Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  No matter who you are, his column explained, happiness is a mere chimera. “I watched Maurice Chevalier … and Walter Donaldson … at Abe Lyman’s opening at Hollywood Gardens … One is the matinee idol of the continent … and the other is one of the great songwriters of all time … These two have the world by the throat … And Lyman is leader of one of the great bands of the country…

  “Yet Chevalier was moody … Donaldson was inattentive … Lyman was nervous and upset … What is this thing called happiness?” he asked, rephrasing the lyric to the recent Cole Porter hit, “What Is This Thing Called Love?”

  Part of the problem was Broadway itself. As he saw it, the street was chock full of phonies. It was a theme he returned to again and again. The phonies. He hated them.

  “In case you don’t know … a phoney is a pretender … a sham and a larcenous fraud … and what a magnificent collection of phonies on your dear old Broadway … They could call this stretch of pavement Phoney Boulevard … Kept women and kept men … Roues and men-about-town … half-pint racketeers … all in the parade of Boulevard de Phoney … Insincerity marks all of them … the moral paupers of this fastest of all centuries … their ambitions condensed into a single line … ‘Mention me in your column’ … What a magnificent ambition … To crash a Broadway column … They can’t conceive of any decoration to match this one … The poor phonies!”

  In January 1932, Ed’s newfound celebrity status afforded him a sought-after opportunity: radio. The medium had arrived by the early 1930s. Although newspaper advertising was eviscerated by the Depression, radio advertising jumped ninety percent in the years following the Crash. Many Americans didn’t have enough money to cover basic necessities, yet radios kept flying off storeroom shelves. Between 1928 and 1932 the number of receivers catapulted from eight million to eighteen million. Part of radio’s attraction was its intimacy. Fans idolized film stars, but radio personalities visited their living rooms. The warmth and immediacy of the medium created a sea change in news and entertainment, and electronic broadcast created a new class of stars. Performers previously limited to a single theater now sang, joked, and told stories to a national audience with the flick of a switch. Many of vaudeville and legitimate theater’s biggest names now angled for a chance in a medium they had at first ignored.

  Walter Winchell’s success in radio, through a series of twists and turns, led to the beginning of Sullivan’s broadcast career. Winchell began his radio career in 1929, hired by CBS for a weekly gossip show sponsored by La Gerardine, a woman’s hair tonic. As popular as Winchell was in newspapers, he was born for radio, with an intense, confidential tone that invited listeners into his fantastic milieu of celebrity. The gossip’s stream of wry chatter about the personal and romantic fortunes of Hollywood and Broadway stars entranced the public.

  Winchell’s show caught the attention of George Washington Hill, the head of American Tobacco Company. Hill called his ad agency and told them to hire the fast-pattering gossip maven for a show sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes broadcast on NBC. The Lucky Strike program offered Winchell a major step up. The CBS program had paid $1,000 a week; the NBC program offered $3,500 a week and was accompanied by top-flight dance orchestras.

  But the sponsor of the CBS program, La Gerardine, wouldn’t let Winchell out of his contract unless he found a replacement. The new hire would need a proper radio voice and good delivery, and was required to bring celebrity guests. Winchell first asked Mark Hellinger, another Broadway reporter. Hellinger turned him down, telling Walter, “I wouldn’t be known as a Winchell imitator for ten thousand a week.” Walter then recommended Sidney Skolsky, a gossip columnist for the Daily-News. Skolsky’s audition served up plenty of show business tidbits but the ad agency found his voice thin and squeaky.

  Walter then phoned Ed and recommended he go after the job. Ed’s audition lacked Winchell’s fluid patter, but he had done some emceeing and his column enabled him to deliver well-known guests. La Gerardine gave him the job. His fifteen-minute show on CBS, Broadway’s Greatest Thrills, debuted on January 12, 1932, broadcasting Tuesday nights at 8:45. This was the opportunity he had so greatly desired—radio was an open doorway to fame—and he threw himself into it. To promote the program he took the unusual step of buying his own ad in Variety every week to tout that week’s star.

  Using an interview format, he conversed with celebrities about their lives and careers. For his debut show he pulled out all the stops, landing legendary tunesmith George M. Cohan, who, remarkably, had opened a new show on Broadway every year since 1903. The composer-producer told the story of the first performance of his patriotic crowd-rouser “Over There,” during a World War I rally in which Woodrow Wilson was scheduled to attend. Adding a touch of drama, Cohan recalled that when the stage lights went out unexpectedly the audience feared it was sabotage by German spies, until a performer spontaneously broke into “Over There” to inspire the anxious crowd.

  Ed only briefly mentioned his radio debut in his column, in a bit of underplayed promotion not characteristic of him. Three weeks later, in an item buried deep in his column, he wrote: “The greatest thrill I got from that first radio broadcast was the very sweet wire from the charming Delores Hutchins, at Loomis Sanitorium.” With time he played up Broadway’s Greatest Thrills much more in his column. After hosting Broadway star Jack Haley (who later played the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz), he wrote, “The mail from St. Louis was unusually heavy,” and reprinted part of a Haley fan letter. He worked in a mention of his radio interview of Broadway promoter Earl Carroll, whose greatest thrill was owning his own theater, by reporting that Carroll was now losing it due to the Depression’s downturn.

  Ed’s guests that winter included his friend from the Silver Slipper, Jimmy Durante; Broadway actress Helen Morgan, whose career was launched by her version of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” in the 1927 debut of Show Boat; the songwriting team of Lew Brown and Ray Henderson, who wrote the music for the current Broadway hit, George White’s Scandals; Buddy Rogers, a screen idol known as “America’s Boyfriend”; and Ruth Etting, a wildly popular vocalist who would have more than sixty hit records by the end of the 1930s.

  On March 29, Sullivan hosted Jack Benny, in the laconic comic’s radio debut. Benny would soon become one of radio’s leading voices, remaining so until the mid 1950s, yet that evening he was only modestly well known, having appeared on Broadway and been a top vaudeville emcee. He began his routine on Sullivan’s show by saying “Good evening, folks. This is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause for everyone to say ‘Who cares?’ ” That night’s program was a huge hit and Ed recapped their exchange in his column. (Benny reprised the evening on his own show ten years later.)

  But Broadway’s Greatest Thrills suffered from a glaring flaw. Ed himself was not making the translation from the printed page to the radio wave. The jocular humor of his column, the sense of a flesh-and-blood Broadway wise guy who provides a peephole to the fantastic, was lost. Radio was an intimate medium, its personalities just a few feet from living room listeners, and Ed was too stiff to create this connection. In its review, Variety made reference to this: “In announcing Sullivan doesn’t go in for gossip such as he partially columnizes each day. Rather, it is straightforward announcing, and in that style. Perhaps this is through the limited time or that Sullivan believes it is sufficient.”

  La Gerardine had wanted a replacement for Winchell’s staccato gossip, but Ed was being straight. Too straight, based on the ratings. The broadcast industry’s first rating service, Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, or C.A.B. (started in 1929), revealed that not many listeners tuned in to Broadway’s Greatest Thrills. Radio’s most popular show, Pepsodent’s Amos ’n’ Andy, earned a 38.1 C.A.B. rating; plenty of programs earned respectable second-tier ratings, like the Eddie Cantor Show (28.9), Eno Crime Club (22.8), and Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra (19.1). Walter Winchell’s Lucky Strike Orchestra earned a 19.6. Sullivan’s show received an abysmal 1.5. There were dozen
s of programs that earned no rating at all, but among those that were assigned ratings, Ed’s was in absolute last place. The management at La Gerardine wasn’t happy.

  In the spring of 1932, Ed juggled his radio program and daily Graphic column. To keep his column current he relied on what he called his “new friends,” a network of Broadway denizens who fed him tips. These sources—bartenders, doormen, and theater staff who were close to the social pipeline—required cash, a generous tip, or a well-greased palm, and Ed kept the dollars flowing. “My operatives never sleep,” he noted.

  In one column he wrote a humorous bit about a young source who failed to get him a story.

  “At the premiere of Jewelry Robbery he crept up on me and pulled at my coat to attract my attention. ‘Boy, oh boy,’ he gasped. “I had a wonderful story for your column, Mr. Sullivan. I always try to get stories for you Mr. Sullivan!’

  “ ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but when I didn’t see you I gave it to Skolsky.’ With a great show of indignation, your reporter snapped: ‘Well you’re certainly a fine pal. Why didn’t you call Winchell or Hoffman and give it to them, too?’ The youngster smiled with relief: ‘I’ve been waiting for you so I could borrow two nickels to call them.’ ”

  But even his myriad operatives couldn’t always keep up with the insatiable appetite of his column, which devoured gossip and celebrity news six days a week. When the pace became too much, Ed was adept at riffing, filling column space with nothing but his impressionistic visions of the Broadway scene, as when he spent a half column describing a gypsy girl waiting for a traffic light to change. Or he provided a touch of sardonic human interest, as when he wrote about a homeless man who was helping fight a fire, only to get roughed up by police when they arrived.

  If nothing else turned up he could ruminate on the city’s news. In 1932 gangster Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll was the victim of a mob hit, which put Ed in a philosophical mood:

  “The rubbing out of Vincent Coll … as he stood in a telephone booth … Putting the finger on a dial phone … While others were putting the finger on him … Makes you wonder to yourself what were his last thoughts … Only an insane man could be brave when Death cuts in on a busy wire … So if Coll choked up … if his heart struggled to pound out of his casing … And if sickening terror gripped him … He was entitled to that recession in courage … Your last bow belongs to you alone.

  “What a dreadful feeling must come over a Coll … As the evil snout of an sub-machine gun adjusts its evil leer … No time to cry out ‘Wait just a minute please’ … No time for explanations … Death has arrived … And the shortest path between two points … Is the path traveled by a leaden bullet.”

  Although these unstructured tone poems might have disappointed readers looking for show business news, some of Ed’s riffs provided the clearest glimpse of Broadway—and his life—as he saw it. His days and nights had changed radically since launching his new persona as a gossip maven. As Louis Sobol had predicted, satisfying the demands of his column was all consuming. In February, seven months after it debuted, he acknowledged, “Like Broadway, those of us who traverse it night after night … Are haggard and worn … We, too, slumber with one eye open … Keyed to an unnatural pace.… Restless because of the city’s restlessness … And if our skin is pasty … it is because … Columnists like me … are awake at hours like this … to write columns like this … for you.”

  By June, a year after beginning the Broadway beat, the pace of the column had begun to not just exhaust him but to consume him.

  “Success on Broadway … that is, considerable success … Is attained at a terrific physical and mental expenditure … Family, friends, particularly the family … Must be subordinated to intense concentration on the angles of a many-angled street … Probably that’s why so many romances crack up here…

  “I don’t believe it’s a street for happiness … it’s a street of opportunity … Opportunity for work that yields cash dividends … So, if the people of Broadway expect to be happy they must first slave along the Stem for the dough that will later take them out of the grind … so long as they remain on Broadway, they must expect the nervous tension of ambition.”

  The nervous tension of ambition. The pressure of it all was very much on Ed’s mind as the summer of 1932 arrived. He had made it on Broadway, but now events were taking it all away from him. The hook was pulling him offstage.

  The Graphic was sinking. The tabloid had long been hemorrhaging money; it was as much as $7.5 million in debt by publisher Bernarr Macfadden’s estimate, though tallies of the paper’s debt varied widely. In a desperate effort to save it Macfadden had tried making the Graphic resemble a legitimate newspaper, publishing only stories that were, roughly speaking, factually corroborated. But it was too little too late. The tabloid that provided Ed his Broadway column—from which all other things flowed—wouldn’t survive the summer. It was common knowledge among employees that they would soon be out of a job.

  Making matters worse, he was being replaced on his radio show. As Variety reported on July 5, the La Gerardine company had hired Daily News columnist Sidney Skolsky to host the show. Apparently the sponsor had gotten tired of Ed’s stiff announcing and poor ratings. The show had been his opening, his chance to rise above, to gain recognition and renown. Now his broadcast career was being cut short.

  Which meant that Ed was on the verge of unemployment. He had faced joblessness before, on several occasions, but now he had a wife and child at home. And now it was 1932, commonly known as the Depression’s nadir. There were no more jobs to be had, just long lines of hollow-eyed men and women waiting for their daily soup kitchen dole. The nervous tension of ambition, indeed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Café Society

  THE GRAPHIC, TO THE RELIEF OF RESPECTABLE NEW YORKERS, published its last issue on July 7, 1932. The following day, the city’s daily dose of 2-cent scandal mongering suspended publication. The paper had filed for bankruptcy on July 2, by one account collapsing under $3.1 million of liabilities. Part of this astronomical sum was a string of unpaid libel judgments, two for $500,000 a piece, and at least two more for lesser amounts. Controversial to the end, the paper’s demise provoked street demonstrations as unpaid printers and tradesman paraded up Varick Street with an effigy of Bernarr Macfadden, shouting what a reporter described as “uncomplimentary ballyhoo.” The cops had to be called to contain the crowd.

  For weeks afterward there was talk of bringing the Graphic back—optimistic scuttlebutt about investors who might be interested—but nothing came of it. In truth, the mood had passed. Those oversized headlines about suicide pacts between flappers and married men were titillating when the paper’s readers had an extra nickel in their pocket. But the deepening gloom accompanying the long breadlines at Broadway and 47th Street had caught up with the Graphic. The paper was from a different era. Other scandal sheets, like The Tatler and Town Topics, were also felled by the Depression.

  One week before the paper closed, Ed received a call from someone identifying himself as Captain Joe Patterson, the publisher of the New York Daily News. Would Ed like to be a Broadway columnist for the News? The caller invited Sullivan over to discuss the terms of his new employment. Ed could hardly believe his good fortune—in fact he didn’t believe it. As soon as he put down the phone he was consumed with doubt. Could the call have been a prank? Perhaps someone he had offended in his column was exacting revenge with a cruel practical joke. Or so Ed thought; fortune this good couldn’t be trusted. He immediately phoned the Daily News and asked: had Joseph Patterson just called him? Yes, it was verified, it had been Patterson. Amazing—Ed had just been offered a job. Relief competed with euphoria.

  Getting a call from the Daily News publisher was like being called up to the big leagues. Patterson’s father had published the Chicago Tribune, and Patterson had been the Tribune’s editor. During his army stint in World War I the flashy British tabloids had caught his eye, and he gue
ssed the formula would succeed in America. Soon after Patterson launched the Daily News in 1919 it became a rousing success.

  Originally called the Illustrated Daily News because of its emphasis on photos, this first modern American tabloid also proved to be one of the hardiest. It would survive through the decades as the majority of newspapers from that period were swallowed by larger papers or ceased publication. The Daily News continues to be one of New York’s leading papers.

  The News spawned a legion of competitors. The Graphic had been inspired by the News, and its booming circulation also impressed William Randolph Hearst. Soon after the tabloid’s initial vaulting success, the newspaper magnate tried to buy it rather than compete with it. When Patterson refused to sell or stop publishing, Hearst launched a competing tabloid, the Daily Mirror. (Hearst’s strategy was to hire journalistic superstars, hence Winchell’s post as a Daily Mirror columnist.)

  Patterson, an ardent socialist in his youth (though later highly conservative), wanted to publish a paper for the working man. Its style would be straightforward, and it would eschew lofty analysis. But if the Daily News lacked pretension, no one could say it wasn’t entertaining. The paper thumbed its nose at staid journalistic tradition: its headlines blared, its front page was often exclusively photos, and its stories emphasized emotional appeal over objective observation. Like the British tabloids it copied, the News was half the size of traditional papers, yet its circulation quickly grew far larger. By the mid 1920s the News had the largest daily circulation of any paper in New York City, at seven hundred fifty thousand; in fact, its circulation would be the largest in the country until the late 1940s.

  Where the Graphic had dismissed any concern for journalistic propriety, the Daily News walked to the edge without jumping off. Its coverage could be sensational, even lurid, but it could not be fabricated. Patterson’s guideline was “no private scandal or private love affairs,” though if they became public through divorce proceedings they were fair game. Patterson understood the power of celebrity news and so nurtured a stable of gossip reporters. As Ed joined the paper, it already had two established show business columnists, John Chapman and Sidney Skolsky.