‘Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea’ : Walter Winchell’s nightly greeting was the signature of gossip’s Golden Age, but the world moved on and Winchell didn’t. : WINCHELL: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, <i> By Neil Gabler (Alfred A. Knopf: $30; 681 pp.)</i>

Every sorcerer must have his apprenticeship; and Henry Allen, the Washington Post’s weaver of spells, served his as a trainee at the New York Daily News at the end of the 1960s.

The post-war suburban drift of the Irish and Italians had changed New York and consigned the News to stay where it was and refuse to adjust to the change. The congregants who had once crowded its pews had begun to fall away as from a dying church; and, since the acolyte’s nostrils are fresher than the initiate’s, Allen could feelingly suffer the air to whose stagnations its journeymen had been awhile since benumbed.

As Allen recalls in his recent book, “Going Too Far Enough” (Smithsonian): “I felt as if I were walking through the Museum of Natural History, looking at dioramas, the Plains Indians in their tepees, that sort of thing, a gone world.”

And yet the Plains Indian is still with us, however most conspicuously visible at work with the croupier’s rake. So too is the Daily News; and, if we are to think of both as historical relics, where can we place the Walter Winchell that Neil Gabler has so admirably toiled to resurrect?

Not with the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, I’m afraid, but upstairs with the stego- and bronto-sauri who press us to ask, “Can these bones have lived?” Winchell seems to have slipped under the primeval ooze almost as long ago as they did and to have become a livelier subject for the paleontologist’s curiosity than the historian’s.

And yet he was a very great man in his time, which was in the 1920s, when he was obscure and earning the appreciative attention of refined appetites. In the ‘30s, when he was famous, he catered to the taste of coarser appetites and was well on his way toward the demoralizing self-importance that would transform him into a common scold in the ‘40s and reduce him to more shade than presence by the end of the ‘50s.

When in 19299 he had scarcely shifted his column of Broadway gossip from the exiguously disreputable New York Graphic to the better-filled and somewhat better-reputed theater of the New York Mirror, Heywood Broun was already persuaded of a future “when (Winchell’s) life and works are studied in freshman English classes a hundred years hence.”

H. L. Mencken registered high respect for his “multitudinous bright inventions” in The American Language and complimented him as “no mean student of new phrases” while finding his etymologies occasionally suspect. Mencken assigns Winchell credit for coinages such as pfft (formarital rifts), welded (for marital conjunctions), blessed event (for the newly born), making whoopee (for courtships), curdled (for post-courtship disillusionment) and phewed (for feud).

Most of these flowers have faded in obedience to a habit general among neologisms, but they echo with unexpected force even now and were once resonant enough to inspire movie titles like “Pfft” and “Blessed Event.”

Poor Winchell’s simultaneous dotings over by arbiters of good taste and slaverings over by exemplars of bad taste may fairly pardon his having gotten so swollen with himself as to think Broadway too small for his enlarged bulk and, as Mencken regretted, “put off the jester’s motley and put on the evangelist’s shroud” to reach out to embrace the cosmos.

By then he had a wider syndication than any other newspaper columnist and a larger radio audience than any other commentator, or for that matter, any other entertainer. His effectiveness as a preacher of the New Deal’s gospel was second only to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s; and he was occasionally invited to the White House for conversations that lasted longer than either party had anticipated.

The Second World War was his apotheosis as the President’s bugle boy, flogger of the laggard, spur to the languid, and flailer of imaginary fascists. His frenzies were as warming to liberals in the ‘40s as they would be to Joe McCarthy when Winchell began flailing at imaginary Communists in the ‘50s.

Winchell’s comet had sputtered downward from the apex of its afternoons with Presidents to my own modest level by 1954, when the two of us found ourselves sitting across from one another at the Army-McCarthy hearings on “Un-American Activities.” He turned out to be a surprisingly agreeable comrade, ever anxious to please and generous about bringing back secrets garnered from his intimate access to the McCarthy camp and doling them out in snippets that tended to be stale when authentic and spurious when fresh.

His grandest trophy from these inside tradings was a report on Communist infiltration of the Fort Monmouth signal corps laboratories prepared by an Army Colonel and bearing the “Top Secret” admonition that rank entitles its possessor to stamp on his coffee-and-danish orders to the commissary. Then as ever afterward, Winchell sought to make a mystery of this document’s provenance, which lay indubitably with McCarthy Counsel Roy Cohn; and he passed it across to me with a portentous whisper that I should read it surreptitiously and use a washroom stall if I were minded to take notes.

Duly cautioned, I lowered this prize to my lap, read it just far enough along to remember reading it earlier and whispered back, “Mr. Winchell, I think this has been printed before.”

“That’s all right,” he replied, “I’ll make it public.”

There in his twilight, he could still speak with all the assumptions of the high noon of those days when the many were dazzled to learn from Walter Winchell whatever it was, true or false, that only the few already knew. The shadows of the night had crept ever farther upon him when we next met at the 1956 Republican convention in San Francisco.

He was even matier for being even more desperate than ever and invited me to join him in an evening’s pilgrimage to the Hearst estate at San Simeon. Visions of communion with the ghosts where Bernard Shaw had been introduced to Marion Davis were enormously tempting; but duty had conscripted me to the Republicans instead and I had to decline. Later that day, another Hearstling conveyed a corporate invitation to San Simeon; and I regretted once more with an explanation that I had already told Winchell that I was bound to the wheel.

“Winchell asked you?” the Hearstling replied. “I hadn’t thought we’d asked him .”

We were together for the last time on an Eisenhower plane trip that fall; and when we got back to Washington and the White House closed us down, Winchell suggested we all go to Duke Zeibert’s. There were no takers until the heartache of his loneliness grew unbearable enough to bring me forward.

Our entrance upon Zeibert’s was so all else but triumphant that its proprietor did not even come to greet us. We sat awhile among the lowly; and the service, although prompt, arrived with such scant ceremony that Winchell soon grew oppressively aware of himself as object of inattention and suggested that he and I go our separate ways to sleep. The check came and I paid it, an act identified in our trade as the signal that one party still has an expense account and the other doesn’t any longer. The owners of property and the proprietors of saloons are infrequently the last to recognize when the orange is squeezed and the rind to be thrown away.

And why had it come to this and would come to worse? Gabler’s chronicle of Winchell’s decline is lively and balanced enough to persuade us that punishment was deserved and that so too was pity. But he lacks--as who among us doesn’t these days?--the Winchell gift for pith. The best of paleontologists cannot hope to explain the dinosaur’s extinction as succinctly as the dinosaur could have.

Once, when he was railing against his daughter’s propensity for the beds of the bad and dangerous, Winchell paused, Gabler tells us, and reflectively and forgivingly observed:

“What can you expect? Her father is a whore too.”

It was never easy to separate the arrogance from the self-distaste in Winchell’s nature; and we would go too far if we defined the gossip column as whore’s work even in the crude early stages of its development in his hands.

His column nonetheless had some of the atmosphere of a house of ill repute. Press agents bought their favors there with the coin of scandals about the clients of other press agents; and the whore-master bullied the customers with the overweening assurance that he owned the best if not the only house in town. Customers in good standing took care to bend the knee and those in bad were exiled and might be worked over for offending the decency affirmed in the pieties and sentimentalities that were as standard appurtenances to his column’s decor as the lavender pillows in a cathouse salon.

Gabler shrewdly traces the withering of Winchell’s authority to the loss of shame that inclined too many sinners to sell their own scandals instead of letting them seep to him for free.

By 1957, he took due note of this great loss when he wrote about the demise of the smut-and-scandal-mongering Confidential, which had been a cherished shooting partner in the infinity of his personal feuds:

“Nearly every high class magazine now offers lowdown articles by well-known people, who supply their own skeleton-rattling. In short, they now sell the stuff they once threatened to sue about.”

“Whether Walter knew it or not,” Gabler comments, “(that) was the epitaph of his own gossip column.”

The gossip column endures now and even proliferates by no means less engagingly but altogether more respectably. The peeping Tom has lost his function in a society whose gaudier personages, far from pulling down the shades, have taken to selling tickets to view the trespasses inside.

Nowadays the gossip columnist triumphs with his scoop not by nosing out Marlon Brando’s dirty secrets but by getting first look at the memoir where Marlon Brando has dirtied them up to an unseemliness perhaps as fanciful as Winchell’s originally fructifying illusions about the bad and the beautiful.

Winchell lingered on as one of the great hosts of those forgotten but not gone until he died in 1971. Gabler reports gossip that a fortune vaster than any other journalist’s two decades before had been considerably shrunken by “failed investments late in life.” It would have been like him to go on believing his dubious stock tips disablingly too well after everyone else had ceased to stop an ear to them.

Oh, well. There had, as Yeats once said in another connection, been some excuse for him and none at all for those who had pretended to like him. Where does the degradation reside in a life like this: in being fawned over by Roy Cohn in the 1950s or being snubbed by him in the ‘60s ?

Gabler is not to be envied the labors of his exhumations; but he has worked at them wonderfully and surprised us with the revelation that these bones do indeed live and are almost as vividly deplorable as when they were flesh pulsing with the same half-educated desperation from their world-conquering start all the way to their world-conquered-by finish.

This had been flesh born in vaudeville, blooming over vaudeville’s ashes and at last mixing up with vaudeville in the dust of what cannot be again. The lesson is only too familiar: Art is short and life thereafter much too long.