Revolving Critic

If there is one thing that Columnist Walter Winchell dislikes more than criticism, it is having an editor slice criticism out of a Winchell column. Last week a combination of both outrages had him in a revolving fury.

It all began with his 2,900-word interview with Gambler Frank Costello, which International News Service syndicated across the nation last month. In Florida (where "your New York correspondent" spends his winters), the Knight-owned Miami Herald ran the Costello interview in full. But it also printed a flood of protests from readers, with such headlines as:

IS WALTER WINCHELL AN APOLOGIST FOR

OUR LAW BREAKERS? Winchell swung back in a column last week from a Florida letter of his own (from a Howard Slaughter), scoring the Herald's "hypocrisy" for running advertisements from nightclubs which turned out to be gambling joints.

Hearst's King Features Syndicate, which distributes Winchell to some 600 papers, cut out the paragraphs attacking the Herald, although the New York Mirror, which gets the column direct from Winchell, had already printed it. Winchell exploded, ordered his secretary to serve King Features with an ultimatum: if they did not send out the missing paragraphs in 15 days, he was quitting. King Features did nothing, but Winchell was mollified when he discovered that the Miami Herald itself had spotted the anti-Herald diatribe in the Mirror and printed it. Said he, ruefully, at week's end: "I'm just making myself older getting into all these things."

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