Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity.

Early last spring, the sharks were closing in on Hillary Rodham Clinton. Damaged first by allegations about her husband's near-compulsive infidelity and then by accusations about her own financial past, Mrs. Clinton had to fight back. But how? Although she would later call a much-praised formal press conference, the First Lady's public relations offensive in those bleak days amounted to hosting exclusive teas not with Johnny Apple of the Times or with David Broder of the Post but with four "celebrity columnists" (their term): Jeannie Williams of USA Today, Liz Smith of Newsday, Cindy Adams of the New York Post, and Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News. In a bid to reach their vast audiences--USA Today has up to six million readers and Smith is syndicated in 70 papers across the country--Mrs. Clinton twice kibbitzed with these women at New York hotels, winning flattering columns from each.

"She's very impressive and very, very smart," Jeannie Williams recently told me. "I think she really truly does like to chat about fun stuff--about what the celebs are doing. We talked about the kinds of things that David Broder wouldn't care about." Adds Smith: "She appears to be candid and down-to-earth, which is a terrific trick for a public person.... She has given us access that I don't think too many journalists have had." Smith, one of whose columns was headlined "Hillary Hits Back at Critics," is right. Asked why Mrs. Clinton has granted such generous audiences to this journalistic circle but to no other, her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, says, "I don't discuss why we do the things we do, but suffice it to say that Mrs. Clinton likes all of those women very much and enjoys spending time with them."

Of course, it was time well spent in making her case to millions of ordinary Americans. Mrs. Clinton undoubtedly knew this, and may have congratulated herself on her strategic wisdom. But whether they knew it or not, Mrs. Clinton and the columnists were playing out long-standing roles in a social drama established by a man an entire generation of Americans may have never heard of: Walter Winchell.

Look back for a moment: On May 10, 1938, Winchell, the syndicated gossip columnist of New York's Daily Mirror and NBC radio broad-caster, left his informal headquarters at Manhattan's Stork Club to spend the day in Washington. This was no ordinary visit, and Winchell was no ordinary visitor: The Washington Times-Herald assigned eight reporters to cover the occasion for its front page; J. Edgar Hoover attended a luncheon in his honor. And, at four o'clock that afternoon, Winchell was shown in to see President Roosevelt. The session was scheduled to last five minutes; it ran nearly an hour. FDR's secretary "bounced in three times," reported Newsweek, "only to find Roosevelt, not Winchell, was prolonging the conversation."

Always shrewd, FDR entertained Winchell with very good reason. In the late thirties and early forties, 50 million Americans, out of an adult population of about 75 million, either listened to Winchell's weekly radio broadcast or read his six-day-a-week column, which was syndicated in more than 1,000 newspapers. (This eclipsed even Will Rogers, who had a radio and newspaper audience of 40 million before his death in 1935.) And during the Depression and World War II, there was no voice more favorable to Roosevelt than Winchell's. After the president's first inauguration, in 1933, Winchell hailed FDR as "the Nation's new hero" and asserted, "Better times are almost here again--because of President Roosevelt!" For the next 12 years, virtually every Winchell column and broadcast would include a bouquet for FDR.

Without much exaggeration, it could be said that Washington's reverential reception of Winchell on that spring day in 1938 signalled the irrevocable intersection of politics and celebrity--the moment at which public relations emerged as the organizing principle of American culture. Though it has been more than 30 years since he was a household name (he died, after years of increasing obscurity, in 1972), without Winchell, Mrs. Clinton would not have thought to summon her gossip columnist pals to her side in a time of trouble. There would be no People magazine; no David Letterman; no "Larry King Live"--in short, there would be no mainstream culture of celebrity. "This culture," writes Neal Gabler in Winchell, "would bind an increasingly diverse, mobile, and atomized nation until it became, in many respects, America's dominant ethos, celebrity consciousness our new common denominator." For anyone who wants to understand the way we live now, this brilliant new book is essential.

Celebrity Quest

Born in 1897 and enduring a melodramatically deprived childhood in the Jewish section of Harlem, Winchell was a sixth-grade dropout who started out in vaudeville before finding his calling in writing spunky gossip items for newspapers. Beginning in the twenties, he was on the scene, pen in hand, at a time of major social change, and through his column and his broadcasts he would help give American culture its distinctive shape by being a forum for the making and tracking of celebrities in an age of mass entertainment and democracy.

Consider: For there to be such a thing as a "celebrity culture," certain elements must be in place. As Nicholas Lemann has observed, there must first be a group of people deemed interesting enough to be celebrated by a large audience with the means to do the celebrating. In other words, you need a celebrity class that a broad section of the public wants to know about through newspapers, radio, magazines, and (later) television. In modern America, the outlines of this culture--the one Winchell would catapult to enduring national significance--can be found about 1919, when Cholly Knickerbocker, a columnist for the Hearst papers, coined the term "cafe society" to characterize the shift of old-line socialites (the Astors, for example) from entertaining only in their mansions to dining out in public places. "Society is going out to dinner," Knickerbocker noted, "out to night life, and letting down the barriers." Hence "society" became "cafe society." As the Jazz Age took hold and speakeasies came into vogue, debutantes from old families began mixing with the newly rich and the Broadway theatrical crowd. The Stork and E1 Morocco became the places to be seen in. The old rule that status in society depended on birth fell away, for cafe society prized one value above all, and it wasn't blood--it was fame. As Winchell put it, "Social position is now more a matter of press than prestige."

And who, exactly, controlled access to the press? Columnists such as Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson--and, most important of all, Winchell, who was, incredibly, the first newspaperman to write about Broadway, romance, divorce, and social jockeying in mainstream publications. Gabler writes: "A mention in his column or on his broadcast meant one was among the exalted. It meant that one's name was part of the general fund of knowledge. It meant that one's exploits, even if they were only the exploits of dining, rated acknowledgement. It meant that one's life was validated...." The good about this is that it opened the way for people of accomplishment but not of high birth to become leading members of society (Damon Runyon, Joe DiMaggio, Tennessee Williams). The bad is that celebrity became an end in itself, with everybody beginning to think of himself as a potential market commodity. In fact, Winchell spawned an entire industry of publicity men, people hired by the rich and the ambitious to get their names in the papers and thus become members of the new elite.

Winchell's ethos was glamorously seductive: DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe chatting with Ernest Hemingway while the suave mobster Frank Costello, debutantes, and Broadway stars swirled about, smoking cigarettes and drinking champagne cocktails. Reflecting on the New York of this period, John Cheever once wrote that it was a time when "the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like the 'Cleveland Chicken,' [and] sail for Europe on ships."

At the same time Winchell was chronicling this New York social milieu from the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties, there would also be no major event in American political life which he would not touch. He was, for example, a primary author of the Hoover G-man myth in the thirties, firmly establishing the Director as an American hero to the broad public; in the days leading up to World War II, Winchell cabled advice to Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (they both responded gratefully); he mentioned Alger Hiss' possible treachery to FDR long before it riveted the nation; he defended MacArthur against Truman; and he claimed to have introduced Joe Mc-Carthy to Roy Cohn. This last marks the point at which Winchell went terribly wrong and veered off into Red-baiting, which in combination with the eclipse of radio by television, a medium he never mastered, led to Winchell's fall from fame.

Still, it is striking to think now of having a powerful voice like Winchell's on the side of the angels in public life. Winchell's devotion to Roosevelt, for instance, was genuine and rather touching. In one column, titled "If I Had an Aladdin's Lamp," Winchell wrote: "I'd fix matters so that FDR never even caught a cold." On economics, Winchell praised the president for wanting to "bring about a more equal distribution of income." And as the thirties grew darker in Europe, Winchell did all he could to prepare his millions of followers for the coming struggle: "Men cannot be free when their country is in chains. Those who try to keep their security by avoiding risk thereby invite attack."

Winchell's political pronouncements came in a blizzard of ephemeral gossip--who was getting "Reno-vated" (Winchellese for a Nevada divorce) and who was "Adam-and-Eveing-It" (romancing). The net effect was to blend three worlds together--politics, sports, and entertainment--to the point where they were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Politicians would play by the same rules of public relations (in the form of mentions in papers and on the radio) as movie stars and other aspiring cafe socialites. Two illustrations make the point. When Winchell wrote that Lucille Ball was pregnant (or, as he put it, was expecting "a blessed event"), Lucy said, "If Winchell says so, it's gotta be true." In 1953, after Winchell had become a conservative Eisenhower booster, Ike told mutual friends he and Mamie often listened to Winchell's show and "WW is [the president's] best voice and contact with the people." Eisenhower even invited Winchell to the White House for a two-hour visit, where he toured the family quarters and putted on the carpet in the president's bedroom.

To a country first consumed by the Depression, then with fighting Hitler, then with the beginnings of the Cold War, celebrities were a welcome distraction. Beginning in the twenties, of course, the majority of the country was moving from rural to urban settings, and people who left small towns and farms left behind, too, the networks of kith and kin that had long formed the basis of daily life. What Winchell was giving this new, more democratic, and uprooted America was a national culture. If you didn't know your neighbors anymore, that didn't matter; you could talk about what Clark Gable or Hedy Lamarr was up to. Winchell's trademark opening line ("Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea") was followed by a blend of gossip and patriotic bromides manufactured for them at his famous Table 50 at the Stork Club. It was a mix of items that prefigured how Larry King, sitting at his table at CNN, would have Melanie Griffith on one night and the president of the United States on the next. Winchell was marketing such "info-tainment" in the thirties. On his Sunday night radio broadcast, announcer Ben Grauer would introduce him as "the most versatile reporter in America...Walter Winchell covers Broadway and Hollywood, politics and society...and his news of today makes the headlines of tomorrow." Of his style, Gabler writes: "The deaths of ten thousand people in Ethiopia was followed immediately by a Hollywood divorce or romance.... Dozens of these items raced past listeners each program, not only abutting one another but given the same urgency and drama. Nothing was differentiated."

This outaged the intellectual elites of the day, especially men like Walter Lippmann and Harold Ross, who published the longest profile in the history of The New Yorker savaging Winchell. But nothing could stymie Winchell's popular appeal: One listener recalled "strolling one Sabbath evening for six blocks through a residential section of Birmingham [Alabama] and never losing a word of WW's broadcast as his voice came through a succession of open windows." Alexander Woollcott wrote that "I have never been able to get far enough into the North woods not to find some trapper there who would quote Winchell's latest observation," and he recalled a "painful" scene in London's Hatchard's bookshop where a lord's order for Winchell's Monday column had not been filled.

More broadly, the values Winchell created--the thirst of the ambitious for press and the validation that comes from being famous--not only endure; they predominate.

There is, of course, the Kennedy example. Joseph Kennedy, Sr., began the century hustling for social respectability. He had been celebrated, at the age of 28, as America's "youngest bank president" in the Hearst papers, and suddenly Kennedy was known not just in Boston but all over the country. This lesson in celebrity was not lost on him; he saw the opportunities cafe society offered to a man with money and contacts. For the next four decades, Kennedy would market his family in newspaper and magazine pieces, "loan" money to influential editors, and seek advice on public relations from Arthur Krock of The New York Times. For his part, John Kennedy visited the Stork Club as a young man and loved running with socialites like the reporter Ben Bradlee and stars like Frank Sinatra. He even married into cafe society. Kennedy's friend Lem Billings noted: "I knew right away that Jackie was different from all the other girls Jack had been dating. She was more intelligent, more literary, more substantial. And her mother's second marriage to Hugh Auchincloss carried the family into the social register, which gave Jackie a certain classiness that's hard to describe." Even in the White House, JFK was so obsessed with his image that he spent hours choosing which photographs of himself and his young family would be released to the public. There is no mistaking the enduring nature of this family legacy when, after her mother's death this spring, Caroline Kennedy landed on the cover of Ladies' Home Journal discussing how to cope with grief.

Star Dust

For those aspiring to membership in today's Washington elite, Winchell's legacy is the desire for fame, no matter how it is attained. And what is the best way to win fame in Washington, if you're not born a Kennedy or caught up in a scandal? Get yourself on television, whether it's "Crossfire" or "Charlie Rose" or "The McLaughlin Group." And how do you appeal to the hosts and producers of these shows? Not with passionate belief; that's boring, earnest.

Once, men like FDR and Will Rogers (and, in his better moments, Winchell) genuinely cared about the country and used their celebrity to pull the nation together. Now, while the outward forms of Winchell's world exist--the columns, the shows, the lust for celebrity conferred in the media of the day--the progressive passion Rogers and Winchell ("Better times are almost here--because of President Roosevelt!") represented in the thirties is utterly passe. Consider the enormous popularity of Rush Limbaugh, one purveyor of the prevailing ironic view and of right-wing politics. David Letterman is an even better example of how Winchell's celebrity culture operates now, because his schtick is complete sarcasm. Watching Letterman, with his sardonic Top 10 lists and practiced uninterest in his guests, you get the feeling that he would rather be back playing second fiddle to Jay Leno than be caught believing in anything. Belief entails risk, and Letterman is not about risk.

When it comes to politics, these shows--whether a late-night show on the networks or a chat show on cable--want someone playing a liberal or (preferably) a conservative role in an entertaining way. Most of all, they want wit, and the easiest way to seem witty and smart is to be ironic, skeptical, and play to the zeitgeist--to knock down, not build up. The ability to put things down in a glib way means you'll always make an interesting guest, and being an interesting guest is what's vital, because only by being invited back does fame come.

Michael Kinsley, the co-host of "Crossfire," acknowledges that much of what happens on his show is make-believe for people who simply want to be on the air: "There are some people, like Senator A1 D' Amato, and he rants and yells and screams and calls you every name in the book. And then during the break he leans over and sort of goes like this and says, 'How am I doing? Is this what you want?"' So public life has become a scripted drama, with men playing parts designed to win attention rather than do substantive good. "They all come on with their soundbites; that's the worst problem," says Kinsley. "They will spit them out no matter what you ask them. There are even people who give courses on how to appear on these shows."

A celebrity culture isn't intrinsically bad; it's what celebrities do with fame that matters. Gabler has brought Winchell and his times to vivid life--you can, at times, smell the cigarette smoke and hear the clatter of telegraph keys that tapped in the background of Winchell's broadcasts. What we should take away from Winchell's story, however, is not just nostalgia but the lesson of what became of the Stork Club, which Winchell famously promoted as "the New Yorkiest spot in New York." Today, on the same spot on East 53rd Street, stands a tiny park, a pocket of quiet in the middle of Manhattan. The center of Winchell's world is gone, demolished. Our culture, for better or for worse, was born there, and the fate of that once-swish spot should remind all who aspire to fame that winning celebrity may be damned hard, but leaving something behind is the hardest part of all.