Impresario

the long version

"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."--Publisher's website. A perfect mirror of its time, The Ed Sullivan Show ran from 1948 to 1971, echoing this period's every chapter; the birth of television, the conformist 1950's, the dawn of the rock era - featuring a hip-shaking Elvis and the Beatles' U.S. debut - and finally, the tumultuous late 1960s.