Earl Wilson: It Happened Last Night

We’re not sure, but we think Earl Wilson (1907-1987) may be the last of the great classic gossip columnists we’ve gotten to covering here: we’ve already had Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons. Wilson’s syndicated column “It Happened Last Night” ran for over 40 years (1942-1983) and chronicled his nightly peregrinations of the Broadway social scene (theatres and bars like Toots Shor‘s) with “B.W.” (Beautiful Wife Rosemary) on his arm. He was said to have had widespread respect throughout the business because (as compared with his colleagues) his background and training in journalism meant that his whispers were both sourced and fact-checked. His gossip wasn’t idle.

Wilson had come up the hard way. An Ohio farm kid, he’d started out writing for high school papers then college papers and small town local papers, and then the Columbus Dispatch, then the Washington Post (when it was a much less important paper than it is now), then the New York Post.

Like all the major columnists he became something of a a celebrity himself. As often happens, he initially thrust himself into the media spotlight to promote his books. His first book, a humor collection called Pike’s Peak or Bust got him on Fred Allen’s radio show in 1946 (they seem to have been friends, Wilson mentioned Allen a lot in his column). Marx Brothers fans will remember his 1947 appearance inCopacabana with Groucho and Carmen Miranda. In 1949 and 1950 he starred in a series of shorts for Columbia called Cavalcade of Broadway. From 1951 to 1952 he had his own variety and talk show on the Dumont Network called Stage Entrance. And in 1957 he had a regular segment on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show called “America After Dark”. He appeared on game shows like Who Said That? and To Tell the Truth, and variety shows like The Morey Amsterdam Show,Faye Emerson’s Wonderful Town, The Red Skelton Hour, The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Ed Sullivan Show, and many others. You can also see him (as himself) in the films A Face in the Crowd (1957)  College Confidential (1960), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) and Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (1968). In the late ’60s and early ’70s he did the requisite rounds of talks show (Merv, Dick Cavett, David Frost,Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas). He also hosted local NYC radio shows.

Wilson’s later books include The Beautiful Wives Cookbook: Glittering Recipes from Celebrities Kitchens (1970), The Show Business Nobody Knows (1971), Show Business Laid Bare (1975), Frank Sinatra: An Authorized Biography (1976), and Hot Times: True Tales of Hollywood and Broadway (1984).

To learn more about show biz history please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.