Walter Winchell
Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897 – February 20, 1972) was a syndicated American 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 claimed that his popularity and influence "turned journalism into a form of entertainment".[1]
Walter Winchell
April 7, 1897
February 20, 1972 (aged 74)
- Journalist
- broadcaster
June Magee
3
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 he aligned with Joseph McCarthy in his campaign against communists. He damaged the reputation of Josephine Baker as well as other individuals who had earned his enmity.
He returned to television in 1959 as the narrator of the 1930s-set crime drama series The Untouchables.[2] Over the years he appeared in more than two dozen films and television productions as an actor, sometimes playing himself.
Style[edit]
Many other columnists began to write gossip soon after Winchell's initial success, such as Ed Sullivan, who succeeded him at the New York Evening Graphic, and Louella Parsons in Los Angeles. 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 him at New York's Cotton Club and publicly lambasted him for using the phrase "pushover" to describe Schultz's penchant for blonde women.[28] Winchell's best known aphorisms include: "Nothing recedes like success" and "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret".
Herman Klurfeld, a ghostwriter for Winchell for almost three decades, began writing four newspaper columns per week for Winchell in 1936 and worked for him for 29 years. He also wrote many of the signature one-liners, called "lasties", that Mr. Winchell used at the end of his Sunday evening radio broadcasts. One of Klurfeld's quips was "She's been on more laps than a napkin". In 1952, the New York Post revealed Mr. Klurfeld as Mr. Winchell's ghostwriter.[29] Klurfeld later wrote a biography of Winchell entitled Winchell, His Life and Times, which was the basis for the television film Winchell (1998).
Winchell opened his radio broadcasts by pressing randomly on a telegraph key, a sound that created a sense of urgency and importance, and using the catchphrase "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press." He would then read each of his stories with a staccato delivery (up to a rate of 197 words per minute, though he claimed a speed of well over 200 words per minute in an interview in 1967),[30] noticeably faster than the typical pace of American speech. His diction also can be heard in his breathless narration of the television series The Untouchables (1959–1963), as well as in several Hollywood films.
Personal life[edit]
On August 11, 1919, Winchell married Rita Greene, one of his onstage partners. The couple separated a few years later, and he moved in with Elizabeth June Magee, who had already adopted daughter Gloria and given birth to her and Winchell's first child Walda in 1927.[31] Winchell eventually divorced Greene in 1928, but he never married Magee, although they lived together for the rest of their lives.
Winchell and Magee had three children. Daughter Gloria died of pneumonia at the age of nine and Walda spent time in psychiatric hospitals.[32] Walter Jr. died by suicide in the family garage on Christmas night of 1968.[33] Having spent the previous two years on welfare, Walter Jr. had last been employed as a dishwasher in Santa Ana, California; for a time, he wrote a column in the Los Angeles Free Press, an underground newspaper published from 1964 to 1978.[34]
Winchellism and Winchellese[edit]
Winchell's colorful and widely imitated language inspired the term "Winchellism."[44] An etymologist of his day said, "Winchell has achieved the position of dictator of contemporary slang."[45] His use of slang, innuendo and invented euphemisms also protected him from libel accusations.[1]
Winchell invented his own phrases that were viewed as slightly racy at the time. Some of the expressions for falling in love used by Winchell were: "pashing it", "sizzle for", "that way", "go for each other", "garbo-ing it", "uh-huh"; and in a similar vein, "new Garbo, trouser-crease-eraser", and "pash". Some Winchellisms for marriage are: "middle-aisle it", "altar it", "handcuffed", "Mendelssohn March", "Lohengrin it", and "merged".[45]