Losing Friends and Influencing People

Television, not radio, was my youthful companion. It was a world in which Walter Winchell was a fringe character, actually little more than the stylized narrator on The Untouchables, the story of Eliot Ness and his gangbusters which ran on ABC from 1959 to 1963. Unfamiliar and unimpressed with the name Walter Winchell, I still remember his voice, a sort of cross between the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun and a car engine backfiring, and assumed that he must have been an important figure back in the wild days of Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti and Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. It wasn’t until I saw Sweet Smell of Success — not in 1957 when it was released, but many years later — that I really thought anything about Winchell. I knew that Burt Lancaster’s J. J. Hunsecker character was based on Winchell, and I was enthralled by his performance. His power was so naked, his dominion over New York’s sleek, dark nightlife so absolute, that he inspired equal measures of repulsion and awe. The Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman script was stylized and filled with memorable lines. “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried,” Hunsecker tells a press agent. And to a United States Senator he says, “You’re a family man, Harry, and some day, god-willing, you may want to be president. And here you are out in the open where any hep person knows that this one is toting that one around for you.”

It was then that I began to wonder who Walter Winchell was and whether he had the power to bury men who displeased him. And if he did have that kind of clout, why had he been excluded or hardly mentioned in the standard histories of the period? Neal Gabler’s Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity answers all my questions about Winchell the man and places him in his proper cultural context. The result is a disturbing portrait of a troubled man and complex age.

As Gabler makes clear, Winchell has not so much been forgotten as systematically ignored by the very people — the very culture — he challenged. Winchell’s “papers,” for example, never found a home in an academic library and were eventually auctioned off piecemeal. “The materials were scattered among buyers,” Gabler noted; “no one will ever have access to the complete collection again” (p. 646). Why? The answer, Gabler suggests, is because Winchell was the barbarian at the gates, the representative of “mass culture” storming the citadel of “elite culture.” He “helped effect and then came to symbolize the cultural revolution in which control of the American agenda shifted from the mandarins of high culture to the new masters of mass culture” (p. 645). And for this Gabler suspects the Old Guard barred Winchell from Valhalla:

Magisterial biographies are generally deemed to concern magisterial subjects: great political figures, military leaders, artists, philosophers. Shunting less august but no less culturally significant figures like Winchell to the historical margins is a way... for high-culturalists to maintain control over the past even as they have surrendered control over the present. This, indeed, has been Winchell’s fate — to be reduced to ephemera.

(p. 645)

Gabler’s task was to disinter Walter Winchell and to treat his world in a magisterial fashion. The Winchell he presents makes J. J. Hunsecker look like a sweetheart. It is difficult to tell from Winchell whether the journalist ever really cared about anyone. He seemed to have cared in the abstract about June, his second wife, and their children, but only in the abstract and only as they touched his own self-centered existence. Certainly there was no evidence in the content of his daily life. It is also difficult to say if he held any beliefs beyond promoting himself. His defense of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and Joseph McCarthy and anticommunism seemed more self-serving...