Style
Many other columnists, such as Ed Sullivan in New York and Louella Parsons in Los Angeles, began to write gossip soon after Winchell's initial success. He wrote in a style filled with slang and incomplete sentences. Winchell's casual writing style famously earned him the ire of mobster Dutch Schultz, who confronted Winchell at New York's Cotton Club and publicly lambasted him for using the phrase "pushover" to describe Schultz's penchant for blonde women. Some notable Winchell quotes are: "Nothing recedes like success", and "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret".
Winchell opened his radio broadcasts by pressing randomly on a telegraph key, a sound that created a sense of urgency and importance and the catchphrase "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press." He would then read each of his stories with a staccato delivery (up to a rate of 197 words per minute), though in an interview in 1967, claimed a speed of well over 200 wpm. noticeably faster than the typical pace of American speech. His diction can also be heard in his breathless narration of the Untouchables television series as well as in several Hollywood films.
Winchell feuded with New York radio host Barry Gray, whom he described as "Borey Pink" and a "disk jerk". When Winchell heard that Marlen Edwin Pew of the trade journal Editor & Publisher had criticized him as a bad influence on the American press, he thereafter referred to him as "Marlen Pee-you".
For most of his career his contract with his newspaper and radio employers required them to reimburse him for any damages he had to pay, should he be sued for slander or libel. Whenever friends reproached him for betraying confidences, he responded, "I know — I'm just a son of a bitch."
Read more about this topic: Walter Winchell
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)