The 40s: The Story of a Decade (58 page)

NOVEMBER 15, 1947 (ON EDITH PIAF)

O
ne of our men, who used to admire Edith Piaf, the tiny French singer, in Paris in 1939, was afraid that she might have brightened up her repertory for her engagement at the Playhouse here, on the theory that Americans demand optimism. He was so concerned that he went over to the Hotel Ambassador to see her before he took a chance on going to the show to hear her—said he wanted to remember her in all her pristine gloom, and not be disillusioned. In Paris, he said, she used to stand up straight and plain in front of a night-club audience—no makeup, a drab dress—and delight it with a long series of songs ending in a drowning, an arrest, an assassination, or death on a pallet. At the finish of each, the listeners would gulp a couple of quick drinks before the next began. “She was a doleful little soulful,” our man remarked sentimentally. He made an engagement with her for one o’clock, and when he called on the hotel phone at that hour, she thanked him in French for being so punctual. “I forgot to set the alarm clock,” she explained, “and if you hadn’t come, I’d have gone on sleeping.” Our man went up to the chanteuse’s living room to wait while she dressed, and while waiting there saw some pencilled notes lying on a coffee table beside a book titled
L’Anglais sans Peine
, open to a chapter called “Pronunciation of the English Th,” which began, “Some people who lisp pronounce without wishing to do so the two sounds of the th as in English perfectly.” The notes were in English and were obviously for introductory speeches for songs that Mlle. Piaf was going to sing in French. Knowing that she had never appeared before an English-speaking audience,
prior to her current engagement, he concluded that she had been memorizing the speeches with
L’Anglais sans Peine
as a reference.

“A woman is waiting for a suitor who promised to return to her when he becomes a captain,” the first note read. “In the corner a phonograph is playing a popular record it is cold as long as there is life there is hope. She waits for 20 years but he does not come back and the record keeps on playing until it is worn out.” The second said, “Perrine—and now the sad story of Perrine, a pretty girl who worked for a priest, but had a secret lover. One night the priest surprises them together and Perrine hides her lover in a large box, but alas forgets about him and leaves him to the mercies of the rats. When he is found a candlestick is made from his leg and a basin for the church from his head, and so ends the sad story of a young man who liked girls too well.” Heartened by what he had read, our man greeted Mlle. Piaf, when she appeared, like an old friend upon whom he could depend. She wore gold mules with platform soles about six inches thick, which increased her height to approximately five feet. Her mop of rusty-red hair, a stage trademark, was imprisoned under a tight turban. She looked sleeker offstage than on, our man said. Mlle. Piaf was born in Belleville, a quarter of Paris not generally considered chic, and made her first public appearance at seven, in a circus in which her father was an acrobat. She made her adult début in 1935, and was a hit almost from the start. When our man asked her—disingenuously, it would seem—whether she had any more of those wonderful sad songs she used to sing, she said, “No, I don’t feel the old songs any more. I have evolved. I was never really a pessimist. I believe that there is always a little corner of blue sky, nevertheless, somewhere. In those old songs, there arrived invariably, at the end, a catastrophe. But now I have one called ‘Mariage,’ which is quite different. It begins in the cell of a woman who has
already
murdered her husband. She reviews her life, she hears the wedding bells, she sees herself in the arms of this man whom she has killed, an innocent young bride. It’s very beautiful.” As for herself, Mlle. Piaf said, she has never married and never killed anybody. “For me, love always goes badly,” she said. “It is perhaps because I have a mania of choosing. I don’t wait to be chosen. That places me in a position of inferiority. And I always choose badly. So the relationships turn out badly. Sometimes only two or three days. But I’m always optimistic.” She is studying English hard, with the assistance of an associate professor at Columbia and of the night clubs of the city. She thinks Ray Bolger is
formidable
and had been to see him three times up to the day our man called.

Reassured, our man went to hear Mlle. Piaf a couple of nights later, and turned up at the office the next morning radiant. “The best number she did,” he said, “was where an accordionist goes off to the war and gets killed. His sweetheart listens to the music of another accordion and goes nuts. Then there is one about a woman tourist who has one big night with a sailor in a port where the ship stops, and the sailor goes off on another ship and gets drowned. For an encore, she sang that old honey about the woman who falls in love with a Foreign Legion soldier—she hasn’t even had time to learn his name—and he gets killed and they bury him under the warm sand. I haven’t had such a good time in years.”

JUNE 15, 1940 (ON WALTER WINCHELL)

O
n Saturday, September 2, 1939, it seemed certain to Walter Winchell, as it did to the rest of us, that Great Britain was about to go to war with Germany. Unlike the rest of us, Winchell did something about this. After turning it over in his mind, he sent a cablegram early the next morning to Prime Minister Chamberlain, as follows:

The next day Winchell made public the text of this cablegram by printing it in his daily column, “Walter Winchell on Broadway,” which appears in the
Daily Mirror
in New York and in a hundred and sixty-five other newspapers in the United States. He printed it without comment, merely making it clear to his readers that it was he who had sent the cablegram.

The day after that, September 5th, Winchell wrote in his column:

It is significant that in announcing what is to him an extraordinary personal coup, Winchell simply presents the facts unemotionally, setting them down for history’s sake, as it were. The inner conviction that he is actually responsible for Chamberlain’s proclamation appears to stir him only intellectually. A tone of almost melancholy aloofness is discernible, as if Winchell no longer enjoys as an adventurer the sweet fruits of triumph but is beginning to see himself with sober detachment as an actor on the stage of current events. There is a telling phrase in the text of his cablegram to Chamberlain. He insists that in what he is saying to the British Prime Minister he is speaking merely as a layman. This is the familiar protestation of the man of consequence. Nobody but a distinguished personage whose eminence is unassailable ever tries to palm himself off as an ordinary, run-of-the-mill citizen.

There are probably critics who would say that it is ridiculous for a mere gossip writer to put his nose into serious international affairs, and that for Winchell to presume that his cablegram actually influenced Chamberlain is patently absurd. This is a narrow view. Winchell has no reason to think that gossip writing is dishonorable or undignified, or that, as a gossip writer, he deserves anything but respectful consideration. Calling Winchell a mere gossip writer is like calling Lindbergh a mere aviator or Gene Tunney a mere prizefighter. The writing of gossip, the setting down of items about the private lives of his fellow-citizens, is responsible for Winchell’s enormous success in life, but it would be an understatement to sum him up by saying, “He writes gossip,” just as it would be to say of Tunney, “He beat Dempsey,” or of Lindbergh, “He flew to Paris.”

From the beginning of his career as a gossip writer fifteen years ago, people whom Winchell looks up to have encouraged him in his work. Such celebrities as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Leopold
Stokowski, James J. Walker, Faith Baldwin, Gypsy Rose Lee, Rupert Hughes, James Montgomery Flagg, Shirley Temple, and Lowell Thomas have written guest columns for him so he could take vacations in the summer. From the start he has been on friendly and sometimes intimate terms with the members of some of the oldest and most respected families of New York. They call him Walter and give him items for his column. He was the favorite columnist of the leading gangsters of New York when they ruled the town; they took him to prizefights and gave him elaborate parties. One of them once sent him a Stutz. About a year ago he was guest of honor at a luncheon tendered in the Capitol Building in Washington by the Vice-President of the United States, and some months before that the President of the United States, in starting off a forty-five-minute tête-à-tête with Winchell, had slapped him affectionately on the knee and said, “Walter, I’ve got an item for you.” The American Legion has given him a gold medal “in recognition of his contribution to Americanism,” and Lakewood, New Jersey, has named a thoroughfare Winchell Street in honor of “the first soldier in our land in the cause of democracy.” His patriotic writings have been reprinted at the expense of the government and handed out to the public by the Democratic Party. His valuable life, once zealously protected by bodyguards assigned to him by his friends Owney Madden and Lucky Luciano, has in more recent years been watched over by agents on the payroll of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, assigned to him by his friend J. Edgar Hoover.

To a sympathetic follower of Winchell’s career it is clear that his gesture in giving advice to Chamberlain was not that of a busybody trying to mind somebody else’s business. It was the thoughtful action of a public figure fulfilling a responsibility which had more or less been thrust upon him. While the idea of conducting the second World War against Hitler rather than against the German people may have occurred to England’s best minds before Winchell cabled Chamberlain (the Allies having made the same distinction between the Kaiser and the German people at the beginning of the first World War), it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that Winchell’s cablegram was shown to the British Prime Minister, that he read it, and that it was respectfully acknowledged.

· · ·

At the moment Winchell is unquestionably the country’s most easily recognized non-layman, with the exception of Father Divine. The major and minor aspects of his existence are distinctive in almost every detail.
Success and public acclaim have not made him a stuffed shirt. He has a gift for idiosyncrasy and is not self-conscious about it. He has two children and both are named after him; his son is Walter and his daughter is Walda. He goes to sleep around nine or ten in the morning and gets up in time to have breakfast while his children are having their supper. In the inside pocket of his coat he carries a loose-leaf booklet containing as many as twenty photographs of Walter and Walda, and in another pocket of his coat he carries a loaded automatic. In his overcoat pocket he carries a second loaded automatic. Although he has never been shot at and has been beaten up only twice, he is always expecting to be attacked.

The
Mirror
pays him $1,200 a week and 50 percent of the money from the syndication of his column, amounting to some $750 a week, and he makes $5,000 a week more for his weekly radio talk. As Winchell has pointed out in his column, he pays around 50 percent of his earnings to the state and federal governments. This leaves him a net income of approximately $185,000 a year, but he wears shoes until they have holes in the soles. He almost invariably wears a blue suit, a blue shirt, a blue tie, and a snap-brim gray felt hat. He has never played golf or tennis or badminton or ping-pong. He learned to swim only last summer. Until 1932 he had never seen a football game. He took up the rumba a few months ago and is now an enthusiast. Practically the only other form of relaxation his friends have actually seen him engage in is motoring. The New York Police Department has given him special permission to equip his sedan with a short-wave receiving set with which he picks up calls sent from Police Headquarters to police radio patrol cars.