Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (31 page)

Moving to the Delmonico was a happy day for Betty. Even getting to class at Mary-mount, an all-girls Catholic school on the Upper East Side, was easier. “
I couldn’t believe I was going to live on Park Avenue and didn’t have to walk blocks across Broadway to get the bus to go to school.” At the Astor, Betty had eaten many of her dinners with a paid companion, a woman named Paula, often going to a restaurant across the street from the hotel called Child’s. After moving to the Delmonico she still ate most of her meals with Paula, but on certain evenings the young teenager accompanied her parents to dinner. They made the rounds of tony restaurants like the Colony or Pavillion. On Wednesdays, the family typically went to Toots Shor’s, one of the city’s best-known celebrity haunts. Their dinners were lengthy, with Ed and Sylvia talking about events of the day and Ed chatting with passersby.

As a father, Ed’s expressions of affection came in small, restrained doses. An occasional brief hug was “
overdoing it,” as Betty remembered. This same sense of being removed, of distance, defined his relationship with most of the people around him. “He was sort of a loner,” his daughter said. Betty saw her father as single-mindedly determined to succeed, and in this drive leaving behind some of life’s small rituals of friendship and family recreation. Her view was echoed by Ed’s grandson, Rob Precht, who spent considerable time with his grandfather, and who described Ed as “
an intimate stranger.”

Certainly he inspired great affection on a personal level. Bill Gallo was a young cartoonist with the
Daily News
in the 1940s who knew Sullivan well, and sometimes went to lunch with him. “He was one of my heroes,” recalled Gallo. “He was the newspaperman that all the kids wanted to be.” Being out every night, socializing with the famous, having a huge readership—it all looked good to Gallo. “He was the personification of a star. He carried that aura about him like it was built in,” he remembered. “He was a regular guy, there was nothing uppity about him, no pomposity. And he didn’t just try to be a nice guy—he
was
a nice guy.” Gallo’s comments concurred with those of many who knew Sullivan personally. Despite the stiff personality he projected on television years later, on a one-on-one basis he had great social ease, even charm, and spoke to anyone as an equal, whether the person was a cab driver or a major film producer.

Yet the social ease extended only so far. The wall remained. Ed’s inner reserve, the sense of apartness right underneath his man-about-town affability, stayed firmly in place. For all his limitless list of friends and contacts, his life was essentially a solo voyage.

Although the war’s end brought a halt to the steady stream of bond rallies Ed organized, his career as an emcee and event producer stayed just as busy. He had become the first person almost any organization called, producing and hosting events for an unlikely quilt of entities, from B’nai B’rith to the League of Catholic Charities. Down in Miami for his yearly press junket, he hosted a hospital dedication show with comedian Jack Carter, the Ames Brothers, and singer Theresa Brewer. He traveled to Philadelphia and put together an event for the Poor Richard Society with vocalist Patti Page, comic Victor Borge, and ventriloquist Senor Wences. He took singer Vic Damone and vaudevillian Sophie Tucker up to the Catskills to emcee a birthday bash for Jenny Grossinger, owner of the famed Borsht Belt resort. He traveled to Boston to put on a show for the Maris Nuns, and drove to his hometown of Port Chester to emcee for the Marching and Chowder Society.

In March 1946, the White House Correspondents Association invited Ed to be master of ceremonies at an event honoring President Harry Truman. After the eight hundred guests tried the new wheat-saving dark bread, professional and amateur entertainers performed comedy skits and sang a humorously rewritten version of the 1920s Eubie Blake tune “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” The song, featured in Sullivan’s
Harlem Cavalcade
a few years earlier, now sported new lyrics: “
I go swimming with Harry / That’s one thing Harry enjoys / ’Cause there’s no women / To spoil the swimmin’ / He just invites the boys.”

The war and its immediate aftermath created a minor conundrum for the Broadway columnists. For them, controversy was like oxygen; they could live on less, but without an occasional inhale they withered and died. With a world war raging, however, the petty internecine squabbles they had indulged in throughout the 1930s were kept to a minimum. Skirmishing with each other would have been unseemly with real battles being fought overseas. Nonetheless, Ed had permitted himself a small jab at Walter Winchell in 1942—though only a token dig given the enmity between the two. Winchell had begged the military to allow him to enlist, so the government, wanting to placate him but concerned for his safety, sent him to Brazil for a month on a fact-finding mission. The columnist, bubbling with excitement at the chance to wear a uniform—and, of course, to trumpet his wartime achievement when he returned—tried to keep it quiet as he left. But Ed popped his bubble, writing, “
The town is chuckling at Winchell’s ‘secret mission …’ ”

Ed had ferreted out only a few minor targets to attack in the war years. Notably included were those “phonies” who pretended to have war medals they didn’t earn, and those elected officials in the same league:
“Tip to Washington, D.C.: Nothing has hurt New Deal prestige in N.Y. so much as the sight of capital czars, married, flaunting their girlfriends in Broadway nightclubs and supper clubs one weekend after another … can’t that be rationed?”

But these subjects didn’t create the splash a Broadway columnist craved. In June 1946, Ed found a fresh source of controversy, one that had headlines blaring. The
New York City police, he wrote, were involved in “
the most cynical grafting spree in New York history.” Reporting what he called the widespread practice of “Broadway grabbing,” he claimed that “detectives’ rake-offs range from $1,700-per-book-maker-phone per month in a Manhattan division to $3,000 per month in the Bronx,” and that the city was suffering from a “complete breakdown in police control.”

Certainly Ed knew the world of the Broadway bookie. On occasion in his column he guffawed about the widespread practice of illegal gambling, including tidbits like, “
When 666 came up on Friday, policy bankers went to the cleaners for fresh dough.” And his friend Joe Moore, an Olympic speed skater when they met in the 1920s, turned to bookmaking after his athletic career ended. (Moore, because of his friendship with Sullivan, was then hired by a press agent named Ed Weiner, who had close ties to Walter Winchell. Between the two of them, Weiner and Moore had access to the city’s leading gossip columnists.)

As soon as Ed’s column hit newsstands, city government experienced convulsions. That same day, Mayor William O’Dwyer ordered an investigation, prompting a fierce round of bureaucratic infighting. The mayor wanted the investigation headed by the Commissioner of Investigation; the police commissioner, however, “
pleaded with the Mayor” to allow the police department to investigate itself first. After hurried discussion the mayor announced he had reversed himself: the police department would investigate itself without the Commissioner. Reporters asked O’Dwyer if Sullivan would be summoned, and the mayor said no. “
I always respect the confidential sources of newspapermen,” he said.

After the initial splash, Ed’s allegations slid quietly off the front page. In July, the police staged a crackdown on bookies, arresting five hundred sixty-two in one month. Following this purported clean up, Mayor O’Dwyer announced in late August that the police department’s investigation of itself had produced no evidence of graft. With the hundreds of bookies arrested and the police department apparently clean, the matter was closed. But while Ed’s muckraking had only token effect on the city’s police, it did point to a new direction in his column. The war had taught him that
Little Old New York
could address weightier issues than Broadway romances and celebrity effluvia. In the late 1940s, his daily column grazed across most any topic that suited him. Although at its heart it remained a show business gossip column, it now traveled far afield, touching upon—always briefly—foreign affairs, domestic politics, sports, books, odd news items, or whatever interested Ed that day.

After he penned an extended homage to the loving nature of dogs—“
Dogs have the capacity for grief, and they have the capacity for love, with no string attached”—he received an appreciative letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. “
I couldn’t refrain from writing this personal note to tell you how much pleasure I gained from reading your column,” Hoover confided. “Your understanding affection for what some ill-informed individuals call ‘dumb’ animals touched my heart.” The two men communicated regularly through the years. Sullivan used his column to toss kudos to the FBI director, which Hoover relished. After Ed included a column tidbit about his fifty-third birthday, Hoover sent him an affectionate thank-you: “
It does warm one’s heart to be remembered by friends on his birthday.… Sincerely, Edgar.”

Yet the column, as far and wide as Ed stretched it, was always just the foundation from which he tried to reach higher, to grab some greater notoriety. In the spring
of 1946, he once again heard the siren song he couldn’t resist. That his first four attempts to launch a radio show, spread over the last fourteen years, had been short-lived failures—the longest lasting just nine months—did not tempt him to concede defeat. So, as if bound by some kind of seasonal migration, he was back knocking at radio’s door.

On April 2, he debuted
Ed Sullivan’s Pipeline
on New York’s WJZ. Broadcasting every Tuesday at 9
P.M.
, the show offered a quarter hour of Ed solo, intoning the daily scuttlebutt from New York, Washington, and Hollywood. Lending an urban dash to his delivery was the sound effect of rapid-tempo typing, punctuated by a typewriter bell—this gossip was hot off a newsman’s Underwood, the percolating sound effects suggested.

The pages of the show’s scripts reveal that Ed was attempting to add extra urgency to his performance. For those who had panned his radio persona as too straight and stiff, he had an answer. To jazz up his vocal rhythm he included plenty of dashes in his script, and he handwrote in extra exclamation points:

“New York—Vindication has finally come to the bobby socks!! Sinatra is more than just The Voice!! Distinguished American sculptor Jo Davidson tells me that the bone structure and shape of Sinatra’s long, lean face is amazingly similar to—hold your breath—Abraham Lincoln.”

The show was a broadcast version of his column, but what worked in print didn’t work over the air. Ed’s attempt to match the hyped-up hypnosis of Walter Winchell proved ill-fated. On September 30, six months after its debut,
Ed Sullivan’s Pipeline
saw its last broadcast. Inarguably, his talents were not suited to the airwaves.

In his Loew’s State variety show in September 1946, Sullivan booked an exceptionally pretty twenty-two-year-old singer-comedienne named Jane Kean. For Ed, the irrepressible young performer—blonde, funny, and lively—was irresistible. Over the weeks they worked together he formed a romantic attraction for her, though it appears to have been largely unrequited.

Jane and her older sister Betty performed as a duo in New York’s nightclubs, singing and telling jokes; the bubbly good humor of their sister act made them highly successful. Betty had performed a comic tap-dance routine in Ed’s 1941 Broadway production,
Crazy with the Heat.
In later years, Jane appeared on Broadway and landed a raft of TV roles, most notably on the 1960s version of
The Honeymooners
, starring Jackie Gleason. She played Art Carney’s wife Trixie, replacing original actress Joyce Randolph.

Kean remembered Sullivan as having real allure. “
He was very attractive to women—and he was interested in them,” she recalled. But Kean’s initial attraction to Ed soon faded. “I did not have a big love affair with him—that was a man in pursuit.” By her account, Ed sent her love letters, off and on, over the next year or so, including some he mailed from his yearly mid-winter stint in Florida. He penned her endearments like “I miss you,” among others. “Yes, he was very fond of me,” she remembered, with a chuckle.