7 million more were watching at home. The show was in its 21st year and Ed Sullivan had developed over those 21 years the specific curatorial instinct for placing people together on a stage and allowing the chemistry of their proximity to produce something worth watching. The chemistry he had arranged for November 12th was Muhammad Ali and Frank Sinatra.
Ali was 26 years old and in the middle of his exile, stripped of his title, his passport confiscated, banned from professional boxing in every state in America, awaiting the Supreme Court decision on his draft conviction that would not come for three more years. He was appearing on television because television was one of the few platforms available to him, and because Ali on television was something that networks understood to be valuable regardless of his current professional status.
He arrived at CBS Studio 50 in a gray suit, alone in the way that exiled men are alone, carrying the specific self-possession of someone who has decided what he believes and is not confused about it. Frank Sinatra was 52 years old. He had recorded more than a thousand songs. He had won the Academy Award.
He had defined the American popular standard in a way that no subsequent artist had supplanted, and that the passage of time had only confirmed. He was, by the consensus of the people who thought carefully about such things, the most technically accomplished popular singer who had ever lived. He arrived at CBS Studio 50 in a black tuxedo with the ease of a man who has been the most important person in every room he has entered for 30 years, and who carries this as a fact about the world rather than as a performance of himself.
Ed Sullivan placed them on adjacent chairs. The conversation had been going for 14 minutes. It had covered Ali’s draft case, his religious convictions, his boxing career and its interruption, and the specific political landscape of 1968 America in which both men were significant figures with significant opinions.
Sinatra had been engaged and respectful. He had publicly opposed the Vietnam War. He had supported civil rights causes, and the specific combination of Ali’s positions and his willingness to pay for them had earned from Sinatra a degree of genuine respect that his public statements about Ali had reflected. For 14 minutes, the conversation was what it appeared to be, two serious men discussing serious things on live television.
Then Ali said something about boxing. He had been making a point about what the sport required, not the physical requirements, which were obvious, but the interior requirements, the thinking, the art of reading another person’s intention before the intention became action. He had been developing the point with the specific eloquence that Ali brought to subjects he had thought carefully about, and he arrived at a formulation that he used often and believed completely.
Boxing is poetry, the most dangerous poetry in the world. Every fight is a poem that one man writes on another man’s body. Sinatra turned to the audience. He laughed. Not a dismissive snort, a genuine laugh, the kind that comes from finding something amusing that was not presented as a joke.
The laugh of a man who has just heard someone apply a category to something he considers outside that category, and found the application either naive or presumptuous or both. Sinatra’s laugh was musical even as a laugh. It carried in the studio, reached the 250 people in the audience, and produced in them the response that Sinatra’s reactions typically produced, which was agreement.
They laughed with him. The studio was full of laughter for approximately 8 seconds. Ali waited. He did not shift in his seat. He did not look at Sinatra, who was laughing. He did not look at the audience, who were laughing with Sinatra. He looked at a point in the middle distance with the expression he wore when he was waiting for something to finish so that the next thing could begin.
The laughter diminished. 8 seconds, then quiet. Ali looked at the camera, not at Sinatra, not at Sullivan, not at the laughing audience, at the camera, at the 7 million people on the other side of the camera who had just watched Frank Sinatra laugh at Muhammad Ali on live television. “Mr. Sinatra has never been hit.
” 11 words delivered at the volume of a conversation, not loudly, not with the projected force of his public voice, not with the theatrical emphasis of his press conference register, at the volume of someone saying something true to someone who is sitting 4 feet away. 11 words. The studio went quiet.
Not the quiet that follows the punchline of a joke, the quiet of 250 people who have just received something and are processing whether what they have received constitutes a response to the laughter that preceded it and have concluded in the specific collective speed of a live audience that it does, that it more than does.
Sinatra was quiet. He was quiet in the specific way that Frank Sinatra, who had been in live television studios for 20 years and who had the instincts of a performer who understood every situation that a performance could produce, was quiet when he had encountered something he had not prepared for. Not embarrassed, Sinatra did not embarrass easily and this was not embarrassment.
The quiet of a man who has laughed at something and received in response to the laugh a sentence that has made the laugh retroactively insufficient. “Mr. Sinatra has never been hit.” Five words and six more. Sinatra had spent 40 years creating art in conditions of relative safety, in studios with engineers and producers and the technical infrastructure of recording, on stages with lighting and sound equipment and the organizational support of management teams.
The art he had made in those conditions was genuine and extraordinary and deserved every acknowledgement it had received. He had never made it while someone tried to take his consciousness away. Ali had spent 14 years making his art in exactly those conditions. The combinations, the footwork, the specific geometric intelligence of a body moving through space against another body that was trying to stop the moving.
All of it produced in the presence of someone whose specific purpose was to prevent it from being produced, to interrupt the thinking, to make the execution impossible by targeting the capacity for execution. Ali had done it anyway. 14 years through Liston and Frazier and the amateurs and everything before and between.
Art made under conditions that art was not supposed to be able to survive. Mr. Sinatra has never been hit. Ed Sullivan looked at his notes. He looked at his director. The director in the booth above the studio floor was looking at his monitors and at the clock and at the two men in adjacent chairs and at the 250 people in the audience who had gone quiet in a way that live television audiences did not typically go quiet.
He cut to commercial. 4 seconds early. The break was scheduled for the 15-minute mark. The director cut at 14 minutes and 56 seconds because the 14 minutes and 56 second mark produced something that he did not know how to follow with television content. The commercial break lasted 4 minutes. When the broadcast returned, Ed Sullivan had rearranged the segment.
