A Novel Treatment of a Legend

By JAY COCKS

WALTER WINCHELL by Michael Herr; Knopf; 158 pages; $18.95

It's got a dark, obsessive, partly despicable and wholly compelling protagonist; a strong supporting cast (Damon Runyon, Ernest Hemingway, Hedy Lamarr); a marvelous milieu (vaudeville in the '20s, New York City cafe society in the '30s, radio in the '40s, television in the '50s); a plot that comes in Gatling-gun bursts; and a resonance that is part parable of American success and part caution. Walter Winchell would make a great movie.

It didn't, though. Michael Herr, whose 1977 Dispatches was one of the seminal books about Vietnam, first wrote this semifictional portrait of the man who turned gossip into a heavy industry as a film script. Herr recalls in a preface that he thought of the piece as "something 'more' than a screenplay," while the prospective producers regarded it as "something less." Salvaging his unproduced work, he has kept much of the shape, hard rhythm and clipped language of the film format, as well as the occasional camera direction.

The result is a bold stylistic stroke. The short scenes and pungent dialogue are ideal for catching the rhythm of Winchell's beat, while the residual piece of screenwriter's carpentry ("closing credits come up") underscores not only its artificiality but also Winchell's own purblind flair for self- dramatization. As a literary form, the screenplay generally rates as much respect as restaurant menu prose, and a novel molded like this slips past any easy characterization. "Maybe it's a mongrel," Herr suggests. "Maybe it's just a novel with a camera in it."

Winchell would have cooked up his own word -- cinetome? flickfic? -- something that catches the brash fluency and gritty romanticism of his own life. He would never have dared, though, to convert himself, as Herr so elegantly does, into a pint-size paradigm of scrambled patriotism and American success gone crazy. Herr's Winchell is an ex-vaudevillian who dances as he writes and lives: with little grace but an overabundance of berserk energy. He starts by posting sheets of trade tattle and pillow talk backstage at the crummy vaudeville theaters he plays. Within a decade he moves center stage, prowling Manhattan for scoops and scandal, making himself as feared and famous as the people he features in his column. Looking at dancers snuggling close one night at the Stork Club, his personal action-central, Winchell remarks, "Personally, I think it's all for show." Asks his long-suffering wife June: "But for whose benefit?" Replies a surprised Walter: "For whose benefit? For my benefit."

An NBC radio show, broadcast weekly "from ocean to ocean, with lotions of love," makes Winchell, in every sense, a media monster. He knows there is something cancerous about American celebrity ("The spotlight," he says, "sheds a poison"), but he can't see that he himself will eventually succumb. In the '50s Winchell gets trounced by television while archrival Ed Sullivan becomes an unlikely Sunday-night institution. A scrappy booster of F.D.R.'s, Winchell gets flummoxed and outfoxed by Roy Cohn and the red- baiters. An anomaly, Winchell throws in his famous fedora and moves to a resentful retirement in Arizona. Herr's vision of Winchell's fate is a fitting postlude, balancing irony and sympathy. He knows that, for Winchell, true hell is closing out of town.