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Dorothy Kilgallen

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Dorothy Mae Kilgallen (July 3, 1913 – November 8, 1965) was an Irish-American journalist and television game show panelist known nationally for her coverage of the Sam Sheppard trial, her syndicated newspaper column, The Voice of Broadway, and her role as panelist on the television game show What's My Line?. She was born in Chicago, the daughter of Hearst newspaperman James Kilgallen and Mae Kilgallen, who was alleged by her husband to have sung opera in Denver before their marriage.[citation needed] Dorothy had one sibling, Eleanor Kilgallen, a New York-based casting agent for Universal Studios.

Career

Dorothy Kilgallen's earliest career was as a trial reporter.[citation needed] Among the events she covered were the trial of Bruno Hauptmann and disbarment proceedings against New York City assistant district attorney Thomas Aurelio, who was the leading candidate for election as a judge to a vacant seat on the New York Supreme Court in 1943.[citation needed] Kilgallen's coverage of the Aurelio hearings was published exclusively by the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, who closely supervised them until his death in 1951.[citation needed] She also wrote for national magazines including Reader's Digest.[citation needed]

In 1936, Kilgallen competed with two fellow New York newspaper reporters in a race around the world using means of transportation only available to the general public. Despite being the only female contestant, she came in second.[1] She described the event in her book Girl Around The World and penned the screenplay for the 1937 movie Fly Away Baby, starring Glenda Farrell, as the Kilgallen-inspired character.[citation needed] During a stint living in Hollywood in 1936 and 1937, Kilgallen wrote a daily column that could only be read in New York that nonetheless provoked a libel suit from Constance Bennett, then the highest-paid actress in Hollywood.[2]

Returning to New York, Kilgallen began in 1938 to write a daily column, The Voice of Broadway, for Hearst's New York Journal-American.[1] The column, which she wrote until her death in 1965. The column featured mostly New York show business news and gossip, but also ventured into other topics, including politics and organized crime. Originally published only in newspapers owned by Hearst, the success of the column led him to syndicate it to other papers via King Features Syndicate.[citation needed]

Beginning in 1945, Kilgallen co-hosted a long-running radio talk show, Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick, with her husband, Richard Kollmar.[1] Airing live on WOR-AM every morning except Sundays (when a recorded broadcast was aired). The show originated from the couple's Park Avenue apartment and featured the pair's discussion "over the breakfast table" about news, gossip, their family, and interesting people they had met hours earlier at Manhattan clubs and parties. Their three children, Richard Jr., Jill and Kerry, were often included in the conversation.[citation needed] When the family moved from the Park Avenue building to a townhouse (described precisely by one family friend as a "Georgian brownstone")[1] in June of 1952, they set up a room on the fifth floor specifically for the radio broadcasts.[citation needed]

In 1950, Kilgallen became a panelist on the American television game show What's My Line?, which aired on the CBS television network from 1950 to 1967. She remained on the show for 15 years, until her death.[1] Kilgallen was typically introduced by the show's announcer as "the popular syndicated columnist whose Voice of Broadway appears in newspapers coast to coast." Though not initially published internationally, The Voice of Broadway was later published in Canada, Europe, Australia, and an English-language newspaper in China.[citation needed]

Kilgallen attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. Her articles won her a Pulitzer Prize nomination.[1]

Controversial articles

Sam Sheppard murder trial

Kilgallen covered the 1954 murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard.[1] The New York Journal American carried the banner front-page headline that she was "astounded" by the guilty verdict.[citation needed] The doctor was convicted of bludgeoning his wife to death at their home in the Bay Village suburb of Cleveland. In the 1990s, the case was reopened and an aging convict named Richard Eberling became a person of interest, but hard evidence to convict him was lacking.[citation needed]

Many Clevelanders believed Dr. Sam Sheppard was guilty,[citation needed] including the editors of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which carried Kilgallen's syndicated column. Immediately after she wrote about the prosecutors "[t]hey didn't prove he was guilty any more than they proved there are pin-headed men on Mars," her column was banned from that newspaper.[3] Nine years later, at the Overseas Press Club in New York, she revealed that the judge in the case had told her toward the beginning of the trial that Dr. Sheppard was "guilty as hell."[This quote needs a citation] When attorney F. Lee Bailey began the appeal of Sheppard's conviction, resulting in the his July 1964 release from prison, he discovered other eyewitness accounts of the judge making up his mind before hearing any testimony or seeing any evidence.[citation needed]

Hearst bylines

Arlene Francis, a fellow What's My Line? panelist, said in 1976, "I thought Dorothy was a marvelous journalist. When she covered something like the Sheppard trial. As opposed to her gossip column."[4] A 1991 history of the Hearst Corporation co-authored by Bill Hearst and Jack Casserly says the company milked famous bylines for all they were worth, encouraging the star reporters to do as many diverse stories as possible to increase circulation and newsstand sales.[5]

Reporting on UFOs

Kilgallen wrote at least two columns on unidentified flying objects with sensational statements that are often cited by UFO researchers.[citation needed]

On February 15, 1954, she commented in her syndicated column, "Flying saucers are regarded as of such vital importance that they will be the subject of a special hush-hush meeting of the world military heads next summer".[6]

In a May 22, 1955 report from London, syndicated by the INS, Kilgallen stated, "British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions of Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet. The source of my information is a British official of Cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified. 'We believe, on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men--probably under four feet tall. It's frightening, but there is no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.'" This article, which was separate from Kilgallen's column, appeared on the front pages of the New York Journal American,[7] the Cincinnati Enquirer[8] and other newspapers.[9]

Various attempts to get to the bottom of the story, including by the London news editor of the INS, were unsuccessful.[citation needed] Gordon Creighton, editor of the magazine Flying Saucer Review, alleged the information was given to Kilgallen by Lord Mountbatten at a cocktail party, but attempts to verify this were also unsuccessful [10]

Kilgallen and the Kennedy assassination

Dorothy Kilgallen conducted an interview with Jack Ruby[1] inside the Dallas courthouse where he was tried for the shooting death of Lee Harvey Oswald. She did not reveal before death what they had talked about.[1] She obtained a copy of Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission, although she kept her source of the testimony confidential.[1] This sparked an FBI investigation into how she obtained it.[1]

Kilgallen's New York Journal-American column was critical of the Warren Commission, while editors at her syndication outlets usually deleted those portions.[citation needed] Regarding the assassination, Kilgallen wrote, "That story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive, and there are a lot of them alive."[11] She had a history of government criticism, once suggesting that the CIA recruited members of the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro (which many years later was proven to be the case).[12] FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on her activities.[13]

During one of Kilgallen's visits to Dallas to cover Ruby's trial for murder, the Dallas Times-Herald ran a short profile of her along with a photograph of her inside the courthouse flanked by the defendant's attorneys Melvin Belli and Joe Tonahill. The article and the caption for the photo both claimed that Kilgallen was preparing articles exclusively for "several European publications" about the events in Dallas,[14] though the identity of these publications are unknown. Kilgallen had at least one show business article published in a German-language magazine called Quick, (in 1964).[15]

Other controversy

Dorothy Kilgallen was often antagonistic toward Frank Sinatra in her daily column and in the multi-part 1956 feature story "The Frank Sinatra Story" (the latter carried only by Hearst papers).[citation needed] Sinatra was angered by this and referred to her publicly as the "chinless wonder."[1] Kilgallen also had a relationship with singer Johnnie Ray.[1] After the power of Broadway columnists started to give way to television commentators and other personalities in the late 1950s, Kilgallen was parodied by comedienne Hermione Gingold and the editors of MAD magazine, among others.[citation needed]

According to the 1980 Ellis Nassour biography Patsy Cline, when country music performers from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry appeared in concert at Carnegie Hall to benefit New York's Musicians Aid Society in 1961, Kilgallen dismissed them as "hicks from the sticks."[citation needed] In her column she advised that "everyone should leave town. The hillbillies are coming."[citation needed] Patsy Cline, one of the headliners, responded that "Miss Dorothy Kilgallen, the Wicked Witch of the East, called us 'hicks from the sticks.' And if I happen to meet that witch while I'm here, I'll let her know just how proud I am to be a so-called 'hillbilly!'"[This quote needs a citation]

Death

The footstone of Dorothy Kilgallen in Gate of Heaven Cemetery

On November 8, 1965, Kilgallen was found dead on the third floor of her five-story townhouse at the age of 52 -- just 12 hours after she appeared, live, on What's My Line?. Her hairdresser, Marc Sinclaire, found her body when he arrived that morning to style her hair.[1] She had apparently succumbed to a fatal combination of alcohol and Seconal, possibly concurrent with a heart attack. It is not known whether it was suicide or an accidental death, although the amount of barbiturate in her system "could well have been accidental," according to medical examiner James Luke.[16]

Because of her open criticism of the Warren Commission and other US government entities, and her association with Jack Ruby and 1964 private interview with him, some[who?] speculate that she was murdered by members of the same alleged conspiracy against JFK. Her claims that she was under surveillance[17] led to a theory that some people had a motive for killing her. This is partially based on the fact that throughout her career she consistently refused to identify any of her sources.[18] In August of 1964, she had told FBI agents that she "would die rather than" identify the man who had given her Jack Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission before President Lyndon Johnson got it.[citation needed]

There was no evidence of a break-in or a struggle in Kilgallen's bedroom on November 8, 1965, although a biographer named Lee Israel discovered in the 1970s that none of her current story notes were ever found. At the death scene, Kilgallen clutched a book, The Honey Badger by Robert Ruark, in her hand, as if to suggest that she had been reading in bed, but her reading glasses were not in the room.[1] Kilgallen and Sinclaire had discussed the book some weeks earlier after she had finished it. Kilgallen had noted in her column four months earlier (July) that the protagonist of the book dies in the end.[19]

Kilgallen's husband Richard Kollmar, who was also in the five-story townhouse, reported nothing unusual. He slept on a different floor of the townhouse than his wife, however, and contradicted himself to police about whether he had seen her after her return home from a late-night live television broadcast of What's My Line?.[citation needed]

Her autopsy did not suggest evidence of homicide, however, her death certificate cites the cause of death as "undetermined." The document was signed by a medical examiner named Dominick DiMaio who only certified deaths in Brooklyn. Kilgallen's body was discovered in Manhattan. He typed on the certificate that he was signing it, "for James Luke" even though Luke spent 45 minutes at the death scene[20] and conducted the autopsy later that day. A week passed before the medical examiner's office issued the certificate, but Luke declined an opportunity to sign it even then; it was the same day (November 15, 1965) that he answered questions from newspaper reporters about Dorothy Kilgallen.[21]

After death and legacy

At the time of her death, Dorothy Kilgallen and Richard Kollmar had been married for 25 years and left behind three children.[1] She is buried in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York. After her death, Kollmar, then 56, married designer Anne Fogarty, who had created the dress Kilgallen had worn on What's My Line? the last night of her life.[1] The newlyweds settled in the very same townhouse where Kollmar had lived for decades, but they rented out the ground floor to an ophthalmologist for his office.

When Kollmar died in early 1971 two days after fracturing his shoulder, he and Fogarty had been married for three-and-a-half years. Two published accounts of him in that late period do not reveal whether he knew anything about the assassination. He and Fogarty were close with her niece who has said she does not recall either of them expressing interest in the subject or speculating about what Kilgallen had known (even though the niece had been an acquaintance of Kilgallen's). The ophthalmologist has stated he recalls Anne Fogarty, who was "personable," visiting his office sometimes to discuss landlord/tenant issues, but he never met her husband, who evidently did not take care of the couple's business.[1] Fogarty, whose age is difficult to determine because of reports that vary by as much as ten years, died shortly after the publication of Lee Israel's book,[22] to which she had not contributed. [23] Information about Fogarty's work for Dorothy Kilgallen, including the original dresses for her last several episodes of What's My Line?, comes from Kilgallen's hairdresser, who knew many designers and Diana Vreeland.[1]

On the What's My Line? broadcast following Dorothy Kilgallen's death, host John Charles Daly opened the show explaining that, after consulting with "her good husband Dick Kollmar," the show's tribute to her would be to go on as usual. During their usual "goodnight"s, each panel member gave a short tribute to her. Bennett Cerf and Steve Allen reminded viewers that her "line" was a print reporter while Arlene Francis and Kitty Carlisle focused on the impact Dorothy had on their television show. Carlisle's statement "... no one can ever possibly take her place"[24] was prophetic. CBS announced 15 months later the cancellation of not only What's My Line? but Carlisle's own show To Tell The Truth along with Allen's show I've Got A Secret.

The New York Journal American, which ran Kilgallen's Voice of Broadway column as usual on the day of her death, expired five months later -- a tremendous blow for the Hearst Corporation. During the five months, the newspaper did not publish any remarks from widower Richard Kollmar, although the columnist's father Jimmy Kilgallen, still a highly respected reporter at age 77, was quoted as saying she "apparently suffered a heart attack, her first." While Kollmar remained silent, Jimmy Kilgallen reminisced fondly about her career and girlish quality for the February 1966 issue of TV Radio Mirror. He said he knew nothing about her prescription medication and declined to discuss the assassination.[25] All the way until 1981, he kept working in the Hearst building on Manhattan's Eighth Avenue, but the word in New York journalism circles was "Don't ask Jimmy about his daughter."

Another close relative of Kilgallen has refused to discuss her, according to crime writer Dominick Dunne. Appearing on Larry King Live on January 25, 2006, he answered a phone caller's query about Kilgallen by saying the columnist could have been murdered. Dunne added, "I doubt we would find anything this many years later," with which King, who said he had known Kilgallen, agreed.[26] In the April 2006 edition of Vanity Fair (magazine), Dunne added that he asked Kilgallen's sister Eleanor about the mystery on two occasions after the columnist's death and before he left film and television production to become a crime writer. Eleanor Kilgallen, a casting agent who worked with him to book actors, "... made me feel like a skunk for asking," Dunne wrote, and she refused to answer.[27]

For her contribution to the television industry, Dorothy Kilgallen has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6780 Hollywood Boulevard. She received the star when she, Hedda Hopper and other powerful show business columnists were honored with some of the first stars on the new Walk of Fame. Kilgallen was able to attend the ceremony because she was nearby at the time (February 1960) covering a murder trial in the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles.

Film credits

Bibliography

  • Kilgallen, Dorothy and Herb Shapiro. Girl Around the World, David McKay Publishing. 1936.
  • Kilgallen, Dorothy. Murder One, Random House. 1967. ASIN: B0007EFTJ6

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Jordan, Sarah. Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen. Midwest Today. 2007.
  2. ^ Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979. p.189.
  3. ^ Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979. p.308.
  4. ^ Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979. p. 217.
  5. ^ earst, William Randolph Jr. with Casserly, Jack. The Hearsts: Father and Son. New York: Roberts Rinehart, 1991. pp. 231-3.
  6. ^ Good, Timothy. Above Top Secret. Morrow, William Company. June 1988. ISBN 0688078605. p.231.
  7. ^ New York Journal American May 22, 1955.
  8. ^ Cincinnati Enquirer, May 23, 1955.
  9. ^ Washington Post, May 23, 1955.
  10. ^ Good, Timothy. Above Top Secret. Morrow, William Company. June 1988. ISBN 0688078605. pp. 43-44.
  11. ^ New York Journal-American September 3, 1965.
  12. ^ New York Journal American July 15, 1959.
  13. ^ Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979. p. 388.
  14. ^ "Columnist Says Dallas Not Guilty" Dallas Times-Herald. February 19, 1964, p. 7A.
  15. ^ Scrapbook # 5 in the Kilgallen collection in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
  16. ^ Krebs, Alvin. "Medical Examiner on Dorothy Kilgallen: Barbiturates and Alcohol" New York Herald Tribune, November 16, 1965, p. 15
  17. ^ Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979. p. 397.
  18. ^ Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979. pp. 177-78.
  19. ^ New York Journal American July 15, 1965.
  20. ^ Dorothy Kilgallen obituary in the Washington Post, November 9, 1965.
  21. ^ Krebs, Alvin. Medical Examiner On Dorothy Kilgallen: Barbiturates and Alcohol New York Herald Tribune. November 16, 1965. p. 15.
  22. ^ Morris, Bernadine. "Anne Fogarty, Designer of American Look" New York Times January 16, 1980, p. D19.
  23. ^ Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. New York: Delacorte Press, 1979.
  24. ^ kinescope of What's My Line? dated November 14, 1965 rerun on GSN most recently on July 23, 2007
  25. ^ Carpozi, George. "An Ace Reporter Remembers His Daughter." TV Radio Mirror edition of February 1966.
  26. ^ Larry King Live broadcast of January 25, 2006 on CNN
  27. ^ Dunne, Dominick. regular column in Vanity Fair (magazine) April 2006 edition
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