Wiener-Schnitzel Winchell

I asked Rita Hayworth what she thought of Esther Williams, and Rita told me she thinks Esther is a good swimmer. Later on I asked Esther about Rita, and she said Rita is a good dancer . . . Curt Jurgens had a simple party at Cap Ferrat--twelve guests, the butler, the chauffeur, the cook, the secretary, one monkey, five parrots, and two dogs . . . Elsa Maxwell, looking like a weather-beaten hill, stood in the lobby of the Excelsior under a big straw hat which made it hard to tell what was front and what was back.

The raconteur of such Parsons-Hopper-Lyons-Kilgallen glimpses of the jet set at play is not named Louella, Hedda, Leonard or Dorothy. He is Germany's Wiener-Schnitzel Winchell, Gossipist Hannes Obermaier, who writes a daily Page 2 column for Munich's tabloid Abendzeitung called "Hunter Jots Down''--the name Hunter coming from a brand of Dutch cigarettes that Obermaier likes. In the eight years that Obermaier has chronicled high life in Europe's low places, Abendzeitung's circulation has shot from 17,000 to 105,000. His bosses give him much of the credit. Says Editor Rudolf Heizler: "I've always let Hannes write what he pleases. His column is a hodgepodge of movie small talk, cafe-society indiscretions and insinuations, nightclub gossip, and his occasional hangover spells of the moral shakes. But we long ago found that reading this hodgepodge becomes highly habit-forming. He's our biggest circulation-getter."

Fat Louse. Obermaier's column has become required reading on casting couches from Berlin to Bel Air. As he travels to the world's watering holes frequented by celebrities, he keeps forked tongue in cheek. In St. Anton, Austria, a ski resort, he wrote of the Shah of Iran's exwife: "On the slopes, Soraya still behaved like a queen, was especially careful not to let any spill mar her majesty. She also refused to queue up at the snack bar. But she had to turn democratic afterward. There was no way of beating the queue in front of the ladies' room.'' So great is his prestige that Film Producer Peter Bamberger says: "Obermaier has written himself into such power that he can seemingly make or break anyone in German moviedom. Last year in Venice, on a pure whim, he picked up Barbara Valentin--a blowzy blonde whom he referred to in private as a 'fat louse.' Within one month, with the aid of all the columnists in the illustrateds who copy Hunter in everything he does, he made her into Germany's No. 1 femme fatale.''

Cat in the Jungle. Obermaier has not always been such a fat cat in the celebrity jungle. Born in a Bavarian village, he was a student in Munich when World War II broke out, was wounded on the Russian front, spent two years in a prisoner-of-war camp. In 1949, after a variety of jobs, he won a competition for a cub reporter's opening on Abendzeitung by doing a story about a night in a Munich police station. While the other contestants spent the evening in police stations, Obermaier stayed in his hotel room, wrote the story as he imagined it. Two years later, after a tour of the U.S., he persuaded his editor to let him write a gossip column, culled his first effort from a stack of U.S. movie magazines he had brought back with him.

His columns haven't changed much since.

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