"The Biggest Success Story"

With a trumpeting of Page One headlines, the New York Post (circ. 390,000) last week launched a series on Hearst Columnist Walter Winchell, "probably the biggest success story in American journalism." To the Post, which has been feuding with Winchell for months, it was a success story without a hero.

Post Editor James Wechsler had long been anxious to hang a picture of Winchell for his readers, but he could not find an occasion to his liking. Winchell supplied one by his attacks on Negro Singer Josephine Baker, after she complained that the Stork Club had refused to serve her (TIME, Nov. 12). When the race-conscious Post took her side, the paper heard that Stork Club Owner Sherman Billingsley had set agents to investigating Post Owner Dorothy Schiff.

The Post decided to investigate Billingsley first, then dropped him in favor of his great & good friend Winchell, because "all the trails seemed to lead to Winchell." Editor Wechsler sent a pack of seven reporters after the story. They spent two months at the job before Editor Wechsler sat down to write most of the series himself.

Faded Orchids. The Post depicted Walter Winchell as "one of the loneliest men in the world," though "he assumes that he knows everybody and everybody knows him . . . He made the gossip column a respectable newspaper feature . . . but he spends much of his time justifying the existence of gossip columns and trying to prove he is a heavier thinker than Walter Lippmann.

"He is a sucker for the most faded verbal orchid from the most cynical suitor. The worst book will get his best notices if he is favorably mentioned in it ... He feels compelled on all occasions to remind the world that he is a central figure in the history of the 20th century. 'One hundred years from now I'm the only newspaperman they'll remember,' he told a private audience ... He depicts himself as the eternal friend of the underdog ... his only requirement is that the underdog remain forever on his leash.

"In his latter-day role of statesman, he is handicapped only by misinformation, lack of knowledge, capricious judgment and a cultivated aversion for the reading of books. 'Tell me what's in it,' he demands impatiently, 'don't make me read it.' " Said the Post: he prefers to let others read, see, listen--and even write--for him. "Winchell's 'gossip' ... is primarily the edited product of diligent, harassed press-agents who give him first choice on all evil that they see, hear or overhear--and some of the good, if it involves their own clients . . . The dividends are indirect; they collect proportionately from their clients for the touch of immortality that goes with the expression: 'He's close to Winchell.'" And, added the Post, they live in unholy terror that they will lose that touch.

The Other Winchells. The busiest of these unpaid, unsung legmen, as the Post tells it, are Pressagents Ed Weiner, Curt Weinberg and Irving Hoffman. Weiner is the columnist's "lobbyist, contact-man, straight-man-about-town"; Hoffman is a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter; Weinberg was Singer Josephine Baker's drum beater until the Stork Club incident, then Weinberg hastily dropped her. Also chased from the Winchell closet was another figure that few other ghosts even knew about: Herman Klurfeld, 35, who sticks close to his Long Island home and is paid a reported $250 a week by Winchell for writing his "schmaltz" columns, such as "Man Playing with Words" ("Central Park: This is an island of repose bounded by a stone-and-steel sea").

Reader & Thinker. "But of the men behind Winchell," the Post said, Ernest Cuneo "deservedly leads the list." A onetime Columbia University lineman, Cuneo is WW's "attorney . . . book-reader . . brain ... at a reported . . . $75,000 a year. [He] has undoubtedly offered the largest single contribution to his book of political knowledge and overheated opinion." Cuneo, friend of many of the early New Dealers, introduced Winchell into the inner circle of the New Deal, and, said the Post, guides most of Winchell's political opinions; lately, the Post implied, .there apparently has been something of a rift, because "Cuneo clings to his old New Deal associates [while] Winchell increasingly sounds . . . Republican." (Cuneo last year bought a large interest in N.A.N.A., a news-feature service.)

One way in which Winchell sounds increasingly Republican, said the Post, is that he has "embraced" Senator Joe McCarthy. "It was fear rather than conviction that persuaded him to make love to Senator McCarthy. He ran for cover when McCarthy opened fire on Drew Pearson, spurning all appeals that he come to Pearson's defense."

"WWrongos." Some of the most telling blows against Winchell were fashioned right out of his own columns. The Post found more than enough errors to run a daily box of Winchell "WWrongos" and his carefully disguised corrections. Example: " 'Irving Berlin, the poor songwriter, netted only $650,000 (after taxes) in 1946.'" Two days later Winchell ran the veiled retraction: " 'Irving Berlin says the report that he made $650,000 (after taxes) is bunk.'"

The Post also took a critical look at Winchell's relations with "the baddies" in the underworld. Commented the Post: " 'The baddies' have staked their newsboy pal to some pretty good beats," such as the surrender of Killer Lepke to Winchell on Aug. 24, 1939, and the murder of Mad Dog Coll. During the Kefauver hearings, Winchell ran a column of anecdotes in which he "remembered all sorts of things about Frank Costello--all nice," and followed it up later with an exclusive interview picturing him "as an authority on how to stamp out crime."

Counterattack? The Post does not minimize the power of Winchell as columnist and Sunday radioracle. And the paper, which has boosted circulation by 35,000 (to 425,000) by the series, expects a counterattack soon, perhaps on Wechsler, an anti-Communist who was once a college Red. Says Jimmy Wechsler: "I hear Winchell's legmen are already working on my WWrongos."

But at week's end, Winchell had not let out a peep. Only note taken of the series was in Hearst's New York Mirror, his home base. Across Page One it ran the headline: THERE IS ONLY ONE WALTER WINCHELL. In this strange quiet, Publisher Schiff* raised her own voice, in her weekend Post column.

"I must admit that I had grown quite fond of Walter over the years," she wrote. "My maternal instinct, perhaps." As late as a year ago she had talked to him about switching his column from Hearst to the Post. But "now my sympathy for Winchell is a thing of the past . . . Maybe this series . . . will bring him to his senses, and he will cease his evil, vindictive campaigns against individuals who have displeased him."

* Her ex-husband, Ted Thackrey, onetime Post editor and now editor and publisher of the Redlined New York Compass, tried last week to get into the Post's act. The Compass picked up an attack on Winchell, recently run in a Manhattan monthly tabloid called Expose, and billed it as "The Original Expose" on Winchell.

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