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IMPRESARIO
The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan
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Excerpt from:
Chapter Four: Broadway
(In 1931, Sullivan took a job as the gossip columnist for the New York Graphic, a notorious Manhattan scandal sheet. This chapter describes his debut on the job.)
Ed’s column, Ed Sullivan Sees Broadway, debuted on Monday, July 1, 1931. For someone who professed to not want the job, he jumped in headfirst.
He began by taking a broad swipe at his colleagues in the gossip trade, a strategy guaranteed to maximize his profile – they were duty bound to swipe back.
“So many have asked me my sensations in turning from sports to Broadway that I will answer them in this introductory column. I feel, frankly, that I have entered a field of writing which offers scant competition, a field of writing which ranks so low that it is difficult to distinguish any one columnist from his road companies…I charge the Broadway columnists with defaming the street.”
He proclaimed that his column would not indulge Broadway’s undesirable elements, as his competitors’ did.
“The uppermost stratum of Broadway, as revealed in the writings of its contemporary historians, the columnists, is peopled with mobsters, cheap little racketeers and a vast army of phonies…As I sat at the gala opening of Hollywood Gardens on Friday night, I marveled to myself…I marveled at the phonies who were there for no better reason than they had a mad desire to be seen…They will betray themselves by rushing up to Mayor Jimmy Walker and shaking his hand as an endless stream of pests did on Friday night…they will gape at racketeers and mobsters who are tough killers and can prove it by the list of victims they have shot – always through the back…I pledge you this huge army of phonies will receive no comfort in this space. To get into this particular column will be a badge of merit and a citation.”
Breaking from the practice of other Main Stem reporters, he announced, his column would not promote the prurient.
“Divorces will not be propagated in this column…I will always experience greater pleasure in seeing Gus Edwards roadhousing with his wife than in seeing a celebrity flaunting his mistress…So with high resolve and no fears, I enter upon my career as a Broadway columnist….I confess that the prospect of competing against the present field leaves me quite cold…It looks like a breeze and, as Mike Casale would say, 'Weather clear, fast track.'
P.S. No apprentice allowance claimed.”
When the paper hit the stands the Broadway community was agog. Ed’s debut was the talk of the town. Graphic publisher Bernarr Macfadden wondered if Sullivan could be serious: a clean Broadway column? The publisher of Variety, Sime Silverman, reprinted the column in full, with commentary: “Sullivan is well known, if not famous, as a sports reporter. He will become equally so as a Broadway writer if continuing the way he started. The tabloids have been called the trade papers of the racketeers. Sullivan is on a tab.” – an apparent reference to the Daily Mirror claim that he was on the mob’s payroll – “His initial outburst sounds as if he intends to disprove the allegation. It’s a great opening.” Many thought the column’s claim of propriety merely funny, like a Burlesque dancer lecturing on grammar. Some speculated it was the columnist’s standard ploy: to gain readers by starting a feud. Winchell and Sobol, understanding that the jabs were aimed directly at them, were incensed.
The evening after his column’s debut, Sullivan ran into Winchell at the Reuben Delicatessen. According to Sullivan, he himself was talkative and Winchell was quiet, until Winchell asked, “Did you mean what you wrote today?” The freshman columnist soft-pedaled his attack, explaining that he had merely wanted to make a dramatic entrance. Winchell said he accepted this as an apology, at which point it was Ed who took offense. The Sullivan hair-string temper leapt out of the bag. “I got so mad I grabbed him by the knot in his necktie and pulled him over the table, right on top of the cheesecake. ‘Apologize to you?’ I said, ‘you son of a bitch, I did mean you and if you say one more word about it I’ll take you downstairs and stick your head in the toilet bowl.’” In Sullivan’s telling of the story, Winchell then fled the Reuben.
Sobol, in the Journal American, parried Sullivan’s opening salvo by writing a column entitled “The Ennui of His Contempt-oraries.” Referring to Ed, he archly noted, “Empty vessels make the most sound.”
Sobol’s riposte was standard stuff by the rules of the Broadway gossips; throwing barbs back and forth was part of their stock and trade. They were as much performers as the nightclub acts they covered. But for Ed, hypersensitive and in a new situation, it was too much. Sobol’s column enraged him. One evening shortly after it ran, Sullivan ran into Sobol outside a Broadway performance. Ed grabbed his rival columnist and, according to Sobol, bellowed, “I’ll rip your cock off, you little bastard.” Sobol, all of 125 pounds, ducked out of Sullivan’s reach while bystanders held him back.
As if Ed hadn’t vented enough, he also took Sobol to task in his column, writing:
“To my former associates in the field of sports writing, I must report that THIS is a soft touch in an unusually responsive arena…While all my columning contemporaries are fuming and fretting at my invasion, one of them has even carried his personal alarm into the two-column measure of his daily piece. This particular fellow has never had much competition. He’s got it now. I have not decided whether to chase him over the right field fence or the left field fence. This, however, is purely a matter of route, and immaterial.”
That would be easier said than done. In claiming he would write a Broadway column free of gossip, Ed faced a gaping void. He had to churn out six columns a week, Monday through Saturday, each about 1,500 words – an enormous amount of space to fill without the usual patter of petty scandal.
His claim of journalistic piety lasted as long as two bits in a Broadway speakeasy. On Tuesday, one day after his opening roundhouse punch, he wrote a padded piece of treacle mourning vaudevillian Joe Schenck, who had died prematurely. On Wednesday he went back on the attack, decrying the “velvet hammer” of the Broadway drama critics, how they “hem and haw, they beat about the reviewing bush and extract from it critical thorns with which to puncture the hide of agonized producers. Primarily, they seek arty phrases in which to couch their barbs. These, they hope, are destined for mouthing in salon and drawing room.” In contrast, Ed promised, “If I like a show, I will say so without any ambiguity of phrasing which might protect my Variety box score.”
In that same Wednesday column – just 48 hours after proclaiming, “divorces would not be propagated in this column” – he included an item about Jack Dempsey’s divorce. Its expense was placing the boxer in “desperate need for ready cash,” Ed wrote. “The ex-champion is seriously considering a fight at Reno against a guaranteed tanker. Dempsey would promote it, and would not have to cut Estelle in on the net.” In one fell swoop he had abandoned his promise and publicized the personal troubles of a friend. It was as if he hadn’t realized how deep the waters were, and, not sure if he could swim, was grasping at anything to keep himself afloat. He would print another item about Dempsey in a few months, claiming that the boxer had ducked in and out of New York quickly because of rumored kidnap threats. That column item prompted an angry telegram from Dempsey, which Ed printed: ALWAYS CONSIDERED YOU A FRIEND STOP DIDN’T EXPECT YOU TO WRITE AND PRINT A STORY YOU KNOW IS RIDICULOUS AND WITHOUT FOUNDATION STOP ONE NEVER KNOWS WHAT TO EXPECT THESE DAYS, HOWEVER. JACK DEMPSEY.
By Friday of his first week, it seemed, he was out of material, reduced to a windy paean lauding the glories of opening night. In lieu of actual news, he provided a dollop of pandering to the hometown crowd (and a florid description of the world the twenty-nine-year-old columnist was entering):
“A First-night supplies all these things to all men of Broadway. Gorgeous women flicking red-tipped cigarettes, suave gentlemen suavely tailored, and the whole against a background of curious crowds at the theater entrances, their gaping delight occasionally blotted out by the brawny shoulders of the cops holding them in restraint…It has a glittering spread to it that reduces the rivalry of other cities to inconsequence. Depreciatingly, these other cities sneer, ‘New York is a sucker town.’ And then these other cities bend frantically to their work in order to get carfare to reach it. For they all want to gaze at the steel-ribbed frame of the ‘sucker city.’”
By the end of the month, gossip flowed from the column in a steady trickle. He began regularly including items like “Grover Cleveland Alexander is back with his wife and off the booze.” In mid July he informed readers, “Everyone who played a lead in The Marriage Circle, including Lubitsch, the director, has been divorced.” In August he reported, “Abe Lyman's sister is returning from the coast…without her hubby.” And shortly thereafter, "Jean Malin belted a heckler last night in one of the clubs…All that twitters isn't pansy…”
Walter Winchell described a scene at LaHiff’s Tavern shortly after Sullivan started including gossip. Ed stopped by the bar and joined Winchell and an assortment of Broadway types who were drinking and talking shop. Walter couldn’t resist needling Ed about his journalistic change of heart:
“Eddie,” I cooed, “what happened? Did your editor tell you to get interesting or get out?”
“No,” he sighed. “My wife did.”
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