Lyle and Goliath.
"Circumstance is a funny thing," Stuart recalls. "You miss a traffic light and your whole life changes. That's what actually happened to me when I was about 15. I was with two high school buddies on 6th Ave. In those days, from 42nd St. to about 45th St., there were a number of little auction shops. We went into one and became what they called 'a tip'?the auctioneer offered some little wrapped packages to anyone who would bid a penny, so we bid a penny, and a black guy standing among us bid a penny too, and of course what that does is, it keeps you there for the whole length of the auction. You're part of the audience, and that draws people in.
"At the end, we got our prize, and it turned out to be a little pocket comb, probably worth about a penny. We left the auction place, walked to 42nd St., and we were about to cross, but the light changed. This black fellow followed us, and we were joking about our prize, and he was about to walk to Times Square to get the subway uptown. We chatted a little bit and he said, 'How'd you like to come to my place for a drink sometime?'
"Being young, adventurous kids, we said, 'Sure.' A couple of nights later, we went to Avant Keel's home in Harlem, and I began my lifetime friendship with him.
"All because of that one penny, spent in 1939, I became very much involved with black affairs, and it would eventually cost Walter Winchell his tv career decades later. Winchell was the most powerful journalist?not of his time, but probably of all time?because his column was of such great importance that he could make a stock rise or fall by mentioning it. He could make a show close by panning it, he could keep a show open as he did with Hellzapoppin' when all the critics were against it. Even the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, would give him items."
Stuart's first contact with Winchell came when he started doing publicity and wrote a line about a stripper who was six-four and, purely as a publicity stunt, married to a midget. They had a real wedding and then separated. The line: "Lois Deefay and the midget broke up because they couldn't see eye to eye." Winchell sent a telegram saying it was the funniest line he'd heard all year. Stuart placed more and more material with him and later started ghosting complete columns, each on one subject.
Stuart was particularly sensitive about racism. One of his favorite books was Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis, about a white man who discovers that he has Negro blood. In fact, he felt so strongly about race that when he was courting Mary Louise, as a test he told her that he was "part Negro." Winchell published almost everything Stuart wrote, but when he submitted a column about blacks in the south, Winchell?who was gradually moving toward right-wing politics?decided Stuart was too liberal for him.
One night, Stuart picked up the next morning's Daily Mirror and, like most Mirror readers, automatically turned to Winchell's column. Winchell had been carrying on a campaign against dialect comics ("vomics," he called them), short-circuiting several careers in the process. He had also been repeatedly smearing internationally renowned black singer Josephine Baker, wrecking her career in America. But this time, at the top of his column, he presented a dialect story about Baker. Supposedly she had wandered into the kitchen at a party and said something to the cook, who responded, "Honey, why don't yo speak the way yo really is?" This enraged Stuart.
He headed straight for his office and his typewriter. The entire second issue of Expose would be devoted to exposing Winchell. But an ambitious attorney who had organized a phony union, the Newspaper Delivery Association, poured mimeograph ink over all 3000 copies and notified Winchell about his action. Stuart had enough money to go back to press; he and his associates distributed the issue themselves. One Times Square newsstand alone sold 1450 copies. Altogether, 85,000 copies were printed and distributed.
A publisher then offered Stuart $1000 to write a book about Winchell. While Stuart was working on it, thugs ambushed and beat him with blackjacks in order to ingratiate themselves with Winchell. When the book was published, it drove Winchell crazy. He had been attacking the Copacabana in his column because they fired one of his girlfriends from the chorus line, so the nightclub sent a limousine to Expose and bought 50 copies every day and handed them out to their best customers each night.
Winchell heard about this and never mentioned the Copacabana again. But he continued to attack Stuart?in print, on radio and television?resulting in three successful libel suits against Winchell, enabling Stuart to start his own publishing company. In the third lawsuit, Stuart personally handed a summons to ABC-TV president Bob Weitman, who told Winchell that they would pay the damages but he would be responsible for the punitive. Winchell said he would resign if he didn't get a piece of paper indemnifying him for the punitive damages. To Winchell's surprise, Weitman accepted his resignation.
"So they used me," Stuart says, "to break his lifetime contract. Again, circumstance is a funny thing. Put a penny on a prize and become very interested in black affairs, leading to that Josephine Baker item in the column, which led to my anger at Winchell, and my doing to him what he had done to people all of his career, and recently we [Barricade Books] re-published The Secret Life of Walter Winchell."
Expose was way ahead of its time, dedicated to good old-fashioned muckraking, with articles such as "Cancer Research" and "The Telephone Monopoly." But the name Expose got confused with the slick scandal magazines that were flourishing then?Exposed, Confidential, Whisper, Secret?so Expose became The Independent, and I eventually became its managing editor.
When Lyle was writing the Winchell book, I helped a little with the research. I was still a college student, committed to working as a camp counselor that summer, and my mother would send me a collection of Winchell's columns each week. When Stuart sued Confidential for libel, he assigned me to serve a subpoena on the publisher, Robert Harrison. I succeeded on my first attempt, and then just stood there in Harrison's office, basking in my own naiveté.
"Okay, it's served," he snarled. "What the hell are you waiting for, a tip?"
It was a great moment of cringe.
[paulkrassner.com]