Walter Winchell – Michael Herr, 1990 ★½

Unfinished Novel about an Incomplete Man

There is a scene in Walter Winchell where the title character is about to get the old heave-ho from show biz. “Pep you got, but pep ain’t talent,” his agent tells the song-and-dance man. But pep will change everything for Winchell; mass media will never be the same.

Pep is what this novel has going for it, too. Michael Herr’s approach is unconventional – presented as a kind of movie script with camera-shot directions but minimal dialogue – and his ability to conjure 1940s Manhattan in a few lines and deliver a series of short takes on Winchell’s crusty persona and well-packed life sucked me in. It never goes anywhere; pep does have its limits.

Winchell explains his vocation in his opening scene, while holding court at a Manhattan restaurant he made famous, The Stork Club:

“I’m telling you, this frigging game. They only ask you two questions: Why did you print that? and Why didn’t you print that? Nobody trusts you, your family hates you, you ruin your health, and when it’s all over, if you have a single friend left, it’s a miracle. Go be a reporter!”

Who was Walter Winchell? Given how time passed him by, a refresher seems in order. In the 1930s, he was owner of America’s most famous byline. Whether warning about Hitler or negotiating the surrender of America’s most wanted criminal, Winchell didn’t just report the news, he was news. Tens of millions read his column and listened to his radio show. If Winchell liked you, he made you a star. If he didn’t, his well-stuffed graveyard always had room for one more.

Walter Winchell in his element. By 1948 he was the most-listened-to voice on radio. A cocked fedora was as much his trademark as Frank Sinatra's. Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walter-Winchell

This sort of power gave him quite an ego. How did he live with himself? How did anyone else? That’s what Michael Herr explores here.

Winchell’s problem was waiting too long to quit. Herr had the opposite problem. He burst onto the public radar with his first book, a searing memoir of his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam called Dispatches, then took over a decade to publish again. People still talk about Dispatches as a great war book; elements of it show up in the screenplay of Full Metal Jacket, to which Herr contributed.

Apparently Herr wrote or rewrote many screenplays through the 1980s; this was his intention when starting Walter Winchell.

In a Preface to Walter Winchell, Herr explains the book’s journey from a script no one wanted, written in prose rather than dialogue “for reasons both practical and temperamental:”

Maybe it’s just a novel with a camera in it. Personally, my most ambitious claims for it are as an entertainment in the tradition of the Hollywood biopic, with the undertones of history spreading beneath the jokes in various bitter shades of dark.

Is it too dark? Herr presents Winchell as a tragic hero, not without humor but with something quite bitter at his core. Herr explains:

He was as nice to people as he had to be on the way up, and totally brutal coming down… He always knew that fate’s natural and expected malice would do something awful to him, just as it had to all his friends.

The novel’s main failure is a fatal lack of story. We see Winchell cracking wise with Hemingway and Damon Runyon, keeping tabs on passing celebrities while press agents and a phone beside his table vie for his attention. Winchell’s abrasive manner makes an impression, but to what end? He’s powerful and likes it. You’ve seen this Winchell before if you watched Burt Lancaster’s famous turn as a thinly disguised Winchell in Sweet Smell Of Success.

Burt Lancaster, with Tony Curtis at left, sent up Winchell in 1957's Sweet Smell Of Success. By that year, television had taken much of the sting from Winchell's tail. Image from https://letterboxd.com/film/sweet-smell-of-success/

…You’re dead, son. Go get yourself buried.

Herr even has Winchell deliver this sort of comment a few times, as a nod to the influence.

A key difference between Herr’s Winchell and the Lancaster version is the emphasis here on Winchell’s Jewishness. The text is crammed with Yiddishisms like shmatte, phidinkus, shmegegge, pisherke, and momsers. Brief flashbacks show him growing up in a Harlem tenement (back when Harlem included Jewish neighborhoods), creeping around and listening in on what the adults were talking about.

Sure he changed his name; still Herr makes clear Winchell owns his ethnicity with a certain pride. When he learns of Hitler’s plans for the Jews back in the 1930s, he calls attention to them. When his notice in turn draws the anger of the German-American Bund, even a beating, he packs a revolver but is otherwise undeterred.

“I tell you, sometimes I think America loves me for the enemies I make,” Winchell declares with satisfaction.

For Herr, this was not entirely a saving grace. Winchell is a guy on a power trip who enjoys making enemies too much, no matter who they are. Later in the novel, we see this come back to bite Winchell when he takes on Communism, which became his favorite foe after World War II ended. A tireless Red-baiter, he hitched his wagon to Senator Joe McCarthy, and paid a heavy price.

Author Michael Herr. According to Graydon Carter, who wrote his 2016 obituary in Vanity Fair, Herr made his living with uncredited screenplay rewrites until giving it up to devote the rest of his life to Buddhism. Photo by Pierre-Olivier Deschamps from https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/michael-herr-appreciation.

Herr floats two theories on Winchell’s ideological transition. One is that he genuinely loved America, the way he was so embraced from the little people to that man in the White House, President Franklin Roosevelt, that it became for him a kind of unquestionable faith. The other is power; when Roosevelt dies and is replaced by Harry Truman, Winchell is insulted when Truman cuts him off. As opposition to Truman among anti-communists grows, Winchell joins in:

“A listener asks if I know what the S in Harry S. Truman stands for. Brother, I’m still trying to figure out what Harry Truman stands for…”

While a narcissistic strain always tugs at Winchell’s patriotic yelps, Herr makes sure we see genuine feeling, too. The novel fades out on a image of Winchell in retirement, standing at attention while his errand boy lowers an American flag he keeps outside his house.

Herr’s Winchell complains about controversy, yet it makes him tick:

“I know all the acts. I know who’s stuck on who, who’s in bed with who, who’s mad at who, who’s stealing whose material. I know who drinks too much, who doesn’t drink enough, who gambles…I know everything about this business the public doesn’t know.”

How he caught the fancy of a nation is something Herr doesn’t explain. His novel is a series of vignettes without much of a point, except to emphasize Winchell’s power and his moral questionability. For a couple of scenes, one editor threatens to bring him to heel, calling him “a terrible price to pay for freedom of the press.” But the matter is handled off-screen, with mention of a call to Winchell’s publisher, William Randolph Hearst. The editor disappears.

Characters come and go so fast you might think Winchell was dining at McDonald’s rather than The Stork Club. Herr develops some connection with Runyon, who gets sick with cancer and pines for the good old days, and a press agent named Hoffman who enjoys Winchell’s rare respect. There’s also Winchell’s wife, June, who throws back cocktails and sticks up for her husband when she is told he’s out with tramps.

“They can’t all be tramps,” she says. “I’m sure some of them are very nice girls.”

Winchell and his wife, June, with daughters Walda (left) and Gloria on vacation in Florida, circa 1935. Gloria died at nine, while Walda spent time in institutions. A son, Walter Jr., committed suicide. Image from http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/muph061-sl791-i001.

Walter Winchell does have humor going for it, very much of the period. Herr clearly enjoys Winchell’s unique voice and employs it at every opportunity. Talking up his vaudeville days, Winchell recalls: “We were on the train with a midget act once. The one above me was the nervous type – all night long he paced up and down in his berth.”

When Winchell dances close with Hedy Lamarr, the screen siren cocks an eyebrow when she suddenly feels something hard in his pants. Winchell notices this, reaches into his pocket, pulls out a Colt .38.

There’s always time for a wisecrack, too:

“You a newspaperman now, Walter?” someone calls.

“Yeah. But don’t tell my mudder. She thinks I’m playing piano in a whorehouse.”

Much of this goes a long way, but it can’t do everything. Even when weighing in at a spry 158 pages, a novel needs more. Herr enjoys setting scenes, and delivers them with zest, but it is clear early on his sense of purpose is limited to ticking off recognizable boxes in Winchell’s life journey.

Herr does this in a montage-like fashion, without build up or resolution. Winchell calls on mobster Louis Lepke to surrender and then we see it happen. Winchell gets pulled into a controversy when black entertainer Josephine Baker can’t get service at The Stork Club. Winchell sics goons on a radio personality he once helped out who gives Baker a microphone to blame Winchell for her snubbing.

It’s less a story than a medley of Winchell’s biggest hits. Even his narration of the TV show “The Untouchables” gets a plug.

Of course, Herr might have been consciously writing this scattershot narrative in emulation of Winchell’s signature writing style, long on ellipsis and short on verbiage. But like Winchell’s career, it’s not a style that wears well. It needed something else, which Herr doesn’t deliver. A novel about a lost character winds up aimless itself.