Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (21 page)

Sullivan’s first attempt at radio had been short-lived, but in March 1934 he found another opportunity. NBC was launching
Musical Airship
, a half hour of dance music and show business gossip, and he leaped at the chance to be its host. In the mid 1930s radio broadcasts of dance bands held America in a semihypnotic trance. Dozens of swing orchestras like those of Paul Whiteman and Eddie Duchin played live as tens of millions of listeners fox-trotted, tangoed, and waltzed. As one reporter noted, “
During a single evening twenty or thirty nationally recognized batoners hold sway.” Combining dance music with humor and witty banter was a winning format. A top radio show that season was CBS’s pairing of the Guy Lombardo Orchestra with the George Burns-Gracie Allen comedy team.

When
Musical Airship
debuted on March 7, it featured the Vincent Lopez Orchestra, one of the country’s leading swing outfits. Sometimes called “The Tango Terror,” Lopez had been a successful bandleader for more than a decade; over the years his bands were a way station for the likes of Glenn Miller and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. Sullivan had been friends with Lopez for years; it was at the bandleader’s nightclub that Ed had met Sylvia in 1926.

The show was a joint effort: Ed was master of ceremonies, introducing Lopez’s band. He interspersed the music with show business news and chatted with a celebrity guest he brought along each week. On many weeks the Lopez band was fronted by vocalist Frances Langford, an elegant chanteuse whose star soared the following year in the Hollywood film
Every Night at Eight
with George Raft. Also on the show was a three-man vocal group called the Three Scamps.
Musical Airship
was broadcast live every Wednesday at 10
P.M.
from New York’s elegant St. Regis Hotel. Sponsored by Gem Razor, the show paid Ed $1,000 a week.

The program got off to an auspicious start.
Radio Guide
immediately made the show its “high spot selection”—its favored choice—for the 10
P.M.
hour. In April it was reported that Ed’s presence on the show “
has been renewed for some time to come.” In May, a
Radio Guide
reviewer praised Ed, though he quibbled with one of his opinions: “
Ed Sullivan, who writes a mean column, and master-of-ceremonies the Wednesday evening
Musical Airship
(NBC) quite well, passed a counterfeit when he intimated it was odd that radio had never yet contributed to the stage—only taken away from it.”

Despite the favorable coverage,
Musical Airship
had trouble finding its audience. That spring it earned a C.A.B. rating of 7.3, far better than Ed’s first show, but far
behind leaders like the
Jack Benny Program
(25.3) and the
Fred Allen Program
(18.5). One month after its debut Sullivan’s show was moved from 10
P.M.
to 9
P.M.
—a better timeslot, but directly opposite the popular
Old Gold
program, hosted by charismatic tenor Dick Powell. In the middle of May it was moved again, to 8
P.M.
, and in early June it was back at 9
P.M.
Then on June 20, with little notice,
Musical Airship
was canceled.

Based on the results of
Radio Guide
’s mail-in popularity contest, the show was hardly noticed, or at least Ed’s portion never was. Vincent Lopez garnered some modest attention; among bandleaders, readers voted him toward the bottom half. That was far better than Ed. Among the one hundred twenty-two stars ranked, with Bing Crosby and Eddie Cantor at the top, and Walter Winchell in about the middle, Sullivan wasn’t rated at all. Apparently no one sent in an entry listing him as their favorite performer. Radio wasn’t turning out to be the elevator to fame that Ed had hoped for. His first show in 1932 had lasted a little more than four months; this year’s program barely made it past three.

With his broadcast career appearing fruitless, Ed turned to the stage. Churning out a column five days a week, which many Broadway scribes viewed as more than enough, left him wanting more. In May, toward the end of
Musical Airship
, he had produced a single vaudeville program at Brooklyn’s RKO Albee Theatre. On July 7, just two weeks after his radio cancellation, he launched his vaudeville career in earnest.

He called his revue
Ed Sullivan’s Dawn Patrol.
Like his first show at the Paramount the previous November,
Dawn Patrol
was an up-tempo vaudeville revue with a mixed bag of comedy, dance, and music. But the new show was more elaborate and showcased a more contemporary lineup. Opening at Manhattan’s Loew’s State Theatre, on the bill were ballroom dancers Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mears, vocalist Joan Abbott, tap dancer Georgie Tapps, singer-hoofer Delores Farris, acrobatic dancer Barbara Blane, and banjo player Ken Harvey. Unlike his one-week stand at the Paramount, his revues would now run regularly, with a fresh lineup of performers for every new revue. Sullivan’s stage shows jumped from theater to theater, but his chief venue was Loew’s State, whose marquee headlined the name Ed Sullivan in oversized letters on a routine basis.

His revue’s title,
Dawn Patrol
, was a double entendre. It referred to the popular 1930 Howard Hawks talkie,
The Dawn Patrol
, about daring and chivalrous World War I flying aces; it also referred to Sullivan’s own practice of club crawling until the sun came up. He often subtitled his column “Dawn Patrol” because it reported on his nocturnal wanderings, and because the phrase helped advertise his vaudeville shows.

Sullivan wore two hats in his
Dawn Patrol
revue, as he would throughout his career: producer and emcee. As producer, he was the show’s business manager, taking a fee from the theater then dividing it among the performers and himself as he saw fit. More important, he made
Dawn Patrol
’s creative choices, building the show from the ground up, deciding which acts to book, placing them in order, determining the balance between comedy and music and dance, and giving the show its pacing. He refreshed the show constantly, mixing and matching performers as he spotted new talent in nightclubs. At some point, probably not as early as 1933, he took his control of the shows a step further: he decided which material performers would present,
choosing their songs, making decisions about dance numbers, and editing the comics’ jokes. Standing right offstage as the show ran, he was its chief critic. He monitored each revue act by act, making changes based on his sense of the crowd’s response. Innumerable hours spent watching his stage shows and gauging audience response would be an invaluable education.

In contrast to his role as producer, his role as emcee—while much more visible to the public—was relatively insignificant. He simply ushered acts on and off the stage, building up the act beforehand and leading the audience in applause afterward. In fact, in his earliest shows he chose not to be master of ceremonies. Instead he hired Harry Rose, known as the “Broadway Jester,” to keep the show moving. After Rose began as emcee, there appears to be a period in which they shared hosting duties. Only after about a year of producing
Dawn Patrol
, when it was highly successful, did Ed make himself its master of ceremonies.

Ed’s career as a vaudeville producer-emcee demanded a grueling pace. Like many theaters, Loew’s State offered patrons a stage show and a movie for a single ticket. The double bill started in late morning and repeated itself, back to back, until after midnight, sometimes until 3
A.M.
The greasepaint and sweat stayed on all day long. It was no wonder that many vaudeville performers brought their children into their act; the family lived at the theater. But as demanding as it was for performers, for the audience it was joy. As in traditional vaudeville theaters, some audience members bought a ticket in early afternoon and stayed all day—the Depression meant they could afford little else. (Some vaudeville producers placed a heinously bad act at the show’s end in an attempt to clear the theater.)

The vaudeville audience of the 1930s was a tough crowd. While more restrained than their recent forebears, who hurled rotten produce, people heckled mercilessly, and they wouldn’t clap or laugh out of polite protocol. Nor would they return to a revue if they weren’t getting their hard-earned 10 cents’ worth. A few years later Ed wrote about an attempt at humor in one of his shows. Eleanor Powell, a tap dancer, stood in front of the stage curtain and announced that she would reveal what happened when famed card manipulator Cardini played poker with the cast. The curtain opened to show Cardini losing everything but his dress shirt to a group of poker players. The audience “
sat in complete silence … not even a murmur,” Ed wrote. It was a rigorous education for a showman. Pleasing this audience was like running a race carrying a forty-pound weight; if you could survive in these conditions you would likely be in good shape anywhere. And competition was fierce. Within a few blocks of Loew’s State in midtown Manhattan there was a plethora of such shows competing for their customers’ limited pocket change.

Ed’s motivation for mounting variety shows was partially money. His $200 a week
Daily News
salary was more than comfortable, yet his notoriety from his column made being a stage producer a lucrative second job. As a variety show producer with a well-known name he could command a large sum; anything left over after paying performers was his. And singers and dancers, with the incentive of his column mentions, could be cajoled to appear in
Dawn Patrol
revues at a competitive rate. As the shows became ever more successful, it’s likely that Sullivan made still more.

In addition to the money was the magnetic draw of being star of the show, center stage, with his name up in lights. Even after his television career made him wealthy,
he found a way to get onstage or in front of a camera again and again. In the mid 1950s, then the producer of a hugely successful TV program, he acted in a summer stock production for fun. And in that same period he launched a live vaudeville tour of the country. He would not—could not—stay away from the spotlight. Once he debuted his
Dawn Patrol
revue in 1934 he was onstage constantly until almost the very end of his life.

Although he called the shows vaudeville, they owed as much to the New York nightclub as to the Keith—Albee circuit. As a denizen of Manhattan’s nightspots, that was where Ed found his talent and earned his show business education. He played up the nightclub element in his shows, dubbing some versions the “All-Star All-American Nightclub Revue.” A reviewer in 1934 noted that Sullivan offered “
a variety of singers, dancers, and comics from the night clubs,” and three years later, another observed, “
In customary fashion, the production has a nightclub setting, is brilliantly lighted and well-staged.” That the shows drew talent from the city’s cabarets and nightclubs meant that they were more contemporary and more urban than traditional vaudeville. (Though, of course, the worlds of nightclub and vaudeville performers overlapped.)

He also broke with vaudeville tradition in the way he ordered the show. Vaudeville custom called for the biggest act to be saved for near the end—to keep the audience waiting. The opening act might be a greenhorn tap dancer who was likely to be booed offstage. But Ed, as a newsman, was guided by the journalistic practice of starting with a hot lead, an arresting opening sentence to lure the reader into reading the entire article. He brought this reporter’s ethic to his stage shows, beginning each revue with a bang. Years later, when he competed in a medium in which audiences changed programs with the flip of a channel, his strategy of grabbing viewers upfront proved crucial to his success.

Sullivan’s players were a constantly revolving cast, though he had a few favorites. On any given night his show might include vocalist Josephine Huston, who appeared in Gershwin’s 1933 musical
Pardon My English
; the Three Berry Brothers, a troupe that sang and danced “
in the true Harlem manner,” as one reviewer wrote; Gali-Gali, a Turkish magician who told jokes; Gloria Gilbert, a soft-shoe artist who starred in Broadway revues throughout the 1930s; and Frances Faye, a hard-driving jazz singer who originated a syncopated vocal style known as the Zaz-Zu-Zaz. Providing musical accompaniment was usually the house band, Ruby Zwerling and his Loew’s State Senators. A favorite performer of Ed’s was Yiddish dialect comic Patsy Flick, an old-time vaudevillian with whom he occasionally did a comedy sketch. Sullivan himself, in addition to hosting, narrated clips of silent movies, providing stories and humorous quips about the on-screen action.