Walter Winchell developed the modern gossip column, employing a brash, sensational style to deal more intimately with the personal affairs of celebrities than other journalists had ever dared. His breezy, racy style came from his vaudeville background,...

For almost 40 years during the mid-twentieth century, Walter Winchell was thought to be the most powerful man in America. A Jewish former vaudevillian, Winchell's power came not from money, family connections, or politics—Winchell was a...

Walter Winchell (April 7 1897 – February 20, 1972), an American newspaper and radio commentator, invented the gossip column at the New York Evening Graphic. He broke the journalistic taboo against exposing the private lives of public figures,...

Walter Winchell PUT PAGE SIX, Liz Smith, and the Style section together, add ellipses, and you have the mix of Walter Winchell--but not the reach. At his height, in the Forties, his six-day-a-week newspaper column was read by fifty million people, while...

Excessively flattering to its subject, "Winchell" is also exceedingly entertaining to watch, at least for its first hour. Then, like the man whose life it dramatizes, it goes batty, cuckoo and haywire. Walter Winchell was one of the most famous and influential people...

Barry H. Landau, presidential collector and connoisseur, remembers the time he was dancing with Betty Ford at the White House and Fred Astaire cut in. Oh?"I recall I was doing a 'Lindy' with Mrs. Ford, and remember 'spinning her out' when I suddenly received a...

Walt Disney was a wretched businessman. This seems like a comically counterintuitive statement, with the Disney machine standing foursquare throughout the world as an impregnable marketing monolith, but this commercial hegemony is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It was only in the last 10 years or...