Can WW Save Vaudeville?

"Ohhh, my back," groaned Walter Winchell, 61, as he soft-shoed through a cluster of show girls rehearsing in Las Vegas, Nev. "Feel this corset," said the grand old man of keyhole journalism. "Go ahead, feel it. I've got a torn muscle near the sacroiliac. How the hell am I gonna get over to that side of the stage?" Last week Gossipist Winchell, an oldtime hoofer before he cast himself in the role of a newspaperman, painfully returned for $35,000 a week to his first love--himself on a stage--and it was rough.

Winchell went back to hoofing for two weeks at the Hotel Tropicana to ease the pinch of losing his TV income from the canceled Walter Winchell File. Spectacular billboards glutted the highways for 300 miles around Las Vegas (and up and down Hollywood's Sunset Strip), radio stations spewed his own breathless announcements all over the West, the Tropicana was laden with huge photographs of Winchell hovering near President Eisenhower (caption: "The only reporter allowed this close").

Paean to a Softy. Mounds of congratulatory telegrams from celebrities filled his suite. Jack Dempsey, the McGuire Sisters and the cast of Say, Darling wished him well. Hedda Hopper was sorry she couldn't make it. Frank Sinatra, Winchell's current shrine character, reserved three tables for opening night (but failed to show up). The Milton Berles, George Raft, Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams were all there. Thoughtful ex-Gambler Mickey Cohen sent flowers and a personal emissary: "Mickey thought it was for the best he should'na come, Walter." "Yeah," said Walter, "it's just as well."

"They offered me $25,000 a week," brooded Hoofer Winchell as show time approached. "They said that's what Marlene gets, but I said Marlene hasn't got syndication." Fitfully hazarding a buck and wing, he boasted: "I did four shows a day at McVickers' in Chicago right after the Armistice." And at twelve, he proudly recalled, he plugged songs with George Jessel at the old Imperial Theater in New York, later danced with Eddie Cantor and Lila Lee.

Winchell strutted onstage before Brobdingnagian blowups of his column, singing New York's My Beat! There followed something called "The Walter Winchell Story," an unabashed paean with heavenly choirs, lots of girls, sawing violins and huge backdrop photographs of Winchell the baby, the boy and the man, among swirling Manhattan towers and streaky dawn skies. Intoned an announcer: "Strange, perhaps, that a man who has delivered gangsters to the FBI and announced the murder of a mobster five hours before his assassination, should be a poetry lover. But sonnets have led off Walter's column now and then for 37 years. And many a torchy tear has been shed by lonely lovers as they see themselves mirrored in print by Winchell, the hard-boiled softy."

"Ughh!" The violins swelled and the choral voices droned: "He started the first gossip column in town; Don Ameche invented the telephone for Walter so he could send out the news; he reported the way Jolson made people laugh and cry; and he helped J. Edgar Hoover with the FBI." From ringside, Rival Columnist Leonard Lyons whispered hoarsely: "And on the seventh day, he rested."

But Walter rested not, donned a Spanish hat for a high-stepping mambo with a slithering siren in gold lame. He kicked too high once, groaned an agonized

"Ughh!" He swept off to a dressing room stuffed with bouquets of orchids and horseshoes of roses. Sighed Old Comic Joe E. Lewis: "I was a little disappointed--I enjoyed it."

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