Word: columnists
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...Around Winchell buzzed a cordon of courtiers - the famous, the has-beens and wannabe's - and their representatives, the press agents, fighting to catch the columnist's attention and get an item (a joke, a movie deal, a simple "was glimpsed confabbing with...") in his daily mix of gossip. Like a duke's dresser in the court of the Sun King, a press agent sees his client at his worst and must present him at his best. The trick was to paint a heroic portrait, of a person with plenty to hide, and sell it to a columnist...
...Sidney is the protagonist of "Sweet Smell of Success," originally a novelette by Ernest Lehman, published in 1950 in Cosmopolitan. Seven years later, the story, rewritten by playwright Clifford Odets, was made into a film directed by Alexander Mackendrick and starring Curtis as Sidney and Lancaster as the Winchellesque columnist J.J. Hunsecker - another fabulous name, for an Attila who sucks the honey out of his minions and spits it into print. Last week, transformed into a John Lithgow musical, "Sweet Smell" opened on Broadway, that tatty, irresistible tenderloin where, more than a half century ago, Lehman spawned J.J. and Sidney...
...story that could have been written only by a press agent. In the early 40s, Lehman had ground out flackery for the noted press agent Irving Hoffman, who was close to Winchell. A-brim with fascination-repulsion for the Broadway milieu, Lehman wrote a long story about a columnist and a press agent. He sold it to Cosmopolitan. But before the issue hit the stands, Hoffman was leaked (what else?) the story and felt betrayed, not just for himself but what he saw as calumny toward the powerful columnist. To Lehman, the complaint must have been as good...
...corrupt cop named Harry Kello. Later that night Sidney is summoned to J.J.'s penthouse apartment but finds only Susie there. After he saves her from jumping to her death, she tears her clothes apart just as J.J. enters to find "evidence" that his sister was raped. Now the columnist has to avenge his little girl...
...Walter wasn't finished. A few years later, Cahn was tried for tax evasion. "I'm 99% sure [that] John Edgar Hoover did it all for Walter," columnist Jack O'Brian told Gabler. "He went and dug into it and dug into it and dug into it." Cahn stood trial and was convicted. At the sentencing (he got 18 months), his attorney declared, "Mr. Cahn has unfortunately run into the ill-will of a well-known and perhaps notorious columnist and radio broadcaster." He might have said what Lehman writes of Dallas in the novelette: that Susie's boyfriend "made...