The radio program, like Kilgallen's newspaper column, mixed entertainment with serious issues. The show followed them when they bought a neo-Georgian townhouse at 45 East 68th Street in 1952. Kilgallen ran her radio program Voice of Broadway, which was broadcast on CBS during World War II, and Kollmar worked a long stint in the nationally syndicated crime drama in which he played Boston Blackie.īeginning in April 1945, Kilgallen and Kollmar co-hosted a WOR-AM radio talk show, Breakfast With Dorothy and Dick, from their 16-room apartment at 640 Park Avenue. Įarly in their marriage, Kilgallen and Kollmar both launched careers in network radio. 1954), and remained married until Kilgallen's death. They had three children: Richard 'Dickie' (b. On April 6, 1940, Kilgallen married Richard Kollmar, a musical comedy actor and singer who had starred in the Broadway show Knickerbocker Holiday and was performing, at the time of their wedding, in the Broadway cast of Too Many Girls. Its success motivated Kilgallen to move her parents and Eleanor from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where she continued to live with them until she got married. The column eventually was syndicated to 146 newspapers via King Features Syndicate. 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. In November 1938, Kilgallen began writing a daily column, the 'Voice of Broadway,' for Hearst's New York Journal-American, which the corporation created by merging the Evening Journal with the American. She described the event 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.

She was the only woman to compete in the contest and came in second.

In 1936 Kilgallen competed with two other New York newspaper reporters in a race around the world using only means of transportation available to the general public. The newspaper was owned and operated by the Hearst Corporation, which also owned International News Service, her father's employer. After completing two semesters at The College of New Rochelle, she dropped out to take a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal. Dorothy Kilgallen was a student at Erasmus Hall High School. The family settled in Brooklyn, New York. The family moved to various regions of the United States until 1920, when the International News Service hired James Kilgallen as a roving correspondent based in New York City. Dorothy had a sister, Eleanor (1919–2014), who was six years her junior. She was of Irish descent, and was a Catholic. Kilgallen was born in Chicago, the daughter of newspaper reporter James Lawrence Kilgallen (1888–1982) and his wife, Mae Ahern (1888–1985).

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