Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (30 page)

Ed’s story of the one-armed soldiers clapping was, to some, quite maudlin, though few would have carped about such a thing at the time. But his constant reports of his own exploits in aiding the war effort—myriad items like “
Editorialists throughout the land are praising this column for suggesting the idea of the Carole Lombard Bond Memorial”—did earn him critical flak. Harriet Van Home, a
World Telegram & Sun
reporter whose trenchant wit resembled Dorothy Parker’s, wrote a parody of a Sullivan column and tacked it up on the newsroom bulletin board. Her editor liked it so much he printed it in the paper. Sullivan, livid, dashed her off a furious letter.

The trivia of Broadway romance still played a major role in his column, but this ephemera was now heavily overweighted by war chronicles. Almost every column reported tales of soldiers on the front, war rally schedules, Ed’s comments on a battle’s progress, or the effect of government rationing: “
Erasers on pencils out for the duration!” he reported, and, “
The wolves no longer offer etchings … The switch: ‘Come up and see my nylon stockings.’ ” Even upcoming birth announcements, formerly reported as “a visit from Sir Stork” were now written as “
The Lieut. Douglas Fairbanks Jrs. expecting a little ensign.”

He frequently printed letters from soldiers that pointed to his own connection with the troops: “
Dear Ed: From us fellows in the 340th Bombardment Group, whom you mentioned in a column in mid June … Most of the gang who read your article got so swell-headed that we’ve been going around hatless.”

And: “
Dear Ed: Over here in England, some of us got to thinking about songs that were popular when we were back home. The one we all remembered was Joe E. Lewis’ ‘Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long.’ Can you get the words of it from Joe for us, and in return we’ll send you lyrics of our marching song, ‘Dirty Gertie from Bizerte.’ If you run this letter with our names, please send us a copy so we can be G.I. hotshots.”

The most notable of his war-related columns told the story of Arthur Ford, a critically wounded soldier from Midgeville, Georgia, in a ward at New York’s Halloran Hospital. In his telling, Ed had sort of adopted the soldier, working to cheer him as he struggled to live: “ ‘
Would you like to meet Jack Benny?’ I asked him, and then he grinned and whispered: ‘Stop your kidding.’ … so I got Jack from another ward, and so strong is training that the badly wounded boy asked me if his hair was combed right … ‘Want to look my best when Mister Benny comes in,’ he explained weakly.”

The Benny visit buoyed the soldier and Ed told him that he would soon return with more celebrity visitors. “ ‘Maybe I won’t be here,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t feel too hot, Mister. They got me right through the stomach’ … So I pretended to bawl him out, and told him he’d BETTER be there when we came back to the ward in two weeks, figuring that if he had some definite date to look forward to, it would keep him holding onto life … we shook hands on it.” Ed kept calling the hospital and “Each succeeding telephone call confirmed the optimistic news … Ford was holding his own.” The soldier’s condition, in fact, seemed to be improving while waiting for Ed’s visit with a celebrity. However, “After keeping that date, the worn boy died that night, very peacefully.”

Ed’s column about Arthur Ford concluded with a statement addressed to his family:

“In his last struggle, they should know that their son, or brother, was not a small-town Georgia boy alone in a big city of Yankees … He was with people who considered him one of their own, and when he died, in the North, of wounds received while landing on a faraway shore, we regretted it bitterly, while acknowledging that the wearied and wounded boy finally had found the one opiate to ease his pain.”

The column displayed the two sides of Ed simultaneously. Certainly it showed him to be the egoist whom Harriet Van Home had skewered, the reporter who relentlessly detailed his own good work, with a dollop of saccharine rivaling that in any of the war movies now flooding theaters. Yet coming when it did, during some of the war’s darkest days, his homespun elegy resonated deeply with his readers.
The piece was Ed at his most empathetic, a touch of the blue-collar poet, and it was read on the radio and reprinted by organizations promoting war bond drives.

But it wasn’t enough for him. All of it—the personal appearances, the syndicated column, the long-running vaudeville shows, being a well-known New Yorker—only left him wanting more. The things he had achieved only served to point out the one thing he hadn’t achieved: fame. And nothing made that disparity more galling than comparing himself with Walter Winchell.

Winchell had been on the radio nonstop since he and Ed were at the
Graphic
, and now Winchell’s show, a half hour of incantatory gossip delivered in a transcendental manic staccato, was followed ritually by nearly a quarter of all Americans. In contrast, Sullivan had never succeeded in getting a show past the six-month point. Winchell was wealthy; Sullivan lived in the Hotel Astor, a residential hotel in a seedy neighborhood. Winchell was courted by Hollywood; Sullivan had been a flop in Hollywood. Winchell was nationally known; Sullivan was a New York celebrity. They both stood on the same pedestal—newspaper columns—but Walter had reached so much higher. In short, Walter was famous, and Ed, clearly, was not.

In Ed’s moodier moments—and he had many of them—he felt this difference acutely. At some point, there’s no record of exactly when, he began to shave a year off his age, as if he was born in 1902 rather than 1901. (He stuck to this so consistently that even the Webster’s Dictionary entry about him lists his birth date as 1902.) He felt he had not accomplished enough for his age. As his father had before him, Ed felt frustrated by his status in life. Something essential was lacking.

Radio was the vehicle that propelled Winchell from mere notoriety to true stardom. Outside of film it was the only medium that pushed a performer, not his words on paper, into the lives of his fans. No amount of vaudeville appearances could compete with the fame-creating magic of the airwaves. Ed, in 1943, saw that now was his time to make a major effort in radio. Regardless of how busy he was, how breakneck his schedule, the time was now. With his war-related columns and his constant high-profile event hosting, his star shone its brightest, his name on more lips and marquees than ever before. It was the time to parley his notoriety into a successful radio show, and finally achieve the fame he had so long desired.

He told his readers the big news on September 11, 1943, in a column entitled “My Secretary, Africa, Speaks.” (The “secretary” format was an imitation of a Winchell trope in which he wrote his column as if it was a note from his personal secretary.) His “secretary” that day wrote her boss an excited note: “
Your CBS radio program tees off Monday night at 7:15 o’clock! Nervous?”

Unlike Ed’s earlier radio shows, mostly straightforward productions, his new program was high concept. Entitled
Ed Sullivan Entertains
, it broadcast from the swank Club 21 nightclub, with the background chatter of the Manhattan nightspot lending urban cachet; as Winchell seemed to allow listeners into the mystique of celebrity lives, so Sullivan would present the ambiance of the smart set. The show more overtly copied Winchell in its signature sound: Walter opened with an urgent telegraph effect; Ed opened with the clickety-clack of a Remington typewriter.

Winchell, of course, never had guests; they would have broken the runic trance of his manic delivery. Ed, with a budget provided by sponsor Mennen Shave Cream,
booked the biggest stars available, including Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich, and Ethel Merman. Along with stage and screen stars he invited little-known personalities from various walks of life, much as he mixed the famous and the hoi polloi in his column.

The show played as if it were capturing Ed in his nightly club hopping, with many of the guests just “dropping in” to say hello to the well-known columnist. (In reality, the show originated from a roped-off area upstairs, so no one just happened by.) A fifteen-minute program, with a commercial break and a newsflash from the
Daily News
“newsroom,”
Ed Sullivan Entertains
moved at an urban pace; no one took the microphone for very long.

In the show’s debut evening, Ed chatted with Irving Berlin about composing “White Christmas,” which won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Song and topped the charts for eleven weeks, no doubt partially spurred by wartime family separation. For all the tune’s popularity, Berlin that night said his favorite of his own songs was “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” the theme to the movie Ed had touted during his Hollywood stint. Also chitchatting with Ed were Marine private Dana Babcock, and the wife of actor Gilbert Roland, then in the military. The guest who “happened by” was actor Melville Cooper, who recently played a supporting role in the Henry Fonda-Maureen O’Hara tearjerker
Immortal Sergeant.

Reviews were generally positive, about the show itself if not its host. One critic apparently struggled to find something positive to say about its headliner: “
Although Sullivan’s voice did not have the weight and authority for this kind of work, it’s no drawback. Different type pipes are welcome.”
Variety
observed that the Marine seemed more comfortable at the microphone than anyone, but that the show was “
a bright quarter hour, having more substance than the usual celebrity interview session in that a name emcee, Sullivan, himself no slouch as a conferencier, is at the helm.”

Because he was so determined to succeed, Ed took the unorthodox step of scripting the entire show—including many of the guests’ responses. The resulting exchanges were highly unnatural, as when Sullivan invited new crooning sensation Frank Sinatra on a show with aging vaudevillian Bert Wheeler. Ed suggested that the veteran Wheeler give young Sinatra some singing advice. Wheeler hesitated, after which Sinatra—in surely the most unlikely request the singer ever made—eagerly implored him to provide vocal coaching. Finally, Wheeler relented:

Wheeler:
Well, Frank, it seems to me that you stand too close to the mike.

Sinatra:
Well, that’s easily corrected. How far away from the mike should I stand?

Wheeler:
If the mike’s here, I’d say you ought to stand around Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Sinatra:
Uh-huh. Any other suggestions?

Wheeler:
Get a collar that fits you. Your collar always looks as though it’s crawling up to whisper in your ear.

Sinatra:
Check—anything else?

Wheeler:
Yes, comb your hair. Just once, comb your hair, and get out of mine.

Not surprisingly, listeners found the canned exchanges far from enchanting; three months into its run the show earned a mediocre 6.4 Hooper rating. That wasn’t all the way at the back of the pack, but it was far from the
Bob Hope Program
at 31.6,
Walter Winchell
at 22.4, or Fred Allen’s
Texaco Star Theater
at 19.8. The sponsor,
Mennen, didn’t see enough interest to justify the expense, and
Ed Sullivan Entertains
was canceled in June 1944. The only consolation for its host, if any, was that its nine-month run was almost twice as long as any other Sullivan show.

Despite the doldrums of his broadcast career, Ed’s lifestyle improved markedly in 1944. A friend of his, Jerry Brady, sat down with him and Sylvia for an earnest conversation. Brady, as Betty recalled, “
didn’t think it was appropriate for us to be living at the Astor Hotel with a young girl.” The couple agreed—the threadbare Astor was no place to raise a child—and the family moved into a suite at the Delmonico, at Park Avenue and 59th Street. Their apartment in this deluxe residential hotel bore little resemblance to their home at the Astor. Located in one of Manhattan’s most desirable neighborhoods, the luxurious three-bedroom suite on the eleventh floor came complete with maids and room service. Its kitchen facilities were almost nonexistent, but Ed and Sylvia had no desire to eat at home; as always they dined out nearly every evening.