Newspaperman

(See front cover)

At four o'clock one morning last May two cheap sedans collided at the corner of Manhattan's 86th Street and Central Park West. Eight people were badly smashed up. The driver of one of the cars was laid out on the sidewalk on a seat cushion, and as an uninjured friend knelt over him waiting for the ambulances to come, he kept repeating: "Oh I'm hurt bad in the chest. My chest's hurt bad."

Suddenly the friend looked up, recognizing a face he had seen in a newspaper. "There's Walter Winchell," he said. "Maybe he'll put something in the paper about you."

The man on the cushion stared up at the black sky and said in the same flat, unsurprised" voice: "Oh I'm hurt bad in the chest--hello. Walter--my chest's hurt bad."

Nearly every journalist has at one time or another tried to explain or describe the Winchell phenomenon. But the parenthetical greeting from the stranger on the sidewalk on Central Park West stands as the most eloquent expression to date of the U. S. people's complete and final acceptance of Walter Winchell's permeating ubiquity. A decade of gags and wisecracks about the omnipresence of the premier gossip of his time was at last confirmed.

Sunday before last over an NBC chain, Walter Winchell barked as usual. "Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea," and, having bounced up and down in his old armchair and yelled secrets for 15 minutes, concluded his seventh broadcasting season. Last Thursday he concluded his column by observing that "that society lady is so nuts about titles she'll probably end up with Joe Louis--who HAS one." He did not mention that he himself was ending up his 14th year in the newspaper business and going on a month's vacation.

All told, it was his best year. For two movies (Wake Up And Live, Love And Hisses), he had made $150,000, for 48 broadcasts he had got $192,000, and a syndicated column which reached 7,200,000 people through 140 newspapers had paid him $89,700.* He had never before been so fully seen, heard, read or paid. And, having progressed from a scandal to a national institution, the Winchell story had become more fabulous than any that even he had ever told.

Up From the Car. Almost every night that he is in Manhattan, Walter Winchell drives up to Harlem and down 116th Street. There, on the north side of the street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues, stands Public School 184 which gave him all the academic education he ever got--from grades one through six. The car tracks where he was run over while he was playing ball in the street have been taken up, but further up the block toward Lenox the Regun Theatre still stands. It used to be called the Imperial. There he got his first job--as a singing usher--and played his first professional engagement. It was a song & dance act billed as "McKinley, Stanley & Lawrence" and it was composed of Winchell, George Jessel and one Jack Wiener. All were under twelve.

A lot of traffic has passed over 116th Street since Walter Winchell started to get up from the car tracks. It has been tough and he does not mind telling about it. His lean years began at the age of 13, when in Providence, R. I., Gus Edwards fired him from his kid act (including Jessel, Lila Lee and Georgie Price) after two weeks with the show. If Winchell had possessed any great talent for singing and dancing, contemporary journalism would have been considerably duller. He and his later girl partners rarely got a better place on a bill than the Number Two Spot-- after the acrobats--and long before the War he was thinking of some other way of making a living. In 1917 he was 20. He enlisted in the Navy. He fought the War in the New York City customs house as receptionist to the late Rear Admiral Marbury Johnston and it was prophetic that he seared his nose in a candle flame when, instead of giving his full attention to applying sealing wax to envelopes, he tried to hear what the Admiral was telling some other officers about the impending Armistice.

The first Winchell gossip column--and the first Winchell portmanteau word--was The Newsense. A neatly typed page divided into three columns, it began to appear in the spring of 1919 on the bulletin boards of theatres in which Pantages Road Show No. 151 was playing. It conveyed such information as the fact that so-&-so's mother was getting over the grippe and it was made sprightlier by quips like "You tell 'em Ouija, I'm bored."

A consuming desire to be in on things, to be in the know, had led him to the newspaper offices of various towns he played. In Chicago in the winter of 1919--where a careless electrician permanently changed Wrinchel's name to Winchell by putting it up that way on the marquee--the hoofer got his first chance to be a reporter. After a heavy snow storm a friend on the Herald and Examiner let him go to the Illinois Central Station and report how the trains were going in and out. Winchell thereafter styled himself the Herex's "traveling reporter."

The Newsense was picked up by Glenn Condon, editor (and staff) of the New York Vaudeville News, and soon Winchell, as the author of "West Coast Echoes" became the News's most enthusiastic contributor. In the summer of 1920 he went east between engagements and told Condon he wanted to help him put out the News. The News was a house organ of the Keith-Albee circuit. It had been founded to combat unionizing activity by the "White Rats." It carried no advertising and was distributed free, but it was Winchell's one chance to be at least a kind of newspaperman and he literally hung around its office until Condon took him on at $25 per week. He began writing jokes and trade gossip under the heading of "Merciless Truths" and "Broadway Hearsay." He also persuaded Condon that they ought to charge a nickel for the sheet and solicit advertising. Winchell took on the job of advertising manager, collecting 20% of the gross, and one of the first things he did was provide the girl dance team of Hill & Aster with a free inside front cover. He and June Magee (Aster) were married in 1923.

In 1924 Fulton Oursler was founding the tabloid New York Graphic for Bernarr Macfadden. Through a vaudeville friend named Norman Frescott, Winchell met Oursler, whose poetry Winchell had been cheerfully rejecting from the Vaudeville News. Oursler said he thought the rejections showed good editorial judgment, hired Winchell for $100 a week to be the Graphic's theatre critic and conduct a column first called "Broadway Hearsay," later "Your Broadway and Mine." The first item was some verse by "W. W." entitled A Newspaper Poet's Love.

In the years that followed he developed in his Graphic column such Winchellese as "the stem" (Broadway), "gigglewater" (liquor), "flicker" and "moom pitcher," which meant the same thing. One year after Winchell left the Vaudeville News for the Graphic, the News folded. He was on the Graphic until 1929, and three years after he left it for the Mirror, the Graphic folded too. By that time it was estimated that 200,000 New Yorkers would follow Winchell to any paper to which he might go.

On the Mirror Winchell became increasingly staccato, informative and readable. He developed the Monday column (sub-headed "This Town of Ours," later "Man About Town") which made a specialty of entertaining and impudent eavesdropping ("Edna St. Vincent Millay, the love poem writer, just bought a new set of store teeth"). He invented "welded," "sealed" and "middle aisled" to mean married, "renovated," "wilted" and "have phffft" for parted or divorced. And a glimmering interest in politics was evidenced in this item printed in September 1932: " 'Sonny' Whitney has dropped the name of Vanderbilt because 'it is incongruous' . . . Sonny also doesn't want you to call him 'Sonny' now that he's running for office. . . . They called Roosevelt 'Teddy' and Lincoln 'Abe,' Sonny. . . ."

What People Say. After studying a picture of Winchell's nervous, foxlike face, examining the column and hearing his breathless voice on the radio, a psychiatrist recently classed Winchell as a sufferer from "sublimated voyeurism," a man who passionately wants to see, to know, hating a secret, vicariously participating in all the things he sees and learns about and living everybody's life.

Other observers have other views. When H. L. Mencken was editing the American Mercury he once said to George Jean Nathan: "The three of us are in the same business, libel, but Winchell seems to know where to stop."

The most recent, as well as the fanciest, published appraisal of Winchell was written for this month's Cosmopolitan by Dorothy Kilgallen, who concludes: "He is a streamlined Aesop spinning the chromium fables of night-time Manhattan, a grey young recording angel writing the fickle legends of Broadway--on a small typewriter, with two fingers."

The angel's critics have not always been so kind. Five years ago, irascible Westbrook Pegler, who got his start in the newspaper business running a station house beat and continues to regard Winchell as an interloping amateur, wrote a column called "A Sport Writer Interviews Himself," more or less in the manner of Winchell's occasional "Portrait of a Man Talking to Himself." It was bitterly perceptive and probably stung Winchell worse than he has ever been stung before or since. Excerpt:

"I must remember to write something nice about George Washington. He deserves it, even from me. Walnuts grow on trees. Shakespeare died at the age of fifty. . . .

"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. . . .

"I must remember to put the blast on Pontius Pilate. . . ."

More than any other one man, however, Winchell helped restore to metropolitan journalism a vigorous, primitive quality which rural journalism never lost: an interest in personalities and the conviction that names make news. "Winchell did much for journalism," said Newspaperman Stanley Walker in The Night Club Era, "for which journalism has been slow to thank him. He helped to change the dreary, ponderous impersonality which was pervading the whole press. Do news papers today print twice, or ten times, as many items about people -- what they are like, what their crotchets are, what they eat and drink and wear -- as they did ten years ago? Some of the credit belongs to Winchell. . . . It took Winchell to prove once more that people are interested in people and that facts, even trivial facts, have an irresistible fascination."

"The Column." The thing in Winchell's column that infuriated folk like Pegler were items on the order of: "A high official who 'resigned' recently because of 'ill health' was forced to retire because he was Harry Thawish," or "What theatricalatt'y has terpsichores fired from shows when they do not go out with his 'particular' and 'eminent' friends?" Tantalizers of this sort are nowadays rare in Winchell's column. "On Broadway" when reviewed, offers impressive evidence that item for item and day by day it has improved pretty steadily. Scattered among the great mass of unimportant and even untrue material that Winchell has printed in the past 14 years, lies many an item which would pass for a scoop in any newspaper office. On a tip from the late Texas Guinan, in February 1932 he recorded the arrival in Manhattan of an execution squad of "Chicago-rillas" just six hours before they murdered over-homicidal Gangster Vincent Coll. The grand jury questioned Winchell on that item but, until last week, he never revealed its source. He had the shooting by G-Men of "Pretty Boy" Floyd well ahead of any other news agency. Last week he called attention to the fact that he had reported that Norma Shearer would play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind just 65 weeks before it was officially confirmed.

Not only does he get a lot of news early, but things have a way of happening when Winchell is around. He was taking a three-day vacation in Miami when Giuseppe Zangara took his famous shot at Franklin Roosevelt, and Winchell, by luck and fast thinking, was the first newspaperman to talk to Zangara after the shooting. He has a Ford sedan--equipped by police permission with a short wave radio receiver, red lights and a siren--that he drives around New York City all night long, going to fires, accidents, robberies. It is uncanny how often violence breaks out within a few blocks of him, and how often he beats the patrol cars and fire engines to the scene.

Most of Wlnchell's information comes to him from people who pass by his stationary nocturnal headquarters, a table at the entrance of Manhattan's convivial Stork Club, which he calls "the joint." Other tips and yarns he picks up when visiting other bars and cabarets. They come from individuals who want to have something nice said about themselves or their friends or clients, and from people who want something not so nice revealed about their rivals or enemies. Winchell has never paid a dime for any information. And since he has neither the time nor the staff to check his information, it is precisely as reliable as its sources. He does, however, refrain from using a source once it has proved unreliable.

He works while most people sleep. As a consequence his domestic life with his wife, son Walter (age two) and daughter Walda (age eleven) is confined to afternoons when he wakes up The writes the next day's column before 6 p. m.) and to evenings and weekends when he knocks off to get acquainted with his family.

Last year he spent eight-and-a-half months in California making pictures with his very friendly enemy Ben Bernie. He does not expect to make more and he sees no reason for leaving New York in the future. There is where most of his news is made and in its night spots most of it is gathered. "There is nothing for me to do in California," he says. "I can't go to people's homes and then write about them." He was made to feel this strongly when he recently found that Walda would not talk to him about her little friend Shirley Temple. "You would just put something in the paper about her," said Walda.

In spite of unpreventable misinformation which creeps into "On Broadway," Winchell has been sued for damages just four times in his professional career. Two suits were not brought to court, one cost the Mirror $15,000 and one is still to be tried. In Winchel's contract are three main provisions--one is that he must never be imitated (and he to be the judge of the imitation) in the Mirror, the second prevents the Hearst organization from moving him out of New York City, and the third makes the Hearst organization liable for his libel, if any.

New Friends-- Last March Publisher Hearst sent a teletype message from San Simeon to "editors of all Hearst newspapers using Winchell": "Please edit Winchell very carefully, and leave out any dangerous or disagreeable paragraphs. Indeed, leave out the whole column without hesitation, as I think he has gotten so careless that he is no longer of any particular value." The paragraphs that have since been most frequently deleted express Winchell's fear and hatred of the German Nazis. He has never made any secret of the fact that he is a Jew, and like most U. S. Jews he dreads the expanding Fascintern. The Lindbergh kidnapping brought him into contact with J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover became one of his early important connections off Broadway. Since then he has steadily expanded his and "the column's" acquaintance among non-Broadway folk.

Among his new friends, predominant are New Dealers and libertarians of various shades, from the President himself to people like Florida's earnest young Senator Pepper. One "whole column" left out of Hearst papers last spring was an account by Playwright Lillian Hellman of a bombing in Madrid. The political consciousness of these people, combined with his natural fear of totalitarianism, has matured the column. Growing up, Winchell is now interested in Problems as well as People.

That got him into Mr. Hearst's bad books.

The quarrel has since been patched up, in spite of the fact that Winchell continues to berate the Nazis--whom he calls Ratzis.

Winchell has been poked just twice, once by Al Jolson over a personal matter and once, Winchell is convinced, by U. S.

Nazis who set upon him after the Hauptmann trial. He believes they are still after him and he prefers to have the location of his upstate farm where he and his family are vacationing unpublished.

What Next? Walter Winchell is the only columnist who is a movie star, the only movie star who is a newscaster. His two musical films in which he and Bernie played themselves, were respectable successes, grossing some $6,000,000. His Jergen's Journal program--one of the oldest on the air under one sponsorship-- has a current Crosley rating of 12 (top for newscasters), compared to Lowell Thomas' summertime 7. As long as Winchell is not deserted by his curiosity, his sentimentality, and his essential innocence--his wide-eyed belief that everything is new and wonderful--there does not seem to be much to stop him. At 41 he is pretty well satisfied with things as they are. J. P. McEvoy, preparing an article on him for the Saturday Evening Post, recently asked Winchell: "What do you want to do next, Walter? What do you want to be?" Walter grinned. "Why, I want to be a columnist--like Walter Winchell."

*WinchelI's gossip column has no serious national rival although columnists like Dale Carhegie and Paul Mallon have more outlets.

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