Winchell v. Baker

In the world of peephole journalism, there is no more beautiful relationship than that between Columnist Walter Winchell and Sherman Billingsley, owner of Manhattan's famed Stork Club. Oklahoman Billingsley dates the beginning of his club's fabulous success from the day Winchell first came in and pronounced it "the New Yorkiest place in town." Since then Winchell has always had his own table there, and uses the Stork as his night office. There, he has planned many of the crusades which have gradually promoted him in his own esteem from gossip reporter to the foremost champion of human rights. But last week the Champ was screaming as shrilly as the kind of drunken blonde that Billingsley never, never allows in his club. Walter had been accused of ignoring an act of "discrimination" * that was made no more than a table-hopper's hop from his Cub Room table.

No Crabrneat. The discriminee was tall, tan Josephine Baker, the sleek Negro singer who first achieved fame in Paris by entertaining while clad only in a girdle of bananas. Miss Baker and some friends (Roger Rico, current male lead in South Pacific, Mrs. Rico and Mrs. Bessie Buchanan, an old friend of Miss Baker's) had sat down in the Cub Room, where they were served a round of drinks. Then Miss Baker ordered a crabmeat cocktail, a steak and a bottle of wine. One hour later, according to friends, nothing had been served, and the waiters were playing a rotary defense. Josephine, who has made something of a specialty of creating incidents since her return to the U.S. last spring, reacted with practiced dispatch. She stormed into the night to find Walter White, executive secretary of the-National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to whom her companions delivered the shattering charge: Winchell had been there and seen it all, and never lifted a finger to help.

White promptly fired off a telegram to Winchell, demanding an explanation. The row was fanned busily by the New York Post, which often vies with Winchell as the foremost champion of human rights. Then Fighter Sugar Ray Robinson weighed in. Sugar Ray said he would regretfully quit Winchell's Damon Runyon Memorial Fund unless Billingsley, also on the fund committee, "cleared up the situation immediately." Josephine Baker had given the fund the $20,000 proceeds of a Los Angeles appearance and Sugar Ray had just returned from a $60,000 benefit for it in Boston. Said Sugar Ray: "I can't tell you how it makes me feel being a member of a committee fighting cancer, and you have a cancer right there in your own committee."

"I Am Appalled." Winchell began to explain. He insisted that he had left the Stork Club before the Baker incident occurred. Cried Winchell: "I am appalled at the agony and embarrassment caused Josephine Baker and her friends at the Stork Club. But I am equally appalled at their efforts to involve me in an incident in which I had no part." As a clincher, he added a letter from Walter White himself, doubting that Winchell "would be a party to any insult to human dignity."

But next day, White indignantly cried foul. He had given the letter to Winchell only with the understanding that Winchell would repudiate Billingsley and his "anti-Negro, anti-Jewish, antilabor, pro-snob attitude." Snapped White: he hadn't.

Attack! Winchell retorted with a fresh flurry of testimonials to himself from Negroes, and launched a sniping attack on Josephine. In successive columns she became pro-fascist, a troublemaker and a Communist-guided provocateuse. Her supporters became "the Josephine Baker riot-inciters." Winchell reported darkly that "newspapermen are checking the tip that one of the complainants against the Stork Club (and her husband) helped incite and participated in the Paul Robeson-Peekskill riots." Then he reported that in 1935 Josephine had declared: "I am willing to recruit a Negro army to help Italy" in Mussolini's war on Ethiopia.

The topper was a report about her and the 1935 New York nightclub, Chez Josephine Baker: "The club was run in an extremely elegant manner . . . she did not want colored patronage."

"Ungather My Dry Goods." Josephine appealed to President Truman himself. "This matter is much bigger than Josephine Baker," she cried. "It is a matter that concerns America itself."

Amidst the babel, the voice of Sugar Ray was heard again in the New York Post. A fellow had come up behind him the other night, said Sugar Ray, grabbed him by the neck and demanded to know where he stood in the argument. "I had to tell him, 'Daddy-O, ungather my dry goods or I'll have to let you have it,' " said Sugar. With the air of a man trying to be helpful to his friend Winchell, Sugar explained that Walter had told him about the Stork Club long ago. "I called him up once," said Sugar, "and told him I'd meet him down at the Stork Club and he said, 'I wish you wouldn't, Champ. Sherman Billingsley doesn't like Negroes and he doesn't want them in his place, and if you came down there and he insulted you I'd have to break with him although I've known him for 23 years.' "

Sugar added a final thought: "Walter is a newspaperman and is entitled to his own opinion, but I think it is making him appear as though he were attacking Miss Baker because she stood up in this matter against Sherman Billingsley."

At week's end, Champ Winchell was still going right on talking. But Sugar Ray had about said the last word.

* Now one of the dirtiest words in the language --thanks to its indiscriminate use by columnists like Winchell. Its popular meaning: antiSemitism, anti-Negroism.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.