Winchell Exclusive – Walter Winchell, 1975 ★½

The Airing of Grievances

Once he ruled the world, or a significant portion of it he helped to create. Near the end, he had fallen so far that even those who followed his path remembered him but faintly, and with a shrug.

Another person might take stock. Walter Winchell took umbrage. In this posthumous memoir, the proudly pugnacious pundit has some bones to pick, and spends a lot more time venting than explaining:

Before I go to hell – which can’t be too far off – I want them all to know that I’ve wearied of the mutual deception. I have forgiven, but I don’t have to forget. I’m not a fighter, I’m a “waiter.” I wait until I catch an ingrate with his fly open, and then I take a picture of it.

If Winchell Exclusive gets one point across, it’s that Winchell is not forgiving, either. One of the more exhausting books of its kind, it harps on two points incessantly, how underappreciated the author was, and the personal and moral awfulness of everyone with whom he ever tangled. Every memoir needs ego, but this runs on pure high-octane narcissism.

In Winchell Exclusive, the author ascribes his approach to writing like being on stage: "You have about ten or twelve minutes in which to get over with the audience. So you try to make everything you say punchy."
Image from https://thecinemaholic.com/walter-winchell-the-plot-against-america/

To be fair, it may not even be Winchell at the controls. He died in 1972, three years before Winchell Exclusive’s publication. Judging by what’s here, Winchell wrote unconnected essays about his life over the latter part of the 1960s. There is no structure here; even the chapters themselves ramble, short as they are.

Winchell was mass media’s first major gossip and opinion maker, usually but not always in that order, calling out celebrity breakups and political crises with equal staccato ardor.

He describes what went into his syndicated “Man About Town” column:

Gossip about show people, newspaper and magazine people, eccentrics, the rich and poor, society folks – Cafooey-Souseity, Cafake Society, etcetera. The girls in the show and their sweedees, people who elope – Lizzie Tish and Schmo McCarthy look like an Elopemental case – and anybody and their half-wittiest sayings. Political boners and political coups, anything, everything, so long as it will be talked about and fill a col’m of about nine hundred to a thousand words daily.

A 1932 "Man About Town" column. The three dots between each news item or quip quickly became his trademark. In Winchell Exclusive, he makes clear he minded that other columnists used it.
 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/4108040/money-walter-winchell/

It wasn’t just what Winchell wrote, but how. Readers came to know his unique argot, his idiosyncratic “Winchellese,” over the decades in newspapers and on radio airwaves.

“Giggle water” meant liquor. “Pash” meant a hot romance. “Lohengrin it” was to marry, “Reno-vated” to be divorced. Winchell Exclusive provides a brief lexicon of terms in back, in case readers forgot.

By 1975, many had. Perhaps that’s why Ernest Cuneo, friend and ally of Winchell, felt the need to pen such an exhausting introduction, explaining how his man had “a fighting heart as big as a beer keg” and that, while neither all that good a fellow or nice to be around, “[h]e became the Greatest of the Great Reporters,” all that mattered in the end.

Much of Cuneo’s Introduction winds up being about Cuneo himself, who led an interesting life but is hardly the person you expect to read about 20 pages into a book about someone else.

Much of Winchell's working life was spent at night, rubbing shoulders with fellow celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. After that was over, he often rode around New York City picking up police dispatches on his scanner.
Image from https://photos.com/featured/walter-winchell-and-marilyn-monroe-bettmann.html.

The book is subtitled “Things That Happened to Me – and Me to Them,” which captures both its muzzy focus and confrontational tone. Winchell recounts pieces of his life in a loose, vaguely chronological fashion, mostly the beefs he had over the years with famous celebrities and rival newsmen, declaring rather than explaining his rightness in each and every dispute.

He begins with a brief account of growing up in the Jewish section of Harlem, dishing on his parents’ failed marriage: “My father was always attractive to women – a real lady killer. And that’s why my mother told him to get out of her life.”

Eventually young Walter discovered two passions, girls and theater. As a young hoofer and song-pitcher, he found success, but also another calling when he began relating juicy stories of backstage life and love among his fellow performers. At first he printed these items himself, then found a newspaper to print them. The rest was history.

Winchell explains: The column I did when I started contained no chitchat or gossip. It dealt mainly with theater-people quips, anecdotes, and human-interest stories and gags told by people in show biz – folks with whom I’d soft-shoe’d on the vaudeville bills coast to coast.

Winchell in his early heyday, endorsing Lucky Strike cigarettes. When Jergens Lotion sponsored his radio show, he told listeners he was sending them "lotions of love."
Image from http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images_body.php?token1=fm_img2685.php

Over time, as Winchell’s importance grew, his approach evolved. The Winchell column of the 1930s was a potpourri of funny anecdotes, stray observations, hot takes, and even light verse.

Winchell Exclusive offers some examples of the latter which show he had some pleasing talent there, as in “Lines to an Old Flame:”

I don’t suppose you’ll ever see this here,

          But if you do – perhaps you’ll have some laughs…

To think that you could make me shed a tear –

          But you’ve helped me to fill three paragraphs!

One thing Winchell doesn’t really get into, though it was well known, was just how much of his column was the work of others, publicity men who fed him items he served up with little or no revision. The opinions expressed were all Winchell’s, and that was what mattered. He wants you to know his opinions, too; at least those that held up over time.

The German-American Bund, a pre-war organization of Nazi sympathizers active in the United States, throw a rally in Manhattan that drew Winchell's scorn. "I was unloved (and unliked, too) by both sides, the Lefts and the Rights - the kind of a fight I enjoy."
Image from https://www.thirteen.org/blog-post/walter-winchell-the-power-of-gossip/

Early on he opposed Nazi Germany, and tells you several times about being beaten up thugs one night for that. When it came to racism, Winchell spoke out early and often about how the Constitution applied to all Americans, not caring what it did to his readership in the Deep South. He was an ardent supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal, which for Winchell connected to his ardent love for the little guy.

But in relating these points, he always finds a way to make it about himself – first, last, and most of the way inbetween. With Roosevelt, for example, he talks up his chats with the President with embarrassing fulsomeness, apparently mistaking FDR’s blandishments for genuine admiration and expecting us to do the same:

The President then said that whenever I heard anything I thought he alone should know (Hitler was on the way up at the time, and Mussolini was another threat) I should tell it to him in person – not via letter or any third person. “That’s an order,” he kidded.

It’s an “order” because Winchell was in the Navy Reserve at the time, a point he brings up again and again as if he was recruited for some vital military function rather than to sell lots of war bonds. Winchell seems to think being a good reporter meant being in the pockets of the right people, an attitude that served him better here than it did later.

Winchell's love for FDR didn't extend to his successor, Harry S. Truman, with whom Winchell tangled. In Winchell Exclusive, he recalls Truman telling him off at the White House one night with the line: "I never kiss anybody's ass."
Image from https://mrnussbaum.com/president-33-harry-s-truman-biography-presidents-series

Winchell’s support for the American Left never extended to socialism, and when the U. S. S. R. replaced Nazi Germany as chief geopolitical foe, he became a proud Red Baiter. For a time he even aligned himself with Senator Joseph McCarthy, sharing a table at his favorite Manhattan nightspot, the Stork Club, with McCarthy’s right-hand man Roy Cohn.

In Winchell Exclusive, this extended dalliance gets sloughed off as an example of how people misread him. He was onto McCarthy’s bogus charges early, he claims, and brags about exposing him to other members of the press. But Winchell never broadcast this, and offers no public account of any split, which him look rather disingenuous.

He notes how the Washington Post dropped his column when he began supporting Dwight D. Eisenhower, Truman’s Republican successor. “I am not a man who is for any party – I am for the candidate I like. Republican or Democrat, like many newspapers that call themselves ‘independent.’”

There’s no wrong as I see it in Winchell changing his politics, or finding himself at odds with former allies. But you can sense the defensiveness in him, here and everywhere, in refusing to admit any basis for criticism.

Crime boss Lewis "Lepke" Buchalter was Winchell's biggest scoop when he allowed the newsman to take him to police custody in August 1939. Lepke screamed at Winchell when he learned he faced more than a few years in jail. He was executed in 1944.
Image from https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/gossip-columnist-crime-boss-surrender-fbi-article-1.798591 

Even when Winchell is offering some kind words about some long-dead writer, he can’t resist the shiv. Ring Lardner was a great scribe and good friend, but Winchell’s reflections boil down to him bumming money of Walter before he died, and that one of Lardner’s sons went on to write something nasty about Winchell in a magazine article.

Winchell seems to have regarded any national pundit who came after him as an rank imitator, and either brags about their demise or whines about their success. He fumes: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? My foot! It’s the sincerest form of burglary!”

The book does get a little better as it goes on. Maybe I just got used to the tone. There is a chapter on Christine Jorgensen, the man who made news by becoming a woman, whom Winchell writes about with amusement but also grace and warmth. When invited to a benefit where her name would sell tickets, Jorgensen agreed. Winchell tells how he made sure everyone was on their best behavior, because he admired her guts and her being a sport. And yes, he uses the female pronoun throughout. So he was a man ahead of his time that way.

Even in his own memoir, Winchell was not one for reminiscing. "I’m not interested in what happened yesterday anyway," he writes. "I never was. 'What’s going to happen tomorrow?' is my theme song."
Image from https://www.thedailybeast.com/walter-winchells-ghost-still-haunts-a-media-biz-that-divides-america

Make no mistake, though, this is a bad book. It’s like flipping through a scrapbook with a megalomaniac. Winchell should make great copy, but he doesn’t, which confuses me. So far, I’ve read four books about Winchell, a straight biography, a novel, a hit job, and this. None were much good; only one, the bio, was even decent.

Being a real jerk throughout his life allowed Winchell to get a lot of good things for himself, but a good autobiography wasn’t one of them.