Word: gablers
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...Gabler is a graduate student...
...Irving Hoffman might not have been so peeved if Lehman hadn't borrowed the Steve Dallas subplot from an infamous episode in the lives of Winchell and his daughter Walda. (Walda Winchell - how's that for ego extension?) To judge from Neil Gabler's account in his excellent biography, "Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity," Bill Cahn was no apple-cheeked beacon of cool jazz and high ethics. He was a hustler who had done time for vagrancy and petty larceny, was busted for going AWOL during the War and was discharged after being diagnosed with severe hysteria...
...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...
...Cahn served his time, then emigrated to Israel. He never again saw Walda; she never again spoke to her father. But the old hustler had wreaked his revenge, if only post-mortem. As Gabler writes: "Walter had ruined Cahn's life. Now, by inspiring Lehman's novella and Mackendrick's movie, Cahn had helped sully Walter Winchell's name forever...
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Hedda Gabler, 42nd Street and Thou Shalt...