Off Beat

A few weeks ago, Gossip Columnist Walter Winchell sat down behind a typewriter and pecked out a column. It was the first he had written in nearly two months; but whatever Winchell had to say he kept to himself. "I went to the typewriter from sheer boredom, doing nothing," he said. "I played around with a column and then tore it up. I'm just not ready to pick up again."

Not since mid-November has a Winchell line appeared in the New York Mirror, his base paper, or in the 140-odd other U.S. papers that take his column. On Nov. 17, in Winchell's space, the Mirror carried the byline of Winchell's customary summer replacement, slight, snappish Lee ("New York Confidential") Mortimer. With the shift went an explanation : "WW is ill with a staph infection. He will resume his column when he feels better. Meanwhile, Lee Mortimer's column will appear in this space." But as the weeks wore on, even this vague promise vanished, leaving readers to wonder whether Winchell was ever coming back.

Furlough Time. Fact is that Winchell himself is not sure. Felled early last fall by a severe staphylococcus infection of the jaw, Winchell, 63, dropped out of a half-hour TV news program in mid-October; the following month, faced with the threat of surgery when the infection did not respond well to antibiotic treatment, he stopped writing his column as well. Since then, his only work has been narrating The Untouchables, a cops-and-robbers TV show in which he is an off-screen voice, reading a prepared script.

A long convalescence--there were unpleasant side effects from the massive drug doses--has sapped Winchell's will to return to the Broadway beat he stalked for nearly four decades. He has also been discouraged by the illness of his wife June: "She's had four heart wallops, three last year." In December Winchell went on an indefinite leave of absence.

Maybe Some Day. Weeks of confinement in his suburban Scarsdale, N.Y. home finally drove Winchell back to the duplex at Manhattan's St. Moritz Hotel that has long been his city hangout. But except for a few evenings at the theater, he has generally avoided the haunts where he once gathered his columnar tidbits.

Winchell's doctors have cleared him for duty, but Winchell has not cleared himself--and neither has his wife. At week's end she left for the Winchell winter home in Scottsdale, Ariz., near Phoenix, to be followed shortly by her husband on a holiday that Mrs. Winchell expects to last at least through May. By then, Winchell may conceivably feel like returning to his gossip gathering. But Mrs. Winchell is inclined to doubt it. "It may be in the fall," says she. "And it may be never."

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