Sweet Smell of Success
Shubert Theatre
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Lehman’s piece set insiders’ tongues wagging throughout the midtown Manhattan world that all-powerful gossip columnist Walter Winchell dubbed “Cafake Society.” It was widely assumed that the vindictive, paranoid J.J. was modeled on Winchell (also known as W.W.), and certainly J.J.’s vendetta against Dallas recalled Winchell’s campaign to break up an affair between his daughter, Walda, and would-be producer Billy Cahn. Winchell brushed off the Cosmo story–but he got nervous a few years later when actor-producer Burt Lancaster purchased the property. The resulting movie, 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, was a star vehicle for Lancaster, whose blend of soft-spoken refinement and animal physicality made his portrayal of J.J. riveting. Sidney’s character was relegated to supporting status despite a fine performance by the impossibly pretty Tony Curtis. The film boasted angular, oddly lit cinematography by James Wong Howe, a sizzling jazz sound track by Elmer Bernstein, and a deliciously sour, eminently quotable screenplay by Lehman and Clifford Odets. Downbeat, cynical, and creepy in its suggestion that J.J.’s obsession with his sister was incestuous, Sweet Smell of Success was a financial failure (as Winchell gleefully reported). But over the years it became a cult classic. And as Neal Gabler writes in his biography Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, it “definitively established the image of Winchell as a megalomaniac”–and further eroded his reputation, in decline as a result of his association with discredited commie chasers Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn.
Lehman’s story and the film it inspired exposed the Winchell-ruled world of celebrity journalism, in which slimy press agents would “feed” unethical columnists nasty news (real or invented) about famous people in return for puffy plugs of the stars and supper clubs the agents repped. (In the story, Sidney describes the tawdry tidbits he and his colleagues concoct as “hunks of raw, red meat…seasoned…with the proper libel-proof words.”) On a larger level, the story was a scathing indictment of the American dream as an illusion of innocence and affluence masking an abyss of hypocrisy and brutal competition.
At its strongest–as in the first-act number “Welcome to the Night,” in which Sidney accompanies J.J. on his nightly prowl for gossip–Sweet Smell focuses on the mentor-pupil relationship between the confident pro and the eager young comer, the preening tiger and the fawning jackal. But by the second act their connection has been obscured by the plot’s laborious mechanics. And at the climax, the focus shifts abruptly and unconvincingly to Susan as she confronts and conquers the treacherous Sidney and overbearing J.J. Her hard-won independence is admirable, but it hasn’t been important enough throughout to be the show’s final point.
