Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (17 page)

T
HE
G
RAPHIC
,
TO THE RELIEF OF RESPECTABLE
N
EW
Y
ORKERS
, published its last issue on July 7, 1932. The following day, the city’s daily dose of 2-cent scandal mongering suspended publication. The paper had filed for bankruptcy on July 2, by one account collapsing under $3.1 million of liabilities. Part of this astronomical sum was a string of unpaid libel judgments, two for $500,000 a piece, and at least two more for lesser amounts. Controversial to the end, the paper’s demise provoked street demonstrations as unpaid printers and tradesman paraded up Varick Street with an effigy of Bernarr Macfadden, shouting what a reporter described as “
uncomplimentary ballyhoo.” The cops had to be called to contain the crowd.

For weeks afterward there was talk of bringing the
Graphic
back—optimistic scuttlebutt about investors who might be interested—but nothing came of it. In truth, the mood had passed. Those oversized headlines about suicide pacts between flappers and married men were titillating when the paper’s readers had an extra nickel in their pocket. But the deepening gloom accompanying the long breadlines at Broadway and 47th Street had caught up with the
Graphic.
The paper was from a different era. Other scandal sheets, like
The Tatler
and
Town Topics
, were also felled by the Depression.

One week before the paper closed, Ed received a call from someone identifying himself as Captain Joe Patterson, the publisher of the New York
Daily News.
Would Ed like to be a Broadway columnist for the
News?
The caller invited Sullivan over to discuss the terms of his new employment. Ed could hardly believe his good fortune—in fact he didn’t believe it. As soon as he put down the phone he was consumed with doubt. Could the call have been a prank? Perhaps someone he had offended in his column was exacting revenge with a cruel practical joke. Or so Ed thought; fortune this good couldn’t be trusted. He immediately phoned the
Daily News
and asked: had Joseph Patterson just called him? Yes, it was verified, it had been Patterson. Amazing—Ed had just been offered a job. Relief competed with euphoria.

Getting a call from the
Daily News
publisher was like being called up to the big leagues. Patterson’s father had published the Chicago
Tribune
, and Patterson had been the
Tribune
’s editor. During his army stint in World War I the flashy British tabloids had caught his eye, and he guessed the formula would succeed in America. Soon after Patterson launched the
Daily News
in 1919 it became a rousing success.

Originally called the
Illustrated Daily News
because of its emphasis on photos, this first modern American tabloid also proved to be one of the hardiest. It would survive through the decades as the majority of newspapers from that period were swallowed by larger papers or ceased publication. The
Daily News
continues to be one of New York’s leading papers.

The
News
spawned a legion of competitors. The
Graphic
had been inspired by the
News
, and its booming circulation also impressed William Randolph Hearst. Soon after the tabloid’s initial vaulting success, the newspaper magnate tried to buy it rather than compete with it. When Patterson refused to sell or stop publishing, Hearst launched a competing tabloid, the
Daily Mirror.
(Hearst’s strategy was to hire journalistic superstars, hence Winchell’s post as a
Daily Mirror
columnist.)

Patterson, an ardent socialist in his youth (though later highly conservative), wanted to publish a paper for the working man. Its style would be straightforward, and it would eschew lofty analysis. But if the
Daily News
lacked pretension, no one could say it wasn’t entertaining. The paper thumbed its nose at staid journalistic tradition: its headlines blared, its front page was often exclusively photos, and its stories emphasized emotional appeal over objective observation. Like the British tabloids it copied, the
News
was half the size of traditional papers, yet its circulation quickly grew far larger. By the mid 1920s the
News
had the largest daily circulation of any paper in New York City, at seven hundred fifty thousand; in fact, its circulation would be the largest in the country until the late 1940s.

Where the
Graphic
had dismissed any concern for journalistic propriety, the
Daily News
walked to the edge without jumping off. Its coverage could be sensational, even lurid, but it could not be fabricated. Patterson’s guideline was “
no private scandal or private love affairs,” though if they became public through divorce proceedings they were fair game. Patterson understood the power of celebrity news and so nurtured a stable of gossip reporters. As Ed joined the paper, it already had two established show business columnists, John Chapman and Sidney Skolsky.

Although Sullivan had blasted his competitors as he launched his
Graphic
column, decrying the moral turpitude of the veteran gossips, he launched his
Daily News
column as an incumbent. As he began his
News
column in mid July—just two weeks after the
Graphic
folded—he made no grand proclamations, he simply went back to work chronicling Broadway life. His salary was $200 a week, a sharp step down from the
Graphic
’s $375 but a highly desirable paycheck nonetheless. He began with three columns a week, which put him in a kind of probation status; many Broadway scribes turned out a daily column as he had at the
Graphic.

While his debut featured no grand announcements, his new column displayed a markedly different attitude. Ed’s new approach would not be as colorful or as free as it had been at the
Graphic
; there would be no more half-page descriptions of gypsy girls at stoplights and no philosophic meanderings about mob slayings. He was now a coolheaded, evenhanded veteran, like his colleagues Skolsky and Chapman.

More significantly, he was now an unabashed populist. At the
Graphic
he had written only periodically about the Depression and the struggles of the common folk; primarily his column had been a window into the lives of the swank set, even as his theme of their essential unhappiness pulled away the curtain. At the
News
he would still cover this half-mythic world. His column was full of stories about people like actress Peggy Hopkins Joyce, whose “only drink was champagne” and who went out on the town in a $3,000 ermine coverlet. As he churned out tidbits about actors, singers, cabaret stars, and well-to-do socialites—their dizzying round-robin of romance rotating faster than their nightclub of choice—the portrait could transport the average reader to a fabulous world.

But getting much more weight were the average people themselves. His writing now focused on and celebrated—empathized with—the life of the common man. As a freshman Broadway columnist he had been a fabulist with a touch of populism; now the populism came first. The shift was in keeping with the times, and with his new employer. The
Graphic
had embraced the giddy, no-tomorrow 1920s; the
Daily News
, sometimes called a newspaper that wore overalls, was an archetypical representative of the populism of the 1930s.

Soon after beginning his
News
column, Ed wrote about the phrase
“You can’t do that to me,” and how often it expresses desperation. “All the ache and hurt that can be summoned is compressed into these six words,” he wrote. “The labor and work of a lifetime is about to be swept away as a veteran employee is dismissed from a business office. He wants to cry out that he has children at home to be fed and clothed … But his heart has stopped beating its normal tempo … and he can utter only six words: ‘You can’t do that to me.’ ” Ed incorporated this vox populi theme in his gossip blurbs by reporting the romances of people like Artie Cohen, a Broadway tailor who eloped with his bride to Rye, New York.

And Sullivan seemingly never passed up the chance to include items like those that chastised the “
nationally-known comic [who] chiseled $2.50 from the pay of $7.50-a-day extras on the local Warner lot.” He tweaked actor Charlie Winniger, then starring on Broadway, because “
his refusal to cut his “Show Boat” salary from $1,000 a week to $750 a week may throw 230 people out of work.”

His anecdotes were now more often about life outside the world of affluence:

“Overhead the L trains rattled and jolted along, between grimy buildings … On the street surface, cars honked impatiently and tense-faced traffic cops, nearing the end of a wearying tour, signaled curtly … In front of a restaurant, two derelicts feasted their eyes on the day’s menu, as if unable to tear their eyes from it. I thought to myself, ‘Here is the very essence of this huge city of ours’ and turned to go, almost colliding with a tall mendicant, his face coarsened by a two-day stubble of beard … ‘Cowboy songs, Mister?’ he said … ‘Get the songs of the open range, 5 cents’…Overhead the L trains rattled as I paid him his modest fee … ‘Songs of the Open Range’ … On Third Ave. and 42nd Street.”

It’s likely that Ed’s populism came to him naturally, but it was also an effective competitive strategy for a columnist in a crowded field. It set him apart from many of his competitors, like the
News’
Sidney Skolsky, who would no sooner report the elopement of a tailor than print a Sunday school prayer. By playing to his audience,
mingling mentions of the hoi polloi with the illuminati, Ed curried favor with those readers who could never hope to sip a champagne cocktail, which was most of them. He was an anti-elitist covering the elite.

But hard-pressed average readers also wanted release from the daily grind, and Ed gave it to them. These readers turned to Broadway columns for the same reason they flipped on a radio: to be transported, to enter a fantasy world. Ed was their membership card to an exclusive club, a fantastic world sometimes referred to as “café society.”

The milieu known loosely as café society was a glittering alloy of screen and stage performers, radio personalities, star athletes, debutantes, musicians, old money socialites, press agents, promoters, and producers: those who were talented and those who wanted to associate with the talented. Despite the Depression, café society rubbed elbows nightly in 1930s Manhattan. Its gathering places were nightclubs like the Colony, El Morocco, Dave’s Blue Room, the Hollywood, and—foremost—the Stork Club, nightspots where entrance alone—if you could get past the doorman—would set you back $5 or even $10.

This gathering of the beautiful and the lucky was a living incarnation of what moviegoers paid two dimes to see on-screen in the 1930s: cool glamour, light conversation attended by chilled champagne, and romances begun while fox-trotting to elegant orchestra music. That right outside the door the unemployment rate was twenty-five percent made this privileged party seem closer to dreamscape than reality.

Being a star in this world meant getting noticed, being one of those that others mentioned when they talked about their evening at Lindy’s or Jimmy Kelly’s. One of the best ways to do this was to appear, as frequently as possible, in Broadway’s leading gossip columns. In an era before television, these columns had inordinate power on the celebrity social scene. To rate a boldface tidbit in the pages of the
Daily News
, the
Post
, or the
Daily Mirror
meant you were a somebody, you existed, that others would turn their heads as you walked in. Ed, as a columnist for the
News
—far above the ever-shaky
Graphic
—was now the ultimate insider in this scene. His
News
berth made him a player, someone whose opinion was talked about and sought after, a leading social arbiter of café society.

The job allowed him to live in his natural habitat. Ed was a nightly sight at Broadway’s openings and ritzy watering holes, dressed in a tailored double-breasted suit, cigarette in hand, hair slicked straight back, socializing with an ever-expanding network of performers, politicos, socialites, and athletes. A magazine profile from the mid 1930s described him: “
He seldom gets home before five a.m., in the meanwhile having taken in, on a typical night, ‘21,’ the Stork Club, the Hollywood, Dave’s Blue Room, Lindy’s, and Jimmy Kelly’s.… Courvoisier brandy is his only but not single drink; then it’s bed until one or two in the afternoon. The column is written—at home. That takes a couple of hours and Sullivan then drives down to the
Daily News
, reads his mail, and waits while the composing room gives him a proof.”

Central to his column were the vagaries of love among the smart set, the intoxicating sexual merry-go-round of Broadway romance:

“Take, for instance, slender and blonde June Knight … her affairs of the heart have kept my operatives working in double shifts since she arrived here to “hot cha” for Ziegfeld … First it was Elliot Myer … Then it was Elliot Sperber … Succeeded by Leo Friede … Who, in turn gave way to Sailing Baruch, Jr.,… Neil Andrews stepped in when Baruch stepped out … Now it looks as though Tommy Manville, Jr., is the lucky guy.”