Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 18, 1990 TAG: 9006170025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He was widely considered the creator of modern gossip writing, and in his heyday this rude, abrasive, egotistical and witty man was the country's best known and most widely read journalist and one of its most influential.
In 1943, when there were 140 million people in the United States, more than 50 million of them read his gossip column every day in more than 1,000 newspapers, including his flagship, The New York Daily Mirror.
Even more people listened to his weekly radio broadcast. Hated, feared and revered, he presided over Table 50 of the Stork Club in New York, creating and destroying celebrities at the drop of his trademark gray snap-brim fedora.
Yet when he died in 1972, at age 74, he was practically forgotten. Only two people attended his funeral: his daughter, Walda, and the rabbi who officiated at his services. Today, not many people under 40 even know the name of Walter Winchell.
Someone who does remember, however, is Michael Herr, the author of "Dispatches," the widely praised hallucinatory memoir of the Vietnam War, and a co-author of the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."
Herr has written "Walter Winchell: A Novel." It began life as a screenplay and in some ways still is one. It is a highly unusual combination of cinema and prose, and some critics have even called it an experimental novel. It is short (158 smallish pages), and it was recently published by Alfred A. Knopf.
"There was something about the shape of Winchell's life that attracted me," Herr says, speaking by telephone from his London home. "The rise and fall, and the way he Winchell sort of invented himself and invented his own place in American life: his ambition, his hunger, his pathology, his extraordinary energy and chutzpah.
"He had no education, but he was very smart. He was shameless. He had nothing to lose. He wasn't technically an immigrant, but he was barely removed from being one.
"And there was that immigrant hunger and rage and ambition and that feeling that anybody could be or do anything they wanted in America. He just rode that for all it was worth, and it was worth a lot."
Herr, 50, remembers Winchell from his youth. "When I was a kid he was so pervasive and powerful," the author says. "I grew up with that voice in my ear."
It was a voice that would start the radio program with the words that became the columnist's anthem: "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea! This is Walter Winchell in New York. Let's go to press."
It wasn't until a few years ago, however, when Herr was working with the artist Guy Peellaert on a book called "The Big Room," that the author's interest in Winchell was renewed. The book was about fame and power in America, and Peellaert had done portraits of 48 Americans connected in the American mind with Las Vegas.
One portrait was of Winchell, who had starred in a stage show there in the 1960s, and in researching a long caption for the portrait Herr became intrigued.
He read of how Winchell was born in poverty in 1897 near the corner of Madison Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem; how Winchell quit school in the sixth grade and became a not-very-successful song-and-dance man in vaudeville.
Herr read of how Winchell began his writing career by typing and posting a gossip bulletin backstage during his vaudeville tours. How Winchell's saucy and unheard-of brand of gossip brought him a fame that rivaled that of anyone he wrote about, including his friends and confidants Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover.
Some people who knew Winchell, especially those who were disaffected by his support of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's anti- communist hearings in the 1950s, have been shocked by Herr's sympathetic portrayal of the columnist.
"I'm sure he was a really terrible guy," Herr says. "He never talked about anything but himself. His ego was unbelievable. But I find that strangely touching and endearing.
"It's his pathology that touches me. It's this guy driven because he always knew - I think he always knew - he was going to go down. He was always looking over his shoulder for that hungry young kid with the new idea who would displace him.
"And when it came, it was a whole hungry generation with a new idea that displaced him. Because the idea was television, and there was no place for him in it."
by CNB