GOSSIP: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WALTER WINCHELL—St. Clair McKelway—Viking ($1.75).
Two months ago The New Yorker delivered to its 152,777 subscribers the sixth and final installment of the longest "profile" (thumbnail biography) it ever ran. The subject: gun-toting, fox-faced Walter Winchell, No. 1 U. S. transom-peeper. The author: St. Clair McKelway, free-lance newshawk and onetime managing editor of The New Yorker. So sharp was Mc-Kelway's scalpel that Winchell, who had expected a pat on the head, did not realize until the operation was well begun that his throat was being slit. This week the operation appeared in book form for as many of Winchell's some 10,000,000 column readers as might relish dignified, cruel irony of the best New Yorker grade. A few of McKelway's incisions:
> Winchell and most of his readers believe he is "fiendishly and uncannily accurate." McKelway checked representative columns, found Winchell was "41.2% completely inaccurate, 18.3% partially inaccurate, 40.5% completely accurate."
> "Next to accuracy . . . it is his journalistic 'scoops' he is proudest of." But of Winchell's 19 self-trumpeted scoops in the Hauptmann case, six "had been printed from four days to seven weeks earlier in the [New York] Times."
> Most gasp-worthy Winchell phenomenon: "Having been an intimate friend of Owney Madden. New York's No. 1 gang leader of the prohibition era, he became in the short space of two years, the public pal of J. Edgar Hoover, the No. 1 G-man of the repeal era." In 1932 Winchell's intimacy with gangland led to fear he would be rubbed out for knowing too much. In terror he fled to California, returned weeks later with a new enthusiasm for law, G-men, Uncle Sam, Old Glory.
> On the world's most successful tattler, McKelway does more than tattle. His aching concern is the "Legacy of an Ex-Hoofer"—the effect of Winchellism on the standards of the press. When Winchell began gossiping in 1924 for the late scatological tabloid Evening Graphic, no U. S. paper hawked rumors about the marital relations of public figures until they turned up in divorce courts. For 16 years gossip columny spread until even the staid New York Times whispered that it heard from friends of a son of the President that he was going to be divorced. "The Graphic in its first year would have considered this news not fit to print." Laments McKelway: "Gossip-writing is at present like a spirochete in the body of journalism. . . . Newspapers . . . have never been held in less esteem by their readers or exercised less influence on the political and ethical thought of the times."
> When friends upbraid him for breaking confidences, Walter Winchell grovels, "I know—I'm just a son of a bitch." But Winchell lets no one cry "Amen" to this judgment. The late Editor Marlen Pew of the tradesheet Editor and Publisher also criticized Winchell as a bad influence on the U. S. press, was thereafter mentioned by Winchell as "Marlen Pee-you."
Of Author McKelway's concern for newspaper ethics Winchell sneers: "Oh stop! You talk like a high-school student of journalism."