final credits - paul winchell
If Paul Winchell's life was pitched as a Hollywood movie project, it would get passed over for its incredibility. He was regarded as one of the best ventriloquists of all time, a pioneer of television ... and he invented the world's first artificial heart. Winchell died June 24, 2005 at the age of 83.
Winchell was born Paul Wilchin in a Jewish ghetto in Manhattan. Already suffering from a stammer, he contracted polio at the age of six, which caused his legs to atrophy. His mother was intolerant of the disease and beat him frequently. He overcame the effects of polio through relentless weight training, and he overcame his speech impediment by learning to throw his voice.
One of Wilchin's early heroes was ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. A school principal helped get him on the CBS "Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour" radio show in 1936. He was deliberately mis-introduced as 'Paul Winchell' and won with an imitation of Bergen and dummy Charlie McCarthy. He one-upped Bergen by actually not moving his lips during his performance (and remember, this was radio). Bergen and Winchell later made a joint appearance on the game show "Masquerade Party," which Winchell later referred to as a highlight in his life. To the next generation of ventriloquists, it was Winchell who was cited as an early hero.
Winchell came to television at a time when few American homes had sets. He debuted on NBC in 1947 with "The Paul Winchell-Jerry Mahoney Show." Jerry was a smart-mouthed puppet who flirted with ladies and spoke back to the man who operated his head. Carol Burnett played Mahoney's girlfriend -- one of her earliest professional credits. During the show's run, Winchell also appeared several times on Ed Sullivan's "Toast Of The Town." In later years, Winchell's ventriloquist act made him a popular guest on "The Lucy Show," "The Dean Martin Show" and "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In." He also appeared on "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Perry Mason" and "Love, American Style."
Little remains of Winchell's countless hours of on-air performances as a ventriloquist. In 1986 he won a $17.8-million jury verdict in a lawsuit against Metromedia Inc. Metromedia, which produced the "Winchell Mahoney Time" show, erased 288 tapes in a dispute with Winchell over syndication rights. Winchell spent his later years trying to hunt down surviving copies of his work.
As a child, Winchell had wanted to go to medical school. In the mid-1950s, he studied pre-med at Columbia University and later became an acupuncturist and a medical hypnotist. In 1963, he built an artificial heart utilising skills he developed building puppets for his act. One of the doctors who encouraged Winchell to patent his device was Henry Heimlich, who later developed an anti-choking manoeuvre.
The University of Utah was working on a similar heart device, and came against Winchell's patent. They somehow convinced Winchell to donate his motorised heart and his patent to the University for further research. Years later, Robert Jarvik and others developed the Jarvik-7, which was implanted into patients after 1982. The relationship between Winchell and the University had become acrimonious, and he accused Jarvik of causing needless suffering by holding the technology back for years. For more about this incredible chapter in medical history, read Paul Winchell's account of surrounding incidents at his web site.
In addition to inventing a portable blood plasma defroster, Winchell held patents for battery-heated gloves, a flameless cigarette lighter, a fountain pen with a retractable tip, the disposable razor, an invisible garter belt and an indicator to show when frozen food had gone bad after a power outage.
As variety shows waned during the 1960s, Winchell switched over to a new career providing voices for animated characters. One of his first forays was with various roles on the 1962 futuristic television series "The Jetsons." Soon he was Dick Dastardly on "Wacky Races," Gargamel on "The Smurfs," and Fleagle on "The Banana Splits."
Winchell will be best remembered for his softly-lisped characterisation of Tigger ("T-I-double grrrr-R") in the Disney cartoons of Winnie the Pooh. It was Winchell's British-born wife who came up with Tigger's signature phrase "TTFN," or "Ta-ta for now."
Winchell played Tigger in nearly two dozen movie and television projects until 1999, when a rasp in his voice caused Disney to replace him with Jim Cummings, who also took over the voice of Pooh (from Sterling Holloway in the late 1970s).
Winchell, along with Sebastian Cabot and Holloway, earned a Grammy in 1974 for Best Children's Recording with "The Most Wonderful Things About Tiggers" from the feature "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too."
Winchell was the last surviving major cast member of "You'll Never Get Rich" (aka "The Phil Silvers Show"), and Allan Melvin is now the sole surviving "Banana Split."
To a younger generation, entertained by a visual world where anything is possible, ventriloquism has become meaningless as an art and an act. Winchell once said "Children are so used to seeing puppets that when they see a real ventriloquist they don't understand it." He donated the original versions of his best-known sidekicks, Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, to the Smithsonian Institute.
Winchell's daughter, April, is a radio personality and a voice actor who has worked on several Disney productions, films such as "Men in Black," and on television's "The Simpsons."
Winchell had long embraced the internet, and his web site maintains an exhaustive collection of articles, clippings and personal recollections.