The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “A woman is waiting for a suitor who promised to return to her when he becomes a captain,” the first note read. “In the corner a phonograph is playing a popular record it is cold as long as there is life there is hope. She waits for 20 years but he does not come back and the record keeps on playing until it is worn out.” The second said, “Perrine—and now the sad story of Perrine, a pretty girl who worked for a priest, but had a secret lover. One night the priest surprises them together and Perrine hides her lover in a large box, but alas forgets about him and leaves him to the mercies of the rats. When he is found a candlestick is made from his leg and a basin for the church from his head, and so ends the sad story of a young man who liked girls too well.” Heartened by what he had read, our man greeted Mlle. Piaf, when she appeared, like an old friend upon whom he could depend. She wore gold mules with platform soles about six inches thick, which increased her height to approximately five feet. Her mop of rusty-red hair, a stage trademark, was imprisoned under a tight turban. She looked sleeker offstage than on, our man said. Mlle. Piaf was born in Belleville, a quarter of Paris not generally considered chic, and made her first public appearance at seven, in a circus in which her father was an acrobat. She made her adult début in 1935, and was a hit almost from the start. When our man asked her—disingenuously, it would seem—whether she had any more of those wonderful sad songs she used to sing, she said, “No, I don’t feel the old songs any more. I have evolved. I was never really a pessimist. I believe that there is always a little corner of blue sky, nevertheless, somewhere. In those old songs, there arrived invariably, at the end, a catastrophe. But now I have one called ‘Mariage,’ which is quite different. It begins in the cell of a woman who has already murdered her husband. She reviews her life, she hears the wedding bells, she sees herself in the arms of this man whom she has killed, an innocent young bride. It’s very beautiful.” As for herself, Mlle. Piaf said, she has never married and never killed anybody. “For me, love always goes badly,” she said. “It is perhaps because I have a mania of choosing. I don’t wait to be chosen. That places me in a position of inferiority. And I always choose badly. So the relationships turn out badly. Sometimes only two or three days. But I’m always optimistic.” She is studying English hard, with the assistance of an associate professor at Columbia and of the night clubs of the city. She thinks Ray Bolger is formidable and had been to see him three times up to the day our man called.

  Reassured, our man went to hear Mlle. Piaf a couple of nights later, and turned up at the office the next morning radiant. “The best number she did,” he said, “was where an accordionist goes off to the war and gets killed. His sweetheart listens to the music of another accordion and goes nuts. Then there is one about a woman tourist who has one big night with a sailor in a port where the ship stops, and the sailor goes off on another ship and gets drowned. For an encore, she sang that old honey about the woman who falls in love with a Foreign Legion soldier—she hasn’t even had time to learn his name—and he gets killed and they bury him under the warm sand. I haven’t had such a good time in years.”

  FROM

  St. Clair McKelway

  JUNE 15, 1940 (ON WALTER WINCHELL)

  On Saturday, September 2, 1939, it seemed certain to Walter Winchell, as it did to the rest of us, that Great Britain was about to go to war with Germany. Unlike the rest of us, Winchell did something about this. After turning it over in his mind, he sent a cablegram early the next morning to Prime Minister Chamberlain, as follows:

  May I respectfully offer the suggestion that if Britain declares war the declaration might be worded not as “War Against Germany” but as “War against Adolf Hitler personally and his personal regime.” Stressing the fact that Hitler does not really represent the true will of the vast civilian population of Germany. Such declaration might have the astonishing effect of bringing the German people to their senses especially if such declaration can be made known to the German people and inevitably it would via radio and other channels. This is merely a layman’s suggestion offered in hopes of a new era of world peace.

  The next day Winchell made public the text of this cablegram by printing it in his daily column, “Walter Winchell on Broadway,” which appears in the Daily Mirror in New York and in a hundred and sixty-five other newspapers in the United States. He printed it without comment, merely making it clear to his readers that it was he who had sent the cablegram.

  The day after that, September 5th, Winchell wrote in his column:

  If you read Monday’s column, this may interest you. At 2:33 a.m. September 4, the London telegraph agency flashed a dispatch reporting that Prime Minister Chamberlain had just read a proclamation to the German people via a French radio station, in which he stated that Great Britain did not declare war against the German people, but against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.… The suggestion was sent to the Prime Minister in a cablegram, acknowledgment of which has arrived.

  It is significant that in announcing what is to him an extraordinary personal coup, Winchell simply presents the facts unemotionally, setting them down for history’s sake, as it were. The inner conviction that he is actually responsible for Chamberlain’s proclamation appears to stir him only intellectually. A tone of almost melancholy aloofness is discernible, as if Winchell no longer enjoys as an adventurer the sweet fruits of triumph but is beginning to see himself with sober detachment as an actor on the stage of current events. There is a telling phrase in the text of his cablegram to Chamberlain. He insists that in what he is saying to the British Prime Minister he is speaking merely as a layman. This is the familiar protestation of the man of consequence. Nobody but a distinguished personage whose eminence is unassailable ever tries to palm himself off as an ordinary, run-of-the-mill citizen.

  There are probably critics who would say that it is ridiculous for a mere gossip writer to put his nose into serious international affairs, and that for Winchell to presume that his cablegram actually influenced Chamberlain is patently absurd. This is a narrow view. Winchell has no reason to think that gossip writing is dishonorable or undignified, or that, as a gossip writer, he deserves anything but respectful consideration. Calling Winchell a mere gossip writer is like calling Lindbergh a mere aviator or Gene Tunney a mere prizefighter. The writing of gossip, the setting down of items about the private lives of his fellow-citizens, is responsible for Winchell’s enormous success in life, but it would be an understatement to sum him up by saying, “He writes gossip,” just as it would be to say of Tunney, “He beat Dempsey,” or of Lindbergh, “He flew to Paris.”

  From the beginning of his career as a gossip writer fifteen years ago, people whom Winchell looks up to have encouraged him in his work. Such celebrities as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Leopold Stokowski, James J. Walker, Faith Baldwin, Gypsy Rose Lee, Rupert Hughes, James Montgomery Flagg, Shirley Temple, and Lowell Thomas have written guest columns for him so he could take vacations in the summer. From the start he has been on friendly and sometimes intimate terms with the members of some of the oldest and most respected families of New York. They call him Walter and give him items for his column. He was the favorite columnist of the leading gangsters of New York when they ruled the town; they took him to prizefights and gave him elaborate parties. One of them once sent him a Stutz. About a year ago he was guest of honor at a luncheon tendered in the Capitol Building in Washington by the Vice-President of the United States, and some months before that the President of the United States, in starting off a forty-five-minute tête-à-tête with Winchell, had slapped him affectionately on the knee and said, “Walter, I’ve got an item for you.” The American Legion has given him a gold medal “in recognition of his contribution to Americanism,” and Lakewood, New Jersey, has named a thoroughfare Winchell Street in honor of “the first soldier in our land in the cause of democracy.” His patriotic writings have been reprinted at the expense of the government and handed out to the public by the Democratic Party. His valuable life, once zealously
protected by bodyguards assigned to him by his friends Owney Madden and Lucky Luciano, has in more recent years been watched over by agents on the payroll of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, assigned to him by his friend J. Edgar Hoover.

  To a sympathetic follower of Winchell’s career it is clear that his gesture in giving advice to Chamberlain was not that of a busybody trying to mind somebody else’s business. It was the thoughtful action of a public figure fulfilling a responsibility which had more or less been thrust upon him. While the idea of conducting the second World War against Hitler rather than against the German people may have occurred to England’s best minds before Winchell cabled Chamberlain (the Allies having made the same distinction between the Kaiser and the German people at the beginning of the first World War), it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that Winchell’s cablegram was shown to the British Prime Minister, that he read it, and that it was respectfully acknowledged.

  · · ·

  At the moment Winchell is unquestionably the country’s most easily recognized non-layman, with the exception of Father Divine. The major and minor aspects of his existence are distinctive in almost every detail. Success and public acclaim have not made him a stuffed shirt. He has a gift for idiosyncrasy and is not self-conscious about it. He has two children and both are named after him; his son is Walter and his daughter is Walda. He goes to sleep around nine or ten in the morning and gets up in time to have breakfast while his children are having their supper. In the inside pocket of his coat he carries a loose-leaf booklet containing as many as twenty photographs of Walter and Walda, and in another pocket of his coat he carries a loaded automatic. In his overcoat pocket he carries a second loaded automatic. Although he has never been shot at and has been beaten up only twice, he is always expecting to be attacked.

  The Mirror pays him $1,200 a week and 50 percent of the money from the syndication of his column, amounting to some $750 a week, and he makes $5,000 a week more for his weekly radio talk. As Winchell has pointed out in his column, he pays around 50 percent of his earnings to the state and federal governments. This leaves him a net income of approximately $185,000 a year, but he wears shoes until they have holes in the soles. He almost invariably wears a blue suit, a blue shirt, a blue tie, and a snap-brim gray felt hat. He has never played golf or tennis or badminton or ping-pong. He learned to swim only last summer. Until 1932 he had never seen a football game. He took up the rumba a few months ago and is now an enthusiast. Practically the only other form of relaxation his friends have actually seen him engage in is motoring. The New York Police Department has given him special permission to equip his sedan with a short-wave receiving set with which he picks up calls sent from Police Headquarters to police radio patrol cars.

  This device forms the centre of Winchell’s recreational activities. For hours, late at night, he cruises the streets of Manhattan accompanied by three or four friends and sometimes some celebrity like Brenda Frazier or John Gunther. The radio picks up police messages and Winchell drives hurriedly to the scene of action. The action almost invariably consists of policemen looking for a burglar. Once in a great while the car reaches the scene of a holdup or a murder in time for Winchell to get what he calls “a thrill.”

  This almost nightly routine is trying to Winchell’s friends and the personnel in the sedan is constantly in process of replenishment. The celebrities seldom go more than once. Myrna Loy dropped off to sleep the time she went. It is possible to sleep in Winchell’s sedan, for although the Police Department has given him permission to equip it with a siren, he is conscious of the disturbance the siren creates in the early hours of the morning and uses it only when he is going on what looks like a particularly exciting call. One night he was speeding up Central Park West on such a call with the siren on. As he approached the apartment house in which he lives, he shut it off. “I don’t want to wake up Walter and Walda,” he explained to his friends. He did not turn the siren on again until the car reached 110th Street.

  · · ·

  Winchell has written more words on the subject of friendship than any other modern gossip writer, but the people he calls his friends do not number more than seven or eight and most of these are new rather than old. “The best way to get along,” he once wrote, “is never to forgive an enemy or forget a friend,” but he has made up with at least one man who denounced him publicly and with another who punched him in the nose. Conversely, he has lost many friends by printing objectionable items about them in his column and, in defending this policy, has said, “I never lost a friend I wanted to keep.” On several occasions when friends have remonstrated with Winchell for what they considered a betrayal of friendship, he has said, “I know—I’m just a son of a bitch.” Some of his friends have accepted this explanation and have continued the friendship; others have regarded it as an inadequate excuse and have broken off with him.

  Friends who have not broken off with Winchell are apt to assume a puzzled expression when asked to describe the subject of their attachment. “He’s a remarkable guy!” one of them blurted recently, after considerable thought. “He’s not a man—he’s a column,” said another, effusively. Nearly all seven or eight of Winchell’s friends will tell you that they have been injured at one time or another by an item about themselves in Winchell’s column. One friend had climbed his way up to a position of intimacy with Winchell which allowed him to dandle young Walter, Jr., on his knee. He was doing this when Winchell informed him that an embarrassing item about him would appear in the column the next day. “I’m just an s.o.b.,” Winchell explained, using the abbreviated form, while Walter, Jr., innocently played with the friend’s vest buttons. The friend started to protest and then nodded acquiescently. He has not broken off with Winchell. Winchell’s journalistic integrity is such that his duty to his public almost always vanquishes whatever impulses of sentimentality he may have toward a friend when what he calls “a good item” is involved.

  When a friend Winchell wanted to keep was killed in an automobile accident some years ago, Winchell published a eulogy which expresses his faith in the practical side of friendship, if not the sentimental side. “Shucks!” he wrote. “A guy like me cannot afford to lose a friend like Donald Freeman! He was one of the few fellers who liked me—and the second important magazine editor to hold out his hand and lift me into his heaven. When I was on a rag that the whole town belittled [the Evening Graphic] away back in 1927—almost a million years ago! Poor Don—he was motoring to see his mother and sister at Mt. Kisco and his car crashed, and now he’s no more. I’ll miss Donald Freeman. I’ll miss that shrewd counsel he always gave me when I needed it.…” The late Mr. Freeman was managing editor of Vanity Fair, which published some articles by Winchell in 1927 and 1928.

  Even if no tempting bit of gossip develops to endanger a friendship with Winchell, he is apt to think of something which the friend will find objectionable and then print it. A friendship with Winchell rarely cools off gradually and reaches a condition of mutual indifference. If he feels that the relationship is losing its first flush of passionate admiration on both sides, he is inclined to take the initiative and strike while the friendship is warm. His phrase for what he does is “I let him have it.” Winchell was once on friendly terms with Lucius Beebe, a fellow-columnist. Mr. Beebe never has found out what happened, but he thinks Winchell decided that some minor criticism of Winchell in another paper (not the Herald Tribune, on which Beebe works) and signed “L.B.” was the trouble. Beebe doesn’t know who this “L.B.” was. In any case, Winchell printed a series of passionately unfriendly items about Beebe. Another time Winchell made up his mind that another very close friend, also a fellow-columnist, had become detached in his attitude toward their relationship. He let the friend have it. The friend happened to possess a thick skin as well as a philosophical attitude toward Winchell. He did not retaliate. Months went by and Winchell was mystified. Finally the two met in a night club and Winchell magnanimously offered to patch things up. “You’ve been
swell,” he told his friend. “I like the way you didn’t knock me when you were sore at me.”

  The practical realism of Winchell’s slant on friendship is present in his attitude toward casual human relationships as well. In conversation he likes either to talk about himself or to listen to something that will be of use to him in his column. Richard Rodgers, the composer, once had an awesome encounter with Winchell in Palm Beach. Rodgers was telling some companions on the beach about an investment he had made in a manufacturing concern when Winchell happened along and joined the group. Rodgers, who had never known Winchell very well, turned to him politely and began to sum up for Winchell’s benefit the subject of the interrupted conversation. When Rodgers was halfway through, Winchell held up a hand with the palm close to Rodgers’ face and said, “Never mind, never mind.” Rodgers was nonplussed. “How do you mean?” he mumbled uncertainly. “It’s no good for the column,” Winchell explained, and walked on down the beach. Rodgers finished telling his friends about the investment he had made in the manufacturing concern, but, as he has remarked since, his heart wasn’t in it.

  When Winchell is talking about himself, he demands the unwavering attention of his listeners. James Cannon, a former sportswriter and one of his closest friends, was in a restaurant one night with his girl and was joined by Winchell. Winchell started to talk about himself. He talked for ten minutes without interruption. Cannon began to wonder if his girl would enjoy the evening more if she had another drink. Keeping his eyes fastened on Winchell’s face so as to appear to be attentive, he said to his girl rapidly and out of the side of his mouth, “Honey, you want something?” Winchell stopped in the middle of a sentence and grabbed Cannon’s arm. “Jimmy!” he said reproachfully. “You’re not listening!”