Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (24 page)

But life was different on the Coast, and Ed knew it. Although he came to Hollywood as an established columnist for a major newspaper, he was a guest in a world owned by the film colony’s reigning gossips, Louella Parsons and her new archrival Hedda
Hopper. Parsons, syndicated by Hearst, and Hopper, syndicated by the Chicago
Tribune
and published in the
Los Angeles Times
, ruthlessly dominated Hollywood stars, exacting homage and wielding the power of their huge readership with an iron hand. There were other gossips in Hollywood, including Jimmy Fidler, the actor turned radio host, and legions of scribes for movie pulps, but none had the studio access that Parsons and Hopper did. The manner in which these two enthroned columnists plied their trade defined the gossip business in Hollywood, and Ed was bound to live in the system they perpetuated.

The two women had taken very different paths to their lofty perch. Hopper, born Elda Furry in rural Pennsylvania, had been pretty and slender as a young woman and enjoyed modest success in theater and film through the 1920s and early 1930s; by 1936 she was a middle-aged single mother with a child to support. She launched a gossipy radio show on a Hollywood station, mining her network of film and stage connections (and employing creative guesswork) to provide a scintillating dose of celebrity Stardust. As the show grew in popularity she parleyed it into newspaper syndication. Hopper was known for her passion for large hats and her ability to hold long, bitter grudges.

Parsons, born Louella Oettinger in rural Illinois, dreamed of being a reporter from a very young age; in her teens she covered social events for the Dixon, Illinois,
Star.
Heavyset and ungainly, she married a well-to-do real estate agent, moved with him to Iowa, had a child, and promptly divorced. Parsons relocated to Chicago, remarried, and worked her way up through the newspaper business, shifting to New York as her career took off, eventually landing a job as the motion picture editor for Hearst’s
New York American.
There she became friends with actress Marion Davies, the romantic partner of William Randolph Hearst. After socializing with Davies and Hearst in Hollywood, the newspaper magnate syndicated Parsons’ column. By the mid 1920s, just as silent movies were set to give way to talkies, Parsons was established as the top Hollywood gossip.

While Parsons was there first, Hopper, with her network of contacts, quickly grew to challenge her gossip supremacy. It was even rumored that the studios had created Hopper, feeding her choice tidbits, to counterbalance Parsons’ overweening influence. But regardless of the competition between them—and they loathed each other—they were essentially mirror images of one another. Both women had a symbiotic relationship with the studios, relying on a regular dole of access and timely news and in turn helping promote films and stars. And both women held as sacrosanct the studios’ unwritten rule: don’t damage our property, that is, our stars.

MGM, Universal, and other star factories spent huge sums building mere actors and actresses into semimythic screen idols. To report that any of these investments were tarnished with an undue fondness for alcohol or a questionable sexual proclivity would have been an unpardonable act of corporate vandalism. Doors would have shut and phone calls would have gone unreturned. So Louella and Hedda lived within carefully prescribed boundaries. Romances, studio news, and benign glimpses of personal lives were promoted; even the whirlwind of divorce, as stars changed partners as casually as ballroom dancers, helped create a glow of ardent sexual energy that pushed ticket sales. And certainly each tilled her own trademark brand of cattiness. But reporting actual scandal was strictly prohibited (unless, of course, the studios gave tacit approval).

Both Louella and Hedda needed to be treated with ultimate care by those in their fiefdom. Sidney Skolsky learned this the hard way. Leaving the
Daily News
for Hearst’s
Daily Mirror
placed him in direct competition with Louella. After one of Skolsky’s early columns contradicted a Parsons scoop, she intimated to Hearst that Skolsky was a communist; he was let go after his contract expired and was unemployed for most of a year. (Skolsky called Hearst shortly after Parsons’ claim, attempting to reclaim his job, asking the newspaper magnate,
“Are you sure she didn’t say ‘columnist’? You know, she has a difficult time pronouncing words. ‘I know what she said,’ Hearst snapped. ‘You’ll work out your contract, and when we’re through with you you’ll be nothing.’ ”)

Ed understood the tender treatment the queen bees required. In the rare instances he mentioned Louella or Hedda—all the papers frowned on acknowledging rival columnists—he tossed them peace bouquets, much as a visiting explorer paid homage to a local potentate. In a typical chummy aside, he wrote, “
Dr. Harry Martin, who is Louella Parsons’ hubby, seriously ill from pleurisy (he is a swell guy, this ‘Doc’ Martin, and the whole town is pulling for him).”

On Broadway, Ed had played by the rough-and-tumble rules of the Main Stem. Broadway columnists were fevered fellows, up all night, working a typewriter and a shot glass with equal fervor, always leading with their elbows. They picked fights, with performers, with each other, or with anyone else, as part of doing business. They weren’t happy if they weren’t in the middle of a minor or major skirmish. This quotidian jousting was a perfect fit with Ed’s personality. But the Hollywood columnists, under the Parsons–Hopper system, were well-oiled and well-feted adjuncts to the studio machinery. The emphasis was less on conflict and more on promoting studio product.

The charge that Ed had leveled against Eddie Cantor back in New York, accusing him of stealing material from another performer, was good for boosting readership on Broadway. But that kind of ad hominem attack could damage a performer, and thus was not allowed by the studios. In fact, a month after arriving in Hollywood, Ed wrote a column in homage to Cantor, who had matched his legendary vaudeville success with Hollywood stardom. “
I know of no performer more deserving than Cantor, and I say that although he and I have severe differences of opinion,” Ed purred. Likewise, his assertion in his Broadway column that Joan Crawford lacked talent. As a Broadway wise guy he could be a cur to Crawford and no matter. If he did that in Hollywood he never would have gotten near her; her studio would have frozen him out—a death knell for someone on the movie beat. “
There are certain things you shouldn’t do in Hollywood,” he wrote in a column about actors offending studio heads and being thrown out of work. He clearly understood the same rules applied to columnists.

In their first few weeks away from New York, Ed and Sylvia didn’t like California. They were homesick, and in addition to missing their friends they missed the city’s tempo. By comparison, Hollywood moved at a pastoral gait, and the two felt out of place. Their young daughter, however, loved it. This was the first time she had lived in a house, and she relished the freedom to play outside whenever she wanted, taking great pleasure in the bungalow’s nice yard and garden.

As they had in New York, Ed and Sylvia hired a live-in babysitter to take care of Betty as they dined out, which they did almost every evening. This post was first filled by a woman Betty remembered as a dominant German governess, who was nice to Ed and Betty but not to Sylvia, and so was summarily dismissed. She was replaced by a succession of paid companions; one was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles.

After Ed and Sylvia gained a circle of friends, they began to enjoy California. They entertained at their house frequently, inviting stars Ed had become friends with for dinner, drinks, and frivolity. To help, they hired a live-in cook and butler, a couple named Jack and Melissa. (Jack, after working for the Sullivans for a while, confided to Ed that he had spent time in prison for a minor offense, but Ed said he didn’t care, he wanted him anyway.)

The Sullivan get-togethers were spirited affairs, and Betty remembered her parents acting silly and young. Groucho Marx, whose huge success in vaudeville turned into even greater fame in Hollywood, became a personal friend. He and his wife Ruth came over for dancing lessons with Ed and Sylvia, and the foursome clowned around the house as they went through their dancing paces.

Virtually all of Sullivan’s Hollywood social circle, like Ed himself, had worked in vaudeville in New York, and most were duplicating that success on the Coast. Bob Hope had toured the Keith-Albee circuit and starred on Broadway before coming to Hollywood in 1937; he played golf with Sullivan and asked him to be the godfather of his daughter Linda. Jack Benny, a popular vaudeville emcee-comedian who starred in a raft of 1930s romantic comedies, was a regular Sullivan houseguest. (Mrs. Hope, Mrs. Benny, and actor Hal Le Roy’s wife came over to give Sylvia decorating suggestions when the Sullivans moved in.) Barbara Stanwyck had been a Ziegfeld chorus girl before launching a Hollywood career that earned her four Academy Award nominations. Likewise frequent houseguests Dick Powell and his wife Joan Blondell: Powell enjoyed great success as a musician and emcee in New York before Warner Bros. hired him for string of “nice guy” roles; Blondell played vaudeville for more than ten years before landing a contract with Warner Bros., which cast her as a bubble-headed blonde (or gold-digger) throughout the 1930s.

Over drinks and laughter, the Sullivan party goers played whimsical games. Sometimes they cavorted through hide-and-seek around the house and in the yard. On one occasion the group devised a ploy with Barbara Stanwyck’s wedding ring, a gold band, hiding it in various rooms and attaching a tiny electric current to it so that anyone picking it up would get shocked.

The line between Ed’s personal socializing and his professional duties was blurry, since his beat included a full schedule of Hollywood gatherings. Dinner parties at the Marx’s, for instance, were a regular social event for Ed, which he also reported on: “
Midnight—the guests have departed. Chico [Marx] and I are at the piano singing ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’ when there’s an interruption. Mrs. Marx suggests that we shut up. We did, but it cost her two Scotch and sodas.” As a teen in Port Chester he had reported on the baseball games that he himself played in, and now he was mixing his reportage and his life in a similar way. His social circle fed him news tips and in turn benefited professionally from his friendship; Joan Blondell was one of a handful of screen stars who got far more column exposure than they otherwise would have.

His job, as it had been on Broadway, was to allow his readers a glimpse into a fabulous world they would never enter. “
I wish you could attend some of these Hollywood parties with me,” Ed confided, explaining how ruthlessly fame-driven the film colony’s social scene was. “The hostess often doesn’t know more than ten percent of her guests … Ninety percent of them have been invited solely because they have won success in their last picture, or because their husbands are powerful at some studio.”

At a typical see-and-be-seen soiree hosted by Countess Dorothy Di Frasso, a wealthy Italian socialite, Ed’s listing of the guests surely gave his readers a vicarious thrill. On the dance floor, fox-trotting to a seven-piece swing band, were Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and a handful of similar screen luminaries. Late in the evening, Groucho Marx corralled Ed and a few others and challenged them to come up with more than three words with the suffix “dous.” The revelers quickly named three (“tremendous,” “stupendous,” and “horrendous”) and Ed asked his readers to help by sending him some more. His mailbox was soon so deluged he had to cancel the request.

He became a connoisseur of the Hollywood party, to the point that he quibbled with the local experts:

“Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., in listing the best hostesses in Hollywood, rates Doris Warner LeRoy, No. 1; Carmen Considine, No. 2; and Mrs. Harry Lachman, No. 3 … Throw his selections out and rate them this way: No. 1, Joe Schenck; No. 2, Dorothy Di Frasso; No. 3, Mrs. Hal Roach; No. 4, Mrs. Jack Warner; No. 5, Edward Everett Horton, and you’ll have a truer picture of what goes on out here …”