Born in Chicago, Kilgallen was the daughter of Hearst newspaperman James Lawrence Kilgallen and his wife Mae Ahern. The family moved from Chicago to Wyoming, Indiana and back to Chicago before finally settling in New York City. After two semesters at The College of New Rochelle, Kilgallen left for a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal, which was owned and operated by the Hearst Corporation.

In 1936, Kilgallen competed with two other New York newspaper reporters in a race around the world using means of transportation only available to the general public. She was the only female contestant and she came in second. She described the event in her book Girl Around The World and penned the screenplay for a 1937 movie, Fly Away Baby, starring Glenda Farrell, as the Kilgallen-inspired character. During a stint living in Hollywood in 1936 and 1937, Kilgallen wrote a daily column that could only be read in New York that nonetheless provoked a libel suit from Constance Bennett, "who in the early thirties had been the highest paid performer in motion pictures," according to a Kilgallen biography, "but who was [in 1937] experiencing a temporary decline in popular appeal."

Back in New York in 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. 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 like politics and organized crime. The column was eventually syndicated to 146 papers via King Features Syndicate.

Beginning in April 1945, Kilgallen co-hosted a WOR-AM radio talk show, Breakfast With Dorothy and Dick, with her husband Richard Kollmar from their 16-room apartment at 630 Park Avenue. The show followed them when they purchased a Georgian brownstone at 45 East 68th Street in 1952. The radio program, which like Kilgallen's newspaper column mixed entertainment with serious issues, remained on the air until 1963.

In 1950, Kilgallen became a panelist on the American television game show What's My Line?, which aired on the CBS television network from 1950 to 1967. She remained on the show for 15 years until her death. Fellow panelist Bennett Cerf claimed that, unlike the rest of the panel's priority on getting a laugh and entertaining the audience, Kilgallen's main interest was guessing the right answers. She would also, according to Cerf, milk her time on camera by asking more questions than necessary, the answers to which she knew to be affirmative.

Cerf described Kilgallen as an outsider among her castmates for two reasons: The first being her political point of view, that of a "Hearst girl," differed from the others', and the second being that information elicited during dressing-room conversations would subsequently appear in Kilgallen's gossip column. Cerf, speaking for his fellow panelists, panel moderator and himself in an audio-tape-recorded interview at Columbia University two years and two months after Kilgallen's death, said, "We didn't like that."

Kilgallen was among the notables on the guest list who attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, in 1953. Kilgallen's articles won her a Pulitzer Prize nomination during this era.

In 1958, Kilgallen and her husband Kollmar, along with Albert W. Selden, co-produced a musical on Broadway entitled The Body Beautiful. Kilgallen and her fellow panelists made mention of the show on various episodes of What's My Line? during this time period. On one episode, a cast member of the ill-fated musical (a well-built young man, billed as a "chorus boy" in the episode) appeared as a contestant and stumped the panel.

Sam Sheppard murder trial

Kilgallen covered the 1954 murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. The New York Journal American carried the banner front-page headline that she was "astounded" by the guilty verdict due to what she argued were manifest shortcomings in the prosecution's case. The doctor was convicted of bludgeoning his wife to death at their home in the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village. In the 1990s, the case was reopened and an aging convict named Richard Eberling became a person of interest, but concrete evidence for a conviction was lacking.

Many Clevelanders believed Dr. Sheppard was guilty, including the editors of The Plain Dealer, which carried Kilgallen's syndicated column. Immediately after she wrote that the prosecutors "didn't prove he was guilty any more than they proved there are pin-headed men on Mars," her column was banned from that newspaper. Nine years later, at the Overseas Press Club in New York, she revealed that the judge in the case had told her toward the beginning of the trial that Dr. Sheppard was "guilty as hell." When attorney F. Lee Bailey began the appeal of Sheppard's conviction, resulting in his July 1964 release from prison, he discovered other eyewitness accounts of the judge prejudging the case before hearing testimony or seeing evidence.

Hearst bylines

Arlene Francis, a fellow What's My Line? panelist, said in 1976, "I thought Dorothy was a marvelous journalist when she covered something like the Sheppard trial. As opposed to her gossip column." A 1991 history of the Hearst Corporation co-authored by Bill Hearst and Jack Casserly says the company milked famous bylines for all they were worth, encouraging the star reporters to do as many diverse stories as possible to increase circulation and newsstand sales.

Kilgallen's father Jim was still a "Hearst star" in 1955 when at age 67 he traveled to Mississippi to cover the trial of two men charged with the murder of Emmett Till for the Hearst-owned International News Service. He also wrote profiles of movie stars.

Reporting on UFOs

On February 15, 1954, she commented in her syndicated column, "Flying saucers are regarded as of such vital importance that they will be the subject of a special hush-hush meeting of the world military heads next summer."

In a May 22, 1955 report from London, syndicated by the INS, Kilgallen stated, "British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet. The source of my information is a British official of Cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified. 'We believe, on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men—probably under four feet tall. It's frightening, but there is no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.'" This article, which was separate from Kilgallen's column, appeared on the front pages of the New York Journal American,the Cincinnati Enquirer, and other newspapers. The Washington Post ran it on page 8.

Gordon Creighton, editor of the magazine Flying Saucer Review, alleged the information was given to Kilgallen by Lord Mountbatten of Burma at a cocktail party, but attempts to verify this were unsuccessful.

Kilgallen and the Kennedy assassination

Kilgallen conducted an interview with Jack Ruby inside the Dallas courthouse where he was tried for the shooting death of Lee Harvey Oswald, although she never revealed the subject of their conversation. Approximately four or five months later, she obtained a copy of Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission, publishing it on the front pages of the Journal American, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and other newspapers. Most of that testimony didn't become officially available to the public until the commission released its 26 volumes in early 1965.

Regarding the assassination, Kilgallen wrote, "That story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive, and there are a lot of them alive." She had a history of government criticism, once suggesting that the CIA recruited members of the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro (which many years later was proven to be the case). FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on her activities. Dr. John McAdams is a Marquette University professor who runs a website about the assassination. The website includes an essay by Eric Padden based on his examination of declassified FBI files about Kilgallen at the National Archives. The essay claims the controversial conspiracy theorist Mark Lane was Kilgallen's only source for her several front-page articles and column items about Oswald and Ruby. The FBI admitted, however, that it never determined who had given the columnist a transcript of Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission. The agency abandoned, in September 1964, all attempts to identify this source. (The attempts had included sending two FBI agents to her home, where Kilgallen told them she would not identify the source under any circumstances.)

Other controversy

Dorothy Kilgallen was often antagonistic toward Frank Sinatra in her daily column and in the multi-part 1956 feature story "The Frank Sinatra Story". Sinatra was angered by this and referred to her publicly as the "chinless wonder."

When country music performers from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry appeared in concert at Carnegie Hall to benefit New York's Musicians Aid Society in 1961, Kilgallen dismissed them as "hicks from the sticks." In her column she advised that "everyone should leave town. The hillbillies are coming." Patsy Cline, one of the headliners, responded that "Miss Dorothy called us Nashville performers 'the gang from Grand Ole Opry - hicks from the sticks.' And if I have the pleasure of seeing that wicked witch, I'll let her know how proud I am to be a hick from the sticks."

Near the end of her life, Kilgallen was embroiled in yet another controversy. The musical Skyscraper was in previews at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. In October 1965 Kilgallen attended a preview, which was a benefit for charity. There has been a long tradition of not reviewing a show that's still in previews, because the point of previews is to test audience reaction and make changes. That didn't stop Kilgallen. She panned the show in one of her columns, calling it a "turkey." There was quite an uproar from the theatrical community. She died very shortly after this final controversy in her life. Skyscraper officially opened five days after her death to mixed reviews and a moderate run of 248 performances.

On November 8, 1965, Kilgallen was found dead on the third floor of her five-story brownstone, just 12 hours after she appeared, live, on What's My Line?. Her hairdresser, Marc Sinclaire, found her body when he arrived that morning to style her hair. He said decades later that she always slept on the fifth floor, adding that on November 8 he used his key to the brownstone and went directly to the third floor where he always did her hair near her large wardrobe closet. She had apparently succumbed to a fatal combination of alcohol and Seconal, possibly concurrent with a heart attack. It is not known whether the death was a suicide or an accidental overdose, although the amount of barbiturate in her system "could well have been accidental," according to medical examiner James Luke.

Because of her open criticism of the Warren Commission and other US government entities, and her association with Jack Ruby and a 1964 private interview with him, some speculate that she was murdered by members of the same alleged conspiracy against JFK. Her claims that she was under surveillance led to a theory that she might have been murdered. She had reportedly told a few friends after her Ruby interview that she was "about to blow the JFK case sky high." Throughout her career she consistently refused to identify any of her sources whenever a government agency questioned her, and that might have posed a threat to the JFK conspirators.

Her autopsy did not suggest evidence of homicide; however, her death certificate cites the cause of death as "undetermined." Despite the fact that medical examiner Luke spent 45 minutes at the death scene, another medical examiner named Dominick DiMaio signed the death certificate, typing above his signature that he was doing this "for James Luke." In the 1990s Luke worked for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. In 1989 DiMaio co-authored Forensic Pathology and later wrote other textbooks. Referring to Kilgallen's death certificate, DiMaio said in a 1995 interview quoted in Midwest Today magazine, "I wasn't stationed in Manhattan [where Kilgallen died]. I was in Brooklyn. Are you sure I signed it? I don't see how the hell I could have signed it in the first place. You got me."

After death and legacy

At the time of her death, Dorothy Kilgallen and Richard Kollmar had been married for 25 years and she left behind three children. She is buried in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York. A year-and-a-half after her death, Kollmar, then 56, married designer Anne Fogarty, who had created the dress Kilgallen had worn on What's My Line? the last night of her life. Newspaper obituaries said Kollmar "died in his sleep" at home. A Kilgallen biography by Lee Israel said he "took his own life in January, 1971, swallowing everything in reach." Although he seemed to have swallowed many more pills than his first wife had five years and two months earlier, the medical examiner did not call it a suicide. Kollmar's death was not a major news item, as Kilgallen's had been, and medical examiner findings about his death were not made public until years later when Israel obtained (with help from the Kollmars' youngest child) documents from the M.E.'s office.

One of two known comments Richard Kollmar made about his first wife after her death was later recalled by Bob Bach, who booked the mystery guests for What's My Line?. At Bach's home several hours after her funeral, the television producer asked the widower to discuss his wife's interest in the assassination, and Kollmar replied, "Robert, I'm afraid that will have to go to the grave with me."

Mark Lane is the source for Kollmar's other known remark. The Padden essay on John McAdams' website claims that Lane told Kilgallen everything she knew about the assassination except for how to obtain the 102-page Warren Commission/Ruby transcript, which came to her from an unknown person. Padden's essay contradicts statements by Lane in the Israel book, in a 1977 issue of the Midnight supermarket tabloid preserved at the National Archives, on talk radio and on the Geraldo Rivera TV show Now It Can Be Told. Lane's side of the story is that a few weeks after the last comment Kilgallen published about the assassination (an item in her September 3, 1965 Voice of Broadway column about Marina Oswald Porter and her photograph of Lee holding a rifle), Kilgallen told him by phone that she planned to visit Dallas again. She did not name any of her sources there, and she declined to tell him who she thought might have shot the president. They never communicated again. A month after her death, Lane contacted Kollmar to ask where her notes were. Lane and Kollmar had met in Kilgallen's presence at the Kollmar brownstone more than a year earlier. Kollmar got rid of Lane quickly, asserting that his late wife's discoveries have "done enough damage already" and "too many people have suffered as a result." Lane never learned anything further about Dorothy Kilgallen's opinions or findings about the assassination.

On the What's My Line? broadcast following Kilgallen's death, host John Charles Daly opened the show explaining that, after consulting with "her good husband Dick Kollmar," the show's tribute to her would be to go on as usual. The text of Daly's announcement, except for the names of those involved, was identical to the announcement he'd made at the beginning of the broadcast the night after regular panelist Fred Allen died. During their usual "goodnights," each panel member gave a short tribute to her. Bennett Cerf and Steve Allen reminded viewers that her "line" was a print reporter while Arlene Francis and Kitty Carlisle focused on the impact Kilgallen had on the television show.

Although Bennett Cerf was audiotaped on January 23, 1968 reminiscing about Kilgallen, he said nothing about her death or about the book Murder One that his company Random House had published in 1967 with the late Dorothy Kilgallen listed as the sole author. Years after his death, his widow Phyllis Fraser admitted to Kilgallen biographer Lee Israel that a writer named Allan Ullman actually had written it with Richard Kollmar's approval. Kilgallen's private secretary Myrtle Verne, who can be seen as one of the contestants on a 1957 episode of What's My Line?, died on January 10, 1975, shortly before Israel began contacting people for her biography.

Despite Richard Kollmar's public silence about his late wife, her father Jim Kilgallen, still a highly respected reporter at age 77, did speak for publication. The breaking story of her death in the Journal American, where father and daughter both worked, quoted him as saying she "apparently suffered a heart attack, her first." He reminisced fondly about her career and girlish quality for the February 1966 issue of TV Radio Mirror. He said he knew nothing about her prescription medication and declined to discuss the Kennedy assassination. During this period Jack O'Brian took over the Voice of Broadway column, but the Journal American ceased publication in April 1966 with O'Brian and other Journal American columnists becoming part of the short-lived New York World Journal Tribune. Later in the 1960s and in the 1970s, Jim Kilgallen continued working as a reporter with his articles appearing in the Hearst papers that remained outside of New York City, but his Hearst colleagues knew not to ask him about his late daughter, and so did his "friends of long standing," said biographer Israel. Contacted by Israel, he wrote to her on January 26, 1976 that he would not help her, noting that he was sticking to "a firm policy" he had maintained since his daughter's death "not to grant interviews to anyone concerning her career."

The National Archives has a file from 1978 containing a collage of newspaper clippings dating from that year that Jim Kilgallen sent to Louis Stokes of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. One was a "Page Six" item in the New York Post about Israel's forthcoming book noting that employees of the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, the place where Dorothy Kilgallen was last seen alive, were instructed not to talk to Israel. But Jim Kilgallen, who continued reporting for Hearst until age 93, is not known to have commented on this or any other suggestions that his daughter might have been murdered.

For her contribution to the television industry, Dorothy Kilgallen has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6780 Hollywood Boulevard.