Gossip

by Joseph Epstein

  Further dilution has occurred with the widening of celebrity through cable television, with its various soap operas, reality shows, and political chat shows. Liz Smith, perhaps the last of the old-line gossip columnists, not long ago remarked: "There aren't any big stars anymore. It's very diminished in quality, I guess is what I'd say, the quality of stardom. Because I don't know who most of these people are. I'm not kidding. I read Page Six [devoted to gossip in the New York Post] mystified every day, and everybody I talk to agrees with me. They don't know who anybody is."

  Explaining this, the critic and editor John Podhoretz notes that the rise in gossip magazines and gossip television shows is partly responsible for this thinning out of celebrity. Lots more people are celebrated, but only for a short time: the current bachelor on the reality show The Bachelor, the professional dancer on Dancing with the Stars, the couple suspected of murdering their child, the plagiarist who flogged his book on Oprah, the male prostitute who turns in the not-out-of-the-closet state governor. Celebrities, each and all of them, famous for being famous, however briefly; but famous, too, because, as Podhoretz puts it, the organs of celebrity, print and electronic, need a continuing supply of names to "feed this inexhaustible maw." He adds that the "older methods of celebrity manufacture"—the Hollywood studios' public relations departments—"no longer suffice." With the old publicity machine of Hollywood inadequate to fill all the magazines and television shows (Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, and the rest) devoted to celebrity, Podhoretz concludes, "celebrity and notoriety are indistinguishable, and the phenomenon of stardom, like so many American institutions, has been delegitimized."

  Another component worth mentioning in all this is that the only way to large-scale celebrity today is through regular appearances on television or in movies or national politics. No matter your achievements, if you are not often seen doing what you do on the tube, or today possibly on YouTube, you may eventually acquire fame, but celebrity will elude you.

  One of the great advantages that Hollywood celebrities of an earlier time had over those of the current day is that they didn't regularly appear on television talk shows to promote their films or their careers; this meant that they were excused from exposing their stupidities. Who today knows how smart or dopey James Cagney or Myrna Loy might have been? What can be known is that movie stars, and a great many others, gain in allure from our ignorance about them, for in the absence of any real knowledge we have, they are as smart and glamorous as we wish them to be.

  A large part of the pleasure of contemporary gossip about celebrities has to do with that ugly little emotion that goes by the German word Schadenfreude, or pleasure in another's fall. Nice to think, is it not, that people gifted with good looks or acting ability or musical talent, rewarded for them with vast quantities of money, also have many of the problems that the rest of us might have, and often a few extra thrown in: children who didn't work out, struggles with diet, marital discord dragged out in public, bankruptcy, and so much more. If in some sense the cult of celebrity is about common people worshiping people luckier than themselves, owing to the good offices of gossip, a way has been found of evening the score, at least a little, by showing that in the end the very lucky often have it no better than we, and sometimes, thanks to the gods of fate and the merchants of gossip, it turns out that they have it even worse.

  Diary

  The playwright Lillian Hellman was sitting in a restaurant with a friend of mine when Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian and chronicler of the Kennedy family, walked in with his then new, much taller than he, wife. It seemed to be the season for men obsessed with politics to marry women much taller than themselves. (Henry Kissinger also married a woman much taller than he, and so did the columnist George F. Will.)

  "There is Arthur with his new wife," Lillian said to my friend. "Extraordinary how much taller she is than he. Do you suppose Arthur goes up on her?"

  Great Gossips of the Western World, II

  The Bully

  GROB, a Yiddish word meaning coarse, crude, rough, pushy, nicely describes the family into which Walter Winchell, for decades the most famous and perhaps most influential of all American journalists, was born. The family's original name was Weinschel, or Winschel, its city of origin Bialystok, in northeastern Poland near the border of what is now Belarus. Winchell's grandfather Chaim settled in America in 1881. He and his wife lived on the Lower East Side and raised a family of nine children. The firstborn, Jacob, was Winchell's father, but the second son, George, who acquired a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, was considered the head of the family in its second generation. Jacob was passed over because he was thought brash, a man of dubious taste, a bust-out, an embarrassment to his brothers and sisters who yearned for assimilated gentility. Grob.

  Jacob's first child, Walter, was born, in 1897, into the black-sheep branch of his extended family, poor, with a father who never really gained a financial foothold and a mother who had no compunction about making her husband aware of her extreme disappointment in him. Jacob's philandering didn't ease matters. Extreme emotional instability and fear of poverty were the heavy pollutants of young Walter's life.

  The result was that Walter Winchell, no matter how great his success in later years, tended permanently to view himself as an underdog, one of the insulted of the earth and a man always worried about money, though he earned a lot of it. Early in the game he decided that no one gives you anything for nothing, and that the world was divided between winners and losers, so a person had no choice but to scrap like mad to gain the upper hand in all things, little and large, and join the winners. Life, in Winchell's reading of it, was combat, full time, no holds barred.

  The first move in Winchell's larger game plan was to get the hell out of his family's dreary home. He quit school at thirteen and left his family at the same time. Ernest Cuneo, who became a legal assistant to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and later a power on the Democratic National Committee during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years and who was a longtime friend of Winchell's—the last not an easy thing to do—claimed that his rough upbringing "had left him with four inches of scar tissue around his heart, and with a heart full of fear, [and] instead of some love, the fear of being broke."

  Like many another of the New York Jewish kids of his generation who had no family business to fall back on, no interest in school or politics or culture, Winchell went into show business. He became a song plugger, then went onstage in vaudeville, as part of a trio that included a man named Jack Weiner, and George Jessel, later known as America's "toastmaster general" and a monumental bore of astounding self-importance.

  Winchell's career as a song-and-dance man went onward but not all that far upward. He had the ambition, he had the energy—only the talent was missing. He worked the lesser vaudeville circuits. He teamed up with a young dancer named Rita Greene, whom he eventually married. A hoofer by trade, he was a hustler in spirit, and he hustled much better than he hoofed. He had also during these years discovered his true métier. He began, almost as a hobby, collecting gossipy items about vaudevillians, writing them up, then posting his typewritten sheets backstage, where people could discover who was making whoopie with whom and other intramural secrets about the interior wheelings and dealings of show biz. He had a newshound's sense of where to find fresh items—he was, that is to say, a natural snoop—and a genuine knack for turning these items into lively reading. Before long, Winchell would give up his tap shoes for tapping out tidbits on a typewriter.

  Vaudeville, though, forged Walter Winchell, his spirit of competitiveness, his understanding that no greater sin exists than being dull in public. Neal Gabler, Winchell's excellent biographer, writes: "Vaudeville made Walter an entertainer for life and in life. Growing up in vaudeville as he did, he not only absorbed its diversity, its energy, its nihilism, and then deployed them in his journalism, but learned how to create his journalism from them: journalism as vaudeville." He understood journalism, in other words, to be ess
entially a form of entertainment.

  Winchell's climb up the rickety rungs of journalism's ladder—working for Vaudeville News, Billboard, the health faddist Bernarr Macfadden's New York Graphic, eventually landing as the Broadway columnist on Joseph Medill Patterson's flagship paper, the New York Daily News—need not detain us. The important point is that Winchell made this climb through personal toughness and an impressive insensitivity to the feelings of everyone he wrote about or worked with. Jimmy Walker, when mayor of New York, told Winchell that "you can keep your friends and be a failure—or lose them and be a success." In Winchell's case this advice was easily heeded by a man who, in the most profound sense, was always in business solely for himself.

  Winchell had a strong instinct for what caught the attention of the average man or woman. He invented a rat-a-tat prose style, punctuated by ellipses, laced with energetic slang, and sprinkled with neologisms of his own devising: booze in his columns became "giggle-water," mistresses "keptives," Broadway was "the Main Stem" or "Coffee Pot Canyon," "Chicagorilla" was a thug from the Second City, "apartache" stood for divorcing couples, and "Renovate" referred to a man or woman going off to Reno for a divorce, while couples expecting a child were "infanticipating."

  Winchell's rise ran parallel with the rise of interest in personality in American journalism and in celebrity in the country at large—an interest that has only increased, if become more diffuse, in our own day. Winchell knew how to plumb this interest for all it could yield. Attacking large names was one of his specialties: early in his career he went after the Schubert brothers, then powerful satraps in Broadway theater. He also had an instinct for the weaknesses of the famous in New York, where fame could sometimes have the shelf life of cottage cheese, and where ever-fresh exposure to publicity, required by the constant stoking of a reputation, was required. "What can you get on the other fellow?" Winchell wrote. "What do you know about him? Is he doing something he'd be ashamed of, and how much is there in it for me?"

  Operating on these principles—perhaps absence of principles is more like it—Walter Winchell himself became a celebrity, one of the noisiest in America. His column was soon widely syndicated, its author written up in Editor and Publisher, Time, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His friend Ernest Cuneo said Winchell did for Broadway what Mark Twain did for the Mississippi—not true but doubtless nice to hear.

  Although Winchell was considered very much a figure of the 1920s, the Depression that ushered in the '30s did not in the least slow him down. He switched his home base from the Daily News to Hearst's New York Mirror, and thence to the same publisher's Journal, which, along with his increased syndication, brought him an ever-wider readership. The Depression, which had the effect, as Neal Gabler points out, of dimming the lights on Broadway, at the same time widened the scope of Winchell's interests; he soon became, more than a mere Broadway gossip columnist, a journalist whose bailiwick was the entire country, his column carrying items on Hollywood, politics, and the international scene.

  Winchell took a giant step when, in 1930, he took his gossip on the radio. His original show was on the air Monday nights from 7:45 to 8:00, featuring gossip items and an interview with an entertainment celebrity. Winchell made no bones about introducing himself as "New York's most notorious gossip," allowing that he has been called lots of other things, too. He was making a six-figure salary from his newspaper column along with a thousand dollars a program for his radio shows on WABC.

  His radio audience grew to be larger than the already large audience for his newspaper column. He was now a star of the stature of the Irish tenor Morton Downey, Kate Smith, and Bing Crosby—all built on nothing more than purveying gossip. He was not above inserting himself into major criminal proceedings. Throughout the trial of Bruno Hauptmann, for the alleged kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, he managed to call attention to himself in his columns and radio shows. At the capture of the criminal boss Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, he arranged to have Lepke turn himself in to him, Winchell, who brought him to the police. All this added greatly to his fame. One night a Broadway producer—drunk or not, it isn't known—asked, "Tell me, Winchell. What is going to happen to America if people like you are successful?" A good question, the answer to which is not yet in.

  Winchell once said that the way to get famous is to throw a brick at someone who is already famous. People now began throwing bricks at him. Heywood Broun, a great name in journalism in the 1920s and '30s, claimed that Winchell's kind of gossip, everywhere invading privacy, was turning New York into a small town. "Who wants New York to have the same sort of underground wires which make small towns so mean and so petty?" Broun wrote. In the thirties, The New Yorker published a lengthy profile of Winchell by St. Clair McKelway (in 1940 this was molded into a book titled Gossip: The Life and Times of Walter Winchell), in which Winchell's inaccuracies were toted up, his political and criminal connections recounted, his sins in particular and in general catalogued. McKelway wrote:

  There are men in New York who have been identified by Winchell, by means of crystal clear euphemisms, as homosexuals; there are people whose attempted suicides he has reported; there are married men and women who, in spite of Winchell's stated intention not to let his columns hurt happy marriages, have been linked with others of the opposite sex; there are couples whose separation has been reported when they were thinking of no such thing, whose impending marriage has been announced when it was not being considered by them; there are individuals whose affectionate regard for someone has been reported when they weren't sure of it themselves. Then, in the middle ground, there are people in New York whose professional aims have been misinterpreted or inaccurately reported; whose opinions have been garbled; whose anecdotes, not told in the presence of Winchell, have been ineptly retold by him, making them feel silly; whose appearances at night clubs have been made to seem more frequent than they really are. At the end of the list are people who merely object to having their names appear in Walter Winchell's column or in any gossip column under any circumstances.

  None of this put the least dent in Winchell's shield. His column was published in more than 150 newspapers; a Fortune survey found him to be the most popular columnist in America. The opening of his fifteen-minute radio show, for which he was now getting paid $3,500 a shot, accompanied by a clacking telegraph sound—"Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea"—was familiar to millions of Americans. Whether Winchell was a journalist or an entertainer was not a question that much bothered him. Neither did individual complaints about his having gone too far in one or another of his "items." "I wait until I can catch an ingrate with his fly open," Winchell wrote in his autobiography, "and then I take a picture of it." Oscar Levant remembered that whenever you complained to him about an item in his column, Winchell's response was "I'm a shitheel." He also said, "Democracy is where everybody can kick everybody else's ass. But you can't kick Winchell's."

  By the late 1930s the brash gossip columnist's reputation and power—the two were of course linked—were of sufficient magnitude for President Roosevelt, who wanted Winchell on his side, to cultivate him. And successfully cultivate him FDR did; some said that Winchell, in his columns, became the president's unofficial spokesman, his link between the White House and the average American. He also became friendly with J. Edgar Hoover. Working the other side of the street, he had New York mob connections. Once, after Winchell was beaten up, he had bodyguards from both the FBI and Lucky Luciano's gang assigned to watch over him.

  Through the early forties, Winchell was a great enemy of Hitler and thought of as a friend of the little man. At the same time, he was a chronicler of the rich and famous, noting their goings-on in such smart New York supper clubs as the Colony and El Morocco. He held personal court at the Stork Club, and his regular presence there was the making of that establishment and of its less than genial host, Sherman Billingsley. He acquired an all-wave radio for his car so he could listen to the police band and race to crime scenes at all hours
.

  With his easy arrogance and his power to break reputations and spoil lives, Winchell was a feared man. Arthur Brisbane, his editor at the New York Mirror, who didn't take to Winchell's throwing his weight around in the newsroom, once told him, "You have neither ethics, scruples, decency or conscience." To which Winchell replied, "Let others have those things. I've got readers." And he did; circulation figures climbed whenever he wrote for the paper. For Winchell life was a simple matter of power, and the person who had the most power dominated.

  Meanwhile, he had become a great bore—"a thrilling bore," someone called him. "When he is not talking," St. Clair McKelway wrote, "he sits forward with his head raised unnaturally in an attitude of intense awareness. His heel is apt to beat quick time on the floor like a swing musician's, his gaze roves ceaselessly over the room, and his hands go on little fruitless expeditions over the tablecloth, up and down the lapels of his coat, in and out of his pockets." The playwright Clifford Odets wondered in his diary, after a night listening to Winchell gas away about himself at the Stork Club, "how a human being could have so little sense of other human beings."

  He was also a bully, treating press agents, who were always eager to get their clients named in his column, with lofty, sometimes brutal, contempt. The 1957 movie Sweet Smell of Success, told in good part from the point of view of the press agent Sidney Falco (played brilliantly by Tony Curtis), is loosely based on Winchell's rough treatment of press agents, who were ready to do anything to ingratiate themselves with him. Meanwhile, Winchell treated kindly only those who had more power than he or those for whose services he had momentary need. Lord Acton wasn't quite right; it doesn't take absolute power to corrupt absolutely. Some people can arrive at the state of absolute corruption with a good deal less than absolute power, and Walter Winchell was one of them.