Dorothy Kilgallen - Death - After Death and Legacy

After Death and Legacy

At the time of her death in November 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen and Richard Kollmar had been married for 25 years, and she left behind three children. A year and a half after Kilgallen's death, Kollmar, 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. Kollmar died at age 60, three years and six and a half months after marrying Fogarty. Newspaper obituaries said Kollmar "died in his sleep" at home. He was not interred with Kilgallen at Gate of Heaven Cemetery. A 1979 Kilgallen biography by Lee Israel said he "took his own life in January 1971, swallowing everything in reach." Although he seemed to have swallowed many more pills than his first wife had five years and two months earlier, the medical examiner did not call it a suicide. Kollmar's death was not a major news item, as Kilgallen's had been, and medical examiner findings about his death were not made public until years later when Israel obtained documents from the M.E.'s office, with help from the youngest child of the Kollmars.

Their youngest child, Kerry Kollmar, was eleven when his mother died. Between 1975 and 1978, he assisted Lee Israel with her work on a biography of his mother. Kollmar helped Israel obtain medical records from his mother's two confinements at NYU Langone Medical Center in March and April 1965. They had something to do with a cast on her left forearm that she can be seen wearing on the April 25, 1965 live telecast of What's My Line?. The documents contained little more than a notation that Dorothy Kilgallen's overall health was "excellent" and that she had fractured her left shoulder. Kollmar also interviewed two of his mother's personal physicians, who claimed to have examined her as she lay dead in her home. Neither offered an opinion on the cause of death. Although Kerry Kollmar provided this assistance to Lee Israel, he never said whether he thought his mother could have been murdered. If Dorothy Kilgallen learned dangerous secrets, she did not share them with her eleven-year-old son.

One of two known comments Richard Kollmar made after her death about his first wife was later recalled by Bob Bach, who booked the mystery guests for What's My Line?. At Bach's home several hours after her funeral, the television producer asked the widower to discuss his wife's interest in the assassination, and Kollmar replied, "Robert, I'm afraid that will have to go to the grave with me."

Author Mark Lane is the source for Kollmar's other known remark. An essay on John McAdams' website about the JFK assassination claims that Lane told Kilgallen everything she knew about the assassination except for how to obtain the 102-page Warren Commission Ruby transcript, which came to her from an unknown person. This contradicts statements by Lane in the Israel book, in a 1977 issue of the Midnight supermarket tabloid preserved at the National Archives, on talk radio in 1993 and on the Geraldo Rivera TV show Now It Can Be Told in 1992. Lane's side of the story is that a few weeks after the last comment Kilgallen published about the assassination (an item in her September 3, 1965 Voice of Broadway column about Marina Oswald Porter and her incriminating photograph of Lee holding a rifle and socialist literature), Kilgallen told him by telephone that she planned to visit Dallas again. She did not name any of her sources there, and she declined to tell him who she thought might have shot the president. They never communicated again. A month after her death, Lane contacted Kollmar to ask where her notes were. Lane and Kollmar had met in Kilgallen's presence at the Kollmar brownstone more than a year earlier. Kollmar got rid of Lane quickly, asserting that his late wife's discoveries have "done enough damage already" and "too many people have suffered as a result." Lane never learned anything further about Dorothy Kilgallen's opinions or findings about the assassination.

On the What's My Line? broadcast following Kilgallen's death, host John Charles Daly opened the show explaining that, after consulting with "her good husband Dick Kollmar," the show's tribute to her would be to go on as usual. Much of the text of Daly's announcement was identical to the announcement he'd made at the beginning of the broadcast the night after regular panelist Fred Allen died. During their usual "goodnights," 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 Kilgallen had on the television show.

Although Bennett Cerf was audiotaped on January 23, 1968 reminiscing about Kilgallen, he said nothing about her death or about the book, Murder One, that his company Random House had published in 1967 with the late Dorothy Kilgallen listed as the sole author. Years after his death, his widow Phyllis Fraser admitted to Kilgallen biographer Lee Israel that a writer named Allan Ullman had written it with Richard Kollmar's approval.

Kilgallen's private secretary, Myrtle Verne, who can be seen as one of the contestants on a 1957 episode of What's My Line?, died on January 10, 1975, shortly before Israel began contacting people for her biography.

Despite Richard Kollmar's public silence about his late wife, her father, Jim Kilgallen, still a highly respected reporter at age 77, did speak for publication. The breaking story of her death in the Journal American, where father and daughter both worked, quoted him as saying she "apparently suffered a heart attack, her first." He reminisced fondly about her career and girlish quality for the February 1966 issue of TV Radio Mirror. He said he knew nothing about her prescription medication and declined to discuss the Kennedy assassination. During this period Jack O'Brian took over the Voice of Broadway column, but the Journal American ceased publication in April 1966 with O'Brian and other Journal American columnists becoming part of the short-lived New York World Journal Tribune. Later in the 1960s and in the 1970s, Jim Kilgallen continued working as a reporter with his articles appearing in the Hearst papers that remained outside New York City, but his Hearst colleagues knew not to ask him about his late daughter, and so did his "friends of long standing," said biographer Israel. Contacted by Israel, he wrote to her on January 26, 1976 that he would not help her, noting that he was sticking to "a firm policy" he had maintained since his daughter's death "not to grant interviews to anyone concerning her career."

The National Archives has a file from 1978 containing a collage of newspaper clippings dating from that year that Jim Kilgallen sent to Louis Stokes of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. One was a "Page Six" item in the New York Post about Israel's forthcoming book noting that employees of the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, the place where Dorothy Kilgallen was last seen alive, were instructed not to talk to Israel. But Jim Kilgallen, who continued reporting for Hearst until age 93, is not known to have commented on this or any other suggestions that his daughter might have been murdered.

For her contribution to the television industry, Dorothy Kilgallen has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6780 Hollywood Boulevard.

In the 2012 comic novel Nick & Jake, by Tad Richards and Jonathan Richards, Kilgallen breaks the news story that paints protagonist Nick Carraway (from The Great Gatsby) as a subversive, thus destroying his career.