November 8, 1965—Dorothy Kilgallen, veteran newspaper columnist and celebrity
panelist on TV’s long-running game show What’s My Line?, died at age 52 in her New York City apartment.
Had she been alive to see it happen to someone else, the odd
circumstances surrounding her demise would have thrilled to the marrow this
longtime crime reporter and gossip maven. The timing alone was eye-opening, as she was
well into what promised to be the biggest story of her career: the
assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In a prior post, I discussed how Kilgallen and husband Richard Kollmar became involved
in a radio feud by imitating the spouse-breakfast talk show of Ed and Pegeen
Fitzgerald. Kilgallen’s career and her relationship are worth entire posts in
themselves.
But the nature of her death says much by itself
about how even the spotlight inevitably created by great celebrity is not enough
to ensure more than a cursory police investigation—and how conspiracy theorists
batten on such amateurish detective work.
“What happened
to Dorothy?” is the insistent, breathless refrain of Lee Israel’s biography
Kilgallen.
At points, she gives serious credence to the fevered speculations of arch
conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. It is also difficult to know Ms. Israel’s own subsequent troubled history
(a guilty plea in federal court to one count of conspiracy to transport stolen
property in interstate commerce, part of a scheme to forge and sell hundreds of
letters by the likes of Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Lillian
Hellman) and not wonder seriously about the biographer's credibility.
But a number of the circumstances that Ms. Israel
and others have recounted about Ms. Kilgallen’s death can only lead to
wondering about the slipshod work of the NY Police Department at this time:
*She was found in the apartment’s master bedroom,
which she had not occupied for several years;
*She was found sitting up with a book, but her
eyeglasses were not in the bedroom where she died;
*She went out, after taping What’s My Line?, to both her usual bar, P.J. Clarke’s, and the
Regency Lounge, but no patrons at the former were interviewed and police were
not even aware that she had gone to the latter;
*She was known to be working on the Kennedy
assassination story, but none of her notes were ever discovered.
The coroner’s determination that Ms. Kilgallen died through
a mixture of alcohol and barbiturates did nothing to quell the nascent JFK
assassination conspiracy industry. The columnist had never been satisfied with
the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, and
the rumor that she was pursuing leads following an eight-minute interview with Jack
Ruby, Oswald’s killer, only increased skepticism among those inclined to
distrust the official version of events.
Kilgallen was definitely among the latter. Her
interest in the assassination was a natural outgrowth of her fascination in
the last few years before her death with several types of stories: CIA attempts
to murder Fidel Castro, famous homicide cases, and gossip about high-level
officials on both sides of the Atlantic.
In addition, she had learned, at least by the second
year of Kennedy’s administration, that he was a philanderer, and, after
receiving a copy of the Warren Commission Report prior to publication, she had started raising
pointed questions about it, both on particular points (Who was the “rich oil man”
mentioned in the report’s discussion, since no witness was cited?)
and in general (“It's a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the
United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is
apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of
police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary
circumstances”). She was hoping that a chapter on the assassination in a
proposed book of hers, Murder One, would land the biggest scoop of her career.
Israel’s biography offers ample evidence of Ms.
Kilgallen’s increased drinking and unhappy marriage (including an affair with
singer Johnnie Ray). Indeed, the biographer could not dismiss the possibility
that Kilgallen may have taken her own life, in despondency of a much younger
man referred to by Israel as “The Out-of-Towner.”
No matter in what way Ms. Kilgallen died, it came to
obscure a career in which she was a trailblazer for subsequent female
journalists. She had leaped to fame in 1936, the result of a 21-day race around
the world against two older male reporters (recounted in her book Girl Around the World). By 1950, her
column had an estimated 20 million readers. Her métier may have been murder
trials, most notably those involving Bruno Richard Hauptmann and Dr. Sam Sheppard.
(In the case of the latter, her disbelief about the initial jury verdict and
deposition about the judge’s bias were instrumental in eventually freeing the
defendant.)
Despite the occasional archness of her prose and
descents into rightwing nonsense about Communists in her gossip column, Ms.
Kilgallen brought a skeptical, questioning intelligence to her work. The NYPD
could have used some of that in investigating her death.
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