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Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity
Hailed as the most important and entertaining biography in recent memory, Gabler's account of the life of fast-talking gossip columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell "fuses meticulous research with a deft grasp of the cultural nuances of an era when virtually everyone who mattered paid homage to Winchell" (Time). of photos.
704 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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692 people want to read
About the author
Neal Gabler
13 books171 followersNeal Gabler is a distinguished author, cultural historian and television commentator who has been called “one of America’s most important public intellectuals.” His first book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and the Theatre Library Association Award for the best book on television, radio or film. On the centenary of the first public exhibition of motion pictures in America, a special panel of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named it one of the one hundred outstanding books on the American film industry. His second book, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named the non-fiction book of the year by Time Magazine. His third book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, is currently being used in college courses across the country to examine the convergence of reality and entertainment. His fourth book, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, a New York Times best-seller, was named the biography of the year by USA Today and won Mr. Gabler his second Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also the runner-up for the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in England. His new book, Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity and Power, was published by Yale Univ Press this past April as part of its Jewish Lives series.
Mr. Gabler was graduated with high distinction and highest honors from the University of Michigan and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He holds advanced degrees in film and American Culture. He has also taught at the University of Michigan, where he won an outstanding teaching award, and at the Pennsylvania State University. Leaving academe, he was selected to replace departing co-hosts Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on the public television movie review program, “Sneak Previews.” He has also been the host of the American Movie Classics cable television network, of “Reel to Real” on the History Channel, and of “Reel Thirteen” on WNET, the public television station in New York, for which he won an Emmy.
Mr. Gabler is a contributing editor at Playboy and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters Opinion, and his essays and articles have appeared in Atlantic, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Republic, Men’s Journal, George, Time, TV Guide, Variety and many other publications. In 2014, he won the National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club. He has also been a contributor to the Fox News Channel and served as a panelist on the weekly media review program “Fox News Watch” from 2002 to 2007. One television critic called him a “megawatt brain…whose take on media coverage was fiercely individualistic, profound and original.” He has made appearances on “The Today Show,” “CBS Morning News,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “Charlie Rose” and the PBS “NewsHour.” And this year he is contributing a weekly column to billmoyers.com on the election and the media
Mr. Gabler has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard University, a Freedom Forum Fellowship, and was a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Scholar. He has also been the chief non-fiction judge of the National Book Awards and a judge of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He is currently a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Society and Entertainment at the University of Southern California and is a Visiting Professor in the MFA Literature and Writing program at SUNY Stony Brook. He was also the 2013 recipient of the Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship at Washington College. His older daughter Laurel was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where she received her doctorate in Public Health. She is currently matriculating at Harvard Medical School. His younger daughter Tanne taught in the World Teach program in American Samoa, was an A
Mr. Gabler was graduated with high distinction and highest honors from the University of Michigan and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He holds advanced degrees in film and American Culture. He has also taught at the University of Michigan, where he won an outstanding teaching award, and at the Pennsylvania State University. Leaving academe, he was selected to replace departing co-hosts Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on the public television movie review program, “Sneak Previews.” He has also been the host of the American Movie Classics cable television network, of “Reel to Real” on the History Channel, and of “Reel Thirteen” on WNET, the public television station in New York, for which he won an Emmy.
Mr. Gabler is a contributing editor at Playboy and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters Opinion, and his essays and articles have appeared in Atlantic, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Republic, Men’s Journal, George, Time, TV Guide, Variety and many other publications. In 2014, he won the National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club. He has also been a contributor to the Fox News Channel and served as a panelist on the weekly media review program “Fox News Watch” from 2002 to 2007. One television critic called him a “megawatt brain…whose take on media coverage was fiercely individualistic, profound and original.” He has made appearances on “The Today Show,” “CBS Morning News,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “Charlie Rose” and the PBS “NewsHour.” And this year he is contributing a weekly column to billmoyers.com on the election and the media
Mr. Gabler has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard University, a Freedom Forum Fellowship, and was a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Scholar. He has also been the chief non-fiction judge of the National Book Awards and a judge of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He is currently a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Society and Entertainment at the University of Southern California and is a Visiting Professor in the MFA Literature and Writing program at SUNY Stony Brook. He was also the 2013 recipient of the Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship at Washington College. His older daughter Laurel was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where she received her doctorate in Public Health. She is currently matriculating at Harvard Medical School. His younger daughter Tanne taught in the World Teach program in American Samoa, was an A
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August 8, 2017
Walter Winchell is one of those cultural figures so of his time that they simply evaporate from history. That time was the 1920s to the 1950s, when the former second-rate Vaudevillian turned from a gossip columnist into a political commentator, from a Rooseveltian Democrat into a McCarthyite Republican, and from a slangy if self-obsessed man of the people into a vicious bully forever sidetracked by meaningless, one-sided beefs. At the peak of his fame and influence, he was read or listened to by two-thirds of Americans each week.
It’s hard to write a biography of a man who was so unknowable and aloof – Winchell had few friends and almost no interests beside his career – but this book gets as close as it can through contemporary articles, secondary sources and interviews with his colleagues and near-confidantes, while doubling as a truly exceptional social history of America: an America for whom Winchell democratised but trivialised and sensationalised news, treating gossip, tragedy or politics with the same screaming, shallow reverence, and increasingly – like his protégé Roy Cohn, later the mentor of one Donald Trump – seeing life as a war between an Eastern intellectual elite and the common, simple and simply patriotic American. If you wondered too where Trump got his tweet style, then look at a ‘50s Winchell item, ending with an accentuated, hyperbolic blast like “Seven subpoenas!” or “Party card!”.
Gabler has a superb vocabulary and a grabby but cerebral style, while littering the narrative with mini-profiles of contemporaries, and short essays on the changing America – and how Winchell first powered that change, and then was powerless to resist it, eventually being destroyed by hubris, his association with McCarthy, his personal unpopularity and his utter irrelevance to the world of the 1960s. The author’s set-pieces are dynamic – including a brilliant chronicle of the Hauptmann trial of the 1930s, and Winchell’s initially understandable but then unbearably overbearing hatchet job on Josephine Baker – and so is his deep, thoughtful and truthful analysis, most memorably of his subject’s political conversion, which he attributes to Winchell’s fear of being investigated himself, his genuine, fervent and long-standing anti-Communism, and the opportunity it gave him to lambast James Wechsler, the editor of the New York Post and a former Young Communist League member, whose paper had just written a series dismantling Winchell’s mythos and reputation.
Gabler argues brilliantly that communism was “the weapon, not the object” and that Winchell’s decisions were often more political than personal. He had become a worshipper of Roosevelt only after being charmed personally by the new president, while – like McCarthy and Cohn, both of whom he liked personally – Winchell was earthy, bitter, working-class and attracted to power. Even in the ‘50s he didn’t see himself as a Republican – telling a party functionary who welcomed him to the GOP at Eisenhower’s election party, “I'm not a Republican, you're a Republican” – and never abandoned his one saving grace, the ‘premature anti-fascism’ (as the HUAC would dub it) of the early ‘30s, in which his uncanny antenna for anti-Semitism saw him repeatedly and passionately denounce the Nazis some five years before most of his contemporaries, and root out fascists and Nazi sympathisers throughout the United States (this role inspired Philip Roth to use Winchell as the defender of the people in his brilliant alternate history, The Plot Against America, in which the hero of the air – and of America First – the fascist Charles Lindbergh becomes president).
In the end, Winchell did as much harm as good: opening up the press to working class voices, challenging outdated mores and unquestionably enlivening the medium, but then using his platform to settle scores and wage vindictive vendettas, accumulating more and more wealth (a reaction to his Dickensian childhood), and – in a broader cultural sense – turning news into entertainment, with the accompanying callousness and collateral damage that engendered. He fought fewer and fewer justified or even coherent battles, was a lousy friend, and was an even worse father, but – for better or worse – he was also among the most significant cultural voices of the 20th century, whose life must be understood in order to understand the present. Without ever over-stretching or being caught up in academic-ese, Gabler’s incredibly entertaining book does as good a job as can be imagined of making that possible.
It’s hard to write a biography of a man who was so unknowable and aloof – Winchell had few friends and almost no interests beside his career – but this book gets as close as it can through contemporary articles, secondary sources and interviews with his colleagues and near-confidantes, while doubling as a truly exceptional social history of America: an America for whom Winchell democratised but trivialised and sensationalised news, treating gossip, tragedy or politics with the same screaming, shallow reverence, and increasingly – like his protégé Roy Cohn, later the mentor of one Donald Trump – seeing life as a war between an Eastern intellectual elite and the common, simple and simply patriotic American. If you wondered too where Trump got his tweet style, then look at a ‘50s Winchell item, ending with an accentuated, hyperbolic blast like “Seven subpoenas!” or “Party card!”.
Gabler has a superb vocabulary and a grabby but cerebral style, while littering the narrative with mini-profiles of contemporaries, and short essays on the changing America – and how Winchell first powered that change, and then was powerless to resist it, eventually being destroyed by hubris, his association with McCarthy, his personal unpopularity and his utter irrelevance to the world of the 1960s. The author’s set-pieces are dynamic – including a brilliant chronicle of the Hauptmann trial of the 1930s, and Winchell’s initially understandable but then unbearably overbearing hatchet job on Josephine Baker – and so is his deep, thoughtful and truthful analysis, most memorably of his subject’s political conversion, which he attributes to Winchell’s fear of being investigated himself, his genuine, fervent and long-standing anti-Communism, and the opportunity it gave him to lambast James Wechsler, the editor of the New York Post and a former Young Communist League member, whose paper had just written a series dismantling Winchell’s mythos and reputation.
Gabler argues brilliantly that communism was “the weapon, not the object” and that Winchell’s decisions were often more political than personal. He had become a worshipper of Roosevelt only after being charmed personally by the new president, while – like McCarthy and Cohn, both of whom he liked personally – Winchell was earthy, bitter, working-class and attracted to power. Even in the ‘50s he didn’t see himself as a Republican – telling a party functionary who welcomed him to the GOP at Eisenhower’s election party, “I'm not a Republican, you're a Republican” – and never abandoned his one saving grace, the ‘premature anti-fascism’ (as the HUAC would dub it) of the early ‘30s, in which his uncanny antenna for anti-Semitism saw him repeatedly and passionately denounce the Nazis some five years before most of his contemporaries, and root out fascists and Nazi sympathisers throughout the United States (this role inspired Philip Roth to use Winchell as the defender of the people in his brilliant alternate history, The Plot Against America, in which the hero of the air – and of America First – the fascist Charles Lindbergh becomes president).
In the end, Winchell did as much harm as good: opening up the press to working class voices, challenging outdated mores and unquestionably enlivening the medium, but then using his platform to settle scores and wage vindictive vendettas, accumulating more and more wealth (a reaction to his Dickensian childhood), and – in a broader cultural sense – turning news into entertainment, with the accompanying callousness and collateral damage that engendered. He fought fewer and fewer justified or even coherent battles, was a lousy friend, and was an even worse father, but – for better or worse – he was also among the most significant cultural voices of the 20th century, whose life must be understood in order to understand the present. Without ever over-stretching or being caught up in academic-ese, Gabler’s incredibly entertaining book does as good a job as can be imagined of making that possible.
May 29, 2016
When I was in my 20s I read Neal Gabler's biography of Walter Winchell. And it changed my life. I can still remember being completely engrossed in this book.
It was the awesome achievement of Winchell's biographer, Neal Gabler, to show how Winchell mattered in history. How he invented the modern celebrity, more or less single-handedly. How he used gossip as a weapon 70 years before TMZ. Gabler marshalled spellbinding amounts of news clippings, correspondence, interviews, and his own critical takes on 20th-century American culture to make his case. And the kicker was this: For such a meaty intellectual biography, it was so readable that I could not put it down until I was done.
And when I was done, I wanted to be Neal Gabler.
Well, you may have seen old Neal’s name in the news recently. He’s the author of that depressing Atlantic cover piece “The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans,” in which he confesses to being so broke that he would be unable to cover a $400 emergency. After reciting a long list of financial humiliations that he and his wife have suffered — hitting up their adult daughters for cash being the worst — Gabler writes, “You wouldn’t know any of that to look at me. Nor would you know it to look at my résumé. I have had a passably good career as a writer … and a small (very small) but respectable reputation.”
He sells himself short. Time magazine named Winchell the best book of 1994, and it remains one of the great biographies of our time. His book on the Jews who invented Hollywood is equally celebrated. As for me, no, I never came close to becoming the next Neal Gabler. But Winchell demonstrated to me that writing about media could be a career option for a serious-minded person. And I got that career!
It was the awesome achievement of Winchell's biographer, Neal Gabler, to show how Winchell mattered in history. How he invented the modern celebrity, more or less single-handedly. How he used gossip as a weapon 70 years before TMZ. Gabler marshalled spellbinding amounts of news clippings, correspondence, interviews, and his own critical takes on 20th-century American culture to make his case. And the kicker was this: For such a meaty intellectual biography, it was so readable that I could not put it down until I was done.
And when I was done, I wanted to be Neal Gabler.
Well, you may have seen old Neal’s name in the news recently. He’s the author of that depressing Atlantic cover piece “The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans,” in which he confesses to being so broke that he would be unable to cover a $400 emergency. After reciting a long list of financial humiliations that he and his wife have suffered — hitting up their adult daughters for cash being the worst — Gabler writes, “You wouldn’t know any of that to look at me. Nor would you know it to look at my résumé. I have had a passably good career as a writer … and a small (very small) but respectable reputation.”
He sells himself short. Time magazine named Winchell the best book of 1994, and it remains one of the great biographies of our time. His book on the Jews who invented Hollywood is equally celebrated. As for me, no, I never came close to becoming the next Neal Gabler. But Winchell demonstrated to me that writing about media could be a career option for a serious-minded person. And I got that career!
June 1, 2009
Wow, this was quite a journey. It took me months to read, and I'm not entirely sure why because it is well enough written and superbly researched. It is a longish book, around 550 pages, but not inordinately so for a biography. It might be due to the level of detail that author Neil Gabler crams into every page; one wants to savor the world and the times in which Winchell lived. This is not just a great biography, but also a vast overview of the 20th century. The book spans the days of vaudeville, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression and Winchell's dominance of radio, newspapers and politics in the '30s and 40s', his close relations with J. Edgar Hoover and FDR, his connections to Hollywood, his relationships to Broadway and his vast orbit of publicity seeking press agents, his participation in WWII, his championing of Jewish causes and his admirable place in being the first major American public figure to decry the Nazis (way before everybody else), and, of course, his decline during the McCarthy era, when he hitched his red-baiting wagon to Joe McCarthy, his bimbo affairs and the train wreck that was his family life; the latter takes us into the era of Vietnam and drugs. Reading this book will help you better understand how things work in the United States of America, for better or worse. Winchell was the progenitor of all the "Entertainment Tonight" gossip wasteland that now dominates corporate media. He was a household word. Now, he's a very obscure trivia question. When Winchell died, nobody cared and nobody came.
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May 26, 2025Towards the end of the 1950 film 'Sunset Boulevard' Norma Desmond says in response to someone remarking that she used to be a big star, "I am big, it's the pictures that have got small." That could also, with the substitution 'celebrities' for 'pictures', be the epitaph for Walter Winchell, the man Neal Gabler credits with creating the 'Culture of Celebrity'. Yet how evanescent that culture seems in 2025 when 'reality TV stars' are the most likely 'celebrities'? The world the author Neal Gabler sees as the successor to Winchell was no more fixed or permanent. Although forgotten Winchell in his Stork Club heyday betrays all the subtlety of today's 'online influencers'. The bile he spouted in his post WWII swansong was no different to things found on the internet today. The real difference is that the restraints of broadcasting regulations, publishing libel laws and the power of advertisers and other powerful bodies has diminished to such an extent. Winchell would have loved the internet and the ability to say whatever he liked without restraint.
The question arises is do we really need to read a 500+ page biography, no matter how finely researched and written (and it is highly researched and very readable). Winchell was powerful because of his platform on radio and in newspapers. But, although reaching a greater audience and with a post WWII career, he is no different to other great radio pundits of the 1920s and 30s like Aimee Semple McPherson and Father Coughlin. He was never part of the nexus of Hollywood studio power in the way Hedda Hopper and Louella Parson's were. He was a great supporter of F D Roosevelt and the president used him in the way he used innumerable people and his use of Winchell was, qualitatively, no different to his use of Joseph Kennedy. He was a greater 'red-baiter' and supporter of the vicious campaigns Joe McCarthy and Hoover to destroy anyone they didn't like. But he was used by them, he never originated anything. I think it significant that in all of James Ellroy's many novels delineating the complex interplay between Hollywood, politics and Hoover I don't think Winchell gets a mention.
A year after Norma Desmond spoke her famous line Winchell's own long decline began with his 1951 mis-handling of an insult to Josephine Baker by Winchell's crony Sherman Billingsley (who he? who cares? but if you don't know who the incomparable Josephine Baker was you need to rectify that immediately). He was big and he stayed big but his stage was growing smaller. The great irony is that Winchell was a New York man, a theatre man, a Vaudeville man. Post WWII New York was beginning to die and along with it Broadway theatre, never mind Vaudeville, as well as newspapers and radio. More cars, federal highways, suburban living were transforming America and his audience was dying out and a new world was being born.
I found this biography fascinating but overlong and despite Mr. Gabler's attempts to try and place Winchell into a context that would not simply 'explain' him but restore him to a prominent place in America's 'cultural' memory. But I don't think he succeeds. Winchell's great years were the 1930s and 40s. He was a force because of his radio show and newspaper columns. Who in the USA even knows that radio is something other than a source of music? Who reads newspapers? How many Americans have been in a theatre never mind know what Vaudeville is? Winchell is forgotten because he failed to make the transfer post WWII to the new age unlike Ed Sullivan, a minnow when he was at his most powerful pre WWII, but who carved out a place in America's history because of hosting Elvis Presley, The Beattles and many others on his long running show.
Still I can't give this biography less than four stars but except as a way of understanding other events it is hard to see who will read this book in years to come. What is certain is that there will never be another biography of Walter Winchell.
The question arises is do we really need to read a 500+ page biography, no matter how finely researched and written (and it is highly researched and very readable). Winchell was powerful because of his platform on radio and in newspapers. But, although reaching a greater audience and with a post WWII career, he is no different to other great radio pundits of the 1920s and 30s like Aimee Semple McPherson and Father Coughlin. He was never part of the nexus of Hollywood studio power in the way Hedda Hopper and Louella Parson's were. He was a great supporter of F D Roosevelt and the president used him in the way he used innumerable people and his use of Winchell was, qualitatively, no different to his use of Joseph Kennedy. He was a greater 'red-baiter' and supporter of the vicious campaigns Joe McCarthy and Hoover to destroy anyone they didn't like. But he was used by them, he never originated anything. I think it significant that in all of James Ellroy's many novels delineating the complex interplay between Hollywood, politics and Hoover I don't think Winchell gets a mention.
A year after Norma Desmond spoke her famous line Winchell's own long decline began with his 1951 mis-handling of an insult to Josephine Baker by Winchell's crony Sherman Billingsley (who he? who cares? but if you don't know who the incomparable Josephine Baker was you need to rectify that immediately). He was big and he stayed big but his stage was growing smaller. The great irony is that Winchell was a New York man, a theatre man, a Vaudeville man. Post WWII New York was beginning to die and along with it Broadway theatre, never mind Vaudeville, as well as newspapers and radio. More cars, federal highways, suburban living were transforming America and his audience was dying out and a new world was being born.
I found this biography fascinating but overlong and despite Mr. Gabler's attempts to try and place Winchell into a context that would not simply 'explain' him but restore him to a prominent place in America's 'cultural' memory. But I don't think he succeeds. Winchell's great years were the 1930s and 40s. He was a force because of his radio show and newspaper columns. Who in the USA even knows that radio is something other than a source of music? Who reads newspapers? How many Americans have been in a theatre never mind know what Vaudeville is? Winchell is forgotten because he failed to make the transfer post WWII to the new age unlike Ed Sullivan, a minnow when he was at his most powerful pre WWII, but who carved out a place in America's history because of hosting Elvis Presley, The Beattles and many others on his long running show.
Still I can't give this biography less than four stars but except as a way of understanding other events it is hard to see who will read this book in years to come. What is certain is that there will never be another biography of Walter Winchell.
July 24, 2011
Walter Winchell was the precursor of tabloid gossip journalism, yellow journalism, if you will. Winchell was based in NY and broadcast lies, half truths and unsubstantiated innuendo. One of the victims of his broadcasts was my grandfather, Robert Keith. When the very unfortunate Peg Entwhistle committed suicide by jumping off of the H in the Hollywood sign, Winchell blamed my grandfather. This was cruel and untrue. My grandfather had dated Peg two years previously. Keith was getting the play he was written produced on Broadway in collaboration with the Shuberts. Peg decided to enter films, so she went to Hollywood. For reasons only known to Peg, she succumbed to despair and took her life. Winchell blamed Keith who said Peg was distraught because she had just learned Keith had two children (my mother and the actor Brian Keith) from a marriage she knew nothing about. This is very curious because my mom had met Peg in NY and Peg was very well aware of Keith's previous wife because they had lunch together...two years previously. My mom went to Winchell after school in her Catholic school girl uniform and explained the pain he was causing the family by his untrue broadcast. He apologized and broadcast a retraction. The truth will out. Backed down by a child in a school uniform. Way to go mom!
November 7, 2008
Matt Drudge frequently mentioned Winchell on his radio show, and now I can see why. Winchell would mix gossip and news and editorial at random in his work, much the way the Drudge Report does.
I also enjoyed reading about his skirmishes with Ed Sullivan - most of us probably only think of the genial Sullivan introducing the Beatles or Elvis on his TV show, but he was a bitter ruthless son-of-a-bitch contemporary of Winchell in the early gossip column and radio wars.
I also enjoyed reading about his skirmishes with Ed Sullivan - most of us probably only think of the genial Sullivan introducing the Beatles or Elvis on his TV show, but he was a bitter ruthless son-of-a-bitch contemporary of Winchell in the early gossip column and radio wars.
June 10, 2010
I really enjoyed this book, but I don't think I could have read it completely through without reading other books along the way. Walter Winchell was a fascinating person and he lived through fascinating times. If you are interested in the history of gossip columns or if you like reading about famous people's day to day lives, this is a good book to read.
July 18, 2017
Walter Winchell was the originator of gossip in the newspapers, not quite the inventor of the genre, but the man who popularized it and set in motion all the ways we expect to know everything about celebrities. He had a syndicated newspaper column when that was an enormously influential thing to have, and a weekly radio broadcast when that was even more powerful. He was, for all intents and purposes, a miserable human being, who mixed up love and control, who gave up the concept of friendship in favor of scoops, who desperately wanted to be known as a journalist when he mostly just put his name to an assemblage of other people's writing. He did as much as anyone to prepare the U.S. for entry into WWII, but then did as much as anyone to support Joe McCarthy's witch hunts after the war. His story is fascinating, despite the fact he was hard to root for throughout his long career.
September 23, 2016
A masterpiece of biography - very funny yet never frivolous, tons of great anecdotes and yarns. The quality that sets this volume above other great biographies is that it's subject was - lets's face it - a pretty vapid character. Gabler makes Walter Winchell into a keyhole (a metaphor frequently used in the book) of a wide variety of spaces - media, celebrity, Broadway, politics, etc. - creating a rich social history. A must-read for anyone looking into the roots of Matt Drudge and Fox News.
March 28, 2012
An interestingly written account of America’s best known 20th century journalist who didn’t know when to quit and walk away thus sabotaging the very legacy he worked so hard to instill in the American public’s mind. Quite the cautionary tale of allowing naked ambition override other parts of your life.
August 15, 2013
One of those famous people from the past that I was too young to know about first hand, but it's a name you hear associated with the 1930's and 1940's. Amazing to think of the power he had back then. Far from the most pleasant person you would want to meet, but an interesting story.
August 13, 2013
Fascinating. And, of course, depressing. Gabler recreates the life and times of the dynamic, egotistical gossip-monger vividly.
February 17, 2018
A very detailed biography of Walter Winchell that is respectful yet unflattering. I think that's why I loved it.
May 1, 2023
"Poor Walter. One morning he's going to wake up and find out he's not Walter Winchell any more".---Dorothy Parker
"Good evening Mr.and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. This is Walter Winchell". No man or woman in American history did more to shape the United States of hyper-reality than gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Infotainment, reality TV shows that are really faked and melding politics with show business are all his monuments. In the post-war world the name alone struck terror. Yet, paradoxically, the man himself is largely forgotten. I once stepped into the New York City Museum of Radio and Television (now renamed the William Paley Media Center; why do these moguls, in this case the founder of CBS, insist on having their own pyramids?) where you can ask for an exhibition of an hour of anything ever on television on a private screen. Julio Pino: "I'd like a documentary of Walter Winchell, please". Female attendant: "Who?". (Don't worry folks. I settled for the classic TV documentary on migrant workers, HARVEST OF SHAME, narrated by Ed Morrow.) In his prime though, Walter moved millions behind political causes, some good, others horrific, while keeping the nation entertained. with celebrity gossip about radio and movie stars, sports legends and politicians. Let's give this devil a couple of dues. The Thirties saw Walter in New York City fighting the good fight by exposing the dangers of Nazism at home and abroad. No compromise for him. A non-practicing Jew, he talked Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Micky Cohen into "persuading" the German-American Bund, the largest fascist organization in the United States, into not holding any more meetings. After the war he influenced New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia into letting in more Jewish refugees from Europe. More heroically, he championed civil rights for African-Americans at a time when that usually produced career hara-kiri. Bu then came Senator Joseph McCarthy, elected in 1946, the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings into alleged Communist influence in Hollywood and the Red Scare under directed by J. Edgar Hoover, first Truman and the Eisenhower. Walter made friends with McCarthy, his sleaze-ball aide Roy, Cohn, and Hoover. His radio show and newspaper column, which circulated in hundreds of papers across the country, outed supposed Reds, pinkos, homosexuals, and anyone suspected of not being 100% the Winchell brand of Americanism. He also abandoned the civil rights battle. Gossip, power, politics, celebrity and even inquisition had fused into an H-bomb in the hands of the man who now simply referred to himself as WW. Then, as Dorothy Parker predicted, Nemesis came calling for Winchell. In 1957 McCarthy died, screenwriter Clifford Odets savaged Winchell in the film SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, and newspapers began to drop his column for fear of embarrassing politicians, such as the up and coming John F. Kennedy. Ten years later Winchell could be found playing a parody of himself in the youth-exploitation flic WILD IN THE STREETS. Walter's home life was a das mess too; driving one son to suicide. Incredibly, Winchell did not die until 1972, and one of his last words were, "I just don't understand the world anymore". Neil Gabler, author of AN EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN: HOW THE JEWS INVENTED HOLLYWOOD has written a balanced and scarily entertaining biography of the father of modern media and celebrity culture and the culture of celebrity.
"Good evening Mr.and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. This is Walter Winchell". No man or woman in American history did more to shape the United States of hyper-reality than gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Infotainment, reality TV shows that are really faked and melding politics with show business are all his monuments. In the post-war world the name alone struck terror. Yet, paradoxically, the man himself is largely forgotten. I once stepped into the New York City Museum of Radio and Television (now renamed the William Paley Media Center; why do these moguls, in this case the founder of CBS, insist on having their own pyramids?) where you can ask for an exhibition of an hour of anything ever on television on a private screen. Julio Pino: "I'd like a documentary of Walter Winchell, please". Female attendant: "Who?". (Don't worry folks. I settled for the classic TV documentary on migrant workers, HARVEST OF SHAME, narrated by Ed Morrow.) In his prime though, Walter moved millions behind political causes, some good, others horrific, while keeping the nation entertained. with celebrity gossip about radio and movie stars, sports legends and politicians. Let's give this devil a couple of dues. The Thirties saw Walter in New York City fighting the good fight by exposing the dangers of Nazism at home and abroad. No compromise for him. A non-practicing Jew, he talked Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Micky Cohen into "persuading" the German-American Bund, the largest fascist organization in the United States, into not holding any more meetings. After the war he influenced New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia into letting in more Jewish refugees from Europe. More heroically, he championed civil rights for African-Americans at a time when that usually produced career hara-kiri. Bu then came Senator Joseph McCarthy, elected in 1946, the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings into alleged Communist influence in Hollywood and the Red Scare under directed by J. Edgar Hoover, first Truman and the Eisenhower. Walter made friends with McCarthy, his sleaze-ball aide Roy, Cohn, and Hoover. His radio show and newspaper column, which circulated in hundreds of papers across the country, outed supposed Reds, pinkos, homosexuals, and anyone suspected of not being 100% the Winchell brand of Americanism. He also abandoned the civil rights battle. Gossip, power, politics, celebrity and even inquisition had fused into an H-bomb in the hands of the man who now simply referred to himself as WW. Then, as Dorothy Parker predicted, Nemesis came calling for Winchell. In 1957 McCarthy died, screenwriter Clifford Odets savaged Winchell in the film SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, and newspapers began to drop his column for fear of embarrassing politicians, such as the up and coming John F. Kennedy. Ten years later Winchell could be found playing a parody of himself in the youth-exploitation flic WILD IN THE STREETS. Walter's home life was a das mess too; driving one son to suicide. Incredibly, Winchell did not die until 1972, and one of his last words were, "I just don't understand the world anymore". Neil Gabler, author of AN EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN: HOW THE JEWS INVENTED HOLLYWOOD has written a balanced and scarily entertaining biography of the father of modern media and celebrity culture and the culture of celebrity.
December 29, 2022
This is a very curious book. As Dorothy Parker says, "[Walter Winchell] was afraid he'll wake up one day and discover he's not Walter Winchell." It's the Victor Hugo-as-madman line all over, crossed with Andy Warhol's contention that "everyone in the future will be world-famous for 15 minutes" (what he actually said). In other words, here's someone spread so thin it actually rivals Slothrop's scattering — like Michael Herr said, in one of the three books he published during his lifetime that weren't co-authored (the other two being Dispatches and Kubrick), "nobody remembers him now, but everyone was frightened of him at the time ... he was as nice as he could possibly be on the way up, and took as many people with him on the way down as he could" (quoted from memory). In other words, that's the startling thing — no-one's heard of him now. As someone born in '72, with the usual corn meter about horseless carriages and the Great Depression and TV's in homes that would lead to, through John Hughes movies and then beyond them ... this is a curious amount of legwork. Running this stuff through your brain will help a lot — you won't just know where stuff comes from, you'll know where the rejoinders to that stuff comes from, the comebacks and responses if you will. It's a "phantom limb" effect.
I enjoyed this book very much.
It will help your sense of historicity, and seems to bridge the gap between Douglas Coupland (Marshall McLuhan comes up) and thinkers of- and post-his ilk, and those of yesteryear; you can see why Thomas Pynchon used the vocabulary he did in Gravity's Rainbow, of radio- and radio-sounding dialogues and speech, why he had to construct the new synergy for us that he did, and how far ahead of us he was —
Highly recommended.
(Get your copy today!!!)
Extra, extra ...
I enjoyed this book very much.
It will help your sense of historicity, and seems to bridge the gap between Douglas Coupland (Marshall McLuhan comes up) and thinkers of- and post-his ilk, and those of yesteryear; you can see why Thomas Pynchon used the vocabulary he did in Gravity's Rainbow, of radio- and radio-sounding dialogues and speech, why he had to construct the new synergy for us that he did, and how far ahead of us he was —
Highly recommended.
(Get your copy today!!!)
Extra, extra ...
June 7, 2023
An excellent look at the life and times of a man mostly forgotten today, but in his day Walter Winchell was one of the most famous, most influential, most powerful - and most feared - of all journalists. Gabler does a very good job documenting the influences on Winchell's life and work, as well as how he shaped modern journalism. Although the book was written several years ago, he also gives food for thought, and a way of understanding where Winchell fits in today. A long but satisfying read.
September 28, 2021
Gabler does a thorough job tracking Winchell’s career, relationships with his family and friends and his ups and downs in the publishing arena, vaudeville, radio, TV business and the gossip culture against the background of what was going on in America in the time period he worked in. I never realized how prolific he was in his career. Very interesting!
August 11, 2022
Stopped about 2/3 of the way. I started this a couple years ago before picking it up again this week. Although I love seeing pop culture from a different time period this book has twice the amount of detail I want. That said my bookmark is staying put and I may finish it down the road. Love the cover.
May 18, 2025
The early section on Winchell's beginnings and start on Broadway were fascinating. But it seemed like the author got tired of writing and did not go in near as much detail with Winchell's ties to J. Edgar Hoover, or his later life. The mental illness in his family was devastating, as was his final illness, but those were perfunctorily covered.
August 21, 2021
Interesting, fairly dark biography, particularly good on the rise of the tabloid press in America and the way news merged with gossip into a new thing.
October 8, 2012
The book is not juicy, for not fun as I expected to see such a oh-my-lord figure. It followed the pattern that since his birth, and then his childhood and growth, to his highlight for a whole life with bittersweet moments, to the last he died in loneliness.
I spent 3 weeks but only finished three quarters. It’s very detailed story about the greatest columnist in American history. His passion towards gossip, his talent writing attracted half of American population, his humor won him soaring career in media. He won fame but died in fame, which is everything and nothing. He sacrificed marriage and family.
Great person always couldn't be imitated, his hardship dwells in his passion for another track, so he couldn’t be balanced to be a normal “good person”.
I spent 3 weeks but only finished three quarters. It’s very detailed story about the greatest columnist in American history. His passion towards gossip, his talent writing attracted half of American population, his humor won him soaring career in media. He won fame but died in fame, which is everything and nothing. He sacrificed marriage and family.
Great person always couldn't be imitated, his hardship dwells in his passion for another track, so he couldn’t be balanced to be a normal “good person”.
April 28, 2012
Interesting biography of noted gossip columnist. He became very famous but his family life was not so good. This one took me quite a while to read.
October 23, 2014
One hell of a guy. Fascinating and eloquently portrayed by Neal Gabler.
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