Mrs. Winchell's Little Boy

"If only when my epitaph is readied," he once mused, "they will say: Here is Walter Winchell--with his ear to the ground--as usual." Nobody, alas, was quite so piquant when Mrs. Winchell's little boy Walter, as he liked to style himself, died last week at 74.

In his acidulous prime, almost everybody had something to say about the country's most controversial neWWs-boy. To Ed Sullivan he was a "cringing coward"; to the California American Legion he was "America's No. 1 Patriot." Ben Hecht said he wrote "like a man honking in a traffic jam." H.L. Mencken lauded him as "an assiduous inventor and popularizer of new words and phrases." Lord Mountbatten and J. Edgar Hoover wrote him fan letters. Ethel Barrymore wondered, "Why is he allowed to live?"

In the end, though, it was none of the legions of WWrongos, the swasti-cooties, Chicagorillas, pinko stinkos or presstitutes who did in Winchell. In the end it was his own "little people," Mr. and Mrs. America, who dealt him the crudest blow a gossip columnist could suffer. They stopped listening.

A child of the streets, raised in Manhattan's Harlem, Winchell quit school when he was 13 to tour the vaudeville circuit with Gus Edwards' revue. Several years later, as a touring hoofer, he began composing a chatty backstage newsletter featuring items about whose mother was recovering from the grippe and such quips as "You tell 'em, Ouija, I'm bored."

Forsaking the footlights in 1922, Winchell began to pound the backstage beat in earnest for the New York Vaudeville News. He joined the New York Mirror as a columnist in 1929 and began enticing his readers with the latest on what moom pitcher star was seen handholding what sweedee pie at El Morocco. As his following grew, so too did his impudence. Throughout the 1930s, the gang at Lindy's and housewives everywhere sniggered at such items as "Edna St. Vincent Millay, the love poet, just bought a new set of store teeth."

Winchell reached his strident peak with the program he took to the airwaves in 1933. Before long, one-third of the adult U.S. population was poised by radios each Sunday night to hear the familiar, high-pitched voice announce above the urgent sound of a telegraph key: "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press!" No one, save perhaps President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an avid listener and confidant, was safe from the Winchell shaft. He railed against "Hitlerooting" U.S. Senators, accused Defense Secretary James Forrestal of plotting a Wall Street dictatorship. Once, when a lengthy study of Winchell in The New Yorker reported that "41.2% of the columnist's items are completely inaccurate," he blasted back that the magazine's editor Harold Ross did not wear underwear. (100% inaccurate.)

Gossipmongers. Holding court at the Stork Club or chasing around town in a car equipped with police radio, siren and flashing red light, Winchell became a "national institution" with annual earnings of more than $500,000. Trading plugs for the latest dirt, he played the fawning pressagents for all they were worth, banishing the unfavored to his feared "DD [drop dead] list." His underworld contacts occasionally turned up a genuine "skewp." In one instance he announced the slaying of Gangster Vincent ("Mad Dog") Coll six hours before it actually happened. In another, acting as a go-between in the surrender of Murder Inc.'s Louis ("Lepke") Buchalter, he picked up the mobster on one street corner and delivered him to J. Edgar Hoover on another.

In the mid-1960s, Winchell's old red-baiting, petty spats and breathless reports of hatchicks with beyootiful stems began to pale. Indeed, the whole genre of gossipmongers was falling victim to the permissive times. As one pressagent lamented, "Nobody's shocked any more." The syndicated outlets for his column fell from a onetime high of nearly 1,000 to slightly more than 100. With press card tucked in his gray, snap-brim fedora as of old, Winchell still occasionally turned up at the scene of a major story, but the old fire was gone. "Yes, by Christ," he said, "I think I am a little bored."

Things turned darker in 1968 when his estranged son, Walter Jr., committed suicide. Almost two years later June Winchell, a former vaudeville dancer and his wife of 47 years, died of a heart attack. It remained for Winchell's daughter Walda, his sole survivor, to deliver that final, almost obligatory epitaph. After his burial last week, she said: "Technically he died of cancer, but actually it was a broken heart."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.