which in his earliest days was allowing a large noisy box into the sanctum of the family living room for the first time, quickly grew to trust him. They understood that he would guard their sensibilities with all of his being. This audience trust granted him a major power. Any performer invited on the show had earned a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval. As comedienne Joan Rivers said, “If he put his arm around you, you knew you had made it. The power he had was enormous.”
And yet this guardian of middle America, this Minister of Culture, exerted a subtle – and sometimes not so subtle – disruptive force on the American living room. The Ed Sullivan Show was based on Ed’s belief in the Big Tent, the variety show as all-inclusive three-ring circus, with elephants and movie stars and jazz singers and football heroes all sharing the same bill. In his view, America was one big family every Sunday night at 8 P.M. He offered something for everyone, all blended together with his signature formula that, in theory, kept the divergent voices from being too discordant. Central to this formula was that Ed always wanted to stay one step – but only one step – ahead of where the audience was willing to go. As the longtime newsman that he was, he had a reporter’s hunger for the hot scoop, the act whose appeal was as fresh as that day’s headlines. Therein lay the destabilizing influence of his supposedly staid Sunday night variety show.
In the course of his push and pull with his beloved audience he presented sights and sounds that helped cause a crack in the cultural dam. In the 1950s, when black faces were invisible on television, they were a constant on the Sullivan stage, and he enraged his sponsor by hugging jazz chanteuse Sarah Vaughn. Ed’s urban sensibilities meant that his trove of Manhattan nightclub discoveries, most notably the rich vein of Jewish comedy, was exported to small towns across the country. In the largest sense, his program demonstrated that everything could be integrated; his appreciation for high art, learned as a boy from his music-loving mother, pushed him to offer a highbrow’s cornucopia of ballet, opera, and legitimate theater on the same stage with slapstick and pop crooners. And finally, and most revolutionary, he used his trusted national showcase to allow into the American living room the great flaying id itself, rock ‘n’ roll, that unwashed legion of guitar twangers, the Pied Pipers of sex and antiestablishmentarianism, which, by the mid 1960s, appeared ready to fell the walls of Jericho. This became a bedrock element of the Sullivan offering. As one reviewer noted, the showman was “one of the fathers of rock ‘n’ roll.”