Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (26 page)

His opinion that this straight-laced ice cream sundae of a musical was the best of the eleven caused guffaws among the film colony intelligentsia. He listed only a few of the other contenders, including
Toy Wife
, starring Luise Rainer;
Kidnapped
, starring Arleen Whelan; and
Holiday
(which he also liked), so the full list is not known. But when
Ragtime
’s premiere that summer proved a box office bonanza, Ed confronted his critics. “
When this reporter, after the local premiere of
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
, declared that it was the greatest entertainment ever produced in Hollywood, you should have heard the derisive hoots at the Beverly Brown Derby,” he wrote in August. “The picture, of course, is cracking records all over the country.
One master mind from MGM … declared that the picture would end the Zanuck legend by costing his studio a fortune … Uh-Huh!”

He had been vindicated by the box office response—his taste, as it so often would, coincided with that of the mass audience. But he couldn’t let the issue go. Having been mocked, he would bring up the movie again and again, reminding his readers of the accuracy of his opinion. (Indeed, over time the film would become a minor classic.) That September Ed was back in New York for a month to emcee the annual Harvest Moon dance competition, and after he spoke with Berlin he quoted the songwriter at length:

“Listen Ed, don’t think that Zanuck and Joe Schenck and I will ever forget that you were the first writer to say
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
would be a smash hit. After the picture started clicking, the rest of them climbed on the bandwagon, but you said so the night of the preview, and you didn’t hedge on the prediction. Hollywood thought it was a flop; you were right and I’m as pleased for your sake as for mine.”

A few nights later he was at Billy Rose’s Casa Manana nightclub to see a live performance from the
Ragtime
musical, and reported that, “
the house comes down” in response to the music. Back in Hollywood in January, he overviewed the year’s best film moments, including “
Alice Faye and John Carradine in the taxicab scene in
Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
”

Ed hadn’t moved out to Hollywood merely to report on movies—he wanted to make them. He had come to transform himself from a reporter into a player, perhaps even a movie star, and he started work as soon as he arrived.

He crafted the story line for a romantic comedy called
There Goes My Heart
, and by March 1938, six months after moving to the Coast, he had found financial backing and signed contracts with the film’s lead actors. He partnered with Hal Roach, a powerful independent producer who had written and directed films since 1915. Roach’s successes included the
Our Gang
series of humorous shorts and the highly popular Laurel and Hardy comedies; toward the end of his life he would receive an honorary Oscar for his countless film productions. (And on Roach’s ninety-fifth birthday an Ed Sullivan impersonator was hired to attend.) Films with Roach’s backing got wide national release. In 1938 Hal Roach Studios switched its distributor from MGM to United Artists;
There Goes My Heart
would be his first film to be released by UA.

Roach hired bankable stars, Frederic March and Virginia Bruce, to play the romantic leads. The rakishly handsome March received a Best Actor nomination for 1930’s
The Royal Family of Broadway
, won Best Actor for 1931’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for 1937’s
A Star Is Born.
Bruce, whose striking good looks earned her a spot as an original “Goldwyn Girl,” played a supporting role in the 1936 box office smash
The Great Ziegfeld.
Filmgoers knew her as the vampish society blond in the Jimmy Cagney vehicle
Winner Take All
; after a volcanic kiss with Cagney she had seductively inquired: “You could stand a cold drink after that one, couldn’t you?” The director of Sullivan’s film was Norman McLeod, who had directed the 1931 Marx Brothers romp
Monkey Business
,
among other successes. Roach hired two veteran screenwriters, Eddie Moran and Jack Jevne, to punch up Ed’s story line.

When
There Goes My Heart
opened on October 13, 1938, it enjoyed modest box office success. Unfortunately for Ed, its greatest weakness was its story line. The film’s plot was widely criticized for being too close to that of
It Happened One Night
, the 1934 Frank Capra classic starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert (a rare winner of all five major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay). Some called Ed’s story the work of a plagiarist, and certainly his tale was close to that of the 1934 hit.

Both plots center on an unlikely pairing between a worldly reporter and a rich heiress, thrown together by unlikely circumstances. In the original, after the requisite bickering and misadventures, they realize they’re hopelessly in love, though she needs a nudge from her father to complete their union. In Ed’s story, the young lovers end up shipwrecked on a small island, and continue skirmishing until a wise minister appears out of nowhere to convince them they’re destined for one another. Recycling plots with minor variations is, of course, a standard Hollywood practice; if that were outlawed, studios would quickly cease production. (Dorothy Parker once observed that the only “ism” that Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.) But Ed had taken a well-loved storyline and made it maudlin and semipious, even by the standards of romantic comedy.

That didn’t bother the critic from his own paper, the
Daily News’
Kate Cameron, who described the film as “
a hilarious and dexterous game of tossing a fast quip and pulling a smart gag,” opining that “the picture achieves its purpose beautifully.” But
The New York Times’
Frank Nugent, voicing an opinion echoed elsewhere, took a different view. Dismissing it in a review titled “The Original Sin of Hollywood Is Unoriginality,” he described
There Goes My Heart
as “
virtually a play-by-play repetition of
It Happened One Night.
” He observed archly that the movie “seems to be based on an Ed Sullivan yarn—and not, as we supposed, on the
[It Happened One Night
author] Samuel Adams Hopkins story.” Worse, the shameless remake was hardly funny, he wrote.

It’s likely that Capra’s
It Happened One Night
had resonated deeply with Ed; its story is not dissimilar to his own life. When he met Sylvia he was something of a worldly newspaperman, and Sylvia was the heiress of a well-to-do real estate entrepreneur. Their unlikely pairing, after extended squabbling, became a love story. But regardless of how honestly Ed may have come to the story for
There Goes My Heart
, its apparent unabashed borrowing prompted plenty of chuckling in the film colony.

The critical barbs didn’t stop Sullivan from diving right back into another film project. In fact, his second movie embodied his hopes for still greater acclaim: he included a major on-screen role for himself. On May 11, 1939, just seven months after the debut of
There Goes My Heart
, Universal released
Big Town Czar
, based on a story by Ed. The tagline of the gangster melodrama screamed from its movie poster: “DICTATOR … Of the Sinister Empire Behind the Big City’s Bright Lights!”

The cast and crew, a step down from Hal Roach’s, were characteristic of the production staffs churning out B movies. Director Arthur Lubin had supervised a handful of undistinguished crime dramas for Universal in the 1930s, and scriptwriter
Edmund Hartmann had just finished the Lucille Ball drama-comedy
Beauty for the Asking
(Ball was a little-known contract player at the time). Lead actor Barton MacLane, with his bulky torso and doughy face, had been typecast as a tough guy gangster or cop; his greatest successes wouldn’t come until the 1940s, when he appeared in the Humphrey Bogart classics
The Maltese Falcon
and
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The love interest, Eve Arden, was also still on her way up in 1939. Her first career break had been two years before, when she landed a minor role in the drama
Stage Door
, starring Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers. Her wisecracking portrayal worked so well in rehearsal that her part was rewritten to make her a friend of the lead. She brought this same tough-girl quality to
Big Town Czar.

If
There Goes My Heart
’s story had come from Ed’s life,
Big Town Czar
seemed to mine even deeper ground from his personal history. Ambitious gangster Phil Daley knocks off his chieftain to take control of the mob, only to realize he lacks what he really wants: the respect of his working-class Irish parents and his sweetheart; Ed was estranged from his father and his mother had died. Phil, as Ed had in real life, has a brother named Danny. Phil takes a paternal approach toward Danny, wanting to protect him, but to no avail. As the real-life Danny had died in infancy, so the film Danny dies, in this case in a hail of dum-dums after he fixes a prizefight for Phil. When a rival gangster loses big money on the fight, he sends his henchmen to kill Phil, but they kill Danny instead. Phil feels guilt that the death meant for him befell Danny; thoughts of the infant death of real-life Danny would stay with Ed throughout his life. In the end, Phil faces the electric chair, and on his way to the death chamber realizes crime doesn’t pay. Ed plays himself in the picture, the knowing columnist as a one-man Greek Chorus, noting the unchanging nature of moral certitude as he pens his memoirs at the end.

One other element of the film relates closely to Ed’s life. Echoing the theme of racial equality he had espoused in his sports columns, the film featured gang warfare by both white and black gangsters, with both outfits equally competent—a highly unusual twist in a 1930s movie.

A few months before the film’s release, one of Ed’s rivals back in New York, a columnist for the
New York Journal-American
, imagined the consequences of bad reviews with a barely disguised schadenfreude. Sullivan, the writer noted, will play himself in the upcoming release. “
Now watch all the film writers he panned get even. He wrote the opera himself, and it better be good or he’ll be a two-time loser.”

And so he was, given the blistering reviews and tepid box office. The notices for
Big Town Czar
were even more damning than those for Ed’s previous picture. “
Story has many weak moments and slow spots,” observed
Variety
, calling the film suitable for “lower-bracketed action houses where patrons like their melodrama spread rather thick.”
The New York Times’
Frank Nugent called it “
a bustling little melodrama, all puffed up with its own unimportance.… It was written by Ed Sullivan in his best water-under-the-bridge style, which, as you know, is extremely first-personal, quite sentimental, and edifyingly moralistic.” As for the performances, most of them were passable in Nugent’s view. However, “The only word for Ed Sullivan’s portrayal of Ed Sullivan is ‘unconvincing.’ ” It was a humiliating blow for someone thinking of branching into acting—a critic had pronounced him unable to play even himself. He was not, apparently, destined for a career in front of the camera.