The Sour Stench of Success

My deep dive into the career of Burt Lancaster would not have been complete without reference to The Sweet Smell of Success, the 1957 noir in which everyone is more or less rotten. Hollywood filmmakers love to delve into the venal side of the entertainment world, often happily focusing on the crass materialism of their own industry. (See, off the top of my head, elements of Sunset Boulevard, Inside Daisy Clover, A Star is Born, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the recent Babylon.) The Sweet Smell of Success, though, is based in Manhattan, mostly the glitzy stretch of Broadway between 42^nd and 57^th Streets. Lancaster’s character occupies an elegant penthouse apartment, and is a regular at swanky nightspots like the 21 Club, places where gossip is gospel.

 Lancaster plays J.J. Hunsecker, a media personality modeled after Walter Winchell. He writes a hot gossip column for the New York Globe, and is also a star attraction over the airwaves. The man is all-powerful: he knows just who is canoodling with whom, and can make even a congressman quake when he spots an inappropriate dinner companion. The comparison to today’s media climate is an interesting one: we gather he’s not on the payroll of any political party, but he still has a firm sense of how the world should work, and will gladly punish anyone who tries to cross him. We gather he has no intimate attachment of his own, but puts all his energy into overseeing the love life of his much younger sister, Susie, who has fallen hard for a clean-cut but independent-minded jazz musician (Martin Milner).

 Lancaster’s Hunsecker is unforgettable, but the film really belongs to Tony Curtis. (The two had earlier starred together in a box-office hit, 1956’s Trapeze)  Curtis, sick of accepting nice-guy roles, here plays a slippery press agent, one who’ll do just about anything to get his clients’ names in newspaper columns. Young and hungry for success, he’ll hustle, scheme, and try to blackmail the powerful into publicizing those on his roster. He feels he has a special “in” with Hunsecker, thanks to his willingness to clean up a certain small mess by any means necessary, and part of the energy of the story goes into seeing him twist himself into pretzels to please the man who holds the keys to the kingdom. Says Hunsecker, with a mix of scorn and appreciation, “You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

 Sweet Smell of Success started out as a differently titled story in a 1950 issue of Cosmopolitan. It was written by a young Ernest Lehman, and reflected his own experience as an assistant to a New York publicist. Eventually Hollywood got wind of Lehman’s writing skills, and he started to rack up jobs as a screenwriter. Among his credits prior to the film version of Sweet Smell of Success were Sabrina, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and The King and I. Later, his major screenwriting hits included North by Northwest, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Who’s Afraid of  Virginia Woolf? But when it came to Sweet Smell of Success,  the dialogue-heavy script required a substantial rewrite that Lehman was too ill to handle. So the gig eventually went to one of Broadway’s most esteemed playwrights, Clifford Odets, who both restructured the story and heavily revamped the details, resulting in some taut, terse dialogue. Here’s one example I like: “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”  And I’ve got to put in a word for the great James Wong Howe’s spectacularly moody black-&-white cinematography.

 Dedicated to fellow biographer Beth Phillips, who knows everything there is to know about Clifford Odets.

 

 

 

 

“'Good Evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea” -- Walter Winchell Signs Off

The recent obits for actress Jane Kean all noted that she played Trixie Norton in the Jackie Gleason Show’s Honeymooners episodes from 1966 to 1970. Few of them mentioned that in the early 1950s she was the protégée and mistress of America’s most powerful newspaperman, Walter Winchell.

 Winchell spotted the petite blonde at New York’s Copacabana, where she was appearing in a sister-act that featured comedy and music. From the first he was smitten with both Kean sisters, inviting them to come along as he cruised Manhattan’s byways in the wee small hours, checking out police calls. Through his syndicated columns and his hugely popular radio broadcast he spread the word about their charms. One result: in 1955 Jane and Betty Kean enjoyed a five-month run as headliners in a Broadway extravaganza called Ankles Away. But all the attention quickly stopped when Jane insisted that Walter (thirty years her senior) divorce his wife. Winchell may not have had much use for domesticity, but he regarded as sacred his public reputation as a family man.

All this and much more I learned through Neal Gabler’s definitive Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. Gabler made me see that Winchell’s personal saga is also the story of twentieth-century America. In the 1920s, when the young ex-hoofer’s Broadway column first began, he showed the rising middle-classes just how celebrity gossip could cut the rich and famous down to size. His slangy use of colloquial English, laden with lively innuendo, changed journalism forever. In the 1930s he rode the crest of the radio wave, attracting listeners from sea to shining sea. (Gabler says that at the height of his fame, 50 million Americans – out of a population of 75 million – either listened to his broadcasts or read his daily columns.)

Given his craving for power at a time when world events were shaking up everyone’s lives, it’s no surprise that Winchell soon turned political. Before and during World War II, he was an unabashed booster of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, using his own bully pulpit to push the Roosevelt agenda, often with the covert help of FDR’s inner circle. But his close personal ties with J. Edgar Hoover led him, after the war, into a fierce anti-communism that made him an early ally of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Winchell’s political about-face – combined with the rise of television and a number of other factors – made him seem far less attractive to his fan base as the Fifties gave way to the Sixties. Gabler vividly details a 1951 run-in with black entertainer Josephine Baker, whose apparent mistreatment at Winchell’s beloved Stork Club led him to make grotesque accusations about her political leanings. Though this ugly episode, in Gabler’s eyes, was the beginning of the end for Winchell, he tenaciously hung on, even while a Hollywood drama, Sweet Smell of Success, splashed onscreen the dark side of  his image. Starting in 1959, he even became a TV star of sorts, adding an idiosyncratic rat-a-tat narration to a popular series based on FBI heroics, The Untouchables.  

Several twentieth-century songs, including Mel Brooks’ “I Want to be a Producer,” allude to the great coup of getting one’s name in Winchell’s column. But as that column sank in importance to his fellow Americans, the man himself increasingly seemed to be living in a world of his own. His long-suffering wife passed away; his son and namesake committed suicide. When he himself died in 1972 -- aged 74 but looking much older – he went out not with a bang but with a whimper. Mr. and Mrs. America didn’t much care.