Being a star in this world meant getting noticed, being one of those whom others mentioned when they talked about their evening at Lindy’s or Jimmy Kelly’s. One of the best ways to do this was to appear, as frequently as possible, in Broadway’s leading gossip columns. In an era before television these columns had inordinate power on the celebrity social scene. To rate a boldface tidbit in the pages of the News, the Post, or the Mirror meant you were a somebody, you existed, that others would turn their head as you walked in. Ed, as a columnist for the News – far above the ever-shaky Graphic – was now the ultimate insider in this scene. His News berth made him a player, someone whose opinion was talked about and sought after, a leading social arbiter of café society.
The job allowed him to live in his natural habitat. Ed was a nightly sight in Broadway’s openings and ritzy watering holes, dressed in a tailored double-breasted suit, cigarette in hand, hair slicked straight back, socializing with an ever expanding network of performers, politicos, socialites, and athletes. A magazine profile from the mid 1930s described him: “He seldom gets home before five a.m., in the meanwhile having taken in, on a typical night, ’21,’ the Stork Club, the Hollywood, Dave’s Blue Room, Lindy’s and Jimmy Kelly’s…Courvoisier brandy is his only but not single drink: then it’s bed until one or two in the afternoon. The column is written – at home. That takes a couple of hours and Sullivan then drives down to the Daily News, reads his mail and waits while the composing room gives him a proof.”
Central to his column were the vagaries of love among the smart set, the intoxicating sexual merry-go-round of Broadway romance:
“Take, for instance, slender and blonde June Knight…her affairs of the heart have kept my operatives working in double shifts since she arrived here to “hot cha” for Zeigfeld…First it was Elliot Myer…Then it was Elliot Sperber…Succeeded by Leo Friede…Who, in turn gave way to Sailing Baruch Jr…Neil Andrews stepped in when Baruch stepped out…Now it looks as though Tommy Manville Jr. is the lucky guy.”
Ed reported on a mythic group of people who had been liberated from the staid sexual mores of Victorian America. The 1920s had seen a revolution in morals and manners. Women, having picketed the White House and gotten hauled away in paddy wagons, had won the right to vote. Hemlines inched up and young ladies went out on the town by themselves. In 1926 Mae West premiered her play Sex, which scandalized the public with tunes like “Honey, Let Yo’ Drawers Hang Low” – and scored a box office bonanza. And though hemlines had fallen with the Crash, something had been loosened by that giddy decade, and Ed’s column covered the results. He dished out a heady catalog of morsels like “Phil Baker, the only bird who can make love over the top of an accordion” and “Maurice Chevalier, who’d rather go places with his pal Primo Carnera, than make love to Jeanette MacDonald…” Printing material like this would have been forbidden not that many years previously – and would seem merely quaint a few decades hence – but it sold newspapers in the 1930s.