Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (18 page)

Ed reported on a mythic group of people who had been liberated from the staid sexual mores of Victorian America. The 1920s had seen a revolution in morals and manners. Women, having picketed the White House and gotten hauled away in paddy wagons, had won the right to vote. Hemlines inched up and young ladies went out on the town by themselves. In 1926, Mae West premiered her play
Sex
, which scandalized the public with tunes like “Honey, Let Yo’ Drawers Hang Low”—and scored a box office bonanza. And though hemlines had fallen with the crash, something had been loosened by that giddy decade, and Ed’s column covered the results. He dished out a heady catalog of morsels like “
Phil Baker, the only bird who can make love over the top of an accordion” and “
Maurice Chevalier, who’d rather go places with his pal Primo Camera, than make love to Jeanette MacDonald.…” Printing material like this would have been forbidden not that many years previously—and would seem merely quaint a few decades hence—but it sold newspapers in the 1930s.

Ed’s reports of the rapid pace of modern love, which in his column seemed to twirl faster than ever, offered readers a vicarious thrill. “
Romances fizzle and burn out in a hurry on the Queerialto that is tagged Broadway … the big heart affairs pass into the hands of receivers quicker than that,” he reported. (Sullivan invented his own slang term for Broadway, “Queerialto,” a combination of “queer”—he always found the Broadway world odd—and “Rialto,” after the famous Broadway theater.) If he could fit in a bit of moralizing with his coverage of romance, all the better:

“Funny, the reactions of the fellows who are involved in these affairs of the cardiac … Tommy Manville, Jr., heir to the asbestos millions … is typical of the wealthier playboys of the Main Stem … Interested in the lovelies of the stage, Manville, like his fellows, will go just so far … The breaking point arrives when a column like this reports that Manville is thinking of buying an engagement ring … The current romance is dead the following day … to the wealthy fellows, wedding bells make a noise like a police riot car.”

The
News
gave Sullivan wide latitude in terms of what he covered, and, like his TV show in later years, his column offered something for many audiences: romantic travails, theater news, political predictions, show business gossip, odd quotes that celebrities gave him, and bits of shopworn wisdom. It was all jumbled together without any differentiation, a stream of consciousness Broadway diary, like the circuitous route taken by a cabbie trolling all of Manhattan. On a daily basis he veered from wedding news, denoted as “hunting for a license bureau,” to announcing a starlet’s pregnancy, referred to as “the arrival of Sir Stork,” to alimony payments, all within the space of a single paragraph.

As at the
Graphic
, he rarely wrote detailed theater criticism, but he often passed pithy one-line judgment on new Broadway shows (which, if positive, were used in a show’s advertisements). “
By far the smartest premiere of the winter season … Was the inaugural performance of
Design for Living
, featuring Noël Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne,” he opined. But even in these hit-and-run reviews he usually spent more ink on the evening’s social scene than on the dramaturgy.

In the Coward opening, he went on to list many of the well-heeled theater patrons in the audience. “Coward’s play delights this audience of the elite … it is as light as champagne bubbles, and produces the same gayety … You leave the theatre and mounted cops are holding back the curious sidewalk onlookers … There is a double line of cars in West 47th street, waiting for their mesdames and messieurs … Most of them are Rolls Royces … it was that kind of opening,” Ed observed, displaying, as he often did, his sense of being a reporter looking at the privileged from afar.

One of his column’s constants were bite-sized descriptions of famous people, opinionated portraits of those with whom he rubbed elbows. He would string together a number of these, as if bringing the reader to an exclusive Broadway party.

“Jack Benny, stage, radio, and movie comedian … Sleepiest of all Broadway personalities … He invites 20 people to 55 Central Park West, and then curls up on the living room couch and goes to sleep … On the level … If he could learn to sleep standing up, he’d make a fine cop … Estelle Taylor, ex-frau of ex-champ Dempsey … one of the keenest wits I’ve ever encountered … With a marvelous sense of humor that bewilders plenty of Coast dumbbells … [actress] Lupe Velez, madcap of movieland … Whose 70 coats, 230 dresses, and 126 pairs of shoes don’t mean a thing because she bought them only for ONE man … And then Gary Cooper wasn’t the fellow she thought he was.”

When he couldn’t actually be present he relied, as always, on his citywide network of sources developed while at the
Graphic.
They allowed him to report that Jimmy Cagney was in town and “
secretly registered” at the Wellington Hotel, or that the Hollywood party thrown for George Burns and Gracie Allen featured some odd sights: “
On the way to the dining room, a naked fellow, sitting in a tub of water, hailed the guests as they passed the door, and advised them not to eat, as the food was terrible.”

Sullivan was quick to trumpet any tidbits he scooped his competitors on, however reliable the scoop might be. “
Months before Wild Bill Donovan forced his recognition as a gubernatorial candidate, the news was printed in this column … A week before Jimmy Walker resigned, my Monday column predicted it.” (In truth, predicting the forced resignation of the embattled mayor, known as the “Night Mayor” for his fondness for the high life, was hardly prescient; at any rate, a few months earlier Ed had predicted
Walker would be cleared.)

“
The information I got late last night … is loaded with political dynamite,” he wrote in October 1932, three weeks before the election that sent Franklin Roosevelt to the White House. “One who is in the know named for me the cabinet which he says Franklin D. Roosevelt plans to install at Washington … and it is SOME combination.” Ed listed eight members of the potential FDR cabinet, only one of whom became an actual cabinet member. In the early days of the Roosevelt administration, Ed was boundless in his support of the new president, as was the
Daily News
itself. In April 1933, he enthused: “
Hugest individual hit of the season, Franklin Delano Roosevelt!!!”

True to the ethic of the Broadway columnist, Ed’s scoops were sometimes more timely than accurate. But that was the nature of this new brand of journalism. (The
New York Post
would later print page after page of Walter Winchell’s mistakes, his
so-called “wrongoes.”) The Broadway column was less about authoritative news than it was the diary of a community, an ephemeral compilation of what the Manhattan tribe was chattering and whispering about. The writings of the Broadway columnists from this period were riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, conjecture, and the alcohol-fueled imaginings born of typing against a 5:30
A.M.
deadline. But while these columnists, Sullivan among them, provoked a public outcry from those who called them a moral corruption, their readers didn’t seem to care. The world that Ed was writing about was hungry for coverage, and those on the outside looking in were even hungrier for the details.

Sullivan’s unstinting dedication to his column left little time for home life. Replacing the domestic scene was a blur of Manhattan nightspots. Several months after landing his
Daily News
post he wrote about his recent nocturnal jaunt with Freeman Gosden and Charlie Correll, stars of the
Amos ’n’ Andy
radio show, then listened to by tens of millions of fans weekly.
“I left them at 5
A.M.
, and I was pale and haggard,” he wrote. “Dave Marks, the toy millionaire, was in equally bad condition … ‘You’re not going home, Ed?’ Gosden queried reproachfully … I assured him that I was going home … ‘That’s too bad,’ said Correll, ‘we thought that as it’s only 5
A.M.
, we could go to Place Pigalle and then taper off with a cup of coffee.’ ” Being out all night was an occupational hazard for the columnist.

But Ed never missed home life. He seemed to take little interest in it. As recalled by his grandson Rob Precht, Ed found the concept of family life to be greatly overrated. He did, however, continue to take Sylvia out to dinner almost every night, as when they were courting. Sylvia was invariably elegantly dressed—she loved to go out—and the two made the rounds of New York’s fashionable restaurants; this also allowed Ed to continue his society reporting. Sylvia never learned to cook and never had the slightest desire to do so. Eventually the couple would move into an apartment with hardly any kitchen at all. As their daughter Betty recalled, “
My parents never ate at home. My father liked to be able to choose what he wanted to eat. I don’t think he was that thrilled about eating.”

Betty herself was cared for by a paid companion during Ed and Sylvia’s evenings out. “
When I was about two years old, my parents took me to Saratoga [in New York] to see the races. I was a very little girl, and I banged with my feet on the bottom of the table,” she remembered. “And my father was so distressed, embarrassed, that I really don’t think I went out with them until I was twelve. Until I could act like a young adult.” Her companion took her to eat at a succession of Manhattan restaurants, though Betty chose less formal places than those frequented by her parents.

As Ed took little time for home life, he also found little time for close friendships. In his twenties he had sought the companionship of boxer Johnny Dundee and soft-shoe dancer Lou Clayton, both largely as mentors. But while he now traveled a social circle as large as the Manhattan phone book, he was close with virtually no one. The sole exception was Joe Moore, the former speed skating star who was now a press agent, and whose friendship with Ed made him a conduit to Sullivan’s column. But even this was as much professional as personal. Having close friends “
wasn’t in his nature,” recalled his daughter.

Covering the famous only whetted Ed’s appetite to be famous himself. His
Daily News
column greatly increased his profile but didn’t satisfy this core desire. That he was now a Broadway somebody only made the question more urgent: how could he turn himself from a reporter into somebody who was reported on? His first attempt at radio had been canceled, but in 1933 he found a far more intriguing opportunity: the movies. Or rather, he didn’t find the opportunity, he created it. Sullivan conceived of and wrote a film script, featuring himself as the star, called
Mr. Broadway.
He convinced a film laboratory and a large New York optical house to back the movie. To help him, Ed hired Edgar G. Ulmer, who later became a leading B movie director, and actor Johnnie Walker, who had starred in scores of silent movies.

Mr. Broadway
was a two-part film, with the first part a cinematic portrayal of the columnist’s life as he made his rounds every night, and the second part a short melodrama. At the opening of the fifty-nine-minute movie, Ed introduces himself, then tours three of Manhattan’s busiest nightspots, the Hollywood, the Casino, and the Paradise. Along the way he talks with, or watches the performances of, a glittering galaxy of celebrities: Jack Benny and Mary Livingston, actor Bert Lahr, vocalist Ruth Etting, dancer Hal LeRoy, vaudevillians Benny Fields and Blossom Seeley, bandleaders Eddie Duchin and Abe Lyman, and boxers Jack Dempsey, Maxie Rosenbloom, and Primo Camera.

At about the film’s forty-five-minute mark, Ed confides that there’s a broken heart for every broken light on Broadway, reprising the theme of “unhappiness despite stardom” that ran throughout his
Graphic
column. At this point the film turns into an overheated melodrama about a young woman, her two suitors, and a stolen necklace. The director, Ulmer, later said he
“didn’t like it at all, because Sullivan forced
it into one of these moonlight-and-pretzel things. It was a nightmare, a mixture of all kinds of styles.”