Winchell – Bob Thomas, 1971 ★★½

The Power of the Fedora

The power of the written word is an amazing thing. It transforms losers into lovers, dreamers into rock stars. Wielded a certain way, it can even morph otherwise ordinary folk into fearsome giants. Such was the case with a failed singer-dancer named Walter Winchell.

While his hoofing croaked onstage in two-a-day vaudeville houses, Winchell honed another act backstage, listening in on the gossip and goings-on of fellow players and posting his observations on the theater bulletin board to be read by all. In the 1920s, he took his gossip-hawking act to newspapers. In short order he became the most-read columnist in America: Feared, loved, hated, enjoyed, but always read.

What made Winchell so unique? Bob Thomas’s biography, written by someone who forged his own long career in celebrity journalism, tries to shed light on Winchell’s rise and fall.

It began, Thomas writes, with an image:

The fedora could be cocked over one ear for comic effect, a la Durante. It could be pushed down on the eyebrows for a look of skepticism. Or it could be shoved back on the head: Reporter at Work.

A tough talker who loved to work, Winchell’s lust for the Manhattan nightlife in its post-flapper heyday sings in his prose. Never an artist, Winchell was a serious craftsman who may not have written every word under his byline, but made sure it all rang with his unique voice.

“…his nervous staccato pace as characteristic of his day as are the rhythms of George Gershwin,” noted The New Yorker’s Alexander Woollcott. Another fan, playwright Ben Hecht, wrote: “In the years I have read him, Winchell has not yet written a sentence I didn’t understand – which is something of a literary record.”

Winchell on the cover of Time magazine, July 11, 1938. By this time Winchell was near the summit of his powers, a confidante of President Roosevelt who held the power to make or break a press agent with a single line. Image from http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19380711,00.html.

Thomas’s bio is itself very readable. Its short chapters emulate Winchell’s brisk delivery. Like Winchell himself, Thomas is long on quotes, shorter on context. You do get a sense of the man underneath the fedora: his many feuds; his insomniac drive; his idiosyncratic politics; his second career on radio; his failures as father and husband. It all moves very quickly, and leaves behind an undernourished feeling, but whether that’s on Thomas or Winchell is hard to say:

The columnist was now being syndicated by Hearst, and his newspaper style was becoming more familiar across the country. Winchell’s radio style seemed to fit it with watchmaker precision: the slangy conciseness, the know-it-all cynicism, the breathless rush to report the news as soon as – and often before – it happened.

At its best, Winchell the book is about achieving success in an era where mass media was coming into its own. In those days, danger always pressed in at the margins. Winchell himself carried grudges and a handgun, and some of his enemies did kill for a living. But his altercations were mostly verbal.

Thomas also escorts you inside the Manhattan nightspots where Winchell plied his trade:

The Stork Club was the customary nighttime residence for Winchell, but only those press agents on the most intimate of terms visited him there…Most of the veterans waited for Winchell’s late visits to Lindy’s or Dave’s Blue Room. All had the faculty for discerning when the columnist entered the restaurant, even though their backs were to the door. A hum of excitement permeated the room. That was true almost anywhere Winchell went.

Winchellian argot was legendary, Thomas notes, the “shorthand lingo of show folk” he picked up from others but quickly made his own. Liquor was “giggle-water,” a romance a “pash.” Broadway was redubbed “Baloney Blvd.” To get married was to be “Lohengrined” or “middle-aisled;” after came “whoopie,” a term Winchell didn’t invent but popularized.

Winchell didn't only cover the movies, he made them, including a pair of 1937 comedies where he and bandleader Ben Bernie carry on a fake feud. Here he makes the moves on Carole Lombard while Clark Gable takes notes. Image from http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/clark-and-carole/images/29938687/title/clark-gable-carole-lombard-walter-winchell-photo 

That was Winchell in a nutshell: a popularizer.

Some other terms Winchell used reflect an early, aggressively negative view of the rise of fascism in Germany, and of its admirers in the United States: “swastinkas,” “swasticooties,” or “Hitlerooters.” Calling them out caused friction with newspaper publishers and may have gotten Winchell himself a beatdown one December night in 1935. But in time, he would be validated for his stand.

So too was his take on civil rights: “Tonight there are some Americans sharing the same grave who in the United States could not have shared the same hotel,” Winchell said in one of his radio broadcasts during World War II.

All this Thomas relates in a manner that reads duller than it should. When Winchell is riding high – winning praise from President Roosevelt, getting choice scoops from eager press agents, accepting plaudits from J. Edgar Hoover – the book comes off less conqueror’s journey than greatest-hits montage. Friction was what drove Winchell; it drives Thomas’s bio, too, when he lets it.

The best parts of the book involve the clashes. People called Winchell out all the time for peddling rumors and falsehoods. Winchell refused to run corrections even when he knew he was wrong.

He hated rival show-biz columnist Ed Sullivan so much that when Sullivan persuaded an heiress to donate a Christmas contribution to poor children, Winchell labelled it “blackmail.” Sullivan responded by calling out Winchell for errors he never bothered to retract.

Ed Sullivan and Winchell, later in life. The two men started out friendly enough as chorus boys together, and finished on good terms. In between, as Thomas notes, there was quite a feud. https://www.flickr.com/photos/iconista/3687177876

Westbrook Pegler was another columnist who took aim at Winchell’s haphazard rumor-mongering in a hilarious parody of non-connected paragraphs and breezy Winchellesque patter Thomas quotes in full:

Wonder if it’s true. I mean about what I mean. I mean about the rumor what I mean. It certainly will prove what I mean if I mean what I mean.

Winchell barked back at critics, even when he could afford to ignore them. Winchell’s Sunday-night commentary show became must-hear radio by the end of the 1940s, Winchell’s high-water mark. Fast forward a few years, though, and Winchell was a has-been. His embrace of communist-baiting Joseph McCarthy, Thomas noted, soon backfired, earning hatred from the liberal intelligentsia that controlled American culture even then.

Thomas explains Winchell’s alignment with the right as a matter of being blackmailed for his own wartime support for President Roosevelt’s leftist causes. Winchell, Thomas concludes, was “excessively vulnerable” to McCarthy and his goons.

This doesn’t jibe with the rest of Thomas’s portrait, Winchell as stubborn to a fault, cowed by nobody. “Don’t disgrace me by defending me,” was a common refrain. Was he maybe a genuine anti-communist who fell out with fellow liberals when they didn’t see the Soviet Union as an enemy the same way he and they had Nazi Germany? Did he genuinely find Harry Truman harder to take than Roosevelt, and a wimp in the face of Russian aggression besides?

A novel by Michael Herr about Winchell I recently reviewed floats both those theories. Thomas doesn’t seem to consider either. Instead he parrots the liberal line of the early 1970s: “Winchell’s treatment of the President [Truman] was reprehensible. It was also basically suicidal.”

Whatever his convictions, Winchell didn’t know when to back off on expressing them. He compared liberal politician Adlai Stevenson to the famous transsexual Christine Jorgensen. He dug in when black singer Josephine Baker complained of bad service at Winchell’s favorite nightspot, the Stork Club, calling her a Red.

All this served in time to weaken Winchell’s public profile. What provided the coup de grace, says Thomas, was television, which changed the broadcast game Winchell had so effectively ruled on radio.

Winchell making an early television-radio simulcast in 1954. His middle-aged appearance didn't jibe with the vigorous voice Americans had known for years, Thomas notes. Image from https://www.walmart.com/ip/Walter-Winchell-Abc-Tv-Radio-Simulcasts-1954-Winchell-Started-Writing-First-Syndicated-Gossip-Column-New-York-Daily-Mirror-1929-History/730720820.

First Winchell tried to duplicate his radio show but with a camera. But he looked nervous. Then he tried a variety-show format. No good:

He came on too strong; home viewers preferred blander, more huggable personalities like Perry Como, Garry Moore, Dinah Shore – and Ed Sullivan. Such stars wore well when they were invited into living rooms week after week; Winchell was like a noisy guest.

Eventually Winchell wore out his welcome. He lost his radio gig, and eventually his column. It still ran in other papers, just not in New York City where it was born. For years he kept trying to return to the Big Apple, even taking out an ad in Variety in 1967 asking for a newspaper gig. “Why not audition the column for one month?” the ad pleaded. There were no takers.

After the suicide of his son Walter Jr. the following year, Winchell went into permanent retirement, seeing no one. While working on this bio, Thomas reached out to Winchell, who would die the year after its publication. Winchell gently brushed him off:

There is nothing I want to discuss about my career. I leave it to you historians to deal with it.

That is what historians have been doing ever since. Thomas’s attempt brings out some of the spark and flavor of Winchell’s day; yet it remains firmly rooted in the image that was Winchell. If there was a real human being under that fedora somewhere, something to help explain the enduring enigma of Winchell, one needs to look elsewhere.