The 40s: The Story of a Decade (59 page)

This device forms the centre of Winchell’s recreational activities. For hours, late at night, he cruises the streets of Manhattan accompanied by three or four friends and sometimes some celebrity like Brenda Frazier or John Gunther. The radio picks up police messages and Winchell drives hurriedly to the scene of action. The action almost invariably consists of policemen looking for a burglar. Once in a great while the car reaches the scene of a holdup or a murder in time for Winchell to get what he calls “a thrill.”

This almost nightly routine is trying to Winchell’s friends and the personnel in the sedan is constantly in process of replenishment. The celebrities seldom go more than once. Myrna Loy dropped off to sleep the time she went. It is possible to sleep in Winchell’s sedan, for although the Police Department has given him permission to equip it with a siren, he is conscious of the disturbance the siren creates in the early
hours of the morning and uses it only when he is going on what looks like a particularly exciting call. One night he was speeding up Central Park West on such a call with the siren on. As he approached the apartment house in which he lives, he shut it off. “I don’t want to wake up Walter and Walda,” he explained to his friends. He did not turn the siren on again until the car reached 110th Street.

· · ·

Winchell has written more words on the subject of friendship than any other modern gossip writer, but the people he calls his friends do not number more than seven or eight and most of these are new rather than old. “The best way to get along,” he once wrote, “is never to forgive an enemy or forget a friend,” but he has made up with at least one man who denounced him publicly and with another who punched him in the nose. Conversely, he has lost many friends by printing objectionable items about them in his column and, in defending this policy, has said, “I never lost a friend I wanted to keep.” On several occasions when friends have remonstrated with Winchell for what they considered a betrayal of friendship, he has said, “I know—I’m just a son of a bitch.” Some of his friends have accepted this explanation and have continued the friendship; others have regarded it as an inadequate excuse and have broken off with him.

Friends who have not broken off with Winchell are apt to assume a puzzled expression when asked to describe the subject of their attachment. “He’s a remarkable guy!” one of them blurted recently, after considerable thought. “He’s not a man—he’s a column,” said another, effusively. Nearly all seven or eight of Winchell’s friends will tell you that they have been injured at one time or another by an item about themselves in Winchell’s column. One friend had climbed his way up to a position of intimacy with Winchell which allowed him to dandle young Walter, Jr., on his knee. He was doing this when Winchell informed him that an embarrassing item about him would appear in the column the next day. “I’m just an s.o.b.,” Winchell explained, using the abbreviated form, while Walter, Jr., innocently played with the friend’s vest buttons. The friend started to protest and then nodded acquiescently. He has not broken off with Winchell. Winchell’s journalistic integrity is such that his duty to his public almost always vanquishes whatever impulses of sentimentality he may have toward a friend when what he calls “a good item” is involved.

When a friend Winchell wanted to keep was killed in an automobile accident some years ago, Winchell published a eulogy which expresses his faith in the practical side of friendship, if not the sentimental side. “Shucks!” he wrote. “A guy like me cannot afford to lose a friend like Donald Freeman! He was one of the few fellers who liked me—and the second important magazine editor to hold out his hand and lift me into his heaven. When I was on a rag that the whole town belittled [the
Evening Graphic
] away back in 1927—almost a million years ago! Poor Don—he was motoring to see his mother and sister at Mt. Kisco and his car crashed, and now he’s no more. I’ll miss Donald Freeman. I’ll miss that shrewd counsel he always gave me when I needed it.…” The late Mr. Freeman was managing editor of
Vanity Fair
, which published some articles by Winchell in 1927 and 1928.

Even if no tempting bit of gossip develops to endanger a friendship with Winchell, he is apt to think of something which the friend will find objectionable and then print it. A friendship with Winchell rarely cools off gradually and reaches a condition of mutual indifference. If he feels that the relationship is losing its first flush of passionate admiration on both sides, he is inclined to take the initiative and strike while the friendship is warm. His phrase for what he does is “I let him have it.” Winchell was once on friendly terms with Lucius Beebe, a fellow-columnist. Mr. Beebe never has found out what happened, but he thinks Winchell decided that some minor criticism of Winchell in another paper (not the
Herald Tribune
, on which Beebe works) and signed “L.B.” was the trouble. Beebe doesn’t know who this “L.B.” was. In any case, Winchell printed a series of passionately unfriendly items about Beebe. Another time Winchell made up his mind that another very close friend, also a fellow-columnist, had become detached in his attitude toward their relationship. He let the friend have it. The friend happened to possess a thick skin as well as a philosophical attitude toward Winchell. He did not retaliate. Months went by and Winchell was mystified. Finally the two met in a night club and Winchell magnanimously offered to patch things up. “You’ve been swell,” he told his friend. “I like the way you didn’t knock me when you were sore at me.”

The practical realism of Winchell’s slant on friendship is present in his attitude toward casual human relationships as well. In conversation he likes either to talk about himself or to listen to something that will be of use to him in his column. Richard Rodgers, the composer, once had an awesome encounter with Winchell in Palm Beach. Rodgers was telling
some companions on the beach about an investment he had made in a manufacturing concern when Winchell happened along and joined the group. Rodgers, who had never known Winchell very well, turned to him politely and began to sum up for Winchell’s benefit the subject of the interrupted conversation. When Rodgers was halfway through, Winchell held up a hand with the palm close to Rodgers’ face and said, “Never mind, never mind.” Rodgers was nonplussed. “How do you mean?” he mumbled uncertainly. “It’s no good for the column,” Winchell explained, and walked on down the beach. Rodgers finished telling his friends about the investment he had made in the manufacturing concern, but, as he has remarked since, his heart wasn’t in it.

When Winchell is talking about himself, he demands the unwavering attention of his listeners. James Cannon, a former sportswriter and one of his closest friends, was in a restaurant one night with his girl and was joined by Winchell. Winchell started to talk about himself. He talked for ten minutes without interruption. Cannon began to wonder if his girl would enjoy the evening more if she had another drink. Keeping his eyes fastened on Winchell’s face so as to appear to be attentive, he said to his girl rapidly and out of the side of his mouth, “Honey, you want something?” Winchell stopped in the middle of a sentence and grabbed Cannon’s arm. “Jimmy!” he said reproachfully. “You’re not listening!”

Winchell believes, with some justification, that practically everybody reads his column every day. If, in conversation, he wishes to refer to something he has written, he says, for example, “The item on the Brooklyn spy scare. Well, listen. Thursday night I called up Hoover,” etc. A friend of Winchell’s once admitted he had not seen the column on a certain Tuesday. Winchell wanted to know with sincere concern if the friend had been ill. Another time another friend returned to New York after a trip abroad. “Jeez, Walter,” he said, “I sure did miss the column. I didn’t see it for two whole weeks.” “That’s all right,” said Winchell. “You can go over to the
Mirror
office tomorrow and look at the files.”

· · ·

A great many people, meeting Winchell for the first time in some restaurant or night club, have exclaimed afterward, “Say, he isn’t such a bad guy!” This is understandable. Winchell has a peculiarly bewitching personality. He has a lean face, full of alertness, with an expression of questing intelligence like a fox terrier’s. His eyes are blue and hard. He is consistently lively and restless; it is impossible to imagine him in repose.
He has an enormous nervous energy, and the experience of watching him burn it up extravagantly is stimulating and sometimes touching. What he says may be uninteresting in itself, but his voice and manner are charged with an inner excitement which is communicable. One of his phrase-making friends calls him “a thrilling bore.” When he is not talking, 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. In a gathering of ten or twelve at a place like Lindy’s or the Stork Club, he appears to listen to the general conversation with only half an ear, but that is enough. If something is mentioned that will make an item for his column, he will say, “I can use that,” and will take out a pencil and notebook and write it down. Having responsibilities which far exceed those of the ordinary journalist, he usually carries a notebook instead of a sheaf of copy paper. He is left-handed, and this makes him look especially intense and painstaking when he is writing something down. At all times he gives the impression of being hungry, of being incessantly in want. In a man of such vitality this is an appealing quality. It is possible for a person to have an entirely unselfish impulse to give Winchell something.

Winchell has a certain integrity, as well as a number of codes all his own. He is as magnificently eccentric in thought as he is in action. He is ashamed of nothing he does. He uses his column at times as an instrument of personal revenge, but he does this as straightforwardly as a cave man would swing a club. “I let him have it three days later,” he will say evenly, in recalling what he wrote about some person who had slighted or insulted him. He is naturally aggressive and is always on the offensive. There is nothing apologetic or cringing in his nature. He has a childlike pride in his success and he makes no bones about it. He is fully conscious of the damage a casual item in his column can do to persons he has no wish to hurt. He seems to be mellowing. It is a process like the aging of granite and is perceptible to people who have been acquainted with him for years. Lately he has been known to writhe in honest agony when the painful consequences of one of his own items are pointed out to him. To a small degree he literally suffers with those he wounds. His attitude on this curious state of affairs seems to be based on the belief that the appearance of such items in his column is as inexorable as fate. “What could I do?” he will say passionately. “It was a good item, wasn’t it?”
Thus he continues to print gossip about the marital relations of people who have not applied for divorce, he does not hesitate to hint at homosexual tendencies in local male residents, and he reports from time to time attempted suicides which otherwise would not be made public. He believes that if a thing is true, or even half true, it is material for his column, no matter how private or personal it may be. He makes one exception to this rule. He claims that he never knowingly reports on extra-marital relationships if he knows the marriage is a happy one. This is pointed to with pride by Winchell’s greatest admirers as being generous and downright decent.

It is true that Winchell has seen married men and women dallying with persons of the opposite sex in night clubs and has withheld this information from the public. In such cases he has known, or has been told, that the marriage of the person concerned seems to be a happy one. If he knows, or has been told, that the marriage is pretty much on the rocks anyway, he feels justified in printing an item about the dallying. There are times, too, of course, when he just doesn’t know, or hasn’t been told, that the person concerned is married at all. “I can’t be expected to know everything,” he has said in defending himself when a harmful item of this sort has appeared in his column. Winchell’s reason for suppressing items which he knows might upset a happy marriage seems to be purely personal. “I’m a married man,” he says. “Where would I be if somebody printed something about my taking a dame out?”

Winchell makes an effort to check some items with certain more or less fortunate people to find out whether the item will do them any particular harm. These people are usually relatively prominent ones whom Winchell has met and has not taken a dislike to. Sometimes they are called to the telephone by Winchell’s secretary, who introduces herself with understandable assurance and says something like “We understand you are sort of crazy about So-and-So. Have you any objection to our printing it?” If the celebrity has what seems to him a legitimate objection, he explains what it is to the secretary and the item is usually not published. This gives the person concerned a feeling of gratitude toward Winchell, coupled with a sensation of general insecurity. Sometimes, even if someone has asked that an item be suppressed, Winchell decides that the request is unreasonable and goes ahead and prints it anyway. Under these circumstances he is apt to accuse the person later of having tried to take advantage of his journalistic ethics. Winchell has been disillusioned many times in thus striving for accuracy and fair play. He cites
numerous cases in which both parties to a disintegrating marriage have denied that they were going to separate and have persuaded him to withhold an item saying that they were, and then, without warning, have filed suit for divorce. “You try to play square with people like that,” he complains bitterly, “and they lie to you. It burns me up.”

Although Winchell prides himself on his accuracy, he fears libel suits and refuses to accept the financial responsibility for libellous items in his column or in his radio program. Some years ago an indignant citizen, a carpenter who, Winchell said in one radio talk, had sat on the end of a tree limb and sawed it off, sued him for libel, claiming injury to his professional reputation. Winchell was asked by his sponsors to share the attorneys’ fees, court costs, and a small settlement granted the carpenter. Winchell refused to do this. He demanded that a clause be inserted in his radio contract providing that the sponsors defend and if necessary settle all libel suits which might result from his broadcasts. The sponsors gave in. Then Winchell asked the
Mirror
to put a similar clause in its contract with him. The
Mirror
agreed. Only three or four people since then have worked themselves up to the point of indignation achieved by the carpenter.