Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (12 page)

And Winchell was powerful. Broadway shows sold more or less tickets and starlets gained or lost bookings based on his pronouncements, which were repeated up and down the Main Stem, as Broadway was known. Over time he would become a one-man media empire. At his height in the late 1930s and 1940s, Winchell’s column was
syndicated in more than two thousand newspapers, and his hit radio show was talked about across the country. It’s estimated that more than half the adult population either read his column or heard his broadcast. As his influence grew, so did the scope of his subject matter. In addition to Broadway and Hollywood celebrities, he dispensed pithy opinions on novels, records, radio programs, and even national affairs, on which he editorialized with a populist bent. His seat-of-the-pants take on current affairs was so well regarded that government officials established a liaison to court his influence, and he was called to the White House on a number of occasions.

Over decades, Sullivan and Winchell would have a complicated relationship. It was often described as a feud, and it was that; the two squabbled bitterly. But at times they had something of a friendship and could be warm and almost brotherly. Each had reason to dislike the other. Ed felt deeply envious of Walter, whose column made him more famous than many of the stars he wrote about. Walter, for his part, was highly insecure, and disliked even his minor competitors, like a popular sports columnist with his photo atop his column. A loner with few, if any, real friends, Winchell was not susceptible to Sullivan’s easygoing glad-handing, and tended to be unimpressed with “Eddie Sullivan,” as he sometimes called him.

The feud-friendship began as soon as the two met. One of their early skirmishes involved Emile Gauvreau, the
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’s tough, shrewd editor. Gauvreau came to the paper from the Hartford
Courant
, a respected small paper, and he retained some memory of journalistic ethics. Paradoxically, Gauvreau supervised the
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’s fabricated news stories but tried to rein in Winchell as the columnist pushed the prim boundaries of 1920s propriety. After Winchell included a column tidbit about a married couple expecting a child, Gauvreau bellowed at him: “
This is a family newspaper! You cannot say people are having babies!” Winchell changed the reference to a “blessed event,” but the battle between Winchell and Gauvreau raged constantly.

According to Sullivan, Winchell at one point asked Ed to intervene on his behalf, to get Gauvreau to go easier on him. The idea was that Sullivan, having plenty of friends at the paper—unlike Winchell—would have influence where the gossip columnist did not.

Sullivan went on a fishing trip with a
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executive, O.J. Elder, and put in a good word for Winchell. When Gauvreau learned about Sullivan’s attempt to influence senior management, he bawled him out for going over his head. After the editor vented his rage, he explained that it had been Winchell himself who had informed him of Ed’s attempt to go over his head. Sullivan felt he had been double-crossed.

At that point, Gauvreau called Winchell to his office. The gossip columnist admitted that, yes, he was the one who had told the editor—but he claimed Gauvreau had forced him. Sullivan, himself now enraged, said, “
Walter, what can I do with a cringing coward like you? If I hit you, you might get hurt. If I spit in your eye, it will be coming down to your level.”

Winchell claimed this story was a Sullivan fabrication. And it may well be a case of the Sullivan Story. It’s not likely that Winchell would have asked Sullivan to intervene on his behalf. The Broadway gossip had considerable clout due to his immense popularity with readers; he wouldn’t have needed the sports editor to plead his case. According to Winchell, he himself lobbied management to stop cutting items from his column.

But the anecdote, if it was an exaggeration by Ed, says something about his envy of Walter, which he admitted only decades later. The story portrays Sullivan as having influence where Winchell did not—and it was exactly Winchell’s power and influence that Ed so admired. And it shows Ed as clearly the dominant victor, one-upping the star gossip columnist. That would always be Ed’s hope, and he would struggle to do so for quite some time. From this rocky beginning the two men would stay oddly intertwined throughout their lives, and would still be playing out their rivalry-brotherhood in their seventies. Ed had lost his twin brother Danny in infancy, but in Walter he found something of a replacement.

Over the course of his many nights at the Silver Slipper, Ed’s friendship with the mobsters who owned the speakeasy grew stronger. After racketeer Frank Marlow was shot to death near Flushing Cemetery in 1929, Ed wrote a fond remembrance of the syndicate figure:

“Along Broadway they are selling extras telling of Frank Marlow’s death, and yet some of us expect to see his fine eyes crinkle in a pleased smile and to hear his cheery ‘Hello pardner,’ a salutation that was not paralleled along Broadway for pure warmth of feeling.… To sit in a night club, to watch his eyes sparkle with pleasure, to hear him gently teasing the little blonde-haired girl with whom he was head-over-heels in love with.… To some, Frank Marlow was a racketeer … to us, who rejoiced in his friendship, he was an eager, impulsive, loyal friend.”

In the view of Dan Parker, a sportswriter for competing tabloid the
Daily Mirror
, Sullivan’s unabashed friendship with the mobsters who managed boxer Primo Camera had led to journalistic fraud. Although Camera, “the Ambling Alp,” would briefly take the heavyweight title in 1933, accounts of his career invariably mention rumors that he was aided by strong-arm tactics other than his own. Parker claimed that Ed’s
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column was part of the fix, that Ed was helping the mob groom Camera for an eventual title shot—a claim that Ed disputed. Sullivan was indeed the boxer’s cheerleader, writing plugs for the mountainous pugilist on a regular basis. But he claimed that his belief in Camera was sincere: “
I really thought a lot of Camera, and praised him all the way up,” Ed said.

Parker and Sullivan became embroiled in a fisticuffs of their own. Parker wrote, “
Speaking for the Duffy interests which he seems to represent, Mr. Sullivan, the columnist, and, as he confesses, ‘the original booster of the big man from the South of Italy,’ offers to take ‘any odds such a scoffer as Danyell Parker will offer and back Camera to beat such as Godfrey, Jim Maloney, K.O. Christner.’ … Now look here, Eddie, you old sheik … do you think I’d be foolish enough to bet on a fight in which Primo Camera participated—assuming, of course, that he will ever participate in a real fight?… And, oh, what I know about Eddie Sullivan!”

Ed quickly counterpunched. He filed a $200,000 lawsuit against the
Daily Mirror
and Dan Parker, charging them with libel and defamation of character. For Parker, that was more fuel for the fire. “
Eddie picked the argument and then ran off sniveling to his lawyer and threatened to sue me! Hot cha cha! What a powerful writer! I mean Eddie’s lawyer.… A nice kid but he can’t take it … that is, he can’t
take a bit of rough joshing … otherwise he can—and does—take it.… Now hop back into Primo’s left shoe, Eduardo, until I need you again.”

Sullivan’s arch nemesis, Walter Winchell, who in the 1930s and 1940s commanded a vast radio and newspaper audience. (Globe Photos)

Those words made Ed even more determined to fight back, but his court case suffered a setback. A State Supreme Court judge ruled that Sullivan had mistaken “
facetious twitting for malicious libel.” Ed, however, didn’t give up. His honor had been impugned and he would, as always, keep slugging until he got what he wanted. He appealed the case to a higher court, where he won a reversal. The court case went forward and this time the judge ruled in his favor. But it wasn’t the money he was after. “I considered the reversal vindication enough,” Ed said. “
I settled with the Hearst lawyers for my lawyers fees, about $850, I think. They were astonished when I said I didn’t want any money for myself.” As Ed reiterated after his court victory, he was indeed a friend of Bill Duffy’s, but his many plugs for Primo Camera had been genuine. As such, “I was willing to
call the whole thing off after I succeeded in defending my reputation.”

(In 1956 Camera sued the movie studio that produced
The Harder They Fall
, based on the Budd Schulberg novel about a fighter whose fights are fixed; many felt it was based on Camera. The boxer lost his suit. In the film, a sportswriter named Eddie Willis is hired by the mob to promote a fighter until he can win a title bout with a champion named Gus Dundee.)

On the morning of October 29, 1929, Wall Street brokers began the trading day under a cloud. Soon after the gong was struck to begin business, their worst fears were realized. The great bull market, after weeks of hiccupping, and a handful of very bad days, was now heading dizzily, devastatingly, downward. The day’s collapse was the worst carnage in the history of American markets. As stocks had climbed in the late 1920s, they lured legions of small investors—teachers, seamstresses, railroad men. Every cabbie, it seemed, had a hot stock tip. Their nest egg was now gone. With the breathtaking declines of Black Tuesday, even large institutions cashed in their chips. Herbert Hoover assured the country that fundamental conditions remained sound, but the crash reverberated throughout the economy. Businesses failed and commodity prices tumbled. Within six months, unemployment soared. One of the sectors hit hardest was newspaper advertising, affecting the
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as much as any New York daily. The paper had always been a hard sell to advertisers. Its impressive circulation was offset by its questionable reputation; many businesses were reluctant to be associated with the lurid tabloid. Now, as advertising budgets grew tight, the paper’s fortunes began to slide.

The Depression, of course, was a change of mood as much as a change in business fortunes. The world that Ed inhabited, the nightspots and cabarets of Broadway, felt a sobering chill. It could hardly have been otherwise: by March 1930 the breadlines in New York snaked block after block, and the city’s YMCA fed twelve thousand unemployed workers daily. The mad spirit of the 1920s—the rouged flappers, the insouciant evenings at gin joints—was slipping away. The carefree effervescence was replaced by a deepening shadow. Even romances, once content to be casual, now faced a make-or-break point.