Eddie Sherman Tells All

Eddie Sherman is not who you think he is. He is not the urbane confidant to the stars that you came to trust for celebrity gossip in MidWeek and the Honolulu Advertiser over the past half century.

Nor is he the hapa Don Ho that you might expect from the picture you saw next to his column, with his “no worries” smile and curly mop of hair.

Rather Eddie, born Eli Sherman, is the original Mainland blue collar product. He was born the child of poor Russian Jewish immigrants who had fled the Cossacks’ antiSemitic persecution at the turn of the century. Arriving in Boston, illiterate and unable to speak English, they had only one option in those days: the sweat-shops. Safe in the United States, they were free from the Cossacks but too poor to raise a child.

Sherman found himself in orphanages and abusive foster homes growing up, finding the only release for his inner turmoil in boxing. A bum shoulder derailed not only his boxing career, but his fledgling Coast Guard career, and set him bound for work at Pearl Harbor as a sheet metal helper. A desperate move by an abandoned man in a country at war, but a move that would flip his world upside down.

“I remember that first morning at Pearl Harbor,” recalls Sherman, “and feeling the trade winds go across my face like a velvet glove. It is something I will never forget.”

That touch began a love affair with the Islands, forcing a Boston boy to rediscover his R’s in order to work in radio and renew his childhood admiration of Walter Winchell’s three-dot style in order to command the Island’s attention on all things celebrity. He approached the work with the same blue collar attitude with which he was raised.

“You want to be a coal miner and dig out the coal, you go in there with a shovel,” says Sherman. “Most journalists just think the stories come over the transom, but you have to go out there and get them.”

Now the coal mine analogy may be a little strong, considering where he did most of his mining was the Kahala Hilton and the Royal Hawaiian, but the hours he put in are mind-boggling.

Every day he would spend at the paper working on his column, 50 to 60 separate items covering all things celebrity, six to seven days a week. After turning in his column at 6 p.m., he would be out on the town to seek out the famous and live their lifestyle until the wee small hours of the morning.

“Most of my journalistic life was a financial struggle, but there were different rewards than financial. But you suffer for it,” says Sherman.

These rewards are outlined in Sherman’s new book, Frank, Sammy, Marlon and Me, where he details the unique friendships he formed while covering the entertainers who are so drawn to the Islands.

“Hawaii is so unique in that almost any celebrity you talk to about it say that the people of Hawaii, when they recognize a celebrity, they respect them, they know they are here on vacation and they leave them alone and don’t pester them,” says Sherman.

This relaxing of their normal defenses allowed Sherman to get closer than most journalists ever dreamed.

Imagine having Brando eschewing the deluxe hotels of Waikiki to stay at your condo? As if that weren’t enough, having him then teach your mother the correct way to put a garbage bag in its pail?

Or how about talking Elvis Presley into giving you all of his gate receipts from his ground-breaking performance Aloha from Hawaii to support Sherman’s new cause, the Kui Lee Cancer Fund?

The book is full of these stories and Sherman’s straightforward approach allowed the celebrities to trust him.

“I did what I did, they did what they did, and I respected them,” says Sherman. “I liked being with them. They were bright, fascinating, talented, and you don’t get that every day. It was a great departure from normal life.”

He lived on that trip for the second half of the 20th century, but this time last year Sherman realized that perhaps the celebrity world was finally passing him by.

“I got to the point where I would write an item about someone I had never heard of before,” says Sherman. “I realized my time had come, I didn’t have the desire I did before. It’s called ... getting old.”

So he hung up the column and did what everyone had been pestering him to do for decades: write a book about his life.

The only problem is that going from writing millions of nonsequitur three-sentence bursts to fleshing out a book is quite a leap.

“It was anguishing at first, but once the faucet opened up I couldn’t stop them,” says Sherman, who continues his charitable ways by giving all the profits from the book to the Rehabilitation Center of the Pacific.

The book does maintain the quick-hit style of the gossip column, with 37 chapters and all but the Brando one under 10 pages. The stories pour out without much flourish, but with a delicious inside look that he sometimes had to rein in for his columns.

“People want to know about people in a concise manner and an entertaining one. How do you do that?” asks Sherman.

To answer that one, you are just going to have to read the book. 

E-mail this story | Print this page | Comments (0) | Archive | | RSS

Most Recent Comment(s):

Be the first to comment on this article.

Posting a comment on MidWeek.com requires a free registration.

Username

Password

Forgot Password