Paul Winchell

Early life and start in ventriloquism

Paul Winchell was born Paul Wilchinsky in New York City, the son of a tailor whose family had emigrated from Congress Poland and Austria-Hungary. Polio at age six left his legs weakened. In his early teens he ordered a ten-cent ventriloquism kit advertised in a magazine, then talked his school art teacher, Jero Magon, into letting him build a dummy for class credit. He named the figure Jerry Mahoney after the teacher who had made the assignment possible.

Winchell built a routine from jokes gathered out of magazines and took it to Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1938, where he won first prize and a spot touring with the Major Bowes Review. Bandleader Ted Weems spotted him on that tour and hired him, making Winchell a professional performer at fourteen.

Television career with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

Winchell's first outing as a ventriloquist came on radio in 1943, but the show did not last long, in part because he was working in the shadow of Edgar Bergen. Television is where he found his footing. From 1950 to 1954 he hosted a prime-time NBC program that ran under three different names — The Paul Winchell Show, The Speidel Show, and What's My Name? — and through the decade he also hosted children's programming built around Jerry Mahoney, sponsored by Tootsie Roll and featuring bandleader Milton Delugg as his on-air sidekick.

Jerry Mahoney was carved by the Chicago figure maker Frank Marshall. Winchell later had basswood duplicates of Jerry's head produced by a commercial duplicating service; one became the upgraded Jerry used through most of his TV run, and two others were reworked into Knucklehead Smiff. For television, Winchell devised a trick that let Jerry and Knucklehead appear to gesture at each other while talking: off-camera assistants slipped their hands into the figures' sleeves. He also built a separate illusion act, Ozwald (and later the related Mr. Goody-good), by painting a face onto his own chin, covering the rest of his face with a small costume, and having the camera image flipped upside down to create a strange, wide-mouthed character.

His most successful show, Winchell-Mahoney Time (1965–1968), was written by his wife, actress Nina Russell, and produced at Metromedia's KTTV in Los Angeles. A later dispute with Metromedia over syndicating the show's 305 color tapes ended badly: when Winchell would not agree to the company's terms, Metromedia erased and destroyed the master tapes. Winchell sued and in 1986 a jury awarded him $3.8 million in damages plus $14 million in punitive damages, a verdict that survived Metromedia's appeal to the Supreme Court. In 1996 he had figure maker Tim Selberg build a more modern version of Jerry Mahoney, which he used to pitch a new series to Disney's Michael Eisner.

Voice acting in animation

After Winchell-Mahoney Time ended, Winchell's career shifted almost entirely to voice work. For Hanna-Barbera he voiced Dick Dastardly across several series including Wacky Races, played Gargamel on The Smurfs from 1981 to 1989, and took on numerous other recurring parts such as Fleegle on The Banana Splits Adventure Hour and Shake on The CB Bears. For Disney, he originated Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh featurettes, winning a Grammy Award for Best Children's Music Album for Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, and also voiced Boomer the woodpecker in The Fox and the Hound and Zummi Gummi in the first five seasons of Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears. He shared the Tigger role with Jim Cummings starting with The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh; his final performances as the character came in 1999, after which the studio judged his voice too old for the part and gave the role fully to Cummings.

Inventions and other pursuits

Winchell studied pre-med at Columbia University and later trained in acupuncture and medical hypnotism. He held more than thirty patents over his life, including a disposable razor, a flameless cigarette lighter, and battery-heated gloves. His most consequential patent, filed with the help of Henry Heimlich, was for an artificial heart implantable in the chest cavity (US Patent #3,097,366, 1963); he later donated the related patents to the University of Utah School of Medicine after they came up as prior art against the university's own research. Whether Robert Jarvik's Jarvik-7 heart drew on Winchell's design remains disputed — Heimlich maintained the basic principle was identical, while Jarvik denied any connection.

In the 1980s Winchell worked on a tilapia aquaculture method intended to address famine in sub-Saharan Africa and testified before Congress alongside Richard Dreyfuss, Ed Asner, and Heimlich, though the pilot program was not funded.

Personal life and death

Winchell married three times and had three children. His 2004 autobiography, Winch, disclosed a difficult childhood, long-term depression, and a mental breakdown, and it caused a lasting rift with his children after it portrayed his second wife, Nina Russell, unfavorably. He died in his sleep of natural causes on June 24, 2005, at his home in Moorpark, California, at age 82. He was estranged from his children at the time and they learned of his death only afterward, a fact his daughter April Winchell, herself a voice actress, addressed publicly on her website.

Figures

• Jerry MahoneyFrank Marshall (original); basswood duplicates by a commercial duplicating service; later version by Tim Selberg (1996) · 1930s (original carving); duplicates and later versions produced over subsequent decades · wood (basswood duplicates)
• Knucklehead Smiffcreated by modifying duplicate Jerry Mahoney heads · unspecified · basswood

Timeline

• 1938 — Won first prize on Major Bowes Amateur Hour, earning a touring spot with the Major Bowes Review.
• 1943 — First ventriloquist radio show with Jerry Mahoney.
• 1950-1954 — Hosted a prime-time NBC show under three titles: The Paul Winchell Show, The Speidel Show, and What's My Name?
• 1965-1968 — Hosted Winchell-Mahoney Time, his most successful show, written by wife Nina Russell.
• 1986 — Won a $3.8 million actual-damages and $14 million punitive-damages jury verdict against Metromedia for destroying the Winchell-Mahoney Time master tapes.
• 1963 — Received a US patent for a mechanical artificial heart implantable in the chest cavity.
• 1996 — Commissioned a new Jerry Mahoney figure from Tim Selberg to pitch a new series to Disney.

On video

18 performances cataloged in our archive. needs research: curate + embed the best 5–8; the rest 301 here