Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan by James Maguire Read Free Book Online

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 ,