Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (23 page)

By 1936, Ed was writing of the “decline and fall of the legitimate Broadway theater” in the face of Hollywood’s advance. The problem, he explained, lay in the twelve cans of film delivered to New York’s Ziegfeld Theater. Where once the great Ziegfeld had produced his
Show Boat
gala live, now it was delivered to this same theater in twelve cans of film. “
This is the new show business … twelve cans of film … Three hundred copies are made in the Coast laboratories … Each copy will play perhaps thirty theatres.…” Live theater, Ed reported, was “romantic, stimulating, exciting … but the new way is more profitable.” (And it was no secret that the Depression had dimmed Broadway’s lights considerably, and that the public’s hunger for Hollywood fantasy was only increased by the downturn.) Ed’s column in 1936 became a kind of de facto Hollywood-Broadway column, as he liberally sprinkled tidbits about film personalities into his Broadway coverage.

Skolsky, in what must have been agonizingly attractive to Ed, kept dropping bon bons about the joys of the Hollywood columnist. “
When Gary Cooper and Madeline Carroll were announced for the cast of the flicker
The General Died at Dawn
, Paramount didn’t know that John O’Hara, Clifford Odets, and Sidney Skolsky would also be in the cast,” he wrote in 1936. His reporting suggested that with enough proximity, even a newshound was invited into the hallowed set, as when he went to the movies with child film star Shirley Temple. “
When I arrived at the theatre Shirley was already there, seated. She didn’t say, ‘You’re late, you kept me waiting.’ She merely said, ‘Good evening, Sidney,’ and shook hands with me.”

Ed began to lobby
Daily News
editor Frank Hause to replace Skolsky. Exactly when he began his extended effort is unknown, but by 1937 the
News
management relented.
They agreed to recall Skolsky to write the Broadway column and send Sullivan to Hollywood. But there was a problem: Skolsky didn’t like the idea and refused to come back to New York. “
I pleaded with him by wire and phone to return but no dice,” Hause later wrote. “I guess the competition on the Broadway beat was too much for the Little Mouse, and he liked the easier tempo and climate of Hollywood.”

The
News
kept pushing Skolsky to return. And he kept pushing back. Finally, he chose to resign rather than return to New York. He aired his feelings publicly in
Variety.
“
Broadway columns are as passé as Broadway,” he wrote. His column’s tagline had been “Don’t get me wrong—I love Hollywood,” but in
Variety
he altered it: “They got me wrong—I love Hollywood.” He took a job as the Hollywood columnist for the
Daily Mirror.
With Skolsky out of the way, the
News
assigned Ed to the Hollywood beat for one year, as they had Skolsky.

As Sullivan sat down to write his farewell Broadway column in September, he certainly had reason to feel fondly toward his New York position. The perks had been numerous. That summer the columnist had sailed to Europe aboard the SS
Normandie
with a group of show business stars that included Jack Benny and his wife (and comedy partner) Mary Livingston. Cole Porter was onboard to serenade the guests; one night he played the Gershwin tune “Lady Be Good” as a tribute to the composer, who had died a week earlier. Ed had plenty of free time in between filling columns with breathless tidbits like “
the Cole Porters are Marlene Dietrich’s favorite shipboard companions.” While crossing the Atlantic he watched movies (appropriately, the 1937 Preston Sturges comedy
Easy Living
was shown). He also practiced his dance steps in preparation for hosting that fall’s Harvest Moon dance competition, and polished his Ping-Pong skills. “Your athletic reporter worked out on the desk tennis tables and thought himself pretty good,” he wrote. “
Then a boy of twelve came along … he gave me a terrible shellacking, and I slunk away to the library.”

Ed’s good-bye column on September 10 was a sentimental recap of his New York years, from his beginnings at the
Evening Mail
in 1921 through his joy at landing his
Daily News
position in 1932. He veritably shoveled praise onto the
News
—not surprising, considering the paper had just granted him the assignment he so coveted.

Ed had begun to say farewell to Broadway in his column the day before, letting his readers know that the good-bye letters and telegrams were pouring in (and reminding them of his popularity): “
You get a funny feeling reading them … After you’ve written for a long time, the readers accept you as one of their own immediate family, and the letters from them are penned in that style.” A mother in New Jersey warned him to be careful of drafts on the trains, and another wrote to say she lit a candle for him at her church. “
There is a letter from Sing Sing, saying that the boys up there wish me luck … ‘We’d all like to be going with you, Sully.’ ”

In that same column was one of Ed’s most unusual qualities as a Broadway scribe. He devoted half his column—and the entire column the day before—to giving tourist advice to the Legionnaires, then in New York for a convention. He wrote as if he were taking these American Legion members under his wing, providing detailed advice for their New York visit. To the average Broadway columnist, a Winchell or a Skolsky, American Legion members were visiting rubes, hometown squares who were best ignored. These columnists—the very embodiment of the urbane—would merely shudder as they hurried past a nametag-wearing American Legion member from Hoboken or Poughkeepsie.

The columnist and his wife preparing to sail to Europe aboard the SS Normandie, in the summer of 1937, as part of a group that included Cole Porter and Jack Benny. (New York Daily News)

But not Ed. He was the kind of Broadway columnist who gave the Legionnaires a step-by-step rundown on how to enjoy the city. That contradiction, if it was one, defined him. Here he was, going off to Hollywood in search of something bigger and better, in effect saying that New York was no longer the center of the world. He dreamed of something grander, some larger fame or status he might acquire. He was a Broadway columnist who had outgrown Broadway. On the face of it that put him in a very different world than the Legionnaires who were looking forward to a 10-cent ride on the Staten Island ferry. But to Ed, catering to the Legionnaires was every bit as important as reaching the Broadway sophisticates, perhaps more so.

So on the way out the door to chronicle the lives of Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, this Courvoisier-sipping Stork Club habitué gave the American Legion tourists some advice about Broadway:

“Patronize the standard clubs and restaurants; avoid the down-at-the-heels clip joints … Avoid the jackals who will offer to guide you to disreputable joints, where they will drug your drinks and swipe your bankroll and perhaps hit you on the head … it’s a great street, and we want you to enjoy it.”

The Legionnaires would be well tended to. As for Ed, he was off to Hollywood.

CHAPTER SIX
Hollywood

E
VERYTHING SEEMED BRIGHT THAT
S
ATURDAY
in September as Ed, Sylvia, and six-year-old Betty left New York to begin their new life in Hollywood. Ed was going out to cover the kingdom of glamour for the paper with the largest circulation in America; it was a plum assignment and at age thirty-five he was at the top of his game. The three of them boarded the deluxe 20th Century Line in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, carrying only the essentials for the three-day trip. Their belongings had been sent along to the house Ed had rented in Beverly Hills. The three-bedroom Spanish-style bungalow at 621 North Alta was modest by comparison to many in the elite neighborhood, but it allowed Ed proximity to the stars he would cover, not to mention the status of a Beverly Hills address.

Ed filed columns during the trip out, wiring them back to New York from cities along the way. As closely as he scoured the passengers for a scoop, he found nothing more substantial than a tidbit about Pandro Berman, a young RKO film producer in the next compartment who had just delivered the first print of Katharine Hepburn’s
Stage Door
to New York.

By the second day of the trip the inactivity was weighing on Ed, who was used to a nonstop schedule. He sat in the dining car and chatted with the chef, J.A. Day, whose trout and turkey dishes Ed raved about, but the banter didn’t stem the brooding: “
As I devoured them, I recalled the time in 1918 when I ran away to Chicago to join the Marines and worked in Thompson’s Cafeteria in the daytime and the Illinois Central freight yards at night … Pass me another trout, please, Mr. Day, I’m feeling morbid.”

As Ed’s beat on Broadway had been the nightclubs and theaters of the Main Stem, on the Coast he would haunt the movie sets and celebrity nightspots of the film colony. The studios, of course, were eager to give him access, knowing his column anecdotes would stimulate interest in upcoming pictures.

On his first few days on the job he received a whirlwind tour of the movie lots. On the 20th Century Fox lot, he met nine-year-old Shirley Temple, then in her second of three years as the country’s top box office draw, having charmed audiences
with 1935’s
The Littlest Rebel
and 1936’s
Poor Little Rich Girl.
Ed reported that the “
curly-haired youngster” took breaks from filming
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
to satisfy the California state law requiring four hours of school a day. He said hello to composer Irving Berlin having lunch in the Fox commissary while working on
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
, and on the MGM lot he watched a Christmas scene being filmed for
Navy Blue and Gold
, starring Jimmy Stewart and Lionel Barrymore.

On the RKO lot he visited the set of
Bringing Up Baby
, the Cary Grant–Katharine Hepburn comedy that featured a one hundred sixty-five pound leopard. Ed reported that one of the bit players had been on a drinking binge, so director Howard Hawks decided to play a practical joke, summoning the actor to the office, placing the sleeping leopard on a chair, then leaving the partially inebriated fellow alone with the big cat. The incident may or may not have happened (it sounds suspiciously prepackaged for visiting reporters), but it’s exactly the kind of thing RKO hoped Ed would write about; by giving him access and feeding him morsels they were generating free publicity.

By the end of his first week he had set up a Sunday golf date with Fred Astaire. The outings with Astaire at the Bel-Air Country Club would become a constant, with Ed and Fred typically joined for a foursome by other film colony members, like Douglas Fairbanks or David Niven. Ed often wrote about his matches with Astaire, as when he described the dancer’s golf technique: “ ‘
I am not envious generally,’ says Astaire, ‘but I do envy anyone who plays good golf.’ Later, on the course, he shows us how he hit those golf balls during his dance in ‘Carefree,’ and after his preparatory dance he whaled a drive two hundred fifty yards straight down the middle. Can you imagine how nutty he’d drive an opponent if before every shot he did a jig?” And, after a later outing: “
Fred Astaire and your correspondent are feeling very happy this bright February morning, incidentally … we teamed up at Bel-Air against Randy Scott and Tyrone Power, and beat them in a harrowing match that will go down in golf history (at least our golf history)….”

Also in his first week he visited the MGM lot to chat with Joan Crawford and director Frank Borzage, who stopped work on
Mannequin
for the publicity effort. Sullivan and Crawford had tangled in New York a few years earlier, when Ed tried to enlist her to appear in a charity event he was hosting and she refused. He had taken journalistic revenge, writing in his column, “
One wonders how Joan Crawford has gotten this far in show business with so little talent.” Crawford had hit back, sending an open letter to a fan magazine decrying Sullivan’s efforts as “
cheap, tawdry, and gangster journalism.” But on the set of
Mannequin
, all was apparently well between the screen goddess and the new Hollywood columnist. Crawford, according to Ed, greeted him warmly: “ ‘
The night we had dinner at 21 in New York I said you belong in Hollywood,’ remembers La Crawford, ‘And here you are.…’ ” For Ed, who had so often attacked “phonies” in his column, his report of an affectionate meeting with Crawford was a remarkable about-face.