Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  Certainly he inspired great affection on a personal level. Bill Gallo was a young cartoonist with the Daily News in the 1940s who knew Sullivan well, and sometimes went to lunch with him. “He was one of my heroes,” recalled Gallo. “He was the newspaperman that all the kids wanted to be.” Being out every night, socializing with the famous, having a huge readership—it all looked good to Gallo. “He was the personification of a star. He carried that aura about him like it was built in,” he remembered. “He was a regular guy, there was nothing uppity about him, no pomposity. And he didn’t just try to be a nice guy—he was a nice guy.” Gallo’s comments concurred with those of many who knew Sullivan personally. Despite the stiff personality he projected on television years later, on a one-on-one basis he had great social ease, even charm, and spoke to anyone as an equal, whether the person was a cab driver or a major film producer.

  Yet the social ease extended only so far. The wall remained. Ed’s inner reserve, the sense of apartness right underneath his man-about-town affability, stayed firmly in place. For all his limitless list of friends and contacts, his life was essentially a solo voyage.

  Although the war’s end brought a halt to the steady stream of bond rallies Ed organized, his career as an emcee and event producer stayed just as busy. He had become the first person almost any organization called, producing and hosting events for an unlikely quilt of entities, from B’nai B’rith to the League of Catholic Charities. Down in Miami for his yearly press junket, he hosted a hospital dedication show with comedian Jack Carter, the Ames Brothers, and singer Theresa Brewer. He traveled to Philadelphia and put together an event for the Poor Richard Society with vocalist Patti Page, comic Victor Borge, and ventriloquist Senor Wences. He took singer Vic Damone and vaudevillian Sophie Tucker up to the Catskills to emcee a birthday bash for Jenny Grossinger, owner of the famed Borsht Belt resort. He traveled to Boston to put on a show for the Maris Nuns, and drove to his hometown of Port Chester to emcee for the Marching and Chowder Society.

  In March 1946, the White House Correspondents Association invited Ed to be master of ceremonies at an event honoring President Harry Truman. After the eight hundred guests tried the new wheat-saving dark bread, professional and amateur entertainers performed comedy skits and sang a humorously rewritten version of the 1920s Eubie Blake tune “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” The song, featured in Sullivan’s Harlem Cavalcade a few years earlier, now sported new lyrics: “I go swimming with Harry / That’s one thing Harry enjoys / ’Cause there’s no women / To spoil the swimmin’ / He just invites the boys.”

  The war and its immediate aftermath created a minor conundrum for the Broadway columnists. For them, controversy was like oxygen; they could live on less, but without an occasional inhale they withered and died. With a world war raging, however, the petty internecine squabbles they had indulged in throughout the 1930s were kept to a minimum. Skirmishing with each other would have been unseemly with real battles being fought overseas. Nonetheless, Ed had permitted himself a small jab at Walter Winchell in 1942—though only a token dig given the enmity between the two. Winchell had begged the military to allow him to enlist, so the government, wanting to placate him but concerned for his safety, sent him to Brazil for a month on a fact-finding mission. The columnist, bubbling with excitement at the chance to wear a uniform—and, of course, to trumpet his wartime achievement when he returned—tried to keep it quiet as he left. But Ed popped his bubble, writing, “The town is chuckling at Winchell’s ‘secret mission …’ ”

  Ed had ferreted out only a few minor targets to attack in the war years. Notably included were those “phonies” who pretended to have war medals they didn’t earn, and those elected officials in the same league: “Tip to Washington, D.C.: Nothing has hurt New Deal prestige in N.Y. so much as the sight of capital czars, married, flaunting their girlfriends in Broadway nightclubs and supper clubs one weekend after another … can’t that be rationed?”

  But these subjects didn’t create the splash a Broadway columnist craved. In June 1946, Ed found a fresh source of controversy, one that had headlines blaring. The New York City police, he wrote, were involved in “the most cynical grafting spree in New York history.” Reporting what he called the widespread practice of “Broadway grabbing,” he claimed that “detectives’ rake-offs range from $1,700-per-book-maker-phone per month in a Manhattan division to $3,000 per month in the Bronx,” and that the city was suffering from a “complete breakdown in police control.”

  Certainly Ed knew the world of the Broadway bookie. On occasion in his column he guffawed about the widespread practice of illegal gambling, including tidbits like, “When 666 came up on Friday, policy bankers went to the cleaners for fresh dough.” And his friend Joe Moore, an Olympic speed skater when they met in the 1920s, turned to bookmaking after his athletic career ended. (Moore, because of his friendship with Sullivan, was then hired by a press agent named Ed Weiner, who had close ties to Walter Winchell. Between the two of them, Weiner and Moore had access to the city’s leading gossip columnists.)

  As soon as Ed’s column hit newsstands, city government experienced convulsions. That same day, Mayor William O’Dwyer ordered an investigation, prompting a fierce round of bureaucratic infighting. The mayor wanted the investigation headed by the Commissioner of Investigation; the police commissioner, however, “pleaded with the Mayor” to allow the police department to investigate itself first. After hurried discussion the mayor announced he had reversed himself: the police department would investigate itself without the Commissioner. Reporters asked O’Dwyer if Sullivan would be summoned, and the mayor said no. “I always respect the confidential sources of newspapermen,” he said.

  After the initial splash, Ed’s allegations slid quietly off the front page. In July, the police staged a crackdown on bookies, arresting five hundred sixty-two in one month. Following this purported clean up, Mayor O’Dwyer announced in late August that the police department’s investigation of itself had produced no evidence of graft. With the hundreds of bookies arrested and the police department apparently clean, the matter was closed. But while Ed’s muckraking had only token effect on the city’s police, it did point to a new direction in his column. The war had taught him that Little Old New York could address weightier issues than Broadway romances and celebrity effluvia. In the late 1940s, his daily column grazed across most any topic that suited him. Although at its heart it remained a show business gossip column, it now traveled far afield, touching upon—always briefly—foreign affairs, domestic politics, sports, books, odd news items, or whatever interested Ed that day.

  After he penned an extended homage to the loving nature of dogs—“Dogs have the capacity for grief, and they have the capacity for love, with no string attached”—he received an appreciative letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. “I couldn’t refrain from writing this personal note to tell you how much pleasure I gained from reading your column,” Hoover confided. “Your understanding affection for what some ill-informed individuals call ‘dumb’ animals touched my heart.” The two men communicated regularly through the years. Sullivan used his column to toss kudos to the FBI director, which Hoover relished. After Ed included a column tidbit about his fifty-third birthday, Hoover sent him an affectionate thank-you: “It does warm one’s heart to be remembered by friends on his birthday.… Sincerely, Edgar.”

  Yet the column, as far and wide as Ed stretched it, was always just the foundation from which he tried to reach higher, to grab some greater notoriety. In the spring of 1946, he once again heard the siren song he couldn’t resist. That his first four attempts to launch a radio show, spread over the last fourteen years, had been short-lived failures—the longest lasting just nine months—did not tempt him to concede defeat. So, as if bound by some kind of seasonal migration, he was back knocking at radio’s door.

  On April 2, he debuted Ed Sullivan’s Pipeline on New York’s WJZ. Broadcasting every Tuesday at 9 P.M., the show off
ered a quarter hour of Ed solo, intoning the daily scuttlebutt from New York, Washington, and Hollywood. Lending an urban dash to his delivery was the sound effect of rapid-tempo typing, punctuated by a typewriter bell—this gossip was hot off a newsman’s Underwood, the percolating sound effects suggested.

  The pages of the show’s scripts reveal that Ed was attempting to add extra urgency to his performance. For those who had panned his radio persona as too straight and stiff, he had an answer. To jazz up his vocal rhythm he included plenty of dashes in his script, and he handwrote in extra exclamation points:

  “New York—Vindication has finally come to the bobby socks!! Sinatra is more than just The Voice!! Distinguished American sculptor Jo Davidson tells me that the bone structure and shape of Sinatra’s long, lean face is amazingly similar to—hold your breath—Abraham Lincoln.”

  The show was a broadcast version of his column, but what worked in print didn’t work over the air. Ed’s attempt to match the hyped-up hypnosis of Walter Winchell proved ill-fated. On September 30, six months after its debut, Ed Sullivan’s Pipeline saw its last broadcast. Inarguably, his talents were not suited to the airwaves.

  In his Loew’s State variety show in September 1946, Sullivan booked an exceptionally pretty twenty-two-year-old singer-comedienne named Jane Kean. For Ed, the irrepressible young performer—blonde, funny, and lively—was irresistible. Over the weeks they worked together he formed a romantic attraction for her, though it appears to have been largely unrequited.

  Jane and her older sister Betty performed as a duo in New York’s nightclubs, singing and telling jokes; the bubbly good humor of their sister act made them highly successful. Betty had performed a comic tap-dance routine in Ed’s 1941 Broadway production, Crazy with the Heat. In later years, Jane appeared on Broadway and landed a raft of TV roles, most notably on the 1960s version of The Honeymooners, starring Jackie Gleason. She played Art Carney’s wife Trixie, replacing original actress Joyce Randolph.

  Kean remembered Sullivan as having real allure. “He was very attractive to women—and he was interested in them,” she recalled. But Kean’s initial attraction to Ed soon faded. “I did not have a big love affair with him—that was a man in pursuit.” By her account, Ed sent her love letters, off and on, over the next year or so, including some he mailed from his yearly mid-winter stint in Florida. He penned her endearments like “I miss you,” among others. “Yes, he was very fond of me,” she remembered, with a chuckle.

  Kean soon began a long-standing romance with Walter Winchell, whom she grew to love. Walter took a much different approach to her in his column. “Winchell, if he liked you, he would just promote you and praise you every time you opened someplace,” she said. “Ed wasn’t that much of a fan or press agent for people.”

  Ed booked Jane and her sister Betty on his television show in 1949, though Kean said by this point any romantic overtures were forgotten. Due to the exposure from their Sullivan show booking, the duo received a series of lucrative engagements in Chicago, Las Vegas, and New York.

  In Kean’s remembrance, it was not uncommon for Ed to have affairs. “He was not Simon Pure, let’s put it that way,” she said. Her recollection is backed up by Jack Carter, a comedian whom Ed booked in his postwar vaudeville shows, as well as some forty times on his television show. Over the years the two men frequently had drinks together at Danny’s Hideaway, a popular New York bar-restaurant. Carter recalled that during one of his Loew’s State shows with Sullivan, Ed had an affair with one of the performers, whose name Carter didn’t remember. She was “an acrobatic dancer with a great body—he was jazzing her,” he said. But Ed was careful to maintain discretion about his liaison. “It was his own private little trick—we knew about it,” Carter said. “It was a quiet thing … if that would have ever gotten out, Winchell would have eaten him alive.”

  In the fall of 1947 Ed became chairman of the entertainment committee for the Heart Fund Drive, which presented him with a daunting task. He needed to organize an extensive radio ad campaign, which required writing scripts, lining up voice talent and musicians, and contacting a slew of radio stations—and convincing everyone to work gratis. Mentioning the mountainous workload to performers backstage at his Loew’s State show, one of them, a young singer named Monica Lewis, suggested Ed call her brother, Marlo Lewis.

  Lewis, an advertising executive at the Blaine Thompson agency, produced a daily radio show called Luncheon at Sardi’s. The thirty-two-year-old adman possessed matinee idol good looks and a correspondingly outsized ego. He tended his appearance fastidiously, always sporting an impeccable coif and visiting the gym constantly; in later years he insisted all his employees visit the gym to stay fit. Lewis projected a natural charisma that some found overbearing; he was described as “egocentric—very much so” by one colleague. Yet he was grateful to Sullivan for booking his younger sister, and after a little cajoling by Ed agreed to help.

  Working for free, Lewis and Sullivan put together a thirty-spot radio campaign. Ed corralled the talent: Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, and others voiced the spots; Marlo Lewis convinced the head of the musicians union, James Petrillo, to allow the striking musicians to record the music, and coordinated logistics such as contacting radio stations. After the spots ran in March 1948, Ed produced a standing room—only variety show with the celebrities at the Capitol Theatre, emceed by Milton Berle.

  The partnership of Marlo Lewis and Ed Sullivan was highly successful—the Heart Fund Drive broke the charity’s fund-raising record. To Ed, this suggested a greater possibility, one that stemmed from his perennial desire to break into broadcasting. Lewis, as an ad executive and radio producer, had contacts with CBS management. Sullivan, a veteran show producer and emcee as well as an influential columnist, had the phone number of every star in show business. Could they pool their talents for this new medium of television?

  PART TWO

  THE BIRTH OF TELEVISION

  “It used to be that we in films were

  the lowest form of art. Now we have

  something to look down on.”

  — BILLY WILDER

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Temporary Job

  THE WAR, HAVING AFFECTED VIRTUALLY EVERY ASPECT of American life, slowed the development of a force that would exert a still greater influence: television. After NBC technicians broadcast a sputtering image of Franklin Roosevelt’s opening speech at the 1939 World’s Fair, the nascent medium appeared to be just a step away from the living room. But the war’s global conflagration sucked all the energy from television’s development. Some suggested, darkly, that the war provided an excuse for those threatened by television—newspaper, radio, and film concerns—to suppress the new medium. An anonymous commentator in the Saturday Evening Post opined in 1942 that these powerful interests put TV “as far back on the shelf as they could because they saw it as a threat to the status quo.”

  If newspapers and film studios could have united to stop the upstart, they surely would have. But the genie was out of the bottle soon after the war ended. Dominant networks NBC and CBS, followed by ABC and Dumont, began competing to stake out a position in television, offering the first few crudely produced shows. Initially, the public took little notice. Television sets in the immediate postwar years were chiefly located in neighborhood bars; the sets were expensive and the programming so scant that few middle-class families were tempted to buy one.

  In the fall of 1947, however, the small screen gave viewers a jolt of excitement: for the first time, the World Series was broadcast on television. An estimated audience of three million people gathered in bars and department stores to watch grainy images of the New York Yankees, led by the mythic Joe DiMaggio, defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose lineup featured Jackie Robinson, who just that year broke baseball’s color line. Advertisers, too, felt a quickening pulse as they contemplated television’s power. Early in 1947, Kraft experimented with a television ad for its new McLaren�
��s Brand Cheese, which was pricey and hadn’t been selling well. In the ad, an attractive young woman was transported by the delicious taste of McLaren’s. By the ad’s third week on the air, New York stores couldn’t keep the cheese in stock.

  “When somebody got a TV set, they would invite the whole neighborhood in to watch—it became a social thing,” recalled Paul Winchell, a ventriloquist who performed in Ed’s shows at Loew’s State. “They were so filled with awe that people would say, my God, the pictures are moving.”

  The big moment came the following summer. On June 8, 1948, NBC debuted the Texaco Star Theatre, starring Milton Berle. The comic’s success had been limited on radio, but his humor—direct, immediate, and visual—played perfectly on the small screen. He joyfully took pies in the face, wore wigs, and fell flat on his face at every cymbal crash. His format was the one he grew up in, vaudeville, with a rapid-tempo parade of comics and singers and acrobats, many of whom Berle interacted with. He pretended to perform with the acrobats, mining his own maladroit moves for laughs, and he romped through skits with the comics as one of them. Although there were only five hundred thousand television sets in the country that summer, Berle became an instant phenomenon; within a year his grinning mug graced both Time and Newsweek. A handful of shows had preceded Berle’s, but none so captured the public. For the first time, people began scheduling their Tuesday nights around a television program.

  Berle’s success threw down a challenge for CBS. The network ran a close second to NBC in radio. Now the popularity of Texaco Star Theatre suggested that NBC was on its way to dominating television as well, especially given that NBC’s Philco TV Playhouse already held a grip on Sunday night, the evening with the largest home audience. To avoid being left at the starting gate, CBS needed to respond—and fast.