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Like his father, Ed never made it to college. He got part-time jobs at factories, played semi-pro baseball (catcher), before finally becoming the sports editor of the Item at $12 a week. Ed next moved to the Hartford Post and at last made the grade as a Manhattan sportswriter on the New York Evening Mail, where he says he coined the phrase "Little Miss Poker Face" for Tennis Champion Helen Wills. In his early days as a reporter, Ed was frequently mistaken for a rising young actor named Humphrey Bogart, who also had high cheekbones and a deadpan expression.
During the roaring 1920s, Ed turned up on the noisiest and brashest of Manhattan's tabloids, the scandal-shrieking Evening—Graphic, where Walter Winchell was beginning his labors in the vineyard of gossip. The meeting of Sullivan and Winchell was explosive. Out of their four years together on the Graphic grew a feud that lasts to this day. Says Ed: "Winchell's all through—and I'm an expert on Winchelliana. I've followed him like a hawk. He's a dead duck. He couldn't be resuscitated by injections at half-hour intervals."
Gossip Monger. In 1926, Ed saw an attractive brunette sitting at a nightclub table with some friends of his. He joined them and met 20-year-old Sylvia Weinstein. He promptly invited Sylvia to a heavyweight fight between Jack Sharkey and Harry Wills. It was the first prizefight Sylvia had ever seen, and she recalls that she tried hard to like it. Three and a half years later, Ed and Sylvia were married in the rectory of a Roman Catholic Church in West Orange, N.J. Sylvia has remained a Jew, but their daughter Betty has been raised a Catholic. Meanwhile, Winchell left the Graphic for the Daily Mirror, and Louis Sobol replaced him as Broadway columnist. When Sobol joined the Journal-American, Sports Editor Sullivan inherited the Broadway assignment. "I didn't want the job, but it was either take it or be fired. I took it, but determined never to rap anyone the way Winchell does. I don't think I have the right to pass final judgment on other people's behavior."
When the Graphic folded in 1932, Ed and his column moved into the Daily News. He has been there ever since, but his syndicated column (35 papers) now appears two times a week instead of five. Though at war with Winchell, Ed—like a good general—learned a great deal from his enemy. Winchell emceed a stage show at Manhattan's Paramount, using the pressure of his column to line up good acts at a nominal cost. Ed did the same and earned $3,750 for a one-week stand. He was always available as a master of ceremonies for charity benefits, and this practice paid its first dividend when the News had Ed take over the job of running its annual Harvest Moon Ball.