On the RKO lot he visited the set of Bringing Up Baby, the Cary Grant-Katherine Hepburn comedy that featured a 165-pound leopard. Ed reported that one of the bit players had been on a drinking binge, so director Howard Hawks decided to play a practical joke, summoning the actor to the office, placing the sleeping leopard on a chair, then leaving the partially inebriated fellow alone with the big cat. The incident may or may not have happened (it sounds suspiciously pre-packaged for visiting reporters), but it’s exactly the kind of thing RKO hoped Ed would write; by giving him access and feeding him morsels they were generating free publicity.
By the end of his first week he had set up a Sunday golf date with Fred Astaire. The outings with Astaire at the Bel-Air Country Club would become a constant, with Ed and Fred typically joined for a foursome by other film colony members, like Douglas Fairbanks or David Niven. Ed often wrote about his matches with Astaire, as when he described the dancer’s golf technique: “’I am not envious generally,’ says Astaire, ‘but I do envy anyone who plays good golf.’ Later, on the course, he shows us how he hit those golf balls during his dance in ‘Carefree’ and after his preparatory dance he whaled a drive 250 yards straight down the middle. Can you imagine how nutty he’d drive an opponent if before every shot he did a jig?” And, after a later outing: “Fred Astaire and your correspondent are feeling very happy this bright February morning, incidentally…we teamed up at Bel-Air against Randy Scott and Tyrone Power, and beat them in a harrowing match that will go down in golf history (at least our golf history)…”
Also in his first week he visited the MGM lot to chat with Joan Crawford and director Frank Borzage, who stopped work on Mannequin for the publicity effort. Sullivan and Crawford had tangled in New York a few years earlier, when Ed tried to enlist her to appear in a charity event he was hosting and she refused. He had taken journalistic revenge, writing in his column, “One wonders how Joan Crawford has gotten this far in show business with so little talent.” Crawford had hit back, sending an open letter to a fan magazine decrying Sullivan’s efforts as “cheap, tawdry and gangster journalism.” But on the set of Mannequin, all was apparently well between the screen goddess and the new Hollywood columnist. Crawford, according to Ed, greeted him warmly: “’The nite we had dinner at 21 in New York I said you belong in Hollywood,’ remembers La Crawford, ‘And here you are…’” For Ed, who had so often attacked “phonies” in his column, his report of an affectionate meeting with Crawford was a remarkable about-face.
****
But life was different on the Coast, and Ed knew it. Although he came to Hollywood as an established columnist for a major newspaper, he was a guest in a world owned by the film colony’s reigning gossips, Louella Parsons and her new archrival Hedda Hopper. Parsons, syndicated by Hearst, and Hopper, syndicated by the Chicago Tribune and published in the Los Angeles Times, ruthlessly dominated Hollywood stars, exacting homage and wielding the power of their huge readership with an iron hand. There were other gossips in Hollywood, notably Jimmy Fidler, the onetime actor turned radio host, and legions of scribes for movie pulps, but none had the studio access that Parsons and Hopper did. The manner in which these two enthroned columnists plied their trade defined the gossip business in Hollywood, and Ed was bound to live in the system they perpetuated.