The 40s: The Story of a Decade (60 page)

· · ·

Winchell writes his column and prepares the script for his Sunday-night radio broadcast at home. He employs two secretaries, who work in an office at the
Mirror
, which he rarely visits. He keeps in touch with his secretaries mostly by telephone. His column goes to press around six in the evening, soon after he wakes up, and at that time he may make last-minute changes by telephone. Then he starts on the column which will go to press the next evening. His mail, which is stupendous in size and variety of subject matter, is sent to him by a messenger around 6 p.m., and he gets a great part of his material from that. He spends several hours going through it and selecting items which he will use in the column he is preparing. He is practically incommunicado during this period and his secretaries call him only on extremely urgent business. He scribbles replies on letters he wishes to answer, then they are sent back to the
Mirror
office and the secretaries work on them the next day. He does not pay for items.

Winchell does not often go to night clubs any more, except for the Stork Club. The Stork Club serves as an outside office. He arrives there almost every night around eleven o’clock, having prepared the major part
of his column from his mail. He is usually at the Stork Club until four or five in the morning. After that he drives around in his car for a while and then goes home, finishes his column, sends it to the
Mirror
office, and goes to sleep around 9 or 10
A.M
. While he is asleep, the column is set up in type and proofs are sent to King Features Syndicate, the Hearst syndicate organization, where it is edited for out-of-town papers. Most of the changes are made in possibly libellous items. Winchell accepts this editing without protest. A lawyer employed by the
Mirror
also reads a proof and makes changes or deletions which he thinks may prevent libel suits.

At the Stork Club, Winchell takes telephone calls from persons he wishes to speak to and receives personally some of the many people who are always wanting to see him, ranging from celebrities and politicians to chorus girls with a complaint about labor conditions. Sometimes he sees them in the Stork Club barbershop and sometimes at a table just inside the entrance. While he is there, the barbershop may be reached only by persons whom Winchell wishes to see. It is in a loft building next door and has two entrances—through the front of the loft building and through a passage from the club. In the club he orders captains of waiters about in a proprietary manner, and although there has been a rumor for years that he has a financial interest in the place, he says he hasn’t. His friend Sherman Billingsley, proprietor of the Stork Club, says the same thing, adding that Winchell’s frequent mentions of the place in his column have had much to do with its success and that he is grateful to Winchell and friendly with him. “That rat!” Mr. Billingsley exclaimed to some table companions recently when Winchell, in spite of their friendship and the fact that Billingsley is still married, linked his name with that of a musical-comedy star. But he managed to conquer his irritation before he saw Winchell later that evening.

When sitting at his table, surrounded by three or four friends, with perhaps one bodyguard in the offing, Winchell may listen to a reformer from Atlantic City who believes his efforts to clean up the resort will be successful only if he has Winchell’s support, or to a hysterical admirer who tiptoes up and says, as if making a speech, “I want to shake your hand, Walter. I think you are a great man and America’s most valuable citizen.” Winchell shakes the hand. Such tributes are frequent. People sit at the Stork Club bar for hours waiting for Winchell to come in so that they may have the opportunity to compliment him. Many of them are sincere, and have no axes to grind. Occasionally the pleasure Winchell
receives from the outbursts of enthusiasm is dulled by an afterthought which the admirer expresses as he bows himself away, such as “I’m a tenor. So-and-So’s the name,” or “I’m at Loew’s State this week. Song and dance. So-and-So’s the name.” Winchell deplores sycophancy of this sort and never rewards such a person with a mention in his column, even a scandalous one. Then there are the bold ones at the Stork Club, such as the débutante who one night slipped over and grabbed Winchell’s bread when he was eating his supper. “A bet,” she said demurely, and skipped off. Late at night, a literary relationship between Winchell and Leonard Lyons, gossip man for the
Post
, is apt to be revealed. It is comparable to Conrad’s paternal friendship for Stephen Crane. Lyons, who is Winchell’s protégé, not a rival, the
Post
being an afternoon paper and his “Lyons Den” gossip column being also syndicated by Hearst, appears unobtrusively from somewhere and says, “Walter, may I check a gag?” “O.K.,” says the veteran. Lyons then recites an anecdote which he intends to pass on to his readers the next day. If it is old or sour, in Winchell’s opinion, he advises Lyons to throw it out. If not, he says “O.K.” a second time and Lyons goes happily back to his job of hopping from table to table, looking for gossip and gags.

· · ·

Winchell has been described in the New York press as “Broadway’s Greatest Scribe,” “Boyfriend of Broadway,” “Little Boy Peep,” and “The Bard of Broadway.” He prefers the last. His friends sometimes refer to him as The Brain and The King. He is unable to decide which of these is his favorite. He is like a king in many ways but not in others. Edmund Burke once asserted that “kings are naturally lovers of low company.” His general argument was that the status of a king is so much higher than that of the next greatest dignitary that the difference between the highest and the lowest non-kings is slight, from a king’s point of view. A king, according to Burke, is irritated by the more consequential non-kings because they feel a responsibility for his behavior, frown at his vices, and try to make him go straight. He therefore consorts with lowly folk who flatter and amuse him. Although Winchell is sought after by many prominent people, he usually shakes them off an hour or two after midnight and hobnobs with mediocre newspaper reporters and undistinguished theatrical folk. He feels more at ease with them. On the other hand, kings, throughout history, have made a habit of putting aside their public personalities and going around incognito. Presidents have shown
a similar weakness. Both Wilson and Coolidge used to slip away from the Secret Service men and take walks by themselves, revelling in anonymity. If Winchell has ever had such impulses, he has suppressed them resolutely. He seems to have no desire to get away from himself. When he goes to Miami Beach in the winter he always stops at the Roney Plaza, where everybody knows him. For years he spent his summer vacations hanging around night clubs and restaurants in town. Two summers ago, his wife having persuaded him to buy a house in Westchester, he discovered and endorsed the country, but in his summer home he sleeps all day in an air-conditioned room kept dark by lightproof blinds and usually comes to town every night whether he has to do so professionally or not. Occasionally, driving around after midnight with friends, he plays a sort of reverse version of the incognito game, the object being to see how soon he will be recognized in a public place off the beaten track. Almost anywhere in town he is recognized by somebody within a few minutes. If he is not, it is his custom to say to a bartender or waiter, “I’m Walter Winchell.” In no time the place is in a hubbub, and Winchell leaves.

Once, not long ago, Winchell and a friend stopped for some coffee at an unpretentious roadside restaurant in lower Westchester. Nobody was in the place but a slatternly girl working behind the counter. She did not recognize Winchell and looked at him sourly, as if he were just a man buying a cup of coffee. Halfway through his coffee, Winchell winked at his friend and then drew the girl into conversation.

“Do you read the
Mirror
?” he asked.

“Nah,” she said. “I take the
News.
”

“Ever listen to the radio?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ever listen to Ben Bernie or Walter Winchell?”

“Nah,” said the girl. “What I really like is Hawaiian music.”

Winchell and his friend left the place without further talk. As they got into the car, Winchell said, “Can you imagine that dumb biddy?” Later, as they drove along, Winchell suddenly said “Huh!” The friend asked him what he meant by this. “I was just thinking about that dumb biddy,” Winchell said. “Can you imagine it?”

DECEMBER 13/20, 1941 (ON THOMAS MANN)

F
or forty years, Thomas Mann has endured the singular experience of being regularly described, while still alive, in terms usually reserved for the exceptional dead. In a half-dozen languages he has been called a genius, a modern classic, Germany’s noblest novelist, and, occasionally, one of the immortal literary figures of all countries, of all time. In the King’s English of the book critics of London, the only literate capital where he has never caught on, he has also been described, less conventionally, as heavy weather. Before Hitler ordered Mann’s political books to be burned, German spokesmen, with their special racial passion for altitude, had solemnly lifted Mann’s major fictional works to the rank of
Faust, Pilgrim’s Progress, The Divine Comedy
, and, as a final tribute, Beethoven’s ninth symphony. A couple of months ago a Nazi radio commentator simply pegged him under the head of “degenerate Western literature.” By his New York publisher, Alfred Knopf, Mann is professionally presented as “the greatest living man of letters,” a carefully composed selling slogan with a fine, chiselled touch applicable to a public statue. By Mann’s few friends, less numerous than the members of his own large family, it has been stated as a natural law that “one speaks of him with the reverence he deserves.” Thus they speak of him reverently, though they also call him Tommy. His children, of whom there are six, cheerfully refer to him, beyond his hearing, as the Master.

Thomas Mann, now sixty-six years old and on his thirty-first book, began being exactly what he is today when he was twenty-five and had just completed his first novel. Mann’s youth and age, gauged by the interior
and the exterior of his impressive head, seem peculiarly interchangeable, because both his work and his physiognomy started by being mature and have remained perfectly preserved. Mann’s first opus,
Buddenbrooks
, a quarter-million-word, two-volume biographical account of the melancholy decline of three earlier generations of very rich merchant Manns, was written by the young author as a private performance, to read aloud to his less opulent family to amuse them after dinner. However, it was the Buddenbrook family’s sad, sure sense of social insecurity, felt as Europe’s newly industrialized eighteen-hundreds ended, which made the novel, when published, Germany’s first disturbing national classic of the nineteen-hundreds. Its sales eventually reached 1,300,000 copies, making it the biggest best-seller, next to Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
, of pre-Hitler Europe. “It was fame,” as Mann himself commented a few years ago in his privately printed
A Sketch of My Life
, employing that lenslike literary manner he invented as a young man in order to view himself with magnified detachment. “I was snatched up into a whirl of success. My mailbag was swollen, money flowed in streams, my picture appeared in the papers, a hundred pens made copy of the product of my secluded hours, the world embraced me amid congratulations and shouts of praise.… Society took me up—in so far as I let it, for in this respect society has never been very successful.”

Certainly, Mann is a recluse, though an elegant one. Even his children, when little, rarely saw him. To them he was the invisible smell of glue from the fine bookbindings in his study and the smoke of his expensive light cigars. In the midst of the ample life he was born in, married into, and writes about, he has always remained comfortably cloistered. He has never made an appreciable use of his select social position but has been careful to take it for granted. He was born to the bourgeois purple. In the seventeen-hundreds, the Mann family, prosperous, prolific woolen drapers in Nürnberg, moved to Lübeck, where they eventually became even more flourishing grain merchants. For a precious hundred years they inhabited mansions, ate rich, stately dinners, and became senators and consuls. They finally attained the climax of their commercial disintegration not only by losing their business but also by producing Thomas and his elder brother, Heinrich, a pair of purely literary scions. From this biological break with family precedent, Heinrich, who took after their mother, a lady with Latin blood, has derived less fame but possibly a lot more pleasure than the more Mannlike Thomas has. Thomas Mann, as shocked by his talent as if he were one of his own conservative Hanseatic
ancestors, from the very first regarded his or anybody’s creative temperament as a suspicious, unhealthy crack in the ideal, solid
Bürgertum
norm, and has always thought the perfect artist—Goethe or Wagner or himself, each of whom he has spent years of his life conscientiously analyzing—a singular cross between a social pariah and a savior of civilization, with a dash of the charlatan thrown in. To the aesthetic refinement of this blend he has devoted his career.