#267: A PARTY FOR HIS FRIENDS.  A quick-moving and entertaining documentary that has just (July, 2025) shown up on Netflix is a chance to learn something you never knew, or, if you are of sufficient age, to have your memory and sense of history revised.  Sunday Best is about The Ed Sullivan Show and the man behind it—one of the great success stories of early television, but a slightly different story than I for one remembered.  Sullivan, born in 1901 in Harlem when it was still largely an Irish and Jewish enclave, started out as a sports columnist; he rather grudgingly accepted being shifted to write about the New York theatre scene, about which he knew nothing.  He became well-known and well-liked, began hosting events and talent shows, and was eventually approached to host a weekly live variety program.  The first episodes were not promising: Sullivan came across as stony-faced and unappealing.  But he eased into the role, and he and the show became vastly popular.  One reason for this was that he was indefatigable in searching out talent; he spent more nights out than at home, scouring the theatres and clubs and vaudeville halls for acts he could invite to the show.  You never knew who was going to turn up, and the Sunday night live broadcast became like going to a restaurant that never had the same menu twice.

       There’s a snag in this, of course: the variety was such that if you were all but guaranteed to want to see some of the performers, there were also lots of chances to sneak out for a cookie or go to the loo.  The show ran from 1948 to 1971; being kids through much of this time, my sister and I occasionally wanted to see the singers or the groups, but quite as often we were just hoping for the appearance of Topo Gigio, an Italian marionette mouse, whom we thought the last word in adorable.  The show was both the descendant and the transformation of the New York vaudeville halls, and it’s almost impossible to convey the weird variety of the guests.  An opera singer might be followed by a unicycling juggler, or the cast of the latest musical theatre hit by a comedy team and then a magic act.  On one show there were Pearl Bailey, Lily Pons, and the Lone Ranger and Silver.  One season opener, ninety minutes long, had Eileen Farrell (an opera singer), Louis Armstrong, the comedy team of Wayne and Shuster (doing a Shakespeare baseball sketch—honest) Rosemary Clooney, the Kim Sisters (a singing act from Korea), Gogia Pasha (an Indian magician) two more comedy acts, and an appearance by the stars of the Chicago White Sox.  Most famously, he gave Elvis Presley his first national appearance; in 1964, with the country still reeling from the Kennedy assassination, he brought on the Beatles.  A short while ago, I told a twelve-year-old girl that I was old enough to remember seeing the Beatles’ performances.  Her jaw dropped and she cried, “No way!”  I half expected she was going to start asking me questions about my memories of the Civil War.

      There are a couple of names in these lists that provide a cue you might not catch.  In watching the show as a kid, and in remembering it, I was oblivious to the patient and dogged determination Sullivan showed in introducing African-American performers.  It’s hard sometimes to remember, or for younger people to understand, how purely lily-white television was at the time.  It was assumed that black performers would anger and alienate the southern audience, but with Ed Sullivan’s show, the door opened.  Bo Diddley was the first through, in late 1955, and Sunday Best goes on to catalogue the appearances of Billy Preston, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, Gladys Knight, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, Nina Simone, the staggeringly young Stevie Wonder, etc. etc. etc., most of them on national television for the first time.  Miriam Makeba came on singing in an African indigenous language; not done at the time.  Perhaps not the least virtue of Sunday Best is that its footage, in the visuals of early television and the costumes and staging of the time, conveys how challenging and strange this music must have been for the larger, white audiences.  Jackie Wilson (singing “Lonely Teardrops”) hits high notes Sinatra and Bing Crosby never dreamt of; he drops to his knees, and springs back up.  James Brown, singing “Please Please Please” lets out a howl never heard by listeners raised on Perry Como.  Even the young Toni Harper, singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” gets a low, quavering breath into her voice entirely unlike the white mainstream music of the time.  This was news; some of this news was not welcomed by everyone, but Sullivan was determined it should be seen and heard.

       Directed by Sasha Jenkins and edited with wizard’s precision by Billy McMillin, Sunday Best captures the background of racial unrest that defined the times, and to maximum effect.  James Brown’s singing of “Prisoner of Love” is nicely intercut with Sullivan’s columns protesting the University of Georgia refusing to play football against NYU unless they benched a star black player, Dave Myers.  Herman Talmadge and Asa Carter, inveighing against the mixing of white and black performers and the “mongrelization” of the white race, are edited with Gladys Knight and the Pips onscreen singing “The End of the Road.”  This is film—Talmadge and Carter looking sour and constipated versus Gladys Knight’s impish swinging performance—going where print can’t so easily go; the contrast is almost shockingly visible, right up there on the screen.  The film is imbued with Sullivan’s tough integrity, a hint of his temper (“I’m sick…,” he writes at one point, “of saying slogans that would make you throw up.”), his eye and ear for talent, and his immensely appealing modesty.  “I’m sort of like some ordinary guy who somehow met someone famous and is throwing a party for his friends, saying “Look who I got to come over!”  After 37 years, 100,000 performers and 1100 episodes, Sullivan said “I’ve had a good long run, I put up a good fight for what I believed in, and I have no complaints at all.”  Harry Belafonte says, “Ed, when he wrote about people of color, his was a more embracing reflection, and I think toned down the temperament, the political temperament of the nation.” Sunday Best is both a wisely-sketched  history and a well-deserved tribute.