I watch the reruns of "What's My Line?" all the time... I enjoy Dorothy Kilgallen, but this book was difficult reading.

The print was small, and for a paperback, it had too many pages, & too much minutiae about her life in society..

So the book bored me, it lost me 1/4 through; but I did read most of the end which recounted her murder... But even that was filled w/ redundancies.

There was a whole lot of collusion going on there, she was found dead very early in the morning (before breakfast) and her family & staff seemed to have covered it up... Reports state she died/was found around noon?

But the most important fact was that she was murdered while investigating the murder of JFK.... and the FBI & CIA had a huge dossier on her...

I wish the book had been easier to read, but the writing was to leave no small stone unturned and all them stones began to drag heavily on me too early on. ( )

The only thing I knew about Dorothy Kilgallen before reading this book is that she was a permanent member of the quiz show What's My Line in the 50's and 60's. I've seen most of the episodes on GSN and enjoy them a lot. Since I was only about seven when she died its not surprising that I know little about her beyond what I saw on old reruns. Somehow I don't think I would have enjoyed knowing her as a person, she was very fashion and clothes obsessed, the bulk of her work was as a gossip columnist and she was pretty nasty about a lot of it. Not things that hold much interest for me. She did do a lot of serious journalism including several murder trials that apparently were very well received. She followed the Sam Shepherd case and was the first to say that he was railroaded in his first trial. The most interesting part of the biography surrounds Dorothy's death. She was apparently consumed at the end of her life with proving that Lee Harvey Oswald had not been a "lone gunman" and was amassing materials to write about her theory. She is one of dozens of people around the death of JFK that died under "mysterious" circumstances. Was it suicide, murder or accident. We'll never know, neither does that author but it was a fun read at the end to see all the facts and theories that surround this woman's demise. ( )

i find her now sad and tenacious and a bit humorless. yet .. a woman who achieved many things in her lifetime.

recently saw an old episode of 'what's my line' that the Game Show Network currently is airing as a loop (the full sweep of the many years of this show) .. one of the mystery guests that day in the early 1950s was Dorothy's father. the stiff relationship revealed in that exchange between the two of them, pride through discomfort, formality and total lack of ease, revealed something ... who knows what. and this biography provides some context.

NA