WINCHELL, WALTER
From the Jazz Age to the beginning of the Cold War, Walter
Winchell (April 7, 1897–February 20, 1972) was “the country’s best-known and most widely read journalist as well
as among its most influential” (New York Times, February
21, 1972). At his peak, one of every three Americans read
Winchell’s nationally syndicated gossip column and listened
to his weekly radio program that brought celebrity, crime,
and war news and views to sixty million Americans.
Walter Winchell was the first of two sons born in Harlem’s Jewish ghetto to Jacob Winchel, a womanizer who
occasionally sold silk for women’s underpants, and Jennie
Bakst Winchel, the daughter in a family recently arrived
from Russia. Jennie sewed, but the ends never met. The
Winchels were stalked by rent collectors from tenement
to tenement, forcing six moves in nine years. Walter often
lodged with relatives and sometimes strangers. He found it
humiliating.
By nine, Walter was an experienced hustler. He peddled
papers along 116th Street and earned extra nickels on rainy
days by holding an umbrella over unsuspecting passengers
outside the Lenox Avenue subway station. At ten, he got his
name in the Evening Sun when he was hit by a trolley bus.
He liked the attention. At twelve he ushered and plugged
songs at Harlem’s Imperial Theater. It gave him “an exciting, breathless feeling” (Gabler 1994, 13). He dropped out
of sixth grade and began touring Vaudeville with other child
performers. Along with Georgie Jessel, the Newsboy Sextette sang and danced and battled one another with rolled
up newspapers across Tin Pan Alley. Walter added an “l” to
his last name because he liked its look on the marquee. He
played Loew’s vaudeville circuit with Rita Greene, starting
in 1917. It was small-time stuff.
From July of 1918 until the Armistice five months later,
Winchell served in the Naval Reserve. Ever after, he liked
wearing the uniform. Winchell married Greene on August
11, 1919, and the couple played the Pantages circuit from Rockford, Illinois, to Bay City, Michigan. For amusement,
Winchell began writing a backstage gossip sheet for fellow vaudevillians called “The Newsense” and tacked it on
the call board. Billboard, a Vaudeville trade paper, began
publishing Winchell’s “Stage Whispers” in February 1920.
In April they were signed with the initials “W.W.” In June,
Winchell’s “Pantages Paragraphs” and “Merciless Truths”
began appearing in the Vaudeville News, a trade paper
distributed free of charge to theater goers. In five months,
Winchell gave up hoofing for a Corona portable typewriter
when he was promoted to assistant editor at the News. His
salary doubled to $50 weekly and his cut on every ad he
solicited was raised to 20 percent.
Winchell loved having a byline and the money and growing reputation that came with it. He roamed Times Square
and Broadway at all hours searching for items that appeared
in his “Broadway Hearsay.” He realized “the later it grew,
the more interesting the conversation became” (Gabler
1994, 50). Veteran newspaperman Stanley Walker remembered the young Winchell as “astonishingly alert,” an “electrically nervous little man” who was “possessed with an
almost maniacal curiosity” (Thomas 1971, 29). Winchell
said he kept a “killer” schedule out of a persistent fear of
going hungry again. His marriage became an early casualty. Winchell and Greene separated in March 1922. The
divorce became final in September 1928. By then, Winchell
had established himself as America’s wise guy, the columnist who let readers in on everything during the Roaring
Twenties.
Jazz journalism became the antidote to the monotony
of industrial living for millions of readers, and few were
better at feeding their appetite for celebrity and scandal
than Walter Winchell. The mainstream press decried the
excesses of tabloid journalism, but when it saw the circulation that could be stimulated by reporting sex, crime, sport,
sentiment and sensation, got in on the act. Leisure culture’s
growing fascination with the distinctive and dramatic, the
rude and the romantic was furthered by columnists preoccupied with personalities, the self and showmanship.
Winchell’s big break came in September 1924 when he was
hired by Bernarr Macfadden’s to do a daily column “Your
Broadway and Mine” for the fledgling New York Graphic,
called by critics “The Pornographic.” Columnists were not
new. Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott,
Christopher Morley, Franklin P. Adams, and Mark Sullivan were New York-based writers enjoying a wide readership. Regular reporting on the Broadway scene, however,
in a language that reached the masses was new. Winchell’s
capacious energy and ear for vernacular raised Broadway
chatter to a widely reviled, but often-imitated art.
Winchell gave gossip a new grammar, furthering a trend
started by Sime Silverman in the pages of Variety. Winchell
wrote a couple in love were “uh-huh,” “that way,” “making whoopee,” “on the verge,” or “Adam and Eveing it.” It
was a clever way to report repetitive kinds of stories and to
slide around libel laws. To get married was to be “welded,”
“sealed,” “merged,” or “middle-aisled.” Expectant parents
were “infanticipating,” “baby-bound,” “getting storked,” or
awaiting a “blessed event” with “blessed expense.” Those
planning divorce had gone “phfft,” were “wilted,” “soured,”
“curdled,” “straining at the handcuffs,” and were going to
“tell it to a judge.” Legs were “shafts” and passion “pash”
along Broadway, the “Hardened Artery.”
In June 1929, Winchell was lured by William Randolph
Hearst to the New York Mirror for $500 a week plus half
of all revenue earned in nationally syndicating his column.
“Walter Winchell on Broadway” ran thirty-three years
with the paper. By 1923, Winchell had taken a common
law wife, June Magee. Their first daughter died of a heart
ailment soon afterwards. As an adult, their son committed
suicide. The family lived in suburban Westchester, while
Winchell slept in Manhattan’s San Moritz Hotel. Throughout the 1930s, it became his custom to hold court at Table
50 in the Cub Room of the Stork Club, the center of New
York’s café society. Press agents were his legmen, hoping
to get their clients names in Winchell’s column. Doormen,
head waiters, cab drivers, and cigarette girls at New York’s
major nightclubs—El Morocco, the Copacabana, Lindy’s,
the Onyx Club, the Blue Angel and Leon and Eddie’s—fed
Winchell material and feared his “drop dead” list, when the
information was wrong.
Winchell’s life as a wise-cracking columnist became the
basis of Warner Brothers highly successful film Blessed
Event in 1932. That was the year Winchell began his Sunday night broadcasts on NBC’s Blue Network, sponsored
by Jurgens Lotion. His million dollar voice, enhanced by
his incessant tap of a telegrapher key, created a sense of
urgency and was good theater. “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs.
America and all the ships at sea—let’s go to press” became
instantly familiar to a generation of listeners. By the time
Winchell played himself in Twentieth Century Fox’s 1937
film Wake Up and Live, he was a millionaire. His militant
anti-fascism won him private audiences with Franklin D.
Roosevelt at the White House. His work as a crime reporter
won him exclusives from J. Edgar Hoover.
Winchell’s strong anti-Communism made him an early
supporter of Joseph McCarthy. A tiff with Josephine Baker
in 1951 led to charges he was a racist. He was attacked
as a journalistic fraud by the New York Post and attacked
back. In 1952 Winchell took his radio show to television but
it was dropped by ABC in 1954. A TV drama “The Walter Winchell File” was cancelled after five months in 1956.
Winchell’s narrative voice gave authenticity to The Untouchables, ABC’s crime series that premiered in 1958. His Las
Vegas act, where he simulated his radio show and soft-shoed
with a chorus girl, was not well received. In 1962 he lost his
column when a strike at the Mirror closed the paper.
In his later years, Winchell still rushed off to crime
scenes even though no paper would hire him. He handed
out mimeographed copies of his column to many patrons
of El Morocco who did not know who he was. He lived
long enough to become a caricature of himself. His lasting
legacy, however, became journalism’s unalterable course of
making the private public through the creation of a culture
of celebrity that has become both folklore and a mainstay
for the masses.
Further Reading
Bessie, Simon Michael. Jazz Journalism: The Story of Tabloid
Newspapers. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1938.
Cohen, Lester. NY Graphic: The World’s Zaniest Newspaper.
Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964.
Gabler, Neal. Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Herr, Michael. Walter Winchell: A Novel. New York: Vintage
Books, 1991.
Kamp, John Peter. With Lotions of Love. New Haven, CT: Constitutional Educational League, 1944.
Klurfeld, Herman. Winchell: His Life and Times. New York:
Praeger, 1976.
McKelway, St. Clair. Gossip: The Life and Times of Walter
Winchell. New York: Viking Press, 1940.
Mosedale, John. The Men Who Invented Broadway: Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell and Their World. New York: Richard
C. Marek, 1981.
Page, Francis. Confucius Comes to Broadway. New York: Windom House, 1940.
Papers of Walter Winchell. Billy Rose Theatre Collection. New
York Public Library.
Stuart, Lyle. The Secret Life of Walter Winchell. New York: Boar’s
Head Books, 1953.
Thomas, Bob. Winchell. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Weiner, Edward Horace. Let’s Go to Press: A Biography of Walter Winchell. New York: Putnam, 1955.
Winchell, Walter. Winchell Exclusive: Things That Happened to
Me and Me to Them. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1975.
Bruce J. Evensen