Dorothy Mae Kilgallen (July 3, 1913 – November 8, 1965) was an Irish-American journalist and television game show panelist, perhaps best 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. Dorothy had one sibling, Eleanor Kilgallen, a New York-based casting agent for Universal Studios, who played an important part in the rising careers of James Dean, Kim Cattrall and other actors.

Dorothy Kilgallen's earliest career was as a trial reporter. She covered the trials of Bruno Hauptmann (who was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's son) and convicted murderess Anna Antonio. An example of a non-murder trial she covered was the disbarment proceedings for a New York City assistant district attorney named Thomas Aurelio, who was the leading candidate for election as a judge to a vacant seat on the New York State Supreme Court in 1943. The reason for the disbarment proceedings was that a tap on his telephone picked up a friendly conversation he had with Italian syndicate leader Frank Costello, who seemed to be assuring Aurelio's election with bribes. Aurelio was not disbarred and served on the state's highest court until 1973. Kilgallen's coverage of the Aurelio hearings in 1943 was published exclusively by the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, who closely supervised them until his death in 1951. She also wrote for national magazines including Reader's Digest.

In 1936, Kilgallen competed with two fellow New York newspaper reporters in a race around the world using means of transportation available to ordinary persons (as opposed to military personnel and the aviation heroes of the time). Despite being the only female contestant, she came in second. She described the event in her book Girl Around The World and penned the screenplay for the 1937 movie Fly Away Baby that starred Glenda Farrell as the Kilgallen-inspired character. During a stint living in Hollywood in 1936 and 1937, Kilgallen wrote a daily column that only could be read in New York that nonetheless provoked a libel suit from Constance Bennett, then the highest-paid actress in Hollywood (p. 189). Kilgallen evidently befriended or at least won the approval of Jean Harlow as evidenced by an invitation to the ill-fated blonde actress' funeral that survives in memorabilia that the columnist saved for decades and that her widower donated to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

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

Beginning in 1945, Kilgallen co-hosted a long-running radio talk show, Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick, with her husband, Richard Kollmar. Airing live on WOR, an AM station, every morning except Sundays (when a recorded broadcast was aired), the show originated from the couple's Park Avenue apartment and featured the Kollmars talking "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. When the family moved from the Park Avenue building to a townhouse (described precisely by one family friend as a "Georgian brownstone") in June of 1952, they set up a room on the fifth floor specifically for the radio broadcasts. Collectors of vintage radio broadcasts often write about this radio show to evoke pleasant nostalgia for Cafe Society and The Stork Club. A recorded broadcast from 1956, however, proves that "Dorothy and Dick" occasionally became controversial on the air. They discussed two New York City laws that were sometimes enforced by police. Storekeepers and homeowners must keep their sidewalks clean at all times yet they are prohibited from sweeping it after 9:00 a.m. The Kollmars wondered how New Yorkers could follow both laws.

In 1950, Dorothy 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. The program became a classic television game show, noted for the urbanity of its host and panel members. Kilgallen was typically introduced by the show's announcer as "the popular syndicated columnist whose Voice of Broadway appears in newspapers coast to coast." She brought to her role as panelist New York sophistication, a competitive spirit, keen questioning of guests, and a gleeful appreciation of humorous moments. She sometimes asked a question invented by Steve Allen: "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" (intended to estimate the size of a product made or sold by the contestant).

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

People outside of North America could not watch Kilgallen on What's My Line?. (Many countries launched their own versions of the game to account for differences in culture, the labor market and varying means of early television broadcasting.) The program's American success evidently gave officials of the Hearst Corporation such confidence, however, that they circulated The Voice of Broadway to Canada, Europe, Australia, and an English-language newspaper in China. The kinescope of the Line episode that aired live on February 13, 1955 includes an announcement at the beginning that Dorothy Kilgallen's column can be read in Australia. It is not known whether she ever published overseas anything of historical value that American editors refused to publish.

Dorothy Kilgallen earned respect among her journalistic colleagues for her newspaper coverage of the 1954 murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. His case inspired the television show The Fugitive. The New York Journal American carried the banner front-page headline that she was "astounded" by the guilty verdict. The doctor, who was an osteopath, was convicted of bludgeoning his wife Marilyn to death with a blunt instrument at their home in the Bay Village suburb of Cleveland. In the 1990s, long after Dr. Sheppard and Kilgallen were dead, his case was reopened and an aging convict named Richard Eberling became a person of interest, but hard evidence to convict him was lacking.

Many Clevelanders believed Dr. Sam Sheppard was guilty, including the editors of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which carried Kilgallen's syndicated column. Immediately after she wrote about the Sheppard prosecutors, "They didn't prove he was guilty any more than they proved there are pin-headed men on Mars," her column was banned by this newspaper (p. 308). Clevelanders should have been grateful for what Kilgallen did not publish. As she revealed nine years later at the Overseas Press Club in New York, the judge in the case told her toward the beginning of the trial that Dr. Sheppard was "guilty as hell." When attorney F. Lee Bailey began the long process of overturning Sheppard's conviction, resulting in the osteopath's 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.

Arlene Francis, who was Dorothy Kilgallen's fellow panelist on What's My Line, said in 1976, "I thought Dorothy was a marvelous journalist. When she covered something like the Sheppard trial. As opposed to her gossip column" (p. 217).

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

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" (p. 231). This statement is sometimes linked to the alleged secret UFO study group Majestic 12. On May 22, 1955, an International News Service (INS) syndicated report from London by 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, the Cincinnati Enquirer and other newspapers.

Various attempts to get to the bottom of the story, including by the London news editor of INS, were unsuccessful. 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 (p. 43-44). Creighton made his claim after Mountbatten's death.

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

Kilgallen's New York Journal-American column was critical of the Warren Commission while editors at her syndication outlets usually deleted those portions. (Kilgallen acknowledged in 1962 that a newspaper editor had every right to do what he wanted with syndicated material.) 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." 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). FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on her activities.

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. What those media outlets were is not known. The Kilgallen biography by Lee Israel does not cite any of them. Kilgallen had at least one show business article published in a German-language magazine called Quick, (in 1964).

Kilgallen visited Europe several times in 1964 and 1965, either alone or as a participant in movie junkets. She is known to have witnessed, along with more than 100 of her fellow journalists, the shooting of the scene in The Sound of Music (film) in which Julie Andrews performs the solo number "I Have Confidence." It is not known, however, if Kilgallen, during her overseas visits, worked on any stories that were not part of show business.

"What's My Line" began prerecording Christmas episodes in 1959 and summer episodes in 1961. For the first time since 1950, Kilgallen and the other series regulars could vacation without anyone having to explain their absences on the air. A few of her comments on entertainment during this late period cross over into other topics, such as her remark in her June 10, 1965 column that The Manchurian Candidate (then 2-1/2 years old) "was a routine melodrama with the plot telegraphed as neatly as if it had been sent by Western Union." On June 6, 1965, What's My Line? panelist Martin Gabel announced on a live broadcast that Kilgallen had just returned from London, where she had written about the Profumo affair two years earlier.

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). Sinatra was angered by this and referred to her publicly as the "chinless wonder." Kilgallen also had a relationship with the singer Johnnie Ray. After the power of Broadway columnists started to give way to television commentators and other personalities in the late 1950s, Kilgallen was often parodied by comedienne Hermione Gingold and the editors of MAD magazine, among others.

According to the 1980 Ellis Nassour biography Patsy Cline, when country music performers from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry appeared at a concert at Carnegie Hall to benefit New York's Musicians Aid Society in 1961, Kilgallen dismissed them as "hicks from the sticks." In her column she advised that "everyone should leave town. The hillbillies are coming." Patsy Cline, one of the headliners, riposted 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!' "

Following the 1951 death of William Randolph Hearst, his empire endured a slow, painful decline heightened by a power struggle between two of his sons and a company executive named Richard Berlin. This situation evidently caused the three men to overlook the controversy Kilgallen provoked under her byline in the New York Journal American until the last day of her life. Even at that late date, the three men operated the newspaper in a filthy, cockroach - infested building on Manhattan's Lower East Side using ancient printing presses. Kilgallen worked out of her home using couriers from Western Union, but she continued to visit the decrepit Journal American building occasionally.

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. She had apparently succumbed to a fatal combination of alcohol and Seconal, perhaps 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 was small enough to suggest an accident (p. 421).

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 speculate that she was murdered by members of the same alleged conspiracy against JFK. Her claims that she was under surveillance (p. 397) 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 (p. 177-8). 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.

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. Kilgallen and Sinclaire had discussed the book some weeks earlier after she had finished it. Moreover, Kilgallen had noted in her column four months earlier (July) that the protagonist of the book dies in the end.

Kilgallen's husband Richard, 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?.

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 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. Both Luke and DiMaio are alive as of 2007.

After Kilgallen's death, her husband Richard, 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. She and Richard settled in the very same townhouse but rented out the ground floor to an ophthalmologist for his office.

At the time of her death, Dorothy and Richard had been married for 25 years and left behind three children. Richard died in 1971. Both are interred in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York, while Anne Fogarty is buried in New York City. Richard and Anne were close with her much-older niece who has said she does not recall either of them expressing interest in the JFK assassination or speculating about what Dorothy had known (even though the niece had been an acquaintance of Dorothy). The ophthalmologist has stated he recalls Anne Fogarty, who was "personable," visiting his office sometimes to discuss landlord/tenant issues, but he never met Richard or the children. Anne, 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, to which she had not contributed. Information about Anne's work for Dorothy, including the original dresses for her last several episodes of What's My Line?, comes from Dorothy's hairdresser, who knew many designers and Diana Vreeland.

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 widower Richard, 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" 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, although Dorothy's father Jimmy, still a highly respected reporter at age 77, was quoted as saying she "apparently suffered a heart attack, her first." While Richard remained silent, Jimmy reminisced fondly about her career and girlish quality for the February 1966 issue of TV Radio Mirror. Mr. Kilgallen said he knew nothing about her prescription medication and declined to discuss the assassination. 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."

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.

* Sinner Take All - 1936, actress * Fly Away Baby - 1937, screenwriter * Pajama Party - 1964, uncredited 1964 cameo appearance, although she states in the film, "My name is Dorothy. What's yours?"

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

* Israel, Lee. Kilgallen. Delacorte Press. October 1979.

* *Dorothy Kilgallen's FBI Files 8 PDF files which are about 4 megabytes each in size. *Midwest Today magazine profile of Dorothy Kilgallen by Sara Jordan *Dorothy Kilgallen: Mysterious Death? – Kennedy Assassination Home Page *Dorothy Kilgallen and the JFK Assassination – Kennedy Assassination Home Page * Dorothy Kilgallen: bio - alleged connection of Dorothy Kilgallen to death of Marilyn Monroe