Gossip (15 page)

Operating on these principles—perhaps absence of principles is more like it—Walter Winchell himself became a celebrity, one of the noisiest in America. His column was soon widely syndicated, its author written up in
Editor and Publisher, Time, The New Yorker,
and elsewhere. His friend Ernest Cuneo said Winchell did for Broadway what Mark Twain did for the Mississippi—not true but doubtless nice to hear.

Although Winchell was considered very much a figure of the 1920s, the Depression that ushered in the '30s did not in the least slow him down. He switched his home base from the
Daily News
to Hearst's
New York Mirror,
and thence to the same publisher's
Journal,
which, along with his increased syndication, brought him an ever-wider readership. The Depression, which had the effect, as Neal Gabler points out, of dimming the lights on Broadway, at the same time widened the scope of Winchell's interests; he soon became, more than a mere Broadway gossip columnist, a journalist whose bailiwick was the entire country, his column carrying items on Hollywood, politics, and the international scene.

Winchell took a giant step when, in 1930, he took his gossip on the radio. His original show was on the air Monday nights from 7:45 to 8:00, featuring gossip items and an interview with an entertainment celebrity. Winchell made no bones about introducing himself as "New York's most notorious gossip," allowing that he has been called lots of other things, too. He was making a six-figure salary from his newspaper column along with a thousand dollars a program for his radio shows on WABC.

His radio audience grew to be larger than the already large audience for his newspaper column. He was now a star of the stature of the Irish tenor Morton Downey, Kate Smith, and Bing Crosby—all built on nothing more than purveying gossip. He was not above inserting himself into major criminal proceedings. Throughout the trial of Bruno Hauptmann, for the alleged kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, he managed to call attention to himself in his columns and radio shows. At the capture of the criminal boss Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, he arranged to have Lepke turn himself in to him, Winchell, who brought him to the police. All this added greatly to his fame. One night a Broadway producer—drunk or not, it isn't known—asked, "Tell me, Winchell. What is going to happen to America if people like you are successful?" A good question, the answer to which is not yet in.

Winchell once said that the way to get famous is to throw a brick at someone who is already famous. People now began throwing bricks at him. Heywood Broun, a great name in journalism in the 1920s and '30s, claimed that Winchell's kind of gossip, everywhere invading privacy, was turning New York into a small town. "Who wants New York to have the same sort of underground wires which make small towns so mean and so petty?" Broun wrote. In the thirties,
The New Yorker
published a lengthy profile of Winchell by St. Clair McKelway (in 1940 this was molded into a book titled
Gossip: The Life and Times of Walter Winchell
), in which Winchell's inaccuracies were toted up, his political and criminal connections recounted, his sins in particular and in general catalogued. McKelway wrote:

 

There are men in New York who have been identified by Winchell, by means of crystal clear euphemisms, as homosexuals; there are people whose attempted suicides he has reported; there are married men and women who, in spite of Winchell's stated intention not to let his columns hurt happy marriages, have been linked with others of the opposite sex; there are couples whose separation has been reported when they were thinking of no such thing, whose impending marriage has been announced when it was not being considered by them; there are individuals whose affectionate regard for someone has been reported when they weren't sure of it themselves. Then, in the middle ground, there are people in New York whose professional aims have been misinterpreted or inaccurately reported; whose opinions have been garbled; whose anecdotes, not told in the presence of Winchell, have been ineptly retold by him, making them feel silly; whose appearances at night clubs have been made to seem more frequent than they really are. At the end of the list are people who merely object to having their names appear in Walter Winchell's column or in any gossip column under any circumstances.

 

None of this put the least dent in Winchell's shield. His column was published in more than 150 newspapers; a
Fortune
survey found him to be the most popular columnist in America. The opening of his fifteen-minute radio show, for which he was now getting paid $3,500 a shot, accompanied by a clacking telegraph sound—"Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea"—was familiar to millions of Americans. Whether Winchell was a journalist or an entertainer was not a question that much bothered him. Neither did individual complaints about his having gone too far in one or another of his "items." "I wait until I can catch an ingrate with his fly open," Winchell wrote in his autobiography, "and then I take a picture of it." Oscar Levant remembered that whenever you complained to him about an item in his column, Winchell's response was "I'm a shitheel." He also said, "Democracy is where everybody can kick everybody else's ass. But you can't kick Winchell's."

By the late 1930s the brash gossip columnist's reputation and power—the two were of course linked—were of sufficient magnitude for President Roosevelt, who wanted Winchell on his side, to cultivate him. And successfully cultivate him FDR did; some said that Winchell, in his columns, became the president's unofficial spokesman, his link between the White House and the average American. He also became friendly with J. Edgar Hoover. Working the other side of the street, he had New York mob connections. Once, after Winchell was beaten up, he had bodyguards from both the FBI and Lucky Luciano's gang assigned to watch over him.

Through the early forties, Winchell was a great enemy of Hitler and thought of as a friend of the little man. At the same time, he was a chronicler of the rich and famous, noting their goings-on in such smart New York supper clubs as the Colony and El Morocco. He held personal court at the Stork Club, and his regular presence there was the making of that establishment and of its less than genial host, Sherman Billingsley. He acquired an all-wave radio for his car so he could listen to the police band and race to crime scenes at all hours.

With his easy arrogance and his power to break reputations and spoil lives, Winchell was a feared man. Arthur Brisbane, his editor at the
New York Mirror,
who didn't take to Winchell's throwing his weight around in the newsroom, once told him, "You have neither ethics, scruples, decency or conscience." To which Winchell replied, "Let others have those things. I've got readers." And he did; circulation figures climbed whenever he wrote for the paper. For Winchell life was a simple matter of power, and the person who had the most power dominated.

Meanwhile, he had become a great bore—"a thrilling bore," someone called him. "When he is not talking," St. Clair McKelway wrote, "he sits forward with his head raised unnaturally in an attitude of intense awareness. His heel is apt to beat quick time on the floor like a swing musician's, his gaze roves ceaselessly over the room, and his hands go on little fruitless expeditions over the tablecloth, up and down the lapels of his coat, in and out of his pockets." The playwright Clifford Odets wondered in his diary, after a night listening to Winchell gas away about himself at the Stork Club, "how a human being could have so little sense of other human beings."

He was also a bully, treating press agents, who were always eager to get their clients named in his column, with lofty, sometimes brutal, contempt. The 1957 movie
Sweet Smell of Success,
told in good part from the point of view of the press agent Sidney Falco (played brilliantly by Tony Curtis), is loosely based on Winchell's rough treatment of press agents, who were ready to do anything to ingratiate themselves with him. Meanwhile, Winchell treated kindly only those who had more power than he or those for whose services he had momentary need. Lord Acton wasn't quite right; it doesn't take absolute power to corrupt absolutely. Some people can arrive at the state of absolute corruption with a good deal less than absolute power, and Walter Winchell was one of them.

His career seemed endless in its upward sweep. He was on the cover of
Time
in the 1930s; at the end of the 1940s he was the highest-paid figure in show business. His column cleared the path for other gossip columnists: Leonard Lyons, Louis Sobol, Louella Parsons, Dorothy Kilgallen, Earl Wilson. Without Winchell, none of their columns would likely have come into existence.

One day in 1948, at a New York Yankees game, sitting with J. Edgar Hoover, Winchell mused on the possibility of running for president. He didn't have the same rapport with Harry Truman as he had had with Franklin Roosevelt. He took the side of General Douglas MacArthur against Truman in their controversy over Korea, which made him persona non grata at the White House. Once thought a liberal in politics, Winchell was, with the aid of Hoover's influence, much taken with Senator Joseph McCarthy; after all, as Neal Gabler suggests, their methods—accusations based on hearsay—were not all that different. Winchell became an anti-Communist of the disreputable kind that found Communists under every bed, and wasn't opposed to using smear tactics to ruin a man's reputation—an anti-Communist of the kind, in short, that gave sensible anti-Communism a bad name.

Hard to pinpoint the precise date when Walter Winchell's meteor began to descend. A racial incident at the Stork Club over seating the black dancer Josephine Baker, in which he did not truly have a part, but in which he defended his friend Sherman Billingsley who did, didn't help. A man named Lyle Stuart, who himself would go on to specialize in the scurrilous, wrote an attack on Winchell, claiming he did not write his own columns, that he had been having an affair with a showgirl, that he was an egomaniac capable of great viciousness, and that he was finally a sham. The
New York Post
also ran a series of articles attacking Winchell, emphasizing his journalistic inaccuracies, citing the careers he had helped destroy, claiming he had devised schemes to avoid paying his full share of income tax.

No work is a greater breeding ground than gossip for paranoia, into which Walter Winchell now submerged. In his case, he was a paranoid with real as well as imaginary enemies. Everywhere he had scores to settle. He started using his column and radio show to go after other radio commentators, fellow columnists, newspaper editors, and those suitors for his daughter of whom he didn't approve. He combined gossip and red-baiting, going after not merely the usual suspects but adding a few unusual ones, Adlai Stevenson notable among them. Always a man to keep bad company, he added Roy Cohn, McCarthy's then young henchman, to his roster of unattractive friends.

The slide began with the gradual cancellation of contracts, the reduction in workload. His ratings dropped; ABC, for whom he broadcast a television show, let him go. His newspaper employer, the Hearst Corporation, refused any longer to insure his column against libel. People who formerly would have lived in fear of his retribution now openly attacked him in public, as the society hostess Elsa Maxwell did on the
Jack Paar Show.
Paar would later call him "a silly old man"; which hurt more, the "silly" or the "old," would be difficult to say.
Sweet Smell of Success,
taken from a story by a former press agent, Ernest Lehman, and with everyone assuming that the part of the out-and-out-bastard columnist was Walter Winchell, turned out to be an enormous hit—it also happens to be a swell movie—though Winchell tried to kill it in his column by claiming it was a financial dud.

The 1960s saw Winchell out. He began picking the wrong horses in politics, claiming, for example, that John F. Kennedy was a Communist sympathizer. The Stork Club went belly-up. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were done for in Hollywood, their services no longer required now that the studio system was ending. Winchell lost his column when his most recent home base, Hearst's
World Journal Tribune,
closed down in 1967. In a piece marking the end of Winchell's column, a writer on the
New York Times
noted that the column ended because of the "rise of television, a growing sophistication among newspaper readers, the decline of Hollywood and the emergence of an international set of performers who no longer read or care about Broadway and show business columns, changes in reading taste, a growing uneasiness about the truth of many [of his] column items and even changing sexual mores." Winchell had given a certain tone to an era—brash, intensely urban, tough-guy—but that era was finished, and so was he.

Walter Winchell without a column was like Babe Ruth without a bat, Jascha Heifetz without a violin, Mae West without a bosom. Little succor was to be found for him in a retreat into family life. He had long before alienated his daughter Walda. His son, Walter Winchell Jr., never able to find a place in life, committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. Winchell himself died two months before reaching seventy-five, and fifteen days after the death of his wife.

Winchell, Neal Gabler notes, simultaneously enlivened and vulgarized journalism. He advanced the spread of gossip, not merely individual items but the thing itself, throughout American newspapers, infecting so-called straight news with it, and making what were once back-alley whisper stories into front-page news. He whetted and fed the appetite for scandal about celebrities. He was in some sense the founding father of all the celebrity gossip magazines and television shows that now deluge our culture.

In Gabler's words, Winchell's legacy was to cause us to "believe in our entitlement to know everything about our public figures. We would believe that fame is an exalted state but suspect that the famous always have something to hide. Above all, we would believe in a culture of gossip and celebrity where entertainment takes primacy over every other value."