“I’m not a fighter, I’m a waiter” is how Walter Winchell opens his memoir, addressing the enemies who had prematurely ended his career and toppled him from power. “I wait until I catch an ingrate with his fly open, then I take a picture of it.” The gossip columnist Louella Parsons, driven from relevance by studio heads tired of her tyranny, dragged down by lawsuits at the end of her life, would retreat into literal silence in protest. The last ten years of her life, it was claimed she never said another word. Which would it be? What would be Denton’s path?
