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Attack! Winchell retorted with a fresh flurry of testimonials to himself from Negroes, and launched a sniping attack on Josephine. In successive columns she became pro-fascist, a troublemaker and a Communist-guided provocateuse. Her supporters became "the Josephine Baker riot-inciters." Winchell reported darkly that "newspapermen are checking the tip that one of the complainants against the Stork Club (and her husband) helped incite and participated in the Paul Robeson-Peekskill riots." Then he reported that in 1935 Josephine had declared: "I am willing to recruit a Negro army to help Italy" in Mussolini's war on Ethiopia.
The topper was a report about her and the 1935 New York nightclub, Chez Josephine Baker: "The club was run in an extremely elegant manner . . . she did not want colored patronage."
"Ungather My Dry Goods." Josephine appealed to President Truman himself. "This matter is much bigger than Josephine Baker," she cried. "It is a matter that concerns America itself."
Amidst the babel, the voice of Sugar Ray was heard again in the New York Post. A fellow had come up behind him the other night, said Sugar Ray, grabbed him by the neck and demanded to know where he stood in the argument. "I had to tell him, 'Daddy-O, ungather my dry goods or I'll have to let you have it,' " said Sugar. With the air of a man trying to be helpful to his friend Winchell, Sugar explained that Walter had told him about the Stork Club long ago. "I called him up once," said Sugar, "and told him I'd meet him down at the Stork Club and he said, 'I wish you wouldn't, Champ. Sherman Billingsley doesn't like Negroes and he doesn't want them in his place, and if you came down there and he insulted you I'd have to break with him although I've known him for 23 years.' "
Sugar added a final thought: "Walter is a newspaperman and is entitled to his own opinion, but I think it is making him appear as though he were attacking Miss Baker because she stood up in this matter against Sherman Billingsley."
At week's end, Champ Winchell was still going right on talking. But Sugar Ray had about said the last word.
* Now one of the dirtiest words in the language —thanks to its indiscriminate use by columnists like Winchell. Its popular meaning: antiSemitism, anti-Negroism.