Personal Life
On August 11, 1919, Winchell married Rita Greene, one of his onstage partners. The couple separated a few years later, and he moved in with June Magee, who had already given birth to their first child, a daughter named Walda. Winchell and Greene eventually divorced in 1928. Winchell and Magee would never marry, although the couple maintained the front of being married for the rest of their lives.
Winchell and Magee successfully kept the secret of their non-marriage, but were struck by tragedy with all three of their children. Their adopted daughter Gloria died of pneumonia at the age of nine, and Walda spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Walter, Jr., the only son of the journalist, committed suicide in his family's garage on Christmas night, 1968. Having spent the previous two years on welfare, Winchell, Jr. had last been employed as a dishwasher in Santa Ana, California, but listed himself as a freelancer who for a time wrote a column in the Los Angeles Free Press, an alternate newspaper published in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Famous quotes related to personal life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)