Columnists

HARRY SALPETER

Informal portraits of two of the outstanding male caryatids of Manhattan's far-flung Fourth Estate

Alexander Woollcott is the most cultivated, the most verbally dexterous, the most witty, the most saltily individual, the most variously endowed of all those who may he roughly classified as New York columnists. Walter Winchell banks more money, 0. 0. McIntyre represents New York to a larger provincial public, and Hey wood Broun inspires debate and affection among more men and women who call themselves liberals, but Woollcott is more in himself—apart from any job he may he holding at the moment—than any one of these. Should you deprive Winchell and McIntyre, for example, of their columns, there would be almost nothing left; if you took ten columns from Woollcott, there would still he Woollcott.

As a critic, he does not know the meaning of equivocation. Whether he praises or condemns, he burns his bridges behind him. The insensitive flesh of more than one ninny has quivered at the sharp point of his impaling phrases—he is probably the most deadly phrase-maker in New York—but if you happen to be Dorothy Parker or Hamilton College, there is no point in loyalty or log-rolling at which he will stop. He is the most shameless log-roller in New York. There is nothing dubious about him. He is either the rudest, or the most tender; the most vindictive, or the most loyal and affectionate person in the world. There are few phenomena in this world of which he deigns to take cognizance which leave him indifferent or about which anyone else within the range of his influence is going to he left indifferent. He rarely fails to give better than he gets. Once upon a time George Jean Nathan referred to him as "the Seidlitz powder of Times Square" and shortly afterwards the heretofore uncomplaining victim published the discovery, irrelevant to the play being discussed, that Nathan looked like a ticket speculator.

There are very few jobs Woollcott would accept that he could not fill and beyond which his vitality would not overflow. I suspect that his own versatility sometimes surprises him. Few of those who chuckle over his bright reviews and precious magazine pieces are aware that he was once a crack reporter who worked himself into a nervous breakdown on the Rosenthal murder case; he worked also on the sinking of the Titanic and on the burning of the state capitol at Albany. He has collaborated in one play, The Channel Rand (with that ubiquitous collaborator and play doctor, George S. Kaufman) and has been acting in S. N. Behrman's Brief Moment.—and acting admirably.

It is not generally known that he was an actor long before he was a critic—at the age of five. That age was a particularly critical one for Master Woollcott, for within a brief period he made his stage début and clenched his little fists in the resolve to be a critic when he grew up. In the narrow hallway of the Woollcott home in Kansas City, he strutted about one afternoon in the entirely appropriate role of Puck in Midsummer's Night's Dream. And soon afterward Roswell Martin Field, Eugene Field's brother, took him to see Eddie Foy in Sinbad the Sailor. It was there and then that Master Woollcott decided to become a critic, which he did many, many years later when, upon emerging from a breakdown caused by over-exertion in trying to cover (and solve) the Rosenthal murder case for the New York Times, he learned that that journal's dramatic critic, Adolph Klauber, had left the paper to marry Jane Cowl.

But between the roles of Peck and of Harold Sigrift (in Brief Moment), Woollcott has squeezed the juices out of many pleasant acting interludes. In fact, his friends suspect that he is always acting—the part of Alexander Woollcott. In charades and other parlor games he has for a long time been distinguished as a most insouciant actor. At dear old Hamilton College (which gave him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 1924), he performed the part of a ravishing blonde in Augustin Daly's A Night Out. When, many years later, the just risen curtain of a benefit performance revealed Woollcott as Henry VIII and Madge Kennedy as Anne Boleyn, a great hiss swept through the audience—which consisted mostly of theatre-folk—and hiss-leaders arose at once to maintain the flagging energies of the hissers. Woollcott wondered at the time that Madge Kennedy could be so unpopular.

He was born forty-five years ago and few of them have been dull ones. He saw the light for the first time in a house on Brisbane Hill, in a place called Phalanx, N. J. Not long afterwards, Alexander was swept westward in a family hegira to Kansas City, and some years later there was a backward trek to Philadelphia, where the family lived while young Mr. Woollcott was of high school age. A scholarship took him through Hamilton College, which gave him his degree in 1909. In proportion to his means, he is probably the most loyal alumnus that college ever had, for it is a quaint custom of Woollcott's to buy out the house for his friends for that evening on which the Hamilton College Choir is to perform in New York. He tried to get a job on the Philadelphia Record and as a preliminary move called on the wife of the editor-in-chief for a note of recommendation. She promised to telephone it and as the journalist-to-be was leaving, to take the street car to the newspaper offices, he heard her saying to the managing editor: "Now, Mr. Dwyer, he should make a good reporter because he's the damnedest noisiest person I ever met." P.S. He didn't get the job. He was given a chance on the New York Times. He was a general reporter and sports writer before he became dramatic critic, on a rainy February night. When the United States entered the war, Woollcott had begun his ascent and had published his first book, a celebration of his most intense loyalty, Mrs. Fiske—her views on acting, actors and the problems of the stage. He tried to enlist in the army, but was rejected; he tried to enlist in the navy and again was turned down. His defects of eyesight, walking and stance were not, however, serious enough to exclude him from a hospital unit. But shortly after he arrived in France, he was selected to found and operate The Stars and Stripes, a daily journal of information and font of morale for the A. E. F. Upon being mustered out, he returned to The Times, where he remained until 1922. He then moved to The Herald, subsequently, The Sun and, finally, The World, which he left long before that paper was absorbed by The Evening Telegram.

• His career as a newspaper dramatic critic included much more than the filling of thousands of feet of newsprint and the attending of thousands of first nights in New York, Paris, London and Berlin. During bright leisure moments he threw off—and is still in the habit of doing this—dozens and dozens of magazine articles, many of which appeared later in book form, among them being Enchanted Aisles and Going to Pieces. Merely to establish a point of law he had himself thrown out of twenty-two theatres. He introduced Ruth Gordon to Jed Harris. He took part in more than one theatrical benefit and did not squirm too uncomfortably when he saw himself caricatured in gestures of deference to an impersonated Mrs. Fiske on the stage of the Garrick during one of the Gaieties.

About the time Woollcott left The World, a rumor was about to the effect that he was leaving the world in another sense—that he was going off to some nice quiet college— preferably Hamilton—to teach. It would have surprised no one had eager thousands of young students beaten a path to Woollcott's lecture hall, in whatever college it may have been, for during a short lecture series on Morningside Heights, Columbia authorities were ready to put the S. R. 0. sign outside of Woollcott's classroom. However, the rumor was proved false.

He had been giving radio talks and these he continued. He was the Town Crier for the Gruen Watch Company at the time that Heywood Broun was the Voice of Liberalism for Eno's Fruit Salts. As Town Crier, Woollcott had the town by the ears with his announcement that Gen. John J. Pershing had shot at, and wounded, Supreme Court Justice Lydon instead of the grouse with which Bernard Baruch had stocked his estate in Scotland.

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He has done many curious things and is adding to the catalogue. He has thought it would be fun to conduct a book shop, or mend shoes, or edit (with Deems Taylor) an intelligent one-edition tabloid daily. He has traveled from New York to China to attend the birthday party of the mother of a Chinese classmate (this occasion lasted a month; 1000 guests and 200 relatives were entertained by two opera companies and three troupes and ministered to by 400 servants, and the scene for these festivities was eight palaces joined together). He took the pulpit of a church during a Christmas Day service and spoke at a meeting to protest the non-appointment of Frank Lloyd Wright to the commission of architects designing Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition for 1933.

II

Just a few years ago, the senior member of the recently disbanded song-and-dance team of Winchell & Greene was going about Broadway in the service of the Vaudeville News, soliciting news items with his right hand and advertisements with his left. With his right hand he earned a mere $25 a week, but with his left he earned so much more that his total pay came to more than that of his employer. When The Graphic opened shop, Fulton Oursler called Bernarr Macfadden's attention to the bright star of the Vaudeville News, and he became columnist, dramatic critic and drama editor of the new tabloid, at $100 a week. In almost no time, Broadway, as well as the rest of the town, was learning a new language. The new columnist's phrases were becoming part of all smart Manhattan chatter. He was quoted, imitated, parodied, mimicked, derided and praised, taken up and put down by the intelligentsia and the cognoscenti. His pay rose by such large percentages that he almost became dizzy. He was given large cuts in the revenues derived from the syndication of his column in papers outside of New York. Magazines were soliciting contributions from a columnist who hadn't passed the sixth year in a Harlem grammar school. The Mirror took him from The Graphic and after a year or more doubled his pay to $600 a week. Radio advertisers bid for his services. Today, the nattily-dressed, white-faced, nervous Broadway columnist deposits $5,000 in the bank every week. His success, the publicity he has been deriving from that success, the envy and the emulation which that success has elicited, the deference paid him by speakeasy owners, doormen, gangsters, Broadway chiselers, politicians, chorus girls, waiters and newspaper men are measured exclusively in terms of the money which he can deposit every week.

Walter Winchell is enjoying the reward of the successful innovator. He discovered that Broadway was a village and that gossip became news the moment it was printed. He became the gossip-monger of America's largest village. At the beginning, he credited too many sources of information; he has since become somewhat more discreet and selective. The limitations of his vocabulary compelled him to tell a story with the potential value of hundreds of words in a phrase, rarely more than a sentence. It is to these limitations that Winchell owes his particular vogue, for, from the beginning, he wrote in the jargon in which he spoke. He awoke to discover himself a contributor to the American language. His phrases were his trademark, and his gossip was inseparable from the language in which it was conveyed.

Winchell is a 116th Street boy. He was born in New York in 1897, attended P. S. 184, terminated his formal education in the 6B grade, at the age of thirteen, and left to sing tenor for a living. Cantor and Jessel were part of the quartette in which he sang at one of the earliest nickelodeon theatres, on 116th Street, east of Lenox Avenue. In the fall of that year, 1910, Gus Edwards took up Cantor, Jessel and Winchell and made them part of a newsboys' sextet that sang at Union Hill, N. J. Winchell remained for two years under the wing of Edwards, earning $15 a week as a performer and another $2 as assistant stage manager. Thus early did he show his predilection for doubling his salary.

In 1916 he appeared in a song, dance and patter act. During the war he was in the navy and when he returned to the vaudeville stage in the East he had no luck and went to Chicago where he obtained a two-years booking on the Pantages circuit.

It was during this period that the restlessly stirring brain of Winchell conceived the beginnings of his present column. He called it The Daily News Sense, got it out in two editions on his typewriter and pasted it up near the traveling troupers' mailbox. In it he would ask such questions as "What was Eddie doing up in Mabel's room at three o'clock this morning?" or "Hasn't Eddie got a girl in Calgary?" In such questions as these and in those concerning income, Winchell has always found his chief instinctive interests and his public is as large as it is because such questions form the lowest common denominator in social curiosity.

The manager of one of the theatres in which Winchell was appearing sent a copy of the News Sense to Glenn Condon, managing editor of the Vaudeville News, in which appeared a facsimile copy and one of the earliest favorable press notices Winchell ever received. Shortly afterwards, Winchell became West Coast correspondent for the Vaudeville News. Winchell had been receiving $100 a week and saving $50. He came on to New York and asked Condon for a job. He got it, at $25 a week, and by drawing on his savings managed to get along until the device of soliciting advertisements on commission occurred to him and he began replenishing his savings. The rest is Broadway history.