Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (4 page)

Central to his resentment was that, unlike his brothers, he hadn’t been able to complete his education. Peter’s parents, Florence and Margaret O’Sullivan, had emigrated from County Cork, Ireland, fleeing the ravaging famine of the mid 1800s in which more than a million souls starved. Florence and his brother John and their families made the journey together. Stopping in London on their way to the New World, the O’Sullivan brothers decided to Americanize their surname; they would now sign their name as Sullivan. Despite this effort at assimilation, Florence and Margaret’s circumstances were only marginally better in their new home. They settled in the fertile valley around Amsterdam, New York, but the family farm took years to rise above subsistence level. Peter, as the oldest son in a family of eight, was forced to leave school and go to work to help support his family.

As the family’s fortunes improved, Florence was able to send his younger sons to college. Two of Peter’s younger brothers, Charles and Daniel, were honor students in college, and another, Florence Jr., became a noted attorney in New York City. Peter possessed the intelligence to have joined them had he been allowed to finish school. He was a gifted mathematician and—when he deigned to speak—a passionate debater about the issues of the day; he ardently supported workers’ rights and railed against industrialists like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. More than anything, though, as his son Ed recalled, Peter felt frustrated by not having achieved more. He was a failure in his own eyes.

If Peter was darkness and clouds, then his wife Elizabeth, called Lizzy, was sunshine and warmth. While Peter, ten years her senior, was an iron-willed believer in corporal punishment, viewing compromise as weakness, Lizzy was gentle and encouraging, and usually handled her children with a soft touch. Years later Ed wrote, “
My father was, in every sense, the head of the family, but my mother was its heart.” The difference was clear simply by looking at them: Peter had a solid frame and a square, firm jaw; Lizzy was slender, with flowing brunette tresses surrounding her comely face. With Lizzy, Peter had married above his station. Although her mother had been a poor Irish squatter’s daughter, her father, Edward Smith, was a man of means, a landholder in upstate New York. Lizzy’s family imbued her with a genteel Victorian sensibility, and she was educated in the arts. She loved music, especially the light operas of the late 1890s, and was an amateur painter.

In the early fall of 1901, Peter and Lizzy were expecting a new arrival in their Harlem flat on East 127th Street. The baby would join Helen, born in 1897, and Charles, born in 1899. When Lizzy gave birth on September 28, she and Peter were met with a surprise: twin boys. Edward, husky and healthy, and Daniel, small and sickly. The lucky one, christened Edward Vincent, was a robust, squalling infant, crying at the top of his lungs to be fed. Young Danny, however, was a worry; he seemed hardly to have made it into this world.

As the months wore on, nothing that Lizzy did succeeded in helping the child gain weight. She tried feeding him a mixture of light barley, water, and milk, yet he only grew sicklier. The family’s tenement apartment wasn’t the best place to nurse a sick infant, and though his weight kept falling, he apparently was never admitted to a hospital. In the middle of the night on July 19, Danny died at home. The cause was listed as infant marasmus, emaciation due to malnutrition, possibly caused by problems in the child’s digestive tract. Two days later the family made a mournful trip up to the town of Amsterdam to bury their ten-month-old son in the family plot.

The death of his twin brother would haunt Ed throughout his childhood. Later, he recounted that when he was “whaled” by his father—a common occurrence—or given the switch by nuns at parochial school, he would imagine that his life would have been different “
if only Danny were here.” Much later in life, Sullivan attributed his high energy level to Danny’s premature death, as if the surviving brother had been supernaturally granted the energy of his deceased twin. One Sunday evening, while hosting his show in front of a television audience of some thirty-five million people, Ed noted a location in New York from which one of his guests hailed. For a moment, he seemed to lose himself in thought, then confided, “
That’s where my brother Danny is buried.” (And if Danny’s problem had been a gastrointestinal defect, it was surely shared by his brother, who was plagued by such problems throughout his adult life.)

The Sullivans soon had another child. Lizzy greeted the girl with a renewed maternal instinct, naming her new daughter after herself. But young Elizabeth, like Danny, was also colicky and cranky. Again, Lizzy was up nights trying to comfort her, but, like Danny, nothing seemed to help. On the morning of August 1, 1905, the twenty-month-old girl died in the Sullivans’ apartment. The cause, similar to Danny’s, was listed as gastroenteritis. The family was forced to make another gray journey to upstate New York to bury Elizabeth. Lizzy, having lost two children in three years, was in a panic of grief. Normally good-natured, she now made a non-negotiable demand.

She blamed the conditions in Harlem for the deaths of her children. Indeed, in the first few years of the 1900s the area was changing rapidly. Throughout the 1890s, real estate developers had quickly bought and sold property in well-to-do West Harlem, making a fast profit with each sale and pushing prices ever higher. In 1904 the bubble burst and speculators were left with too many properties and too few occupants who could afford them. By 1905 banks stopped making loans to these developers. When the market went bust, landlords were forced to slash rents severely to lure tenants. An enterprising black real estate entrepreneur named Philip Pay ton devised a plan to fill these empty buildings. He guaranteed their owners the
rent, then subcontracted the dwellings to black tenants, charging them a small premium above the depressed rent levels. Large numbers of poor blacks moved into Harlem and the area’s neighborhoods became ever more crowded.

Lizzie, already disenchanted with the neighborhood, demanded that her family move from the area. Because Peter’s income didn’t allow a move to one of the city’s better neighborhoods, she told him to find a job outside the city. They had come to New York to build a better life, but that hadn’t worked. She now wanted to leave as soon as possible.

Peter, apparently without much argument, agreed. In 1906 the Sullivan family bundled up their few belongings and boarded the New Haven line of the New York Central Railroad. They moved to the working class burg of Port Chester, New York, where Peter found employment in a hardware factory. Although only twenty-six miles north of the city, Port Chester lived in a world of a few decades earlier. Its quiet streets were lined with watering troughs for horses, and its town doctor still made house calls in his buckboard wagon. As they had since the 1800s, traveling medicine shows stopped and sold quack elixirs and mystery tonics like “Dr. Pink’s Pale Pills” and “Thayer’s Slippery Elm Lozenges.” But the town’s proximity to New York City meant this otherwise drowsy outpost of Americana was a confluence of unadulterated Old World influences. There had been a time in the 1800s when local Protestants had pulled down their curtains to avoid watching a Catholic church being built. But with the waves of immigrants flowing into and out of New York City, the town became an ethnically mixed alembic of Italians, Irish, Germans, Poles, Jews, and other recent arrivals.

Most importantly for Lizzy, she found what she wanted: a quiet, clean place to raise her family. And a place, of course, to have more children, which the Sullivans soon did.

Decades later, social commentators would point to Ed Sullivan as the apotheosis of square, a prude, a man who ran his great national showcase by tight moralistic strictures. Certainly Sullivan himself, the showman behind the curtain, was in reality far from this. But to the extent that the man projected this quality, the boy learned this prim and pious worldview on the leafy streets of Port Chester.

The Sullivans found modest lodging in the top floor of a two-family house. Though the family never seemed to have enough money, Lizzy decorated the parlor in typical Victorian style, with velveteen upholstered furniture and gilt frame engravings. Her and Peter’s brass double bed was topped with crocheted lace pillow covers over a blue sateen lining. An avid and talented gardener, Lizzy grew vegetables and flowers in the house’s garden; she constantly clipped the roses and gladiolas and arrayed them in vases around the living room. Within a few years Ed, Helen, and Charles were joined by two sisters, Mercedes and Frances, who were born healthy.

Radio had yet to arrive, but music was plentiful in the Sullivan house. Lizzy scrimped to ensure that all her children took music lessons, and an old upright piano dominated the parlor. Someone was always plinking out a waltz or warbling a sentimental ballad. Ed’s older sister Helen was an accomplished pianist, and his older brother Charles, a violinist who sang in the choir, joined her in duets. Lizzy often led the family in group sing-alongs of hit musicals like “O, Promise Me,” or
gay ’90s
stalwarts like “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” She particularly enjoyed the syrupy operettas of Victor Herbert.

From left: Ed’s older brother Charles, his older sister Helen, and Ed, circa 1905. (Globe Photos)

Knowing their mother’s passion for music, the children broke open their piggy banks and (with help from an uncle) bought her an Aeolian music box for Christmas one year. When she saw it, Lizzy gasped and gave out an “Oh, children!”—her response whenever she was deeply touched. Even Peter, never one for expressing his feelings, managed a wide smile. Later the family purchased a gramophone and gathered around to relish the recordings of opera singers like Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba. (And five decades later,
The Ed Sullivan Show
presented more opera bookings than its Nielsen ratings indicated was a good idea.)

For all her love of music, Lizzy’s hopes of turning Ed into a musician came to naught. The coins she gave him for piano lessons were diverted to the local movie house, where he spent many afternoons immersed in the chiaroscuro fantasy of that week’s silent two-reeler. He worshipped William S. Hart, who played a rugged stand-alone cowboy hero, mowing down rows of Indians in melodramas like
Hell’s Hinges
and
The Return of Draw Egan.
Or, Ed bought a nickel ticket to the traveling vaudeville shows that visited Port Chester, spending Saturday afternoons “
marveling at the people who had the nerve to stand in a little white spotlight and dance, or sing, or make jokes.” If no nickel was available, Ed and his cohorts perched on a hill outside town and gawked at the lines of Packards and Pierce-Arrows roaring past en route to collegiate football games.

Although Ed’s mother was gentle, she wasn’t permissive. Right and wrong were clearly defined in the Sullivan home. In one formative episode—which, like most of Ed’s own stories of his boyhood, comes straight from a Norman Rockwell painting—he and some neighborhood boys pilfered a handful of candy from Mr. Genovese’s grocery store. When Ed offered some to his mother and she realized it came from petty theft, she dragged her son back to the store and made him confess to the grocer, after which she paid for the candy.