Gossip v. Fact

Probably no newspaperman in history, and certainly no other gossip, has ever sold his words so dearly as Walter Winchell. Last week it was loudly proclaimed that the inflated price of his treetop chatter might go even higher.

According to Variety, in a front-page "scoop" signed by Editor Abel Green, rich Marshall Field was waving his bankroll under Winchell's nose, to lure him away from Hearst and into the Chicago Sun, as Field had lured Cartoonist Milton Caniff from McCormick & Patterson. The bait: $200,000 a year, double Winchell's income from Hearst.

Not that "W.W." was anxious to switch, wrote his crony Abel Green. But for the first time in 17 years Winchell was "sans contract." He had told the publisher of Hearst's New York Mirror that if The Chief "wants to keep me interested," perhaps they'd better talk things over. As matters stood, the pay from his syndicated column was chicken feed for Turkey Gobbler Winchell: on the radio, where he sells lotion, he was getting $7,500 a week, a $130,000-a-year raise over 1946. His gross income: $502,000 a year.

Actually, doubling Winchell's newspaper income "means little" to Winchell, said Variety, since taxes had taken all but $6,000 of his $130,000 radio pay boost. "Accordingly, if Field could do something about a stock interest for capital-gains purposes, or any other method where he 'could keep a few bucks,' that would be something else again."

The facts behind the story were something else again, too. Oh, the story was all true, said Abel Green--in the sense that he hadn't made it all up. But the story of Marshall Field's "offer," which Variety had attributed to "the Chicago Sun syndicate's spokesman," had actually come from Winchell himself. Had there really been an offer? Said Harry Baker, head of Marshall Field's Chicago Sun syndicate: yes, he'd had a chat with Winchell--at the request of a pal of Winchell's. "I've given no thought to it since. No offer was made then, and the probability is that no offer will be made. . . ."

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