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Late to Bed. Ed and his wife Sylvia have lived in hotels for most of their married life. For the past twelve years home has been a small four-room apartment—office, living room, two bedrooms and kitchenette—in Manhattan's Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue. Last year Ed bought a 2OO-acre dairy farm in Southbury, Conn., where he can occasionally relax, as fond parent and grandfather, with his 24-year-old daughter Betty and her two children (Robert Edward, 1½, and Carla Elizabeth, 3 weeks), while Betty's husband, Lieut, (j.g.) Robert Precht Jr., is on a tour of sea duty.
Ed goes to bed late and rises late. Usually he prepares his own breakfast—an unappetizing bowl of strained oatmeal and a glass of milk which, he hopes, are good for his ulcer—and eats in the white-walled living room decorated with two portraits of his tall, attractive wife and a Renoir landscape that Ed gave Sylvia this year for their 25th wedding anniversary. Then he lights the first of the day's many cigarettes and is ready for the phone calls that his secretaries, Carmine Santullo and Jean Bombard, have been holding at bay all morning. When Ed is not scheduled to deliver dealer pep talks in Akron or Denver, he often makes three-day flying trips to Europe, as he did last week for a film interview with Gina Lollobrigida in Paris. Last year he traveled 175,000 miles looking for new talent. He does all the booking on his show. Many of his leads come from entertainers who have been on his program ("They play everywhere, and see all the new acts"), while his aide, Mark Leddy ("He knows every animal act there is"), constantly scouts the furred, feathered and four-legged field.
Touch and Emotions. After whipping up a new show every Sunday night for seven years, Ed has formulated some definite theories. Each program must contain 1) something children will like, 2) comedy. As for the acts themselves, Ed says, "The best ones are those where two different kinds of people play against each other: if Lily Pons and Pearl Bailey do a duet, Lily sings it straight while Pearl clowns it up." His added ingredient is a shrewd combination of news and human interest. When Arthur Godfrey fired Baritone Julius La Rosa, Ed had the young singer on his show the same week ("There's nothing personal in it—if Arthur got fired, I'd hire him"). The human interest touches are usually emotional. Sullivan presented Helen Hayes shortly after the tragic polio death of her 19-year-old daughter, Mary MacArthur; Broadway Director Josh Logan (South Pacific), who had suffered a breakdown, spoke feelingly on Ed's show about the problems of mental health. Observes Ed: "It's things like these that people remember about a show, things that touch their emotions. They're far more important than the acts."