Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (19 page)

On the town, 1935: As a gossip columnist with a daily column to fill, Sullivan circulated through Manhattan’s Café Society nearly every night of the week. Here he is at the Versailles Club with, from right, his wife Sylvia, Ziegfeld Follies performer Mary Alice Rice, and silent screen star Conrad Nagel. (New York Daily News)

Reviewers agreed. “
There is nothing particularly new or entertaining in all this unless one happens to be the type that enjoys glimpsing the near greats at play,” sniffed
The New York Times
, which pronounced the story element “unintentional burlesque.”
Variety
found the nightclub tour interesting but judged the movie unsatisfactory overall: “
As entertainment, it fails to measure up.” The low-budget production was “many leagues behind the average as to story, action, direction, photography.” As for Ed’s soap opera at the film’s end, “The meller [melodrama] sequence to which [the] film cuts in telling the story is very amateurishly carried out.… It shows how a man murders his best friend to please a girl whom he later learns is a prostie.”

Although the movie was roundly panned, Ed tried again in 1934 with
Ed Sullivan’s Headliners.
This twenty-minute short was directed by Milton Schwarzwald, who directed dozens of 1930s musical-comedy shorts; the film’s music was supervised by Sylvia Fine, a composer who later wrote some sharp material for singer-actor Danny Kaye, her husband. The short, again, was a collection of appearances by Broadway’s leading lights, with Sullivan as tour guide. But despite its celebrity sightings and directorial and musical talent,
Headliners
, like
Mr. Broadway
, disappeared without a trace. Because both films were made without the help of a studio, it’s likely they received limited distribution. Whatever minimal success they might have had, they failed in their primary goal: to launch Ed in a film career. Nevertheless, he wasn’t giving up.

After being hired by the
Daily News
in 1932 to write three columns a week, by early 1933 the paper promoted Sullivan to full status, with five Broadway columns weekly. He had made it on the Main Stem. As if to prove he was a force to be reckoned with, he began the year by picking a fight with no less a star than Eddie Cantor.

Having grown up in Yiddish theater, Cantor sang and joked his way to vaudeville’s pinnacle, topping it off by winning a role in Ziegfeld’s
Midnight Frolics
revue in 1916. His physical comedy fueled a passel of wildly popular silent films through the 1920s. Soon after the advent of talkies in 1927, Samuel Goldwyn hired him to croon, mug, and dance in a string of lavishly produced musical comedies. By 1933 Cantor was one the country’s most admired celebrities.

Sullivan, in a column segment called “Cantor Goes to Dogs,” claimed that the performer had stolen the comic dog routine of vaudevillian Bert Lahr. Worse, he compared Cantor to Milton Berle, an up-and-coming comedian well-known for lifting material from other comics. “
I can’t give Cantor a great deal of credit in lifting Lahr’s act,” Ed wrote. “If Broadway has been intolerant of Milton Berle, a youngster, it should be doubly of Cantor for establishing a nasty precedent.”

Cantor, enraged, phoned Sullivan and cursed at him vehemently. In a follow-up column, Ed made sport of the conflict, recounting Cantor’s anger as a source of amusement. He described the performer’s verbal tongue lashing with typographical discretion:

1:04 A.M.—“Hello, Ed, this is Eddie Cantor. I just read that story and I want to tell you something.… I never had anything to do with those *!*”!* dogs!…”

1:05 A.M. (Sullivan) “Now wait a min-”

1:05¼ A.M. Cantor—“No, let me finish.… In the first place I’m not doing the dog act, Jessel’s doing it.… I don’t need those *!*”! dogs in my act.…”

It turned out that Sullivan’s claims of plagiarism were inaccurate. But Ed, characteristically, admitted no mistake. Instead he obfuscated, conceding that another producer had indeed been responsible, yet noting that the theatrical theft occurred in Cantor’s revue. At the skirmish’s end he threw one last column jab at the popular performer: “
I suggest Cantor urge Jessel to drop Lahr’s dog act. That would do more to discourage theatrical banditti than any preaching in this space.”

The point Ed was making, really, was that he was now big enough to tweak a Broadway heavyweight. Just nineteen months before he had been a sports columnist, but now he was scolding one of the Main Stem’s top names, a star with an adoring national following. He had arrived.

Furthermore, his minor tussle with Cantor was Ed at his most natural: in conflict. As in the athletic fields of Port Chester, he always dove in headfirst, never backing down and never fearing the resultant split lip. For him conflict was as comfortable as breathing. And, it was good for the column. In tweaking Cantor, Ed was doing what Broadway columnists did. They engaged in arguments; they fought, bickered, and had spats with whomever was at hand, regardless of the merits of the case. It was a reliable way to keep their column a topic of conversation, and to ensure people turned to it shortly after glancing at the front page.

Toward the end of 1934, Ed combined his taste for journalistic fisticuffs with his populist instincts. As Christmas approached he used his column to write an open letter to Barbara Hutton, heiress to the massive Wool worth fortune. In the popular imagination Hutton was a cipher for easy wealth and the high life. At age four her mother had committed suicide, leading the tabloids to dub Hutton the “Poor Little Rich Girl.” In 1933, at age twenty-one, she inherited the $50 million Woolworth estate. She was then married to her first of seven husbands, Russian-born Prince Mdivani, commonly thought of as a society playboy.

Ed wrote Hutton a holiday request. “
How about establishing an annual Princess Barbara Christmas Dinner for some of the poor of New York City?” he asked, suggesting she donate one thousand Christmas baskets to charity.

The item was characteristic of Ed’s writing, which played to his Depression-worn readers while reporting on the glittering set. But Ed didn’t stop with his request. He went on to give Hutton, and especially her husband, a journalistic thrashing:

“The unreality of your existence must be boring, Princess. You have a husband who has little or no relation to everyday life … I have heard grim and resolute men say some nasty things about your husband … I have heard underworld chieftains speak about him and his apparently callous disregard for human suffering, and I would not want them to speak that way about me.”

The article’s arm-twisting request for money was decried by, among others, a writer in
The New Yorker
magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section, who opined, “
We think the time has come for someone to do something about the Broadway columnists
who write open letters to people for money.” Hutton, seeking defense from the full-bore fusillade—she called it blackmail—sought the help of Walter Winchell. Winchell eagerly took up battle against his
News
counterpart, firing a return volley in his
Daily Mirror
column:

“We endorse anybody who helps the poor, but that’s beside the argument … The open-letter sender took pains to point out that her husband wasn’t popular with the gang chiefs ‘who would like to meet him on some waterfront.’ A remark, incidentally that some of the ‘boys’ resented … we subscribe to the sentiment of many who considered the article in the ugliest taste … and we pledge them all, that every time anybody uses (or abuses) a newspaper in that manner, we’ll fight it and protest against it at the top of our lungs and typewriter … That means YOU!”

But Sullivan’s strong-arm tactic prevailed. One week before Christmas a $5,000 check arrived from Hutton. And Ed, in his manner, thanked her. He wrote an open letter to New York’s children, describing the many letters he had received from needy parents:

“There’s one letter from one of your mothers, and it is typical … She says that the three of you had chopped meat for Thanksgiving, and the older boy said: ‘Mamma, why aren’t you and papa eating?’ … She told you that she and your dad had eaten earlier and that they weren’t hungry, but listen, you three little kids … Your mother and father were fibbing … When you grow up, I want you to be pretty swell to them. [These parents don’t ask for much,] just enough to stuff small stomachs on Christmas Day … it seems to me that in the richest city in the world, that is a reasonable request. A very lovely lady, who doesn’t want her name used, thinks that it is a reasonable request, too … she’s the kind of lady you read about in story books … She sent me a check for $5,000.”

Although Ed had achieved his goal, the incident marked a new season in his relationship with Walter Winchell. They would now be archrivals.

It hadn’t always been so. There was a period after Sullivan took over Winchell’s former spot at the
Graphic
that it looked as if the two, while professional rivals, might have something of a friendship. Walter had called Ed about the CBS radio opening, and Ed had sent Walter a series of affectionate notes. “
Your Monday column still fills me with respectful amazement,” he wrote in one missive to Walter. “It’s gorgeous great. Where you get it, I don’t know but as I pay better dough, I believe your operatives, with the possible exception of Dorothy Parker, will see the error of their ways and get on the Sullivan bandwagon.”

After Winchell got into a contretemps at the Casino Park Hotel, in which stage producer Earl Carroll told him he wasn’t “
fit to be with decent people” because of his brand of gossip, and Winchell had stood his ground—the incident became the talk of Broadway—Ed dashed him off a lighthearted memo: “
If you let me know who’s fighting at the Casino next week I would like to make my reservations in advance.” Even after Ed moved to the
Daily News
, establishing himself in a secure post, he sent Walter a note combining flattery with affectionate chiding. A recent Winchell radio show, Sullivan opined in his letter, hadn’t lived up to the quality of
Walter’s column; however, Ed confided, “
you are the only one for whom I hold a sincere personal and professional respect.” When Walter’s nine-year-old daughter Gloria died on Christmas Eve of 1932, Ed and Sylvia sent a condolence note. But by 1934 their relationship had changed. Ed was no longer a freshman columnist, and any need to curry favor with an upperclassman was gone. They would henceforth only snarl at one another.

An element in Ed’s column that was as constant as conflict was his appreciation of female pulchritude. An attractive woman was “an eyeful,” and he used the phrase frequently. The avenues of Manhattan were chock-full of such creatures, by Sullivan’s account. In a typical column, he wrote about spending the evening at a Greenwich Village nightclub owned by Barney Gallant. “
The other night, sitting in the half-gloom of the place … I asked him the one question he has always avoided … I asked him who, in his opinion, was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen.”