-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
Kilgallen
Lee Israel�1979
Delacorte Press
New York, NY
ISBN 0-440-04522-3
--[2]--
28/THE OUT-OF--TOWNER
THROUGH the late summer and early fall of 1964, Dorothy began producing a
series of explosive exclusives related to the assassination. The first was a
corker. Howard Rothberg picked her up one night in mid-August, after what he
understood, from Dorothy, was "some kind of meeting." She was toting a heavy
sheath of papers inside the cover of the Life magazine issue that featured
Lee Harvey Oswald on the cover, hefting the Mannlicher-Carcano with which he
was alleged to have shot the President. Howard relieved her of the package as
they left his car and headed toward a restaurant.
"What are all these papers?" Howard asked.
She answered jauntily: "Oh, it's just the Warren Commission Report."[1]
The report was not due to be released until late September, until which time
it was classified Top Secret. Dorothy had somehow obtained a verbatim copy of
a portion of the voluminous study, consisting of Jack Ruby's testimony to the
commission, which had transpired in Dallas back in June of that year.
It would take Dorothy three days to convince her newspaper to publish the
long-awaited document. She had first to swear to her publisher, Joseph
Kingsbury Smith, and to the lawyers at the Journal-American, that she had
done nothing illegal in- obtaining the transcript and that the person from
whom she obtained it was in rightful possession of the 102 page segment.
Smith asked her to name her source. This she would not do.
Dorothy assumed that her paper's reluctance to publish transcended the legal
issues involved. She would tell Mark Lane that she perceived a compliant
self-censorship at the journal, that the publisher knew that the government
would not be pleased and that he might, as a result, become persona non grata
at White House functions. Lane asked her if she didn't fear the same kind of
social ostracism. "Oh, Lyndon's a bore," she replied. "Who wants to go to his
parties?" Mark Lane was not buying her flip response. He believed that she
was just too modest to proclaim that getting the facts out about the
assassination dwarfed any social considerations she might have had.[2]
In her dealings with the paper, she permitted Paul Schoenstein to photostat
only one page of the document, which was run to authenticate the coup. The
rest she demanded back after its contents were typed. The testimony was
published in three parts, with Dorothy's comments, questions, and assessments
running alongside. The installments were treated with proper hoopla. She was
making available, for the first time, one of the most eagerly awaited
documents of the century.
The first installment of the Ruby transcript was published on August 18. Two
days later, Lee Rankin of the Warren Commission requested J. Edgar Hoover to
conduct an investigation of how Dorothy came into possession of the
classified report.[3] The investigation was exhaustive, with agents
interviewing everyone who was in the room during the Ruby interview or had
access to the transcript thereafter. They questioned sheriffs, a jailer, a
court reporter, secretaries, district attorneys, and lawyers. The Warren
Commission was allowed to investigate its own people. There is no indication
in the FBI dossier that the source was ever uncovered. When Dorothy somehow
learned that the federal agents were narrowing in on a female court reporter
who had transcribed the proceedings, she made her one concession, insisting
that a man and not a woman was the source of her material.
Two federal agents knocked on her door on August 21. She asked them to tea,
told them that she "would die rather than reveal her source," and noted, with
amusement, that they appeared to be embarrassed, recognizing the futility of
their mission. As they were about to leave, she gave them one clue, in jest.
"I can tell you that it wasn't John Daly," she said. Daly was married to the
daughter of Chief Justice Earl Warren.[4]
Immediately after she caused the Ruby transcript to be published, Dorothy
made another trip to Dallas. There she somehow obtained the original police
log that chronicled the minute-by-minute activities of the department in the
immediate wake of the assassination, as reflected in its radio
communications.[5] She ascertained from the exclusive material a surprising
datum that would not be incorporated into the massive Warren Commission
Report. Chief Curry of the Dallas police department, who was in the first car
of the motorcade, had reacted to the shots he heard with an initial command:
"Get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there."[6]
Dorothy noted, in her banner story based on this latest acquisition:
Twenty-four hours after the assassination, however, Chief Curry assured
reporters that the sound of the shots told him at once they had come from the
Texas School Depository and that "right away" he radioed an order to surround
and search the building. But actually, as we see from the Police Department's
official version of events, Chief Curry's immediate concern was not the
Depository, but the triple-tiered overpass towards which the Presidential car
was moving at about eight miles an hour when the fatal shots were fired.[7]
J. Edgar Hoover was following the dispatches of the flighty and
irresponsible" Dorothy Kilgallen with extraordinary and painstaking
attention. Her dossier is annotated in Hoover's own handwriting, a phenomenon
that Mark Lane, who has seen voluminous documents released under the Freedom
of Information Act, considers most unusual.[8] Hoover quibbles in the margin
with some of her conclusions. "Wrong" he scrawled underneath her surmise that
the overpass must have been unguarded. He also corrected the time at which
she deduced that police were dispatched to the Depository. He did not and
could not correct her startling revelation about Curry's order, which was
treated in a somewhat truncated fashion in the still-unpublished Warren
Commission Report. It reported only: "The Dallas police log reflects that
Chief of Police Curry reported the shooting of the President and issued his
first order at 12:30 p.m."[9] The commission did not choose to mention what
that order was.
Invigorated by her growing skepticism, Dorothy, with Richard's assistance,
reenacted the assassination from her swank five-story town house on East
Sixty-eighth Street.
>From the information she was assembling, Dorothy learned that the testimony
from which the Dallas police first radioed a description of Oswald's height
and weight came from the eye witness observations of Howard Brennan, a steam
fitter who was sitting on a concrete wall more than a hundred feet away from
the sixth-floor comer window out of which the purported assassin took aim and
fired. The Warren Commission Report would state: "Brennan was in an excellent
position to observe anyone in the window."[10]
Late one night, with the lights on in the house, Richard positioned himself,
broomstick in hand, leaning out of one of their fifth-floor corner windows.
Dorothy went outside to East Sixty-eighth Street. Standing at the approximate
distance that Brennan had been situated, she craned up at her play-acting
husband, hoping, doubtlessly, that they were unobserved by neighbors. Dorothy
concluded that there was no way in the world that such a description could
have been accurately determined by Brennan.[11]
The report would be masterly in its accommodations to the statements of the
witness, who asserted that he discerned no change in Oswald's stature as he
saw him walk around inside the Depository and then fire his shots, though it
was definitely determined that the assassin would have had to kneel to shoot,
given his height and the fact that the window pane was not broken.[12]
Dorothy was never convinced that Brennan could have seen what he was reported
to have seen. And the Zapruder film, which was not available to her at the
time, eventually revealed, according to Mark Lane, that the steam fitter "was
not even looking up at the time the shots were fired."[13]
Dorothy did not publish this particular observation. But she did describe the
reenactment to Mark Lane when they came face to face for the first time at
her town house.
Lane and Kilgallen were an unlikely match. He and she were miles apart
politically. As a New York assemblyman, he was an outspoken critic of
Governor Rockefeller's pet bombshelter project and uncovered information that
some of the sponsors of the proposed program had a financial interest in its
implementation. He was a civil rights worker and a defense attorney. He had
gone to Dallas at the request of Marguerite Oswald, who asked him to defend
her son's interest before the Warren Commission. As a consequence of that
brief encounter, he embarked on an independent, scrupulous investigation,
which would be published eventually as Rush toJudgment. In these years, he
was chipping away, gathering information, and battling for access to media,
which was usually denied to him.
When he was told, at his New York office of the Citizens' Committee of
Inquiry, that Dorothy Kilgallen was on the telephone, he thought, "My God,
what does she want? Hasn't enough happened to us already!"[14] He had never
liked her or what she appeared to represent. He perceived her to be a
provinicial, insignificant gossip columnist.
When they met, he found himself charmed and moved by her. He had fought a
long and lonely fight. And here was a woman of some power and goodly access
to the public weal who shared both his passion and his persuasion. Dorothy
told Mark that she hoped to "break the case." He reminded her that there
would be formidable obstacles placed in her way and possibly personal danger.
"That doesn't concern me," Dorothy replied. "They've killed the President,
the government is not prepared to tell us the truth, and I'm going to do
everything in my power to find out what really happened." [15]
They established a working relationship, exchanging information and ideas.
Dorothy functioned frequently as a conduit to bring to public attention,
through her newspaper, the fruits of his investigation.
Dorothy told Mark that she knew her phones were tapped from the time she
published the Ruby transcript, and that his probably was, too. "Intelligence
agencies will be watching us," she warned. "We'll have to be very
careful."[16]
The enlightened modern heretic remains mindful, to some extent, of being
dismissed as paranoid. When Marguerite Oswald told Mark Lane that she
suspected her son was an agent, he advised her to keep her suspicions to
herself lest she diminish her credibility.[17] Neither did he now disclose
his own fears of surveillance or repeat Dorothy's admonition about the
intelligence community to anyone. Mark Lane did not, however, consider that
Dorothy was overcautious when she suggested that they would be watched. He
was to say, in 1976, I would bet you a thousand-to-one that the CIA
surrounded her as soon as she started writing those stories." [18]
When he and Dorothy needed to communicate on the telephone, they arranged to
go to separate phone booths. At her suggestion, he was code-named "Parker"
and she "Robinson." They met several times at her home, once or twice with
Richard present. Richard listened quietly and excused himself before the
termination of the meetings. Dorothy usually had a drink in her hand; she was
never anything close to drunk. Dorothy and Mark also met at P. J. Clarke's
and other East Side saloons. Once, late at night, they exchanged information
under a lamppost.
She began to produce headline stories based upon statements and affidavits
that Mark Lane supplied to her at these clandestine meetings, material
gathered from personal interviews he and his small staff gathered in Dallas.
He had talked about some of the dissident data on local radio stations. The
networks had systematically prohibited him from appearing.[19] Dorothy had a
wider audience, access to print�a more suitable medium for the complex
stories that wanted telling�and new insights.
Using information furnished to her by Mark, she asked questions, in her
front-page stories, that would be conveniently begged when the report was
finally issued.
>From her first reading of the purloined transcript, Dorothy could not accept
the theory that Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald because he "loved the
President." Nor did she believe it credible that Jack Ruby, a police buff,
had never met Officer J. D. Tippit. She paid a good deal of attention, in one
of her stories that accompanied an installment of the Ruby transcript, to the
alleged meeting at the Carousel Club between Jack Ruby, Officer Tippit, and
Bernard Weissman. She pondered how it was that Ruby, who loved the President,
and Weissman, who sponsored the black-bordered advertisement in the Dallas
paper that had allegedly "infuriated" the ferret-man, could have met eight
days before the Presidential visit. She noted that the commission 's
questions to Ruby about the alleged meeting were lax, and that "while he
never admitted that the reported meeting took place, he never directly denied
it either."[20]
With Mark Lane's input, she built upon that dubiety. He gave her a copy of
his own secret testimony to the Warren Commission, never before published. It
was that testimony of Lane's, based on information provided to him by Thayer
Waldo, which introduced to the commission the possibility of the meeting, and
it was on the basis, presumably, of that testimony that the commission asked
Ruby the pertinent questions.
Under the headline NEW DOROTHY KILGALLEN EXCLUSIVE�TALE OF "RICH OIL MAN" AT
RUBY CLUB�Dorothy printed Mark's secret testimony. But his testimony
implicated a trio at the Carousel: Ruby, Tippit, and Weissman. Reexamining
the transcript of Ruby's testimony before the commission, she noticed that
the questions posed to him concerned not a trio, but a quartet. Earl Warren,
in his questioning, informed Ruby that Lane had said: "In your Carousel Club
you and Weisman [sic] and Tippit . . . and a rich oil man had an interview or
conversation for an hour or two." [21]
Dorothy, who did not have access yet to the complete Warren Report, had to
deduce,
The mention of the "rich oil man" by Chief justice Warren would indicate
then, that the Commission was informed of the meeting by a source other than
Mr. Lane, and that this second source provided the name of a fourth party-the
oil man. If that is not the case, if the Commission had only Mr. Lane's
testimony to go on, it would appear that the oil man was "invented" by the
investigators. And it is difficult to imagine the Commission doing any such
thing.[22]
The introduction of the rich oil man into the questioning effectively
discombobulated the already-confused Jack Ruby.
When the report was released, it was clear that no testimony was given by any
of the 552 witnesses about a rich oil man. Either there was a significant
omission in the report of the Warren Commission, or the oil man was part of
the unofficial corpus of information to which Warren was privy, or Dorothy's
thesis-however "difficult to imagine"�was correct.
Through August and September, Dorothy hung out all the dirty linen of the
official case. She printed story after story of witnesses who had been
threatened by the Dallas police or the FBI. She indicated that there was some
evidence that the rifle used was a Mauser and not a Carcano .23 She had in
her possession, transcribed, excerpted, and published, a taped interview
between Acquila Clemmons, one of the witnesses to the shooting of Officer
Tippit, and Shirley Martin, a co-worker of Mark Lane's. The story was run on
the first page of The Journal-American.[24]
Mrs. Clemmons stated that she saw two men running from the scene, neither of
whom fitted Oswald's description. "I'm not supposed to be talking to anybody,
might get killed on the way to work."
Q: Is that what the policeman said?
A: Yes. See they'll kill people that know something about that. There's
liable to be a whole lot of them.
Q: Who?
A: There might be a whole lot of Oswalds and things. You know, you don't know
who to talk to, you just don't know.[25]
Mrs. Clemmons was not called to tesify by the Warren Commission.[26]
None of Dorothy's published information was incontrovertible. None of it,
perhaps, would have constituted the rosetta stone of the case against the
official version. But Dorothy was the first reporter to publish most of it,
based responsibly on affidavits, tapes, documents, and interviews with
witnesses.
When the Warren Commission Report was finally pub-lished, she had an
insider's view of the way in which the Commission systematically omitted,
minimized, or denigrated what detracted from the case that they had set out
to prove: that Oswald was the lone, unaffiliated assassin; that Ruby was a
vagrant psychopath.
Dorothy responded to the release of the report in her column:
I would be inclined to believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation might
have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather
than how I got them . . . At any rate the whole thing smells a bit fishy.
It's a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the United States,
escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a
movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure,
and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances.[27]
She was bolder when talking with friends. She told Marlin on several
occasions, "This has to be a conspiracy!"[28] She expressed the same thought
to Bill Franklin, Johnnie, Bob Bach, and her makeup man, Carmen Gebbia. To
Mort Farber, a lawyer and manager of music talent, she said that the Warren
Commission Report was "laughable . . . I'm going to break the real story and
have the biggest scoop of the century."[29]
And she was in love again.
She arranged a private screening of The Sound of Music. Marlin Swing was
there and suspected that she did it just to revivify the first blush of
Salzburg and her meeting with the dark-haired man on the bald marble
mountain. She and the Out-of-Towner junketed together again in late October
to Rome, Florence, and London.
In her girlish fiction, Dorothy Mae could not have fantasized a more romantic
ambience for a love affair. They stayed, in Florence, at a hotel with their
adjoining balconies overlooking the city. Sunlight streaming in, they rattled
off their respective stories. The Out-of-Towner climbed onto Dorothy's
balcony, pleased with what he had just written.
Impressed, she laughed and covered her typewriter. "Let's go out," she said.
I can't write a column after that."[30]
They walked hand in hand through Florence. She excused herself to duck into a
little church. A non-Catholic, he stood back as she walked buoyantly toward
the altar. "Pssst," he called to her, "you forgot the Holy Water."
And there was more laughing.
He would claim, during one interview, that he was made aware of her drinking
problem for the first time in Rome. Dorothy was returning to the States the
next morning, and he was continuing on. They dined and got back to the hotel
very late. She suggested a nightcap in her room. They each had one or two
drinks out of a full bottle of vodka.
According to his story, she said, "I think I'll go," and she took the bottle
with her. When he went to awaken her so that she could make her plane, he
discovered that the bottle was empty.
"God, you drank a lot last night," he said.
I know," Dorothy replied.[31]
After the fall junket, Dorothy began to use her considerable power to advance
his career as a writer of popular songs. She was able to convince at least
one important recording artist to include a work by the Out-of-Towner in a
forthcoming album.
Dorothy telephoned the Out-of-Towner excitedly. By this time, they had their
standard opening exchange.
"Hello," Dorothy would say. "This is Susie Ding-Dong, your New York
secretary."
Hmmmm," he would reply, "that name has a ring to it." "She was so thrilled to
be able to do something like that," he recalled. "She loved being a part of
something."[32]
She arranged to have a company set up to publish all the Out-of-Towner's
songs. Someone affiliated with the company recalled: "He wouldn't have gotten
in the front door without Dorothy. His stuff just wasn't that good."
Through 1965, Dorothy's health varied considerably. She was still taking
Seconal to sleep, and the Out-of-Towner experienced the same petering-out
conversations from the Cloop to which Johnnie, Marlin, and Bill had been
subjected. Carmen Gebbia recalled that there were some evenings before the
television show when she entered the makeup room holding on to the wall,
asking "How do I look? Do I look all right?"[33]
In March, she fractured her left shoulder. The condition was attributed
publicly to a fall. She was hospitalized twice after that fall. The length of
her stays seems too long for treating the injury. The only obtainable data
from University Hospital includes one page of unsigned and scrawled
handwriting that says "sustained injury to (L) shoulder." None of the three
doctors who treated her on admission or readmission will comment. One stated
to Kerry Kollmar that he kept her in the hospital for an inordinately long
period�there was a short stay, followed by another of three weeks-to withdraw
her from alcohol and barbiturates. Included in the medical report is the
designation "Allergies," which refers probably to barbiturates. Her general
health was described as "excellent," her blood count "within normal limits."
At one point during her confinement, Pearl Bauer recalled, Richard brought
her "pills and liquor that damned near killed her."[34]
When Myrtle Verne lunched with Harvey Daniels, she referred to the "goings-on
at the house."[35] She was no more specific.
Dorothy began writing Murder One, which was four years overdue at Random
House. She did some work updating the Sheppard case and finally came face to
face with the attractive osteopath in Cleveland, where there was a cocktail
party in his honor. They envinced tremendous fondness toward each other. He
was grateful and Dorothy faithful.
Afterwards, she discussed Sheppard with the Out-of-Towner. She asked him:
"What do you really think?" He answered, I think as little as possible. But
if he's guilty, he's one of the strongest men who ever lived."[36]
He would comment during one interview, "A good Sam Sheppard, a very good Sam
Sheppard, could have fooled Dorothy. She was easily taken in." [37]
Dorothy was working as well on the Jack Ruby chapter. Joe Tonahill
collaborated on that segment of the book. He wrote, in a letter of January
12, 1978:
You asked why she never published an account of the episode [her private
interview with Ruby]. I think she was in the process of doing a book called
Murder I [sic] when she died. At least, she and I talked many times over the
phone about the book and I was doing a piece for it for her which had to do
with "Irresponsible Murder" as opposed to "Murder I". She may have the
material that I sent her in her notes.[38]
Producer Joe Levine, to whom Dorothy was excessively attentive in her column
now, evinced great interest in the property as a possible television series,
with Dorothy doing the voice-over. They had at least one meeting, at which
they discussed some of the legal problems involved. Levine had seen a general
outline and the chapter on Sheppard, but not the Ruby material. In
conversation, he told an associate who prefers to remain anonymous, "She's
got some good stuff there. It could be a helluva thing." Six figures were
mentioned as the purchase price of the property. It was money that would have
alleviated her financial problems considerably.
Litigation as avocation ceased. She dropped the Cindy Adams matter after the
Adamses countersued Dorothy, Hearst, King Features, Hearst Consolidated, the
Chicago American, The Journal-American, and the Chicago American Publishing
Company-each for one million dollars. Dorothy dropped Edgar Hatfield when he
presented her with a bill for $20,000 on the Elaine Shepard matter and
threatened to involve her "in unfavorable publicity" if she didn't make a
healthy payment on the money owed to him, which was long overdue.[39]
She could no longer afford the extravagances of pique, though she did indulge
occasionally. There was a latter-day brannigan with Johnny Carson, whom she
accused of tastelessness because he told some off-color jokes during the
inauguration of Lyndon Johnson. Carson came back at her during a White House
photographers' dinner: "Dorothy Kilgallen took issue with some of my
material," Carson said. "That's like having your clothes criticized by Emmett
Kelly. I don't know why Dorothy should take offense at a joke I made. I
didn't when her parents made one."[40]
She rather liked Carson and regretted the exchange of vitliol.[41] Unlike
Paar and Sinatra, he stopped short of the grotesque.
Jack O'Brian was not so charitable. After Dorothy blinded a rather tepid item
about him in the VOB, he appeared on the Fitzgeralds' radio show and vilified
her.
He recalled the substance of the broadcast pridefully.
I said to Ed Fitzgerald that I doubted Miss Kilgallen will appreciate my
replying this way, but since you brought it up, I'd like to talk about
Johnnie Ray and a few other men in her life. . . . And I talked and Ed fed me
questions. . . . It all involved things I had observed myself at parties in
her house, at El Morocco, at the Stork-the groping of each other and the
kissing and the necking. We finished up with that and Ed said, "That
certainly answers the question." And I said, "I doubt very much that she will
answer me because bullies are usually yellow."
Dorothy did not answer him. Jim Kilgallen, a buddy of O'Brian's, telephoned.
"Jack," he said, "what did you do to my little girl?"
"It was impelled by the protection of my own good name. And it's a better
name than hers."
I promise you, Jack, she's been destroyed. I just talked to her at home and
she's in tears. I hope you're not going to do it again," Jim Kilgallen
said.[42]
Dorothy spent a good part of the summer of 1965 in Europe, alone. "What's My
Line?" now stockpiled some shows to permit the panel extended vacation time.
She clearly missed the Out-of-Towner. Dorothy wired him that she had stood
alone on Waterloo Bridge and thought of him.[43]
She went to Ireland as a guest of the Irish Tourist Board to cover the Bal
des Petits Lits Blanes-the ball of the little white beds, which was held in
an old Dublin castle. Princess Grace of Monaco was also in attendance. "The
ball," Dorothy wrote, "was a bore." [44]
In mid-June, she returned to the States and was scheduled to appear on the
American Broadcasting Company's "Nightlife," which was then hosted by Les
Crane. Bob Bach, who was booking talent for the show, had invited her. She
expected that she would be discussing the assassination and showed up with a
thick folder full of material. The order came down. Nick Vanoff, one of the
producers, went to see her in the dressing room as she prepared to go on. He
asked her not to broach the subject. It was, he said, "too controversial."
She replied that she had come specifically to talk about the assassination.
He implored. She capitulated. Vanoff passed Bob Bach, who was standing in the
doorway.
"Send her a dozen long-stemmed roses," he whispered to Bob.[45]
At least once during that same summer, she sojourned to Zurich. She stayed at
the Grand Dolder Hotel. Friends gleaned various impressions about the purpose
of the trip. jean Bach thought she was there for rest, retreat, and to make a
dent in Murder One.[46] Mort Farber, who was now handling her legal affairs,
claimed she told him that she underwent cell therapy,[47] a Swiss program of
rejuvenation through the injection of animal embryo cells into the body. She
sent a wistful little note to the Out-of-Towner, indicating that she missed
him.[48]
However it was that she occupied her time in Switzerland, Dorothy returned
looking and feeling better than she had in years. Kerry Kollmar recalled that
this was the first time in a long time that she seemed really well., Johnnie
Ray and Bill Franklin, who were back from, Spain, were elated by the apparent
state of her health. She was plumper. Her color was higher. Many of the
quirky symptoms she had manifested disappeared, including an occasional
locking of the jaw, about which Bill had asked her once and about which she
would not comment. Gone, too, was the whining voice, the regression to
dependent little girl.[49]
She spoke with Mark Lane for the last time in late summer or early fall. She
said that she planned a trip to Dallas. I expect I'm going to learn a lot
this time," she said. He was about to leave the country, and promised that he
would telephone on his return.[50]
They discussed, at some point, another. perception, jointly held. The Life
magazine that she carried with her, featuring the inculpatory picture of
Oswald with a Carcano in one hand and socialist literature in the other, was
said to have been taken by Marina Oswald in their backyard in Texas, on March
31, 1963. It was purportedly confiscated by the police when they went
foraging for Oswald's belongings. Oswald exclaimed, upon seeing the photo,
that the picture had been doctored, that it was not his body and that he
would prove it in time.[51]
The authenticity of the picture has since been seriously discredited.
Photoanalysis, in 1964, indicated that the real Oswald's head was
superimposed on another body�a body that was doing all the wrong things for
Oswald and all the right things for the Warren Commission.
Robert Sam Anson would comment in They've Killed the President, written ten
years after Dorothy's death, that the bushes shown in the background of the
snapshot were not in bloom at the time Marina asserted she had photographed
her husband, that the photo showed bright sunlight when the day in question
was cloudy with touches of rain, and that the stance he assumed was a
physical impossibility: "When one attempts to stand at such an angle, one
invariably falls over." [52]
Photographic expert Robert Grodon told the House Assassinations Committee in
September, 1978, that there was "a paste-line through the chin" of Marina's
purported portrait of an assassin.
Dorothy had in her possession the Life cover and the photographs taken when
Oswald was in custody. The chin of the man in the police station is cleft and
pointed, that of the man on the magazine cover broad and jutting. It is at
the point just above the chin that the fragments were affixed.
She and Mark agreed that the picture appeared to be doctored. She never
specifically pinpointed the most telling facial disparity. "And I never
mentioned it to her, either," Lane commented, "for rather obvious
reasons."[53]
Dorothy's last published item about the assassination of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy ran in her column on September 3, 1965:
Those close to the scene realize that if the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald (now
married to another chap) ever gave out the "whole story" of her life with
President Kennedy's alleged assassin, it would split open the front pages of
newspapers all over the world. Even if Marina explained why her late husband
looked so different in an official police photo and the widely-printed
full-length picture featured on the cover of Life magazine, it would cause a
sensation. This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter
alive�and there are a lot of them.
On Johnnie Ray's return from Europe, he headlined at New York's Latin Quarter
on a bill with Johnny Puleo and his Harmonica Gang. The gig was successful.
Johnnie's material was new, his voice improved, and his old energy restored.
A critic for Variety wrote, "Ray opens strong and continues to pour it on,
turning a ballad like 'What Now My Love?' into an emotional striptease. . . .
He does for tense what Perry Como does for relaxation."[54] Dorothy broke her
promise to Richard and raved about the appearance in her VOB: "Johnnie Ray is
such a smash in this current Broadway engagement, -he's been signed for the
Tropicana in Las Vegas starting October 5."[55]
"Dickie may not like it," she told Bill Franklin, "but I'm just reporting the
facts. He can't deny that the boy is a smash." [56]
She visited Johnnie almost every night during his threeweek engagement,
waiting backstage for him as he came off. But she permitted herself to be
seen in the house only once. Even though she was out of harm's way vis-a-vis
the singer, there was Richard to think about and the recent O'Brian smear.
Neither of them would understand that the relationship had annealed into an
intimate and loving friendship. Indeed, Johnnie himself had no idea of
Dorothy's emotional priorities.
Dorothy, who was vain enough to think it might hurt-as it would have�did not
tell Johnnie about the Out-of-Towner, nor about the many trips she had made
to Europe without visiting, nor about the junkets. She resumed a close and
loving relationship with Johnnie and Bill. In October, she flew out to Las
Vegas to see Johnnie perform at the Tropicana. His opening coincided with
Tony Bennett's at the Riviera. She was flown out by Joe Levine, who was
hyping Bennett in connection with a new movie.
Bill Franklin met her at the airport bearing a gift. "For you," he said,
handing her a lavender and pink purse of brassy mesh with a silver dollar on
one side and the words "Welcome to Las Vegas-Big Spender," on the other. She
dangled it by its long metal chain.
"I love it," she said.
I told you I had rich friends," Bill replied.
At her hotel, Bill waited while she changed for the evening. She emerged
looking smashing in a slinky black dress with pearls in her hair. She put
some money into Bill's hand for taxi and tips. "Everything I need is right
here in this extraordinary purse," she said. And she carried it all night.[57]
They met Johnnie at the Tropicana. The three of them caught Bennett's show
and made a mandatory stop at the party Joe Levine was hosting for him. After
Johnnie's last show, he took her back to the Riviera and kissed her good
night. She had an early plane back to New York.
Johnnie turned to watch her as his cab pulled away.
She was so happy that night. As far as I was concerned, nothing had changed.
The only reason she came out was to see me. The Levine party was a pretext.
She wasn't much on junkets."
Dorothy wrote to the Out-of-Towner on lavender paper she had purchased in
Switzerland. They had obviously planned to meet in New York, sometime in the
fall, to discuss their publishing venture. Indicating that her schedule was
particularly hectic, she asked him to make the trip in "late October or early
November." They would then have time "for conferences and all that jazz." She
signed: "Kisses, d." [59]
Sometime in October, while Carmen Gebbia prepared her for the television
show, Dorothy blurted out to the makeup man that she was "all excited."
"Is it Kennedy?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, "and it's very cloak and daggerish."
She told Gebbia that she was going to New Orleans, where she was going to
meet someone who was going to give her "information on the case." Gebbia
remains vague about the details: "It was a designated area. She said she
didn't know the man, but she'd recognize him because of something�a walking
stick, a straw hat. I don't remember. I do know that she said to me several
times, 'If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to break this case. '" [60]
New Orleans, of course, was one of the hub cities of the assassination. Big
Jim Garrison, the district attorney who evinced ferocious interest in the
possibility of conspiracy and brought Clay Shaw to trial if not to justice,
reigned there.[61] The months that Lee Oswald spent there prior to the death
of the President, distributing pro-Castro literature and, at the same time,
attempting to infiltrate the anti-Castro organization of Carlos Bruinguier,
were never fully explored by the Warren Commission or the FBI. Bruinguier was
also the publisher of an anti-Castro newsletter supported by the Central
Intelligence Agency. The items published in Bruinguier's propaganda sheet
were strikingly similar to many with which Dorothy, violently anti-Castro,
had been peppering her column since 1959.
On October 18, 1965, in her column, she reported on actor Patrick O'Neal's
"ostentatious liberalism" while filming outside of New Orleans, alienating
citizens by "flashing his CORE card." That is hardly the kind of item that
would have been fed to her by the film's press person. It is possible that
she was in New Orleans around this time, or at least that she was
communicating with a right-wing informant there.
But this is highly speculative. She was a clam about sources, never once
mentioning to Mark Lane, Johnnie, Bill, Bob Bach, Marlin, or Gebbia whom she
saw on any of her sundry trips, or what it was she was hypothesizing to
supplant the lone-assassin theory, which was long since discredited in her
mind.
On Sunday, November 7, "Mitch," the press agent, phoned her at her home
around 6 P.m. to find out whether she had late plans after "What's My Line?"
Richard answered and said that she was resting. Dorothy then picked up and
told her caller, with whom she often socialized, that she had a previous
engagement. He assumed she planned to see the Out-of-Towner.[62]
She went to "What's My Line?" as she had done regularly for fifteen years.
Bennett Cerf told her that he had read and liked the segments of Murder One
that she had given him.
The panel that Sunday night included Dorothy, Arlene, Bennett, and Tony
Randall. Dorothy wore a low-cut wingsleeve dress. The show was dull, but
Dorothy was not. Her speech was crisply perfect, her mind razor-sharp, her
spirits high.
The panel missed guessing a man who operated the Hollywood Wax Museum. A
woman named Jones signed in. Bennett quickly established that her product was
dangerous, but he went down to defeat on deducing "firearms."
"However," Dorothy asked, 11 would it do a lot of damage and make a lot of
noise?"
"Yes."
"Would it be in the dynamite family?"
"Yes," John Daly said, coyly, "it would be in the dynamite family."
Dorothy pulled back and straightened up, as she always did when she was right
there:
"I don't know anyone else in the dynamite family. Is it dynamite?"
Daly asked her what Miss Jones did with the dynamite.
I think Miss Jones sells dynamite," Dorothy said jauntily.
There was applause, after which John Daly complimented Bennett "for opening
the door."
Joey Heatherton was the mystery guest, indicating that she was on her way to
Vietnam to entertain "the boys." The commercial instructed the audience to
"Come all the way up to Kools." Little time remained for the final guest, a
lady sportswriter. Eight down, two to go. Daly called time. The panel wasn't
even close to determining the woman's occupation. A stubborn hubbub emerged
from Dorothy Mae's space.
"What is it, Dorothy?" the moderator asked, rushed and annoyed.
"Is she a writer?" Dorothy asked speedily.
"Good heavens!" Daly exclaimed, genuinely impressed.
Time remained only for quick, standard adieus.
"And good night, Dorothy Kilgallen," John Daly said.
After the show ended at 11:00 P.m., Dorothy and Bob Bach repaired to
P. J. Clarke's. They pressed through the mob at the bar and were seated
immediately by Frankie
Ribando, the maitre d', at table 36, by the blackboard and the rear exit.
Dorothy's favorite waiter, young Patty Blue Baker, brought them drinks. She
was having her standard vodka and tonic. Dorothy told Bob, in her tantalizing
way, that she had a late date. He had not approved of Johnnie and he did not
like the Out-of-Towner. He and Dorothy were both cute and evasive about their
outside activities. Bob never probed for what was not offered. He walked her
to her car after midnight. He was "under the impression" that she was on her
way to meet the Out-of-Towner.[63] Johnnie was in
California.
She entered the reddish-dark cocktail lounge of the Regency Hotel alone,
greeting Harvey Daniels, who was at the bar near the door.[64] It was
approximately one o'clock. She was bright, cheery, and a little high.[65] She
walked to the right, toward a corner table. When Harvey left at 1:30, he was
under the impression that she was still at the table. She would have had to
pass Harvey in order to leave, except if she exited through the kitchen.
She would not have remained in a chic piano lounge seated alone. It was
simply not in her nature. But Harvey did not see the party or parties with
whom she sat.
Harvey Daniels is the last person who will admit to seeing Dorothy Kilgallen
alive. When she walked toward her corner table, she yawed into oblivion.
Nothing further can be directly determined about these last hours of her life.
Dorothy was discovered dead sometime Monday, sitting up in bed, not in the
Cloop, but in the third-floor master bedroom. A copy of Robert Ruark's The
Honey Badgers lay by her side.
The Journal headlined the death, of course, and trumpeted their inclusion in
Monday's paper of Dorothy's last column, which, it asserted, she had written
"early in the morning" and sent, by messenger, at 2:30 A.M. Jim Kilgallen was
at work, they said, and was told of the death by Mae. He asked Eddie Mahar,
of the transmogrified love diary and the Kilgallen-Lotto communications, at
an indeterminate time, whether he could leave. "Mr. Kilgallen," the story
continued, "said his daughter apparently suffered a heart attack, her
first."[66]
Dorothy had taped "To Tell the Truth," a Goodson-Todman identity game, on
November 2. She, Arlene Francis, and Joan Crawford appeared in masks. The
panel had to determine which of the three masked ladies was "the real Joan
Crawford." The program was aired on Monday, November 8, from 3:00 to 3:25
P.M. Immediately after the show, Douglas Edwards made the first announcement:
"Dorothy Kilgallen, just seen on the preceding prerecorded program-was found
dead in her home today. "[67]
On Tuesday, November 9, the lights went out up and down the eastern seaboard.
Joan Crawford, under the influence of grief and spirits, stared out her
window and was heard to exclaim, "What a wonderful tribute to Dorothy!"[68]
Ten thousand mourners filed passed her closed and covered African mahogany
coffin at the Abbey Funeral Directors, directly across the street from St.
Vincent Ferrer. Dorothy was gowned in cream and gold satin brocade, a pearl
rosary draped in her hands, a pink bouquet of tiny flowers from her children.
During the first private night at the Abbey, Mae Kilgallen had taken Lillian
Boscowitz by the hand and led her up to the casket. "She's so beautiful.
She's so beautiful," the old woman keened. "Why. . . ."[69]
pps. 388-409
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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