Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (14 page)

Breaking from the practice of other Main Stem reporters, he announced, his column would not promote the prurient.

“Divorces will not be propagated in this column.… I will always experience greater pleasure in seeing Gus Edwards roadhousing with his wife than in seeing a celebrity flaunting his mistress.… So with high resolve and no fears, I enter upon my career as a Broadway columnist.… I confess that the prospect of competing against the present field leaves me quite cold.… It looks like a breeze and, as Mike Casale would say, ‘Weather clear, fast track.’

P.S. No apprentice allowance claimed.”

When the paper hit the stands the Broadway community was agog. Ed’s debut was the talk of the town.
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publisher Bernarr Macfadden wondered if Sullivan could be serious: a clean Broadway column? The publisher of
Variety
, Sime Silverman, reprinted the column in full, with commentary: “
Sullivan is well known, if not famous, as a sports reporter. He will become equally so as a Broadway writer if continuing the way he started. The tabloids have been called the trade papers of the racketeers. Sullivan is on a tab [an apparent reference to the
Daily Mirror
claim that he was on the mob’s payroll]. His initial outburst sounds as if he intends to disprove the allegation. It’s a great opening.” Many thought the column’s claim of propriety merely funny, like a Burlesque dancer lecturing on grammar. Some speculated it was the columnist’s standard ploy: to gain readers by starting a feud. Winchell and Sobol, understanding that the jabs were aimed directly at them, were incensed.

The evening after his column’s debut, Sullivan ran into Winchell at the Reuben Delicatessen. According to Sullivan, he himself was talkative and Winchell was quiet, until Winchell asked,
“Did you mean what you wrote today?” The freshman columnist soft-pedaled his attack, explaining that he had merely wanted to make a dramatic entrance. Winchell said he accepted this as an apology, at which point it was Ed who took offense. The Sullivan hair-trigger temper leaped out of the bag. “I got so mad I grabbed him by the knot in his necktie and pulled him over the table, right on top of the cheesecake. ‘Apologize to you?’ I said, ‘You son of a bitch, I did mean you and if you say one more word about it I’ll take you downstairs and stick your head in the toilet bowl.’ ” In Sullivan’s telling of the story, Winchell then fled the Reuben.

Sobol, in the
Journal-American
, parried Sullivan’s opening salvo by writing a column entitled “The Ennui of His Contempt-oraries.” Referring to Ed, he archly noted, “
Empty vessels make the most sound.”

Sobol’s riposte was standard stuff by the rules of the Broadway gossips; throwing barbs back and forth was part of their stock-in-trade. They were as much performers as the nightclub acts they covered. But for Ed, hypersensitive and in a new situation, it was too much. Sobol’s column enraged him. One evening shortly after it ran, Sullivan ran into Sobol outside a Broadway performance. Ed grabbed his rival columnist and, according to Sobol, bellowed, “
I’ll rip your cock off, you little bastard.” Sobol, all of one hundred twenty-five pounds, ducked out of Sullivan’s reach while bystanders held him back.

As if Ed hadn’t vented enough, he also took Sobol to task in his column, writing:

“To my former associates in the field of sports writing, I must report that THIS is a soft touch in an unusually responsive arena.… While all my columning contemporaries are fuming and fretting at my invasion, one of them has even carried his personal alarm into the two-column measure of his daily piece. This particular fellow has never had much competition. He’s got it now. I have not decided whether to chase him over the right field fence or the left field fence. This, however, is purely a matter of route, and immaterial.”

That would be easier said than done. In claiming he would write a Broadway column free of gossip, Ed faced a gaping void. He had to churn out six columns a week, Monday through Saturday, each about fifteen hundred words—an enormous amount of space to fill without the usual patter of petty scandal.

His claim of journalistic piety lasted as long as two bits in a Broadway speakeasy. On Tuesday, one day after his opening roundhouse punch, he wrote a padded piece of treacle mourning vaudevillian Joe Schenck, who had died prematurely. On Wednesday he went back on the attack, decrying the
“velvet hammer” of the Broadway drama critics, how they “hem and haw, they beat about the reviewing bush and extract from it critical thorns with which to puncture the hide of agonized producers. Primarily, they seek arty phrases in which to couch their barbs. These, they hope, are destined for mouthing in salon and drawing room.” In contrast, Ed promised, “If I like a show, I will say so without any ambiguity of phrasing which might protect my
Variety
box score.”

In that same Wednesday column—just forty-eight hours after proclaiming, “divorces would not be propagated in this column”—he included an item about Jack Dempsey’s divorce. Its expense was placing the boxer in “
desperate need for ready cash,” Ed wrote. “The ex-champion is seriously considering a fight at Reno against a guaranteed tanker. Dempsey would promote it, and would not have to cut Estelle in on the net.” In one fell swoop he had abandoned his promise and publicized the personal troubles of a friend. It was as if he hadn’t realized how deep the waters would be, and now, not sure if he could swim, was grasping at anything to keep himself afloat. He would print another item about Dempsey in a few months, claiming that the boxer had ducked in and out of New York quickly because of rumored kidnap threats. That column item prompted an angry telegram from Dempsey, which Ed printed:
ALWAYS CONSIDERED YOU A FRIEND STOP DIDN’T EXPECT YOU TO WRITE AND PRINT A STORY YOU KNOW IS RIDICULOUS AND WITHOUT FOUNDATION STOP ONE NEVER KNOWS WHAT TO EXPECT THESE DAYS, HOWEVER. JACK DEMPSEY.

By Friday of his first week, it seemed, he was out of material, reduced to a windy paean lauding the glories of opening night. In lieu of actual news, he provided a dollop of pandering to the hometown crowd (and a florid description of the world the twenty-nine-year-old columnist was entering):

“A First-night supplies all these things to all men of Broadway. Gorgeous women flicking red-tipped cigarettes, suave gentlemen suavely tailored, and the whole against a background of curious crowds at the theater entrances, their gaping delight occasionally blotted out by the brawny shoulders of the cops holding them in restraint.… It has a glittering spread to it that reduces the rivalry of other cities to inconsequence. Depreciatingly, these other cities sneer, ‘New York is a sucker town.’ And then these other cities bend frantically to their work in order to get carfare to reach it. For they all want to gaze at the steel-ribbed frame of the ‘sucker city.’ ”

By the end of the month, gossip flowed from the column in a steady trickle. He began regularly including items like “
Grover Cleveland Alexander is back with his wife and off the booze.” In mid July he informed readers, “
Everyone who played a lead in
The Marriage Circle
, including Lubitsch, the director, has been divorced.” In August he reported, “Abe Lyman’s sister is returning from the coast … without her hubby.” And shortly thereafter, “
Jean Malin belted a heckler last night in one of the clubs.… All that twitters isn’t pansy …”

Walter Winchell described a scene at LaHiff’s Tavern shortly after Sullivan started including gossip. Ed stopped by the bar and joined Winchell and an assortment of Broadway types who were drinking and talking shop. Walter couldn’t resist needling Ed about his journalistic change of heart:

“
Eddie,” I cooed, “what happened? Did your editor tell you to get interesting or get out?”

“No,” he sighed. “My wife did.”

Initially, Ed’s job as a Broadway columnist included drama criticism. If dealing with gossip meant swimming in uncharted waters, writing serious theater criticism put him in over his head. Just weeks earlier he had been reporting blow-by-blows from the bouts at Madison Square Garden. Now, having never read a single play, he found himself at the opening night of a production of August Strindberg’s
The Father
, an intense psychological drama. Sullivan didn’t like the play and made that clear in his review. In his best imitation of a drama critic, he recommended that the playwright rewrite the entire second act. Not until the following day did Ed realize that Strindberg was long dead.

But
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readers didn’t pay 2 cents to read in-depth reviews of Strindberg productions, and Ed quickly navigated away from serious theater criticism. Henceforth he would go no closer to legitimate theater than comments like, “
those cocktails at Alice Brady’s party would have jolted Eugene O’Neil [
sic
] into writing a musical comedy.” Instead, Sullivan’s column provided readers with his tell-it-like-it-is descriptions of lighthearted Broadway fare, the broad comedies and showy musicals that lit up the Main Stem.

More than covering light theater, though, Ed’s column created a kind of parallel universe. As the Depression cast deep shadows, even the
Graphic
’s headlines turned serious: “
6,000 Hunger Marchers Set Out for Washington” and “
Mid-West Farmer Pays Taxes with Nuts in Lieu of Money.” Ed’s column was a respite from the grimness. He mentioned the Depression, to be sure—it was unavoidable at this point. But more often he wove a pixie-dust fairy tale of Broadway glamour, peopled with big spenders, shapely chorines, and talented showbizzers. This beautiful set had the luxury of falling in and out of love with dizzying frequency, usually at high-class speakeasies where the headwaiter understood the importance of seating stars around the room at a discreet distance.

He didn’t have to invent this world; some vestige of it still existed from before the Crash, and he was quickly invited in. For a columnist who could provide publicity, the invitations were numerous. Ed visited Fred Astaire’s dressing room at the New Amsterdam Theater. The thirty-one-year-old dancer was then appearing in the original Broadway production of
The Band Wagon
, having yet to make his first trip to Hollywood:

“If you find [vaudeville star] Joe Schenck at Richman’s dressing room, you are more apt to find a Vanderbilt or a Whitney in Astaire’s place. The youthful dancing star claims most of the social set as his bosom pals, or, perhaps I should twist that around and point out that they claim him.

“Fred’s droll colored dresser provides a lighter note for the guests here, providing he knows them. If he likes them, he will even go out of the theater and get them a glass of Fred’s favorite after-performance beverage, milk. Bob Benchley is a member in good standing of the Astaire Dressing Room and Milk-Drinking Benevolent Association.”

Musical theater producers buttonholed the new columnist to hobnob with their stars. “
Before Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers left for the Pacific Coast to write songs for Maurice Chevalier’s next picture, I had lunch with them and George Gershwin on Broadway,” Ed reported, as if he dined with Main Stem superstars on a regular basis. It was impossible to say which of that day’s lunch companions was more famous; Gershwin had debuted the groundbreaking
Rhapsody in Blue
in 1924, and Rodgers and Hart’s bubbly musicals continuously delighted Broadway. “The conversation switched to aviation. We all agreed that we were safer on the ground. Rodgers, who doesn’t like flying, suddenly remembered something. ‘I shouldn’t be opposed to flying,’ he said, ‘for an airplane trip gave me an idea for one of our best songs.’ ” Rodgers, Sullivan wrote, explained that he composed “With a Song in My Heart” after listening to the roar of an airplane engine.

Ed seemed to become fast friends with Florenz Ziegfeld, whose leggy
Ziegfeld Follies
comedy-dance revue was one of the signature acts of the 1920s. “
In a speakeasy the other night, before the ‘Follies’ left for Philadelphia, Flo Ziegfeld chided me for writing that he was sixty-seven years old,” Ed wrote. “ ‘It’s sixty-three,’ protested Ziggie, forgetting that two weeks previous, at the Peacock Ball, he had given me sixty-seven as his correct age.” (Ziegfeld in fact was sixty-three in 1931.)

Sullivan sat in the lobby of the Hotel Warwick with Jack Benny and Eddie Cantor and debated the effect of various theaters on the success of a show. “
Jack Benny felt that the Manhattan Theater, the former Hammerstein Theater, contributed to the poor reception of
Free for All.
Cantor disagreed volubly,” Ed noted. (The Manhattan Theater would later be renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater.)

The columnist sometimes journeyed uptown, to Harlem, to investigate the newest jazz orchestras. He preferred bandleader Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington, a position he conceded was controversial: “
I said he would overhaul Ellington … the town giggled at the thought.… But I ask you now … who’s bigger, Ellington or Calloway?”