Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan by James Maguire

soiree Sullivan presented Al Jolson, the vaudeville singer whose blackface performance in the first talkie, 1927’s The Jazz Singer , helped introduce a new Hollywood era.
    Being a master of ceremonies was a job that Ed found that he liked immensely. It put the young columnist right were he wanted to be, in the spotlight.

    The Graphic employee that Sullivan would have the most longstanding relationship with was Walter Winchell, the paper’s gossip columnist and its biggest star. An egoistic workaholic whose column commanded the attention of Manhattan’s “in crowd” as well as those with their nose pressed against the window, Winchell is considered the original show business gossip columnist. Other publications covered Broadway, and gossip was a staple of newspapers long before Winchell, but he combined the two with a go-for-the-jugular ethic and streetwise verbal wit like no one before him. Graphic readers could hardly wait to read Your Broadway and Mine , his irreverent daily peephole into the lives of the rich and famous.
    In an age when it was viewed as improper to report even a pregnancy, the Graphic allowed Winchell to chronicle the glamorous classes in intimate detail, including divorces, affairs, courtships, and illnesses. With a sprawling network of sources and a rat-a-tat-tat machine gun style, he exposed the peccadilloes of the well known seemingly without censor. That he was widely read didn’t mean he was widely loved. In fact he was loathed by many, by those who felt his skewering of the status quo was immoral, and by those whose secrets he exposed. But Winchell didn’t care. He was driven by his column. The public felt profoundly ambiguous about him—as it did about the Graphic itself—with some calling him a corrupting influence, but he sold newspapers.
    And Winchell was powerful. Broadway shows sold more or less tickets and starlets gained or lost bookings based on his pronouncements, which were repeated up and down the Main Stem, as Broadway was known. Over time he would become a one-man media empire. At his height in the late 1930s and 1940s, Winchell’s column wassyndicated in more than two thousand newspapers, and his hit radio show was talked about across the country. It’s estimated that more than half the adult population either read his column or heard his broadcast. As his influence grew, so did the scope of his subject matter. In addition to Broadway and Hollywood celebrities, he dispensed pithy opinions on novels, records, radio programs, and even national affairs, on which he editorialized with a populist bent. His seat-of-the-pants take on current affairs was so well regarded that government officials established a liaison to court his influence, and he was called to the White House on a number of occasions.
    Over decades, Sullivan and Winchell would have a complicated relationship. It was often described as a feud, and it was that; the two squabbled bitterly. But at times they had something of a friendship and could be warm and almost brotherly. Each had reason to dislike the other. Ed felt deeply envious of Walter, whose column made him more famous than many of the stars he wrote about. Walter, for his part, was highly insecure, and disliked even his minor competitors, like a popular sports columnist with his photo atop his column. A loner with few, if any, real friends, Winchell was not susceptible to Sullivan’s easygoing glad-handing, and tended to be unimpressed with “Eddie Sullivan,” as he sometimes called him.
    The feud-friendship began as soon as the two met. One of their early skirmishes involved Emile Gauvreau, the Graphic ’s tough, shrewd editor. Gauvreau came to the paper from the Hartford Courant , a respected small paper, and he retained some memory of journalistic ethics. Paradoxically, Gauvreau supervised the Graphic ’s fabricated news stories but tried to rein in Winchell as the columnist pushed the prim boundaries of 1920s propriety. After Winchell included