Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan

by James Maguire

  As The New York Times described it, “Harlem Cavalcade goes in for dancing, swing, stomp, for the blare of the trumpet and the shuffle of feet, for the golden tooth widely shown, for eagerness and cheer.… On the stage of the Ritz they are hopping and bouncing, they are dancing tap and tumble, they are singing swing spirituals and popular songs.… No doubt about vaudeville’s coming back.”

  For all its kinetic high spirit, an all-black vaudeville show was not well-suited for Broadway. The only black-themed Broadway production to have done passably well had been George Gershwin’s classic Porgy and Bess in 1935, and even that was a financial loss in its first run, playing only one hundred thirty-five shows. Harlem Cavalcade saw just forty-nine performances. However, like Ed’s first Broadway show, Harlem Cavalcade enjoyed its greatest success in its post-Broadway run. Sullivan and Sissle booked it into Harlem’s Apollo Theater, where it played a long run of four shows daily at prices ranging from 20 to 55 cents. Despite the show’s short Broadway run, it displayed a key aspect of Ed’s success as a producer: the ability to work with and appreciate black performers, which benefited him greatly in the years ahead.

  While Harlem Cavalcade was showing uptown, Ed helped organize war benefits in midtown and downtown. The first, in June, by The Yiddish Theatre Division for Army and Navy Relief at the National Downtown Theater, featured skits by Menasche Skilnick and Aaron Lebedeff and a chorus of a hundred. The second, in July on the steps of the huge public library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, was a massive war bond rally. A crowd of twenty thousand gathered to see Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a cast of Broadway stars, along with a swing orchestra, with Ed as emcee. The makeshift stage was festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, a coast guard lifeboat, and a seventeen-hundred-horsepower airplane engine. Rain interrupted the event; the audience screamed and laughed as thunderclaps competed with the swing band. As the storm cleared, the crowd, drenched but undeterred, kept raising its bids and buying more stamps and bonds from the volunteers walking among the throng. “Triumphantly at the end, the master of ceremonies, Ed Sullivan, newspaper writer and columnist, announced the total of $1,405,000 in bonds and $30,000 in stamps as ‘an American record,’ ” a reporter wrote.

  As soon as the war bond rally ended, Ed began organizing an even bigger extravaganza, a benefit for Army Emergency Relief at Madison Square Garden on September 30. As chairman of the entertainment committee, he worked the phones to enlist a glittering crowd of his Hollywood and Broadway contacts: Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Barbara Stanwyck, and many others. Working double-time, he simultaneously produced and emceed a Loew’s State vaudeville show, hosting his usual hodgepodge of singers, jugglers, and comics. After opening in August, the Loew’s State show’s brisk ticket sales kept it running into September, ending just in time for Sullivan to emcee the war benefit at Madison Square Garden, which raised $203,000.

  In November, he helped with a United Jewish Appeal benefit attended by twenty thousand people, sharing master of ceremonies duties with Milton Berle and Henny Youngman. In December, he headed the entertainment committee for a Police Athletic League event seen by eighteen thousand, featuring Hollywood and Broadway actors. In January, he took part in a United Service Organizations (USO) show at the Waldorf Astoria, and in February, he led the entertainment committee for the annual Israel Orphan Asylum benefit. While working on these events—and continuing to write his daily column—he launched a winter version of his Loew’s State revue, starring the Louis Jordan swing orchestra, impressionist Neal Stanley, and harmonica player John Sebastian. As this closed he began putting together the largest single war benefit to date, for the American Red Cross at Madison Square Garden. It featured a mock striptease by a group of male movie stars; appearances by Helen Hayes, Ray Milland, and Ozzie Nelson; and a three-hundred-seventy-five-member chorus singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” To increase contributions, Sullivan named the box seats after recent war heroes and charged $5,000 apiece; front row seats were $100. The April benefit raised $249,000.

  In addition to his whirlwind of war benefits, Ed organized a constant stream of celebrity-filled shows at New York—area hospitals filled with wounded soldiers. He often recounted moments from these shows in his column, always in highly emotional terms. Typical of his anecdotes was one from a variety revue he put together at Staten Island’s Halloran Hospital, starring comedienne Beatrice Lilly, Jimmy Durante, and Peg Leg Bates. In the show, Durante reprised his wildly physical 1920s act from Club Durant in which he tore apart a piano, hurling the pieces pell-mell through the hall. After his act, standing offstage with Ed as Peg Leg Bates performed, Durante pointed out two soldiers. “Then I noticed the tears on his face,” Ed wrote. “ ‘Ed,’ he said, in that hoarse whisper, ‘take a look at those two kids out there.’ He indicated two youngsters, one a lieutenant and the other a G.I., each of whom had lost an arm … They were applauding Peg Leg Bates. With great spirit and not the slightest self-consciousness, they were clapping their hands—the lieutenant’s left against the G.I.’s right.”

  Ed’s story of the one-armed soldiers clapping was, to some, quite maudlin, though few would have carped about such a thing at the time. But his constant reports of his own exploits in aiding the war effort—myriad items like “Editorialists throughout the land are praising this column for suggesting the idea of the Carole Lombard Bond Memorial”—did earn him critical flak. Harriet Van Home, a World Telegram & Sun reporter whose trenchant wit resembled Dorothy Parker’s, wrote a parody of a Sullivan column and tacked it up on the newsroom bulletin board. Her editor liked it so much he printed it in the paper. Sullivan, livid, dashed her off a furious letter.

  The trivia of Broadway romance still played a major role in his column, but this ephemera was now heavily overweighted by war chronicles. Almost every column reported tales of soldiers on the front, war rally schedules, Ed’s comments on a battle’s progress, or the effect of government rationing: “Erasers on pencils out for the duration!” he reported, and, “The wolves no longer offer etchings … The switch: ‘Come up and see my nylon stockings.’ ” Even upcoming birth announcements, formerly reported as “a visit from Sir Stork” were now written as “The Lieut. Douglas Fairbanks Jrs. expecting a little ensign.”

  He frequently printed letters from soldiers that pointed to his own connection with the troops: “Dear Ed: From us fellows in the 340th Bombardment Group, whom you mentioned in a column in mid June … Most of the gang who read your article got so swell-headed that we’ve been going around hatless.”

  And: “Dear Ed: Over here in England, some of us got to thinking about songs that were popular when we were back home. The one we all remembered was Joe E. Lewis’ ‘Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long.’ Can you get the words of it from Joe for us, and in return we’ll send you lyrics of our marching song, ‘Dirty Gertie from Bizerte.’ If you run this letter with our names, please send us a copy so we can be G.I. hotshots.”

  The most notable of his war-related columns told the story of Arthur Ford, a critically wounded soldier from Midgeville, Georgia, in a ward at New York’s Halloran Hospital. In his telling, Ed had sort of adopted the soldier, working to cheer him as he struggled to live: “ ‘Would you like to meet Jack Benny?’ I asked him, and then he grinned and whispered: ‘Stop your kidding.’ … so I got Jack from another ward, and so strong is training that the badly wounded boy asked me if his hair was combed right … ‘Want to look my best when Mister Benny comes in,’ he explained weakly.”

  The Benny visit buoyed the soldier and Ed told him that he would soon return with more celebrity visitors. “ ‘Maybe I won’t be here,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t feel too hot, Mister. They got me right through the stomach’ … So I pretended to bawl him out, and told him he’d BETTER be there when we came back to the ward in two weeks, figuring that if he had some definite date to look forward to, it would keep him holding onto life … we shook hands on it.” Ed kept calling the hospital and “Each succeeding telephone call confirmed t
he optimistic news … Ford was holding his own.” The soldier’s condition, in fact, seemed to be improving while waiting for Ed’s visit with a celebrity. However, “After keeping that date, the worn boy died that night, very peacefully.”

  Ed’s column about Arthur Ford concluded with a statement addressed to his family:

  “In his last struggle, they should know that their son, or brother, was not a small-town Georgia boy alone in a big city of Yankees … He was with people who considered him one of their own, and when he died, in the North, of wounds received while landing on a faraway shore, we regretted it bitterly, while acknowledging that the wearied and wounded boy finally had found the one opiate to ease his pain.”

  The column displayed the two sides of Ed simultaneously. Certainly it showed him to be the egoist whom Harriet Van Home had skewered, the reporter who relentlessly detailed his own good work, with a dollop of saccharine rivaling that in any of the war movies now flooding theaters. Yet coming when it did, during some of the war’s darkest days, his homespun elegy resonated deeply with his readers. The piece was Ed at his most empathetic, a touch of the blue-collar poet, and it was read on the radio and reprinted by organizations promoting war bond drives.

  But it wasn’t enough for him. All of it—the personal appearances, the syndicated column, the long-running vaudeville shows, being a well-known New Yorker—only left him wanting more. The things he had achieved only served to point out the one thing he hadn’t achieved: fame. And nothing made that disparity more galling than comparing himself with Walter Winchell.

  Winchell had been on the radio nonstop since he and Ed were at the Graphic, and now Winchell’s show, a half hour of incantatory gossip delivered in a transcendental manic staccato, was followed ritually by nearly a quarter of all Americans. In contrast, Sullivan had never succeeded in getting a show past the six-month point. Winchell was wealthy; Sullivan lived in the Hotel Astor, a residential hotel in a seedy neighborhood. Winchell was courted by Hollywood; Sullivan had been a flop in Hollywood. Winchell was nationally known; Sullivan was a New York celebrity. They both stood on the same pedestal—newspaper columns—but Walter had reached so much higher. In short, Walter was famous, and Ed, clearly, was not.

  In Ed’s moodier moments—and he had many of them—he felt this difference acutely. At some point, there’s no record of exactly when, he began to shave a year off his age, as if he was born in 1902 rather than 1901. (He stuck to this so consistently that even the Webster’s Dictionary entry about him lists his birth date as 1902.) He felt he had not accomplished enough for his age. As his father had before him, Ed felt frustrated by his status in life. Something essential was lacking.

  Radio was the vehicle that propelled Winchell from mere notoriety to true stardom. Outside of film it was the only medium that pushed a performer, not his words on paper, into the lives of his fans. No amount of vaudeville appearances could compete with the fame-creating magic of the airwaves. Ed, in 1943, saw that now was his time to make a major effort in radio. Regardless of how busy he was, how breakneck his schedule, the time was now. With his war-related columns and his constant high-profile event hosting, his star shone its brightest, his name on more lips and marquees than ever before. It was the time to parley his notoriety into a successful radio show, and finally achieve the fame he had so long desired.

  He told his readers the big news on September 11, 1943, in a column entitled “My Secretary, Africa, Speaks.” (The “secretary” format was an imitation of a Winchell trope in which he wrote his column as if it was a note from his personal secretary.) His “secretary” that day wrote her boss an excited note: “Your CBS radio program tees off Monday night at 7:15 o’clock! Nervous?”

  Unlike Ed’s earlier radio shows, mostly straightforward productions, his new program was high concept. Entitled Ed Sullivan Entertains, it broadcast from the swank Club 21 nightclub, with the background chatter of the Manhattan nightspot lending urban cachet; as Winchell seemed to allow listeners into the mystique of celebrity lives, so Sullivan would present the ambiance of the smart set. The show more overtly copied Winchell in its signature sound: Walter opened with an urgent telegraph effect; Ed opened with the clickety-clack of a Remington typewriter.

  Winchell, of course, never had guests; they would have broken the runic trance of his manic delivery. Ed, with a budget provided by sponsor Mennen Shave Cream, booked the biggest stars available, including Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich, and Ethel Merman. Along with stage and screen stars he invited little-known personalities from various walks of life, much as he mixed the famous and the hoi polloi in his column.

  The show played as if it were capturing Ed in his nightly club hopping, with many of the guests just “dropping in” to say hello to the well-known columnist. (In reality, the show originated from a roped-off area upstairs, so no one just happened by.) A fifteen-minute program, with a commercial break and a newsflash from the Daily News “newsroom,” Ed Sullivan Entertains moved at an urban pace; no one took the microphone for very long.

  In the show’s debut evening, Ed chatted with Irving Berlin about composing “White Christmas,” which won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Song and topped the charts for eleven weeks, no doubt partially spurred by wartime family separation. For all the tune’s popularity, Berlin that night said his favorite of his own songs was “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” the theme to the movie Ed had touted during his Hollywood stint. Also chitchatting with Ed were Marine private Dana Babcock, and the wife of actor Gilbert Roland, then in the military. The guest who “happened by” was actor Melville Cooper, who recently played a supporting role in the Henry Fonda-Maureen O’Hara tearjerker Immortal Sergeant.

  Reviews were generally positive, about the show itself if not its host. One critic apparently struggled to find something positive to say about its headliner: “Although Sullivan’s voice did not have the weight and authority for this kind of work, it’s no drawback. Different type pipes are welcome.” Variety observed that the Marine seemed more comfortable at the microphone than anyone, but that the show was “a bright quarter hour, having more substance than the usual celebrity interview session in that a name emcee, Sullivan, himself no slouch as a conferencier, is at the helm.”

  Because he was so determined to succeed, Ed took the unorthodox step of scripting the entire show—including many of the guests’ responses. The resulting exchanges were highly unnatural, as when Sullivan invited new crooning sensation Frank Sinatra on a show with aging vaudevillian Bert Wheeler. Ed suggested that the veteran Wheeler give young Sinatra some singing advice. Wheeler hesitated, after which Sinatra—in surely the most unlikely request the singer ever made—eagerly implored him to provide vocal coaching. Finally, Wheeler relented:

  Wheeler: Well, Frank, it seems to me that you stand too close to the mike.

  Sinatra: Well, that’s easily corrected. How far away from the mike should I stand?

  Wheeler: If the mike’s here, I’d say you ought to stand around Fort Wayne, Indiana.

  Sinatra: Uh-huh. Any other suggestions?

  Wheeler: Get a collar that fits you. Your collar always looks as though it’s crawling up to whisper in your ear.

  Sinatra: Check—anything else?

  Wheeler: Yes, comb your hair. Just once, comb your hair, and get out of mine.

  Not surprisingly, listeners found the canned exchanges far from enchanting; three months into its run the show earned a mediocre 6.4 Hooper rating. That wasn’t all the way at the back of the pack, but it was far from the Bob Hope Program at 31.6, Walter Winchell at 22.4, or Fred Allen’s Texaco Star Theater at 19.8. The sponsor, Mennen, didn’t see enough interest to justify the expense, and Ed Sullivan Entertains was canceled in June 1944. The only consolation for its host, if any, was that its nine-month run was almost twice as long as any other Sullivan show.

  Despite the doldrums of his broadcast career, Ed’s lifestyle improved markedly in 1944. A friend of his, Jerry Brady, sat down with
him and Sylvia for an earnest conversation. Brady, as Betty recalled, “didn’t think it was appropriate for us to be living at the Astor Hotel with a young girl.” The couple agreed—the threadbare Astor was no place to raise a child—and the family moved into a suite at the Delmonico, at Park Avenue and 59th Street. Their apartment in this deluxe residential hotel bore little resemblance to their home at the Astor. Located in one of Manhattan’s most desirable neighborhoods, the luxurious three-bedroom suite on the eleventh floor came complete with maids and room service. Its kitchen facilities were almost nonexistent, but Ed and Sylvia had no desire to eat at home; as always they dined out nearly every evening.

  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.”