The Press: Working Newswoman

The press box in the Los Angeles County Courthouse at times seemed like a Hollywood set. Recruited to provide reportorial bylines and sidelights on the murder trial of Dr. R. Bernard Finch and his well-molded mistress, Carole Tregoff, both accused of slaying Finch’s wife, were portly Producer Al (High School Confidential) Zugsmith, Novelist-Scenarist Irving (I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf) Shulman, Actresses Pamela (The Upturned Glass) Mason and Terry (Mighty Joe Young) Moore. Explained Terry Moore: “I’m doing it in preparation for a role in Girl on Death Row—and by the way, the girl is innocent.” Against such amateurs, an old newspaper pro could only look good—and Hearstling Dorothy Kilgallen is a bona fide professional. Rushed to Los Angeles to perk up the Hearst chain’s coverage of the Finch-Tregoff trial. Reporter Kilgallen ranged far and wide, occasionally clucking faint disapproval of Carole Tregoff (“No one taking a long look at her would doubt that she was more interested in men than sculpture, soccer or Scrabble”), aseptical-y criticizing the jury (“It contains in the alternate section a lady I would not care to have judge me on a jaywalking rap”), offering advice on uxoricide (“The best way to murder your wife is to have a few drinks with her, pull out your revolver and shoot her, then head for the nearest cop and hand him the gun”), and from first to last reporting the trial in breezy, firehouse prose.

But Dotty Kilgallen could also hold her own with her reportorial rivals in their own business: of all the celebrities covering, or attempting to cover, the Finch-Tregoff trial, she was the best known. At 46, the mother of three, Reporter Kilgallen conducts a syndicated daily gossip column, shares a daily small-talk radio program with her husband Dick Kollmar, and appears weekly on the television panel show What’s My Line? In Los Angeles busy Dorothy sometimes attracted more interest than the trial itself: she posed for pictures with the defendants, signed scores of autographs for admirers, received an orchid from an unidentified California judge. Yet for all that, her copy, rattled off on an electric typewriter in her hotel room, provided the best coverage of the Finch-Tregoff trial.