Walter Winchell

Vanity Fair, January 1930

'Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press!" That's how Walter Winchell opened his weekly radio show, which reached 30 million listeners and made him America's highest-paid newsman. Winchell grew up in Harlem, hit the vaudeville circuit at twelve with Georgie Jessel, and at twenty-seven became a star, "Little Boy Peep, ' ' for inventing the tabloid gossip column. From his office—the Stork Club's Table 50—he spewed out a searing mix of news and scandal in rapid-fire show-biz shtick. He was a fierce F.D.R. man, railed against "Ratzis" and "Scummunists," ran exclusives on Capone and the Lindbergh kidnapping, delivered Murder Inc.'s Lepke Buchalter to J. Edgar Hoover, and dished who was "that way about that one." Now, in Walter Winchell (Knopf), Michael Herr, author of Dispatches, takes on the man Hemingway said "may be the only newspaperman in the world who would last three rounds with the Zeitgeist."