Mickey Rooney, who could not match his schedule to ours for taping.
After the show Jack Benny asked me why I hadn’t invited him on. “I don’t know you as well as I do the others,” I replied. “I wasn’t sure you’d respond.”
“I’d have loved to,” said Jack. “You’ve no idea the pressure Ed put on me to appear with him when he started his shows.”
Just for the record, these are the people, in alphabetical order, who did make their appearances on “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood”: Lucille Ball, Anne Bauchens, Stephen Boyd, Francis X. Bushman, John Cassavetes, Gary Cooper, Ricardo Cortez, Robert Cummings, William Daniels, Marion Davies, Walt Disney, Janet Gaynor, Bob Hope, Hope Lange, Harold Lloyd, Jody McCrea, Liza Minnelli, Don Murray, Ramon Novarro, Anthony Perkins, Debbie Reynolds, Teddy Rooney, Venetia Stevenson, James Stewart, Gloria Swanson, King Vidor, and the four Westmore brothers.
Ed blasted me twice before I tried to fire back. He was still banging away like thirty-nine weeks of “Wagon Train.” He tried another tactic. He complained to two show-business unions, the Screen Actors’ Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, that he found me guilty of “the most grievous form of payola.” “Here,” he said, “is a columnist using plugs in a column to get performers free.”
For this, I called him a liar. I have never pressured anybody to do anything for me in my life. On the air on January 10, the Hopper show did fine. Our rating matched Ed’s exactly—and we were brand-new. He didn’t appear that evening on his own show. His ulcer wouldn’t let him.
There was an epilogue. The United Services Organization gave a benefit luncheon at $25 a plate for Mary Martin at the Hotel Pierre in New York. I sat on the dais, due to make a speech, near Ed Sullivan, who was billed to introduce me. At least two hundred people at the other tables knew what had gone on between us, including Mary Patterson of the News, Joe’s widow.
Ed mumbled his few opening words without looking at me. I know the whole room was hoping I’d let fly. I said: “Thank you very much, Mr. Sullivan. That is the most beautiful introduction you have ever given me.” Then I went on with my speech.
“I expected fireworks,” Mary Patterson told me afterward.
“I wouldn’t do that to Mary Martin,” said I.