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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television was invented. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Ed Sullivan was not the kind of personality you’d expect to find at the summit of the country’s cultural mountaintop, but by 1956, he was the weekly host of the top rated variety show on television.
Edward Vincent Sullivan was born September 28, 1901, in New York City. His father Peter Sullivan was a customs inspector of Irish descent, like his mother, Elizabeth. The Sullivans lived in a working-class, mostly Irish neighborhood in Harlem where the intensely urban, Irish-American experience shaped his pragmaticIc, stoic persona.
As a teenager, Sullivan took up boxing, training and sparring at neighborhood gyms though he never fought professionally. He was mostly looking for recreation – and access to the tightly knit world of sports in New York.
By the time he finished high school in 1920, the connections he’d made led him into journalism, starting with short pieces he wrote for the New York Evening Graphic and The Morning Telegraph, two papers well known for their sports and entertainment coverage. By his early twenties, Ed Sullivan was a full-time sportswriter and columnist – first covering boxing and baseball, then taking on theater and show business gossip.
When the Evening Graphic folded in 1932, he started writing a column called Little Old New York for the Daily News, which placed the column prominently and syndicated it nationally. By 1936, Little Old New York was appearing in dozens of papers across the U.S. and Sullivan became one of the country’s leading entertainment columnists. His mix of Broadway reviews, celebrity gossip, and nightclub chatter put Ed Sullivan in the same league as more familiar Broadway columnists like Walter Winchell.
From Print To Radio to TV
After a long run in print, Sullivan shifted to broadcasting in the late 1930s, hosting programs that carried his mix of Broadway chatter and celebrity interviews to a national radio audience.
During World War II he organized USO shows for American troops and contributed morale-boosting columns to military publications like Stars and Stripes.
After the war, Sullivan’s reputation as a talent broker and show-business insider brought him to the attention of CBS, which was developing a Sunday-night variety show for television.
Sullivan was hardly blessed with the kind of charisma or comic timing that came naturally to contemporaries like Milton Berle or Sid Caesar. He spoke stiffly, smiled rarely, and gestured awkwardly.
But his gift was not performance, it was curation.
The audience he’d attracted – and the industry network he’d built – was enough for CBS to anoint him as the ringmaster of Toast of the Town when it premiered on Sunday, June 20, 1948.
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Full episodes of The Toast of The Town can be found on YouTube. If you don’t have time to watch the whole show, at least take a few minutes to see the opening dance number before Ed Sullivan is introduced.
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Through the early 1950s, Sullivan’s flair for booking headline acts – from opera singers and comedians to baseball stars and boxing champions – made Toast of the Town one of the most-watched programs on CBS. Its ratings consistently placed it among the network’s top ten shows, often ranking alongside or ahead of Berle’s Texaco Star Theater and Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. That steady performance convinced CBS to drop the generic title in September 1955 and rename its Sunday night tentpole The Ed Sullivan Show.
Black and White in Black & White
What set Ed Sullivan apart from his competition was his instinct for what the public wanted to see, often before the public knew it wanted to see it. And one of his most radical instincts was his insistence on featuring Black artists on national television.
The very first episode of Toast Of The Town featured the Black vaudeville dance team of Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham and Johnny Lee. At a time when many sponsors balked at integration on television, Sullivan stood firm. When a CBS affiliate in the South threatened to cut away during an appearance by Lena Horne, Sullivan famously told them they could “go dark for all I care.”
Ed Sullivan’s quiet determination to present Black artists as equals, garnered both admiration and death threats.
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It’s not “Pigmeat Markham, but here’s Cab Calloway on Toast of The Town in 1951
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But to Sullivan, entertainment was America’s common language; if a performer could move an audience, they belonged on his stage. When CBS censors suggested he might refrain from “social gestures” like air-kisses and hand-shakes, Sullivan brushed them off, saying “The most important thing that we put on our show is everything but bigotry.”
Which brings us to the most ironic of the roughly 10,000 performers that Ed Sullivan presented in nearly 1,100 shows over nearly a quarter century.
The Largest Audience
On September 9, 1956, an estimated 60 million viewers – the largest television audience ever to date – tuned in not for one of Sullivan’s barrier-breaking Black artists, but for a white Southerner who some accused of stealing Black artist sound and style: Elvis Presley. 1
Contrary to popular memory, that September 1956 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was not the first time Elvis Presley appeared on television. He’d appeared on several regional shows before appearing in January, 1956 on CBS’s Stage Show, hosted by big-band veterans Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. Those appearances introduced Elvis as a polite, energetic Southern boy with a curious blend of country twang and rhythm-and-blues swagger.
Six months later, on June 5, 1956, Elvis appeared on NBCs Milton Berle Show. This time he was dressed in a loud checked jacket and performed his recent hit Hound Dog in a slower, more suggestive version than the record – punctuated by the hip gyrations that scandalized the nation. Critics called his performance vulgar; one newspaper called him “a juvenile delinquent.”
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Yeah, this really happened
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The controversy deepened a month later when Elvis appeared on The Steve Allen Show. Ever the urbane satirist, Allen tried to neutralize the uproar by having Elvis perform Hound Dog to an actual basset hound wearing a top hat. The bit drew laughs, but it also made Elvis look ridiculous.
Ed Sullivan had publicly vowed that he would never book Elvis Presley. He considered the young singer’s onstage gyrations indecent and sought to keep his show above the hysteria.
The Ratings Decide
That reticence lasted until Presley’s July, 1956, appearance on The Steve Allen Show drew higher ratings The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan came to the light and signed Elvis to a three-show contract worth a then-staggering $50,000 (more than half a million in 2026 dollars) — the largest sum ever paid to a single performer for a television engagement.
The first Sullivan appearance was arranged for September 9, 1956. Sullivan himself was recuperating from a serious auto accident, so the show that night was hosted from New York by actor Charles Laughton.
After Loughton’s introduction from New York, the screen cut to a set in Hollywood, where the audience screams as Elvis comes onstage in a plaid jacket with his leather-clad Martin acoustic guitar. After a few words of gratitude, the band launches into Don’t Be Cruel. He follows with the ballad Love Me Tender, a preview of his first movie. Later came Ready Teddy and Hound Dog, complete with the moves that had alarmed America’s moral guardians.
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Elvis Preslsey’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show
September 9, 1956
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Ed Sullivan himself was back in his familiar spot at CBS Studio 50 2when Elvis made his second appearance on October 28, 1956. Before a nationwide audience of nearly 57 million viewers Elvis performed Don’t Be Cruel, Love Me Tender, Hound Dog, and Love Me. At Sullivan’s behest, Elvis toned down his stage movements but the charisma and appeal remained – especially to screaming teen girls. Some of the press grudgingly admitted that the boy could sing, but the country’s moral watchdogs continued to denounce his “contortions” and “jungle rhythms” for corrupting America’s youth.
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Elvis performs Hound Dog October 28, 1956
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The third appearance aired on January 6, 1957. By this time Elvis hysteria had become such a national controversy that Sullivan insisted the cameras frame Elvis only from the waist up. That night he sang Hound Dog, Don’t Be Cruel, Love Me Tender, and When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again.
Then Elvis revealed a quieter, almost plaintive side of his character when he dipped into his gospel repertoire for a reverent rendering of Peace in the Valley to close out the show.
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Ed Sullivan, Peace In The Valley, and “a decent, fine boy” named Elvis
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The limited camera angles served to amplify the stately power of Presley’s voice. His third and final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show again reached more than 50 million viewers, cementing Presley’s dominance of both music, television, and film for the two decades that followed.
A “Decent, fine boy”
By the end of his three appearances, Ed Sullivan’s personal ambivalence toward Elvis Presley eased into genuine admiration. Regardless of the controversy around his pelvic antics, Sullivan could see the sincerity and artistic integrity that drove the spectacle. After the final performance, Sullivan greeted Presley onstage and told the audience that Elvis Presley was “a real decent, fine boy.”
In the months that followed his Sullivan triumph, Elvis Presley became the most famous entertainer in the world. Between 1956 and 1958 he released a string of number-one singles, starred in hit films like Love Me Tender and Jailhouse Rock, and with the carnival touch of his manager Colonel Tom Parker spurred a merchandising frenzy unmatched in American pop culture.
By the time he was drafted into the U.S. Army in March 1958, Elvis Presley had sold more than 25 million records, turned rock ‘n roll into an international language. His success blurred the lines between race, class, and youth in ways that demonstrated television’s capacity to shift American culture at the same time it reflected it.
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New York Yankees stars Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle & Bill “Moose” Skowron appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on April, 13, 1958 to sing Take Me Out To The Ballgame with the song’s composer, Jack Norworth.
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Ed Sullivan continued presiding over Sunday nights as America’s master of ceremonies. From The Beatles to The Supremes, from Topo Gigio to Señor Wences, his stage became a showcase of shifting tastes and cultural tides. Though his personal style remained stiff, even awkward, his instincts never failed him. For nearly a quarter century, his show was where America went to see its best self.
The final episode of The Ed Sullivan Show aired on Sunday June 6, 1971, after which the show was cancelled by CBS. After a 23-year run that began as Toast of the Town in 1948, Sullivan was stunned by the network’s decision, but remained with CBS as a special host and presenter for the remainder of his years.
Ed Sullivan died on October 13, 1974 – fittingly, a Sunday – at the age of 73.
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1 That night’s show drew an estimated 60 million viewers, representing about 82 percent of the television audience — unprecedented for any program up to that point. It eclipsed even the massive ratings of Milton Berle’s and Steve Allen’s earlier Elvis appearances, and it helped solidify Sullivan’s show as the national stage for pop culture.
Later broadcasts (like the Beatles’ debut in 1964, which reached around 73 million viewers) would surpass it, but in 1956, Elvis set the all-time record and confirmed that Sunday nights on CBS were where America went to see what was new, shocking, and unforgettable.
2 CBS Studio 50, on Broadway at West 53rd Street, was renamed The Ed Sullivan Theater in 1955, at the height of Sullivan’s popularity. The 1,200-seat neo-Gothic theater—originally opened in 1927 as the Hammerstein Theater – remained home to The Ed Sullivan Show until its final broadcast in 1971. In later years it became one of television’s most storied addresses: the site of David Letterman’s The Late Show from 1993 to 2015, when Letterman was replaced by Stephen Colbert.
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