Reporters: The Triple Threat

When Queen Elizabeth II paid her first official visit to the U.S. in 1957, New York reporters spent warm hours trudging alongside her ticker-tape parade up Broadway. At one point, they were startled by the sight of an unexpected limousine in the procession. In side, cool and elegantly dressed, sat Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, covering the event in her regal fashion. Wiping the perspiration from her forehead, an exasperated woman reporter murmured: “There goes the Queen covering the Queen.”

To her readers, Dorothy Kilgallen became as much of a celebrity as the celebrities she covered — and often skewered. Until her death at 52 last week of still undetermined causes, she remained a triple threat of the communications world. She wrote a daily gossip column, “The Voice of Broadway,” which was syndicated in 146 papers; she appeared as a panelist with a waspish will to win on the TV show What’s My Line?; and she covered occasional front-page events for the Hearstpapers with a flair rarely equaled by the competition. On any assignment she made herself so conspicuous that she often became part of the story. After Dr. Sam Sheppard’s 1954 conviction for murder, the New York Journal-American was moved to run a headline: DOROTHY KILGALLEN SHOCKED.

Hints of Espionage. As a youngster, Dorothy wanted to grow up to be like Daddy—crack I.N.S. Reporter James Kilgallen. The summer after her freshman year at the College of New Rochelle, she went to work at the New York Evening Journal and liked it so much she never went back to the class room. Enjoying a well-known byline by the time she was 23, she joined a race with two other New York reporters to see who could get around the world fastest by commercial airline. By clock and calendar, Dorothy came in second; in the contest for personal publicity she finished first. The Journal was so pleased that it gave her a Broadway column and a free hand. No one ever edited Dorothy; when a copyreader once had the temerity to change one of her sentences, she tried to have him fired.

The Kilgallen column was a mixture of catty gossip (“A world-famous movie idol, plastered, commanded a pretty girl to get into his limousine, take off all her clothes”), odd tidbits of inconsequential information (“The Duke of Windsor eats caviar with a spoon”), and dark hints of international espionage (“Anti-American factions are planning to blow up the Panama Canal”). When she wasn’t being very nasty, she could be very nice. While she knocked Frank Sinatra and Jack Paar at every possible opportunity, she had only good things to say about Pop Singer Johnny Ray or Broadway Producer Richard Kollmar, her husband. She also wrote kindly about a Latin American playboy—until she learned that the playboy did not exist. He was the product of a pressagent’s imagination.

Prescription for Murder. No one could fault Dorothy for her resourcefulness as a reporter. With the help of one of the most liberal expense accounts in the business and a smile that rarely came unstuck, she wangled stories that eluded others. By lining up a screen test for a stage-struck court official at the Finch-Tregoff murder trial in California in 1960, she got inside information on the jury’s deliberations. Her chumminess with the judge at Sam Sheppard’s trial earned her more than one scoop—besides bringing sharp criticism for the judge by a U.S. District Court when it heard Dr. Sam’s appeal. Dorothy had the good journeyman’s talent for catching accurate detail, as well as a sharp eye for the offbeat feature story on, say, an obscure trial witness. Whenever Hearst editors scented a big story, she was sure to get the assignment; she was on hand for Bruno Hauptmann’s trial, F.D.R.’s first presidential campaign, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, Princess Margaret’s marriage, Khrushchev’s U.S. visit. In turn, her fellow Hearst employees respected her as a master practitioner of Hearst journalism, a judgment that was amply evident in the amount of space—some seven pages—that the Journal-American devoted to her death.