What's My Line? 11-7-65 with Joey Heatherton 1 of 3

What's My Line? 11-7-65 with Joey Heatherton (1 of 3) This was the last appearance of Dorothy Kilgallen - she died that night.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• What's
• My
• Line?
• Joey
• Heatherton
• 1965
• Dorothy
• Kilgallen

[wheresmylife]

Three notes of interest to me.

1. Bennett Cerf is the only member of the panel regulars that doesn't look as though he aged.

2. I can't believe the original show lasted almost 18 years.

3. Many of these episodes seem like innocent fun but it's sad how scandalous their lives were. Especially Dorothy Kilgallen. There really was no such time in history as "innocent times." Hollywood only portrayed certain time periods that way.

[alanwatts1]

Arlene does not talk about Dorothy's personal problems or slurred speech in her 1978 autobiography. Dorothy is not sweating more than anyone else on this kinescope from the night she died. Studio lights are much brighter than on other episodes. Everyone's skin is shiny. Dorothy slurs her introduction to Tony Randall. Several minutes later she enunciates while questioning Spoony Singh of Hollywood. On other episodes she also slurs, but * what * she says is always apropros. She isn't drunk

[alanwatts1]

All you can do is read Arlene's 1978 memoir to try to understand how many times she and Martin moved and for possibly silly reasons. Be careful saying their son Peter moved with them. He attended a boarding school.

The Cerf family was different.  They lived in the same Mt. Kisco and East 62nd Street houses for decades.

[alanwatts1]

Gymnastix, I must not forget your question about where Arlene and Bennett lived. She seems to have moved many times within Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s. On at least one occasion, according to her 1978 memoir, she moved for a silly, impulsive reason having to do with an organic food chef whom she hired to prepare meals in her kitchen, and he yelled at her friends to vacate the kitchen. A very short time later, she said to her husband Martin words to the effect, "That's it. We're moving."

[alanwatts1]

"The Pawnbroker" offended many white people in Middle America with its flashbacks to a Nazi concentration camp (in a quickie style that inspired the people who created "Midnight Cowboy" and MTV) and its frontal nudity of a black woman whose boyfriend works for a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Even today, the issue of Jewish people owning all the stores where all the employees are black remains touchy.

Yet Ron Pataky said in his newspaper in November of 1965 how much he loved that movie.

[alanwatts1]

Unfortunately, nobody at your 1977 panel discussion seemed to know that Ron Pataky was still working for a Columbus, Ohio newspaper. Although people in Columbus seem to have had little to do with Ramparts magazine in the late 1960s or the New Left movement, Pataky was and is a very open-minded person. He judges each person as an individual and each movie as a unique thing. A very short time after his friend Kilgallen died, his newspaper ran his glowing review of the film "The Pawnbroker."

[alanwatts1]

Reply to Gymnastix: It is interesting you moderated a 1977 panel discussion on JFK that included Danny Schechter yet you are interested in "where Kilgallen used to wine and dine with Johnnie Ray."

Did you know she spent very little time with Mr. Ray during the years 1964 and 1965 ?

Kilgallen spent much more time with a Columbus, Ohio newspaper film / music critic named Ron Pataky during that era.

In February and March of 1968, Pataky helped Mark Lane promote his film "Rush to Judgment."

[gymnastix]

@alanwatts1 Also, do you know if Arlene Francis or Bennett Cerf were frequent patrons of any New York bistros themselves?

I am somewhat confused on this, as on "WML?" Cerf and Francis spoke of being neighbors in Mount Kisco, NY. Yet I thought each also had apartments (a penthouse in Francis' case) in Manhattan. Of course, each was also wealthy enough to have maintained multiple residences. But where did Cerf and Francis live most of the time? Do you know this, from any research?

[gymnastix]

@alanwatts1 But anyway, moving on, even as a devout fan of the original "What's My Line?," I am having trouble recalling Dorothy Kilgallen's regular hangout. I know the watering hole of John Daly was Toots Shor's. But, for some reason, I thought some place other than P.J. Clarke's is where Kilgallen used to wine & dine with Johnnie Ray, and others of her New York society friends. Can you think of the name of another NYC nightclub/restaurant at which Kilgallen was a frequent patron?

[gymnastix]

@alanwatts1 Years later, I also had the opportunity to communicate with a retired Fort Worth police officer, who was on detail the day JFK arrived at the FW airport, before Kennedy traveled to Love Field in Dallas. And what that man told me of his own family's experiences with LBJ, along with my own knowledge of LBJ's utter contempt for Bobby Kennedy, convinced me the 36th President of the United States was definitely involved with a plot to remove the 35th President of the U.S.

[gymnastix]

@alanwatts1 I have read a fair amount on the subject. In fact, as a college newspaper editor, I moderated a forum on the CIA and political assassinations, with a panel that included a former news director of WBCN-FM in Boston (who had also been a reporter for the now-defunct "Ramparts" magazine, and for ABC News), and a representative of the Assassination Information Bureau (AIB). That forum was in 1977, not long after Congress re-opened the investigation into the JFK assassination.

[gymnastix]

@alanwatts1 I am not a JFK assassination conspiracy buff, per se, even though I was five years old on the day of President Kennedy's death, and still have a pretty much full recollection of the events of those four days in November of 1963.

Though I don't think conspiracies are behind every strange or unexplained, major event in history, I have always thought there was more to JFK's murder than merely Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone gunman.