Is Schmooze News?

Michael Herr`s `Screen-novel` Tells The Story Behind Walter Winchell

May 13, 1990|By Reviewed by Joseph Coates, Tribune book critic.

Walter Winchell

By Michael Herr

Knopf, 158 pages, $18.95

When is a novel not a novel but still a very good piece of fiction?

Answer: When it`s an aborted screenplay by Michael Herr, whose impressionistic book of Vietnam reportage, ``Dispatches,`` published in 1977, remains the best of many excellent accounts of that war because it invented its own genre, one that somehow combined the best features of fiction and nonfiction, of sensitive personal memoir and hard-nosed eyewitness journalism.

As a correspondent for Esquire magazine, Herr went to Vietnam in 1967 unhampered by newspaper or network deadlines. He was less dependent on the official sources, who were all too willing to supply reporters with their own version of that uniquely divisive war, and was able to let the story shape its own form, to follow his own feelings to the sweat-level truths and ironies he found among the grunts who fought it.

It`s interesting that in ``Walter Winchell`` he follows the same patterns: This book didn`t start out to be a book but was consciously written as something else, in this case a screenplay. ``To be honest,`` Herr says in a preface, ``I always meant it to be read, and in that sense thought of it as something `more` than a screenplay,`` but ``its producers thought of it as something less. . . . You could call it a screenplay that`s typed like a novel, that reads like a novel but plays like a movie.`` And this hybrid is about a kind of news and newsman that most journalists would still refuse to dignify with those terms.

Early on, we see Winchell the failed vaudevillian turning down a day job in a business run by an old friend with the punchline, ``What, and leave show business?`` Instead he tries to figure out how to ``take what I know and turn it into dough. . . . I know all the acts . . . who`s in bed with who, who`s stealing whose material. . . .``

``So, you got a great line of schmooze,`` the friend says. ``Who`ll buy?``

``You call it schmooze, I say it`s news.``

It would appear, then, that Herr is identifying with Winchell to some extent, for both men achieved success (on vastly different scales, to be sure) by widening the definition of news and making it stick. And both started out in times-the `20s and the `60s-when the news business was ripe for new definition. When Winchell doubts he could ever be a newspaperman, his friend says:

``You think it`s above you? You ever meet a newspaperman? They make you guys (vaudevillians) look like the Prince of Wales.``

After Winchell has parlayed his backstage newsletters into a Broadway gossip column on the Daily Graphic, Bernarr Macfadden`s sleazy tabloid, he reflects on the times with his caustic new friend and mentor, Damon Runyon:

``Al Capone`s as famous as Al Jolson. . . . It`s all going nuts, and it`s all going into the papers.``

Herr depicts the early Winchell as a man of integrity and even courage, telling a complaining advertiser that ``you buy space in the paper, you don`t buy me,`` making fun of his powerful publisher in print, standing up to the mobster Owney Madden, who later saves his life when Winchell breaks the story about the imminent assassination of Mad Dog Coll by a group of imported Chicago torpedoes.

His decline doesn`t begin until after he allows the repellent Roy Cohn to bully him onto the McCarthy bandwagon in the late 1940s-when, in any case, the Front Page style that Winchell embodied to the point of parody is beginning to look more than a little archaic and when his brash, streetwise ego has hardened into megalomania.

Even slightly modified to novel form, this is a brilliant screenplay, full of punchy dialogue, colorful people and places, and period movie devices like spinning headlines that convey both the highly charged era it portrays and the vitality of the times as Winchell himself incarnated it.

``Midnight. The Stork Club. The Cub Room is packed,`` begins one passage showing him at the height of his powers in 1943. ``The camera moves rapidly from the front doors of the club through the crowds, WALTER WINCHELL`S p.o.v., people turning as though they`ve felt a blast of tremendous energy at their backs. . . .`` And there are insider vignettes of such celebrities as Hemingway, Runyon and Hedy Lamarr, along with a cowed chorus of press agents whose gallows humor relieves the strain of their fawning on Winchell.

``Jeez,`` one of them says, ``did you see the column this morning? Bette Davis has cancer.``

``She better have cancer, or she`s in big trouble.``

Maybe Herr`s ``Winchell`` never got to the screen because it reminded too many Hollywood types of themselves. Though it does play beautifully as a movie, it doesn`t do what the novel alone can do: Give us the interior life of people simultaneously with the external events around them. But assuming you have to write a novel instead of a screenplay, Herr`s hybrid is perfect for painting a hollow man like Winchell, who turned himself into the kind of brittle celebrity persona he wrote about.

``Personally,`` Herr tells us, ``my most ambitious claims for it are as an entertainment in the tradition of the Hollywood biopic, with the undertones of history spreading beneath the jokes in various bitter shades of dark.``

In those terms, ``Winchell`` succeeds brilliantly, even if it leaves the reader a little hungry for the meat and potatoes of a novel.