In 1936, Kilgallen and two other New York newspaper reporters (Herbert Roslyn Ekins of the
New York World-Telegram and Leo Kieran of
The New York Times) competed in a race
to travel around the world, using only means of transportation available to the general public. She was the only woman to compete in the contest and came in second. She described the race in her book
Girl Around The World, which is credited as the story idea for the 1937 movie
Fly-Away Baby starring
Glenda Farrell as a character partly inspired by Kilgallen. In November 1938, Kilgallen began writing a daily column, the "Voice of Broadway," for Hearst's
New York Journal-American, after the corporation merged the
Evening Journal with the
American. The column, which she wrote until her death in 1965, featured mostly New York show business news and gossip, but also ventured into other topics such as politics and organized crime. The column eventually was syndicated to 146 newspapers via
King Features Syndicate. They had three children: Richard "Dickie" (b. 1941), Jill (b. 1943), and Kerry Kollmar (b. 1954), and remained married until Kilgallen's death. and was picked up by
Mutual Radio in 1944 for a brief run. and continued until June 1949. Beginning in April 1945, Kilgallen and Kollmar co-hosted a weekday radio talk show on
WOR 710 AM.
Breakfast With Dorothy and Dick was broadcast live from their 16-room apartment at 640 Park Avenue. The show followed them when they bought a neo-Georgian townhouse at 45 East 68th Street in 1952. The radio program, like Kilgallen's newspaper column, mixed entertainment news and gossip with serious matters. Kilgallen and Kollmar occasionally had a
major league baseball player as a guest on the show. The couple continued doing the show from their home, with most broadcasts airing live, until 1963. Kilgallen's longtime fellow panelist on ''
What's My Line'',
Arlene Francis, also hosted a weekday talk show on WOR for many years, starting in 1960. Magazine inserts in Sunday editions of newspapers carried Kilgallen's articles over a period of decades. So did at least two magazines owned by the Hearst corporation:
Good Housekeeping and
Cosmopolitan. The Billy Rose Theatre Division of the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has, in its Kilgallen collection, a 1964 piece she wrote about newlyweds
Elizabeth Taylor and
Richard Burton in the German-language weekly
Quick, published by the
Bauer Media Group in
Munich. As part of Kilgallen’s Hearst corporation job duty of interviewing young singers who were starting careers at New York’s trendy nightclubs, she befriended singer
Johnnie Ray in 1952 during his rise to international fame. Their close relationship lasted until her death.
Frank Sinatra feud Kilgallen and singer
Frank Sinatra were fairly good friends for several years and were photographed rehearsing in a radio studio for a 1948 broadcast. Eventually, they had a falling out after she wrote a multi-part 1956 front-page feature article titled "The Real Frank Sinatra Story". In addition to the
New York Journal-American, Hearst-owned newspapers across the United States ran the feature. Following this publication, Sinatra made derogatory comments about Kilgallen's physical appearance to his nightclub audiences in New York and Las Vegas. However, he stopped short of mentioning her name on television or during magazine and newspaper interviews. The
New York Journal-American carried the banner front-page headline that Kilgallen was "shocked" by the guilty verdict because of what she argued were serious flaws in the prosecution's case. At the time of the Cleveland jury's guilty verdict in December 1954, Kilgallen's sharp criticism of it was controversial and a Cleveland newspaper dropped her column in response. Her articles and columns in 1954 did not reveal all she had witnessed in the
Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. Nine years after the verdict and sentence, and after the judge had died, she claimed at an event held at the
Overseas Press Club in New York that the judge had told her before the start of jury selection that Sheppard was "guilty as hell". Attorney
F. Lee Bailey, who was working on a
habeas corpus petition for his client Sheppard, attended the Overseas Press Club event, heard what Kilgallen told the crowd, and then asked her privately if she would help him. "Some days later," as Bailey wrote in his memoir
The Defense Never Rests, On February 23, 1964, she published an article in the
New York Journal-American about a conversation she had with Jack Ruby, when he was at his defense table during a recess in his murder trial. She also obtained a copy of Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission, which he had given on June 7, 1964. Kilgallen published it in August 1964 in three installments
The Philadelphia Inquirer, the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and other newspapers. In response, the Warren Commission condemned what it called the "premature publication" of Ruby's testimony and announced that there would be a federal investigation as to how Kilgallen had received the testimony.
''What's My Line?'' ,
Arlene Francis, and
Hal Block, with
John Daly as the host Kilgallen became a panelist on the American television game show ''
What's My Line?'', beginning on its first broadcast, which aired live on February 2, 1950. The series was telecast from New York City on the CBS television network until 1967. She was seen almost every Sunday evening on the show for 15 years, until her death. Beginning in 1959, the series was not always telecast live. Goodson Todman Productions used
videotape, a recent invention. In 1961, producers were able to stockpile enough videotaped episodes so that Kilgallen and fellow panelists
Arlene Francis and
Bennett Cerf, along with host
John Charles Daly, could take their summer vacations. In 1965, they returned to do a live telecast on September 12. It was followed by eight consecutive Sunday nights when Kilgallen appeared live, the last of them being November 7. ==Death==