The precise origins of his invention are unclear, and Winchell himself muddied the waters with several conflicting versions. Finally, Winchell gathered a series of items one Monday and sneaked them past the editor.
The effect was revolutionary and, as it turned out, enduring. It was one thing for marginal publications like Town Topics and Broadway Brevities to print who was romancing whom, whose marriages were in jeopardy, which couples were about to have children, who was consorting with gangsters, who had welshed on a debt, who was seriously ill, and a hundred other secrets, peccadilloes, and imbroglios.
It was entirely another matter for these items to be printed in a mainstream publication, even one as disreputable as the Graphic. The buzz of comment and criticism and alarm spread from Broadway to Park Avenue. Winchell delighted in knocking down the wall that separated them from us, the world of celebrity from the quotidian world of his readers. And he reaped the reward. Elaine Arden is another of the secret brides. Who is the prominent theater producer Gentile whose divorce case will be an international sensation next month?
Analysts were scrambling to explain what made him so popular. There was truth in each of these analyses, but what contemporary observers caught up in the novelty of Walter Winchell overlooked was the appeal of the bitter subtext of the gossip he purveyed.
Himself nursing deep resentments, Winchell understood that gossip was a weapon that empowered his readers. Invading the lives of the famous and revealing their secrets brought them to heel, humanized them, and in humanizing them demonstrated that they were no better than we and in many cases worse.
The Broadway of the Jazz Age was a place where the pace never slackened, the lights never dimmed, the crowds never thinned, the revelry never stopped—a place where all the energy of the era could roar.
Now, by exploiting the populist component of his column, Winchell was able to survive the end of the Roaring Twenties, with which he had been so closely identified, while so many other emblems of the age—Texas Guinan, Al Capone, Jimmy Walker —perished. It was primitive, often not much more than gibes and anecdotes, but there was at least one observer who understood the potential program, especially now that Winchell was reaching an ever larger audience through a new weekly fifteen-minute radio program of gossip and commentary.
With the political mantle thus bestowed upon him, Winchell had achieved a credibility that few other celebrities had and a celebrity that no political commentator had ever had. In some ways, though, the best or at least the most admirable was yet to come. He had also begun funneling information on pro-Nazi activities to the Federal Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover, thus forging one of the most important of his professional relationships.
But more than predicting events, he was also actively shaping them, pushing first for a massive program of rearmament and then, after Hitler had invaded Poland, nudging the country toward intervention. Burton Wheeler of Montana, who fought against American involvement before Pearl Harbor and against Roosevelt after it. The right-wingers reviled FDR and feared him, but destroying Roosevelt was beyond their power.
They fastened much of the enmity instead on his obstreperous cheerleader. Why was a rapscallion like Winchell allowed to be a member of the naval reserve? Winchell in fact was eager to go on active duty.
He kept pressing the Navy and even the President. Roosevelt told him he was too important in his role as broadcaster, but eventually, in December , FDR succumbed and enlisted Winchell to conduct a fact-finding mission in Brazil.
He probably would have been the subject of a serious full-scale biography long before mine. He might have had the status that Edward R. Murrow enjoys. He might even have wound up on a postage stamp. It continued into the Cold War, when Winchell gradually shifted his fire from the vanished Nazi threat to the new threat of communism.
The postwar years were especially difficult ones for Winchell, though his radio popularity was, if anything, even greater than it had been. Winchell needed some clear political target at which to aim his anger; he needed Nazis to fight.
McCarthy: In this fight to clean out the disloyal people, the bad security risks from the State Department, the opposition we've run into has been, as you know, tremendous. Czitrom: It's a mistake to think of anti-communism as something that was rammed down the throats of the American people against their will, that it was somehow a tiny movement.
Doherty: Winchell sees in Senator McCarthy this rising star who might one day be president of the United States, Winchell: Congressional detectives are now breathing heavily down the neck of a very big man in the Department of Defense. McCarthy can't stand the elites either because the elites are also contemptuous of him. Doherty: McCarthy is a very far-sighted politician in the sense of using the new medium that's come on in the postwar era.
Goldberg: In the s, the television diet is a mix of variety shows, westerns, and situation comedies. McCarthy: One great evil Doherty: McCarthy realizes, 'Why should I spend decades toiling in the Senate mastering legislation when I can go on this new medium of television and get a national profile instantaneously by making the right accusation?
North and South America and all the ships at sea, let's go to press -- Dallas, Texas. Dorothy Parker, the famous playwright and poet, will make a speech in New York on the 17th at a hall in Greenwich Village, probably on 4th Street, on behalf of the communists now in American jails for conspiring to overthrow the United States.
Rhodes: Josephine Baker had lived this amazing life all the way from the stage to working for the French Resistance to sort of advocating for civil rights. Rhodes: After the war, African-Americans are demanding their rights, and the discrimination that still exists is becoming less and less tolerable. So Josephine Baker was celebrated as a credit to her race, a real symbol of racial accomplishment. Gabler: She demands that the nightclubs be integrated, and Winchell, who has always been a prominent advocate of civil rights, cheers her on in his columnand integrates the club for her.
Winchell: Josephine Baker's applause at Copa City is the most deafening, prolonged and sincere we have ever heard in 40 years of showbiz, a one gal-show with exquisite gowns, charm, magic, and big-time zing. Gabler: Winchell would later claim he saw none of this, but Josephine Baker claims that Winchell is responsible because he didn't come to her aid. Winchell: I thought my record was crystal clear when minorities are getting kicked around, and it irritates me, no little now, to have to recite that record and disgrace myself with any defense.
He sends the FBI letters which claim she had fraternized with Russians during a tour of the Soviet Union 14 years before. Rhodes: We really see a pretty rapid and precipitous decline in her career, and she eventually ends up going back to France because of that. Ed Sullivan, a variety-show host who champions diversity, has disdained Winchell's methods ever since the s when they were rival columnists at the 'Evening Graphic.
He shouldn't have this power to ruin people's reputations, especially based on things that were not true. Goldberg: Winchell won't dare touch Ed Sullivan, but he can go after the man who interviewed him. Winchell: Borey was M. Nancy: Barry Gray became 'Borey,' I guess for 'boring.
Winchell: Borey, pink, gray, red, yellow, once claimed he didn't know Nancy: Pink for pinko communist, Yellow -- he was a coward. Czitrom: You have a number of liberal outlets that begin to go after Winchell because they perceive him now as being a right-wing demagogue. I still remember I was about 6 or 7 years old at the time, and we came out of the house, and they popped out from the bushes. Czitrom: The 'New York Post' ran a part series on Winchell, a sort of comprehensive look at his life, his career, his connections, his money.
One might describe it as vicious, except that mostly what it was was simply revealing facts. Jim: He said he never read the series at first, but he got so aggravated by it that he had to stop working for three months, said he was sick. And then Winchell came back, and he said, 'Now we're gonna go get the people at the 'Post. Wechsler, the editor of the 'New York Poo,' who is now ducking the dead cats, keeps whining that he's a Commy.
Gabler: It becomes a rather sad, I think, and sordid response and helps to lead to Winchell's downfall. Welch: Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.
Winchell: The White House reporters last Friday reported Winchell: Judge Noonan Gabler: But when television came along, there was a meanness to him that worked very much against him. So it was television revealing what Winchell had become, and what he'd become was not appealing.
He quietly undermines Walda's acting career, telling producers, 'She doesn't belong in the theater. As Winchell's own world tightens, the more he clings to his radio broadcast, and when that's canceled in , all he has left is the column.
Winchell: We'd been hearing rumors for seven or eight months, ever since the strike started, as a matter of fact. Gabler: Here's one of the most interesting things about arguably the most famous man in America in the s after Franklin Roosevelt.
But we inhabit the world that Winchell created the blurring of the boundary between news and entertainment. Ingraham: Experts say Gabler: You can see Walter Winchell as part of the evolution of what was beyond the pale. Gabler: Or you'll see a television star become the president of the United States.
Gabler: The kind of dividing line between entertainment and politics was shattered by Winchell in the '30s. Limbaugh: Femi-Nazis Gabler: And we're still living that in any journalism that we absorb today. Winchell: I remain your New York correspondent, Walter Winchell, who can sit at his window andreview the passing parade below. Narrator: Next time on 'American Masters' Thomas: Experience the wonder in the music.
Narrator: Look for Michael Tilson Thomas Thomas: It's the music. I'm ready to go all over again. Skip to main content Skip to footer site map. Walter Winchell photographed in Spring Vaudeville Winchell begins performing in vaudeville revues led by composer Gus Edwards.
Spring Fall First newspaper job Winchell gets his first newspaper job at the Vaudeville News, a trade paper. Fall September 20, During this time, NBC had given him the opportunity to host a variety show, which lasted only thirteen weeks. His readership gradually dropped, and when his home paper, the New York Daily Mirror , where he'd worked for thirty-four years, closed in , he faded from the public eye. He wrote in a style filled with slang and incomplete sentences. Winchell's casual writing style famously earned him the ire of mobster Dutch Schultz, who confronted Winchell at New York's Cotton Club and publicly lambasted him for using the phrase "pushover" to describe Schultz's penchant for blonde women.
Some notable Winchell quotes are: "Nothing recedes like success," and "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret.
Winchell opened his radio broadcasts by pressing randomly on a telegraph key, a sound which created a sense of urgency and importance and the catchphrase "Good evening Mr. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.
His diction can also be heard in his breathless narration of the Untouchables television series as well as in several Hollywood films. For most of his career his contract with his newspaper and radio employers required them to reimburse him for any damages he had to pay, should he be sued for slander or libel.
Whenever friends reproached him for betraying confidences, he responded, "I know — I'm just a son of a bitch. On August 11, , Winchell married Rita Greene, one of his onstage partners. Joseph McCarthy, filling his pages and broadcasts with vindictive, denunciatory tirades and mean-spirited accusations that resulted in lawsuits and loss of media outlets. He had climbed to the top and tumbled.
Walter Winchell died of prostate cancer on 20th February, Winchell was a powerhouse widely feared because of his penchant for exposing the private lives of important public men - from mistresses and pregnancies to divorces - which gave him plenty of bargaining chips to trade for information about what was going on inside their businesses or agencies.
He had morphed from a Broadway critic to a political commentator who thought nothing of weighing in on domestic and international affairs While there were a number of prominent American journalists who were sympathetic to the British plight, Lippman, Pearson, and Winchell went beyond publishing Ministry of Information handouts to actively aiding the cause whenever they could, and they were in close contact with British intelligence There was a long list of ink-stained crusaders who had been fighting against Hitler and Mussolini since as far back as - among them Dorothy Thompson and Edmund Taylor - and who had proved helpful to the BSC in its covert campaign against isolationism and defeatism.
Ernest Cuneo, the affable, Falstaffian attorney and sidekick to Winchell, who was known to be a member of Roosevelt's "palace guard" and a behind-the-scenes operator bar none Cuneo had such close ties to the BSC that he was considered a member of the club, had his own code name - CRUSADER - and was empowered to "feed" select British intelligence items about Nazi sympathizers and subversives to Pearson, Winchell, and other handpicked outlets.
At the time, he was actually ghostwriting many of Winchell's columns and radio broadcasts, which parroted the British propaganda line of the day. Unquestionally each used the other. From Table 50 at the Stork Club - he never picked up the tab - Winchell held court like a prince, beckoning prizefighters, movie stars, debutantes, royalty and gangsters to his table.
He mingled with the mob, interviewing Al Capone and palling around with Frank Costello, and defiantly dominated a Broadway world that no longer exists. One of his biggest coups came in when Louis Lepke Buchalter, described by Hoover as ''the most dangerous criminal in the Untied States,'' surrendered to him. Buchalter was electrocuted in Winchell's reach into politics and sports was also huge. He adored the New Deal, supported civil rights and repeatedly denounced Hitler and Fascism far sooner than more Establishment journalists did.
His two favorite public figures were President Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover.
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