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IMPRESARIO
The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan
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Excerpt from:
Chapter Five: Cafe Society
(In Depression-era Manhattan, Sullivan was an influential gossip columnist, chronicling the lives of the smart set. This chapter describes his experiences as a New York Daily News columnist.)
The milieu known loosely as café society was a glittering alloy of screen and stage performers, radio personalities, star athletes, debutantes, musicians, old money socialites, press agents, promoters, and producers; those who were talented and those who wanted to associate with the talented. Despite the Depression, café society rubbed elbows nightly in 1930s Manhattan. Its gathering places were nightclubs like the Colony, El Morocco, Dave’s Blue Room, The Hollywood, and, foremost, the Stork Club, nightspots where entrance alone – if you could get past the doorman – would set you back five or even ten dollars.
This gathering of the beautiful and the lucky was a living incarnation of what moviegoers paid two dimes to see on screen in the 1930s: cool glamour, light conversation attended by chilled champagne, romances begun while foxtrotting to elegant orchestra music. That right outside the door the unemployment rate was twenty-five percent made this privileged party seem closer to dreamscape than reality.
Being a star in this world meant getting noticed, being one of those whom others mentioned when they talked about their evening at Lindy’s or Jimmy Kelly’s. One of the best ways to do this was to appear, as frequently as possible, in Broadway’s leading gossip columns. In an era before television these columns had inordinate power on the celebrity social scene. To rate a boldface tidbit in the pages of the News, the Post, or the Mirror meant you were a somebody, you existed, that others would turn their head as you walked in. Ed, as a columnist for the News – far above the ever-shaky Graphic – was now the ultimate insider in this scene. His News berth made him a player, someone whose opinion was talked about and sought after, a leading social arbiter of café society.
The job allowed him to live in his natural habitat. Ed was a nightly sight in Broadway’s openings and ritzy watering holes, dressed in a tailored double-breasted suit, cigarette in hand, hair slicked straight back, socializing with an ever expanding network of performers, politicos, socialites, and athletes. A magazine profile from the mid 1930s described him: “He seldom gets home before five a.m., in the meanwhile having taken in, on a typical night, ’21,’ the Stork Club, the Hollywood, Dave’s Blue Room, Lindy’s and Jimmy Kelly’s…Courvoisier brandy is his only but not single drink: then it’s bed until one or two in the afternoon. The column is written – at home. That takes a couple of hours and Sullivan then drives down to the Daily News, reads his mail and waits while the composing room gives him a proof.”
Central to his column were the vagaries of love among the smart set, the intoxicating sexual merry-go-round of Broadway romance:
“Take, for instance, slender and blonde June Knight…her affairs of the heart have kept my operatives working in double shifts since she arrived here to “hot cha” for Zeigfeld…First it was Elliot Myer…Then it was Elliot Sperber…Succeeded by Leo Friede…Who, in turn gave way to Sailing Baruch Jr…Neil Andrews stepped in when Baruch stepped out…Now it looks as though Tommy Manville Jr. is the lucky guy.”
Ed reported on a mythic group of people who had been liberated from the staid sexual mores of Victorian America. The 1920s had seen a revolution in morals and manners. Women, having picketed the White House and gotten hauled away in paddy wagons, had won the right to vote. Hemlines inched up and young ladies went out on the town by themselves. In 1926 Mae West premiered her play Sex, which scandalized the public with tunes like “Honey, Let Yo’ Drawers Hang Low” – and scored a box office bonanza. And though hemlines had fallen with the Crash, something had been loosened by that giddy decade, and Ed’s column covered the results. He dished out a heady catalog of morsels like “Phil Baker, the only bird who can make love over the top of an accordion” and “Maurice Chevalier, who’d rather go places with his pal Primo Carnera, than make love to Jeanette MacDonald…” Printing material like this would have been forbidden not that many years previously – and would seem merely quaint a few decades hence – but it sold newspapers in the 1930s.
Ed’s reports of the rapid pace of modern love, which in his column seemed to twirl faster than ever, offered readers a vicarious thrill. “Romances fizzle and burn out in a hurry on the Queerialto that is tagged Broadway…the big heart affairs pass into the hands of receivers quicker than that,” he reported. (Sullivan invented his own slang term for Broadway, “Queerialto,” a combination of “queer” – he always found the Broadway world odd – and “Rialto,” after the famous Broadway theater.) If he could fit in a bit of moralizing with his coverage of romance, all the better:
“Funny, the reactions of the fellows who are involved in these affairs of the cardiac…Tommy Manville Jr, heir to the asbestos millions…is typical of the wealthier playboys of the Main Stem…Interested in the lovelies of the stage, Manville, like his fellows, will go just so far…The breaking point arrives when a column like this reports that Manville is thinking of buying an engagement ring…The current romance is dead the following day…to the wealthy fellows, wedding bells make a noise like a police riot car.”
The News gave Sullivan wide latitude in terms of what he covered, and, like his TV show in later years, his column offered something for many audiences: romantic travails, theater news, political predictions, show business gossip, odd quotes that celebrities gave him, bits of shop worn wisdom. It was all jumbled together without any differentiation, a stream of consciousness Broadway diary, like the circuitous route taken by a cabbie trolling all of Manhattan. On a daily basis he veered from wedding news, denoted as “hunting for a license bureau,” to announcing a starlet’s pregnancy, referred to as “the arrival of Sir Stork,” to alimony payments, all within the space of a single paragraph.
As at the Graphic, he rarely wrote detailed theater criticism, but he often passed pithy one-line judgment on new Broadway shows (which, if positive, were used in the show’s advertisement). “By far the smartest premiere of the winter season…Was the inaugural performance of “Design For Living,” featuring Noel Coward, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne,” he opined. But even in these hit-and-run reviews he usually spent more ink on the evening’s social scene than on the dramaturgy.
In the Coward opening, he went on to list many of the well-heeled theater patrons in the audience. “Coward’s play delights this audience of the elite…it as light as champagne bubbles, and produces the same gayety…You leave the theatre and mounted cops are holding back the curious sidewalk onlookers…There is a double line of cars in West 47th street, waiting for their mesdames and messieurs…Most of them are Rolls Royces…it was that kind of opening,” Ed observed, displaying, as he often did, his sense of being a reporter looking at the privileged from afar.
One of his column’s constants were bite-sized descriptions of famous people, opinionated portraits of those with whom he rubbed elbows. He would string together a number of these, as if bringing the reader to an exclusive Broadway party.
“Jack Benny, stage, radio and movie comedian…Sleepiest of all Broadway personalities…He invites 20 people to 55 Central Park West, and then curls up on the living room couch and goes to sleep…On the level…If he could learn to sleep standing up, he’d make a fine cop…Estelle Taylor, ex-frau of ex-champ Dempsey…one of the keenest wits I’ve ever encountered…With a marvelous sense of humor that bewilders plenty of Coast dumbbells…[actress] Lupe Velez, madcap of movieland…Whose 70 coats, 230 dresses and 126 pairs of shoes don’t mean a thing because she bought them only for ONE man…And then Gary Cooper wasn’t the fellow she thought he was.”
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