The story of a self-appointed arbiter of mass culture and gossip
In Neal Gabler's fascinating biography, Walter Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, he emerges as a strangely emblematic figure—a guru of "a cultural revolution in which control of the American agenda shifted from the mandarins of high culture to the new masters of mass culture." Just how did Winchell achieve celebrity status that set the guidelines for others to follow? Very simply, Winchell moved with the spirit of the times and turned it all in his direction.
During the Depression, his hectic descriptions of Broadway and Hollywood shenanigans provided a glamorous escape from the cruel realities of the Depression and mass unemployment, while his support for Roosevelt's New Deal populism buttressed his pose as a champion of the people. And in the years before and after World War II, his impassioned denunciations of Hitler and his call to arms echoed the feelings of the people. Gabler sets Winchell's life amidst the times as a springboard for a fascinating social history. At the same time, Gabler uses a novelistic approach to give us a vivid, psychologically acute portrait of Winchell and the stuff other celebrities are made of. Given the lies and silence that lie at the heart of every individual's life, a good biography is always an imaginative leap beyond formal records, like a novel.
"I'm not a fighter," Winchell wrote in his autobiography. "I'm a waiter. I wait until I can catch an ingrate with his fly open, and then I take a picture of it." Winchell read his times and rode it, but it was his smart, slangy prose of cafe society and his mastery for gossip that earned him his avid following. Literary critic H.L. Mencken credited Winchell for having enlarged the American vernacular. Couples didn't get married: they were 'welded'; they didn't have babies, they had 'blessed events' and when they got divorced, they were 'renovated' or 'phfitt'. Fame on a national level followed in the early '30s with the success of his radio broadcasts, broadcasts that brought distracting news of celebrity marriages and divorces to a country reeling with unemployment and rising inflation.
The road to celebrity is, finally, through politics and it was only a question of time before Winchell tried to transform his oracular skills on the broader stage of politics. Roosevelt paid him tribute and Winchell return the compliment for rallying support for him at home and abroad.
After the War and Roosevelt's death, Winchell's liberalism began to sour. By the early '50s, he became an ardent supporter of Joe McCarthy, not solely out of anticommunist fervour, Gabler suggests, but also out of a willingness to employ similar tactics of witch hunting. His columns and broadcasts became increasingly vituperative and vindictive. All pretenses of populist sentiment vanished and he used his power to settle personal scores. "When some heel does me dirt, I return the compliment some day. In the paper, on the air, with a bottle of ketchup on the skull."
By the '60s, Winchell had become an anachronism, forced out of radio by TV and diminished as a columnist by self-destructive rants. Having celebrated the cult of ephemeral celebrity, he died in 1972 by the cruel rules of the game he had helped to invent, alone and forgotten.
Elaborating on his book after it became a bestseller, Gabler said: "Celebrities spawned by the mass media to sell papers, magazines and films were obviously different from those who achieved fame before the advent of mass media. In his book The Image, historian Daniel Boorstin defined the basic difference as that between well-knownness for its own sake (modern celebrity) and fame as the product of greatness (old-fashioned heroism). The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his trademark or image."
It was the image that sold celebrities. It's not what you've done to make the cover of Time; it's making the cover that counts. In a society where fame was the end and the means one used to gain it largely irrelevant, fame paradoxically functioned as an equaliser. It reduced all celebrities, those who achieved something and those who did not to the same standard—hair stylists and diet gurus were on par with movie stars, athletes and journalists.
Images are disposable. New images are constantly shunting old ones aside. Naturally, this puts a premium on a fresh supply of celebrities to keep ahead of the curve. The tragedy of Walter Winchell was that having set down the ground rules of the celebrity game, he blew his image in later years. Or is it, once you have achieved fame, you've reached the summit and the rest is all downhill?