All in the family: My connection to Walter Winchell

Posted

“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press. FLASH!”

You’re listening to the staccato voice of Walter Winchell, whose top-rated radio program and nationally syndicated New York Daily Mirror newspaper columns made him an institution in the United States of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

And, oy, he had a way with words. “She’s been on more laps than a napkin’’ was one of his lines.

Yes, he was Jewish. It might not have been obvious, but it was essential to the way he viewed himself and the world. And, whatever failings he had – and he had plenty – give him credit for raising early alarms about Hitler.

Winchell pioneered gossip journalism with inside tidbits on Broadway, Hollywood and the corporate world, mixing them with news and views of politics, crime and war.

His rapid-fire 15-minute broadcasts crackled with an air of urgency, intensified by the sound of a telegraph key that he would press to transition from one topic to another.

It’s been said Winchell was so powerful he could make or break careers. He could be exuberant. Fawning. Egotistical. Insecure. Driven. Reckless. And vicious.

He was not a man you’d necessarily pick to be in your mishpachah. But he was in mine – he and my father, Fall River lawyer Lester Bakst, were first cousins.

My grandfather, Michael Bakst, and Walter’s mother, Jennie, were siblings. They also had a sister, Rose. To both my father and Walter, she was Aunt Rose.

And now, Mr. and Mrs. Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts, let’s go to press.

FLASH! Dateline Fall River, Thursday, Jan. 4, 1934. My father writes to Aunt Rose – married name, Oser – to say he listened to Winchell’s program on Sunday night. He refers to the part of the broadcast where Winchell responds to folks who write to him.

“All of a sudden,” my father reports, he heard Winchell call out:

“Mrs. Rose Oser, Memphis, Tennessee.” There was some more chatter from Winchell, who then declares, “Get better.”

In his letter, my father tells his aunt, “You can imagine how thrilled I was to hear those words. I sincerely hope that you were listening at the time and what is more important, I hope his words cheered you.

“We at home here trust that you are speedily on the way to recovery…’’

He discusses other family matters and ends with the wish that “all of us will have luck, happiness and health for a good many years to come.’’

A copy of the letter was furnished to me by Ed Kaplan, a retired Memphis lawyer and distant relative who has done extensive research on his family and its Bakst connection.

Any note from Aunt Rose would surely have drawn Winchell’s attention. He spent considerable time with her in his youth. In his memoir, he said he loved her “very much” and that “she baked such delicious chawklitt and coconut cakes and gave me a nickel every day.”

Winchell sometimes spelled things in odd ways like that. Indeed, he’d often invent new ones: A couple wouldn’t be expecting a child, they’d be infanticipating…

A New York Public Library unit at Lincoln Center has a huge collection of Winchell’s radio scripts and columns you can view on microfilm. Its staff was kind enough to locate for me the script of that Dec. 31, 1933, broadcast, sponsored by Jergens, that had caught my father’s ear. When it proved difficult to scan from the microfilm, they went back to the original paper manuscript and sent me photographs.

There it is, typewritten, with last-minute handwritten notations, including markings – “ticker” – for where he’d hit the telegraph key.

I knew that Winchell at times modified his opening lines – sometimes, say, it was “Mr. and Mrs. America” instead of “North and South America” – but I’d never seen this introduction before:

“Good evening Mr. and Mrs. Yankee Doodle – Canada – Cuba, Alaska – and the Byrd expedition at the South Pole – let’s go to press!”

“FLASH! PEIPING, CHINA – “The war drums in the Far East are rumbling, again…’’

And he was off and running, skipping around the world, speaking in bursts.

“FLASH! MOUNT VERNON, New York. An undetermined number of persons were burned in a 3-alarm fire at the Plaza Theatre in this city today…’’

Then a plug for people to support parties around the country for President Roosevelt’s Jan. 30 birthday. “The entire proceeds from the various affairs in every city and town – will be turned over to the President – for the establishment of an endowment – for the Warm Springs Foundation…So that the Foundation may carry on its National Crusade against Infantile Paralysis…Try to attend the affair in your city. (ticker).’’

“FLASH! PASADENA, CALIFORNIA. It is the consensus of opinion among the California wisenheimers – that Columbia hasn’t a chance to win tomorrow’s game with Stanford…” (Actually, the Lions did win this Rose Bowl contest.)

“FLASH! NEW YORK CITY. Five investigators for the State Alcoholic Beverage Control Board – were fired yesterday…’’

Are you following all this? We’re barely on page 2 of the script.

Several pages in, he indeed responds to people who have written to him, and – FLASH! – here it is:

“Mrs. Rose Oser of Memphis: The new Follies opens in N.Y. Thursday. Get better.”

Alas, on March 28, she died, in her 50s. The death certificate – Kaplan sent a photo – lists the cause as cancer of the uterus.

One important item in the script particularly caught my eye. I take it as a reflection of Winchell’s Jewishness:

“FLASH! PARIS, FRANCE – One of the royalist newspapers in France today editorially demanded a restriction of Jewish refugees from Germany to France…The editor also stated that he doesn’t mean the ban to be applied to influential Jewish bankers. He only means, he says, the poorer class. Ominously, he added: ‘The Jewish bankers are welcome because they can be of some use in time of war.’ ”

Over the years, Winchell had ghostwriting help, something that pops up in this passage from Winchell biographer Neal Gabler’s assessment of his Judaism:

“With his proper English surname, Winchell was not often thought to be a Jew, but he never denied it or forgot it…. He certainly wasn’t a religious Jew; he hadn’t set foot in a synagogue since his confirmation. Nor did the Jewish community particularly rush to claim him.”

Gabler adds:

“He called himself an ‘intuitive’ Jew, but his Judaism ran deep. ‘If there was one consistent thread in his crazy-quilt life, it was his Jewishness,’ ghostwriter Herman Klurfield said, citing especially his ‘radar-like sensitivity to any form of anti-Semitism.’ He was always fighting these battles.”

Gabler quotes Arnold Forster, a Jewish activist and Winchell confederate as saying, “He thought as a Jew”… and “was self-conscious about his Jewishness.’’

Gabler goes on:

“And like Klurfield, Forster believed Walter was never more Jewish than when Jews were under fire. He suffered a vulnerability about being Jewish, a sense that ‘underneath, they’re all anti-Semitic.’ To him, it was always the latent motive of his enemies: They had to destroy the powerful Jew.”

In reality, Winchell destroyed himself with endless feuds, including a celebrated one with Josephine Baker, a Black entertainer, who claimed in 1951 that she had been denied service in Winchell’s hangout, the Stork Club nightclub, and that Winchell did not come to her aid. He said he didn’t know it was happening, and the battle raged on.

Winchell also aligned himself with Joe McCarthy, the loathsome Red-baiting demagogue.

He struggled to catch on in TV. His newspaper base folded in the 1960s – first the Mirror, then the Journal-American, and then the World Journal Tribune. (I was a student at Columbia Journalism School in 1966-67 during the WJT’s brief existence, and I remember telling my father that Winchell’s column was running infrequently and virtually buried.)

You couldn’t be Walter Winchell without a major New York outlet. He became a sad figure whom time passed by. At age 74, he died of prostate cancer in 1972.

Still, if you mention him today to folks of a certain age, they’ll remember those frantic radio programs – and that telegraph key.

CHARLES BAKST is a retired Providence Journal political columnist.

Walter Winchell, Fall River