Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (25 page)

As Ed had haunted nightspots like Jimmy Kelly’s and Dave’s Blue Room in New York, his home away from home in Hollywood was the city’s trendiest gathering places, like the Clover Club, the Brown Derby, and the House of Murphy. Hollywood’s equivalent of Manhattan’s Stork Club was the Trocadero, owned by the publisher of the
Hollywood Reporter
, Billy Wilkerson. A troop of autograph seekers stood vigil outside this Sunset Boulevard club, besieging any screen star heading to a celebrity appearance in its oak and red-cushioned bar. The famed paparazzo Hymie Fink was often on hand to snap glossies for
Photoplay
and other fan magazines (the stars reportedly loved him because he would rip up a bad photo). Ed fed his column’s voracious hunger for celebrity gossip by table-hopping among terraces full of star-laden get-togethers at the Troc.

Ever the show organizer, Sullivan also used the Trocadero as a venue for an All-Broadway revue he produced to benefit the film actors’ relief fund; he organized this show just a month after arriving in Hollywood. Whatever other altruistic aims he had, the benefit show helped introduce and ingratiate him within the film community. (But he would not, of course, produce vaudeville shows in Hollywood; the idea of a live stage show was merely quaint in the movie colony.)

If Broadway had served up plenty of grist for the gossip mill, Hollywood offered all the more. Based on Ed’s column, the sexual merry-go-round of partner hopping was even more rapid on the Coast than on the Main Stem:

“Don’t be startled if Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck get married the same week that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard take the leap … That should be about St. Patrick’s Day, as Mrs. Gable gets her divorce March 6.”

“Greta Garbo really told off Leopold Stokowski when her name was dragged into his wife’s Reno [divorce] action. ‘It’s a disgrace—you are trying to ruin me,’ she burned over the long distance phone. Incidentally, Garbo and Boyer in
Conquest
make all other screen lovers look sophomoric … Jimmy Stewart is helping Virginia Bruce forget her stock losses … Joan Bennett’s most persistent honey is that New York attorney, but he’s married.”

“Howard Hughes making passes at Arleen Whelan, but the red-haired eyeful is true to her Richard Greene.”

Especially titillating was the love triangle between contract players
Tyrone Power, Sonja Henie, and Janet Gaynor, which Ed chronicled as if he were privy to their diaries. In one episode he informed readers, “Tyrone Power and Sonja Henie started spooning as soon as Janet Gaynor stepped on the eastbound train.” In his reporting, starring in a picture together seemed to produce a combustible form of romance: “
The Ross girl and Eddie are a real life combination … Gloria Blondell and Ronald Regan [
sic
] are an item … Rochelle Hudson, the Oklahoma oucham-agoucha, and Norman Krasna are a four-alarm blaze.…”

As in his Broadway column, his blind items allowed him to include truly salacious items without fear of a libel suit. “
A Filipino manservant will be named by a famous star as a housewrecker,” he wrote, going several steps further with, “One of the local writers, always panning movie stars for deserting their wives and taking up with younger girls, has deserted his for a sixteen year old.” If his readers wanted still more, he willingly obliged: “
Hollywood dance director who invaded that girl’s apartment and tore her face apart in a sadistic orgy was saved because the girl refused to tell the police … she feared the publicity.”

His chronicles of the personal peccadilloes of the famous frequently involved interviews of the stars themselves, as when he spoke with Joan Crawford a year after moving to Hollywood. His kind column treatment of the actress had won him extensive access. When he interviewed her in August 1938, Crawford was at the tail end of her third of five marriages.

“I asked Joan Crawford yesterday if she’d ever try Love again. She shook her head emphatically: ‘I don’t believe there’s a man in the world who has the capacity for taking love seriously for more than a few months. Girls can and do, but not men.’ I suggested that perhaps her own driving ambition for a career had overpowered Daniel Cupid. She said: ‘I was most ambitious to make a success of marriage.’ ”

After speaking with her, he wrote an extended analysis of Crawford’s troubled relationship with Franchot Tone, a serious dramatic actor on the New York stage. “Undoubtedly he must have resented (as any young husband would) the fact that his wife was a star.” Perhaps, he theorized, it was alcohol—Tone liked vodka and Crawford reportedly didn’t drink (though she later drank heavily), or perhaps it was
something as simple as “the noise he made brushing his teeth … on such trifles was [divorce capitol] Reno constructed,” Ed noted.

He concluded his analysis—doubtless devoured by his readers, for Crawford was now blazingly popular—by describing the actress as she rehearsed for 1938’s
The Shining Hour.
Despite being on his best behavior, Ed found a way to tweak the screen star. When she and co-star Tony De Marco practiced a ballroom dance on a deserted soundstage, Ed wrote that Crawford was dressed in “a black evening dress, cut low in the back [which] revealed her shapely and tanned shoulders and back … Solemnly sitting on the blue chair was a tan daschund who persisted in hopping down to the dance floor and following his mistress as she whirled and pivoted. ‘He chewed through his leash,’ explained Joan. ‘He’s Franchot’s dog.’ There was no connection between the thoughts.”

Sullivan also gave his readers behind-the-scenes peeks at the wheeling and dealing that took place just off the movie lots. “
Business perked up all over the country last week, and the movie moguls have rehired the yes-men they fired during the slump,” he reported in the summer of 1938. Adding glitter to his coverage were details about Hollywood’s astronomical pay scale, like reports that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., received $100,000 to appear in
The Rage of Paris
, and Rouben Mammoulian made $178,000 for directing
High, Wide, and Handsome
(a major flop). He noted that Universal’s
Mad About Music
was heading toward an impressive $3 million gross.

Ed frequently recounted anecdotes about films in progress, tidbits gathered by visiting the set. “
[Jack] Haley had the afternoon off from [
The
]
Wizard of Oz.
He’s playing the Tin Man, and he’s supposed to be a rusty tin man. The prop man suddenly observed that there was no rust on the tin, so Haley had to take off his costume while they rusted it.” Ed saw “
four midgets on the MGM lot for [
The
]
Wizard of Oz
 … You grow accustomed to all sorts of sights in this town, but your correspondent can be pardoned a start of surprise when he rounded a corner and found the passageway jammed with the little men.…”

No film of the late 1930s reached the mania of pre-release publicity of
Gone with the Wind.
Ed followed every twist and turn of the production’s progress, as the studio dribbled out news bites like breadcrumbs in an effort to mesmerize the public. The suspense over who would land the coveted role of tempestuous Scarlett O’Hara became as much a soap opera as the film itself, with dozens of actresses considered for the part. “
I spoke with blonde Miriam Hopkins this afternoon and asked if she had won the role of Scarlett O’Hara,” Ed wrote in September 1937, reporting an inconclusive answer. His detective work was ongoing; at the end of 1938, he confided: “
Carole Lombard still has the inside track on Scarlett O’Hara.” Finally, in January 1939, he informed his readers that the odds were “
1,000 to 1” that Vivien Leigh would win the role.

The next day he received a letter from David Selznick, the film’s producer. “
Dear Ed, in reference to your paragraph yesterday, Vivien Leigh is by no means cast as Scarlett. There are three other possibilities.” But Selznick’s note was coy. He detailed the many reasons Leigh would be superb for the role (and in fact just four days later he announced Leigh would play Scarlett) and he asked Ed for his support: “If she gets the role, I’d like to think that you’ll be in there rooting for her.” Ed would
indeed root for the picture, exhaustively covering the tidal wave of audience interest that led up to its release. He reported, for instance, that months before its release a Hollywood nightclub hosted parody script readings, and had renamed its mens’ and ladies’ rooms as Rhett and Scarlett. After premiering for capacity houses, the film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, a record that stood for sixteen years.

Ed saw virtually every film churned out by the studios. His viewing ranged from Jimmy Cagney gangster movies like
Angels with Dirty Faces
to the lighthearted musicals of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, from westerns starring taciturn strongman Gary Cooper such as
Cowboy and the Lady
to big-budget star vehicles like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant’s
Holiday.
While he wasn’t a film critic per se, he sprinkled his reactions to recent releases through his column and doubtless sold tickets to the films he praised.

For those he didn’t like, he could have fun with a pan, as in his reaction to 1938’s
Rich Man, Poor Girl:
“
Answer this question: In the boating party in this comedy, what falls overboard and is lost? Answer: The plot and the MGM stockholders.” He was contrary enough to describe Luise Rainer’s performance in
The Great Ziegfeld
, for which she won an Oscar, as “
hammy.” Sometimes he simply dismissed a picture altogether, opining that the soon-to-be-forgotten
Pacific Liner
“
hardly qualified as palatable entertainment.” If a film did poorly at the box office he dubbed it a “floperoo.”

More often, Ed employed his one-line reviews to cast kudos on his favorites, as in his yearly wrap-up prior to the 1938 Oscars. Among the dozens of film performances he praised were “
Edward G. Robinson’s college professor in
I Am the Law
,” “The charge of the Scots in
The Bucaneer
that sent chills up your spine as the thin line advanced,” and “Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, and her pa in
Pygmalion
, although they should have eliminated her cockney father’s last scene … His first scene was dynamite, when he came to Howard’s house to blackmail him for dough.”

The studios invited all the leading columnists to pre-release screenings, and Ed’s reaction to a round of screenings in May 1938 prompted some members of the film colony to question his judgment. He saw eleven films that month, soon-to-be released pictures from MGM, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Columbia. Of all of them, his favorite was
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
, a bubbly musical about the early days of jazz, in which Tyrone Power and Alice Faye hoofed and warbled their way through dozens of sunny Irving Berlin tunes. “
Reel for reel, this had more solid, down-to-earth entertainment value than any of the others, and the cavalcade of Irving Berlin hit tunes gives this picture an added nostalgic value that raises it to the classification of GREAT flicker,” he wrote.