Walter Winchell
Journaliste extraordinaire?

For the Baby Boomers, Walter Winchell was the announcer with the funny voice on the hit television series The Untouchables. Broadcast from 1959 to 1963, The Untouchables starred Robert Stack, better known to later generations for hosting the TV series Unsolved Mysteries. But on The Untouchables Robert played the T-Man Eliot Ness (no, Eliot was not with the FBI). Each episode of The Untouchables began and closed with the staccato machine-gun voice-over by Walter who also provided additional narration when needed.

But the Boomers' parents - and grandparents - knew Walter from long before. Walter Winchel (yes, only one "l" - a misspelling on a marquee gave him the double letter) started off as a hoofer and singer on the vaudeville circuit just before World War I. There he sang and danced with the likes of Georgie Jessel and Eddie Cantor.

Naturally on the circuit, Walter learned a lot about the private lives of the stars. So he started posting notes on bulletin boards in the theaters about who was doing what. It wasn't just the news but also the style of writing with its clever puns that caught the eye of the publisher of Vaudeville News. He soon got Walter to save the juicy tidbits of the great and near-great and write them up in what was one of the first gossip columns.

The column caught on and mainstream papers scooped it up. Walter then went into syndication for the Hearst Publishing Company, and as time went on he developed sources that were providing him with plenty of "you-heard-it-here-first" news stories.

It wasn't just Walter's news that got people reading his columns, but the actual words. His phrases like "Nothing recedes like success" were not accidental malapropisms of the likes of Yogi Berra that became famous for their unintentional wisdom. Instead Walter carefully crafted and selected his linguistic creations. For a while people spoke about "Winchellisms". A couple expecting a baby were "infanticipating". Liquor was "giggle water" or "fun milk". Broadway was "The Grandest Canyon".

Walter was certainly the right person at the right time. He had a distinctive voice, high in timbre but with a tough edge that appealed to a country being entertained by the emerging radio dramas. So to radio Walter went.

The medium was perfect. With many of his stories rarely taking more than a couple of sentences, Walter could say a lot in fifteen minutes. To give an even greater sense of immediacy to his news, Walter punctuated his narration with beepbeepbeepbeep-beepbeepbeep-beepbeep telegraph signals. He also started each show saying, "Hello, Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast, and all the ships at sea." So the listeners knew that he was talking to everyone.

Throughout the 1930's and to the 1950's Walter's was the most listened to radio program in America. In some years he even beat out Jack Benny, Lowell Thomas, and George Burns and Gracie Allen. On his broadcasts he dished out the scoops, pointing out in later broadcasts when he had been called to task but was later vindicated.

One thing continued to irritate Walter. He was still labeled as a gossip columnist. But he saw himself as a bonafide reporter with the ability to get inside information. True, he would also give his opinion when reading the news, but that was his prerogative, and it was always clear when opinion was opinion. And sometimes Walter was way ahead of other journalists, particularly in what many see as his finest hour.

In 1933 and to the surprise of the world, Maria Schicklgruber's grandson got appointed Chancellor of Germany. The rise of the Nazis had been so rapid that they soon had a large enough legislative plurality that the president of Germany, Otto von Hindenburg felt pressured to appoint the leader of the party, Adolf Hitler, to the chancellorship even though Adolf had never held any previous office. Then following the Reichstag fire, the Chancellor declared a state of emergency granting him dictatorial powers. And so Adolf was off and running.

Walter, who was Jewish, was one of the first broadcasters to blast Hitler as a dangerous maniac while most other commentators either ignored him or dismissed him as a carpet-chewing buffoon. Even when Hitler began sending thousands of - quote - "undesirables" - unquote - to concentration camps Walter was one of the few voices calling Hitler out.

Walter also had no truck with "America Firsters" like Charles Lindbergh who supported neutrality even after Britain and Germany went to war. We can imagine that Walter - at a time when Hitler vilified the "Jewish race" - would take exception when Charles wrote that an alliance with Germany would hold back the "infiltration of inferior blood". Walter was remarkably far-seeing on racial issues, and he fully supported civil rights. He totally trashed the Ku Klux Klan and he was an early advocate for equality of the races.

There was one thing people noted as Walter's fame grew. He was someone you didn't want to cross. If you got on his bad side, you could expect some snipe on his broadcasts - a snipe that would be heard by millions of listeners. These shows became so influential that even mobsters wanted to stay on his good side. And we include the biggest mobster of all!

No, we don't mean Al "Scarface" Capone, nor Charles "Lucky" Luciano. We mean Frank Costello.

Ha? (To quote Shakespeare). Frank Who?

Frank Costello.

You see, Frank was not the type of gangster that made good movies and detective stories. He didn't wear flashy suits or strut about with showgirl babes on his arms. Instead, Frank looked like someone's kindly grandfather. But he was also the head of what became the Genovese Crime Family. During the 1940's Frank had risen to be - as he was called - "The Prime Minister" of organized crime. And he began to worry about Walter.

Walter, as one of the biggest celebrities in the country, could afford high class vacations. During the summer of 1946, he had taken time off and was visiting Florida, staying at the opulent Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach. Normally Walter's vacationing in Florida would be no big deal.

But Meyer Lansky was in charge of the near-by Colonial Inn, a night club which also had a casino in the back. At that time, only Nevada had legalized casino gambling, and Frank, who had a stake in Meyer's casino, was worried that even a brief comment from Walter about the wide open gambling in Florida would bring publicity to the club. Yes, illegal casinos, then as now, don't want publicity - and least not public publicity.

Frank flew in from New Orleans, and Meyer picked him up at the airport. Along for the ride was a young man named Harold Conrad. Harold was later a major boxing promoter and had been doing some sports writing. But for that summer he was working at the Colonial Inn.

Although we said illegal casinos wanted to avoid publicity, the night club wanted to bring in customers who would then go to the casino. So Harold had been specifically hired to drum up (legitimate) publicity to get people to come to the club. On the other hand, he had to keep at arms distance any negative publicity about the casino.

In the car Frank explained he was concerned that Walter was in the area. What could they do to make sure that he didn't start any preaching against the gambling in Florida in general and the Colonial Inn in particular? Meyer mused he didn't know what to do and asked if Harold had any ideas.

He did. Walter had recently become one of the founders of the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. Damon had been one of the most popular sports and short story writers and had just died of throat cancer. Walter provided a lot of publicity for the fund and was a major collector of the donations.

Harold suggested they make a donation to the fund. Make it big, he suggested, say $5000.

Walter was sitting at poolside when Harold showed up with the check. He said it was from the boys at the Colonial Inn. Walter was impressed.

"Why not come out to the club?" asked Harold. Walter said he would.

Walter had a fine time. He not only had a good dinner, saw the show, and gambled at the casino, but he also struck up - well, an acquaintance with one of the showgirls.

Later that night Frank saw Harold.

"You done good, kid," he commented.

Needless to say, there were no problems from Walter about the Colonial Inn.

Walter was based in New York and his favorite hangout was the Stork Club which was owned by Sherman Billingsley. The Stork Club was one of the hottest of the hotspots and was where you could see the biggest of the bigshots. Anyone who was anyone had their own table and Walter's was Table #50. The rule was if you came in and Walter called a greeting, you came over. If he didn't, you went on by.

One of Walter's biggest pals was John Edgar Hoover, then (and for years before and after) head of the FBI. Edgar found Walter's popularity had its advantages. In 1937, the mobster Louis "Lepke" Buchalter had gone on the lam to avoid indictment. For all his efforts, Edgar and his G-men couldn't bring Louis in.

Then two years later, Louis agreed to give himself up on the understanding he'd get a break. The person he agreed to surrender to was, yes, Walter Winchell. Walter then turned Louis over to Edgar.

(For what it's worth there was evidently a failure to communicate or someone welshed on the deal. Louis was tried and convicted for murder. He died in the electric chair at Sing Sing, the only high level mobster ever to suffer the extreme penalty at the hands of the law.)

Gradually Walter's status began to wane. The decline can be looked at from two standpoints. First you can consider it simply as the natural progress of fame. With few exceptions, celebrity rises and falls, and there are hundreds of people that were households names in one decade and the next you'll scratch your head and wonder who they were and what they did.

But even if Walter's fame, like the Roman Empire, really didn't fall so much as peter out, there were specifics that led to the petering. That's what's interesting to read about.

Probably what started Walter's wane was his palling around with Roy Cohn. As you know, Roy was Joe McCarthy's chief counsel in his anti-communist crusades. In fact, Walter had become one of Joe's most vocal advocates.

Nowadays with communism universally dismissed as a bankrupt philosophy, we wonder why non-Tailgunner Joe gets so much static. After all, he was routing out communists, and even communists don't like communism anymore.

But one thing that's forgotten is that many of Joe's critics were also anti-communists - including President Harry Truman. In fact, throughout the 1950's, virtually everyone saw commies as the enemies of America and freedom. So why did Joe get so much flack?

As Shakespeare might have said, it was not so much the matter but the manner of Joe's Red Scare crusade. But Joe also listed as communists or suspected communists who were nothing of the sort. You had people like Harry Belafonte (popular singer and civil rights activists), Howard K. Smith (ABC broadcaster who gave thoughtful and yet fairly conservative editorials), Orson Bean (comedian and panelist on celebrity quiz programs), Lena Horne (great singer and all around lady), Alan Lomax (who with his father John became famous for their folk song collecting), Yip Harburg (writer of the lyrics of many songs including Somewhere Over the Rainbow), Arthur Miller (playwright and author of The Crucible and once the husband of Marylin Monroe), Charles Chaplin (master comic of the silent era), Orson Wells (who directed and starred in Citizen Kane and who had a guest appearance in the Muppet Movie), Robert Shayne (who played Inspector Henderson on the TV series, the Adventures of Superman), Howard Fast (author of the novel Spartacus which was later made into the movie starring Kirk Douglas and who penned The Crossing about George Washington), Gypsy Rose Lee (among other things the most famous ecdysiast in history), Oscar Brand (friend of Pete Seeger and whose album Presidential Campaign Songs is a classic), Peter Viertel (screenwriter who wrote The African Queen), José Ferrer (movie actor whose most famous roles were Iago and Toulouse-Lautrec and who had a major role in The Big Bus), Aaron Copland (American composer of "Fanfare for the Common Man", "Appalachian Spring", "Rodeo", and "Billy the Kid"), Dorothy Parker (famous author and purveyor of sarcasm), Richard Attenborough (British actor who starred in The Great Escape), Professor Irwin Corey (yes, even he was blacklisted), Eddie Albert (who later starred with Eva Gabor on Green Acres), Ossie Davis (famous actor who appeared in many movies including Bubba-Ho-Tep and Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property), Martin Gabel (Tony Award winning stage actor and husband of Arlene Francis), Zero Mostel (creator of the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and who played Max Bialystock in The Producers with Gene Wilder), Josh White (master bluesman whose "The House I Live In" sounds amazingly patriotic), Will Geer (who played the grandfather on The Waltons), Leonard Bernstein (yes, even Lenny), Langston Hughes (famous author who wrote poetry that actually rhymes and has meter), Ruby Dee (star with Sidney Poitier in Raisin in the Sun), Artie Shaw (often married Big Band leader), and Jeff Corey (highly prolific actor with more roles than we can list as well as being an acting teacher who coached Leonard Nimoy).

True, some of those fingered had expressed liberal sentiments (and Pete Seeger as a young man had even been a member of the Communist party but dropped out after seeing what Uncle Joe Stalin had wrought). But none were actually dangers to America. In fact most were people that all Americans should be proud to call their friends. In the end the tactics of McCarthyism were so blatantly wrong that Joe ended up getting censured by the US Senate. For someone fighting communism in 1954 that's pretty hard to do unless you really screw up.

But Walter never backed down from his pro-Joe stance, and rightly or wrongly, Walter found himself falling out of favor with Mr. and Mrs. America. He also wasn't a man to take criticism lightly and sometimes referred to journalistic opponents as "presstitutes". He even trashed Ed Sullivan (a journalist before he began hosting "really big shews") as well as dancer Josephine Baker when Josephine dared say that Walters favorite hang-out, the Stork Club, had refused to serve her.

Walter, in fact, had become something of a 1950's shock jock. Sometimes he strayed beyond the bounds of good taste. Adlai Stevenson, who if not someone people wanted as president, nevertheless was widely respected by his colleagues and the American people. But Walter read out that "A Vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen" linking Adlai to the first famous trans-gender personality. That was, at the time, a horrible slur. And Walter, following the lead of Joe McCarthy, continued his trashing of Harry Truman.

But in the end it was technology that did Walter in. The sad truth is that although Walter was a natural for radio and newspapers, he was pretty much a bust on television.

It certainly wasn't for want of trying and the networks were quick to give Walter his own television shows. But on TV Walter still had the telegraphic beeps punctuating his stories. On the radio these gave the listener the sense that the news had "just come in". But on television the camera would cut to Walter's hand randomly pressing the key. This just looked silly.

Also on the camera Walter looked more and more a relic from the past. Snap-brim fedora? Pressy business suit? Communicating by telegraph? Those went out with 23-skidoo. And then when he appeared as a host for a variety show - those now defunct programs which paraded a plethora of disparate entertainments - Walter was clearly a fish out of his ocean.

But many critics feel that Walter's true end came with his famous feud with Jack Paar. Jack was then the host of the Tonight Show which even then was one of the most watched television programs on the air. Once Jack's guest was Elsa Maxwell, who like Walter was a gossip columnist. Walter had taken a few slings at Elsa, and sitting next to Jack, she now tossed a few barbs Walter's way.

Jack himself had a beef with Walter. Walter had written in his column that Jack and his wife of eventually 60 years, Miriam, were having martial difficulties. Jack took umbrage at what he thought was sloppy (and incorrect) reporting and so he not only agreed with Elsa but tossed out a few snips of his own suggesting the pitch of Walter's voice was due to tightness of his undergarments.

Now there are indications that at first Jack and Elsa didn't intend their remarks to be taken too seriously. But Walter privately made some very discourteous remarks about Jack and a particularly vile remark - which will not be repeated here - about Elsa. With the flames thus fanned, on the air Jack later read parts of The Secret Life of Walter Winchell, a tell-all book written in 1953. Hopes for any kind of truce was pretty much scotched.

Walter found himself in a bind. Yes, he could respond to Jack's stings in his columns and radio broadcasts. But radio was falling from popularity as people found it more relaxing to plop themselves in front of the tube and watch the Tonight Show with Jack Paar. So more and more people were hearing that Walter was just - as Jack said - a "balding ego" and "a silly old man".

Papers began to discontinue Walter's column, the number dropping from 2000 papers at the height of his fame to 150 by the early 1960's. Clearly the media moguls no longer saw him as an asset.

Then a young politician actually turned down an invitation to appear on Walter's show. Walter fumed and never forgave John Kennedy. When JFK was elected president, Walter flailed out that JFK was turning the press into a propaganda weapon. Walter became increasingly bitter at the young and popular president and when JFK was assassinated Walter made no mention of it.

Less than a month later, Walter's base paper, the Daily Mirror, closed its doors. Even Walter - the man who boasted about his scoops - hadn't seen it coming. His flagship, he said, had been sunk. Papers that still carried his columns began to cut back even further on their number and length. Walter's daily columns were pared down to twice a week and then cut to down to weekly.

Then disaster! Yes, on October 5, 1965 ...

THE STORK CLUB CLOSED!!!!!

And Walter was displaced.

As the 1960's went on, Walter was seen less and less. He was lucky to get the occasional paper to carry his column even once a week. Even that ended in 1967 when the Hearst Publications dropped him entirely. He continued to appear as a guest of various television shows, but as his appearances became fewer and fewer, older people wondered what happened to him. Younger people never knew he existed.

Still, you needn't feel too sorry for Walter. He signed a contract to emcee a two-week show at Las Vegas for $70,000. And remember the The Untouchables lasted four years - a good run for a television show of the time. Some sources say Walter got $25,000 a show. If so, with the over one hundred episodes, Walter cleaned up nearly a cool $3 million dollars. That's in 1960's currency, too. Compare this with the $9000 James Earl Jones earned for voicing Darth Vadar in the original Star Wars.

Like some other writers who crank out thousands of words, write multiple daily articles, and have radio and television shows, Walter had paid researchers and writers. They remembered him as generous although not hesitant to criticize their work when bad and give praise when it was good. That, of course, is what a boss should do.

As the 60's waned, Walter would still pop up from time to time. One of his last assignments was covering the hippie-infused Democratic Convention of 1968. When his picture appeared while he was covering a hippies vs. police riot, he was noted only as an "unidentified reporter".

But at least he was a reporter.

 

References

Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity, Neal Gabler, Knopf, 1994.

Winchell: His Life and Times, Herman Klurfeld, Praeger Publishing, 1976.

Winchell, Robert Thomas, Berkeley Publishing, 1972.

"Walter Winchell", Encyclopedia Britannica.

Little Man, Robert Lacey, Little Brown, 1991.

Inventing Elsa Maxwell: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World, Sam Staggs, St. Martins Press.

J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, Curt Gentry, Norton, 1991.

"Harold Conrad, 80, Promoter and Writer", The New York Times, May 20, 1991.

"He Turned Gossip Into Tawdry Power; Walter Winchell, Who Climbed High and Fell Far, Still Scintillates", The New York Times, November 18, 1998.

Those Great Old-Time Radio Years, Aubrey J. Sher, XLibris, 2013.

"The Age of Winchell", Ralph D. Gardner, Eve's Magazine, 2001.

"How the Late, Great Tonight Show Host Slew a Bully", Timothy Noah, Slate, January 28, 2004.

"Forget It, His Fame Is Untouchable", Bob Greene, Chicago Tribune, December 28, 1988