Lee Israel lives in New
York City. Her first book, Miss Tallulah
Bankhead, was published in 1972. This was followed by Kilgallen
(1979), a biography of Dorothy Kilgallen.
In the book Lee Israel discovered a great deal about Kilgallen's investigation
into the assassination of John
F. Kennedy.
He third biography, Estee
Lauder: Beyond the Magic, was published in 1986.
Dorothy
Kilgallen: The Key Witness
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Online
Seminar: Florence Pritchett and Dorothy Kilgallen
(1)
Lee Israel, Kilgallen (1979)
There
had been some snide little items about her (Dorothy Kilgallen) in
the columns, an occasional short profile in the magazines, and frequent
strafing from television performers. Jack Paar led the pack in 1960,
taking up Sinatra's slack. That tempestuous round began when Dorothy
swiped at him in the column over his impassioned support of Fidel
Castro. She was violently opposed to the new Cuban leader and peppered
her column with anti-Castro items, many of which appear to have been
fed to her by Miami-based exiles or CIA fronts on an almost daily
basis. Paar retaliated on his prime-time, high-rated television show.
(2)
Lee Israel, Kilgallen (1979)
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."
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.
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.
(3)
Lee Israel, Kilgallen (1979)
During
one of her (Kilgallen’s) visits - sometime in March, before the
verdict – she prevailed upon Joe Tonahill to make arrangements
through Judge Brown for a private interview with Jack Ruby.
Brown, awestruck by Dorothy, acceded readily to Tonahill’s request.
The meeting room in the jailhouse was bugged, and Tonahill suspected
that Brown’s chambers were as well. Brown and Tonahill chose
a small office off the courtroom behind the judge’s bench. They
asked Ruby’s ubiquitous flank of four sheriff’s guards to
consent to remain outside the room.
Dorothy was standing by
the room during a noon recess. Ruby appeared with Tonahill. The three
entered the room and closed the door. The defendant and Dorothy stood
facing each other, spoke of their mutual friend, and indicated that
they wanted to be left alone. Tonahill withdrew. They were together
privately for about eight minutes, in what may have been the only
safe house Ruby had occupied since his arrest.
Dorothy would mention the
fact of the interview to close friends, but never the substance. Not
once, in her prolific published writings, did she so much as refer
to the private interview. Whatever notes she took during her time
alone with Jack Ruby in the small office off the judge’s bench
were included in a file she began to assemble on the assassination
of John F. Kennedy.
(4)
David B. Herschel (18th November, 1993)
As the thirtieth anniversary
of the JFK assassination approaches, I must tell the world about a
58-year-old man who can identify the conspirators. What follows has never been published before.
I am a journalism student at Virginia Commonwealth University who
was born after the assassination. I don't have the money to travel
to New York City where I know of people who can testify that this
58-year-old man holds the key. In the limited time I have had to solicit
media people who could expose this story, they have all dismissed
the idea as libelous. The Washington Post and the New York Press (a
free weekly) turned it down. My faculty has no pull.
So please, somebody, steal the following story! I'm a poor student
who must prepare for final exams. Can you send this along to a journalist
you know who can publish or broadcast it? He or she knows that the
best defense against libel is the truth, which is:
The JFK assassination conspirators
recruited Ron Pataky, now 58, to seduce and kill journalist Dorothy
Kilgallen. Their motive was to prevent her from printing the truth
about November 22, 1963 in her widely read newspaper. She had already
published front-page stories in newspapers around the country implicating
Chief Justice Earl Warren and the Justice Department in the cover-up.
She worked closely with Mark Lane, a lawyer who in 1964/65 was working
on his ground-breaking assassination book "Rush To Judgment."
He gave Kilgallen leads for her news stories. In the fall of 1965,
she told him and other friends that she was about to travel to Dallas,
where she expected to find evidence that would break the JFK case
wide open.
But on November 7, 1965, a newspaper columnist named Ron Pataky waited
for his intimate friend Dorothy Kilgallen to arrive for a prearranged
meeting in the cocktail lounge of New York's Regency Hotel. That night
she appeared as usual as a panelist on the TV game show called "What's
My Line?". Millions of people around North America saw her figure
out the careers of two contestants as CBS broadcast the series live
from 10:30 to 11:00 pm. She then joined Bob Bach, the producer of
"What's My Line?", at a club called P.J. Clarke's, whose
employees later admitted having seen her. After midnight, she left
Bach to visit the cocktail lounge of the Regency Hotel (Park Ave.
and 61st St.), whose employees have never admitted what they saw.
One Regency employee, Harvey
Daniels (press agent), did tell a writer in 1976 that he saw Kilgallen
enter the cocktail lounge at about 1:00 am on November 8. But he did
not pay attention to where or with whom she sat. He left the building
shortly thereafter. This writer who interviewed him is Ms. Lee Israel,
a veteran magazine journalist whose conversations with Helen Gahagan
Douglas and Katherine Hepburn had appeared in Esquire and Saturday
Review. When Ms. Israel tried to interview other Regency employees
for the Kilgallen book she was working on, the management (Loews Hotels)
warned her away.
I found out earlier this
month (November 1993) that several employees of the Regency who were
on duty that night still work there. The only name I know is John
Mahon, a bartender. He told me that he and various waiters and bellhops
will talk if you clear it with Loews Hotels. The contact person, Debra
Kelman, did NOT work there in 1976 when Loews told Lee Israel to keep
away.
The direct line to Debra
Kelman is 212-545-2833. On the phone she sounds too young to remember
the assassination. But I don't have the money to stay in New York
to interview anyone.
What could you get out
of an interview with a Regency employee? Well, the official cause
of Dorothy Kilgallen's death is an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol,
"circumstances undetermined." I interviewed Ron Pataky and
I believe he gave her a Mickey Finn in that hotel lounge. When Loews
Hotels warned away Lee Israel in 1976, the media did not have the
power it has today. Oprah Winfrey and cable TV had not yet come along,
and the JFK assassination was still largely a taboo topic. Someone
who approaches Loews and then bartender John Mahon and other Regency
employees may get better results today.
You might wonder about
contacting Ron Pataky. I already interviewed him on the phone for
three hours and taped it. In the beginning of the conversation he
became very upset when I asked about his frequent stays at the Regency
in 1964/65. He then rambled on about his "close friendship"
with Dorothy Kilgallen. He later admitted to talking to her on the
phone long distance five times a week, often at three in the morning.
He revealed that she made overseas calls to him from a vacation she
made to Europe, and she sometimes used his Regency Hotel suite to
change clothes before they painted the town in New York. He says he
wrote the lead paragraph to one of her JFK articles. He first met
her a year and five months before she died, but he denies that they
had an affair.
(5)
Donald Nolen, review of Lee
Israel, Kilgallen, Amazon (14th January, 2004)
So posterity needs to evaluate each mysterious death according
to how plausible the murder theory is. Lee Israel puts in this book
some evidence that a broken love affair with Johnnie Ray and the fall
of the Hearst newspaper empire gave Dorothy Kilgallen trouble sleeping,
and she could have mixed barbiturates with booze. But Lee also details
the strange circumstances of Dorothy's death. Police and medical examiner
reports say her body was found in a bed in which she never slept.
Nobody slept in it. It was a showroom to convince celebrity houseguests
who partied in the next room that everything was hunky dory in the
25 - year marriage of Dorothy and her husband Richard Kollmar.
There
was no pill bottle on the bedside table or anywhere else in the death
scene. Dorothy had fallen "asleep" while reading a new novel
by Robert Ruark, even though she had said in her newspaper column
four months earlier that the protagonist of the book dies in the end.
She had discussed said novel with her hairdresser Marc Sinclaire some
weeks before cops and doctors found the book in her dead hand. She
had told Mr. Sinclaire that she had enjoyed the work after having
finished reading it.
That's
what you will find in this book. Now I'll add the two things I've
seen while sight seeing. First, you can find Dorothy Kilgallen's death
certificate at the National Archives in Maryland, a popular tourist
site. In the section where the doctor makes the classification of
natural causes, suicide, homicide, etc., the thing says "undetermined
pending further investigation." Strangely, the deputy medical
examiner of Brooklyn signed it "for James Luke," the chief
medical examiner. Kilgallen died in the borough of Manhattan, and
Dr. Luke had no reason not to sign it. He visited the death scene
for 45 minutes, according to the Washington Post obituary. That Brooklyn
deputy M.E., Dominick Di Maio, is still alive.
The
second thing I've seen that's not in the book is a video interview
with criminal defense attorney Joe Tonahill preserved at Lamar University
in Texas. On it he says his last telephone conversation with Dorothy
Kilgallen happened a short time before she died, "maybe a week
before." They planned to participate in a radio talk show about
the JFK assassination, but she died before the plans could materialize.
Shortly before that conversation, Dorothy visited Miami to discuss
Oswald, etc. on the talk show of a young Larry King. The same Larry
now on CNN.
(6)
Eric Paddon, Dorothy
Kilgallen and the JFK Assassination (2002)
Kilgallen ran one last column on the JFK assassination
on September 3, 1965. It was little more than a rehash of questions
surrounding the photos, and an assertion that if Marina Oswald could
explain the "real story" it would undoubtedly cause a "sensation."
She closed by vowing, "This story isn't going to die as long
as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them."
She evidently found time
to investigate one lead on her own in New Orleans. Her make-up artist
for "What's My Line?" recalled Kilgallen telling him in
October that she had planned to go to New Orleans to meet someone
who would give her "information on the case." The appendix
to Israel's book indicates that the contact was either Jim Garrison
or one of
his associates. This would make a great deal of sense. Mark Lane,
in addition to providing Kilgallen with information, would also become
a prime source of assistance to Garrison once his "investigation"
kicked into high gear, and it may be possible that he or one of the
other conspiracy authors he associated himself with, had referred
Garrison to Kilgallen. It is worth noting that the connections of
Lane and his associates to Garrison is never mentioned in Israel's
book.
What she learned, if anything,
was never written up. In the early morning hours of November 8, 1965,
just four hours after doing the live broadcast of "What's My
Line?" and not long after she had left her next-day's column
under the door of her apartment, Dorothy Kilgallen died under circumstances
that remain puzzling to this day. The official explanation of complications
from barbiturates and alcohol remains dubious to some people because
they felt that Kilgallen was largely over her addictions by 1965,
especially since she had recently begun a happy affair with a gentleman
Israel describes as "The Out-Of-Towner". The tape of the
"What's My Line?" broadcast however, clearly shows her slurring
her speech at various points (not "crisply perfect" as Israel falsely
claims). None of this affected her game-playing abilities, which were
always superior to any other member of the panel, but it is clear
that she was not in the best of health that particular night. In 1978,
HSCA counsel Robert Blakey asked for a review of Kilgallen's autopsy
(a copy of which is in the JFK Assassination files in the National
Archives), but he and his staff evidently found nothing worth pursuing
since no mention of Kilgallen ever made it into the final report.
Someone might be able
to prove someday that there was more to Dorothy Kilgallen's death
than met the eye that night. But if someone succeeds in doing that,
he will still not be able to show that it could have had any remote
connection with the JFK assassination. If one encompasses everything
she knew at the time of her death, it is clear that she did not have
a clue as to what the truth really was. Her entire investigation had
consisted of shoddy detective work on her part, coupled with false
and misleading information from a dishonest gentleman named Mark Lane.
Had she been able to tell the world everything she knew on the night
of her death, they would have been given another sneak preview of
some of the stories Mark Lane would trumpet in his book (I) Rush To
Judgment (I), as well as a possible preview of some of Jim Garrison's
outlandish assertions that culminated in his witchhunt against Clay
Shaw. In both instances, Kilgallen had been nothing more than a courier,
not an investigator. Considering that no ill-fortune befell either
Lane or Garrison when their respective work appeared in full bloom
by 1966 and 1967, the likelihood of Kilgallen's death being assassination-related
becomes even more remote. Indeed, the FBI files available to us, indicate
that at no time were they ever concerned about the nature of any of
her 1964 assertions about the case that were fed to her by Lane. The
only thing about Dorothy Kilgallen that ever worried the FBI was the
prospect of more columns unjustly maligning their image if they continued
their investigation of who leaked the Ruby transcript to her.
Dorothy Kilgallen was
without question a bright, intelligent woman who had solid credentials
as a reporter, and who was the key to much of the success of "What's
My Line?". It is unfortunate that at a time when she was not
up to her best standards of health and deductive reasoning, she became
a willing target for the deceptions of Mark Lane and company. She
would not have been the first intelligent person to fall victim to
Lane's chicanery. The distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper also
would be suckered by Lane, when he agreed to write the introduction
to (i) Rush To Judgment (ii) and made assertions about the case that
only repeated unchallenged what Lane had told him. So too, did Dorothy
Kilgallen have a bizarre willingness to accept everything Lane had
given to her without utilizing any of her usual skills of reporter's
skepticism and investigative prowess. The end result caused her tragic
death to be surrounded in pointless sensationalism and disinformation
that ultimately did her memory a tragic disservice.
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