Winchell knew
Neil Sinclair
The recent drama of Jeremy Thorpe was accompanied by a plaintive and familiar cry from Mr Harold Wilson and others: who is to protect us from the scurrilous hounds of the press—where is our privacy? The kind of privacy they crave—that is, the situation in which public figures can lead lives which might shock or embarrass or interest ordinary people but are protected by a silent press—was wiped out years ago. A New Yorker called Walter Winchell—a man who at the height of his influence could elect the government to which he paid over 250,000 dollars in income tax—abolished that kind of privacy for ever.
His biography has just emerged in America— Winchell Exclusive. Like Winchell the book is both fascinating and repellent. Winchell wrote it shortly before he died in 1972, and it is arranged as one long column—a jaunty farrago of sneering snidery leavened with shrewd and amusing commentary.
Winchell was, as John Crosby wrote in a marvellously acid obituary, a '14 carat sonof-a-bitch', a graduate of the New York Graphic—conceivably, says Crosby, 'the most evil newspaper ever to spring from the loins of journalism'. But many of those who knew him also had what Crosby called 'a curious respect for the arrogance and sheer originality of the man.' He pumped out a daily column wired to 1,000 newspapers in America, and he had a radio column which he shouted to 'Mr and Mrs America, from coast to coast, and all the ships at sea' in a style reflecting the Broadway of his day, cynical, hard-bitten.
Winchell's old friend and lawyer Ernest Cuneo says: 'Walter created New Yorkese by recording it. The words of New York are hard and clipped. Like machine-gun bullets they're fired in short, sharp bursts. New Yorkers are terse because they are tense, and they like to be.' Winchell operated in the New York of chattering rivet guns, moaning newspaper presses, thunderous pile-drivers and the trip-hammers which were then battering out the skyline. He cruised the steaming streets in a black Cadillac with its own police siren and radio, and rested early in the morning at Table 50 in the Stork Club. There he composed slanderous items about the famous who were Adam-and-Eveing-it (going out), head
ing for Splitsville (divorce), who were That Way (sleeping together), or who were getting tired on Giggle Water (liquor). Damon Runyon towards the end of his life would sail through the streets with Winchell, a perfect listening companion since doctors had removed his cancerous vocal cords and rendered him mute. But he carried a pencil and pad on which he would occasionally scrawl 'balls' to silence the bawling Walter.
Winchell could, and did, elect Presidents. He was granted private audiences with Roosevelt at the White House, and often used to test the popularity of Presidential ideas. He could, and did, re-arm the US Navy by pressing his millions of readers to badger their Congressmen and Senators for fifty billion dollars so that America could have a 'two-ocean navy'. Readers responded with over one million letters, and America got thirty-five new battleships, twenty carriers, eighty-eight cruisers, 378 destroyers and 180 submarines.
Of course, it would be misleading to suggest that his column was concerned exclusively with matters of state. It was more often concerned with trivial feuds with other journalists, show-biz stars or nightclub proprietors. He puffed—or demolished—books that he never bothered to read, and performed a similar service for films. When St Clair McKelway wrote a put-down of the Winchell column in a hilarious, 40,000-word New Yorker expose, Walter embarrassed that magazine's drunken editor Harold Ross by saying in print that Ross did not wear underpants.
The British Ambassador to Washington, the Marquis of Lothian, was asked bY Winchell what Britain intended to do about the rising Adolf Hitler. Lothian said: 'We shall try to fatten the tiger without strengthening him.' To which Winchell shrevvdlY observed: 'I've seen some big tigers and some little tigers. I've never seen a fat one.
Walter Winchell is buried in Arizona, the state to which he retired before his death. In the end he was a sad figure, gutted by grief after the suicide of his only son Walter and the increasing number of attacks on himself and his column (the film Sweet Smell of Success, with its loathsome star IL is said to be an accurate portrayal of Winchell). But in his day he exposed manY crooks, took many risks and was never bought off by anyone. His old friend Ernest Cuneo thinks of Winchell as 'the greatest reporter' and ascribes his driving, ruthles,s manner to 'The Mazeppa Complex • Mazeppa, a young Polish nobleman caught in the bed of a countess by her husband, was tied naked to a wild horse which galloped all the way to the Ukraine before dropping dead. This wild, galloping rhythm, says Cuneo., hammered in the hearts of pre-war Americans, and Walter Winchell was its journalistic interpreter. For fifty years he laid about him with a gleaming scythe. If the information was embarrassing enough be would print it. He abolished privacy.
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