Dear Ed: You’re sick. Sincerely, Frank. P.S. Sick, sick, sick!
As a newsprint neighbor, his “Broadway” often runs cheek by jowl with my “Hollywood” in the News, though the Chicago Tribune won’t print him. I’d been asked several times to go on his show and be introduced from the audience. He received the standard reply: “Mr. Sullivan, when I appear on TV, I go as a guest and get paid for it.” The Screen Actors’ Guild ruled long ago that an interview doesn’t constitute a performance, since it tends to promote the career of the player involved. The union set a minimum pay scale of $210 for interviews.
That was what I paid each of a long list of stars who agreed to appear in interview format on “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” a Sunday television hour that Talent Associates arranged for me to do for NBC, 8 to 9 P.M., while Ed was on CBS at the same time. I took on the show to see how TV and I got along together, on the understanding that there’d be five more similar shows if I liked it. But Ed was told that I was going to do the half dozen for certain. That’s what got his bowels in an uproar.
The rumble gave us a singularly un-merry Christmas. The only time we could hire the big MCA studio we needed for one hour was on Friday, December 25. Use of the sound stage there for sixty minutes cost $1000, plus double pay for the crew. I had another taping session set up for three days later, with Ben-Hur’s Charlton Heston, who had given his promise five weeks earlier and cabled from London that he would land in Hollywood on Sunday, December 27, ready to work with me the following day.
I didn’t know a blessed thing about it until I read it in the News, but Ed was scared I was going to steal his TV audience. He’d been busy trying to engage extra stars for his show, including Heston, who turned up that Sunday evening, the twenty-seventh, on Sullivan’s soiree, reading from the Bible for a $10,000 fee.
On the Monday, three other actors from Ben-Hur—Stephen Boyd, Francis X. Bushman, and Ramon Novarro—sat waiting with me for Heston, all of us made up and rarin’ to go. At the appointed hour of 2 P.M. a telephone call reached the studio from his agent, Johnny Dugan of MCA. “I have advised Mr. Heston,” he told me, “not to come on your show.”
“That is very kind of you. Might I ask why?”
He had assumed the program would be local, not network, said Johnny. “He’s negotiating for two more shows with Ed Sullivan, and he’s afraid this might jeopardize those two engagements.”
“What about his promise, as a man, that he would appear with me? When did he arrange with Mr. Ed Sullivan to go on last Sunday?”
“I don’t rightly remember,” said Johnny Dugan.