Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (15 page)

By the early 1930s, Broadway faced an upstart rival in the business of fame, Hollywood, and this new world was often feted in Ed’s column.

“Every time one of the West Coast picture stars arrives in New York the playboys go into action on all fronts, for it is a particular badge of merit to have wooed and won, even for a fortnight, a movie star…

“You can imagine the commotion that was raised by the Men About Town when the petite Raquel Torres, one of the smarter-looking coasters, detrained in the local trainshed. I don’t blame the local Men About Town for the haste in placing orders at the greenhouses; Raquel is an unusually pretty girl and, in addition, seems to know what time it is without looking at the Paramount Building clock.”

Ed was thoroughly thrilled by his new status as a Broadway chronicler. He had, he admitted, no desire to go back to sports, the field in which he had labored so long to establish himself. “
So many have asked my reaction to the new field of work that I will tell them now that Broadway columning is more varied and more interesting than sports columning,” he wrote in September 1931, having launched his column two months prior. “I believe that the people you meet in theater and its wings are, in the aggregate, smarter and more interesting.” If he had been coerced into this job, as he later claimed, he took to it like an actor to the stage.

New York had been a good place to cover sports, but it was
the
place to report on the breathless business of glamour. “
They say that Broadway and 42nd Street is the junction of the universe and it’s about right, at that,” he rhapsodized. “Not many nights ago, I sat in one of the more elaborate speakeasies in the Fifties and marveled at the diversity of life gathered together in one spot.

“There, by the wall, with a blue sailor hat pulled down over her eyes, sat Greta Garbo with Berthold Viertel … on the left side of the room was Harry Richman, matinee idol, and with him was Bert Lahr, comedian of screen and stage [later to play the Cowardly Lion in
The Wizard of Oz
]…two tables to the right … was Jim Turner, vice-president of huge R.K.O.

“Where else but on Broadway would you find all these various types all in the same room, and nobody paying any attention to them.”

For all of Ed’s outwardly jaunty tone, all was not well. He had always been moody, prone to fits of melancholia and sudden anger. But now an event plunged him into a dismal funk. On September 28, 1931, his thirtieth birthday arrived. As he saw it, the day dawned like a late edition headline proclaiming his personal failure. He fell into a gray mood, a cloudy depression as dark as that on the streets of New York. In essence, he felt deeply frustrated at not having achieved more. By external measure he was in splendid shape; not only was he employed, no small achievement in 1931, but at $375 a week he could easily afford to travel in the circles of those he covered. He had just landed a high-profile job that opened doors all over the city. Yet by his self-evaluation he was nowhere.

Years later his daughter recalled, “
I remember my mother saying my father was lying on the bed, and it was his thirtieth birthday, and he felt he should have accomplished more than he had.… He was a moody person, he might have even been depressed. In those days we didn’t pay attention to that.”

His wife described that blue mood as “
one of the unhappiest days of Ed’s life. I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. There he was looking as if the end of the world had come. Ed felt he was getting old and not getting where he wanted to be.”

As fortunate as his life had been, he hadn’t gained the one thing he so hungered for. “
He didn’t have national prominence—and that’s what he wanted,” Sylvia said. “I was perfectly happy with him the way he was but he was born with a desire to be a big success.” This frustrated desire for greater recognition made him “terribly tense,” she said.

What Ed wanted, in short, was to be a star like those he wrote about. He had always idolized athletic heroes—Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Babe Ruth, even perhaps
his former fiancée, Olympic gold medalist Sybil Bauer. Now he lived in an even brighter solar system, meeting the likes of Rodgers and Hart, Fred Astaire, Eddie Cantor, and George Gershwin. These were the mythic figures whose names were known coast to coast, who traveled on the gossamer wings of fame and renown. This is what
he
wanted, but the calendar said he was thirty and it still hadn’t happened. He wasn’t going to give up, of course—the desire, the hunger, burned too fiercely. He wanted to be famous. He was going to have to work on that.

Having violated his vow against gossip early on, after a few months Ed let it fall away altogether, reporting a constant stream of divorces and romantic intrigues. As he wrote about Broadway closets he used a new journalistic convention created by Walter Winchell: a series of phrases connected by ellipses. The effect was freeing, as if journalism, having loosened the moorings of propriety, would now dispense with the tired sentence-period-sentence format. “
I linked Thelma Todd to Ronald Colman … That’s wrong … the real romance is with a married man, and it looks like a house wrecking,” he reported. “
Claire Windsor, on tour with Jolson’s ‘Wunderbar’…is taking iron injections … She’s still bothered by injuries suffered in the Phil Plant yacht crash … Reid, her coast honey, will join her as soon as he recovers from scars inflicted in an airplane wreck … But I’ll tell you confidentially that there will be no marriage.” In Ed’s column the giddy merry-go-round of love never paused:
“The Ginger Rogers—Mervyn Le Roy romance is still blazing, and Ralph Ince is going places with Mervyn’s wife while she awaits the divorce decree.”

The blind items, with no specific names attached, could go that extra step: “
conspicuous on the [dance] floor was that well-known widow … with her gigolo.” But even with the names attached the gossip sometimes took a darker turn. “
Mrs. Violet Swanstrom plans a doctor’s examination to disprove those drug charges.” The gambling losses of the elite were steady diet. “
Al Jolson has sworn off the gee-gees [horse races] for the balance of the season,” Ed reported. And the uncle of CBS radio network head Bill Paley “
wound up by blowing $27,000” in an Atlantic City casino, he wrote.

The freshman columnist freely admitted that he was a scandalmonger. In early January Ed described the ethic of the Broadway columnist—now that he was very much one of them:

“The idea is that we go along, in our own humble way, trying to spread seeds of dissatisfaction where orchids grew before … Harmony is our ruin and our downfall … We seek discord, divorce, lawsuits, and you will pardon the smug chuckle as I say: We got them!… We are the vultures winging above the Empire State Building … Eyeing you hungrily … You think at night you are hearing airplanes … not so … that’s us.

“Scandal, gossip, rumor … Founded or unfounded … to us, they’re a wagonload of hors d’oeuvre … Life to us is a bowl of cherries … with the razzes for you … You only offend me when you say, for instance, that I’m constructive … Constructive?… You wound me to the soul … You mean that I don’t hurt your feelings … My gracious, I’m a floperoo … What? Oh, I do belt now and then … Well now, that’s better … I wouldn’t want to think I was smothering to death in a pot of honey … Eh, what?… You have an exclusive story for me … Don’t be crazy … I printed that two weeks ago.”

Paradoxically, as much gossip as Ed shoveled, he presumed to maintain his own sense of the puritanical. He did not, for example, approve of women who told dirty stories: “
It puts them in the same catalogue with birds who carry filthy pictures in their pockets … It is an unhealthy lewdness that adds nothing to a girl’s charm … Just as it is an ugly practice for such a talented lyricist as Harold Arlen to write double-entendre lyrics for Leitha Hill.”

Although he was now a Broadway fellow, Ed made it clear he was no dandy. He was, as rival columnist Louis Sobol had described him, “
a he-man type fellow.” Perhaps to keep the score clear, Ed wrote regularly of the “pansies.” “
Bert Savoy … Effeminate in the days when pansies wore skirts … Today they wear swallow-tails … Fashions change, and the pansies with them.” Yet Ed readily acknowledged that not everyone shared his standoffish attitude. If big money stopped investing in speakeasies, “
the late spots will be patterned after the crude loft building which houses the pansy cabaret in the 1200s on 6th Avenue,” he opined. “The pansies, under the leadership of one of their veterans, have rigged out a spot that represents an investment of perhaps $50. Instead of a cash register, they use a butter tub to hold the receipts. Daubs of paint furnish the coloring. Yet Greta Garbo and other celebs storm the place to watch the effeminate men serve hard liquor.”

As Ed mined the gold of celebrity news through the fall and winter of 1931–32, he also reported what he saw as the hidden truth behind its luster: the talented and the famous were not really happy. Underlying the façade of celebrity was a foundation of worry and concern. “
Not long ago we had dinner with the Babe Ruths … here must be a happy soul … an orphan boy … greatest idol of the country … at a fabulous salary … playing better than he had ever played, in his thirty seventh year … he had every reason to be happy and content.” But he wasn’t happy, Ed wrote. “He was fretting over his income tax … over the choice of a school for his daughter, Julia.”

No matter who you are, his column explained, happiness is a mere chimera. “
I watched Maurice Chevalier … and Walter Donaldson … at Abe Lyman’s opening at Hollywood Gardens … One is the matinee idol of the continent … and the other is one of the great songwriters of all time … These two have the world by the throat … And Lyman is leader of one of the great bands of the country…

“Yet Chevalier was moody … Donaldson was inattentive … Lyman was nervous and upset … What is this thing called happiness?” he asked, rephrasing the lyric to the recent Cole Porter hit, “What Is This Thing Called Love?”

Part of the problem was Broadway itself. As he saw it, the street was chock full of phonies. It was a theme he returned to again and again. The phonies. He hated them.

“In case you don’t know … a phoney is a pretender … a sham and a larcenous fraud … and what a magnificent collection of phonies on your dear old Broadway … They could call this stretch of pavement Phoney Boulevard … Kept women and kept men … Roues and men-about-town … half-pint racketeers … all in the parade of Boulevard de Phoney … Insincerity marks all of them … the moral paupers of this fastest of all centuries … their ambitions condensed into a single line … ‘Mention me in your column’ … What a magnificent ambition … To crash a Broadway column … They can’t conceive of any decoration to match this one … The poor phonies!”

In January 1932, Ed’s newfound celebrity status afforded him a sought-after opportunity: radio. The medium had arrived by the early 1930s. Although newspaper advertising was eviscerated by the Depression, radio advertising jumped ninety percent in the years following the Crash. Many Americans didn’t have enough money to cover basic necessities, yet radios kept flying off storeroom shelves. Between 1928 and 1932 the number of receivers catapulted from eight million to eighteen million. Part of radio’s attraction was its intimacy. Fans idolized film stars, but radio personalities visited their living rooms. The warmth and immediacy of the medium created a sea change in news and entertainment, and electronic broadcast created a new class of stars. Performers previously limited to a single theater now sang, joked, and told stories to a national audience with the flick of a switch. Many of vaudeville and legitimate theater’s biggest names now angled for a chance in a medium they had at first ignored.