Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (38 page)

In addition to the vote of confidence from Ford, Ed received validation from an unusual source in this period. Sometime in late 1949 or early 1950, he took a rare trip home to Port Chester. All of his siblings had remained there; his mother had died in 1929 and his father was now eighty-nine. His older sister Helen, who worked as a factory foreman, had become the family conduit to Ed. When someone needed something, usually financial help, the request was funneled through Helen to Ed. His salary as a
Daily News
columnist and his success as a vaudeville producer made him the affluent sibling.

He may have made the trip home because he knew his father was dying, for Peter was seriously ill and would die in April 1950. This was likely the last time Ed saw his father, from whom he had remained estranged. Even at age eighty-nine, Peter had never once met Ed’s daughter Betty, who was now nineteen years old.

Television had made it into the Sullivan home in Port Chester, and Ed’s father, with great mental confusion, mentioned that he had seen Ed’s show. “
Ed, you were in that little box there!” he exclaimed. “How did you get in there?” He could not, even after considerable explanation, understand how his son’s image had appeared in his living room.

By the late 1940s, Ed’s
Daily News
column traveled far afield from its roots as a gossip chronicle. Nearly in his twentieth year of writing five columns a week, he turned
Little Old New York
into a stream of consciousness compendium of his opinions and observations. Anything could now be commented upon, from the low price of whale steaks in Vancouver—good for housewives, he observed—to the fact that marijuana was sold openly on Seventh Avenue. He explained the code used by tugboats sailing off Manhattan (“
one long blast is ‘right your rudder’ ”) and covered the glory days of Yankee demigod Joe DiMaggio. As always, his blind items took a darker turn; he included rumor of an unnamed producer who paid $5,000 to hush up a morals charge. Ed even dispensed advice to the underworld: “
Tip to mobs: don’t try to heist the shipment on the West Side docks. You’ve got to get hurt.” Broadway and Hollywood remained leading players, as he reported that
A Streetcar Named Desire
was one of the few plays with a busy box office, and he whispered updates like “
the Humphrey Bogart stork checks in January” and “
Before she filed [for divorce], Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan had a friendly hour’s confab at Warner’s.”

He gave ample coverage to the funeral for Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the storied black tap dancer who died in November 1949. Robinson and Sullivan had had a long friendship, and the dancer was one of the first performers Ed booked on his television show. The funeral for Robinson, a larger-than-life folk hero in New York City before earning Hollywood fame, was attended by scores of public figures, including Mayor O’Dwyer, Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, and Ethel Merman. According to
The New York Times
, approximately five hundred thousand people lined the streets as the flag-draped hearse drove slowly from the church service in Harlem to Times Square to the cemetery in Brooklyn. Robinson had made a small fortune as a performer, yet he died destitute. The pastor who eulogized him explained that he had but two vices, “
ice cream and gambling.” Ed, along with composer Noble Sissle (his partner in the Broadway show
Harlem Cavalcade
), took charge of the funeral arrangements, partially funding it and soliciting contributions for the rest. Adam Clayton Powell, New York’s pioneering black Congressman, thanked Sullivan in his eulogy to Robinson, and Ed also delivered a eulogy at the service.

Aside from show business events like Robinson’s funeral, or Broadway–Hollywood news, Ed’s column now most often spotlighted politics. At times he covered the intersection of politics and show business, as when he reported in the summer of 1948 that Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante donated large sums to the new state of Israel, a favorite cause of Ed’s. But more often now he put aside show business to write about politics itself. He analyzed the 1948 Dewey–Truman presidential race at length, clearly leaning toward the Republican Dewey, a shift from when the young columnist was a cheerleader for Franklin Roosevelt. Truman, he observed, appeared “
grayer and plumper,” and seemed “
pretty grim over the coldblooded disinterest in his own party.” Indeed, Truman faced an all-but-certain loss in the fall election. Which would be good for the country, Ed opined. “
Can you imagine the cleanup job J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI will do if former DA Tom Dewey gets in? Truman group has handcuffed Hoover, while the henchmen loaded the boodle.”

The political development that most concerned Ed was the rise of the Soviet Union. He dissected the internal power struggles of the U.S.S.R. down to the minutiae: “
The Russian conflict is between Stalin’s group … versus forty-nine-year-old Andrei Zhdanov and Zhukov’s Red army officer clique, arch foes of U.S. and England … They tell me that even in the Russian embassies in this country, the current bitter communist rift has split apart Russians, with each spying on the other.”
As the Cold War settled in, he warned constantly of the threat Russia posed to the United States. He supported those who called for increased defensive measures, as he wrote in July 1948: “
GOP leaders, burning at the call for a special session of Congress, first will ask President Truman why the Air Force hasn’t a single assembled atom bomb? It would be two weeks for one to be assembled, if Russia pulled a Pearl Harbor in Europe.”

Ed reported what he saw as the growing influence of communist subversives in the United States. “
Commies in this area bolder now that all books of twelve Commie leaders destroyed,” he wrote shortly after his show debuted. A few weeks later, “
Commies in this area have labored overtime, through the years, to bag [boxer] Joe Louis. At one big political rally in Harlem, the Commie speaker suddenly pointed to Louis and screamed: ‘Even the heavyweight champion of the world isn’t permitted to play golf at white clubs. Isn’t that so, Joe?’ … Louis rose to his feet and said, ‘No, you’re wrong again. I play golf with Bob Hope, Hal LeRoy, Lou Clayton, Ed Sullivan, Bing Crosby, and I play at the top clubs in the country’ … Only time on record that golf flogged communism … Have you noticed the sudden silence of local Commies? Not a pink peep out of them for weeks.”

In late 1949, the anticommunist fervor Ed supported came into conflict with his role as a television producer. He booked Paul Draper, a dancer known as “The Aristocrat of Tap” for his ability to adapt his flashing feet to any genre, from samba to classical. Scheduled for January 1950, the Draper booking created controversy almost as soon as it was announced.

Mrs. Hester McCullough, a Connecticut housewife and anticommunist crusader, had declared that Draper and harmonica player Larry Adler were communist sympathizers. It appears her charge was based on nothing more substantial than Draper and Adler’s high-profile support of third-party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, the 1948 nominee of the Progressive Party. (Wallace, a former vice president under Roosevelt, was a constant target of red-baiters in the late 1940s due to his left-of-center beliefs.) Prior to a 1949 performance by Draper and Adler in Greenwich, Connecticut, McCullough had launched a letter-writing campaign, aided by Hearst columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote as “Cholly Knickerbocker.” With Knickerbocker’s support, she demanded the concert be canceled, asserting that performers with communist sympathies were traitors. Draper and Adler denied her charges, issuing a statement picked up by the Associated Press that they were not and never had been communist sympathizers, and that their allegiance stood solely with the United States. The two performers filed suit against McCullough and played their concert as planned, which went well.

That Sullivan decided to book Draper after this much controversy was a clear risk. It’s probable that he knew Draper had lost nightclub bookings after his support of Wallace’s campaign—which Ed himself had vehemently opposed. Yet Ed knew Draper and had worked with him, booking him on numerous occasions for his local variety shows, and Draper and Adler played many USO shows during the war. Ed knew the dancer well enough to know that McCullough’s claims were groundless. And Draper was a perfect performer for the modestly funded
Toast of the Town
: his tap brilliance played well on television, yet he wasn’t well-known enough to command a large paycheck. At any rate, it appeared that Draper had successfully stood up to McCullough, having filed suit against her and performed as planned. Furthermore,
any action by a Hearst columnist (a group that included Winchell) was likely to produce an equal and opposite reaction by Ed.

Soon after Draper’s
Toast of the Town
appearance was announced, a full assault began. Cholly Knickerbocker, now aided by conservative Hearst columnists Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky, demanded that Ford Motor Company cancel the appearance. Ford, its ad agency Kenyon & Eckhardt, and Ed circled the wagons, holding tense meetings about how to handle the issue. One sticky problem: Draper had filed suit against McCullough; if Ford canceled Draper’s television appearance, would they themselves be faced with legal action?

The decision was made to go ahead with the Draper booking, but Ed dressed it up beyond reproach. He directed the dancer to perform to “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and, right after Draper’s performance, the camera cut to Benson Ford in the audience, no more wholesome representative of mainstream America, clapping with gusto. But the other side was not to be appeased. Hearst’s
New York Journal-American
decried the show with banner headlines, and the Hearst columnists led a letter-writing campaign that sent nearly thirteen hundred angry letters to Ford. Some were duplicates, with large numbers coming from the same post office, but the meaning was clear: Ford had stepped into a public relations quagmire. Worried meetings were again convened between Ford, its agency, and Sullivan, after which Ed wrote a letter, supposedly to the head of Kenyon & Eckhardt, but in reality to be distributed as a press release:

“
I am deeply distressed to find out that some people were distressed by the appearance … of a performer whose political beliefs are a matter of controversy … You know how bitterly opposed I am to communism and all it stands for … If anybody has taken offense, it is the last thing I wanted or anticipated, and I am sorry … Tell everybody to tune in again next Sunday night, and if I can get a plug in, it will be a great show—better than ever.”

It was a strategic retreat—after the battle was done—but Ed had, in essence, learned his lesson. Booking a performer with even an imagined shadow over his credentials was profoundly hazardous. Never again would he do so. The show and its success were primary; nothing would ever challenge that as his guiding precept. While he had been a bellicose Cold Warrior before the Draper incident, he now redoubled his efforts. Soon after the controversial booking, he let it be known that he checked each show’s lineup with Theodore Kirkpatrick, a former FBI agent and now coeditor of
Counterattack
, which billed itself as “a newsletter of facts on communism.” If Sullivan thought a musician or comic might be considered a communist sympathizer, he invited Kirkpatrick, a self-appointed expert on such matters, to meet with the performer in Ed’s suite at the Delmonico. Ed made it clear that
Toast of the Town
would be above even the suggestion of subversive taint. “
Kirkpatrick has sat in my living room on several occasions and listened attentively to performers eager to secure a certification of loyalty,” he wrote in June 1950. “On some occasions, after interviewing them, he has given them the green light; on other occasions, he has told them ‘Veterans’ organizations will insist on further proof.’ ”

Those evenings at the Delmonico reflected a larger national mood. In February 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a little known junior senator from Wisconsin, made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he alleged there were communists in the U.S. State Department. He had a list, he said, of two hundred five State Department
personnel who were members of the Communist Party; furthermore, he claimed they continued to actively shape U.S. foreign policy. That the list was never actually produced was beside the point. McCarthy had placed a seed in fertile soil. It was a season of fear, and, given world events, not without reason. Communists had taken control of mainland China a year earlier, and the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb six months earlier. Just one month before McCarthy’s speech, Alger Hiss, a low-ranking State Department employee, was convicted of perjury in a case involving his alleged membership in the Communist Party. Hiss continued to maintain his innocence, but that, too, was immaterial. His highly publicized congressional hearings—the first televised hearings, in 1948—suggested that something subversive and pervasive lurked just beyond sight.

Amid it all, in June 1950, Ed announced in his column that a “bombshell” was on its way, a publication to be distributed to all broadcast networks, sponsors, and ad agencies. Kirkpatrick had told Sullivan, and Ed, by giving advance warning in his column, let readers know he was on the inside track. The two-hundred-fifteen-page book lived up to its billing. Published by
Counterattack
and entitled
Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television
, the publication warned of a Soviet effort to infiltrate American culture using radio and television. It listed one-hundred fifty-one individuals with “citations” for communist sympathies. The list, shockingly, contained some of the leading lights of stage and screen: Zero Mostel, a comic actor whom Ed worked with on numerous benefits for United Jewish Relief; actor John Garfield, a Sullivan houseguest in Hollywood; playwright Arthur Miller, whose
Death of a Salesman
was a 1949 Broadway hit; composer Aaron Copland, whose paean to homespun Americana,
Appalachian Spring
, debuted in 1944; and Hollywood star Edward G. Robinson, whose florid portrayals of mobsters had inspired Ed’s own
Big Town Czar.
Adding credence to the hysteria trumpeted by
Red Channels
, within a week of its release communist forces from North Korea invaded South Korea.