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About People
A Profile of Walter Winchell, Americas
Best Known Journalist and Scoopster
By Alexander Woollcott
I SHOULD like, in sketching this profile of
Walter Winchcll, to point out the two aspects
of his work which interest me most. He has
been much touted by the more exhausting essayists
for the new-minted words with which he has en
riched the American language; the “making
whoopee,” which is now part of every man’s vo
cabulary; the “Reno-vatcd,” which he substituted
for “divorced”; the “Is my face red?” and the
“You dope!” which he added to the list of con
venient locutions. Broadway became “The Main
Stem,” and champagne became “giggle-water.” If
you ever speak about So-and-So being “that way”
about Thingumabob, you are using a Winchellism.
These achievements do not greatly impress me,
and often he seems straining himself almost to the
bursting point in his effort to keep up the pace.
But I am deeply interested in all the enterprise
that lies back of that title, “Blessed Event” in
all his work, that is, as flagrant gossip. This is
his great contribution.
When in retrospect, the historians of journalism
come to consider the decade through which we
are now floundering, they will, I suppose, refer
to it as the Age of the Two Walters, Lippmann
and Winchell. Neither, as was usual in the old
days of Dana, (ireeley or Pulitzer, is the owner
or even the editor of a newspaper. Each is, rather,
the untrammeled author of a column distributed
to many newspapers, and controlled therefore by
none.
Lippmann, like Wells and Shaw, is preemi
nently the patient pedagogue, attempting the Sisy
phean task of teaching the American citizen how
to think. Winchell seeks merely to interest his
readers. He is the little brother to the sidewalk
clowns who hopefully sing and dance for your
amusement at the boulevard cafes in Paris.
Recently a New Y'orker cartoon pictured a
formidable matron as saying that all she needed
for breakfast was orange juice and Walter Lipp
mann. I know a good many lighter creatures
who can get along on just Winchell—with, per
haps, a dash of gin.
It was his contribution to go on strike against
the vast impersonality which, at the time of his
advent, was deadening the American newspaper
into a kind of daily Congressional Record. Be
ginning with the war, these mighty journals be
came such conscientious purveyors of international
events, blessed or otherwise, that only episodes
like war, famine, flood, bank failures, or legisla
tive investigation seemed fit to print. If a story
involved fewer than fifty thousand people, it could
not make the front page. Only when some dis
contented cow would make so striking a gesture
as doing in her husband with a sash weight, let
us say, or when some nameless avenger would
stretch a parson and his choir singer dead beneath
a crabapple tree, was the reader reminded at
breakfast that there were, after all individuals as
well as groups astir on this planet.
Soft-shoeing into this dreary phase of Ameri
can journalism came Master Winchell, his eyes
wide with the childlike interest all newcomers
have, his nervous staccato pace as characteristic
of his day as are the rhythms of George Gershwin.
His success reminded a generation of columnists
who w-ere mere jokesmiths that, after all, there is
nothing so richly entertaining as a fact, and also
reminded a generation of despondent city editors
that, after all, people, as such, are interesting, too.
Unauthorized news of impending marriages, di
vorces, quarrels, babies—these he passed on as soon
as he got them, reducing New York to the scale
of a neighborhood, beating the whole world with
his forecast of the first Lindbergh baby, more often
printing not only first, but alone, such personal
items as most newspapers were disinclined to print
at all, obeying, as they were, from force of habit,
a tradition of reticence which had long since
passed out of American conversation. I suppose
it would be easy to assemble evidence in support
of the contention that Winchell is lacking in taste.
He has a more valuable asset. For w-ant of a
better term, let us call it zest.
One popular delusion I must object to. It is
the implication of the great keyhole which was
the poster of “Blessed Event” that Winchell gath-
This is an extract by Alexander Woollcott,
on Winchell, which appeared in the May is
sue of Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan
Magazine. We present it through the cour
tesy of the editor of the Cosmopolitan Maga
zine.
-K
ers these tidbits by eavesdropping. Nonsense. In
the first place, most of them are telephoned in to
him. In the second place, did you ever try to
look through the keyhole of a Y ale lock?
It is also the implication of his more abusive
critics that each time he reports a ruptured ro
mance or forecasts some amendment of the vital
statistics, the parties concerned drink poison in
their despair at this exposure to the public gaze.
Nonsense, again. Most of the victims of his in
trusion are simply delighted.
Another aspect of Winchell’s work which in
terests me derives from the fact that he is a quick
witted and apprehensive autodidact. I hope he
will look the w-ord up before he gets red in the
face. 1 myself, when young was inclined to ma
triculate in every school I chanced to pass, and
now enjoy, as an unearned increment, the degree
of Doctor of Humane Letters. Therefore, I
study with a vague misgiving the more glowing
work of the self-taught.
I am reminded, from time to time, by the
careers of such neighbors of mine as Norman Bel
Geddes, Irving Berlin, Harpo Marx and Walter
Winchell, none of whom ever got through gram
mar school, that perhaps I might better have played
hooky than labored so earnestly for those good
marks. If I had been “left down” when I was
twelve years old, I should either have died of mor
tification or hanged myself. Winchell was “left
down” for three successive years, and never got
past Six B.
Of course that makes it all the easier today for
him to fill up that most popular of his columns
“Things I Never Knew Till Now.” To be sure,
w-hen compared w-ith Harpo Marx, Winchell is a
Phi Beta Kappa man. Harpo spent five years in
public school, all of them in one grade. This did
WALTER WINCHELL
not humiliate him, as he ascribed it to his in-
fatuated teacher’s disinclination to part compam
with him. Winchcll himself, of course, is hum
bly impressed by his collegiate confreres and fairly
swells writh satisfaction when so austere a publia
tion as The Bookman asks him to contribute.
His chief hesitation in accepting his first now
paper job was a terror lest it be discovered tha-
he never had been able to fathom the difference
between "who” and “whom.” His day of great
est pride w-as when he learned that an indolent
undergraduate in a mid-western university had
turned in one of Winchell’s articles as his own and
been rewarded with an A by teacher.
Winchell went from school to the stage. Even
before quitting school, his nostrils had learned,
after hours, the fascinating smell of the theater.
Across the street from Public School 184 was the
Imperial Theater, a measly nickelodeon where, in
the afternoons, he and another little boy used to
serve as ushers in order to see the show. This
cherished privilege was accorded them because the
other little boy’s mother, with a shaw-1 over her
head, was the ticket seller. The other little boys
name w-as George jessel.
These tw'o, incandescent w'ith ambition, induced
a poor schleimiel from among their contemporaries
in the neighborhood to join w ith them in forming
a trio of warblers. They billed themselves a>
Lawrence, Stanley and McKinley. It is not
known why. Winchell w-as Law-rence, Jessel
McKinley. Their repertory included “1 Drcair
in the Gloaming of Y'ou,” “The Lobster and the
Wise Guy,” and “Pony Pony.” They must have
been terrible.
They w-ere obliged to do theii singing from the
orchestra pit to evade the Gerry Society’s prejudice
against children going on the stage. Lawren-
was only twelve, and McKinley, who sang ba»-
vvas eleven. It w-as later, when his voice changed
that he sang tenor. If this sounds odd to yot.
don’t blame me. That is the w-ay it was.
For this concerted effort they w T ere paid five dol
lars a week each. When the other tw-o got job*
elsew-here, Jessel became, by the process of eli® 1 '
nation, a soloist. In his recently published mem
oirs, that gifted minstrel recalled how- the nickelo
deon used to advertise that it w-as worth five cefl®
admission just to hear Jessel alone.
******
I never have been able to get far enough
the North woods not to find some trapper the:-
who w-ould quote Winchell’s latest observation-
and I remember once witnessing a painful scene ®
Hatchard’s bookshop in Piccadilly. The scene **
being made by a noble lord in a temper. 1 he ^
ble lord had left strict orders that Wincheljj
Monday column should be rushed to him tl*
moment it reached England, and, good God son’'
w-retched clerk had failed to arrange it.
Copyrifhted 1932 for The Soutbun Imuueute
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m THE SOUTHERN ISRAtXf**