Here is Dorothy Kilgallen's biography:
Dorothy Kilgallen was the daughter of James Kilgallen, a newspaperman with the Hearst Corporation. She followed her father into the newspaper business and made her early reputation as a crime reporter and for her participation in an around-the-world race in 1936. Her fame and subsequent book about the race, "Girl Around the World," established her as a presence in the journalism profession.
In 1938, Kilgallen became a powerful and influential Broadway columnist. She and her husband Richard Kollmar hosted a long-running early morning radio talk show called "Breakfast With Dorothy and Dick." The couple had two children who sometimes joined them on the radio, and they "lived an early version of an open marriage," allowing both to carry on affairs outside of their relationship.
Millions of Americans came to know and admire Kilgallen through the TV quiz show "What's My Line?" She took the game more seriously than her colleagues and allegedly bothered her that she was never as popular with the show's viewers as were her fellow panelists. Game show viewers seemed to have strong feelings about her, either loving her or hating her.
Kilgallen's relationship with singer Johnnie Ray started out as fun and secretive but later became disastrous when she competed with Ray's male lovers for his attention. She also had a close relationship with Jack Ruby, the defendant in the murder trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, and secured two exclusive interviews with him.
Kilgallen's knowledge of the judge's misconduct during the 1954 murder trial of Samuel Sheppard helped F. Lee Bailey secure a new trial for Sheppard. She also became a vocal critic of the Warren Commission investigation of the president's assassination and allegedly planned to reveal important new information on the murder of JFK before her death.
Kilgallen died under mysterious circumstances in 1965, and her notebooks containing the information she was about to publish disappeared. Some believed that she was murdered, while others thought it was an accidental overdose.
