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

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,