Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  Sullivan’s stage shows were uniformly well reviewed; in a small mountain of vaudeville notices there wasn’t a single sour note. Typical of the reviews was the New York Journal-American’s description of the show as “swift, funny … once again he has assembled an ingratiating lot of performers who trot out their talents in an admirable fashion.” Audiences agreed. Theater owners knew that Sullivan could be counted on to sell tickets, and between 1934 and 1937 his revues grew progressively more successful at the box office. (The city’s tepid emergence from the Depression surely helped this.)

  In 1936, fellow Broadway columnist Louis Sobol reported, “Some weeks ago, columnist Ed Sullivan established a new record at Loew’s State when something like $41,000 rolled into the box office.” (Sobol, however, tweaked Sullivan by pointing out that his record was broken the following week by a George Burns—Gracie Allen show at Loew’s.) The following year, the Journal-American noted, “Ed Sullivan’s Dawn Patrol revue, at Loew’s State Theatre has broken all attendance records and will be retained for a consecutive week’s engagement.… This marks the second time in the vaudeville history of the State that a show had been held for a consecutive week’s engagement.”

  As for Ed as emcee, reports were mixed. Most positively, one Dawn Patrol reviewer wrote, “In his third appearance here, Mr. Sullivan is much more at ease than he was in his debut, doing a commendable job as master of ceremonies.” Modest praise, to be sure, and contradicted by other sources. Based on eyewitness accounts of his vaudeville shows, Sullivan’s persona was much like it was in his television show, that is, stiff. As canny and skillful as he was as a producer, he was never a natural onstage. A Variety reviewer noted this after an early Sullivan vaudeville production, when Ed still shared emcee duties with Harry Rose: “Harry Rose with his aggressive style of emceeing is working hard this week and looks responsible for keeping the show together.… His sustained clicking makes it easier for the rest of the troupe, especially for Sullivan, who found Rose’s help quite handy in the microphone moments.…”

  It was a central irony of his life: despite his countless hours onstage, as much as he hungered to be in front of an audience, he was never comfortable in its eye. Part of it was simple stage fright. As numerous staffers from his television show recalled, he suffered from stage nerves. This avid socializer, one of Broadway’s leading glad-handers, lost his natural charm when facing a full theater.

  Adding still more gravity to Sullivan’s stage presence may have been his feelings about what he called “phonies”—those people, as he wrote in his column, who put on a false front, who pretended. He despised the fakers. Although he himself could be disingenuous, the act of adopting a suave show business persona was not in his nature. Perhaps he was too rigid, or perhaps putting on a happy face was simply distasteful to him. Either way, Ed, unequivocally, had to be Ed.

  Another person, realizing he was essentially uneasy onstage, might have found an alternative. Sullivan could have been the show’s producer without acting as emcee, as in his first few shows at Loew’s State. He had the option of continuing to hire Harry Rose or another performer as master of ceremonies. Certainly the kings of vaudeville, Benjamin Keith and Edward Albee, weren’t known as onstage personalities. But something powerful drew Ed to a live audience, regardless of what small agonies this required of him. He needed to be in the spotlight. So when the Brooklyn RKO Albee, the Capitol, or Loew’s State ran ads, it was always: “In Person—Ed Sullivan—and his All New Dawn Patrol Revue.”

  In 1936 Sullivan began emceeing the Harvest Moon Ball, the annual whirling-blur finale to the city’s amateur dance competition. Sponsored by the Daily News, and promoted by the paper heavily, Harvest Moon had an almost religious following. When the first unofficial contest was held in Central Park Mall in 1927, 75,000 people showed up to watch or compete, forcing city officials to cancel later contests for fear of public safety. The News relaunched the annual event at Madison Square Garden in 1935, and it grew bigger every year through the 1930s and 1940s. The Harvest Moon Ball became the country’s top amateur dance contest.

  Thousands of energetic dancers competed in preliminary contests at nightclubs like the Savoy and Roseland to earn a spot in the finals, where top swing orchestras vamped as couples swirled and swung their best Lindy hop, collegiate shag, fox-trot, tango, or rhumba. The News promoted the contest as a chance at fame. “Booking agents will grab up any dance teams whose routines have the stuff upon which stardom is built,” tempted the paper. In the second year that Sullivan emceed Harvest Moon, two hundred thousand people bought tickets in the first fourteen days of the competition.

  While Ed didn’t produce these yearly events, hosting them greatly boosted his profile. He parlayed their popularity to his advantage by booking the winners in his vaudeville shows. And because Harvest Moon was a dazzling visual spectacle, it was filmed for newsreels, a fact that later would profoundly influence his career.

  Between writing five columns a week and producing a steady stream of vaudeville shows, Ed ran a continuous circuit between several nightclubs, that week’s vaudeville house, the Daily News office, and whatever charity event he was hosting. Meeting the incessant demands of a daily column meant trawling nightspots until near dawn and sifting through piles of tips from press agents and publicity flacks. The lineup for upcoming stage shows had to be selected and booked, and the shows themselves often played all day long. He worked the phone constantly. The pace of it all meant he sometimes banged out his column while backstage at his variety revue. One evening, theater promoter A.C. Blumenthal brought author H.G. Wells, famous for War of the Worlds, to Loew’s State to introduce him to Sullivan. Ed, typing away backstage, was so distracted that when he heard the name, he hardly looked up from his typewriter. Instead, he absented-mindedly said, “Oh, just like the English writer,” at which point Blumenthal had to tell Ed it was the English writer.

  To help with his errands, Ed hired Carmine Santullo, a Bronx-born shoe-shine boy, a shy, skinny teenager with big dark eyes. He became Ed’s tireless factotum. Carmine worshipped Ed, always calling him Mr. Sullivan, and he was happy to do virtually anything for his employer: deliver Ed’s column to the Daily News office, filter and respond to mail, and help with the unending stream of phone calls. He could shrug off Ed’s sudden bursts of temper with hardly a care and anticipate his boss’s answer to any question. Carmine would remain with Ed throughout his life, becoming more of a family member than an employee. In the late 1960s, Carmine arranged for a passel of state governors to declare that February 9 would be Ed Sullivan Day.

  Hollywood. By the mid 1930s the word had a whisper all its own, a come-hither suggestion of glamour and money and sex and, most of all, boundless fame. In the 1920s, Broadway and Hollywood had been close rivals in the public imagination. Broadway’s glorious Ziegfeld Follies and many touring stage shows were held in a regard similar to that of the silent pictures of Valentino. But by the 1930s the fame machine was shifting inexorably westward. Since Jolson’s first talkie in 1927, show business had never been the same.

  The Broadway columnists took notice, including ever more Hollywood tidbits in their coverage. The columnists’ affection for Hollywood was far from unrequited. The studios understood the value of romancing New York’s entertainment columnists. Some columnists were even hired to appear or star in movies. If the picture made a profit—more likely with the columnist’s clout—it was an added benefit. But at the very least the studios considered the money well spent on the care and feeding of publicity sources.

  Walter Winchell authored the story for 1933’s Broadway Thru a Keyhole, and it had propelled his already considerable profile still higher. And the film’s studio, 20th Century Pictures (later 20th Century Fox) was requesting more from Winchell. Sidney Skolsky, Ed’s gossip colleague at the Daily News, wrote the screenplay to the 1935 Hollywood production Daring Young Man.

  Paramount in 1935 invited Ed to make a cameo appearance in Paramount Headliner: Broadway Highlights
No. 2. The first Broadway Highlights film, made earlier in the year, had featured appearances by stars like Jack Benny, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker, emceed by Paramount studio head Adolph Zukor. Like its predecessor, Highlights No. 2 was a showcase for brief celebrity appearances, spotlighting personalities like comedian Milton Berle, crooner Rudy Vallee, screen star Norma Talmadge (whom Ed called “my favorite actress”), and boxer Benny Leonard. The short film was shown before full-length features as a studio promotion, and so was given wide release. But Ed’s minor role in this star vehicle was dwarfed by the success enjoyed by Winchell and Skolsky—and he was aware of that.

  In April 1936, Fox Movietone News hired Ed to narrate a biweekly newsreel, to be shown in nine thousand theaters across the country. This was the same series of newsreels narrated by famed newsman Lowell Thomas in his march-tempo gravitas cadence. The acclaim that Ed had wanted, the national exposure, now seemed so close—but still wasn’t there. Ed’s Paramount cameo and his newsreel narration only increased his appetite for more.

  By the mid 1930s, Ed began to turn his eyes westward, drawn by the allure of Hollywood. Growing up, he had dreamed of New York, and he had succeeded there, as a Broadway columnist and stage show producer. But now a far more compelling siren song called, trilling from a place that offered Stardust far surpassing that found in New York. He was well known in the city, arguably famous as a local celebrity, but he hungered for something bigger. He hobnobbed day and night with the truly famous, luminaries who were admired from coast to coast, and that’s what he wanted for himself.

  He devised a plan. He had already accomplished one unlikely metamorphosis, from sports reporter to Broadway potentate. Now, in 1937, he dreamed of a far grander change: moving to Hollywood, which would catapult his star to where he had always wanted it to be. He could be a Hollywood columnist, attaching his fortunes to the ever-growing notoriety of the film capital. But the most compelling possibility was doing what Winchell and Skolsky had done. If those two typewriter-bangers could make it onto the silver screen, then surely Ed could also. He hadn’t had any success with his own attempt at film, 1933’s Mr. Broadway, but if he were a Hollywood columnist, romanced by the studios as the Coast columnists were, he could parley his status into a film career. He could be a screenwriter, maybe try his hand at acting—with the nascent film industry growing so quickly, there was no telling where it might lead.

  Many had a similar plan. With the pace at which the film industry churned out pictures, its appetite for scripts was insatiable. In the summer of 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, enticed by visions of scriptwriting riches. At around this time or in the next few years a small crowd made a similar pilgrimage, including Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, and Nathaniel West. They were undeterred by studio head Jack Warner’s description of screenwriters as “schmucks with Underwoods”—or perhaps that made the task seem all the easier.

  One person stood in Ed’s way. Sidney Skolsky already covered the Daily News’ Hollywood beat and showed no signs of wanting to give it up. The paper had sent Skolsky to the Coast in 1933 to write a gossip column from inside the film colony. He had stretched his one-year assignment into four; Skolsky enjoyed the beat, with its lavish perks and access to what he thought of as the real action. Although Skolsky’s Hollywood column was printed side by side with Ed’s Broadway column—or maybe because of it—Skolsky sang the praises of the Coast over the Stem constantly. The very week that Ed’s Broadway column debuted in July 1932, Skolsky archly noted, “Notice how all the Broadway columns these days are dotted with Hollywood items. That’s because there’s nothing doing on Main Street.”

  By 1936, Ed was writing of the “decline and fall of the legitimate Broadway theater” in the face of Hollywood’s advance. The problem, he explained, lay in the twelve cans of film delivered to New York’s Ziegfeld Theater. Where once the great Ziegfeld had produced his Show Boat gala live, now it was delivered to this same theater in twelve cans of film. “This is the new show business … twelve cans of film … Three hundred copies are made in the Coast laboratories … Each copy will play perhaps thirty theatres.…” Live theater, Ed reported, was “romantic, stimulating, exciting … but the new way is more profitable.” (And it was no secret that the Depression had dimmed Broadway’s lights considerably, and that the public’s hunger for Hollywood fantasy was only increased by the downturn.) Ed’s column in 1936 became a kind of de facto Hollywood-Broadway column, as he liberally sprinkled tidbits about film personalities into his Broadway coverage.

  Skolsky, in what must have been agonizingly attractive to Ed, kept dropping bon bons about the joys of the Hollywood columnist. “When Gary Cooper and Madeline Carroll were announced for the cast of the flicker The General Died at Dawn, Paramount didn’t know that John O’Hara, Clifford Odets, and Sidney Skolsky would also be in the cast,” he wrote in 1936. His reporting suggested that with enough proximity, even a newshound was invited into the hallowed set, as when he went to the movies with child film star Shirley Temple. “When I arrived at the theatre Shirley was already there, seated. She didn’t say, ‘You’re late, you kept me waiting.’ She merely said, ‘Good evening, Sidney,’ and shook hands with me.”

  Ed began to lobby Daily News editor Frank Hause to replace Skolsky. Exactly when he began his extended effort is unknown, but by 1937 the News management relented. They agreed to recall Skolsky to write the Broadway column and send Sullivan to Hollywood. But there was a problem: Skolsky didn’t like the idea and refused to come back to New York. “I pleaded with him by wire and phone to return but no dice,” Hause later wrote. “I guess the competition on the Broadway beat was too much for the Little Mouse, and he liked the easier tempo and climate of Hollywood.”

  The News kept pushing Skolsky to return. And he kept pushing back. Finally, he chose to resign rather than return to New York. He aired his feelings publicly in Variety. “Broadway columns are as passé as Broadway,” he wrote. His column’s tagline had been “Don’t get me wrong—I love Hollywood,” but in Variety he altered it: “They got me wrong—I love Hollywood.” He took a job as the Hollywood columnist for the Daily Mirror. With Skolsky out of the way, the News assigned Ed to the Hollywood beat for one year, as they had Skolsky.

  As Sullivan sat down to write his farewell Broadway column in September, he certainly had reason to feel fondly toward his New York position. The perks had been numerous. That summer the columnist had sailed to Europe aboard the SS Normandie with a group of show business stars that included Jack Benny and his wife (and comedy partner) Mary Livingston. Cole Porter was onboard to serenade the guests; one night he played the Gershwin tune “Lady Be Good” as a tribute to the composer, who had died a week earlier. Ed had plenty of free time in between filling columns with breathless tidbits like “the Cole Porters are Marlene Dietrich’s favorite shipboard companions.” While crossing the Atlantic he watched movies (appropriately, the 1937 Preston Sturges comedy Easy Living was shown). He also practiced his dance steps in preparation for hosting that fall’s Harvest Moon dance competition, and polished his Ping-Pong skills. “Your athletic reporter worked out on the desk tennis tables and thought himself pretty good,” he wrote. “Then a boy of twelve came along … he gave me a terrible shellacking, and I slunk away to the library.”

  Ed’s good-bye column on September 10 was a sentimental recap of his New York years, from his beginnings at the Evening Mail in 1921 through his joy at landing his Daily News position in 1932. He veritably shoveled praise onto the News—not surprising, considering the paper had just granted him the assignment he so coveted.

  Ed had begun to say farewell to Broadway in his column the day before, letting his readers know that the good-bye letters and telegrams were pouring in (and reminding them of his popularity): “You get a funny feeling reading them … After you’ve written for a long time, the readers accept you as one of their own immediate family, and the letters from them are penned in that style.” A mother in New Jersey warned him
to be careful of drafts on the trains, and another wrote to say she lit a candle for him at her church. “There is a letter from Sing Sing, saying that the boys up there wish me luck … ‘We’d all like to be going with you, Sully.’ ”

  In that same column was one of Ed’s most unusual qualities as a Broadway scribe. He devoted half his column—and the entire column the day before—to giving tourist advice to the Legionnaires, then in New York for a convention. He wrote as if he were taking these American Legion members under his wing, providing detailed advice for their New York visit. To the average Broadway columnist, a Winchell or a Skolsky, American Legion members were visiting rubes, hometown squares who were best ignored. These columnists—the very embodiment of the urbane—would merely shudder as they hurried past a nametag-wearing American Legion member from Hoboken or Poughkeepsie.

  The columnist and his wife preparing to sail to Europe aboard the SS Normandie, in the summer of 1937, as part of a group that included Cole Porter and Jack Benny. (New York Daily News)

  But not Ed. He was the kind of Broadway columnist who gave the Legionnaires a step-by-step rundown on how to enjoy the city. That contradiction, if it was one, defined him. Here he was, going off to Hollywood in search of something bigger and better, in effect saying that New York was no longer the center of the world. He dreamed of something grander, some larger fame or status he might acquire. He was a Broadway columnist who had outgrown Broadway. On the face of it that put him in a very different world than the Legionnaires who were looking forward to a 10-cent ride on the Staten Island ferry. But to Ed, catering to the Legionnaires was every bit as important as reaching the Broadway sophisticates, perhaps more so.