“We live in a world of gossip,” says John Guare, author of the book for the musical version of “Sweet Smell of Success.” “There is nothing more powerful than gossip.”
Walter Winchell knew this. For more than four decades, his was the word. It is estimated that at his peak, in the 1930s and ’40s, more than 50 million Americans (of an adult population of 75 million) either listened to his weekly radio show or read his column, syndicated to 2,000 papers. “He did not just invent the modern gossip column,” writes Neal Gabler in his definitive biography, “Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity.” “He became an opinion-maker largely because he understood . . . that gossip, far beyond its basic attraction as journalistic voyeurism, was a weapon of empowerment for the reader and listener.”
Winchell once said, “The way to become famous fast is to throw a brick at someone who is famous.” He used his column to further the careers of favorites and hamper those of others. He accused people of being communists, having illicit affairs, even committing crimes. He once wrote wrongly that Bette Davis had cancer, prompting a press agent to declare, “I don’t know whether she has it or not, but if she doesn’t have it, she’d better get it!”
John Lithgow, who plays J.J. Hunsecker, the character modeled on Winchell, says, “You could never write a modern ‘Sweet Smell’ with [New York Daily News columnist] Liz Smith as the villain. No one has ever attained Winchell’s level of power, and no one ever will.”
Winchell’s career fizzled during the late 1950s and evaporated in the 1960s. A variety of factors contributed to his fall: television, which cut into newspaper readership and contributed to the shuttering of many of the nightclubs where he plucked his items; the folding of his newspaper, the New York Daily Mirror; his association with and championing of Red-chasing Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Though gossip was a relatively quiet newspaper commodity during the ’70s and ’80s, it become louder when fueled by the O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky stories and the Winchell wannabes on the Internet.
Now, in a world made serious by terror and war, is there a place for gossip? The Tribune recently ceased publication of its INC. column and other publications are questioning the place of gossip in their pages.
“Sweet Smell of Success” takes us back into an era when gossip was king. Gabler writes, “Once loosed [by Winchell] gossip refused to confine itself to the columns. Once loosed, it danced all over the paper, sometimes seizing headlines, sometimes spawning whole publications and television programs, sometimes, more insidiously, infecting reportage of so-called straight news.”
“But it is important to remember one thing,” says Guare. “It is not the man who is powerful. It’s the gossip that’s powerful.”
Winchell died, all but forgotten, in 1972. Only one mourner attended his funeral: his daughter Walda.
