Walter Winchell
Walter Winchell was an American syndicated newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator. Originally a vaudeville performer, Winchell began his newspaper career as a Broadway reporter, critic and columnist for New York tabloids. He rose to national celebrity in the 1930s with Hearst newspaper chain syndication and a popular radio program. He was known for an innovative style of gossipy staccato news briefs, jokes, and Jazz Age slang. Biographer Neal Gabler said that his popularity and influence "turned journalism into a form of entertainment".
He uncovered both hard news and embarrassing stories about famous people by exploiting his exceptionally wide circle of contacts, first in the entertainment world and the Prohibition era underworld, then in law enforcement and politics. He was known for trading gossip, sometimes in return for his silence. His outspoken style made him both feared and admired. Novels and movies were based on his wisecracking gossip columnist persona, as early as the play and film Blessed Event in 1932. As World War II approached in the 1930s, he attacked the appeasers of Nazism, then in the 1950s aligned with Joseph McCarthy in his campaign against communists. He damaged the reputation of Josephine Baker as well as others who had earned his enmity.
He returned to television in 1959 as the narrator of the 1930s-set crime drama series The Untouchables. Over the years he appeared in more than two dozen films and television productions as an actor, sometimes playing himself.
Early life
Winchell was born in New York City, the son of Jennie and Jacob Winchell, a cantor and salesman; they were Russian Jewish immigrants. He left school in the sixth grade and started performing in Gus Edwards's vaudeville troupe the Newsboys Sextet, which also featured Eddie Cantor and George Jessel. During this time, Winchell performed as a tap dancer. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, and attained the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve.Professional career
Winchell began his career in journalism by posting notes about his acting troupe on backstage bulletin boards. He joined the Vaudeville News in 1920, then left the paper for the Evening Graphic in 1924, where his column was named Mainly About Mainstreeters. He was hired on June 10, 1929, by the New York Daily Mirror, where he became the author of the first syndicated gossip column, On-Broadway. The column was syndicated by King Features Syndicate.He made his radio debut over WABC in New York, a CBS affiliate, on May 12, 1930. The show, Saks on Broadway, was a 15-minute feature that provided business news about Broadway. He switched to WJZ and the NBC Blue in 1932 for the Jergens Journal.
Walter Winchell's radio-acting career included an episode of Lux Radio Theatre, when on June 28, 1937 he played the role of newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson in a one-hour adaptation of The Front Page.
Underworld connections
By the 1930s, Winchell was "an intimate friend of Owney Madden, New York's no. 1 gang leader of the prohibition era," but in 1932 his intimacy with criminals caused him to fear he would be murdered. He fled to California and "returned weeks later with a new enthusiasm for law, G-men, Uncle Sam, Old Glory". His coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping and subsequent trial received national attention. Within two years, he befriended J. Edgar Hoover. He was responsible for turning Louis "Lepke" Buchalter of Murder, Inc. over to Hoover.His newspaper column was syndicated in a wide array of newspapers worldwide, and he was read by millions every day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His Sunday night radio broadcast was heard by another 20 million people from 1930 to the late 1950s. In 1948, Winchell had the top-rated radio show when he surpassed Fred Allen and Jack Benny. One indicator of his popularity was being mentioned in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1937 song "The Lady Is a Tramp": "I follow Winchell and read every line."
Outspoken views
Winchell was one of the first commentators in America to attack Adolf Hitler and American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund, especially its leader Fritz Julius Kuhn. He was a staunch supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal throughout the Depression era, and frequently served as the Roosevelt Administration's mouthpiece in favor of interventionism as the European war crisis loomed in the late 1930s. Early on, he denounced American isolationists as appeasing Hitler, and explicitly attacked such prominent isolationists as Charles Lindbergh, whom he dubbed "The Lone Ostrich", and Gerald L.K. Smith, whom he denounced as "Gerald Lucifer KKKodfish Smith". Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Winchell was also an outspoken supporter of civil rights for African Americans, and frequently attacked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups as supporting un-American, pro-German goals.During World War II, he attacked the National Maritime Union, the labor organization for the civilian United States Merchant Marine, which he said was run by Communists, instancing West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges. In 1948 and 1949, he and influential columnist Drew Pearson attacked Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in columns and radio broadcasts.
Subsequently, Winchell began to denounce Communism as the main threat facing America.
Television
During the 1950s, Winchell supported Senator Joseph McCarthy's quest to identify Communists in the entertainment industry. His weekly radio broadcast was broadcast on ABC television on the same day. His program debuted on TV on October 5, 1952. Sponsored by Gruen Watch Company, it originated from WJZ-TV from 6:45 to 7 p.m. ET. By 1953, his radio and television broadcasts were simulcast until he ended that association because of a dispute with ABC executives in 1955. He starred in The Walter Winchell File, a television crime drama series that initially aired from 1957 to 1958, dramatizing cases from the New York City Police Department that were covered in the New York Daily Mirror. In 1956, he signed with NBC to host a variety program called The Walter Winchell Show, which was canceled after only 13 weeks—a particularly bitter failure in view of the success of his longtime rival Ed Sullivan in a similar format with The Ed Sullivan Show. ABC rehired him in 1959 to narrate The Untouchables for four seasons. In 1960, a revival of the 1955 television simulcast of Winchell's radio broadcast was canceled after six weeks.In the early 1960s, a public dispute with Jack Paar effectively ended Winchell's career—already in decline due to a shift in power from print to television. Winchell had angered Paar several years earlier when he refused to retract an item alleging that Paar was having marital difficulties. Biographer Neal Gabler described the exchange on Paar's show in 1961:
Hostess Elsa Maxwell appeared on the program and began gibing at Walter, accusing him of hypocrisy for waving the flag while never having voted . Paar joined in. He said Walter's column was "written by a fly" and that his voice was so high because he wears "too-tight underwear" … e also told the story of the mistaken item about his marriage, and cracked that Walter had a "hole in his soul".
On subsequent programs, Paar called Winchell a "silly old man" and cited other examples of his underhanded tactics. No one had previously criticized Winchell publicly, but by then his influence had eroded to the point that he could not effectively respond. The New York Daily Mirror, his flagship newspaper for 34 years, closed in 1963; his readership dropped steadily, and he faded from the public eye.
Personal ethics
Winchell became known for his attempts to destroy the careers of his political and personal enemies as his own career progressed, especially after World War II. Favorite tactics were allegations of having ties to Communist organizations and accusations of sexual impropriety. He was not above name-calling; for example, he called New York radio host Barry Gray "Borey Pink" and a "disk jerk". Winchell heard that Marlen Edwin Pew of the trade journal Editor & Publisher had criticized him as a bad influence and called him "Marlen Pee-you".For most of his career, his contracts with newspaper and radio employers required them to hold him harmless from any damages resulting from lawsuits for slander or libel. He unapologetically published material told to him in confidence by friends; when confronted over such betrayals, he typically responded, "I know—I'm just a son of a bitch." By the mid-1950s, he was widely seen as arrogant, cruel, and ruthless.
While on an American tour in 1951, Josephine Baker, who never performed before segregated audiences, criticized the Stork Club's unwritten policy of discouraging black patrons, then scolded Winchell, an old ally, for not rising to her defense. Winchell responded swiftly with a series of harsh public rebukes, including accusations of Communist sympathies. He spurned any attempts by friends to mitigate the heated rhetoric. The ensuing publicity resulted in the termination of Baker's work visa, forcing her to cancel all her engagements and return to France. It was almost a decade before U.S. officials allowed her back into the country. The adverse publicity of this, and similar incidents, undercut his credibility and power.
In his radio and television broadcasts on April 4, 1954, Winchell helped stoke public fear of the polio vaccine. He said, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America... and all the ships at sea. Attention everyone. In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccine claimed to be a polio cure. It may be a killer." Winchell claimed that the U.S. Public Health Services found live polio viruses in seven of ten vaccine batches it tested, reporting, "It killed several monkeys... the United States Public Health Service will confirm this in about 10 days." Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, immediately responded that the vaccine, which had been recently tested on 7,500 schoolchildren at the University of Pittsburgh, had been triple tested for the absence of live virus by its manufacturers, the National Institutes of Health, and his own research lab, and that similar testing would continue to screen out batches containing live virus.