Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  By the spring of 1919, Ed wore two hats—athlete and reporter—and the two roles became one and the same. With his hard-charging competitive spirit he was voted captain of the baseball team, one of his proudest achievements; as a freelance reporter for the Item, he reported on the very games in which he himself played. It was a conflict of interest, to be sure, but one the paper freely admitted on May 20:

  “To maintain a position of strict neutrality in the Port Chester–Greenwich athletic engagements is a tough proposition, for it is only human and natural that the contentions of the Port Chester teams should be upheld by our correspondent. The following article is from the pen of our High School writer, who is a member of the team, and therefore hardly in a position to give an unbiased view on the merits of Port Chester’s grievances. It is published as Port Chester’s side of the story.”

  The young reporter’s coverage of his own teams was as spirited as it was partisan. “Port Chester High sure came back with a vengeance yesterday afternoon, when they defeated the crack Mount Vernon team to the tune of an 8–2 score,” Ed wrote. Furthermore, he enthused, “Port Chester displayed the same punch and aggressiveness that they showed in the recent Mount Vernon game and outclassed the New Rochelle High School team at every stage of play.” Typical of the sports headlines that spring was “High School Plays Excellent Ball.”

  Ed’s own role in these contests was always fully reported. “Sullivan drove in both runners ahead of him with a circuit-clout [home run] into deep center field,” he wrote that summer. “The slugging of Walker of the visitors and Sullivan of the Saxers were added features of the game.”

  Covering local baseball for the Item was a taste of celebrity, and Ed loved it. He attracted far more attention as a reporter than he had as an athlete. He clearly relished his reporting, writing lengthy blow-by-blows of the day’s athletic skirmishes, spotlighting his opinions even more prominently than his bat and glove work. In an age before television, before radio became commonplace, the newspaper was the only way for townsfolk to get the full story. And in Port Chester the only source of a complete postgame report was Ed’s animated coverage. The Item, with a daily circulation of thirty-six hundred, spread the name Ed Sullivan to barbershops and taverns and informal bull sessions all over the area.

  The young sports reporter became a minor hero in town, finding himself center stage for the first time in his life. It was a feeling he enjoyed, perhaps even craved, immensely.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Two Loves

  THE PORT CHESTER HIGH GRADUATION CEREMONY in June 1919 paid homage to the sacrifices of the Great War. Many of the forty-one seniors presented a pageant entitled “The Torch,” in which students played The Captive Nations and The Allied Nations. As the Three Fates swirled and danced, Mother Earth fought Strife and Greed. In the end, Democracy defeated the Forces of Evil.

  Ed played the role of Strife, which was as close as he was to get to his dream of taking part in the war. Armistice had been signed eight months earlier. Instead of facing the trenches of Europe, as had the boys who graduated a year earlier, he received varsity letters for basketball and baseball. In the final class assembly he led the school choir in a rousing rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and in the graduation ceremony he gave a speech about the importance of continuing to conserve even after the war.

  The Port Chester Daily Item reported, “He delivered his address with a natural ease that served to make his words all the more impressive and called for extended applause when he had finished.” It would be the only printed account of Sullivan onstage that described him as having “natural ease.”

  And he may have written the article himself. The piece had no byline, and on June 24 the paper had added a new name to its masthead: Edward V. Sullivan. Two days before graduation, the seventeen-year-old was hired full-time for $10 a week. One of his father’s brothers, most likely Florence the New York attorney, had offered to put Ed through college. But Ed turned him down. School had never interested him, and besides, the high school graduate already had his dream job, sports reporter.

  The Item proudly displayed its rock-ribbed Republicanism. “Splendid Record of Republican Town Administration” was a characteristic headline. Denouncing what it called the misguided leadership of President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was a routine exercise on its editorial page. The paper reflected the Victorian morality of 1919, with a raft of stories like “Commission to Force Women Bathers to Wear Stockings.” (“Young women bathers at Oakland Beach who have been in the habit of showing off their physical charms by parading stockingless through the park … may be deprived of that privilege.”) In addition to covering local events, the Item reported the personal, with a steady stream of articles like “Wife Won’t See Hubby” (“says the sight of him nauseates her”), “Wifey Acted As Her Own Detective” (because her husband was “mushing it up” with another lady), and “Wife Confesses to Kissing Another.”

  Item publisher Tom Blain got his money’s worth from Ed, turning him into a newspaper jack-of-all-trades. Aside from his sports beat, the cub reporter covered weddings, fires, courts, social events, and funerals, and also handled layout and other production chores. “I never worked so hard before or since,” Sullivan recalled.

  The paper didn’t give its three staff reporters bylines, so it’s not known who covered what, but the sports section was clearly Ed’s. A month after he went full-time, a burst of energy infused the Item’s sports section. He launched a new column, In the Realm of Sport, and expanded coverage of boxing and tennis. In some of Ed’s pieces he adopted an approach that was like nothing else in the Item. Instead of blocks of text he wrote short clips of pithy opinion, a layout style then fashionable in the New York papers:

  “Slim” Kelly played a fine game for the Electrics at the hot corner. “Slim” is rapidly developing in to a crack third-sacker.

  The Abendroth–P.R. Mallory game was a fine exhibition of baseball as it ain’t.

  Of course we realize the teams had an off day. They always have.

  If you stand on your head while reading the league standings, the Abendroth team is leading the league.

  Well, so long!

  When readers disagreed with Ed’s firmly opinionated reports, the young reporter always stood ready for a fight. He ignited a major fracas with his coverage of an exhibition game between the Philadelphia Athletics, a professional team, and a Port Chester semipro squad. He opined that the Athletics made “a laughingstock” out of the Port Chester team by using their third-string catcher. It may have been true, but the editor soon got a phone call from an irate reader demanding an apology. Sullivan was biased, the caller claimed, because he played catcher for a competing local team, a Catholic squad called the Saxers.

  Ed refused to apologize. He told his editor that his opinion came from his baseball expertise, not his team affiliation. Blain, exasperated with his young reporter, snorted, “Oh, you Irish!” Complicating the situation, the caller was W.L. Ward, a local hardware store owner and prominent Republican booster—not a man Blain wanted to offend. Reluctantly, the editor called back Ward and told him no apology was forthcoming. “Good for him,” said Ward. “Tell him always to stick to his guns if he’s right.” Ed was impressed with what he saw as Ward’s largesse. As he put it, “Even to a young Democrat, Mr. Ward’s support of my position was impressive proof of his genuine bigness.” Sullivan arranged a match between the two local teams as a way of settling the dispute.

  Although Ed was on his way up at the Item, garnering a raise to $12 a week, a larger world beckoned. In the fall of 1920 he learned of an opening for a sports reporter at the Hartford Post. Without hesitation he made the trip to Connecticut to apply and was hired that day—at $50 a week. He was overjoyed at the job offer. The Sullivan family, however, had a heated discussion as to whether he should take the position. His mother and Helen saw it as a great opportunity but Ed’s father said he should remain in Port Chester. Yet Ed himself felt no doubt about taki
ng the job. Before he left, the town of Port Chester threw its departing celebrity a grand going-away party, presenting him with an engraved watch. The Item, in reporting his departure, boasted that he had “built up its sports page from a humble beginning to a place where it was on a par with the best in the country.”

  Sullivan never wrote a single story for the Post. He arrived in Hartford the week before Christmas, and two days later the employees learned the bad news: the paper had been sold and everyone was losing their jobs. Ed had two weeks severance pay in his pocket and no idea what to do. Embarrassed at what he saw as his failure, he devised a plan to keep the paper’s closing a secret from his family. He rented a cheap room in a Hartford boarding house and found a stock boy’s job in the basement of a department store. When he went home on the weekends he used his severance pay to be a big man about town, as if he were still the Post’s sports reporter. Underneath the façade he was terrified and kept hoping something would turn up.

  Luck shined on him. A former colleague at the Item, Jack Lawrence, had found work at the New York Evening Mail. He wrote Ed a reference letter, which Ed sent to the Mail’s management. Just a few weeks after the Post folded he received a letter from Sam Murphy, one of the Mail’s sports editors. The New York paper hired Sullivan to cover high school and college sports. If the job offer in Hartford had been a major opportunity, landing the big city post was a minor miracle. Ed went home to Port Chester to trumpet his accomplishment.

  Just before he began working in New York, his mother said to him, “I read about the Hartford paper failing, Edward. Since Christmas I’ve been praying for you.”

  Ed was nineteen years old when he reported for duty at the Evening Mail’s offices in lower Manhattan in early 1921. New York City, a far different burg than the one his family had fled years earlier, now cantered at a markedly faster clip. In 1917 the city had boasted of an important benchmark: for the first time, its streets were crowded with more motor vehicles (one hundred fourteen thousand) than horses (one hundred eight thousand). As the financial hub of the country that had turned the tide in the Great War, the city strode with a pronounced spring in its step; New York now stood shoulder to shoulder with world capitols like London and Paris. And it was an easy town in which to be naughty; after Prohibition went into effect in January 1920, the city’s drinking establishments more than doubled in number. Gentlemen—and now even ladies—could quench their thirst almost anywhere. Speakeasies were illegal, of course, and the Ladies Temperance Union warned of the demon rum, but that merely added an extra thrill to hoisting a cocktail.

  Ed’s reporting work in Port Chester had hardly prepared him for what he was about to attempt. While the Port Chester Daily Item still considered a carriage crash front-page news, the Evening Mail’s front page was a riot of national and international news, with more than twenty headlines crowding page one: Wall Street, Broadway, American and European politics, crime and corruption, the arts, women aviators—all the world, or so it seemed, was contained in its pages. In January, Ed’s first month, Paramount Pictures founder Adolph Zukor contributed a piece to the Mail’s entertainment section: “I predict a year’s run for pictures on Broadway, so confident am I of the character and drawing power of the picture of the future.” That same month the paper opined, with more optimism than accuracy, that “No Occupation Bars Women Now” (“Girls Today May Be Steamboat Captain, Bank Director, Steel ‘Man’—and No One Will Say Her Nay”). American mores were changing, and the Mail was keeping track. “Ban on Petting Parties? No! Chorus Columbia Men” (“Petting parties are only successful if played with a ‘20th-century girl,’ a Columbia man declared”).

  Ed was overwhelmed. At the Item he had turned in handwritten articles, but the composing room at the Mail quickly let him know this wouldn’t pass muster. One of Sullivan’s editors, Jack Jackowitz, demanded that the new hire learn how to type. So Ed found an unused typewriter and spent hours copying editorials from The New York Times, hunting and pecking with two fingers.

  Typing was the least of what he had to learn. His writing at the Item had been plucky, often tongue-in-cheek and flavored with unabashed hometown vinegar. But for the Mail Ed attempted to write in what he thought was a more sophisticated style, resulting in some frozen prose. On January 13, his column, College Sports, Notes and Gossip, displayed his unease:

  “The Columbia Spectator directs attention to the fact that although the army athletic authorities are correct in stating that although no monetary advantages accrue to the athletes who enroll at the academy, that very fact that football stars are allowed to play another four seasons of varsity ball after entering West Point is sufficient inducement for a great number of collegiate luminaries.”

  As Ed struggled through January it was unclear as to whether he would succeed at the Mail. An editor suggested that reporting might not be the career for him. When he was assigned to cover the annual Westminster dog show at Madison Square Garden in early February, he immediately assumed it was an effort by one of his editors to embarrass him. The assignment could be his last, he worried—he knew nothing about dog breeds.

  At the show, he overheard a little girl ask her mother, “How do they wash their faces with all those wrinkles?” Inspired by this simplistic question, Sullivan decided to drop his attempt at big city sophistication—which clearly wasn’t working—and have fun with the piece. He wrote:

  “The truth of the matter is that the harassed dogs have been patted and petted to death, and now, tired and exhausted, big dogs and little dogs alike are not above grabbing off a surreptitious nap at each and every opportunity.… The fond caresses of the visiting proletariat have undermined the morale of the defenseless bologna-questers.”

  A theme emerged in this piece that would run throughout Ed’s newspaper work for years to come: he resented the affluent. He saw himself as distinctly apart from them, and took every opportunity to poke fun at the moneyed classes. There were two groups of people at the Madison Square Garden event, he explained, and it was easy to tell them apart.

  “The former class converse knowingly of the days when Hector was a pup, assume Rolls Royce grins, and park their patrician selves within the sacred precincts of the rings. The latter class gets nailed for life memberships in every dog society in the world and buys cartons of dog biscuits at the behest of total strangers.”

  As he went home that night after turning in the piece, he began to worry. “I became more and more terrified as I imagined what the sophisticated New York sportswriters would think when they picked up this piece of whimsy,” he said.

  On the way to work the next morning he bought the Mail, and, reading the paper on the train, was amazed to see that the story had been given prominent play. It was spread across two columns—a first for him. The nineteen-year-old reporter was mesmerized by the success of his article. Rather than complete his trip downtown, he kept riding the train uptown and downtown, repeatedly reading his piece as he traveled in a circuit. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to point out the story to a fellow train rider. If there was a single moment when he felt he had “made it” in the big city, this was it.

  The lesson he learned, he later explained, was that he would fail if he tried to be sophisticated. The only approach that would work for him was the one that came naturally. Ed had to be Ed; any other strategy was bound for failure. In truth his writing style would soon adopt every bit of the 25-cent sophistication of his fellow New York sports reporters. But he recounted this anecdote in the 1950s, when his decidedly unsophisticated television persona was under fire from critics, and anecdotes like this seemed to justify his unadorned stage manner.

  That May he wrote his first front-page story, covering a collegiate boat race between Princeton, Columbia, and Penn State on the Harlem River: “The challenge was met with a quick acceleration of the Columbia stroke, and from that [sic] on the two boats fought it out stroke for stoke, while the crowds went wild.” Throughout 1921 Ed inched his way up the Mail’s masthead, ge
tting promoted to cover professional golf and tennis in addition to college sports. By the end of the year his writing had regained the cheeky humor of his Port Chester reports. Covering swimmer Helen Wainwright, who had just broken four world records in the 500-yard freestyle, he observed her at lunch. His goal, he wrote, was to discover what makes a champion. “Miss Wainwright ordered a club sandwich, a piece of watermelon, a large slice of lemon meringue pie, ice cream and a glass of milk, and after stowing that away the youngster started on a box of chocolates. Of such stuff are champions made.”

  With his promotion Sullivan earned $75 a week, a handsome salary in the early 1920s when a furnished room in Manhattan rented for well under $50 a month. He had lived at home in his early Mail days, but with his raise he rented an apartment in midtown, on West 48th Street, over a bar called Duffy’s Tavern. Equipped with a place of his own, he dipped a tentative toe into the swirling waters of Manhattan nightlife. At first, the Port Chester boy was ill at ease, yet he soon found a tour guide. The Mail’s boxing editor managed a fighter named Johnny Dundee, then a top featherweight contender, and he introduced him to Ed. The twenty-seven-year-old boxer, born Giuseppe Carrora in Sicily, had fought professionally since age seventeen. He won the junior lightweight title in 1921 and the featherweight title in 1923. He would later be inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame and become such a revered ring hero that Angelo Mirena, Muhammad Ali’s lead trainer, legally changed his surname to Dundee in Johnny’s honor.

  Ed and Johnny became fast friends. As a celebrity athlete, Dundee had entrée to the city’s most exclusive haunts. The boxer took Ed under his wing, introducing him to major figures in many walks of life. In the late 1930s Sullivan recalled how Dundee had shown him around, and how Ed “died a thousand deaths every time he met a celebrity, but didn’t want to let on.”