Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  Although Sullivan had blasted his competitors as he launched his Graphic column, decrying the moral turpitude of the veteran gossips, he launched his Daily News column as an incumbent. As he began his News column in mid July—just two weeks after the Graphic folded—he made no grand proclamations, he simply went back to work chronicling Broadway life. His salary was $200 a week, a sharp step down from the Graphic’s $375 but a highly desirable paycheck nonetheless. He began with three columns a week, which put him in a kind of probation status; many Broadway scribes turned out a daily column as he had at the Graphic.

  While his debut featured no grand announcements, his new column displayed a markedly different attitude. Ed’s new approach would not be as colorful or as free as it had been at the Graphic; there would be no more half-page descriptions of gypsy girls at stoplights and no philosophic meanderings about mob slayings. He was now a coolheaded, evenhanded veteran, like his colleagues Skolsky and Chapman.

  More significantly, he was now an unabashed populist. At the Graphic he had written only periodically about the Depression and the struggles of the common folk; primarily his column had been a window into the lives of the swank set, even as his theme of their essential unhappiness pulled away the curtain. At the News he would still cover this half-mythic world. His column was full of stories about people like actress Peggy Hopkins Joyce, whose “only drink was champagne” and who went out on the town in a $3,000 ermine coverlet. As he churned out tidbits about actors, singers, cabaret stars, and well-to-do socialites—their dizzying round-robin of romance rotating faster than their nightclub of choice—the portrait could transport the average reader to a fabulous world.

  But getting much more weight were the average people themselves. His writing now focused on and celebrated—empathized with—the life of the common man. As a freshman Broadway columnist he had been a fabulist with a touch of populism; now the populism came first. The shift was in keeping with the times, and with his new employer. The Graphic had embraced the giddy, no-tomorrow 1920s; the Daily News, sometimes called a newspaper that wore overalls, was an archetypical representative of the populism of the 1930s.

  Soon after beginning his News column, Ed wrote about the phrase “You can’t do that to me,” and how often it expresses desperation. “All the ache and hurt that can be summoned is compressed into these six words,” he wrote. “The labor and work of a lifetime is about to be swept away as a veteran employee is dismissed from a business office. He wants to cry out that he has children at home to be fed and clothed … But his heart has stopped beating its normal tempo … and he can utter only six words: ‘You can’t do that to me.’ ” Ed incorporated this vox populi theme in his gossip blurbs by reporting the romances of people like Artie Cohen, a Broadway tailor who eloped with his bride to Rye, New York.

  And Sullivan seemingly never passed up the chance to include items like those that chastised the “nationally-known comic [who] chiseled $2.50 from the pay of $7.50-a-day extras on the local Warner lot.” He tweaked actor Charlie Winniger, then starring on Broadway, because “his refusal to cut his “Show Boat” salary from $1,000 a week to $750 a week may throw 230 people out of work.”

  His anecdotes were now more often about life outside the world of affluence:

  “Overhead the L trains rattled and jolted along, between grimy buildings … On the street surface, cars honked impatiently and tense-faced traffic cops, nearing the end of a wearying tour, signaled curtly … In front of a restaurant, two derelicts feasted their eyes on the day’s menu, as if unable to tear their eyes from it. I thought to myself, ‘Here is the very essence of this huge city of ours’ and turned to go, almost colliding with a tall mendicant, his face coarsened by a two-day stubble of beard … ‘Cowboy songs, Mister?’ he said … ‘Get the songs of the open range, 5 cents’…Overhead the L trains rattled as I paid him his modest fee … ‘Songs of the Open Range’ … On Third Ave. and 42nd Street.”

  It’s likely that Ed’s populism came to him naturally, but it was also an effective competitive strategy for a columnist in a crowded field. It set him apart from many of his competitors, like the News’ Sidney Skolsky, who would no sooner report the elopement of a tailor than print a Sunday school prayer. By playing to his audience, mingling mentions of the hoi polloi with the illuminati, Ed curried favor with those readers who could never hope to sip a champagne cocktail, which was most of them. He was an anti-elitist covering the elite.

  But hard-pressed average readers also wanted release from the daily grind, and Ed gave it to them. These readers turned to Broadway columns for the same reason they flipped on a radio: to be transported, to enter a fantasy world. Ed was their membership card to an exclusive club, a fantastic world sometimes referred to as “café society.”

  The milieu known loosely as café society was a glittering alloy of screen and stage performers, radio personalities, star athletes, debutantes, musicians, old money socialites, press agents, promoters, and producers: those who were talented and those who wanted to associate with the talented. Despite the Depression, café society rubbed elbows nightly in 1930s Manhattan. Its gathering places were nightclubs like the Colony, El Morocco, Dave’s Blue Room, the Hollywood, and—foremost—the Stork Club, nightspots where entrance alone—if you could get past the doorman—would set you back $5 or even $10.

  This gathering of the beautiful and the lucky was a living incarnation of what moviegoers paid two dimes to see on-screen in the 1930s: cool glamour, light conversation attended by chilled champagne, and romances begun while fox-trotting to elegant orchestra music. That right outside the door the unemployment rate was twenty-five percent made this privileged party seem closer to dreamscape than reality.

  Being a star in this world meant getting noticed, being one of those that others mentioned when they talked about their evening at Lindy’s or Jimmy Kelly’s. One of the best ways to do this was to appear, as frequently as possible, in Broadway’s leading gossip columns. In an era before television, these columns had inordinate power on the celebrity social scene. To rate a boldface tidbit in the pages of the Daily News, the Post, or the Daily Mirror meant you were a somebody, you existed, that others would turn their heads as you walked in. Ed, as a columnist for the News—far above the ever-shaky Graphic—was now the ultimate insider in this scene. His News berth made him a player, someone whose opinion was talked about and sought after, a leading social arbiter of café society.

  The job allowed him to live in his natural habitat. Ed was a nightly sight at Broadway’s openings and ritzy watering holes, dressed in a tailored double-breasted suit, cigarette in hand, hair slicked straight back, socializing with an ever-expanding network of performers, politicos, socialites, and athletes. A magazine profile from the mid 1930s described him: “He seldom gets home before five a.m., in the meanwhile having taken in, on a typical night, ‘21,’ the Stork Club, the Hollywood, Dave’s Blue Room, Lindy’s, and Jimmy Kelly’s.… Courvoisier brandy is his only but not single drink; then it’s bed until one or two in the afternoon. The column is written—at home. That takes a couple of hours and Sullivan then drives down to the Daily News, reads his mail, and waits while the composing room gives him a proof.”

  Central to his column were the vagaries of love among the smart set, the intoxicating sexual merry-go-round of Broadway romance:

  “Take, for instance, slender and blonde June Knight … her affairs of the heart have kept my operatives working in double shifts since she arrived here to “hot cha” for Ziegfeld … First it was Elliot Myer … Then it was Elliot Sperber … Succeeded by Leo Friede … Who, in turn gave way to Sailing Baruch, Jr.,… Neil Andrews stepped in when Baruch stepped out … Now it looks as though Tommy Manville, Jr., is the lucky guy.”

  Ed reported on a mythic group of people who had been liberated from the staid sexual mores of Victorian America. The 1920s had seen a revolution in morals and manners. Women, having picketed the White House and gotten hauled away in paddy wagons, had won the right t
o vote. Hemlines inched up and young ladies went out on the town by themselves. In 1926, Mae West premiered her play Sex, which scandalized the public with tunes like “Honey, Let Yo’ Drawers Hang Low”—and scored a box office bonanza. And though hemlines had fallen with the crash, something had been loosened by that giddy decade, and Ed’s column covered the results. He dished out a heady catalog of morsels like “Phil Baker, the only bird who can make love over the top of an accordion” and “Maurice Chevalier, who’d rather go places with his pal Primo Camera, than make love to Jeanette MacDonald.…” Printing material like this would have been forbidden not that many years previously—and would seem merely quaint a few decades hence—but it sold newspapers in the 1930s.

  Ed’s reports of the rapid pace of modern love, which in his column seemed to twirl faster than ever, offered readers a vicarious thrill. “Romances fizzle and burn out in a hurry on the Queerialto that is tagged Broadway … the big heart affairs pass into the hands of receivers quicker than that,” he reported. (Sullivan invented his own slang term for Broadway, “Queerialto,” a combination of “queer”—he always found the Broadway world odd—and “Rialto,” after the famous Broadway theater.) If he could fit in a bit of moralizing with his coverage of romance, all the better:

  “Funny, the reactions of the fellows who are involved in these affairs of the cardiac … Tommy Manville, Jr., heir to the asbestos millions … is typical of the wealthier playboys of the Main Stem … Interested in the lovelies of the stage, Manville, like his fellows, will go just so far … The breaking point arrives when a column like this reports that Manville is thinking of buying an engagement ring … The current romance is dead the following day … to the wealthy fellows, wedding bells make a noise like a police riot car.”

  The News gave Sullivan wide latitude in terms of what he covered, and, like his TV show in later years, his column offered something for many audiences: romantic travails, theater news, political predictions, show business gossip, odd quotes that celebrities gave him, and bits of shopworn wisdom. It was all jumbled together without any differentiation, a stream of consciousness Broadway diary, like the circuitous route taken by a cabbie trolling all of Manhattan. On a daily basis he veered from wedding news, denoted as “hunting for a license bureau,” to announcing a starlet’s pregnancy, referred to as “the arrival of Sir Stork,” to alimony payments, all within the space of a single paragraph.

  As at the Graphic, he rarely wrote detailed theater criticism, but he often passed pithy one-line judgment on new Broadway shows (which, if positive, were used in a show’s advertisements). “By far the smartest premiere of the winter season … Was the inaugural performance of Design for Living, featuring Noël Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne,” he opined. But even in these hit-and-run reviews he usually spent more ink on the evening’s social scene than on the dramaturgy.

  In the Coward opening, he went on to list many of the well-heeled theater patrons in the audience. “Coward’s play delights this audience of the elite … it is as light as champagne bubbles, and produces the same gayety … You leave the theatre and mounted cops are holding back the curious sidewalk onlookers … There is a double line of cars in West 47th street, waiting for their mesdames and messieurs … Most of them are Rolls Royces … it was that kind of opening,” Ed observed, displaying, as he often did, his sense of being a reporter looking at the privileged from afar.

  One of his column’s constants were bite-sized descriptions of famous people, opinionated portraits of those with whom he rubbed elbows. He would string together a number of these, as if bringing the reader to an exclusive Broadway party.

  “Jack Benny, stage, radio, and movie comedian … Sleepiest of all Broadway personalities … He invites 20 people to 55 Central Park West, and then curls up on the living room couch and goes to sleep … On the level … If he could learn to sleep standing up, he’d make a fine cop … Estelle Taylor, ex-frau of ex-champ Dempsey … one of the keenest wits I’ve ever encountered … With a marvelous sense of humor that bewilders plenty of Coast dumbbells … [actress] Lupe Velez, madcap of movieland … Whose 70 coats, 230 dresses, and 126 pairs of shoes don’t mean a thing because she bought them only for ONE man … And then Gary Cooper wasn’t the fellow she thought he was.”

  When he couldn’t actually be present he relied, as always, on his citywide network of sources developed while at the Graphic. They allowed him to report that Jimmy Cagney was in town and “secretly registered” at the Wellington Hotel, or that the Hollywood party thrown for George Burns and Gracie Allen featured some odd sights: “On the way to the dining room, a naked fellow, sitting in a tub of water, hailed the guests as they passed the door, and advised them not to eat, as the food was terrible.”

  Sullivan was quick to trumpet any tidbits he scooped his competitors on, however reliable the scoop might be. “Months before Wild Bill Donovan forced his recognition as a gubernatorial candidate, the news was printed in this column … A week before Jimmy Walker resigned, my Monday column predicted it.” (In truth, predicting the forced resignation of the embattled mayor, known as the “Night Mayor” for his fondness for the high life, was hardly prescient; at any rate, a few months earlier Ed had predicted Walker would be cleared.)

  “The information I got late last night … is loaded with political dynamite,” he wrote in October 1932, three weeks before the election that sent Franklin Roosevelt to the White House. “One who is in the know named for me the cabinet which he says Franklin D. Roosevelt plans to install at Washington … and it is SOME combination.” Ed listed eight members of the potential FDR cabinet, only one of whom became an actual cabinet member. In the early days of the Roosevelt administration, Ed was boundless in his support of the new president, as was the Daily News itself. In April 1933, he enthused: “Hugest individual hit of the season, Franklin Delano Roosevelt!!!”

  True to the ethic of the Broadway columnist, Ed’s scoops were sometimes more timely than accurate. But that was the nature of this new brand of journalism. (The New York Post would later print page after page of Walter Winchell’s mistakes, his so-called “wrongoes.”) The Broadway column was less about authoritative news than it was the diary of a community, an ephemeral compilation of what the Manhattan tribe was chattering and whispering about. The writings of the Broadway columnists from this period were riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, conjecture, and the alcohol-fueled imaginings born of typing against a 5:30 A.M. deadline. But while these columnists, Sullivan among them, provoked a public outcry from those who called them a moral corruption, their readers didn’t seem to care. The world that Ed was writing about was hungry for coverage, and those on the outside looking in were even hungrier for the details.

  Sullivan’s unstinting dedication to his column left little time for home life. Replacing the domestic scene was a blur of Manhattan nightspots. Several months after landing his Daily News post he wrote about his recent nocturnal jaunt with Freeman Gosden and Charlie Correll, stars of the Amos ’n’ Andy radio show, then listened to by tens of millions of fans weekly. “I left them at 5 A.M., and I was pale and haggard,” he wrote. “Dave Marks, the toy millionaire, was in equally bad condition … ‘You’re not going home, Ed?’ Gosden queried reproachfully … I assured him that I was going home … ‘That’s too bad,’ said Correll, ‘we thought that as it’s only 5 A.M., we could go to Place Pigalle and then taper off with a cup of coffee.’ ” Being out all night was an occupational hazard for the columnist.

  But Ed never missed home life. He seemed to take little interest in it. As recalled by his grandson Rob Precht, Ed found the concept of family life to be greatly overrated. He did, however, continue to take Sylvia out to dinner almost every night, as when they were courting. Sylvia was invariably elegantly dressed—she loved to go out—and the two made the rounds of New York’s fashionable restaurants; this also allowed Ed to continue his society reporting. Sylvia never learned to cook and never had the slightest desire to do so. Eventually th
e couple would move into an apartment with hardly any kitchen at all. As their daughter Betty recalled, “My parents never ate at home. My father liked to be able to choose what he wanted to eat. I don’t think he was that thrilled about eating.”

  Betty herself was cared for by a paid companion during Ed and Sylvia’s evenings out. “When I was about two years old, my parents took me to Saratoga [in New York] to see the races. I was a very little girl, and I banged with my feet on the bottom of the table,” she remembered. “And my father was so distressed, embarrassed, that I really don’t think I went out with them until I was twelve. Until I could act like a young adult.” Her companion took her to eat at a succession of Manhattan restaurants, though Betty chose less formal places than those frequented by her parents.

  As Ed took little time for home life, he also found little time for close friendships. In his twenties he had sought the companionship of boxer Johnny Dundee and soft-shoe dancer Lou Clayton, both largely as mentors. But while he now traveled a social circle as large as the Manhattan phone book, he was close with virtually no one. The sole exception was Joe Moore, the former speed skating star who was now a press agent, and whose friendship with Ed made him a conduit to Sullivan’s column. But even this was as much professional as personal. Having close friends “wasn’t in his nature,” recalled his daughter.

  Covering the famous only whetted Ed’s appetite to be famous himself. His Daily News column greatly increased his profile but didn’t satisfy this core desire. That he was now a Broadway somebody only made the question more urgent: how could he turn himself from a reporter into somebody who was reported on? His first attempt at radio had been canceled, but in 1933 he found a far more intriguing opportunity: the movies. Or rather, he didn’t find the opportunity, he created it. Sullivan conceived of and wrote a film script, featuring himself as the star, called Mr. Broadway. He convinced a film laboratory and a large New York optical house to back the movie. To help him, Ed hired Edgar G. Ulmer, who later became a leading B movie director, and actor Johnnie Walker, who had starred in scores of silent movies.