Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (11 page)

CHAPTER THREE
The Porno Graphic

T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORK
E
VENING
G
RAPHIC
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 Mallen’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.