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Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.
So many holes
To study the history of American broadcasting is to share a room with many — for lack of a better term — assholes. These ghostly assholes still haunt us, because electronic communications gave them so much power while they lived.
I've written about the bigoted and xenophobic painter Samuel Morse, who made telegraphy accessible to the masses; the egotistical founder of NBC, David Sarnoff; his frenemy William Paley, lord-potentate of CBS.
Contemporaries would put the hard-living radio personality Tallulah Bankhead in the category of a-hole, as did listeners insulted by the audio blackface of Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, better known Amos and Andy.
Why focus on jerks of yore? It’s because modern media, especially podcasting, makes much more sense when you understand the numerous flaws of these foundational personalities.
This truth applies especially to the mid-20th-century superstar Walter Winchell, a combination gossip columnist/radio-talk king/political operator/backstabber whose example might send you running for the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path in despair.
Winchell made assholery his whole brand, his spectacle, his shtick for decades in print and on the air. For just as long, Very Important journalists and gatekeepers wrung their hands about his popularity and attacked him, hoping to shut him down.
That effort was clearly a bust, as Winchell's ghostly essence has now spread itself wide and far in the general culture. His invisible vibes permeate every metric we use to measure and market ourselves.
As Jon Meacham put it in the New York Times in 2017:
It's Walter Winchell's world.
The rest of us are just living in it.
Photo by Paul Dorsey for the Saturday Evening Post, August 13, 1938.
A weekly blast
Winchell, born in 1897 to a family of Russian-Jewish descent in Harlem, dropped out of school in the sixth grade and joined a vaudeville troupe, tap-dancing his way across the country until he landed back in New York as a gossip columnist for a Broadway trade magazine. During the 1920s, he kept getting bigger gigs until he landed at William Randolph Hearst's tabloid the New York Daily Mirror, where his column was syndicated to newspapers around the country.
But radio gave Winchell his true power. Not long after his broadcast debut in 1930, his declarative, New York-ese yelp made him one of the best-known voices in the US.
His blockbuster show on NBC, Jergens Journal, was a surreal blend of gossip, international headlines, true crime and ads for shea-butter lotion. It was top-rated for more than a decade, reaching millions weekly. Writing for the BBC, Alistair Cooke called Winchell "America's Sunday night tornado."
Cooke was amazed that listeners didn't seem to know or care about what they'd just heard. They just loved it and wanted more. I think it's worth learning from Winchell's dark broadcasting arts — which are really not that hard to figure out if you pay attention.
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Notice me
For much of the 1930s and 40s, Winchell had a direct line to the White House, the FBI, members of the Mob and Congress, Hollywood executives and high society.
His personal life was, by all accounts, utter wreckage: he was a neglectful but controlling parent, an adulterous husband, a crummy employer, and overall a transactional man who commodified the personal — sometimes inaccurate — stories of friends and foes alike.
At least Winchell was self-aware about his prime directive. His biographer Neil Gabler has a telling passage about one of Winchell's earliest gigs in broadcasting, as MC of "The Lucky Strike Dance Hour" NBC.
As always, he was haunted by the possibility of failure, by the possibility that if he did fail, he would destroy his new aura of invincibility and ruin his career, by the possibility that he would finally be found out to be talentless. He debuted on November 3 [1931] — he was introduced as "the one and only Walter Winchell, whose gossip of today becomes the news of tomorrow" — nervous and contrite but surprisingly candid about his motives. "[M]y skin is thick," he said. "As the Honorable Ham Lewis* of Illinois said to the editor of a famous New York daily — 'Notice me, for Heaven's sake, notice me. If you can say something good, say it; but, in any event, say something.' Notice me!"
[* Democratic US Senator and arguably an asshole — JB]
OG pod bro
At his best, Winchell was a loud and early opponent of Hitler and leaders of the American Nazi movement (though even then, he often used homophobic slurs to make his points). At his worst, Winchell ran a kompromat operation, got his detractors blacklisted as Communist traitors, and almost derailed the uptake of the new polio vaccine by questioning its safety.
Paranoid and conspiratorial anti-vax attention slut, you say? Yes it's all extremely familiar, but even more so the helpless attempts by others to stop him, to turn his story arc into a moral cautionary tale in an effort to scare off other would-be Winchells. (I will link to some of these takes at the end of this piece, as they fill a whole shelf of their own.)
Winchell died of cancer in 1972, miserable and lonely. How could he not, after smoking constantly while alienating almost every friend and editor he'd known? Yet he seemed to have had a good long run — decades of clubbing and dancing, fornicating and settling scores, chasing leads from the police radio and heads of state alike.
Since we all now live and die by the electron, we might as well learn something from him. Not from his ethics, or by imitating his monstrous persona, but from his intuitive grasp of how words reach our brains through the microphone.
A Journal breakdown
Walter Winchell was such a prolific and provocative guy, people tend to overlook the mundane realities of how his show Jergens Journal got made week after week.
Like most network radio at the time, the program was done live, and much of it was never recorded. If you're curious to hear, there are partial air-check recordings available on the Internet Archive or via Old Time Radio Researchers, and a few full versions of the show posted on YouTube.
But it’s from the big ol’ stack of books about W.W. that I gleaned a few secrets of his broadcasting success.
1️⃣ : Pacing and a signature sound
Jergens Journal was 15 minutes long. With commercials, that meant Winchell only had 11-and-a-half minutes to speak. Other news "commentators" back then might use such a short time to report on two or three big topics.
Winchell came from vaudeville, where he could see audiences getting bored after a minute or two. So he broke his show into chunks of headlines, punctuated by telegraphic sound effects he generated himself.
What did the listeners hear? They heard the clack of a telegraph ticker at the top of the show and also in between the items — a sound that was to become as closely identified with Walter Winchell as his trademark salutation to “Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea,” which he incorporated into the broadcast in 1934 and retained thereafter. The clacks meant nothing in Morse code, though they suggested that the news was hot off the wire. “The Big Idea is for sound effect,” Walter admitted, “and to set the tempo.” He also said it helped him catch his breath. They heard Walter's voice, the timbre high and clipped like verbal tap shoes, racing at nearly two hundred words per minute.
Gabler notes that Winchell told people he intentionally started his broadcast an octave higher than his normal vocal range. It conveyed urgency, and his delivery also cut through the murky static of AM radio.
2️⃣ : Inside jokes
Winchell rewarded loyal listeners (and readers) with the constant neologisms, words or phrases he invented mainly for euphemistic purposes to evade censorship or libel suits. These phrases took on a life of their own as slang beyond the broadcast, widening his influence and creating a sense that listeners belonged to a special club.
Here's how media historian Erik Barnouw described it in 1968:
Marrying couples had “melded” or “sealed" or “lohengrined” or “merged” or “middle-aisled”; separating couples had “soured” or “curdled” or were “telling it to the judge” or had “Reno-vated” or were “on the verge.” Since 1933 his Sunday evening radio series sponsored by Jergens Lotion had kept a huge audience constantly on edge. Shouting in strident voice at top speed, it seemed to confirm a theory held at many advertising agencies that the main requisite for radio was not a pleasant voice but an unmistakable one.
3️⃣ : The last line
Winchell was a stickler about his sign-off each week. He wanted it to be a bon-mot to seal his clever and prophetic status for another week, and he placed the burden of composing it on his long-suffering ghostwriter, Herman Klurfeld, who would turn out hundreds of ideas every week for a kicker, which Winchell called a "lasty."
But even then Klurfeld couldn't trust that his mission was complete; he was on twenty-four-hour retainer. "I'd say, 'I'm going to have a Sunday off. Terrific!' Well, Sunday morning I get a call… He changed his mind. He needs a new lasty… And there went my whole Sunday. I sat at that goddamned typewriter and turned them out until he got one he liked. Some days he didn't like it and used the one he had on Friday anyhow.... I worked harder on that goddamned one line than I did in writing four columns."
4️⃣ : Sustainability
This is one of the most overlooked features of any long-running program. Is it easy and affordable enough to produce on the regular for years? Unlike other network programs of the era, Winchell's didn't require an orchestra, or actors, or scriptwriters (other than the much-abused and uncredited Klurfeld). Winchell himself was expensive, but worth it for all the gallons of lotion he sold.
🚫 : adrenaline kills
Winchell's old friend, FDR-era political operative and attorney Ernest Cuneo, would review Winchell's weekly scripts for libel risks (though it sounds like he was really the overall editor). He likened Winchell's state before the broadcast to that of a racehorse.
Like all great champions, Winchell became increasingly tense as the adrenaline poured into his bloodstream. Man o’ War Walter started kicking his stall late Thursday night. He became cantankerous, testy. By Friday night, he had to be held in…When he [rehearsed] Friday night copy, even if it was good, I learned not to approve. If I did, he’d drive both of us up the wall for the next forty-eight hours, improving the improvements….
Saturday night he was ungovernable. Nothing was good enough….
Exactly at 8:58 [on Sunday night], Walter would enter the broadcasting studio, open up his shirt, loosen his belt, open the waistband of his pants and tap on the sound-effects key. I was thrilled. I knew he was going to make another great run.
This routine was fun for Cuneo, apparently, and of course for Winchell. But several books are full of examples of Winchell crossing the line, throwing tantrums, calling his employees at all hours, and firing them without a second thought. It stresses me out just reading about his behavior. Do not be an adrenaline junkie.
Who loved Walter then?
Winchell's one-man-act was portable, which was good because he liked to travel far and wide, in search of new gossip or to convalesce after one of his many nervous breakdowns. He could do his show from any studio hooked up to the NBC Blue Network.
In 1947, at one of those stations in Miami with a small live audience, Alistair Cooke watched in wonder. He later wrote up the scene for the BBC's magazine The Listener.
They sat like mice before an altar: breathless and humble and very privileged, they watched Winchell jiggle his silly little telegraph key which mimics the morse code. He tore at his tie; he pushed his hat back: he talked in a frenzy for fifteen minutes and tore for the tape just in time to bid a frantic goodnight to Mr. and Mrs. America. Then they got up and they went timidly away as from a service. I followed some of them and overheard them; and what came through unmistakably was that Winchell had something for them that he would never have for you and that I had never dreamed of. He was the promise of American freedom and uninhibited bounce; he was Americanism symbolised in a nose-thumbing at the portentousness of the great; he released them for fifteen minutes once a week from the fear of oppression: he was the defender of the American faith. It was a view of him almost frightening in its innocence.
If that scene doesn't give you chills, then congratulations: you will never be haunted.
- 30-
A Winchell Library Annex
Winchell-land is bigger than I could cover, but here are a few ways he lives on.
Winchell in film
Winchell starred as himself in the 1937 farce Wake Up and Live.
You can see him on television in 1952 on his eponymous show for ABC here.
Check out Sweet Smell of Success (1957) for Burt Lancaster as a grim Winchellesque columnist. Though it lacks a sense of humor, the “Twilight Zone” vibes are cool.
Winchell is a 1997 HBO biopic starring Stanley Tucci as Winchell, and Paul Giamatti as Herman Klurfeld. The story is a little sanitized, depriving Tucci of a rare chance for a bit of villainy.
Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip is a 2020 documentary that ran on PBS American Masters. Stanley Tucci reprises his role as Winchell, but only as a voice actor and pair of moving lips.
Profiles and think-pieces
“He Snoops to Conquer.” Saturday Evening Post, Aug 13, 1938.
“The Last Word on Walter Winchell.” Harold Brodkey wrote this essay for the New Yorker in 1995. It's by far my favorite take for the way it puts Winchell’s life in a wider context.
“Only Gossip” by Kurt Andersen (2002).
Dick Cavett remembers meeting and interviewing Winchell (2009).
“The Man to Blame for Our Culture of Fame” by Jon Meacham (2017).
On the Media interview with Winchell biographer Neil Gabler (2017).
Books
GOSSIP: The Life and Times of Walter Winchell by St. Clair McKelway, 1940. Based on his four-part takedown in the New Yorker; McKelway was a strange figure in his own right.
Let’s Go to Press: A Biography of Walter Winchell by Ed Weiner, 1955. This is largely a hagiography by a former press agent, and in typical fashion, it cost him his friendship with Winchell.
The Secret Life of Walter Winchell by Lyle Stuart, 1953. Pure attack from a figure who later went on to publish The Turner Diaries, a white supremacist screed, in the name of "free speech." So I dunno, man.
Winchell Exclusive, 1975. Winchell tried for years to get this disjointed autobiography published, to no avail. It came out in three years after his death.
Ghostwriter Herman Klurfeld published Winchell: His Life and Times in 1976, which later became the basis of the HBO biopic.
Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity by Neil Gabler, 1994. This biography is nearly 700 pages long and well worth the attention it’s received.
Winchell is redeemed as a hero in Phillip Roth’s speculative-history novel The Plot Against America (also made into an HBO miniseries in 2020).
Music
“It’s a cinch Winchell knows,” sings the crooner in “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” (thanks to CW subscriber Cheryl Devall for this reference!)
Cut a rug with the Winchell Rhumba by Xavier Cugat and his orchestra.
Winchell gets a mention in Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Did he light it? Did he try to fight it? I cannot say.