Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  Ever the show organizer, Sullivan also used the Trocadero as a venue for an All-Broadway revue he produced to benefit the film actors’ relief fund; he organized this show just a month after arriving in Hollywood. Whatever other altruistic aims he had, the benefit show helped introduce and ingratiate him within the film community. (But he would not, of course, produce vaudeville shows in Hollywood; the idea of a live stage show was merely quaint in the movie colony.)

  If Broadway had served up plenty of grist for the gossip mill, Hollywood offered all the more. Based on Ed’s column, the sexual merry-go-round of partner hopping was even more rapid on the Coast than on the Main Stem:

  “Don’t be startled if Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck get married the same week that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard take the leap … That should be about St. Patrick’s Day, as Mrs. Gable gets her divorce March 6.”

  “Greta Garbo really told off Leopold Stokowski when her name was dragged into his wife’s Reno [divorce] action. ‘It’s a disgrace—you are trying to ruin me,’ she burned over the long distance phone. Incidentally, Garbo and Boyer in Conquest make all other screen lovers look sophomoric … Jimmy Stewart is helping Virginia Bruce forget her stock losses … Joan Bennett’s most persistent honey is that New York attorney, but he’s married.”

  “Howard Hughes making passes at Arleen Whelan, but the red-haired eyeful is true to her Richard Greene.”

  Especially titillating was the love triangle between contract players Tyrone Power, Sonja Henie, and Janet Gaynor, which Ed chronicled as if he were privy to their diaries. In one episode he informed readers, “Tyrone Power and Sonja Henie started spooning as soon as Janet Gaynor stepped on the eastbound train.” In his reporting, starring in a picture together seemed to produce a combustible form of romance: “The Ross girl and Eddie are a real life combination … Gloria Blondell and Ronald Regan [sic] are an item … Rochelle Hudson, the Oklahoma oucham-agoucha, and Norman Krasna are a four-alarm blaze.…”

  As in his Broadway column, his blind items allowed him to include truly salacious items without fear of a libel suit. “A Filipino manservant will be named by a famous star as a housewrecker,” he wrote, going several steps further with, “One of the local writers, always panning movie stars for deserting their wives and taking up with younger girls, has deserted his for a sixteen year old.” If his readers wanted still more, he willingly obliged: “Hollywood dance director who invaded that girl’s apartment and tore her face apart in a sadistic orgy was saved because the girl refused to tell the police … she feared the publicity.”

  His chronicles of the personal peccadilloes of the famous frequently involved interviews of the stars themselves, as when he spoke with Joan Crawford a year after moving to Hollywood. His kind column treatment of the actress had won him extensive access. When he interviewed her in August 1938, Crawford was at the tail end of her third of five marriages.

  “I asked Joan Crawford yesterday if she’d ever try Love again. She shook her head emphatically: ‘I don’t believe there’s a man in the world who has the capacity for taking love seriously for more than a few months. Girls can and do, but not men.’ I suggested that perhaps her own driving ambition for a career had overpowered Daniel Cupid. She said: ‘I was most ambitious to make a success of marriage.’ ”

  After speaking with her, he wrote an extended analysis of Crawford’s troubled relationship with Franchot Tone, a serious dramatic actor on the New York stage. “Undoubtedly he must have resented (as any young husband would) the fact that his wife was a star.” Perhaps, he theorized, it was alcohol—Tone liked vodka and Crawford reportedly didn’t drink (though she later drank heavily), or perhaps it was something as simple as “the noise he made brushing his teeth … on such trifles was [divorce capitol] Reno constructed,” Ed noted.

  He concluded his analysis—doubtless devoured by his readers, for Crawford was now blazingly popular—by describing the actress as she rehearsed for 1938’s The Shining Hour. Despite being on his best behavior, Ed found a way to tweak the screen star. When she and co-star Tony De Marco practiced a ballroom dance on a deserted soundstage, Ed wrote that Crawford was dressed in “a black evening dress, cut low in the back [which] revealed her shapely and tanned shoulders and back … Solemnly sitting on the blue chair was a tan daschund who persisted in hopping down to the dance floor and following his mistress as she whirled and pivoted. ‘He chewed through his leash,’ explained Joan. ‘He’s Franchot’s dog.’ There was no connection between the thoughts.”

  Sullivan also gave his readers behind-the-scenes peeks at the wheeling and dealing that took place just off the movie lots. “Business perked up all over the country last week, and the movie moguls have rehired the yes-men they fired during the slump,” he reported in the summer of 1938. Adding glitter to his coverage were details about Hollywood’s astronomical pay scale, like reports that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., received $100,000 to appear in The Rage of Paris, and Rouben Mammoulian made $178,000 for directing High, Wide, and Handsome (a major flop). He noted that Universal’s Mad About Music was heading toward an impressive $3 million gross.

  Ed frequently recounted anecdotes about films in progress, tidbits gathered by visiting the set. “[Jack] Haley had the afternoon off from [The] Wizard of Oz. He’s playing the Tin Man, and he’s supposed to be a rusty tin man. The prop man suddenly observed that there was no rust on the tin, so Haley had to take off his costume while they rusted it.” Ed saw “four midgets on the MGM lot for [The] Wizard of Oz … You grow accustomed to all sorts of sights in this town, but your correspondent can be pardoned a start of surprise when he rounded a corner and found the passageway jammed with the little men.…”

  No film of the late 1930s reached the mania of pre-release publicity of Gone with the Wind. Ed followed every twist and turn of the production’s progress, as the studio dribbled out news bites like breadcrumbs in an effort to mesmerize the public. The suspense over who would land the coveted role of tempestuous Scarlett O’Hara became as much a soap opera as the film itself, with dozens of actresses considered for the part. “I spoke with blonde Miriam Hopkins this afternoon and asked if she had won the role of Scarlett O’Hara,” Ed wrote in September 1937, reporting an inconclusive answer. His detective work was ongoing; at the end of 1938, he confided: “Carole Lombard still has the inside track on Scarlett O’Hara.” Finally, in January 1939, he informed his readers that the odds were “1,000 to 1” that Vivien Leigh would win the role.

  The next day he received a letter from David Selznick, the film’s producer. “Dear Ed, in reference to your paragraph yesterday, Vivien Leigh is by no means cast as Scarlett. There are three other possibilities.” But Selznick’s note was coy. He detailed the many reasons Leigh would be superb for the role (and in fact just four days later he announced Leigh would play Scarlett) and he asked Ed for his support: “If she gets the role, I’d like to think that you’ll be in there rooting for her.” Ed would indeed root for the picture, exhaustively covering the tidal wave of audience interest that led up to its release. He reported, for instance, that months before its release a Hollywood nightclub hosted parody script readings, and had renamed its mens’ and ladies’ rooms as Rhett and Scarlett. After premiering for capacity houses, the film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, a record that stood for sixteen years.

  Ed saw virtually every film churned out by the studios. His viewing ranged from Jimmy Cagney gangster movies like Angels with Dirty Faces to the lighthearted musicals of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, from westerns starring taciturn strongman Gary Cooper such as Cowboy and the Lady to big-budget star vehicles like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant’s Holiday. While he wasn’t a film critic per se, he sprinkled his reactions to recent releases through his column and doubtless sold tickets to the films he praised.

  For those he didn’t like, he could have fun with a pan, as in his reaction to 1938’s Rich Man, Poor Girl: “Answer this question: In the boating party in this comedy, what falls overboard and is
lost? Answer: The plot and the MGM stockholders.” He was contrary enough to describe Luise Rainer’s performance in The Great Ziegfeld, for which she won an Oscar, as “hammy.” Sometimes he simply dismissed a picture altogether, opining that the soon-to-be-forgotten Pacific Liner “hardly qualified as palatable entertainment.” If a film did poorly at the box office he dubbed it a “floperoo.”

  More often, Ed employed his one-line reviews to cast kudos on his favorites, as in his yearly wrap-up prior to the 1938 Oscars. Among the dozens of film performances he praised were “Edward G. Robinson’s college professor in I Am the Law,” “The charge of the Scots in The Bucaneer that sent chills up your spine as the thin line advanced,” and “Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, and her pa in Pygmalion, although they should have eliminated her cockney father’s last scene … His first scene was dynamite, when he came to Howard’s house to blackmail him for dough.”

  The studios invited all the leading columnists to pre-release screenings, and Ed’s reaction to a round of screenings in May 1938 prompted some members of the film colony to question his judgment. He saw eleven films that month, soon-to-be released pictures from MGM, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Columbia. Of all of them, his favorite was Alexander’s Ragtime Band, a bubbly musical about the early days of jazz, in which Tyrone Power and Alice Faye hoofed and warbled their way through dozens of sunny Irving Berlin tunes. “Reel for reel, this had more solid, down-to-earth entertainment value than any of the others, and the cavalcade of Irving Berlin hit tunes gives this picture an added nostalgic value that raises it to the classification of GREAT flicker,” he wrote.

  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 proj
ect. 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.