Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  That would be easier said than done. In claiming he would write a Broadway column free of gossip, Ed faced a gaping void. He had to churn out six columns a week, Monday through Saturday, each about fifteen hundred words—an enormous amount of space to fill without the usual patter of petty scandal.

  His claim of journalistic piety lasted as long as two bits in a Broadway speakeasy. On Tuesday, one day after his opening roundhouse punch, he wrote a padded piece of treacle mourning vaudevillian Joe Schenck, who had died prematurely. On Wednesday he went back on the attack, decrying the “velvet hammer” of the Broadway drama critics, how they “hem and haw, they beat about the reviewing bush and extract from it critical thorns with which to puncture the hide of agonized producers. Primarily, they seek arty phrases in which to couch their barbs. These, they hope, are destined for mouthing in salon and drawing room.” In contrast, Ed promised, “If I like a show, I will say so without any ambiguity of phrasing which might protect my Variety box score.”

  In that same Wednesday column—just forty-eight hours after proclaiming, “divorces would not be propagated in this column”—he included an item about Jack Dempsey’s divorce. Its expense was placing the boxer in “desperate need for ready cash,” Ed wrote. “The ex-champion is seriously considering a fight at Reno against a guaranteed tanker. Dempsey would promote it, and would not have to cut Estelle in on the net.” In one fell swoop he had abandoned his promise and publicized the personal troubles of a friend. It was as if he hadn’t realized how deep the waters would be, and now, not sure if he could swim, was grasping at anything to keep himself afloat. He would print another item about Dempsey in a few months, claiming that the boxer had ducked in and out of New York quickly because of rumored kidnap threats. That column item prompted an angry telegram from Dempsey, which Ed printed: ALWAYS CONSIDERED YOU A FRIEND STOP DIDN’T EXPECT YOU TO WRITE AND PRINT A STORY YOU KNOW IS RIDICULOUS AND WITHOUT FOUNDATION STOP ONE NEVER KNOWS WHAT TO EXPECT THESE DAYS, HOWEVER. JACK DEMPSEY.

  By Friday of his first week, it seemed, he was out of material, reduced to a windy paean lauding the glories of opening night. In lieu of actual news, he provided a dollop of pandering to the hometown crowd (and a florid description of the world the twenty-nine-year-old columnist was entering):

  “A First-night supplies all these things to all men of Broadway. Gorgeous women flicking red-tipped cigarettes, suave gentlemen suavely tailored, and the whole against a background of curious crowds at the theater entrances, their gaping delight occasionally blotted out by the brawny shoulders of the cops holding them in restraint.… It has a glittering spread to it that reduces the rivalry of other cities to inconsequence. Depreciatingly, these other cities sneer, ‘New York is a sucker town.’ And then these other cities bend frantically to their work in order to get carfare to reach it. For they all want to gaze at the steel-ribbed frame of the ‘sucker city.’ ”

  By the end of the month, gossip flowed from the column in a steady trickle. He began regularly including items like “Grover Cleveland Alexander is back with his wife and off the booze.” In mid July he informed readers, “Everyone who played a lead in The Marriage Circle, including Lubitsch, the director, has been divorced.” In August he reported, “Abe Lyman’s sister is returning from the coast … without her hubby.” And shortly thereafter, “Jean Malin belted a heckler last night in one of the clubs.… All that twitters isn’t pansy …”

  Walter Winchell described a scene at LaHiff’s Tavern shortly after Sullivan started including gossip. Ed stopped by the bar and joined Winchell and an assortment of Broadway types who were drinking and talking shop. Walter couldn’t resist needling Ed about his journalistic change of heart:

  “Eddie,” I cooed, “what happened? Did your editor tell you to get interesting or get out?”

  “No,” he sighed. “My wife did.”

  Initially, Ed’s job as a Broadway columnist included drama criticism. If dealing with gossip meant swimming in uncharted waters, writing serious theater criticism put him in over his head. Just weeks earlier he had been reporting blow-by-blows from the bouts at Madison Square Garden. Now, having never read a single play, he found himself at the opening night of a production of August Strindberg’s The Father, an intense psychological drama. Sullivan didn’t like the play and made that clear in his review. In his best imitation of a drama critic, he recommended that the playwright rewrite the entire second act. Not until the following day did Ed realize that Strindberg was long dead.

  But Graphic readers didn’t pay 2 cents to read in-depth reviews of Strindberg productions, and Ed quickly navigated away from serious theater criticism. Henceforth he would go no closer to legitimate theater than comments like, “those cocktails at Alice Brady’s party would have jolted Eugene O’Neil [sic] into writing a musical comedy.” Instead, Sullivan’s column provided readers with his tell-it-like-it-is descriptions of lighthearted Broadway fare, the broad comedies and showy musicals that lit up the Main Stem.

  More than covering light theater, though, Ed’s column created a kind of parallel universe. As the Depression cast deep shadows, even the Graphic’s headlines turned serious: “6,000 Hunger Marchers Set Out for Washington” and “Mid-West Farmer Pays Taxes with Nuts in Lieu of Money.” Ed’s column was a respite from the grimness. He mentioned the Depression, to be sure—it was unavoidable at this point. But more often he wove a pixie-dust fairy tale of Broadway glamour, peopled with big spenders, shapely chorines, and talented showbizzers. This beautiful set had the luxury of falling in and out of love with dizzying frequency, usually at high-class speakeasies where the headwaiter understood the importance of seating stars around the room at a discreet distance.

  He didn’t have to invent this world; some vestige of it still existed from before the Crash, and he was quickly invited in. For a columnist who could provide publicity, the invitations were numerous. Ed visited Fred Astaire’s dressing room at the New Amsterdam Theater. The thirty-one-year-old dancer was then appearing in the original Broadway production of The Band Wagon, having yet to make his first trip to Hollywood:

  “If you find [vaudeville star] Joe Schenck at Richman’s dressing room, you are more apt to find a Vanderbilt or a Whitney in Astaire’s place. The youthful dancing star claims most of the social set as his bosom pals, or, perhaps I should twist that around and point out that they claim him.

  “Fred’s droll colored dresser provides a lighter note for the guests here, providing he knows them. If he likes them, he will even go out of the theater and get them a glass of Fred’s favorite after-performance beverage, milk. Bob Benchley is a member in good standing of the Astaire Dressing Room and Milk-Drinking Benevolent Association.”

  Musical theater producers buttonholed the new columnist to hobnob with their stars. “Before Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers left for the Pacific Coast to write songs for Maurice Chevalier’s next picture, I had lunch with them and George Gershwin on Broadway,” Ed reported, as if he dined with Main Stem superstars on a regular basis. It was impossible to say which of that day’s lunch companions was more famous; Gershwin had debuted the groundbreaking Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, and Rodgers and Hart’s bubbly musicals continuously delighted Broadway. “The conversation switched to aviation. We all agreed that we were safer on the ground. Rodgers, who doesn’t like flying, suddenly remembered something. ‘I shouldn’t be opposed to flying,’ he said, ‘for an airplane trip gave me an idea for one of our best songs.’ ” Rodgers, Sullivan wrote, explained that he composed “With a Song in My Heart” after listening to the roar of an airplane engine.

  Ed seemed to become fast friends with Florenz Ziegfeld, whose leggy Ziegfeld Follies comedy-dance revue was one of the signature acts of the 1920s. “In a speakeasy the other night, before the ‘Follies’ left for Philadelphia, Flo Ziegfeld chided me for writing that he was sixty-seven years old,” Ed wrote. “ ‘It’s sixty-three,’ protested Ziggie, forgetting that two weeks previous, at the Peacock Ball, he had given me sixty-seven as his corr
ect age.” (Ziegfeld in fact was sixty-three in 1931.)

  Sullivan sat in the lobby of the Hotel Warwick with Jack Benny and Eddie Cantor and debated the effect of various theaters on the success of a show. “Jack Benny felt that the Manhattan Theater, the former Hammerstein Theater, contributed to the poor reception of Free for All. Cantor disagreed volubly,” Ed noted. (The Manhattan Theater would later be renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater.)

  The columnist sometimes journeyed uptown, to Harlem, to investigate the newest jazz orchestras. He preferred bandleader Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington, a position he conceded was controversial: “I said he would overhaul Ellington … the town giggled at the thought.… But I ask you now … who’s bigger, Ellington or Calloway?”

  By the early 1930s, Broadway faced an upstart rival in the business of fame, Hollywood, and this new world was often feted in Ed’s column.

  “Every time one of the West Coast picture stars arrives in New York the playboys go into action on all fronts, for it is a particular badge of merit to have wooed and won, even for a fortnight, a movie star…

  “You can imagine the commotion that was raised by the Men About Town when the petite Raquel Torres, one of the smarter-looking coasters, detrained in the local trainshed. I don’t blame the local Men About Town for the haste in placing orders at the greenhouses; Raquel is an unusually pretty girl and, in addition, seems to know what time it is without looking at the Paramount Building clock.”

  Ed was thoroughly thrilled by his new status as a Broadway chronicler. He had, he admitted, no desire to go back to sports, the field in which he had labored so long to establish himself. “So many have asked my reaction to the new field of work that I will tell them now that Broadway columning is more varied and more interesting than sports columning,” he wrote in September 1931, having launched his column two months prior. “I believe that the people you meet in theater and its wings are, in the aggregate, smarter and more interesting.” If he had been coerced into this job, as he later claimed, he took to it like an actor to the stage.

  New York had been a good place to cover sports, but it was the place to report on the breathless business of glamour. “They say that Broadway and 42nd Street is the junction of the universe and it’s about right, at that,” he rhapsodized. “Not many nights ago, I sat in one of the more elaborate speakeasies in the Fifties and marveled at the diversity of life gathered together in one spot.

  “There, by the wall, with a blue sailor hat pulled down over her eyes, sat Greta Garbo with Berthold Viertel … on the left side of the room was Harry Richman, matinee idol, and with him was Bert Lahr, comedian of screen and stage [later to play the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz]…two tables to the right … was Jim Turner, vice-president of huge R.K.O.

  “Where else but on Broadway would you find all these various types all in the same room, and nobody paying any attention to them.”

  For all of Ed’s outwardly jaunty tone, all was not well. He had always been moody, prone to fits of melancholia and sudden anger. But now an event plunged him into a dismal funk. On September 28, 1931, his thirtieth birthday arrived. As he saw it, the day dawned like a late edition headline proclaiming his personal failure. He fell into a gray mood, a cloudy depression as dark as that on the streets of New York. In essence, he felt deeply frustrated at not having achieved more. By external measure he was in splendid shape; not only was he employed, no small achievement in 1931, but at $375 a week he could easily afford to travel in the circles of those he covered. He had just landed a high-profile job that opened doors all over the city. Yet by his self-evaluation he was nowhere.

  Years later his daughter recalled, “I remember my mother saying my father was lying on the bed, and it was his thirtieth birthday, and he felt he should have accomplished more than he had.… He was a moody person, he might have even been depressed. In those days we didn’t pay attention to that.”

  His wife described that blue mood as “one of the unhappiest days of Ed’s life. I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. There he was looking as if the end of the world had come. Ed felt he was getting old and not getting where he wanted to be.”

  As fortunate as his life had been, he hadn’t gained the one thing he so hungered for. “He didn’t have national prominence—and that’s what he wanted,” Sylvia said. “I was perfectly happy with him the way he was but he was born with a desire to be a big success.” This frustrated desire for greater recognition made him “terribly tense,” she said.

  What Ed wanted, in short, was to be a star like those he wrote about. He had always idolized athletic heroes—Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Babe Ruth, even perhaps his former fiancée, Olympic gold medalist Sybil Bauer. Now he lived in an even brighter solar system, meeting the likes of Rodgers and Hart, Fred Astaire, Eddie Cantor, and George Gershwin. These were the mythic figures whose names were known coast to coast, who traveled on the gossamer wings of fame and renown. This is what he wanted, but the calendar said he was thirty and it still hadn’t happened. He wasn’t going to give up, of course—the desire, the hunger, burned too fiercely. He wanted to be famous. He was going to have to work on that.

  Having violated his vow against gossip early on, after a few months Ed let it fall away altogether, reporting a constant stream of divorces and romantic intrigues. As he wrote about Broadway closets he used a new journalistic convention created by Walter Winchell: a series of phrases connected by ellipses. The effect was freeing, as if journalism, having loosened the moorings of propriety, would now dispense with the tired sentence-period-sentence format. “I linked Thelma Todd to Ronald Colman … That’s wrong … the real romance is with a married man, and it looks like a house wrecking,” he reported. “Claire Windsor, on tour with Jolson’s ‘Wunderbar’…is taking iron injections … She’s still bothered by injuries suffered in the Phil Plant yacht crash … Reid, her coast honey, will join her as soon as he recovers from scars inflicted in an airplane wreck … But I’ll tell you confidentially that there will be no marriage.” In Ed’s column the giddy merry-go-round of love never paused: “The Ginger Rogers—Mervyn Le Roy romance is still blazing, and Ralph Ince is going places with Mervyn’s wife while she awaits the divorce decree.”

  The blind items, with no specific names attached, could go that extra step: “conspicuous on the [dance] floor was that well-known widow … with her gigolo.” But even with the names attached the gossip sometimes took a darker turn. “Mrs. Violet Swanstrom plans a doctor’s examination to disprove those drug charges.” The gambling losses of the elite were steady diet. “Al Jolson has sworn off the gee-gees [horse races] for the balance of the season,” Ed reported. And the uncle of CBS radio network head Bill Paley “wound up by blowing $27,000” in an Atlantic City casino, he wrote.

  The freshman columnist freely admitted that he was a scandalmonger. In early January Ed described the ethic of the Broadway columnist—now that he was very much one of them:

  “The idea is that we go along, in our own humble way, trying to spread seeds of dissatisfaction where orchids grew before … Harmony is our ruin and our downfall … We seek discord, divorce, lawsuits, and you will pardon the smug chuckle as I say: We got them!… We are the vultures winging above the Empire State Building … Eyeing you hungrily … You think at night you are hearing airplanes … not so … that’s us.

  “Scandal, gossip, rumor … Founded or unfounded … to us, they’re a wagonload of hors d’oeuvre … Life to us is a bowl of cherries … with the razzes for you … You only offend me when you say, for instance, that I’m constructive … Constructive?… You wound me to the soul … You mean that I don’t hurt your feelings … My gracious, I’m a floperoo … What? Oh, I do belt now and then … Well now, that’s better … I wouldn’t want to think I was smothering to death in a pot of honey … Eh, what?… You have an exclusive story for me … Don’t be crazy … I printed that two weeks ago.”

  Paradoxically, as much gossip as Ed shoveled, he presumed to maintain his own sense of
the puritanical. He did not, for example, approve of women who told dirty stories: “It puts them in the same catalogue with birds who carry filthy pictures in their pockets … It is an unhealthy lewdness that adds nothing to a girl’s charm … Just as it is an ugly practice for such a talented lyricist as Harold Arlen to write double-entendre lyrics for Leitha Hill.”

  Although he was now a Broadway fellow, Ed made it clear he was no dandy. He was, as rival columnist Louis Sobol had described him, “a he-man type fellow.” Perhaps to keep the score clear, Ed wrote regularly of the “pansies.” “Bert Savoy … Effeminate in the days when pansies wore skirts … Today they wear swallow-tails … Fashions change, and the pansies with them.” Yet Ed readily acknowledged that not everyone shared his standoffish attitude. If big money stopped investing in speakeasies, “the late spots will be patterned after the crude loft building which houses the pansy cabaret in the 1200s on 6th Avenue,” he opined. “The pansies, under the leadership of one of their veterans, have rigged out a spot that represents an investment of perhaps $50. Instead of a cash register, they use a butter tub to hold the receipts. Daubs of paint furnish the coloring. Yet Greta Garbo and other celebs storm the place to watch the effeminate men serve hard liquor.”

  As Ed mined the gold of celebrity news through the fall and winter of 1931–32, he also reported what he saw as the hidden truth behind its luster: the talented and the famous were not really happy. Underlying the façade of celebrity was a foundation of worry and concern. “Not long ago we had dinner with the Babe Ruths … here must be a happy soul … an orphan boy … greatest idol of the country … at a fabulous salary … playing better than he had ever played, in his thirty seventh year … he had every reason to be happy and content.” But he wasn’t happy, Ed wrote. “He was fretting over his income tax … over the choice of a school for his daughter, Julia.”