Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (7 page)

Sullivan never wrote a single story for the
Post.
He arrived in Hartford the week before Christmas, and two days later the employees learned the bad news: the paper had been sold and everyone was losing their jobs. Ed had two weeks severance pay in his pocket and no idea what to do. Embarrassed at what he saw as his failure, he devised a plan to keep the paper’s closing a secret from his family. He rented a cheap room in a Hartford boarding house and found a stock boy’s job in the basement of a department store. When he went home on the weekends he used his severance pay to be a big man about town, as if he were still the
Post
’s sports reporter. Underneath the façade he was terrified and kept hoping something would turn up.

Luck shined on him. A former colleague at the
Item
, Jack Lawrence, had found work at the New York
Evening Mail.
He wrote Ed a reference letter, which Ed sent to the
Mail
’s management. Just a few weeks after the
Post
folded he received a letter from Sam Murphy, one of the
Mail
’s sports editors. The New York paper hired Sullivan to cover high school and college sports. If the job offer in Hartford had been a major opportunity, landing the big city post was a minor miracle. Ed went home to Port Chester to trumpet his accomplishment.

Just before he began working in New York, his mother said to him, “
I read about the Hartford paper failing, Edward. Since Christmas I’ve been praying for you.”

Ed was nineteen years old when he reported for duty at the
Evening Mail
’s offices in lower Manhattan in early 1921. New York City, a far different burg than the one his family had fled years earlier, now cantered at a markedly faster clip. In 1917 the city had boasted of an important benchmark: for the first time, its streets were crowded with more motor vehicles (one hundred fourteen thousand) than horses (one hundred eight thousand). As the financial hub of the country that had turned the tide in the Great War, the city strode with a pronounced spring in its step; New York now stood shoulder to shoulder with world capitols like London and Paris. And it was an easy town in which to be naughty; after Prohibition went into effect in January 1920, the city’s drinking establishments more than doubled in number. Gentlemen—and now even ladies—could quench their thirst almost anywhere. Speakeasies were illegal, of course, and the Ladies Temperance Union warned of the demon rum, but that merely added an extra thrill to hoisting a cocktail.

Ed’s reporting work in Port Chester had hardly prepared him for what he was about to attempt. While the
Port Chester Daily Item
still considered a carriage crash front-page news, the
Evening Mail
’s front page was a riot of national and international news, with more than twenty headlines crowding page one: Wall Street, Broadway, American and European politics, crime and corruption, the arts, women aviators—all the world, or so it seemed, was contained in its pages. In January, Ed’s first month, Paramount Pictures founder Adolph Zukor contributed a piece to the
Mail
’s entertainment section: “I predict a year’s run for pictures on Broadway, so confident am I of the character and drawing power of the picture of the future.” That same month the paper opined, with more optimism than accuracy, that “No Occupation Bars Women Now” (“Girls Today May Be Steamboat Captain, Bank Director, Steel ‘Man’—and No One Will Say Her Nay”). American mores were changing, and the
Mail
was keeping track. “Ban on Petting Parties? No! Chorus Columbia Men” (“Petting parties are only successful if played with a ‘20th-century girl,’ a Columbia man declared”).

Ed was overwhelmed. At the
Item
he had turned in handwritten articles, but the composing room at the
Mail
quickly let him know this wouldn’t pass muster. One of Sullivan’s editors, Jack Jackowitz, demanded that the new hire learn how to type. So Ed found an unused typewriter and spent hours copying editorials from
The New York Times
, hunting and pecking with two fingers.

Typing was the least of what he had to learn. His writing at the
Item
had been plucky, often tongue-in-cheek and flavored with unabashed hometown vinegar. But for the
Mail
Ed attempted to write in what he thought was a more sophisticated style, resulting in some frozen prose. On January 13, his column,
College Sports, Notes and Gossip
, displayed his unease:

“The Columbia
Spectator
directs attention to the fact that although the army athletic authorities are correct in stating that although no monetary advantages accrue to the athletes who enroll at the academy, that very fact that football stars are allowed to play another four seasons of varsity ball after entering West Point is sufficient inducement for a great number of collegiate luminaries.”

As Ed struggled through January it was unclear as to whether he would succeed at the
Mail.
An editor suggested that reporting might not be the career for him. When he was assigned to cover the annual Westminster dog show at Madison Square Garden in early February, he immediately assumed it was an effort by one of his editors to embarrass him. The assignment could be his last, he worried—he knew nothing about dog breeds.

At the show, he overheard a little girl ask her mother, “
How do they wash their faces with all those wrinkles?” Inspired by this simplistic question, Sullivan decided to drop his attempt at big city sophistication—which clearly wasn’t working—and have fun with the piece. He wrote:

“The truth of the matter is that the harassed dogs have been patted and petted to death, and now, tired and exhausted, big dogs and little dogs alike are not above grabbing off a surreptitious nap at each and every opportunity.… The fond caresses of the visiting proletariat have undermined the morale of the defenseless bologna-questers.”

A theme emerged in this piece that would run throughout Ed’s newspaper work for years to come: he resented the affluent. He saw himself as distinctly apart from them, and took every opportunity to poke fun at the moneyed classes. There were two groups of people at the Madison Square Garden event, he explained, and it was easy to tell them apart.

“The former class converse knowingly of the days when Hector was a pup, assume Rolls Royce grins, and park their patrician selves within the sacred precincts of the rings. The latter class gets nailed for life memberships in every dog society in the world and buys cartons of dog biscuits at the behest of total strangers.”

As he went home that night after turning in the piece, he began to worry. “
I became more and more terrified as I imagined what the sophisticated New York sportswriters would think when they picked up this piece of whimsy,” he said.

On the way to work the next morning he bought the
Mail
, and, reading the paper on the train, was amazed to see that the story had been given prominent play. It was spread across two columns—a first for him. The nineteen-year-old reporter was mesmerized by the success of his article. Rather than complete his trip downtown, he kept riding the train uptown and downtown, repeatedly reading his piece as he traveled in a circuit. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to point out the story to a fellow train rider. If there was a single moment when he felt he had “made it” in the big city, this was it.

The lesson he learned, he later explained, was that he would fail if he tried to be sophisticated. The only approach that would work for him was the one that came naturally. Ed had to be Ed; any other strategy was bound for failure. In truth his writing style would soon adopt every bit of the 25-cent sophistication of his fellow New York sports reporters. But he recounted this anecdote in the 1950s, when his decidedly unsophisticated television persona was under fire from critics, and anecdotes like this seemed to justify his unadorned stage manner.

That May he wrote his first front-page story, covering a collegiate boat race between Princeton, Columbia, and Penn State on the Harlem River: “
The challenge was met with a quick acceleration of the Columbia stroke, and from that [
sic
] on the two boats fought it out stroke for stoke, while the crowds went wild.” Throughout 1921 Ed inched his way up the
Mail
’s masthead, getting promoted to cover professional golf and tennis in addition to college sports. By the end of the year his writing had regained the cheeky humor of his Port Chester reports. Covering swimmer Helen Wainwright, who had just broken four world records in the 500-yard freestyle, he observed her at lunch. His goal, he wrote, was to discover what makes a champion. “
Miss Wainwright ordered a club sandwich, a piece of watermelon, a large slice of lemon meringue pie, ice cream and a glass of milk, and after stowing that away the youngster started on a box of chocolates. Of such stuff are champions made.”

With his promotion Sullivan earned $75 a week, a handsome salary in the early 1920s when a furnished room in Manhattan rented for well under $50 a month. He had lived at home in his early
Mail
days, but with his raise he rented an apartment in midtown, on West 48th Street, over a bar called Duffy’s Tavern. Equipped with a place of his own, he dipped a tentative toe into the swirling waters of Manhattan nightlife. At first, the Port Chester boy was ill at ease, yet he soon found a tour
guide. The
Mail
’s boxing editor managed a fighter named Johnny Dundee, then a top featherweight contender, and he introduced him to Ed. The twenty-seven-year-old boxer, born Giuseppe Carrora in Sicily, had fought professionally since age seventeen. He won the junior lightweight title in 1921 and the featherweight title in 1923. He would later be inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame and become such a revered ring hero that Angelo Mirena, Muhammad Ali’s lead trainer, legally changed his surname to Dundee in Johnny’s honor.

Ed and Johnny became fast friends. As a celebrity athlete, Dundee had entrée to the city’s most exclusive haunts. The boxer took Ed under his wing, introducing him to major figures in many walks of life. In the late 1930s Sullivan recalled how Dundee had shown him around, and how Ed “
died a thousand deaths every time he met a celebrity, but didn’t want to let on.”

Now that Ed was a New York fellow he wanted to look like one, and he spent every penny of his
Mail
salary to do so. He outfitted himself in high-quality hand-tailored suits and shirts; photos from the period show him to be nattily attired, with his hair slicked back, often sporting a fedora. One of the
Mail
’s advertisers was the Durant motorcar company, which must have caught Ed’s eye; he was soon motoring around town in his own Durant roadster. As a young man he was ruddily handsome, with wavy auburn hair and strong blue eyes, his masculine mien reflecting the glow of his Port Chester athleticism.

On weekends he drove home to date his Port Chester sweetheart, Alma Burnes, but during the week he pursued the young women he met in New York’s nightclubs. The
Mail
referred to these female speakeasy habitués as “flappers”; in the 1890s the term referred to a young prostitute, but by the 1920s it had come to mean any girl with a thin, boyish figure and an informal manner. The flappers lived up to their reputation for flouting convention. The practice of young women frequenting drinking establishments by themselves was new, and frowned upon by many. Worse, many of the flappers wore dresses with hemlines a full twelve inches above the ground and visibly used cosmetics, and some even smoked in public.

Ed’s favorite nightspot was the Silver Slipper, on West 48th Street, a roaring upscale speakeasy not far from his apartment. He was there almost every night, cigarette and drink in hand. His Port Chester shyness long gone, he was now an avid socializer, a natural glad-hander who conversed with anyone and everyone. One of those he became friends with was Joe Moore, a top speed skater who would compete in the 1924 Olympics, and later become a press agent who worked with Ed.

More than lighting up his nights, the Slipper and other Broadway speakeasies introduced Ed to show business. He sat in jam-packed audiences as dozens of New York’s biggest acts strutted and twirled, like dancer Ruby Keeler, who later high-stepped in a raft of Busby Berkeley musicals, and Van and Schenk, a vaudeville comedy-music duo who crooned “All She’d Say Was ‘Umh Hum.’ ” Ed described the Slipper as the “
hottest of the ‘hot’ spots when the heat was turned on … [full of] sporty, informal rendezvous with semi-nude chorines nodding to big shots, half-hidden by pitchers of fizzing champagne.… Where Ruby Keeler, with a gold chain … did a tap dance that was later to intrigue Al Jolson.”

Ed spent many late evenings enjoying the comedy-music-dance act of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. The trio didn’t limit their antics to the stage; instead, they hurled themselves around the club in rough, exuberantly riotous routines. Ed became
good friends with one of the trio, tap dancer Lou Clayton, who by one account was a “
soft shoe man, tough guy, gambler, and with the ladies, a gentleman.” Sullivan and Clayton sometimes stayed out all night, completing their nocturnal revelries with a round of golf as the sun came up.