Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (29 page)

The critical response, though still not enthusiastic, was markedly better. “Being a person of unusual compassion, Ed Sullivan, the celebrated columnist, hated to see all the good things go to waste in
Crazy with the Heat
, which succumbed to prostration nearly a fortnight ago,” wrote
The New York Times’
Brooks Atkinson. “With the assistance of Lew Brown, songwriter and beer jongleur, he revived it last evening at the Forty-forth Street Theatre in an improved condition.” Atkinson noted, however,
that the show still lacked the material for a first-rate revue, and audiences agreed.
Crazy with the Heat
ran just ninety-two performances. Still, after it closed on Broadway, Ed revised it again, booking a pared-down version into Loew’s State, where he gave it a lengthy run. With its odd melange of fast-moving acts the show was better fit for vaudeville than Broadway.

As the show was running, so was the rumor mill. Ed, or so some said, was having an affair with one of its actresses. Who the actress was remains unclear because Ed maintained discretion, whatever the extent of the dalliance. Yet knowledge of the affair seemed widespread. In 1941, Walter Winchell began a very public romance with Mary Lou Bentley, a leggy twenty-year-old showgirl. All Broadway columnists followed an unwritten rule that prohibited the reporting of affairs involving anyone who was married, as was Winchell, unless they were clearly separated from their spouse. A blind item was permissible but naming the participants was forbidden (and the
Daily News’
editorial policy also forbade it). But Ed, always envious of Walter, tried to include an item about Winchell and Bentley. After
News
editor Dick Clark deleted it, Ed ran into his office screaming, wanting it put back in before publication. Clark calmly explained to the columnist that if the item ran, Winchell would take revenge by printing bits about Sullivan’s own affairs. Ed decided it was best to let the matter drop.

Whatever romance Ed may have been having during
Crazy with the Heat
’s run on Broadway, it must have been on-again, off-again; he flew down to Miami Beach that winter for his first of many annual two-week press junkets. Perks for columnists were numerous but this all-expense-paid trip was one of the dearest. Ed stayed in a lavish penthouse suite and the staff feted him like royalty. “
By day a columnist surveys the trimly proportioned misses lounging around the beach or around the pools; by night he sits at ringside tables of Florida clubs and is entertained by the cream of the performers,” he reported. In exchange he wrote glowing reports about the joys of Miami tourism, though he noted that the city suffered a severe crime problem. He could be influenced, but, his caveat seemed to say, he could not be bought.

Soon after the Eastern Airlines Douglas airliner returned him to New York, he began laying the groundwork for another radio program. Producing stage shows was lucrative, but true fame required getting inside the living room radio; the most successful stage performers resembled mere understudies next to broadcast stars. Debuting on April 27 on WABC, the new program was a weekly talk show, every Sunday night at 6
P.M.
As the headliner, Ed alternated between interviewing guests and sprinkling celebrity pixie dust, offering an insider’s glimpse into Broadway and Hollywood by reprising his column.

Accompanying him were drummer-comedian Ray McKinley and vocalist Terry Allen, with Will Bradley’s orchestra vamping swing music. Sponsored by the International Silver Company, the show was titled
Summer Silver Theater.
The network clearly viewed the thirty-minute program as a seasonal replacement for its serial radio drama, but with luck—in the form of high ratings—the show would earn its own time slot when fall arrived. To boost ratings, Ed used his column’s influence to cajole appearances by some big names, like Eddie Cantor and bandleader Tommy Dorsey, though most of the guests were only modestly known.

Throughout the summer, Ed’s radio program, vaudeville shows at Loew’s State, and daily column became a circular path for performers. Once the showman-columnist
invited them in he could circulate them between the three. That a singer had performed at Loew’s State gave him reason to tout him or her in his column; once the singer appeared on his radio show, he or she could be introduced at Loew’s State as having just been on the air. In the early summer, Gertrude Niesen, a popular big band chanteuse, performed in his Loew’s State show, sang on his radio program, and enjoyed plugs in his column. It was his own one-man show business circuit, a revolving platform for singers and comics, a cross-venue promotional device placing the name Ed Sullivan front and center in print, on marquees, and over the airwaves.

For a short time, that is. On September 28 the radio show saw its last broadcast. True to the original schedule, Sullivan’s program proved to be simply a summer replacement. Huge listener interest, of course, would have won it another spot, but that hadn’t materialized. Ed’s latest attempt to launch a broadcast career lasted slightly longer than five months.

Toward the end of the year it finally happened. After long and rancorous national debate about whether to intervene, and years of anxious anticipation, events forced a decision. On December 8, 1941, the
Daily News
reported the previous day’s carnage in type so large that only three words fit on the front page: JAPS BOMB HAWAII.

Although Ed, a forty-year-old family man, wasn’t going to don a uniform, he threw himself into the war effort as if he had. As his age had kept him from the first war it also kept him from this one, yet he was as eager to take part now as when he ran away to join the Marines at age sixteen. The
News
had been isolationist, and Ed had nominally echoed this. As late as February 1941 he dashed off column asides like, “
At any continental dinner party Uncle Sam always gets stuck with the check.” But with the attack he was ready. That June, six months before Pearl Harbor, he volunteered to be an air-raid warden, part of the city’s new civil defense plan; in the event of German attack each district’s air-raid warden would coordinate its response. Ed signed up the first day the program was announced. (And he wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm. “
Chinese, Italians, Germans, Jews, and Irish all appeared to respond,” reported
The New York Times.
) And in May he had joined Irving Berlin, the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, and others at the Greek Festival for Freedom, a fund-raiser for the Greek war-relief effort.

Suddenly, life moved faster. Slapped awake by Pearl Harbor, New York no longer slogged along in its late Depression funk. One month after the attack, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia declared a six-day work week for city employees, and the city’s nightlife, as if responding in kind, also sprang to life. “
Nightclubs did a terrific business starting Friday night … All joints jammed,” Ed reported in January. The Copacabana started including table maps showing all fire exits, and the Stork’s receipts soon leaped by more than thirty percent. But as fast as the city would spin, Ed would spin still faster.

His primary battle had always been his career, his indefatigable effort to push his star higher. The war, and indeed nothing, would ever interrupt this. But the war required him to redouble himself, because he would also be needed—and would answer the call eagerly—for war benefit drives, hospital shows, and a plethora of fund-raising personal appearances.

In the few short months before war rallies became a steady drumbeat, Ed launched his second Broadway show, this one an all-black production in partnership with Noble Sissle. A fifty-one-year-old composer and bandleader, Sissle cowrote the hit “It’s Your Fault” with pianist Eubie Blake, and would win a posthumous Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1979 for the Broadway musical
Eubie.
When Ed began their collaboration, Sissle’s orchestra was the house band for Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe club, a fashionable Manhattan nightspot.

Sullivan, as producer and codirector, and Sissle, as codirector and performer, conceived of a rollicking, high-energy revue. They recruited the stars of black vaudeville: Moke and Poke, the 5 Crackerjacks, the Harlemaniacs, Pops and Louie, and several others, with Sissle himself performing two numbers. In a nod to the headlines, some of the vocalists dressed as air-raid wardens, and a sketch portrayed a young man grappling with a draft questionnaire. Opening at Broadway’s Ritz Theater in May 1942,
Harlem Cavalcade
offered a fresh twist on Ed’s variety shows. The production presented vaudeville as practiced above 125th Street, in the neighborhood to which the show paid homage.

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.”