Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  Now that Ed was a New York fellow he wanted to look like one, and he spent every penny of his Mail salary to do so. He outfitted himself in high-quality hand-tailored suits and shirts; photos from the period show him to be nattily attired, with his hair slicked back, often sporting a fedora. One of the Mail’s advertisers was the Durant motorcar company, which must have caught Ed’s eye; he was soon motoring around town in his own Durant roadster. As a young man he was ruddily handsome, with wavy auburn hair and strong blue eyes, his masculine mien reflecting the glow of his Port Chester athleticism.

  On weekends he drove home to date his Port Chester sweetheart, Alma Burnes, but during the week he pursued the young women he met in New York’s nightclubs. The Mail referred to these female speakeasy habitués as “flappers”; in the 1890s the term referred to a young prostitute, but by the 1920s it had come to mean any girl with a thin, boyish figure and an informal manner. The flappers lived up to their reputation for flouting convention. The practice of young women frequenting drinking establishments by themselves was new, and frowned upon by many. Worse, many of the flappers wore dresses with hemlines a full twelve inches above the ground and visibly used cosmetics, and some even smoked in public.

  Ed’s favorite nightspot was the Silver Slipper, on West 48th Street, a roaring upscale speakeasy not far from his apartment. He was there almost every night, cigarette and drink in hand. His Port Chester shyness long gone, he was now an avid socializer, a natural glad-hander who conversed with anyone and everyone. One of those he became friends with was Joe Moore, a top speed skater who would compete in the 1924 Olympics, and later become a press agent who worked with Ed.

  More than lighting up his nights, the Slipper and other Broadway speakeasies introduced Ed to show business. He sat in jam-packed audiences as dozens of New York’s biggest acts strutted and twirled, like dancer Ruby Keeler, who later high-stepped in a raft of Busby Berkeley musicals, and Van and Schenk, a vaudeville comedy-music duo who crooned “All She’d Say Was ‘Umh Hum.’ ” Ed described the Slipper as the “hottest of the ‘hot’ spots when the heat was turned on … [full of] sporty, informal rendezvous with semi-nude chorines nodding to big shots, half-hidden by pitchers of fizzing champagne.… Where Ruby Keeler, with a gold chain … did a tap dance that was later to intrigue Al Jolson.”

  Ed spent many late evenings enjoying the comedy-music-dance act of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. The trio didn’t limit their antics to the stage; instead, they hurled themselves around the club in rough, exuberantly riotous routines. Ed became good friends with one of the trio, tap dancer Lou Clayton, who by one account was a “soft shoe man, tough guy, gambler, and with the ladies, a gentleman.” Sullivan and Clayton sometimes stayed out all night, completing their nocturnal revelries with a round of golf as the sun came up.

  The Evening Mail continued to assign the young reporter an ever-widening area of coverage. During 1921 and 1922 Ed churned out four or five articles a week, and by 1923 he earned sports reporter-at-large status, writing tartly trenchant accounts of horse races, swim meets, and tennis matches—he dubbed court ace Helen Wills “little poker face” for her ability to baffle opponents. He also garnered sought-after professional boxing and baseball assignments. He brought the immediacy of the ring into his pieces, as in his report of the Pal Moore-Frankie Jerome bout at Madison Square Garden:

  “Moore, who is reported to be a Klu [sic] Klux, was in rare form last night, and his laughable antics redeemed the show from being an utter failure. Pal slapped at Jerome from every angle of the landscape, and when he wasn’t slapping the Bronx youngster all over the ring he kept the crowd roaring by jigging. The combination was too much for Jerome and, although he did his best to land a damaging punch, Moore made him look ridiculous.

  “Jerome, time and again, swung viciously at the dancing, tantalizing figure in front of him, only to miss and zigzag around in a semicircle, when Moore deftly stepped out of range. Every time Jerome missed—and he missed plenty—Moore would cuff him dizzy with an open-glove slap that for all their lightness enabled the southerner to pile up an enormous advantage.”

  Ed often used a sly humor in his pieces, as in his explanation of “the razzberry,” the characteristic form of booing used in New York sporting events:

  “Slipping the gentle razzberry is America’s most expressive indoor sport. The razzberry, one of this country’s best beloved vegetables, conveys a distinct thought to the razzberr-ee and the value of this thought is measured by the tone, displacement, and volume of the gentle razz.… [One evening at Madison Square Garden] all was silent as the announcement cut its way through the smoke clouds hanging over the ring and mounted into the galleries, but ere the echoes of Joe’s voice had died away the gentle razz began to pervade the summer air. Louder and louder it grew until the whole Garden was rocking to its tune.”

  In the spring of 1923 the Mail paid Sullivan a career-boosting compliment, placing his photo above his column on a weekly basis. His headshot portrayed him as dapper in a coat and tie, gazing out with a determined mug into the middle distance. Ed Sullivan was now a known personality, a sports expert, a wise guy whose dictums were agreed with or disparaged in barroom banter. The twenty-one-year-old reporter’s coverage kept growing in color and humor, as in his profile of boxing promoter Jimmy Johnston:

  “Down and out a hundred times, busted at one time or other in every State in the Union, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams at intervals, but always game, the Boy Bandit’s fantastic career has ceased to startle the crowd who have been sunburned under the bulge of the great White Way.

  “Daniel Webster would have liked Jimmy a lot had he known him. For James Joy breathes, sleeps, and eats most of the glowing adjectives that the elder Webster corralled for our convenience.

  “Words are Jimmy’s pet diet. All advertising men, believers in publicity, like to dabble with ’em; in fact, they have to. Johnston, greatest publicity man the modern world has ever produced, not only dabbles with syllables. He makes them sit up and beg, and his finished products are evidence complete that Jimmy learned more than a little of human nature in his nomadic tours of the world.

  “King Tut received a lot of publicity when they trumped his coffin with a spade, but if the Bronx word juggler had been on the job we’d have learned more about Tut in one story than we gleaned from a batch of star correspondence in a month of overtime labor. In fact, Jimmy could have written better stuff sitting behind a ‘mill’ in his publicity bureau in the West Forties than was cabled by the writers on the spot.”

  During Ed’s many long nights spent watching cabaret acts at the Silver Slipper, he became friendly with the club’s owners, a trio of syndicate crime figures named Owney Madden, Frankie Marlow, and Bill Duffy. The syndicate plowed some of its enormous profits from illegal liquor sales into business interests in horse racing and boxing. Marlow owned ponies and oversaw the management of two fighters, and Duffy had an interest in boxer Primo Camera, a lumbering mountain of a man who would briefly hold the heavyweight title. According to Broadway scuttlebutt, these syndicate figures saw benefit in socializing with sports reporters, expecting it to improve coverage of their investments in pugilists and racehorses.

  The trio of mobsters welcomed the Mail’s young sports reporter. “At the club, we used to sit at Frankie Marlow’s own table,” Ed said. “Bill Duffy would join us.” One evening as Ed chatted with Duffy and Marlow at the Slipper, they were joined by Larry Fay, a racketeer and taxi fleet operator who wanted to enter the burgeoning speakeasy business. “Fay had just bought the Rendezvous from Marlow and Duffy and apparently he hadn’t paid up,” Sullivan said. “I heard Marlow call him over—remember, this guy Fay was pretty tough himself—and Marlow said to him, ‘Just a reminder, Larry, I gotta get the dough by Monday or you’ll find your ears lopped off.’

  “That’s how friendly I was with those guys. I got to overhear a conversation like that. I remember that line about lopping off the ears.…”

  Ed’s frien
dship with vaudeville dancer Lou Clayton often brought him to Club Durant, a speakeasy on West 58th Street. Soon after Jimmy Durante opened the club in early 1923, it became one of the city’s most notorious nightspots. Because Durante and Clayton were close friends, the soft-shoe man was present most nights. With his tough demeanor, Clayton was given the task of checking the patrons’ guns, storing them on ice (he considered it a good hiding spot) until they left. The intimate club, seating one hundred thirty-five and decked out with black velvet walls, stayed open until 7 A.M., and was a popular hangout for mobsters, whose business was flourishing with Prohibition. One small-time hood told Durante that he had “brought some sunshine into the lives of the mob.”

  Club Durant catered to big spenders: the entrance fee was a hefty $4 and a gallon of illegal wine fetched $25. Its orchestra played until dawn, and, noted one patron, “There are winsome girlies, too, who run true to cabaret type in conformation, appointment and program.” The club’s star was Durante himself, especially when he performed his wildly physical routine called “Wood.” As the band vamped brassy honky-tonk music, Durante mugged through a song and dance routine that entailed smashing every wooden item on stage. At the act’s climax, with the band screaming full bore, he tore apart a piano piece by piece and threw it into the orchestra (the musicians ducked artfully). The audience roared and laughed and demanded more as Durante dismembered the instrument. Ed, sitting in the audience sometime around 3 A.M. drinking illegal spirits, was so impressed he would book the act decades later.

  The high point of the reporter’s career in 1923 was his September interview with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, then in New York for a title bout. The pugilist was America’s idol that fall. Boxing was an ascendant sport in the 1920s and “The Manassas Mauler” led the way. His 1921 match against George Carpentier had boasted the first $1-million gate, and Dempsey was now the country’s highest paid athlete. His fabled “long count” match against Gene Tunney in 1927 would be one of the decade’s signature events. Having knocked down Tunney, Dempsey stood over him instead of returning to his corner, delaying the referee’s count; those few extra seconds allowed Tunney to recover, after which he went on to win. Whether Dempsey would have won had he quickly returned to his corner was debated endlessly in barrooms across the country.

  For Sullivan, who idolized sports figures (an idolization that continued throughout his life), meeting the champion was like being ushered into the presence of a Greek god. Even more heart-fluttering, Dempsey greeted the young reporter in his room at the Alamac Hotel, and invited Ed to join him for breakfast. “When I knocked at Dempsey’s door, he opened it himself—and I remember how big he looked,” Ed recalled. “He seemed to fill the doorway. He was wearing a loud striped bathrobe and he was smiling.” As they sat eating breakfast, the two men found common ground apart from the reporter—athlete interview. Sullivan, noticing a grapefruit packed in a bowl of ice, noted that he had never seen it served that way—he had never eaten in a restaurant in his youth. Dempsey one-upped him in terms of a humble background. The boxer said he had never seen grapefruit at all as a kid.

  Simpatico established, Sullivan and Dempsey would consider themselves friends from then on, staying in touch through the years. Toward the end of their lives they often had lunch together on Saturdays at Dempsey’s Broadway restaurant, talking about old times.

  In October 1923, Ed’s reporting career took a hard turn to the left. The New York Call, the city’s socialist newspaper, was revamping its format. Its new name was the New York Leader, and its self-proclaimed goal was to be “more than a propaganda organ. To be a REAL newspaper.” Its meager sports section, limited to desultory coverage of baseball and boxing, was being expanded to cover all major sports. It needed an editor to oversee its new sports staff of six contributors. Ed, at age twenty-two, saw the job as a chance for advancement.

  If moving from the Port Chester Daily Item to the New York Evening Mail had been a journey to a different world, Ed’s jump to the Leader required a still more fantastic voyage. The paper had so vigorously opposed U.S. involvement in World War I that it was prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Its offices were raided and wrecked during the “Red Scare” of 1919, a government campaign to harass suspected communists prompted by the recent Bolshevik overthrow of Russia. Later, the Leader published articles supportive of Sacco and Venzetti, the Italian radicals whose politically charged trial and subsequent conviction stirred controversy throughout the 1920s.

  Although the paper’s leftist sympathies were wide in scope—it published a sex education column by Margaret Sanger that included her writings about birth control—its chief focus was the burgeoning organized labor movement. The Leader provided detailed coverage of labor—management battles, with headlines like “Printers Win 44-Hour Week” and “Alabama National Guard Set Serious Precedent in Suppressing Miners.” Its hero was socialist labor organizer Eugene V. Debs (“Eugene V. Debs, former political prisoner of the United States government, would not leave San Francisco until he had visited Tom Mooney in his prison cell in San Quentin.”). The paper published a weekly listing of all the socialist meetings in New York, and also espoused brotherhood with its communist compatriots overseas, with stories like “Russian Workmen Made Sharers in Prosperity.” The Leader’s publisher, Norman Thomas, would be the Socialist Party presidential candidate from 1928 to 1948, and would help launch the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

  Ed, as the Leader’s sports editor, was also its top sports columnist. His column, East Side—West Side, All Around the Town, covered any sports topic he found interesting. For his debut piece on October 1 he wrote his own version of a workers’ solidarity piece, skewering racetracks and baseball stadiums for overcharging the common man. Baseball teams, he pointed out, haul in great sums from their fans—up to $1 million in the recent season, by his count—yet the best seats for the upcoming World Series tickets were set at the unconscionably high price of $6 a seat. “Instead of acknowledging the fans’ support throughout the season by a reduction in current baseball admission prices the judge boosted them, evidently using reverse English to arrive at his decision,” Ed opined. “It’s a great old world.”

  A few days later he wrote about how the Ku Klux Klan had influenced a southern sporting event, the Klan being a favorite target of the Leader. He began his piece with a reference to a black boxer named Battling Siki, who was originally from Senegal, Africa:

  “Battling Siki, the Senegalese dark horse, can’t speak English fluently, but if he could, he probably would express himself somewhat after this fashion: ‘Any Irishman who risks a world’s title down below the Mason–Dixon line of Kukluxland is about as crazy as any colored boy who risks one against an Irishman in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day.’ Yesterday’s near-riot in Columbus, Ga., precipitated by the Mike McTigue—Young Stribling championship go, can be traced directly to the Ku Klux clan [sic]. McTigue, an Irish Catholic, managed by Joe Jacobs, a Jew, has as much chance of getting an even break in Georgia as the well-known snowball has of enduring the scorching blasts of Dante’s Inferno.”

  After his first week, though, Ed’s Leader writing turned largely apolitical, however much the newsprint around him trumpeted the international proletariat. His move to the Leader seemed less a reflection of his politics than a desire to step up a career rung, less about the working class than about one individual worker. Although he advanced from reporter to editor, he covered sports much as he had at the Mail, offering sharply opinionated reports of everything from horse racing to the upcoming Olympics. He touted Illinois sophomore Red Grange as one of the great football halfbacks, lauded Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne’s competitive spirit—“Army never got over the shock of Notre Dame’s cocksuredness”—and plugged his friends, speed skater Joe Moore, on his way to the Olympics, and boxer Johnny Dundee, now featherweight champion. When he was wrong, which was not infrequent, he poked fun at himself. Covering the 1923 World Series, he forecast a Giants victory over the Yankee
s by four games to two; instead it was the Yankees, propelled by Babe Ruth, who won by that very score. Ed acknowledged his strikeout by adding a drawing to his column showing a group of men looking quizzically at a newspaper, with the caption, “Yes, We Picked the Giants!”

  But Ed’s newfound editorial status proved ill-starred. On November 13, less than six weeks after launching with its new name, the Leader suspended publication. Organized labor and socialist groups had pooled $100,000 to revamp the newspaper but increased costs quickly devoured the investment. “It seemed in every way right to suspend the Leader while it is solvent rather than try to continue at a financial hazard a paper of greatly reduced size,” announced one of its worker-managers. That may have made sound business sense but it didn’t change the fact that its entire staff, including its sports editor, was now unemployed.

  His newspaper contacts came in handy. The Evening Mail, which Ed had left to work for the Leader, threw him a lifeline, hiring him to cover winter sports in Florida. It was a plum job. He had canvassed the New York area covering sporting events but this was his first travel assignment. And covering baseball’s spring training was an added perk. Sullivan headed south sometime after the first of the year, 1924.

  This door, however, closed even faster than the Leader. On January 25, publishing mogul F.A. Munsey bought the Evening Mail for a price rumored to be in excess of $2 million, planning to incorporate the paper into one of his existing dailies. In the shuffle, Ed lost his assignment and found himself stranded in Florida.

  He was not only unemployed but nearly broke. Living the high life in Manhattan hadn’t entailed a savings plan. A golf pro named Tommy Armour loaned him $50 and referred him to famed sportswriter Grantland Rice (who wrote the oft-quoted aphorism “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”). Rice helped Ed get a job as a publicist for a golf course at Ormond Beach, Florida, a career detour that taught him a skill he often used later in life, event organizing. He gained his first experience as an event producer by putting together exhibition golf tournaments, which he promoted with minor publicity stunts.