Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Porno Graphic

  THE NEW YORK EVENING GRAPHIC knew how to elbow its way through the clutter of New York dailies. The paper’s frothy mix of scandal, sleaze, sex, and sensation provoked howls of protest. Many claimed the Graphic was moral corruption in print. “Negress Bares Rich Man’s Love Notes” blared a typical headline, or “Doctor’s Death Bares Exotic Sex Orgies.” Each day the paper found a fresh way to assault the respectable, with shockers like “Dating Bureaus for Lonely Co-eds to Solve Undergraduate Sex Problem” and “Beauty and Married Man Take Poison in Love Pact.” The city’s other leading tabloids, the Daily News and the Daily Mirror, were paragons of thoughtful, in-depth journalism by comparison to the Porno Graphic, as it was called. But if few respected the Graphic, quite a few read it. The paper’s circulation was near three hundred thousand in the mid 1920s.

  Graphic publisher Bernarr Macfadden was a notorious eccentric. A physical fitness buff who often walked barefoot through the newsroom, he hosted a radio show that guided listeners through rigorous morning calisthenics. The Graphic espoused his lusty appreciation of the human body and sex. The newspaper’s daily article about exercise featured photos of two scantily clad showgirls demonstrating moves, with captions: “Does your boyfriend’s driving get on your nerves?” asked one. “Yes,” answered her companion, “sometimes it seems as if he’ll never get out to the parking place!”

  Like Macfadden’s other publications, True Story and Physical Culture magazines, the Graphic relied heavily on photographs. And if the Graphic lacked an exclusive photo, it invented one. When the tabloid wanted a revealing shot of a debauched Broadway party or a celebrity divorce trial, it fabricated one using an unorthodox technique called the composograph. Staffers re-created scenes from news events by dressing up actors (sometimes reporters), photographing the tableau, then using scissors and glue to create a single “photograph.” Including as many seminude models as possible was imperative.

  For Ed, moving to the Graphic wasn’t a step up the ladder as much as a step toward greater notoriety. The paper screamed from the newsstand, and a Graphic byline gave a newsman a pronounced notoriety, if not respectability. Unlike some of the papers Ed worked for, at which he labored in anonymity, the Graphic moved him center stage.

  He landed his own daily column, Ed Sullivan’s Sport Whirl, with his photo gracing the top. In his headshot he was squarely handsome, the young athlete with his hair slicked back and parted in the middle, looking out with a firm gaze. As a columnist he no longer had to chase down stories but instead offered his opinions, with a generous dose of gossip and barroom philosophizing. Sport Whirl was a free-flowing insider’s notebook of tidbits and factoids, sometimes with an actual story thrown in. His column roamed freely through the world of professional athletics, from the personal to the political to the trivial, as if the Graphic had said to him: Here’s a typewriter, we’ll publish anything you want to write.

  Ed’s column pondered whether Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, the godlike stars of the New York Yankees, would continue their home run streaks. He reported that Pittsburgh Pirate captain Pie Traynor gave up cigars when the season started to aid his batting eye. Readers learned that tennis star Bill Tilden had every phonograph record made by opera star Mary Garden, and that William Wrigley (the chewing gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner) operated an aviary on Catalina Island, but quit after a $1,500 bird died.

  Sullivan had a special fondness for boxing, which in the 1920s vied with baseball as the nation’s leading sport. In his column the give and take of the ring could be analogous to almost anything. In a 1928 piece he compared the battle for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations, led by Herbert Hoover and Al Smith, respectively, to the battle between fighters to determine who got a shot at heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. Boxing also allowed Sullivan to write about race, a visceral issue in the sport at the time.

  Although Jack Johnson’s 1908 victory made him the first black pugilist to win the heavyweight title, after he lost in 1915 the boxing industry closed ranks to prevent another black champion. Ed addressed the issue in his 1928 column about George Godfrey, a fighter who he opined had a good chance of winning the title: “after peering at the two hundred twenty-five pound negro [sic], one can readily imagine him telling even Dempsey to go get a reputation.” But after a conversation with top promoter Tex Rickard, Ed reported Godfrey would be denied a title bout against reigning (white) champion Gene Tunney due to his race:

  “Why does Tex shy from another mixed heavyweight scrap? I asked that question in his office one afternoon. ‘I saw pictures of colored men strung to lampposts after the Johnson-Jeffries fight.… I resolved that I’d never try that again,’ Rickard replied. Tex believes that the country has grown more tolerant, but he refuses to believe that our present degree of tolerance can prevail against passions which are a great deal older than any of the present generation. So Godfrey can be counted out definitely.”

  Sullivan’s Graphic writing about race and sports was as much advocacy as reporting. He continued to cover a cause he had touched on at the Leader, civil rights. Ed claimed he had gotten access to a contract for a football game between New York University and the University of Georgia. In the document, according to Sullivan, New York University agreed to a demand by the southern university to bench one of its players because he was black. “For the next week, I castigated New York University’s immorality and suggested that their Hall of Fame be torn down and transferred to some other university with a higher regard for a boy’s dignity.”

  In advocating for the rights of black athletes, Ed took a stand that there was little public demand for, and likely not what the Graphic’s sports readers paid their 2 cents to read about (though the paper itself relished controversy in all its forms). His vocal and unstinting support of equal rights would be one of the few facets of his career he pursued regardless of how the audience felt about it.

  In one of Sullivan’s columns about boxing and ethnicity, he wrote that the results of three recent Madison Square Garden boxing matches “erased any immediate possibility that the Jewish race would break what amounts to an exclusing [sic] Irish-Italian monopoly on the world’s pugilistic titles.” He observed that titles once capably held by Battling Levinsky, Louis “Kid” Kaplan, and Charlie Rosenberg were now taken by Irish and Italian pugilists.

  His own Irish-Jewish matchup continued apace, as he and Sylvia Weinstein maintained their tempestuous romance. The couple continued to be on-again, off-again, but remained steady despite the turbulence. She grew ever adept at handling his moods, knowing when to let him be and avoid the subject. And he began taking her to events other than sporting matches. As a Graphic staffer, he received tickets to events of many kinds, and one evening he took Sylvia to opening night of an Eddie Cantor movie, Kid Boots—a special thrill for his date. In a major step, the couple even made the trip to Ed’s home in Port Chester, though it did nothing to change the Sullivan family’s attitudes toward a potential marriage. And as always, Ed and Sylvia spent many evenings hopping between Manhattan speakeasies.

  For Ed, nights on the town were a way to engage in his favorite sport: glad-handing. He was an incurable socializer whose crowd of acquaintances became a stepping-stone to a still larger crowd. The sports columnist socialized around the Graphic office as much as he worked, perhaps more so, never missing a chance to shoot the bull or trade the latest gossip. “While his associates sped hither and thither in a rush of activity, Sullivan just lounged around and talked to people,” wrote Graphic editor Frank Mallen. “He got more use out of a chair than anyone connected with the place.… He was a friendly person whose attribute of easily making acquaintances gradually spread his personality around New York.” Ed called everyone at the office by his or her first name, except for Macfadden. He became such a popular figure at the Graphic that the other sportswriters elected him sports editor.

  But the social butterfly wasn’t neglecting his work, in Mal
len’s view. “Those who mistook his easy-going [sic] gait as an indication of languor, however, were wrong. It was purely a matter of mathematics. It would take him half the time to write his stories than others needed. The reason was that he never had to stop to find the right word, an angle, a good start, or to look things up. They cascaded freely right into his typewriter, attesting to an uncanny gift of expression and memory.”

  The columnist was continually looking for his next venture. He began organizing and promoting “Strong Man” tournaments, in which great hulking slabs of men performed unlikely feats of strength. Contestants bent and lifted a plethora of iron and steel contraptions, grunting while attempting to outdo the competition. He held the carnival-like events in New York’s Webster Hall, emceeing the contests himself, introducing the men onstage and enthusiastically directing audience applause. He also judged the tournaments, deciding—presumably based on audience reaction—which of the bulked-up behemoths won top honors. On occasion, some of the strongmen disputed Sullivan’s rulings. One giant demanded that Ed follow him to the freight yards and watch him move a train car using his head.

  Ed also began organizing and acting as master of ceremonies for the celebrity-studded Graphic sports dinners, held at swank locations like the Hotel Astor. With Macfadden’s backing, Ed assembled rosters of star athletes, like Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Red Grange, and golf star Gene Sarazen; the charismatic Mayor Jimmy Walker made cameos as well. On certain evenings Sullivan assembled and hosted Graphic dinners with marquee stage performers, like Rudy Vallee, the popular crooner who sometimes sang through a megaphone, and Sophie Tucker, the risqué comedienne who warbled double entendre chestnuts like “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love.” At one Graphic soiree Sullivan presented Al Jolson, the vaudeville singer whose blackface performance in the first talkie, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, helped introduce a new Hollywood era.

  Being a master of ceremonies was a job that Ed found that he liked immensely. It put the young columnist right were he wanted to be, in the spotlight.

  The Graphic employee that Sullivan would have the most longstanding relationship with was Walter Winchell, the paper’s gossip columnist and its biggest star. An egoistic workaholic whose column commanded the attention of Manhattan’s “in crowd” as well as those with their nose pressed against the window, Winchell is considered the original show business gossip columnist. Other publications covered Broadway, and gossip was a staple of newspapers long before Winchell, but he combined the two with a go-for-the-jugular ethic and streetwise verbal wit like no one before him. Graphic readers could hardly wait to read Your Broadway and Mine, his irreverent daily peephole into the lives of the rich and famous.

  In an age when it was viewed as improper to report even a pregnancy, the Graphic allowed Winchell to chronicle the glamorous classes in intimate detail, including divorces, affairs, courtships, and illnesses. With a sprawling network of sources and a rat-a-tat-tat machine gun style, he exposed the peccadilloes of the well known seemingly without censor. That he was widely read didn’t mean he was widely loved. In fact he was loathed by many, by those who felt his skewering of the status quo was immoral, and by those whose secrets he exposed. But Winchell didn’t care. He was driven by his column. The public felt profoundly ambiguous about him—as it did about the Graphic itself—with some calling him a corrupting influence, but he sold newspapers.

  And Winchell was powerful. Broadway shows sold more or less tickets and starlets gained or lost bookings based on his pronouncements, which were repeated up and down the Main Stem, as Broadway was known. Over time he would become a one-man media empire. At his height in the late 1930s and 1940s, Winchell’s column was syndicated in more than two thousand newspapers, and his hit radio show was talked about across the country. It’s estimated that more than half the adult population either read his column or heard his broadcast. As his influence grew, so did the scope of his subject matter. In addition to Broadway and Hollywood celebrities, he dispensed pithy opinions on novels, records, radio programs, and even national affairs, on which he editorialized with a populist bent. His seat-of-the-pants take on current affairs was so well regarded that government officials established a liaison to court his influence, and he was called to the White House on a number of occasions.

  Over decades, Sullivan and Winchell would have a complicated relationship. It was often described as a feud, and it was that; the two squabbled bitterly. But at times they had something of a friendship and could be warm and almost brotherly. Each had reason to dislike the other. Ed felt deeply envious of Walter, whose column made him more famous than many of the stars he wrote about. Walter, for his part, was highly insecure, and disliked even his minor competitors, like a popular sports columnist with his photo atop his column. A loner with few, if any, real friends, Winchell was not susceptible to Sullivan’s easygoing glad-handing, and tended to be unimpressed with “Eddie Sullivan,” as he sometimes called him.

  The feud-friendship began as soon as the two met. One of their early skirmishes involved Emile Gauvreau, the Graphic’s tough, shrewd editor. Gauvreau came to the paper from the Hartford Courant, a respected small paper, and he retained some memory of journalistic ethics. Paradoxically, Gauvreau supervised the Graphic’s fabricated news stories but tried to rein in Winchell as the columnist pushed the prim boundaries of 1920s propriety. After Winchell included a column tidbit about a married couple expecting a child, Gauvreau bellowed at him: “This is a family newspaper! You cannot say people are having babies!” Winchell changed the reference to a “blessed event,” but the battle between Winchell and Gauvreau raged constantly.

  According to Sullivan, Winchell at one point asked Ed to intervene on his behalf, to get Gauvreau to go easier on him. The idea was that Sullivan, having plenty of friends at the paper—unlike Winchell—would have influence where the gossip columnist did not.

  Sullivan went on a fishing trip with a Graphic executive, O.J. Elder, and put in a good word for Winchell. When Gauvreau learned about Sullivan’s attempt to influence senior management, he bawled him out for going over his head. After the editor vented his rage, he explained that it had been Winchell himself who had informed him of Ed’s attempt to go over his head. Sullivan felt he had been double-crossed.

  At that point, Gauvreau called Winchell to his office. The gossip columnist admitted that, yes, he was the one who had told the editor—but he claimed Gauvreau had forced him. Sullivan, himself now enraged, said, “Walter, what can I do with a cringing coward like you? If I hit you, you might get hurt. If I spit in your eye, it will be coming down to your level.”

  Winchell claimed this story was a Sullivan fabrication. And it may well be a case of the Sullivan Story. It’s not likely that Winchell would have asked Sullivan to intervene on his behalf. The Broadway gossip had considerable clout due to his immense popularity with readers; he wouldn’t have needed the sports editor to plead his case. According to Winchell, he himself lobbied management to stop cutting items from his column.

  But the anecdote, if it was an exaggeration by Ed, says something about his envy of Walter, which he admitted only decades later. The story portrays Sullivan as having influence where Winchell did not—and it was exactly Winchell’s power and influence that Ed so admired. And it shows Ed as clearly the dominant victor, one-upping the star gossip columnist. That would always be Ed’s hope, and he would struggle to do so for quite some time. From this rocky beginning the two men would stay oddly intertwined throughout their lives, and would still be playing out their rivalry-brotherhood in their seventies. Ed had lost his twin brother Danny in infancy, but in Walter he found something of a replacement.

  Over the course of his many nights at the Silver Slipper, Ed’s friendship with the mobsters who owned the speakeasy grew stronger. After racketeer Frank Marlow was shot to death near Flushing Cemetery in 1929, Ed wrote a fond remembrance of the syndicate figure:

  “Along Broadway they are selling extras telling of
Frank Marlow’s death, and yet some of us expect to see his fine eyes crinkle in a pleased smile and to hear his cheery ‘Hello pardner,’ a salutation that was not paralleled along Broadway for pure warmth of feeling.… To sit in a night club, to watch his eyes sparkle with pleasure, to hear him gently teasing the little blonde-haired girl with whom he was head-over-heels in love with.… To some, Frank Marlow was a racketeer … to us, who rejoiced in his friendship, he was an eager, impulsive, loyal friend.”

  In the view of Dan Parker, a sportswriter for competing tabloid the Daily Mirror, Sullivan’s unabashed friendship with the mobsters who managed boxer Primo Camera had led to journalistic fraud. Although Camera, “the Ambling Alp,” would briefly take the heavyweight title in 1933, accounts of his career invariably mention rumors that he was aided by strong-arm tactics other than his own. Parker claimed that Ed’s Graphic column was part of the fix, that Ed was helping the mob groom Camera for an eventual title shot—a claim that Ed disputed. Sullivan was indeed the boxer’s cheerleader, writing plugs for the mountainous pugilist on a regular basis. But he claimed that his belief in Camera was sincere: “I really thought a lot of Camera, and praised him all the way up,” Ed said.

  Parker and Sullivan became embroiled in a fisticuffs of their own. Parker wrote, “Speaking for the Duffy interests which he seems to represent, Mr. Sullivan, the columnist, and, as he confesses, ‘the original booster of the big man from the South of Italy,’ offers to take ‘any odds such a scoffer as Danyell Parker will offer and back Camera to beat such as Godfrey, Jim Maloney, K.O. Christner.’ … Now look here, Eddie, you old sheik … do you think I’d be foolish enough to bet on a fight in which Primo Camera participated—assuming, of course, that he will ever participate in a real fight?… And, oh, what I know about Eddie Sullivan!”