Radio doings (Dec 1930-Jun1932)

"It's a Funny Racket, Eut ♦ ♦ ♦ I Wouldn't Do Anything Else! £ £ T T'S a dizzy business ... yet I'm happy where I am," declared Walter Winchell, the country's most talked-about radio columnist, whose forte is pumping people for news and spreading it to the four winds! But it takes hard work to make a gossip strip that's worth reading and hearing, Winchell reveals. "I get up promptly at four every afternoon, make the office by five and prepare the column for the next yawning," says Mrs. Winchell's boy. "Then comes the nightly round of theaters, sin-dens, ritzy parties and cognoscenti conclaves. I drink a little giggle-water here and there and sniff out the news about the celebs. At seven in the morning I go to bed. And maybe you think, people, that isn't work! "But I'll let you in on a little secret. You've got to pump for news. If you pump hard enough, you'll get plenty. Furthermore you can always manage to find a leak in the very person who promised not to tell. It's a funny racket, this gabbing game, but believe me, I wouldn't do anything else in the world. All Broadway is my backyard and you couldn't pry me loose with a part opposite Glorious Garbo." Back before the war, a stage-struck kid, who earned his coffee and cakes as a singing usher in a movie house in Harlem, eventually graduated into vaudeville where he earned $10 a week as a hoofer. He quit the stage cold and went to work as a news writer at $25.00 a week because "I thought I'd like reporting better." Apparently Walter Winchell, the lowly but ambitious reporter, was right. Because today he buys his coffee and cakes with a salary that will provide his meal-ticket for some time to come. The boy who sang in the Harlem movie emporium now writes a column syndicated throughout the country and also talks over coast-to-coast National Broadcasting Company networks in one of radio's highest-paying programs. His voice is heard in far-away Hawaii, Berlin, Tokio, and Buenos Aires, and Winchell's "0. K. America!" has become a byword wherever radio programs are heard. Winchell was born in New York in 1897. "No rag went into an extra edition over that blessed event," he says. He went to public school until he was thirteen. It was then that he went off to join the "Imperial Trio," composed of three singing ushers in the Harlem "moom pitcher" house, as he himself calls it. That trio wasn't famous then, but consider each of them now! One was Eddie Cantor, the third member, George Jessel. All have starred in NBC programs in the last year. This now famous trio once kept the crowds out of the aisles, collected late tickets and during intermissions sang popular "chunes" to those lively illustrated slides. Cantor was the lead in the trio, Jessel sang bass and Winchell was the whisky tenor. Winchell spelled his name with only one "1" then, but shortly afterward, Gus Edwards put the three boys into a revue, and the printer spelled it in its present form. "What the '1!" chimed Walter, and nonchalantly accepted the expanded moniker. It was with this act that the real trekking started. Walter played the boards in various acts from coast-to-coast, which ought to dispel the belief that little Walter hasn't been anywhere but up and down Broadway. Then along came the Says WALT WINCHELL ". . . Again in trim for his today's gossip, that becomes the neivs of tomorrow." war and believe-it-or-not, Winchell became a wise-cracking gob. "And can you imagine!" says Walter, "they made me confidential secretary to two admirals. What a nautical error! And also a juicy slice of irony. First confidential sec to a battleship, and now the mogul of Broadway's scandal-mongers." When the papers that stopped the war were signed. Winchell returned to vaudeville but soon decided to quit the stage. He wanted, the worst way, to become a newspaper man — at any price. While he was thinking about his ambition he started "The Daily News Sense," consisting of a couple of typewritten sheets which he tacked up beside the mail box in every theater where he appeared. Finally one theater owner showed the sheet to Glenn Condon, editor of the New York Vaudeville News. Condon thereupon agreed to "sign on the dotted line," with the fat salary of $25 a week! That was a break for Walter! Soon he was earning fifty, and after Condon agreed to allow him 20 per cent of the advertising he was making more than the editor. Then a new "tab" sprang to life in New York and Winchell was hired as dramatic critic, amusement editor and [Turn to Page 14] RADIO DOINGS Page Nine