Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity Book

When I was in my 20s I read Neal Gabler's biography of Walter Winchell. And it changed my life. I can still remember being completely engrossed in this book.

It was the awesome achievement of Winchell's biographer, Neal Gabler, to show how Winchell mattered in history. How he invented the modern celebrity, more or less single-handedly. How he used gossip as a weapon 70 years before TMZ. Gabler marshalled spellbinding amounts of news clippings, correspondence, interviews, and his own critical takes on 20th-century American culture to make his case. And the kicker was this: For such a meaty intellectual biography, it was so readable that I could not put it down until I was done.

And when I was done, I wanted to be Neal Gabler.

Well, you may have seen old Neal's name in the news recently. He's the author of that depressing Atlantic cover piece "The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans," in which he confesses to being so broke that he would be unable to cover a $400 emergency. After reciting a long list of financial humiliations that he and his wife have suffered ' hitting up their adult daughters for cash being the worst ' Gabler writes, "You wouldn't know any of that to look at me. Nor would you know it to look at my résumé. I have had a passably good career as a writer … and a small (very small) but respectable reputation."

He sells himself short. Time magazine named Winchell the best book of 1994, and it remains one of the great biographies of our time. His book on the Jews who invented Hollywood is equally celebrated. As for me, no, I never came close to becoming the next Neal Gabler. But Winchell demonstrated to me that writing about media could be a career option for a serious-minded person. And I got that career!