Chicago -- Neal Gabler, in a fascinating new book, "Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity" (Knopf), explains to us that if we have the Oprah-izing of America in the 1990s, it is only because we first had the Winchellizing of it in the 1930s.
Walter Winchell was a minor hoofer and singer in vaudeville. He ** had started out in a boys' act with people who rose higher on the circuit than he did -- George Jessel and Eddie Cantor. But Winchell and his wife did well enough to stay alive for a few years singing and dancing.
Winchell started a gossip sheet about his fellow performers, at first for free distribution backstage. Then he placed it as a column in a New York tabloid, run by a bizarre entrepreneur and health nut, Bernarr McFadden.
The column became so popular that William Randolph Hearst wanted it for his papers. Then NBC wanted a radio version of it. Then Hollywood wanted a movie version. Winchell, pulled in all directions, dished the dirt faster and faster, with less and less checking.
He was the first to chronicle for all America the marital problems, the divorces, the quickie remarriages of other people -- though he hid his own first marriage from the public, and the fact that he had never married the woman who lived with him and bore his children.
Winchell was gleefully amoral in his early days, interested only in fame, no matter how it was won. He palled around with the celebrity gangsters of his day. He quoted another person as expressing his own drive: "As the honorable Ham Lewis of Illinois said to the editor of a famous New York daily, 'Notice me, for heaven's sake, notice me. If you can say something good, say it; but, in any event, say something. Notice me!' "
Winchell became political, in a mildly left-wing way, when President Roosevelt gave him some attention. He became even more political, in a viciously right-wing way, when J. Edgar Hoover began to cultivate him. When Winchell had his first son, Hoover sent him a telegram saying, "So you also get your man." From Hoover it was just a short step to promoting Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Mr. Gabler paints the picture of an essentially empty man, always seeking the limelight that eluded him in his vaudeville days, a person whose only contribution was stylistic -- the invention of a breathless staccato style on the page and on the airwaves that seemed to capture the tempo of the technologically accelerated world around him.
Do we have celebrity freaks on Oprah, intrusion into others' lives, invaded privacy, dissolving confidentiality? Winchell, more than anyone, invented the techniques and made them popular. He covered his rootless snooping about with moralizing platitudes. He treated politics as showbiz and showbiz as politics. He staged feuds with other people, and assailed them in order to increase his own circulation. Truly he was a hero for our time.
6* Garry Wills is a syndicated columnist.