View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro. or don't show this againI am good at figuring things out. Full text is unavailable for this digitized archive article. Not a never-never land, but a very real and magic place called Broadway. His program debuted on TV on October 5, 1952. He was known for an innovative style of gossipy staccato news briefs, jokes and Jazz Age slang. Over the years he was responsible for discovering or boosting the careers of Arthur Godfrey, Jackie Gleason, Buddy Ebsen, Frank Sinatra, Rowan & Martin, and scores of others for whom an orchid from Winchell in the column or on the broadcast would mean months of bookings. Copyright 1949-2022 American Heritage Publishing Co. All Rights Reserved. CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 6-- William F. Lawless 2d, a former Army private, filed suit for divorce today in Middlesex County Probate Court and asked alimony of Walda Winchell, 18, actress daughter . they wanted to know. Other Works . Thanks for your help! His daughter, Walda, was mentally unbalanced and was the only person at his graveside when he died. All his foes needed was opportunity; they got it on October 16, 1951, at Winchells headquarters, the Cub Room of the tony Stork Club. (In his youth he had been a minor Vaudeville singer.). If people like to read the slang you write and the junk you prepare and publishers pay you for that stuff, what is going to happen to art, literature and intelligence? the theater producer Morris Gest asked Winchell when the columnist was first achieving national recognition. The danger, as his onetime supporter The New Yorker expressed it in a scathing six-part profile, was that Winchell was not one of them. Visiting Winchells winter radio broadcast in Miami in 1947, Alistair Cooke, writing for the British magazine Listener , observed the thrall in which Winchell held his audience. Survivors include a daughter, Mrs. Walda von Dehn of Los Angeles; a New York, New York County (Manhattan), New York, USA, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, USA. As his readers and listeners knew, Winchell was a true democrat, a general of the ascendant mass culture. Failed to report flower. It was primitive, often not much more than gibes and anecdotes, but there was at least one observer who understood the potential program, especially now that Winchell was reaching an ever larger audience through a new weekly fifteen-minute radio program of gossip and commentary. He never legally married June Magee, the mother of his children, because he had been introducing her as his wife for some time before the birth of their first child, Walda, and he did want anyone to know that Walda was illegitimate. "[45] His use of slang, innuendo and invented euphemisms also protected him from libel accusations. Learn about how to make the most of a memorial. Herman Klurfeld, a ghostwriter for Winchell for almost three decades, began writing four newspaper columns per week for Winchell in 1936 and worked for him for 29 years. What does Winchell mean? He had been born Walter Winschel on April 7, 1897, in the Harlem section of Manhattan. I go the pace that kills, he wrote in a poem for the News . You talk like a high-school student of journalism."[10]. Like the linguistic inventions of hip-hop and rap today, slang aerated English to create a new language, a kind of subversive tongue that was especially attractive to young urban Americans. White happily complied, knowing that Winchell had been a fervent advocate of civil rights both publicly and privately. On August 11, 1919, Winchell married Rita Greene, one of his onstage partners. On the one hand, Twentieth Century-Fox enticed him to star in two films, both of them box-office successes: Wake Up and Live and Love and Hisses . Walter Winchell fans also viewed: Richard LeParmentier. Like his work on the News , his Graphic column, which he called Your Broadway and Mine, was a compendium of jokes, puns, showbusiness news, and slang. Wife Rita was a former vaudeville partner. Thanks for using Find a Grave, if you have any feedback we would love to hear from you. Winchell in fact was eager to go on active duty. Other Works Once a lovable rogue, Walter Winchell had become detestable. Winchell said, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. A lot of people are going to psychiatrists today to find out what they want, he would say years later, recalling his decision at thirteen to leave his family for vaudeville. Walda Winchell Net Worth. Originally a vaudeville performer, Winchell began his newspaper career as a Broadway reporter, critic and columnist for New York tabloids.He rose to national celebrity in the 1930s with Hearst newspaper chain syndication and a popular radio program. He uncovered both hard news and embarrassing stories about famous people by exploiting his exceptionally wide circle of contacts, first in the entertainment world and the Prohibition era underworld, then in law enforcement and politics. Winchell was born in New York City, the son of Jennie (Bakst) and Jacob Winchell, a cantor and salesman; they were Russian Jewish immigrants. "Winchell was a good newspaperman but a vain man, convinced he could change the course of world events -- slightly deluded, but never mind. As Winchell later told it, Franklin Roosevelt invited him to the White House shortly after his first inauguration just to make the columnists acquaintance and chat. This memorial has been copied to your clipboard. I knew what I didnt want. Your new password must contain one or more uppercase and lowercase letters, and one or more numbers or special characters. Thank you for fulfilling this photo request. I knew that Winchell was the countrys best-known and most widely read journalist as well as among its most influential, as. Filled with gossip, puns, and jokes, it tickled the troupe, and its author was soon sending items to, As the season wore on, Rita became tired, homesick, and depressed and begged Winchell to ask for a release from their contract. She did, then left. As it turned out, the woman was a beautiful nineteen-yearold high-kick dancer named June Aster whom Rita remembered as having flirted with Winchell at the NVA Club. [28] Winchell's best known aphorisms include: "Nothing recedes like success", and "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret". The piece is about a ruthless journalist, J.J. Hunsecker, and is generally thought to be a thinly veiled commentary on the power wielded by Winchell at the height of his influence. His newspaper column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, and he was read by 50 million people per day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. Daughter Gloria born and adopted c. 1924. [10], Winchell responded to McKelway saying, "Oh stop! So closely was Winchell identified with gossip in the late twenties and thirties that many readers thought it had sprung full-blown from his head. And he reaped the reward. [4] Winchell served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. Nor- folk County jail awaiting trial on charges of robbery. Published in TIME, Monday, Aug. 05, 1935: Born: To Columnist Walter Winchell and Mrs. (June Magee) Winchell; a son; in Manhattan. Daughter Walda divorces H Von Dehn. But I realized as I began to learn more about his life that Winchell appealed to the outsider in me as well as to the renegade historian. Eileen Jean ("Walda") Winchell, 28, onetime Broadway actress (Dark of the Moon), daughter of Columnist Walter Winchell; and California Industrialist Hyatt von Dehn, 46; she for the second time, he for the third (his second: Singer-Actress Ginny Simms); in Beverly Hills, Calif. When the clarity didnt present itself, he imposed it, not only demonizing the Soviets, who could certainly be said to have deserved it, but also hurling wild charges at the Truman administration and irresponsibly exploiting national anxieties. I thought I had chosen Walter Winchell, as I said earlier, because he possessed power and exerted a lasting effect on our culture and because he was a serious force that had never been taken seriously. In 1950, Ernest Lehman, a former publicity writer for Irving Hoffman of The Hollywood Reporter, wrote a story for Cosmopolitan titled "Tell Me About It Tomorrow". In 1946, following the death from cancer of his close friend and fellow writer Damon Runyon, Winchell appealed to his radio audience for contributions to fight the disease. Gottfried, Gilbert, host. Caricatured in "The Woods are Full of Cuckoos" as Walter Finchell, and in "Speaking of the Weather" as Walter Snitchall. Paul Bern is that way over Helen Chandlerbut who isnt? [13] In 1948 and 1949, he and influential leftist columnist Drew Pearson attacked Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in columns and radio broadcasts.[14]. On the defensive Winchell promptly took the offensive, branding Baker a Nazi sympathizer, a Communist, and an anti-Semite. [34], In the 1960s, Winchell wrote some columns for the film magazine Photoplay. But more than predicting events, he was also actively shaping them, pushing first for a massive program of rearmament and then, after Hitler had invaded Poland, nudging the country toward intervention. His daughter, Walda, was mentally unbalanced and was the only person at his graveside when he died. FOR WINCHELL, THE WORST OF IT was that the defeat took nearly two decadestwo decades of small humiliations, little nicks in the armor that had been Walter Winchell. Walter Winchell's grave is located at Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery, Phoenix, Arizona. [35] He announced his retirement on February 5, 1969, citing his son's suicide as a major reason as well as the delicate health of his companion, June Magee. In the early 1960s, a public dispute with Jack Paar effectively ended Winchell's careeralready in decline due to a shift in power from print to television. In his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein introduced the term "winchell" into the American vocabulary as a term for a politically intrusive gossip columnist, in reference to the character Ben Caxton. The Broadway of the Jazz Age was a place where the pace never slackened, the lights never dimmed, the crowds never thinned, the revelry never stoppeda place where all the energy of the era could roar. Three pallbearers took the simple, cedar coffin to the gravesite, then left, leaving Miss Winchell and Rabbi Albert Plotkin alone during the service. Directories Newly added. Sponsored by Gruen Watch Company, it originated from WJZ-TV from 6:45 to 7 p.m. Eastern Time. Walter Winchell was born on April 7, 1897 in New York City, New York, USA as Walter Winchel. Still, the NAACPs executive secretary, Walter White, asked Winchell to decry the Storks discrimination on his broadcast, and Winchell agreed to do so if White provided a letter exculpating him from any charges of racism. ("I believe that a mans private life and preferences are his own, he concluded one column in 1933, but Hitler is so dangerous and such a faker, that any weapon can be used with justification.") Create Biography You may not upload any more photos to this memorial, This photo was not uploaded because this memorial already has 20 photos, This photo was not uploaded because you have already uploaded 5 photos to this memorial, This photo was not uploaded because this memorial already has 30 photos, This photo was not uploaded because you have already uploaded 15 photos to this memorial. Are you sure that you want to report this flower to administrators as offensive or abusive? Slang was a nosethumbing, a fashion, an entertainment, a way of showing one was in the know when being in the know was an important differentiation, and Walter Winchell rapidly became, in the word of one speech professor, slangs dictator., Couples didnt get married in Winchells column; they were welded, lohengrinned, Adam-and-Eveing it. They didnt have fun; they made whoopee! They didnt have babies; they had blessed events. And when they got divorced, they were Renovated or phffft! Movies were moom pitchers, and movie lovers cinemaddicts. Legs were shafts. Passion was pash. Debutantes were debutramps. Jews were Joosh., BUT IF SLANG BROUGHT WIN- chell notice, it was gossip that brought him to national prominence and that would constitute his most important contribution to journalism. In fact, that spring at the NVA Winchell had attempted to interview Miss Aster for the News after hearing that she had taken in the child of a destitute fellow vaudevillian. . based on information from your browser. 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. 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, instancing West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges. PHOENIX, Ariz., Feb. 21 (AP) Walter Winchell was buried here today, in a service with only a single mourner and rabbi present. By this time he had been living for years with June Magee who had given birth to his child Walda. An etymologist of his day said, "there are plenty of expressions which he has fathered and which are now current among his readers and imitators and constitute a flash language which has been called Winchellese. Please complete the captcha to let us know you are a real person. Publicity Listings Despite the controversy surrounding Winchell, his popularity allowed him to leverage support for causes that he valued. I thought I had chosen Walter Winchell, as I said earlier, because he possessed power and exerted a lasting effect on our culture and because he was a serious force that had never been taken seriously. He was not part of any elite. He did, and that November Winchell Sc Greene returned to New York with a nest egg of fifteen hundred dollars but only the vaguest plan of what to do with it. A true democrat, a Communist, and movie lovers cinemaddicts married Rita Greene, of! Legal and company contact details on IMDbPro to McKelway saying, `` good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America All. Phoenix, Arizona causes that he valued sympathizer, a general of the ascendant mass culture your password... Winchell was a true democrat, a Communist, and one or more uppercase and lowercase letters, and anti-Semite... Was known for an innovative style of gossipy staccato news briefs, jokes and Jazz Age.! Was born on April 7, 1897 in New York, USA as Walter Winchel awaiting on... His onstage partners letters, and one or more numbers or special characters like high-school! Winchell said, `` Oh stop readers and listeners knew, Winchell married Rita Greene, one his! 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