ERNEST HEMINGWAY ONCE called Walter Winchell “the greatest newspaper man that ever lived”; a long-term employee described him as “almost godlike. . . . He was the king of the world and I was one of the assistant kings.” Yet Winchell—the inventor of gossip as a form of mass-market entertainment, the broadcaster whose machine-gun delivery was part of the sound track of his time, the columnist who held court at Table 50 of the Stork Club and made press agents tremble in fear of landing on his “Drop Dead List”—has left little to mark his passage.
Some rasping voice-overs on cable-TV reruns of The Untouchables, a few scattered citations in slang dictionaries as the popularizer of “phffft” or “blessed event”: not much to show for a career in which for the better part of three decades Winchell effortlessly dominated radio and print journalism and, as Neal Gabler suggests in his richly detailed biography, presided over the birth of the tabloid culture of infotainment and fifteen-minute fame. But after contemplating Winchell’s trajectory, few readers will wonder at his almost total disappearance from public memory. By the time Winchell finally left the stage in the late sixties, he had long since worn out his welcome; the go-getting vaudevillian and impish purveyor of showbiz patois and spicy tidbits had mutated over the years into a vitriolic avenger of imagined slights, hurling political and personal smears in the manner of Lear raging at the elements.
The spectacle of Winchell’s spectacular decline would have more tragic resonance if he had more substance to begin with. Watching him in action in Gabler’s pages is like studying a mass of adrenaline hurtling blindly forward. To the public, Winchell seemed like a dynamo at the heart of twentieth-century American life, but he remained untouched by the nuances of the society he was helping to mold. Although his acquaintances ranged from Franklin D. Roosevelt to the gangster Owney Madden, from nightclub queen Texas Guinan to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the breadth of his associations seems not to have made a dent in Winchell’s unbelievably narrow frame of reference. Directing his energy strictly toward staying on top, keeping his journalistic rivals at bay, and maintaining the preeminence of “The Column,” he passed through extremes of self-absorption into the outer limits of paranoid vindictiveness.
Gabler’s biography, which is admirable for its thorough research and carefully measured assessments, has an underlying grimness at odds with the raffish and exuberant Broadway scene that Winchell converted into part of the national mythology. The superficially colorful elements of that milieu—vaudeville, speakeasies, racketeers, hordes of fast-talking “gintellectuals” and “illiterati”—may add some spice, but Gabler is not especially interested in nostalgic evocation. He is more concerned with how Winchell found a way to package strictly local shtick, the private banter of mostly small-time operators, and turn it into coast-to-coast media fodder.
HIS USE OF LANGUAGE—or, in Winchellese, “slanguage”—was crucial. As Gabler observes, “to know which words were in vogue, to know what ‘scram’ meant and ‘palooka’ and ‘belly laughs’ and ‘lotta baloney’ and ‘push-over,’ was like being part of a secret society.” Thanks to Winchell, anybody with a nickel to plunk down for the Mirror could enjoy the illusion of eavesdropping on the insiders of the Main Stem. The Stork Club was a magic space inhabited vicariously by every reader of The Column. His outmoded critics called it “prodding impudent fingers into intimacies which any gentleman would consider deserving of privacy,” but Winchell’s millions of fans felt privileged to be admitted as equals to the inner circle.
In the long run, the insiders needed Winchell more than he needed them, and it was through the ruthless dispensing or withholding of plugs that he maintained his power. A Stork Club habitué recalled the protocol of Table 50: “If he deigned to wave or something, you’d go over to shake his hand. If he ignored you, you wouldn’t go near him because he’d be very rude.” It was this Winchell, fawned on by celebrities and hungry press agents, who provided the model for what may be his most enduring monument: the unforgettable megalomaniac gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster in the 1956 movie Sweet Smell of Success.
Show business could hardly provide him a wide enough arena for the exercise of power. Franklin D. Roosevelt thought so, too, and successfully steered the columnist in the 1930s into a new role as an unofficial cheerleader for government policy initiatives. Winchell’s deep admiration for Roosevelt was clearly one of the strongest emotional bonds of his life, and it was in acting on behalf of FDR that Winchell was to play an unexpectedly heroic part. Taking on congressional isolationists (some of them virtual Nazi sympathizers), Winchell found himself under attack from the anti-Roosevelt right, the target of ferocious anti-Semitic invective and trumped-up legal investigations. (Gabler’s account of this episode offers an astonishing gallery of political monsters, from Mississippi senator John Rankin, who publicly described Winchell as “that little communistic kike,” to Michigan representative Clare Hoffman, who sought legislation making membership in the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League a federal crime.) His vigorous self-defense won him admiration, however briefly, as a champion of democratic ideals.
There is no doubt that Winchell liked a good fight, but in the long run it was an open question how much he cared what the fight was about. He applauded the excesses of McCarthyism with as much energy as he had resisted the onslaughts of the right-wingers of the war era. He took pride in claiming to have introduced Roy Cohn to Joe McCarthy, and played the “pinko” card with increasing abandon in his attacks on a rapidly multiplying list of enemies, from singer Josephine Baker to New York Post editor Joseph Wechsler. The 1950s marked Winchell’s painfully slow fall from grace, as his vendettas took on a punch-drunk quality and his family was racked by madness, suicide, and physical collapse. The embittered isolation of his final years makes painful reading.
The final impression is of a man whose energy as performer and scuffler was matched only by his utter lack of self-knowledge. Dorothy Parker’s famous description—“He’s afraid he’ll wake up one day and discover he’s not Walter Winchell”—was borne out only too precisely in the hollow awakening of his last days. A reviewer wrote admiringly of Winchell in his heyday that he was “as vivid as a nerve, and he is all nerves”; when advised to calm down, Winchell’s reply was: “Dead people stay calm.” In a culture that worshiped “verve” and “zip,” he was the perfect leader of the dance, but his life turned into a parable of momentum without direction as he became, in Gabler’s words, “another name on the ash heap of celebrity.”
Newsday, October 1994