Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897 – February 20, 1972) was an American syndicated newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator. Originally a vaudeville performer, Winchell began his newspaper career as a Broadway reporter, critic and columnist for New York tabloids. He rose to national celebrity in the 1930s with Hearst newspaper chain syndication and a popular radio program. He was known for an innovative style of gossipy staccato news briefs, jokes, and Jazz Age slang. Biographer Neal Gabler said that his popularity and influence "turned journalism into a form of entertainment". Over the years he appeared in more than two dozen films and television productions as an actor, sometimes playing himself.
Early life
Winchell was born in New York City, the son of Jennie (Bakst) and Jacob Winchell, a cantor and salesman; they were Russian Jewish immigrants. He left school in the sixth grade and started performing in Gus Edwards's vaudeville troupe the Newsboys Sextet, which also featured Eddie Cantor and George Jessel. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, and attained the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve.
Professional career
Winchell began his career in journalism by posting notes about his acting troupe on backstage bulletin boards. He joined the Vaudeville News in 1920, then left the paper for the Evening Graphic in 1924, where his column was named Mainly About Mainstreeters. He was hired on June 10, 1929, by the New York Daily Mirror, where he became the author of the first syndicated gossip column, On-Broadway. The column was syndicated by King Features Syndicate.
He made his radio debut over WABC in New York, a CBS affiliate, on May 12, 1930. The show, Saks on Broadway, was a 15-minute feature that provided business news about Broadway. He switched to WJZ (later renamed WABC) and the NBC Blue (later ABC Radio) in 1932 for the Jergens Journal.
Walter Winchell's radio-acting career included an episode of Lux Radio Theatre, when on June 28, 1937 he played the role of newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson in a one-hour adaptation of The Front Page.
Underworld connections
left|thumb|262x262px|"The Bard of Broadway" with Walter Winchell ad in [[The Film Daily, 1932]]
By the 1930s, Winchell was "an intimate friend of Owney Madden, New York's no. 1 gang leader of the prohibition era," but in 1932 his intimacy with criminals caused him to fear he would be murdered. He fled to California and "returned weeks later with a new enthusiasm for law, G-men, Uncle Sam, [and] Old Glory". One indicator of his popularity was being mentioned in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1937 song "The Lady Is a Tramp": "I follow Winchell and read every line."
Outspoken views
Winchell was one of the first commentators in America to attack Adolf Hitler and American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund, especially its leader Fritz Julius Kuhn. He was a staunch supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal throughout the Depression era, and frequently served as the Roosevelt Administration's mouthpiece in favor of interventionism as the European war crisis loomed in the late 1930s. In 1948 and 1949, he and influential columnist Drew Pearson attacked Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in columns and radio broadcasts.
Subsequently, Winchell began to denounce Communism as the main threat facing America.
Television
During the 1950s, Winchell supported Senator Joseph McCarthy's quest to identify Communists in the entertainment industry. His weekly radio broadcast was broadcast on ABC television on the same day. His program debuted on TV on October 5, 1952. Sponsored by Gruen Watch Company, it originated from WJZ-TV from 6:45 to 7 p.m. ET. By 1953, his radio and television broadcasts were simulcast until he ended that association because of a dispute with ABC executives in 1955. He starred in The Walter Winchell File, a television crime drama series that initially aired from 1957 to 1958, dramatizing cases from the New York City Police Department that were covered in the New York Daily Mirror. In 1956, he signed with NBC to host a variety program called The Walter Winchell Show, which was canceled after only 13 weeks—a particularly bitter failure in view of the success of his longtime rival Ed Sullivan in a similar format with The Ed Sullivan Show. ABC rehired him in 1959 to narrate The Untouchables for four seasons. In 1960, a revival of the 1955 television simulcast of Winchell's radio broadcast was canceled after six weeks.
In the early 1960s, a public dispute with Jack Paar effectively ended Winchell's career—already in decline due to a shift in power from print to television. Winchell had angered Paar several years earlier when he refused to retract an item alleging that Paar was having marital difficulties. Biographer Neal Gabler described the exchange on Paar's show in 1961:
<blockquote>Hostess Elsa Maxwell appeared on the program and began gibing at Walter, accusing him of hypocrisy for waving the flag while never having voted [which, incidentally, wasn't true; the show later issued a retraction]. Paar joined in. He said Walter's column was "written by a fly" and that his voice was so high because he wears "too-tight underwear" … [H]e also told the story of the mistaken item about his marriage, and cracked that Walter had a "hole in his soul".</blockquote>
On subsequent programs, Paar called Winchell a "silly old man" and cited other examples of his underhanded tactics. No one had previously criticized Winchell publicly, but by then his influence had eroded to the point that he could not effectively respond. The New York Daily Mirror, his flagship newspaper for 34 years, closed in 1963; his readership dropped steadily, and he faded from the public eye.
Personal ethics
Winchell became known for his attempts to destroy the careers of his political and personal enemies as his own career progressed, especially after World War II. Favorite tactics were allegations of having ties to Communist organizations and accusations of sexual impropriety. He was not above name-calling; for example, he called New York radio host Barry Gray "Borey Pink" and a "disk jerk". Winchell heard that Marlen Edwin Pew of the trade journal Editor & Publisher had criticized him as a bad influence and called him "Marlen Pee-you". He unapologetically published material told to him in confidence by friends; when confronted over such betrayals, he typically responded, "I know—I'm just a son of a bitch."
While on an American tour in 1951, Josephine Baker, who never performed before segregated audiences, criticized the Stork Club's unwritten policy of discouraging black patrons, then scolded Winchell, an old ally, for not rising to her defense. Winchell responded swiftly with a series of harsh public rebukes, including accusations of Communist sympathies.
In his radio and television broadcasts on April 4, 1954, Winchell helped stoke public fear of the polio vaccine. He said, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America ... and all the ships at sea. Attention everyone. In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccine claimed to be a polio cure. It may be a killer." Winchell claimed that the U.S. Public Health Services found live polio viruses in seven of ten vaccine batches it tested, reporting, "It killed several monkeys ... the United States Public Health Service will confirm this in about 10 days." Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, immediately responded that the vaccine, which had been recently tested on 7,500 schoolchildren at the University of Pittsburgh, had been triple tested for the absence of live virus by its manufacturers, the National Institutes of Health, and his own research lab, and that similar testing would continue to screen out batches containing live virus.
Style
Many other columnists began to write gossip soon after Winchell's initial success, such as Ed Sullivan, who succeeded him at the New York Evening Graphic, and Louella Parsons in Los Angeles. He wrote in a style filled with slang and incomplete sentences. Winchell's casual writing style famously earned him the ire of mobster Dutch Schultz, who confronted him at New York's Cotton Club and publicly lambasted him for using the phrase "pushover" to describe Schultz's penchant for blonde women. Winchell's best known aphorisms include: "Nothing recedes like success" and "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret".
Herman Klurfeld, a ghostwriter for Winchell for almost three decades, began writing four newspaper columns per week for Winchell in 1936 and worked for him for 29 years. He also wrote many of the signature one-liners, called "lasties", that Winchell used at the end of his radio broadcasts. One of Klurfeld's quips was "She's been on more laps than a napkin". In 1952, the New York Post revealed that Klurfeld was Winchell's ghostwriter. Klurfeld later wrote a biography of Winchell, Winchell, His Life and Times, the basis for the television film Winchell (1998).
Winchell opened his radio broadcasts by pressing randomly on a telegraph key, a sound that created a sense of urgency and importance, and using the catchphrase "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press." He then read each of his stories with a staccato delivery (up to a rate of 197 words per minute, though he claimed a speed of well over 200 words per minute in an interview in 1967), noticeably faster than the typical pace of American speech. His diction can also be heard in his breathless narration of the television series The Untouchables (1959–1963), as well as in several Hollywood films.
Personal life
On August 11, 1919, Winchell married Rita Greene, one of his onstage partners. The couple separated a few years later, and he moved in with Elizabeth June Magee, who had already adopted daughter Gloria and given birth to her and Winchell's first child Walda in 1927. Winchell divorced Greene in 1928, but never married Magee, although they lived together for the rest of their lives.
Winchell and Magee had three children. Daughter Gloria died of pneumonia at age nine and Walda spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Walter Jr. died by suicide in the family garage on Christmas night of 1968. Having spent the previous two years on welfare, Walter Jr. had last been employed as a dishwasher in Santa Ana, California; for a time, he wrote a column in the Los Angeles Free Press, an underground newspaper published from 1964 to 1978.
Later years
thumb|250px| Grave site of Walter Winchell in Greenwood Memory Lawn
In the 1960s, Winchell wrote some columns for the film magazine Photoplay. He announced his retirement on February 5, 1969, citing his son's suicide as a major reason as well as the delicate health of his companion, June Magee. Exactly one year after his retirement, Magee died at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, while undergoing treatment for a heart condition.
Winchell spent his final two years as a recluse at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died at age 74 in Los Angeles and is buried at Greenwood/Memory Lawn Mortuary & Cemetery in Phoenix. Larry King, whose column replaced Winchell's in the Miami Herald, recalled:
<blockquote>He was so sad. You know what Winchell was doing at the end? Typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner. That's how sad he got. When he died, only one person came to his funeral: his daughter.
</blockquote>
Several of Winchell's former co-workers expressed a willingness to go but were turned back by Walda.
Filmography
{|class="wikitable"
! Year
! Title
! Role
! Notes
|-
| 1930
| The Bard on Broadway (Short)
| Himself
| Film debut
|-
|1933
|I Know Everybody and Everybody's Racket (Short)
|Himself
|
|-
| rowspan=2|1933
| Beauty on Broadway (Short)
| Himself
|
|-
| Broadway Thru a Keyhole
| Himself
| Also writer
|-
| rowspan=2|1937
| Wake Up and Live
| Himself
|
|-
| Love and Hisses
| Himself
|
|-
| 1947
| Daisy Kenyon
| Himself
|
|-
| 1949
| Sorrowful Jones
| Himself
| Voice, uncredited
|-
| 1955
| There's No Business Like Show Business
| Himself
| Voice, uncredited
|-
| 1956
| The Walter Winchell Show
| Himself
| 3 episodes
|-
| rowspan=4|1957
| A Face in the Crowd
| Himself
|
|-
| Beau James
| Narrator
|
|-
| The Helen Morgan Story
| Himself
|
|-
| Telephone Time
| Himself
| 1 episode
|-
| 1957–1959
| The Walter Winchell File
| Himself/host/'Two Gun' Crowley
|
|-
| 1959
| Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse
| Narrator
| Voice, 3 episodes
|-
| 1959–1963
| The Untouchables
| Narrator
| Voice, 119 episodes
|-
| rowspan=2|1960
| The Bellboy
| Narrator
| Voice, uncredited
|-
| College Confidential
| Himself
|
|-
| 1961
| Dondi
| Himself
|
|-
| 1962
| Wild Harvest
| Narrator
| Voice
|-
|-
| 1964
| Valentine's Day
| Radio Announcer
| Voice, 1 episode
|-
| 1966
| The Lucy Show
| Narrator
| Voice
|-
| 1967
| The Kraft Music Hall
| Himself
|
|-
| rowspan=2|1968
| Single Room Furnished
| Himself
| Uncredited
|-
| Wild in the Streets
| Himself
| Final film, uncredited
|}
Legacy
Even during Winchell's lifetime, journalists were critical of his effect on the media. In 1940, St. Clair McKelway, who had earlier written a series of articles about him in The New Yorker, wrote in Time:
<blockquote>the effect of Winchellism on the standards of the press... When Winchell began gossiping in 1924 for the late scatological tabloid Evening Graphic, no U.S. paper hawked rumors about the marital relations of public figures until they turned up in divorce courts. For 16 years, gossip columns spread until even the staid New York Times whispered that it heard from friends of a son of the President that he was going to be divorced. In its first year, The Graphic would have considered this news not fit to print... Gossip-writing is at present like a spirochete in the body of journalism... Newspapers... have never been held in less esteem by their readers or exercised less influence on the political and ethical thought of the times.
Winchell is credited for coining the word "frienemy" in an article published by the Nevada State Journal on 19 May 1953.
Winchellism and Winchellese
Winchell's colorful and widely imitated language inspired the term "Winchellism." An etymologist of his day said, "Winchell has achieved the position of dictator of contemporary slang." His use of slang, innuendo, and invented euphemisms also protected him from libel accusations. and its follow-up, Love and Hisses (1937).
- In the Warner Brothers cartoon Porky's Movie Mystery (1939), a radio announcer at the beginning of the short identifies himself as "Walter Windshield."
- Waldo Winchester, newspaper scribe, was a recurring figure in Damon Runyon's fiction.
- In the film Sweet Smell of Success, Burt Lancaster plays J. J. Hunsecker, a tyrannical gossip columnist widely understood by audiences at the time to be based on Winchell.
- In Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, characters refer to syndicated columnist Ben Caxton as a "winchell", the lower case indicating that in the future world of the novel, "winchell" had become a common noun.
- He was caricatured as a bird in the Warner Brothers cartoons The Coo-Coo Nut Grove and The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos in 1936 and 1937 respectively.
- Longtime San Francisco gossip columnist Herb Caen used Winchell as a model, calling the style 'three dot journalism'.
- Winchell is listed in the first verse (concerning the 1950s) of Billy Joel's 1989 song, "We Didn't Start the Fire", between South Pacific and Joe DiMaggio.
- Winchell was portrayed by Vaughn Meader in the 1975 crime biopic Lepke starring Tony Curtis.
- In 1991, Winchell was portrayed by Craig T. Nelson in the HBO biopic The Josephine Baker Story.
- The HBO biopic Winchell (1998) stars Stanley Tucci in the title role and Paul Giamatti as Herman Klurfeld, his sidekick and ghostwriter.
- In Douglas Kennedy's novel The Pursuit of Happiness (2001), Winchell appears in connection with McCarthyism.
- Winchell has a major role in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004, adapted as miniseries 2020), an alternate history novel that depicts Charles Lindbergh winning the 1940 presidential election.
- In the 1991 film Oscar, Sylvester Stallone's character asks, "Why don't you phone it in to Walter Winchell?"
- In the 2001 musical The Producers and its 2005 film adaptation, Matthew Broderick's character mentions wanting to "read my name in Winchell's column."
- In the second season of television series Fargo, released in 2015, Betsy Solverson tells her husband "Good night, Mr Solverson" and Lou replies "Good night, Mrs. Solverson—and all the ships at sea," paraphrasing how Winchell introduced his radio broadcasts.
- In 2020, Walter Winchell: The Power Of Gossip, an episode of American Masters on PBS, profiled Winchell, touching on his career, connections, and controversy.
References
Further reading
- Brooks, Tim and Marsh, Earle, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows.
External links
- Walter Winchell papers, 1920–1967, held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
- A remembrance by a contemporary
- Dick Cavett remembers an evening with WW
- FBI file on Walter Winchell