Dorothy Kilgallen - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Born in Chicago, Kilgallen was the daughter of the Hearst newspaperman, James Lawrence Kilgallen (1888–1982) and his wife, Mae Ahern. The family moved from Chicago to Wyoming, Indiana, and back to Chicago before finally settling in New York City. Dorothy's sister Eleanor, six years her junior, became a casting agent for movies and television shows. After two semesters at The College of New Rochelle, Dorothy Kilgallen dropped out to take a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal, which was owned and operated by the Hearst Corporation. She was Roman Catholic.

In 1936, Kilgallen competed with two other New York newspaper reporters in a race around the world using only means of transportation available to the general public. She was the only woman to compete in the contest and she came in second. She described the event in her book Girl Around The World, and it credited for the story idea for the 1937 movie, Fly-Away Baby, starring Glenda Farrell, as a character partly inspired by Kilgallen. 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, "who in the early thirties had been the highest paid performer in motion pictures," according to a Kilgallen biography, "but who was experiencing a temporary decline in popular appeal."

Back in New York in 1938, Kilgallen began writing a daily column, the Voice of Broadway, for Hearst's New York Journal American, which the corporation created by merging the Evening Journal with the 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 such as politics and organized crime. The column eventually was syndicated to 146 papers via King Features Syndicate.

In April 1940, Kilgallen married Richard Kollmar (1910-1971) who had starred in the musicals Knickerbocker Holiday and Too Many Girls. Beginning in April 1945, Kilgallen co-hosted a WOR-AM radio talk show with her husband, Breakfast With Dorothy and Dick, from their 16-room apartment at 640 Park Avenue. The show followed them when they purchased a Georgian brownstone at 45 East 68th Street in 1952. The radio program, which like Kilgallen's newspaper column, mixed entertainment with serious issues, remained on the air until 1963.

In 1950, Kilgallen became a panelist on the American television game show, What's My Line?, which was aired on the CBS television network from 1950 to 1967. She remained on the show for 15 years, until her death. Fellow panelist Bennett Cerf claimed that, unlike the rest of the panel's priority on getting a laugh and entertaining the audience, Kilgallen's main interest was guessing the correct answers. Cerf asserted that she also would milk her time on camera by asking more questions than necessary, the answers to which she knew would be affirmative.

Cerf described Kilgallen as an outsider among her castmates for two reasons. The first was that her political point of view, that of a "Hearst girl," differed from that of the others. The second was that information Kilgallen elicited during conversations in the dressing room shared by all four panelists, would subsequently appear in her newspaper column. Cerf, speaking for his fellow panelists, panel moderator, and himself in an audio-tape-recorded interview at Columbia University two years and two months after Kilgallen's death, said, "We didn't like that."

Kilgallen was among the notables on the guest list of those who attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, in 1953. Kilgallen's articles won her a Pulitzer Prize nomination during this era.

In 1958, Kilgallen and her husband Kollmar, along with Albert W. Selden, co-produced a musical on Broadway entitled, The Body Beautiful. Kilgallen and her fellow panelists made mention of the show on various episodes of What's My Line? during this time period. On one episode, a cast member of the ill-fated musical (a well-built young man, billed as a "chorus boy" in the episode) appeared as a contestant and stumped the panel.