Impresario

• Sullivan has nearly 100% name recognition among people 40 and older

• In a survey of the fifty most influential programs in the U.S., TV Guide ranked The Ed Sullivan Show #10

• Show still appears on PBS and on cable stations across the country

• Sixty million baby boomers grew up watching The Ed Sullivan Show



For more than twenty years, from 1948 to 1971, fifty-five million viewers watched The Ed Sullivan Show religiously every Sunday night. Everyone who was anyone appeared—the Beatles and Elvis, of course, and Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and Elizabeth Taylor, plus public figures such as Fidel Castro, David Ben-Gurion, and Martin Luther King, Jr. More than thirty years later, the program remains a pop-culture icon. But despite Ed Sullivan’s prominence, little was known about the private man...until now. Impresario reveals what the Sullivan viewers never saw: nasty, hot-tempered, craven, yet also capable of high ideals and, above all, hugely ambitious. At a time when Americans are looking back, The Ed Sullivan Show stands out as a shining example of television during the golden era. Impresario lets readers look behind the screen to see the man who made it happen.


From the Hardcover edition.