His career seemed endless in its upward sweep. He was on the cover of Time in the 1930s; at the end of the 1940s he was the highest-paid figure in show business. His column cleared the path for other gossip columnists: Leonard Lyons, Louis Sobol, Louella Parsons, Dorothy Kilgallen, Earl Wilson. Without Winchell, none of their columns would likely have come into existence.
One day in 1948, at a New York Yankees game, sitting with J. Edgar Hoover, Winchell mused on the possibility of running for president. He didn't have the same rapport with Harry Truman as he had had with Franklin Roosevelt. He took the side of General Douglas MacArthur against Truman in their controversy over Korea, which made him persona non grata at the White House. Once thought a liberal in politics, Winchell was, with the aid of Hoover's influence, much taken with Senator Joseph McCarthy; after all, as Neal Gabler suggests, their methods—accusations based on hearsay—were not all that different. Winchell became an anti-Communist of the disreputable kind that found Communists under every bed, and wasn't opposed to using smear tactics to ruin a man's reputation—an anti-Communist of the kind, in short, that gave sensible anti-Communism a bad name.
Hard to pinpoint the precise date when Walter Winchell's meteor began to descend. A racial incident at the Stork Club over seating the black dancer Josephine Baker, in which he did not truly have a part, but in which he defended his friend Sherman Billingsley who did, didn't help. A man named Lyle Stuart, who himself would go on to specialize in the scurrilous, wrote an attack on Winchell, claiming he did not write his own columns, that he had been having an affair with a showgirl, that he was an egomaniac capable of great viciousness, and that he was finally a sham. The New York Post also ran a series of articles attacking Winchell, emphasizing his journalistic inaccuracies, citing the careers he had helped destroy, claiming he had devised schemes to avoid paying his full share of income tax.
No work is a greater breeding ground than gossip for paranoia, into which Walter Winchell now submerged. In his case, he was a paranoid with real as well as imaginary enemies. Everywhere he had scores to settle. He started using his column and radio show to go after other radio commentators, fellow columnists, newspaper editors, and those suitors for his daughter of whom he didn't approve. He combined gossip and red-baiting, going after not merely the usual suspects but adding a few unusual ones, Adlai Stevenson notable among them. Always a man to keep bad company, he added Roy Cohn, McCarthy's then young henchman, to his roster of unattractive friends.
The slide began with the gradual cancellation of contracts, the reduction in workload. His ratings dropped; ABC, for whom he broadcast a television show, let him go. His newspaper employer, the Hearst Corporation, refused any longer to insure his column against libel. People who formerly would have lived in fear of his retribution now openly attacked him in public, as the society hostess Elsa Maxwell did on the Jack Paar Show. Paar would later call him "a silly old man"; which hurt more, the "silly" or the "old," would be difficult to say. Sweet Smell of Success, taken from a story by a former press agent, Ernest Lehman, and with everyone assuming that the part of the out-and-out-bastard columnist was Walter Winchell, turned out to be an enormous hit—it also happens to be a swell movie—though Winchell tried to kill it in his column by claiming it was a financial dud.
The 1960s saw Winchell out. He began picking the wrong horses in politics, claiming, for example, that John F. Kennedy was a Communist sympathizer. The Stork Club went belly-up. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were done for in Hollywood, their services no longer required now that the studio system was ending. Winchell lost his column when his most recent home base, Hearst's World Journal Tribune, closed down in 1967. In a piece marking the end of Winchell's column, a writer on the New York Times noted that the column ended because of the "rise of television, a growing sophistication among newspaper readers, the decline of Hollywood and the emergence of an international set of performers who no longer read or care about Broadway and show business columns, changes in reading taste, a growing uneasiness about the truth of many [of his] column items and even changing sexual mores." Winchell had given a certain tone to an era—brash, intensely urban, tough-guy—but that era was finished, and so was he.
Walter Winchell without a column was like Babe Ruth without a bat, Jascha Heifetz without a violin, Mae West without a bosom. Little succor was to be found for him in a retreat into family life. He had long before alienated his daughter Walda. His son, Walter Winchell Jr., never able to find a place in life, committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. Winchell himself died two months before reaching seventy-five, and fifteen days after the death of his wife.
Winchell, Neal Gabler notes, simultaneously enlivened and vulgarized journalism. He advanced the spread of gossip, not merely individual items but the thing itself, throughout American newspapers, infecting so-called straight news with it, and making what were once back-alley whisper stories into front-page news. He whetted and fed the appetite for scandal about celebrities. He was in some sense the founding father of all the celebrity gossip magazines and television shows that now deluge our culture.
In Gabler's words, Winchell's legacy was to cause us to "believe in our entitlement to know everything about our public figures. We would believe that fame is an exalted state but suspect that the famous always have something to hide. Above all, we would believe in a culture of gossip and celebrity where entertainment takes primacy over every other value."
Would all this have happened anyway, even if Winchell had not lived? Maybe, maybe not. But in him man and subject were perfectly joined. His need for recognition, his disregard for the feelings of others, his shrewd sense of self-promotion, his tireless pursuit of the scandalous—all this made Walter Winchell the gossip columnist par excellence, which is perhaps the most dubious possible compliment a journalist can be paid.
Diary
An interview with Orson Welles is no small thing, and the journalist showed up at an expensive restaurant for a latish lunch in Los Angeles to discover that Welles had preceded him and was already seated. They tucked into a very grand lunch. No surprise, this, for Orson Welles was, to speak euphemistically, a substantial man; to speak uneuphemistically, he weighed more than three hundred pounds. The interview went well. The meal was a full one: drinks, starters, soup, large main courses, two bottles of wine, heavy desserts, cognac and coffee. At the conclusion of lunch and interview, Welles announced he must be on his way. The journalist thanked him, he hoped not too obsequiously. With Welles now departed, he asked for the check. He expected it to be large, but when it arrived he was flabbergasted. He also couldn't decipher how it had risen to this stratospheric sum. He called the waiter over to ask for an explanation.
"You see, sir," said the waiter, "Mr. Welles arrived something like an hour and a half ahead of you, and had a full lunch before you showed up. He instructed us to put it on your check."
12. Antediluvian Gossip
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.
—GWENDOLYN FAIRFAX IN The Importance of Being Earnest
IN HER NOVEL Daniel Deronda George Eliot called gossip "a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco pipes of those who diffuse it; it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker." True enough, but as an astonishingly smart woman and a great novelist, Eliot also knew how central gossip could be not only to moving forward dramatic action in novels but to altering life itself. The latter knowledge she came by at first hand. In 1854 Eliot (née Mary Ann Evans) entered into a union with G. H. Lewes, a married man who, owing to complex English law, could not be legally divorced from his first wife. Because of her unconventional partnership, Eliot's social life was less than comfortable; she was often the victim of gossip of the meanest kind, with the consequence that she did not go much, and probably never lightheartedly, into society.
A minor character in Daniel Deronda, a Mr. Vandernoodt, reporting a pertinent piece of gossip to Daniel, the novel's eponymous hero,
remarks that "there are plenty of people who knew all about it"—the secret family of the man whom the heroine of the novel is to marry—"but such stories get packed away like old letters. They interest me. I like to know the manners of my time—contemporary gossip, not antediluvian." The distinction between contemporary and antediluvian gossip is a useful one, especially when it comes to public gossip, or gossip about celebrity figures.
As for contemporary gossip, at some point age kicks in and one loses interest in the people around whom gossip of the day swirls most vigorously. Long ago it kicked in for me. I don't regularly read any gossip column. I sometimes check the New York Post's Page Six, though I am lucky if on any given day I know half the subjects of its gossip items; even when I know of them, usually vaguely, I find myself a good deal less than excited by the revelations about them. That a rock singer trashed a luxurious hotel room and left dirty needles and used feminine-hygiene products behind, "according to sources," and also flooded the floor, doesn't arouse much interest in me. Nor does the indecent proposal that a movie star made years ago to a 1960s model at a Hollywood party light my fire. As for Todd Phillips, Brian Grazer, Chosan Nyugen, Mary J. Blige, Michael Hirtenstein, Ed "Jean Luc" Kleefield, Cydney Bernard, Tara Subkoff, Rikki Klieman, and Count Alex de Lesseps, names that all appeared on Page Six on a recent day, I can only ask, in the words of the Sundance Kid to his friend Butch, "Who are these guys?"
I don't currently watch any of the television shows dedicated to gossip about movie and television stars. I don't watch the soaps, and I watch no so-called reality TV, both of which, in a gossip-drenched time, provide low-grade celebrity subjects for contemporary gossip. I realize that there are now celebrity chefs and celebrity dermatologists to the stars, and I have even seen a reference to a celebrity gardener in the Hamptons, but I am not displeased at my inability to call up any of their names. While standing in the supermarket checkout line, I glimpse the grocery press—the National Enquirer, the Globe, and the rest—but increasingly I am mystified about the subjects of the stories that appear there. When not mystified, I cannot bring myself to care, certainly not about that lead-dust triangle of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Jennifer Aniston, about the poundage freshly arriving and slowly departing from the carcass of Oprah Winfrey, about the child adoption problems of Madonna, about the lowjinks of Paris Hilton, and about the goings-on of lesser mortals. When I see a magazine cover whose headline is "Jake's Web of Lies," and another with "What Ali's Hiding," I haven't a clue about who Jake and Ali might be, and find I cannot stir myself sufficiently to care. As I write, the marital meltdown of a couple named Jon and Kate Gosselin—they have a reality television show, I learned, called Jon and Kate Plus 8—is getting a great amount of publicity in the grocery gutter press, but my own fond expectation is that, by the time this book is published, their names will be deep down in the crowded dustbin of gossip history.
Much gossip that continues to be purveyed now qualifies as quasi-, or perhaps semi-, antediluvian, in Mr. Vandernoodt's term. This includes gossip about these hardy perennials of modern but no longer contemporary figures: various members of the Kennedy family, the British royals, the artful (now dead) dodgers Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Princess Diana, O. J. Simpson. Hardy perennials, after all, they remain hardy and perennial. A story not long ago emerged about Marlon Brando having slept on two different occasions with Jackie Onassis. The story derives from a book that also has Mrs. Onassis canoodling with her brother-in-law Bobby. Wunderbar!
My own taste in gossip, unlike Mr. Vandernoodt's, tends to run to the antediluvian, but it tends also to run to the highbrow. Either you care about Rosie O'Donnell or you don't. I don't, not in the least. I prefer my gossip analytical and refined. I care a lot less for gossip about Conan O'Brien than I do for gossip about Conor Cruise O'Brien. I cannot bring myself to become faintly interested in even the most lurid stories of the latest passing celebrity schlepper ("Celebrity Butcher Found Dead in Freezer"). But when I read, as I not long ago did in the Times Literary Supplement, that two of Cary Grant's (five) wives alleged physical abuse on his part, it gets my attention, though Grant is long gone. It does so because Grant was an immensely attractive figure; though an actor, not a notably cerebral profession, he appears to have had a thought or two of some originality. ("I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me," he said of his charming screen persona.) Why would a man so gifted by the gods and privileged by the world as Cary Grant—with good looks, money, fame—feel the need to beat up women? Something worth contemplating here: gossip, in other words, as food for thought.
I am only interested in gossip about people whom I find intrinsically interesting. Often, as with Cary Grant, these turn out to be dead people, some dead for quite a long while. In a recent reading of Pages from the Goncourt Journals, for example, I was pleased to hear the long-ago gossip that Guy de Maupassant was the illegitimate son of Gustave Flaubert; that Talleyrand may have been the father of the painter Eugène Delacroix; that Émile Zola probably had an enlarged prostate, causing him to piddle frequently on short train trips; that the food at the home of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte was wretched; that the Comte de Montesquiou, Proust's model for Baron de Charlus, had a love affair with a female ventriloquist who, "while Montesquiou was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunk voice of a pimp, threatening the aristocratic client." Now that's what I call quality gossip, antediluvian though it assuredly is.
The hunger for gossip feeds much modern biography. Of a biography of Somerset Maugham, a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (October 9, 2008) writes: "What reads like a thoroughly traditional, archive-based cradle-to-grave biography in fact includes a good deal of gossip and speculation." But the same hunger for gossip, for the inside, unofficial, and true story, can still attach to long-deceased subjects of biography. The first successful modern biography was James Boswell's Life of Johnson, though some say Samuel Johnson himself wrote the first modern biographies in his Lives of the Poets. Boswell, readers of the day must have thought, had given them the real lowdown on the great man, recounting anecdotes about him, eliciting his opinions, whenever possible allowing him to speak for himself. But the lowdown would in time get much lower still, lower than lots of people might wish to go. In a review of two recent biographies of Johnson, Pat Rogers, a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, provides this arresting paragraph:
One issue which has provoked a great deal of discussion is Johnson's possible taste for masochistic sex. This derives from a padlock left with Hester Thrale and some suspicious references to chains and punishment (some in a letter coded in French that he wrote to Hester). Martin [Peter Martin, the author of one of the biographies under review] states baldly that the suggestion, originally made by the scholar Katherine Balderston, "has been discredited." The rashness of this claim emerges when we turn to Meyers [Jeffrey Meyers, the author of the second biography], who supports the prosecution case with a quote from Krafft-Ebing. Personally, I am with Meyers on this, but the facts are not conclusive, and, though biographers have to make up their mind on such points, it is only fair to the reader if they admit the scale of disagreement. Similarly Meyers buys easily into the theory that a mysterious letter M which crops up in Samuel's journal reveals "a painful and unceasing struggle with masturbation." As Martin shows, there are other and maybe more plausible explanations, notably a record of bowel movements.
After reading this passage, one would prefer to be a Baptist minister in a small town who has been found dead drunk on Sunday morning on the steps of his church than a great critic and man of letters whose private life is exposed to the speculations of modern scholars centuries after his death. Not a pretty thing to have academics argue that you—as in the case of Samuel Johnson, an earnest Christian and in his generosity to the downtrodden a genuinely saintly man—are into masochistic sex and that you have had a lifelong problem with masturbation. Yet under the banner of sc
holarship this sort of loose, gossipy talk goes on all the time, and often its targets are precisely the people who would find it most appalling.
For many years now, scholars and critics have been earnestly at work on what I think of as the HJHP, or Henry James Homosexual Project. Although there is no evidence that Henry James ever made actual physical love to anyone, woman or man, biographers have been keen to prove that his abstinence has hid James's true sexual nature, which many of them feel was homosexual. Such evidence as has been adduced on behalf of this gossipy speculation is that James, late in life, wrote effusive letters to a sculptor named Hendrik Andersen and other younger men, and also that he became a great hugger of men. Thin stuff, one would have thought: as for the letters, James had long been an epistolary master of what he himself called "mere gracious twaddle," which entailed deliberately, even comically overstated effusions; as for the hugging, if hugging a man is a sign of homosexuality, then there goes Hollywood and the entire National Basketball Association, where the hug between men long ago replaced the handshake. One of James's biographers has him sharing a night in the same bed, when young, with his contemporary Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and the novelist Colm Tóibín used this scene in a novel, The Master, that argues the case for James's homosexuality. Scholars have also found that Abraham Lincoln, when young, shared a bed for a few nights with another man, with findings similar to those against Henry James. Biographers tend to prefer the flashier explanation of latent or overt homosexuality over that of a simple shortage of beds in the nineteenth century: the young Abe Lincoln was poor; Holmes and James were on a camping party when sharing their bed.
Gossip Page 12