Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897 – February 20, 1972) was an American syndicated newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator. Originally a vaudeville performer, Winchell began his newspaper career as a Broadway reporter, critic and columnist for New York tabloids. He rose to national celebrity in the 1930s with Hearst newspaper chain syndication and a popular radio program. He was known for an innovative style of gossipy staccato news briefs, jokes, and Jazz Age slang. Biographer Neal Gabler said that his popularity and influence "turned journalism into a form of entertainment".
He uncovered both hard news and embarrassing stories about famous people by exploiting his exceptionally wide circle of contacts, first in the entertainment world and the Prohibition era underworld, then in law enforcement and politics. He was known for trading gossip, sometimes in return for his silence. His outspoken style made him both feared and admired. Novels and movies were based on his wisecracking gossip columnist persona, as early as the play and film Blessed Event in 1932. As World War II approached in the 1930s, he attacked Nazi appeasers, then in the 1950s aligned with Senator Joseph McCarthy in his campaign against Communists, including McCarthy's quest to identify Communists in the entertainment industry. He damaged the reputation of Josephine Baker as well as others who had earned his enmity.
Over the years he appeared in more than two dozen films and television productions as an actor, sometimes playing himself.
Winchell was born in New York City, the son of Jennie (Bakst) and Jacob Winchell, a cantor and salesman; they were Russian Jewish immigrants. He left school in the sixth grade and started performing in Gus Edwards's vaudeville troupe the Newsboys Sextet, which also featured Eddie Cantor and George Jessel. During this time, Winchell performed as a tap dancer. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, and attained the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve.
Winchell began his career in journalism by posting notes about his acting troupe on backstage bulletin boards. He joined the Vaudeville News in 1920, then left the paper for the Evening Graphic in 1924, where his column was named Mainly About Mainstreeters. He was hired on June 10, 1929, by the New York Daily Mirror, where he became the author of the first syndicated gossip column, On-Broadway. The column was syndicated by King Features Syndicate.
He made his radio debut over WABC in New York, a CBS affiliate, on May 12, 1930. The show, Saks on Broadway, was a 15-minute feature that provided business news about Broadway. He switched to WJZ (later renamed WABC) and the NBC Blue (later ABC Radio) in 1932 for the Jergens Journal.
Walter Winchell's radio-acting career included an episode of Lux Radio Theatre, when on June 28, 1937 he played the role of newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson in a one-hour adaptation of The Front Page.
By the 1930s, Winchell was "an intimate friend of Owney Madden, New York's no. 1 gang leader of the prohibition era." Madden gifted him a Stutz Bearcat and they had an agreement that Winchell would keep him out of his gossip column. They had met by chance in a barbershop when Winchell introduced himself to Madden. In 1932 his intimacy with criminals caused him to fear he would be murdered. He fled to California and reportedly "returned weeks later with a new enthusiasm for law, G-men, Uncle Sam, [and] Old Glory".
He had what his biographer described as a "cautious but cordial" relationship with Frank Costello, boss of the Luciano crime family. They both lived in The Majestic at 115 Central Park for roughly a dozen years together. When Costello testified before the US Senate's Kefauver Committee, Winchell argued that Costello's civil rights had been infringed upon. He later interviewed Costello for INS radio. Reception to the interview was overwhelmingly negative and it was one of the few times in his career where he wrote a series of columns defending himself. Costello frequently made large donations to Winchell's Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, which Winchell announced on the radio as coming from an anonymous generous benefactor.
His coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping and subsequent trial received national attention. Within two years, he befriended J. Edgar Hoover. He was responsible for turning Louis "Lepke" Buchalter of Murder, Inc. over to Hoover.
His newspaper column was syndicated in a wide array of newspapers worldwide, and he was read by millions every day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His Sunday night radio broadcast was heard by another 20 million people from 1930 to the late 1950s. In 1948, Winchell had the top-rated radio show when he surpassed Fred Allen and Jack Benny. One indicator of his popularity was being mentioned in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1937 song "The Lady Is a Tramp": "I follow Winchell and read every line."
Winchell was one of the first commentators in America to attack Adolf Hitler and American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund, especially its leader Fritz Julius Kuhn. He was a staunch supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal throughout the Depression era, and frequently served as the Roosevelt Administration's mouthpiece in favor of interventionism as the European war crisis loomed in the late 1930s. Early on, he denounced American isolationists as appeasing Hitler, and explicitly attacked such prominent isolationists as Charles Lindbergh, whom he dubbed "The Lone Ostrich", and Gerald L.K. Smith, whom he denounced as "Gerald Lucifer KKKodfish Smith". Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Winchell was also an outspoken supporter of civil rights for African Americans, and frequently attacked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups as supporting un-American, pro-German goals.
During World War II, he attacked the National Maritime Union, the labor organization for the civilian United States Merchant Marine, which he said was run by Communists, instancing West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges. In 1948 and 1949, he and influential columnist Drew Pearson attacked Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in columns and radio broadcasts.
Subsequently, Winchell began to denounce Communism as the main threat facing America.
On October 5, 1952 a simulcast of Winchell's weekly radio broadcast was added to ABC's television schedule (see The Walter Winchell Show). Sponsored by Gruen Watch Company, it originated from WJZ-TV from 6:45 to 7 p.m. ET. He ended that association in 1955 because of a dispute with ABC executives. In 1956, he signed with NBC to host a variety program, also called The Walter Winchell Show, which was canceled after only 13 weeks—a particularly bitter failure in view of the success of his longtime rival Ed Sullivan in a similar format with The Ed Sullivan Show. He was then the host and narrator of The Walter Winchell File, a television crime drama series that initially aired on ABC from 1957 to 1958, dramatizing cases from the New York City Police Department that were covered in the New York Daily Mirror. ABC television rehired him in 1959 as the narrator of the 1930s-set crime drama series The Untouchables.. The Untouchables ran for four seasons. In 1960, an expanded half-hour revival of the 1952-1955 television version of Winchell's radio broadcast aired, but was canceled after six weeks.
In the early 1960s, a public dispute with Jack Paar effectively ended Winchell's career—already in decline due to a shift in power from print to television. Winchell had angered Paar several years earlier when he refused to retract an item alleging that Paar was having marital difficulties. Biographer Neal Gabler described the exchange on Paar's show in 1961:
Hostess Elsa Maxwell appeared on the program and began gibing at Walter, accusing him of hypocrisy for waving the flag while never having voted [which, incidentally, wasn't true; the show later issued a retraction]. Paar joined in. He said Walter's column was "written by a fly" and that his voice was so high because he wears "too-tight underwear" … [H]e also told the story of the mistaken item about his marriage, and cracked that Walter had a "hole in his soul".