Mr. Broadway was a two-part film, with the first part a cinematic portrayal of the columnist’s life as he made his rounds every night, and the second part a short melodrama. At the opening of the fifty-nine-minute movie, Ed introduces himself, then tours three of Manhattan’s busiest nightspots, the Hollywood, the Casino, and the Paradise. Along the way he talks with, or watches the performances of, a glittering galaxy of celebrities: Jack Benny and Mary Livingston, actor Bert Lahr, vocalist Ruth Etting, dancer Hal LeRoy, vaudevillians Benny Fields and Blossom Seeley, bandleaders Eddie Duchin and Abe Lyman, and boxers Jack Dempsey, Maxie Rosenbloom, and Primo Camera.
At about the film’s forty-five-minute mark, Ed confides that there’s a broken heart for every broken light on Broadway, reprising the theme of “unhappiness despite stardom” that ran throughout his Graphic column. At this point the film turns into an overheated melodrama about a young woman, her two suitors, and a stolen necklace. The director, Ulmer, later said he “didn’t like it at all, because Sullivan forced it into one of these moonlight-and-pretzel things. It was a nightmare, a mixture of all kinds of styles.”
On the town, 1935: As a gossip columnist with a daily column to fill, Sullivan circulated through Manhattan’s Café Society nearly every night of the week. Here he is at the Versailles Club with, from right, his wife Sylvia, Ziegfeld Follies performer Mary Alice Rice, and silent screen star Conrad Nagel. (New York Daily News)
Reviewers agreed. “There is nothing particularly new or entertaining in all this unless one happens to be the type that enjoys glimpsing the near greats at play,” sniffed The New York Times, which pronounced the story element “unintentional burlesque.” Variety found the nightclub tour interesting but judged the movie unsatisfactory overall: “As entertainment, it fails to measure up.” The low-budget production was “many leagues behind the average as to story, action, direction, photography.” As for Ed’s soap opera at the film’s end, “The meller [melodrama] sequence to which [the] film cuts in telling the story is very amateurishly carried out.… It shows how a man murders his best friend to please a girl whom he later learns is a prostie.”
Although the movie was roundly panned, Ed tried again in 1934 with Ed Sullivan’s Headliners. This twenty-minute short was directed by Milton Schwarzwald, who directed dozens of 1930s musical-comedy shorts; the film’s music was supervised by Sylvia Fine, a composer who later wrote some sharp material for singer-actor Danny Kaye, her husband. The short, again, was a collection of appearances by Broadway’s leading lights, with Sullivan as tour guide. But despite its celebrity sightings and directorial and musical talent, Headliners, like Mr. Broadway, disappeared without a trace. Because both films were made without the help of a studio, it’s likely they received limited distribution. Whatever minimal success they might have had, they failed in their primary goal: to launch Ed in a film career. Nevertheless, he wasn’t giving up.
After being hired by the Daily News in 1932 to write three columns a week, by early 1933 the paper promoted Sullivan to full status, with five Broadway columns weekly. He had made it on the Main Stem. As if to prove he was a force to be reckoned with, he began the year by picking a fight with no less a star than Eddie Cantor.
Having grown up in Yiddish theater, Cantor sang and joked his way to vaudeville’s pinnacle, topping it off by winning a role in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolics revue in 1916. His physical comedy fueled a passel of wildly popular silent films through the 1920s. Soon after the advent of talkies in 1927, Samuel Goldwyn hired him to croon, mug, and dance in a string of lavishly produced musical comedies. By 1933 Cantor was one the country’s most admired celebrities.
Sullivan, in a column segment called “Cantor Goes to Dogs,” claimed that the performer had stolen the comic dog routine of vaudevillian Bert Lahr. Worse, he compared Cantor to Milton Berle, an up-and-coming comedian well-known for lifting material from other comics. “I can’t give Cantor a great deal of credit in lifting Lahr’s act,” Ed wrote. “If Broadway has been intolerant of Milton Berle, a youngster, it should be doubly of Cantor for establishing a nasty precedent.”
Cantor, enraged, phoned Sullivan and cursed at him vehemently. In a follow-up column, Ed made sport of the conflict, recounting Cantor’s anger as a source of amusement. He described the performer’s verbal tongue lashing with typographical discretion:
1:04 A.M.—“Hello, Ed, this is Eddie Cantor. I just read that story and I want to tell you something.… I never had anything to do with those *!*”!* dogs!…”
1:05 A.M. (Sullivan) “Now wait a min-”
1:05¼ A.M. Cantor—“No, let me finish.… In the first place I’m not doing the dog act, Jessel’s doing it.… I don’t need those *!*”! dogs in my act.…”
It turned out that Sullivan’s claims of plagiarism were inaccurate. But Ed, characteristically, admitted no mistake. Instead he obfuscated, conceding that another producer had indeed been responsible, yet noting that the theatrical theft occurred in Cantor’s revue. At the skirmish’s end he threw one last column jab at the popular performer: “I suggest Cantor urge Jessel to drop Lahr’s dog act. That would do more to discourage theatrical banditti than any preaching in this space.”
The point Ed was making, really, was that he was now big enough to tweak a Broadway heavyweight. Just nineteen months before he had been a sports columnist, but now he was scolding one of the Main Stem’s top names, a star with an adoring national following. He had arrived.
Furthermore, his minor tussle with Cantor was Ed at his most natural: in conflict. As in the athletic fields of Port Chester, he always dove in headfirst, never backing down and never fearing the resultant split lip. For him conflict was as comfortable as breathing. And, it was good for the column. In tweaking Cantor, Ed was doing what Broadway columnists did. They engaged in arguments; they fought, bickered, and had spats with whomever was at hand, regardless of the merits of the case. It was a reliable way to keep their column a topic of conversation, and to ensure people turned to it shortly after glancing at the front page.
Toward the end of 1934, Ed combined his taste for journalistic fisticuffs with his populist instincts. As Christmas approached he used his column to write an open letter to Barbara Hutton, heiress to the massive Wool worth fortune. In the popular imagination Hutton was a cipher for easy wealth and the high life. At age four her mother had committed suicide, leading the tabloids to dub Hutton the “Poor Little Rich Girl.” In 1933, at age twenty-one, she inherited the $50 million Woolworth estate. She was then married to her first of seven husbands, Russian-born Prince Mdivani, commonly thought of as a society playboy.
Ed wrote Hutton a holiday request. “How about establishing an annual Princess Barbara Christmas Dinner for some of the poor of New York City?” he asked, suggesting she donate one thousand Christmas baskets to charity.
The item was characteristic of Ed’s writing, which played to his Depression-worn readers while reporting on the glittering set. But Ed didn’t stop with his request. He went on to give Hutton, and especially her husband, a journalistic thrashing:
“The unreality of your existence must be boring, Princess. You have a husband who has little or no relation to everyday life … I have heard grim and resolute men say some nasty things about your husband … I have heard underworld chieftains speak about him and his apparently callous disregard for human suffering, and I would not want them to speak that way about me.”
The article’s arm-twisting request for money was decried by, among others, a writer in The New Yorker magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section, who opined, “We think the time has come for someone to do something about the Broadway columnists who write open letters to people for money.” Hutton, seeking defense from the full-bore fusillade—she called it blackmail—sought the help of Walter Winchell. Winchell eagerly took up battle against his News counterpart, firing a return volley in his Daily Mirror column:
“We endorse anybody who helps the poor, but that’s beside the argument … The open-letter sende
r took pains to point out that her husband wasn’t popular with the gang chiefs ‘who would like to meet him on some waterfront.’ A remark, incidentally that some of the ‘boys’ resented … we subscribe to the sentiment of many who considered the article in the ugliest taste … and we pledge them all, that every time anybody uses (or abuses) a newspaper in that manner, we’ll fight it and protest against it at the top of our lungs and typewriter … That means YOU!”
But Sullivan’s strong-arm tactic prevailed. One week before Christmas a $5,000 check arrived from Hutton. And Ed, in his manner, thanked her. He wrote an open letter to New York’s children, describing the many letters he had received from needy parents:
“There’s one letter from one of your mothers, and it is typical … She says that the three of you had chopped meat for Thanksgiving, and the older boy said: ‘Mamma, why aren’t you and papa eating?’ … She told you that she and your dad had eaten earlier and that they weren’t hungry, but listen, you three little kids … Your mother and father were fibbing … When you grow up, I want you to be pretty swell to them. [These parents don’t ask for much,] just enough to stuff small stomachs on Christmas Day … it seems to me that in the richest city in the world, that is a reasonable request. A very lovely lady, who doesn’t want her name used, thinks that it is a reasonable request, too … she’s the kind of lady you read about in story books … She sent me a check for $5,000.”
Although Ed had achieved his goal, the incident marked a new season in his relationship with Walter Winchell. They would now be archrivals.
It hadn’t always been so. There was a period after Sullivan took over Winchell’s former spot at the Graphic that it looked as if the two, while professional rivals, might have something of a friendship. Walter had called Ed about the CBS radio opening, and Ed had sent Walter a series of affectionate notes. “Your Monday column still fills me with respectful amazement,” he wrote in one missive to Walter. “It’s gorgeous great. Where you get it, I don’t know but as I pay better dough, I believe your operatives, with the possible exception of Dorothy Parker, will see the error of their ways and get on the Sullivan bandwagon.”
After Winchell got into a contretemps at the Casino Park Hotel, in which stage producer Earl Carroll told him he wasn’t “fit to be with decent people” because of his brand of gossip, and Winchell had stood his ground—the incident became the talk of Broadway—Ed dashed him off a lighthearted memo: “If you let me know who’s fighting at the Casino next week I would like to make my reservations in advance.” Even after Ed moved to the Daily News, establishing himself in a secure post, he sent Walter a note combining flattery with affectionate chiding. A recent Winchell radio show, Sullivan opined in his letter, hadn’t lived up to the quality of Walter’s column; however, Ed confided, “you are the only one for whom I hold a sincere personal and professional respect.” When Walter’s nine-year-old daughter Gloria died on Christmas Eve of 1932, Ed and Sylvia sent a condolence note. But by 1934 their relationship had changed. Ed was no longer a freshman columnist, and any need to curry favor with an upperclassman was gone. They would henceforth only snarl at one another.
An element in Ed’s column that was as constant as conflict was his appreciation of female pulchritude. An attractive woman was “an eyeful,” and he used the phrase frequently. The avenues of Manhattan were chock-full of such creatures, by Sullivan’s account. In a typical column, he wrote about spending the evening at a Greenwich Village nightclub owned by Barney Gallant. “The other night, sitting in the half-gloom of the place … I asked him the one question he has always avoided … I asked him who, in his opinion, was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen.”
To further investigate New York beauty, he assembled an “All-American, All-Gal Eleven,” a mock all-star football team of female performers:
“Picking the first team, my All-American, All-Gal Eleven, was no part of a cinch … I spent a small fortune taking out each of the candidates, feeding ’em, and noting their reactions.
“In the course of my selections, I had to drop at least twenty girls for one reason or another. I had Peggy Joyce lined up for quarterback, but when she insisted on magnums of champagne for the training table I had to let her go. Claire Carter was ideal for tackle and she would have added blonde charm to the forward wall, but she wouldn’t leave Jay C. Flippen for practice.”
Not all of the women were picked because they were an eyeful. Gracie Allen, who played a ditzy counterpart to George Burns’ straight man, was chosen as quarterback for her ability to confuse the defense. Aunt Jemima, a heavyset vaudeville singer later memorialized as the advertising icon for a pancake syrup, was selected for her heft.
A few weeks later, Ed assembled a corresponding men’s Broadway all-star team, but he gave it short shrift by comparison, and apparently felt it unnecessary to take each man to dinner.
In the fall of 1933, Ed’s high profile as a Daily News columnist led to a series of invitations to produce and host charity shows. In November he organized and emceed an all-black show for the Urban League benefit at Manhattan’s Town Hall, presenting tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, singing quartet the Southernaires, and the Nicholas Brothers, a two-brother vaudeville tap dance team. The following evening he emceed a revue he produced for the Jewish Philanthropic Societies, held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, featuring a raft of radio and stage stars.
At the end of November he walked onstage for an event that would mark the beginning of a life-long career: his first variety show.
The manager of Manhattan’s Paramount Theatre, Boris Morros, invited him to produce and host the show. The phone call from Morros became a favorite anecdote of Ed’s, though it appears to be an exaggeration. Morros called Sullivan to offer him $1,000 for a one-week run; for this fee, Ed would choose and pay the performers, taking the remaining money for himself. Ed—overjoyed by the lucrative offer—said, “You must be crazy.” In Sullivan’s telling, Morros thought the columnist was negotiating and so quickly raised the offer to $1,500. They went back and forth like this, and by the end of the day Morros agreed to pay him $3,750, according to Sullivan. It’s highly unlikely that a theater manager in the depth of the Depression would almost quadruple his offer based on a simple misunderstanding. But the anecdote portrays Ed as highly sought after, and he loved to repeat it. Whatever the actual negotiation process, he readily agreed.
Broadway tough guy: although he would later present himself as the staid guardian of the American living room, Sullivan came of age in the rough-and-tumble of the 1920s New York newspaper business. This 1954 photo reveals the streetwise side of the showman. (Globe Photos)
To organize the show, he relied on a format with a rich tradition: vaudeville. By the early 1930s classic vaudeville was on its last legs. The Depression meant there were fewer people with an extra dime, and movies and radio were offering overwhelming competition. After the first talkie in 1927 the allure of moving pictures had proven irresistible, and radio brought theater into listeners’ homes for free. As Ed had written in 1932, “No longer does an actor boast of playing ten weeks at the Palace … Now they’re interested only in how many stations they’re on.” Vaudeville had grown stale and dated as many veteran acts offered the same routine year after year. Yet the American taste for the new and different had continued apace, the Depression notwithstanding. Forward-looking social commentators in the early 1930s were writing nostalgic eulogies for vaudeville.
Although vaudeville circuits were closing, the form’s guiding principles would live on; its roots ran too deep to disappear. Borne of the English music hall, Yiddish theater, and the traveling minstrel show, vaudeville had come into its own in America in the 1880s and had flourished for decades. Several generations of American performers grew up on its stage, including Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Al Jolson, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Will Rogers, Ethel Waters, Jimmy Cagney, Bessie Smith, Bums and Allen, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the Marx Brothers.
/> Ethnic distinctions were very pronounced in vaudeville. Irish, Italian, and Jewish performers played their routines according to the broad stereotypes associated with these groups. Present in almost all shows was a blackface act, typically a white performer whose face was blackened with burned cork, affecting a dialect and playing the role of a happy-go-lucky shiftless black man for laughs. The crude caricature of blackface routines was a facet of vaudeville that appeared most dated by the 1930s.
A vaudeville show moved at a relentless tempo, with a blink-and-you-miss-it succession of one-legged tap dancers, comics, ventriloquists, blackface song and dance acts, legitimate musical theater, jugglers, acrobats, and one-liner artists, all pushed along by a master of ceremonies who kept things moving—briskly, at all times. If you didn’t like a routine there was no time to get bored; you’d soon see a new one.
If people enjoyed watching it, an act usually found its way to vaudeville. The Mayo Brothers did a two-man dance-acrobatics routine on a small tabletop. One popular performer was a skilled regurgitator who swallowed live fish and brought them back up at will. Jack Spoons lifted chairs with his teeth while he played the spoons, and Joe Frisco smoked a cigar while doing soft-shoe. Lady Alice balanced trained rats on both arms, with a rodent on top of her head that was trained to blow into a kazoo. Fuzzy Night and his Little Piano featured a man who danced with his piano.
Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan Page 12
