Dear Readers:
Perhaps, some day, an enterprising reporter will write a book entitled “The Secret Life of Jim Romenesko.” What a sensational story that would be about the Elvis of bloggers! With the creation of “Media Gossip,” Romenesko changed the way journalists think and work. When Poynter hired Romenesko, they persuaded him to tame his title, changing it from “Media Gossip” to “Media News,” which morphed into the eponymous “Romenesko.”
Dr. Ink recounts this brief history after reading “The Secret Life of Walter Winchell,” by Lyle Stuart, who recently re-published the 1953 cult classic under the imprint of Barricade Books. A half-century after its publication, the book reveals important messages for our times, identifying the fault lines between gossip and news, between celebrity and democracy, between popularity and responsibility.
Winchell would have hated Romenesko, whose blog would have exposed Winchell’s crude methods, his fabrications, half-truths, and inaccuracies. Winchell might have arranged for three thugs to beat up Romenesko, just as he did with unauthorized biographer Lyle Stuart in 1953.
But, like it or not, anyone who publishes gossip wears the fedora of Walter Winchell. What’s more, Winchell’s was a new voice expressing a new form of journalism. He offended those who embraced the more sober values of journalism, just as bloggers now challenge the standards of the mainstream news media. For these reasons, “The Secret Life of Walter Winchell” is worth reading, holding up to us a distant mirror for our own time of tumultuous media change.
To a young Dr. Ink, Walter Winchell was nothing more than a staccato voice, narrating weekly episodes of “The Untouchables.” To mid-century America, he was much, much more. According to a new introduction by Stuart, “The Winchell column appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers around the world. His broadcast (and later, telecast) could be heard even by those who didn’t own a radio if they walked down any residential street at 9 p.m. on Sunday night. Everybody’s radio was tuned in to Winchell.”
Lyle Stuart trafficked in gossip himself, and even ghost-wrote some of Winchell’s columns, giving Stuart the inside track on this twisted Horatio Alger story: how Winchell, a young vaudevillian, began to write about the entertainment business and how he rode the twin horses of celebrity and the tabloid press to become the greatest bad journalist of all time.
It is Winchell’s badness, as a journalist and a human being, that is the central concern of what Stuart calls his own “cruel book.” Here’s Stuart’s explanation, in his own words:
The book you hold in your hands made quite a bit of history. The author, yours truly, was attacked by three hired thugs for writing it. He identified two of them from a police mug book and they were arrested, tried, and convicted. They received one-year prison sentences.
A primary source of information for this book was Winchell’s former son-in-law. He was sent to prison for five years on a trumped-up income tax charge.
The book’s original publisher, Samuel Roth, also went to prison for five years on charges that had little to do with why the Justice Department came after him. It was, as Freedom of Information documents revealed, solely because he dared to publish this book. His conviction resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roth obscenity decision.
After the two men went to the penitentiary, Winchell told me to my face that I would be next. I told him I was packed and ready.
In the years that followed, I sued Winchell three times for libel and collected every time. I used $8,000 of this money to start a book publishing company which grew to where it was sold in 1989 for $12.5 million …
Walter Winchell was, in his time, the most powerful journalist in the world. He described gossip as ‘the art of saying nothing in a way that leaves practically nothing unsaid.’
Winchell could put people in jail with the help of his close friend, the closet queen J. Edgar Hoover who ran the F.B.I. as a personal preserve. You can find all 3,908 pages of the 30-year correspondence between Winchell and Hoover on the Internet.
Walter Winchell could, all by himself, make a corporation’s stock rise or fall with a single sentence spoken on his Sunday night radio broadcast … He could make or break a new film with a single mention in his column or on his broadcast.
But things change and circumstance took a hand. The parade passed him by. When he died in 1972, he was a broken man, forgotten, ignored, powerless. At his burial in Greenwood Memorial Lawn in Phoenix, Arizona, the only mourner at his graveside was Walda, one of his three children.
“The Secret Life of Walter Winchell” is, as its author/publisher describes it, a “cult classic.” While it chronicles the rise and fall of an important figure in the history of American journalism, it also reminds us that many important stories require physical and moral courage to write, that to tell the truth, authors, at least metaphorically, must sometimes be “packed and ready.”
“The Secret Life of Walter Winchell,” by Lyle Stuart was published originally in 1953 and has been re-issued by Barricade Books, Fort Lee, NJ. The 253-page paperback costs $12. The ISBN # is 1-56980-251-3.
