Background
Winchell was born in New York City, the son of Jennie and Jacob Winchell, a salesman; they were Russian Jewish immigrants.
Winchell was born in New York City, the son of Jennie and Jacob Winchell, a salesman; they were Russian Jewish immigrants.
He left school in the sixth grade and started performing in Gus Edwards's vaudeville troupe known as the "Newsboys Sextet," which also included a young George Jessel.
He began his career in journalism by posting notes about his acting troupe on backstage bulletin boards. He joined the Vaudeville News in 1920, then left the paper for the Evening Graphic in 1924, where his column was named Mainly About Mainstreeters. He was hired on June 10, 1929, by the New York Daily Mirror, where he finally became the author of the first syndicated gossip column, entitled On-Broadway. The column was syndicated by King Features Syndicate.
He used connections in the entertainment, social, and governmental realms to expose exciting or embarrassing information about celebrities in those industries. This caused him to become very feared as a journalist, because he would routinely affect the lives of famous or powerful people, exposing alleged information and rumors about them, using this as ammunition to attack his enemies and to blackmail influential people. He used this power, trading positive mention in his column (and later, his radio show) for more rumors and secrets.
He made his radio debut over WABC in New York, a CBS affiliate, on May 12, 1930. The show entitled Saks on Broadway was a 15-minute feature that provided business news about Broadway. He switched to WJZ (later renamed WABC) and the NBC Blue (later ABC Radio) in 1932 for the Jergens Journal.
By the 1930s, Winchell was "an intimate friend of Owney Madden, New York's No. 1 gang leader of the prohibition era", but "in 1932 Winchell's intimacy with criminals caused him to fear he would be 'rubbed out' for 'knowing too much.'" He fled to California and "returned weeks later with a new enthusiasm for law, G-men, Uncle Sam, and Old Glory". His coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping and subsequent trial received national attention. Within two years, he befriended J. Edgar Hoover, the No. 2 G-man of the repeal era. He was responsible for turning Louis "Lepke" Buchalter of Murder, Inc. over to Hoover. His newspaper column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, and he was read by 50 million people a day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His Sunday night radio broadcast was heard by another 20 million people from 1930 to the late 1950s. In 1948, Winchell had the top-rated radio show when he surpassed Fred Allen and Jack Benny. One example of his profile at his professional peak was being mentioned in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1937 song "The Lady Is a Tramp": "She follows Winchell, and she reads every line."
Winchell was Jewish and was one of the first commentators in America to attack Adolf Hitler and American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund, and especially its leader Fritz Julius Kuhn. He was a staunch supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal throughout the Depression era, and frequently served as the Roosevelt Administration's mouthpiece in favor of interventionism as the European war crisis loomed in the late 1930s. Early on, he denounced American isolationists as favoring appeasement of Hitler, and was explicit in his attacks on such prominent isolationists as Charles Lindbergh, whom he dubbed "The Lone Ostrich", and Gerald L. K. Smith, whom he denounced as "Gerald Lucifer KKKodfish Smith". Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Winchell was also an outspoken supporter of civil rights for African Americans, and frequently attacked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups as supporting un-American, pro-German goals. After World War II, Winchell began to denounce Communism as the main threat facing America.
During World War II, he attacked the National Maritime Union, the labor organization for the civilian United States Merchant Marine, which he said was run by Communists. In 1948 and 1949, he and influential leftist columnist Drew Pearson "inaccurately and maliciously assaulted Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in columns and radio broadcasts."
Winchell announced his retirement on February 5, 1969, citing his son's suicide as a major reason, while also noting the delicate health of his companion, Elizabeth June Magee. Exactly one year after his retirement, Magee died at a Phoenix hospital while undergoing treatment for a heart condition.
Winchell spent his final two years as a recluse at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Larry King, who replaced Winchell at the Miami Herald, observed:
He was so sad. You know what Winchell was doing at the end? Typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner. That's how sad he got. When he died, only one person came to his funeral: his daughter.
(Several of Winchell's former co-workers expressed a willingness to go, but were turned back by his daughter Walda.)
Winchell died of prostate cancer at the age of 74 on February 20, 1972, in Los Angeles, California. He is buried in Greenwood/Memory Lawn Mortuary & Cemetery in Phoenix.
Many other columnists began to write gossip soon after Winchell's initial success, such as Ed Sullivan in New York and Louella Parsons in Los Angeles. He wrote in a style filled with slang and incomplete sentences. Winchell's casual writing style famously earned him the ire of mobster Dutch Schultz, who confronted him at New York's Cotton Club and publicly lambasted him for using the phrase "pushover" to describe Schultz's penchant for blonde women. Some notable Winchell quotations are: "Nothing recedes like success", and "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret".
Winchell opened his radio broadcasts by pressing randomly on a telegraph key, a sound that created a sense of urgency and importance, and using the catchphrase "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press." He would then read each of his stories with a staccato delivery (up to a rate of 197 words per minute, though he claimed a speed of well over 200 wpm in an interview in 1967), noticeably faster than the typical pace of American speech. His diction can also be heard in his breathless narration of the Untouchables television series as well as in several Hollywood films.
On August 11, 1919, Winchell married Rita Greene, one of his onstage partners. The couple separated a few years later, and he moved in with June Magee, who had already adopted daughter, Gloria and given birth to their first child in 1927, a daughter named Walda. Winchell and Greene eventually divorced in 1928. Winchell and Magee would never marry, although the couple maintained the front of being married for the rest of their lives.
Winchell and Magee had three children; two daughters, Gloria (whom the couple adopted), Walda, and a son, Walter Jr. Gloria died of pneumonia at the age of nine, and Walda spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Walter Jr., the only son of the journalist, committed suicide in his family's garage on Christmas night, 1968. Having spent the previous two years on welfare, Walter Jr. had last been employed as a dishwasher in Santa Ana, California, but listed himself as a freelancer who for a time wrote a column in the Los Angeles Free Press, an alternative newspaper published between 1964 and 1978.