Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (8 page)

The
Evening Mail
continued to assign the young reporter an ever-widening area of coverage. During 1921 and 1922 Ed churned out four or five articles a week, and by 1923 he earned sports reporter-at-large status, writing tartly trenchant accounts of horse races, swim meets, and tennis matches—he dubbed court ace Helen Wills “little poker face” for her ability to baffle opponents. He also garnered sought-after professional boxing and baseball assignments. He brought the immediacy of the ring into his pieces, as in his report of the Pal Moore-Frankie Jerome bout at Madison Square Garden:

“Moore, who is reported to be a Klu [
sic
] Klux, was in rare form last night, and his laughable antics redeemed the show from being an utter failure. Pal slapped at Jerome from every angle of the landscape, and when he wasn’t slapping the Bronx youngster all over the ring he kept the crowd roaring by jigging. The combination was too much for Jerome and, although he did his best to land a damaging punch, Moore made him look ridiculous.

“Jerome, time and again, swung viciously at the dancing, tantalizing figure in front of him, only to miss and zigzag around in a semicircle, when Moore deftly stepped out of range. Every time Jerome missed—and he missed plenty—Moore would cuff him dizzy with an open-glove slap that for all their lightness enabled the southerner to pile up an enormous advantage.”

Ed often used a sly humor in his pieces, as in his explanation of “the razzberry,” the characteristic form of booing used in New York sporting events:

“Slipping the gentle razzberry is America’s most expressive indoor sport. The razzberry, one of this country’s best beloved vegetables, conveys a distinct thought to the razzberr-ee and the value of this thought is measured by the tone, displacement, and volume of the gentle razz.… [One evening at Madison Square Garden] all was silent as the announcement cut its way through the smoke clouds hanging over the ring and mounted into the galleries, but ere the echoes of Joe’s voice had died away the gentle razz began to pervade the summer air. Louder and louder it grew until the whole Garden was rocking to its tune.”

In the spring of 1923 the
Mail
paid Sullivan a career-boosting compliment, placing his photo above his column on a weekly basis. His headshot portrayed him as dapper in a coat and tie, gazing out with a determined mug into the middle distance. Ed Sullivan was now a known personality, a sports expert, a wise guy whose dictums were agreed with or disparaged in barroom banter. The twenty-one-year-old reporter’s coverage kept growing in color and humor, as in his profile of boxing promoter Jimmy Johnston:

“Down and out a hundred times, busted at one time or other in every State in the Union, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams at intervals, but always game, the Boy Bandit’s fantastic career has ceased to startle the crowd who have been sunburned under the bulge of the great White Way.

“Daniel Webster would have liked Jimmy a lot had he known him. For James Joy breathes, sleeps, and eats most of the glowing adjectives that the elder Webster corralled for our convenience.

“Words are Jimmy’s pet diet. All advertising men, believers in publicity, like to dabble with ’em; in fact, they have to. Johnston, greatest publicity man the modern world has ever produced, not only dabbles with syllables. He makes them sit up and beg, and his finished products are evidence complete that Jimmy learned more than a little of human nature in his nomadic tours of the world.

“King Tut received a lot of publicity when they trumped his coffin with a spade, but if the Bronx word juggler had been on the job we’d have learned more about Tut in one story than we gleaned from a batch of star correspondence in a month of overtime labor. In fact, Jimmy could have written better stuff sitting behind a ‘mill’ in his publicity bureau in the West Forties than was cabled by the writers on the spot.”

During Ed’s many long nights spent watching cabaret acts at the Silver Slipper, he became friendly with the club’s owners, a trio of syndicate crime figures named Owney Madden, Frankie Marlow, and Bill Duffy. The syndicate plowed some of its enormous profits from illegal liquor sales into business interests in horse racing and boxing. Marlow owned ponies and oversaw the management of two fighters, and Duffy had an interest in boxer Primo Camera, a lumbering mountain of a man who would briefly hold the heavyweight title. According to Broadway scuttlebutt, these syndicate figures saw benefit in socializing with sports reporters, expecting it to improve coverage of their investments in pugilists and racehorses.

The trio of mobsters welcomed the
Mail
’s young sports reporter. “
At the club, we used to sit at Frankie Marlow’s own table,” Ed said. “Bill Duffy would join us.” One evening as Ed chatted with Duffy and Marlow at the Slipper, they were joined by Larry Fay, a racketeer and taxi fleet operator who wanted to enter the burgeoning speakeasy business. “
Fay had just bought the Rendezvous from Marlow and Duffy and apparently he hadn’t paid up,” Sullivan said. “I heard Marlow call him over—remember, this guy Fay was pretty tough himself—and Marlow said to him, ‘Just a reminder, Larry, I gotta get the dough by Monday or you’ll find your ears lopped off.’

“That’s how friendly I was with those guys. I got to overhear a conversation like that. I remember that line about lopping off the ears.…”

Ed’s friendship with vaudeville dancer Lou Clayton often brought him to Club Durant, a speakeasy on West 58th Street. Soon after Jimmy Durante opened the club in early 1923, it became one of the city’s most notorious nightspots. Because Durante and Clayton were close friends, the soft-shoe man was present most nights. With his tough demeanor, Clayton was given the task of checking the patrons’ guns, storing them on ice (he considered it a good hiding spot) until they left. The intimate club, seating one hundred thirty-five and decked out with black velvet walls, stayed open until 7
A.M.
, and was a popular hangout for mobsters, whose business was flourishing with Prohibition. One small-time hood told Durante that he had “
brought some sunshine into the lives of the mob.”

Club Durant catered to big spenders: the entrance fee was a hefty $4 and a gallon of illegal wine fetched $25. Its orchestra played until dawn, and, noted one patron, “
There are winsome girlies, too, who run true to cabaret type in conformation, appointment and program.” The club’s star was Durante himself, especially when he performed his wildly physical routine called “Wood.” As the band vamped brassy honky-tonk music, Durante mugged through a song and dance routine that entailed smashing every wooden item on stage. At the act’s climax, with the band screaming full bore, he tore apart a piano piece by piece and threw it into the orchestra (the musicians ducked artfully). The audience roared and laughed and demanded more as Durante dismembered the instrument. Ed, sitting in the audience sometime around 3
A.M.
drinking illegal spirits, was so impressed he would book the act decades later.

The high point of the reporter’s career in 1923 was his September interview with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, then in New York for a title bout. The pugilist was America’s idol that fall. Boxing was an ascendant sport in the 1920s and “The Manassas Mauler” led the way. His 1921 match against George Carpentier had boasted the first $1-million gate, and Dempsey was now the country’s highest paid athlete. His fabled “long count” match against Gene Tunney in 1927 would be one of the decade’s signature events. Having knocked down Tunney, Dempsey stood over him instead of returning to his corner, delaying the referee’s count; those few extra seconds allowed Tunney to recover, after which he went on to win. Whether Dempsey would have won had he quickly returned to his corner was debated endlessly in barrooms across the country.

For Sullivan, who idolized sports figures (an idolization that continued throughout his life), meeting the champion was like being ushered into the presence of a Greek god. Even more heart-fluttering, Dempsey greeted the young reporter in his room at the Alamac Hotel, and invited Ed to join him for breakfast. “
When I knocked at Dempsey’s door, he opened it himself—and I remember how big he looked,” Ed recalled. “He seemed to fill the doorway. He was wearing a loud striped bathrobe and he was smiling.” As they sat eating breakfast, the two men found common ground apart from the reporter—athlete interview. Sullivan, noticing a grapefruit packed in a bowl of ice, noted that he had never seen it served that way—he had never eaten in a restaurant in his youth. Dempsey one-upped him in terms of a humble background. The boxer said he had never seen grapefruit at all as a kid.

Simpatico established, Sullivan and Dempsey would consider themselves friends from then on, staying in touch through the years. Toward the end of their lives they often had lunch together on Saturdays at Dempsey’s Broadway restaurant, talking about old times.

In October 1923, Ed’s reporting career took a hard turn to the left. The
New York Call
, the city’s socialist newspaper, was revamping its format. Its new name was the
New York Leader
, and its self-proclaimed goal was to be “
more than a propaganda organ. To be a REAL newspaper.” Its meager sports section, limited to desultory coverage of baseball and boxing, was being expanded to cover all major sports. It needed an editor to oversee its new sports staff of six contributors. Ed, at age twenty-two, saw the job as a chance for advancement.

If moving from the
Port Chester Daily Item
to the New York
Evening Mail
had been a journey to a different world, Ed’s jump to the
Leader
required a still more
fantastic voyage. The paper had so vigorously opposed U.S. involvement in World War I that it was prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Its offices were raided and wrecked during the “Red Scare” of 1919, a government campaign to harass suspected communists prompted by the recent Bolshevik overthrow of Russia. Later, the
Leader
published articles supportive of Sacco and Venzetti, the Italian radicals whose politically charged trial and subsequent conviction stirred controversy throughout the 1920s.

Although the paper’s leftist sympathies were wide in scope—it published a sex education column by Margaret Sanger that included her writings about birth control—its chief focus was the burgeoning organized labor movement. The
Leader
provided detailed coverage of labor—management battles, with headlines like “
Printers Win 44-Hour Week” and “Alabama National Guard Set Serious Precedent in Suppressing Miners.” Its hero was socialist labor organizer Eugene V. Debs (“
Eugene V. Debs, former political prisoner of the United States government, would not leave San Francisco until he had visited Tom Mooney in his prison cell in San Quentin.”). The paper published a weekly listing of all the socialist meetings in New York, and also espoused brotherhood with its communist compatriots overseas, with stories like “
Russian Workmen Made Sharers in Prosperity.” The
Leader
’s publisher, Norman Thomas, would be the Socialist Party presidential candidate from 1928 to 1948, and would help launch the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Ed, as the
Leader
’s sports editor, was also its top sports columnist. His column,
East Side—West Side, All Around the Town
, covered any sports topic he found interesting. For his debut piece on October 1 he wrote his own version of a workers’ solidarity piece, skewering racetracks and baseball stadiums for overcharging the common man. Baseball teams, he pointed out, haul in great sums from their fans—up to $1 million in the recent season, by his count—yet the best seats for the upcoming World Series tickets were set at the unconscionably high price of $6 a seat. “
Instead of acknowledging the fans’ support throughout the season by a reduction in current baseball admission prices the judge boosted them, evidently using reverse English to arrive at his decision,” Ed opined. “It’s a great old world.”