Kirby's Augusta - A Hollywood Reporter's Mysterious Death

A REPORTER’S MYSTERIOUS DEATH
It happens all the time.
A celebrity journalist comes to town and everyone tries to impress.
They wine. They dine. They put on a grand show.
And a few weeks later the story comes out and the town gets trashed anyway.
It happened to Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics.
And it happened to Augusta in the spring of 1953.
The journalist was Dorothy Kilgallen.
She's pretty much forgotten today, but half a century ago Kilgallen was part Barbara Walters and part Oprah Winfrey, with a dash of Sylvia Cooper thrown in.
A nationally known newspaper reporter, author and screenwriter, Kilgallen was a Hollywood columnist, a radio personality and a regular panelist on the TV show What's My Line?where her perceptive interviewing skills were on display each week as she tried to guess the profession of a mystery guest.
She came to Augusta 61 years ago this spring because everyone else was coming to Augusta, too.
We were a boom town with construction at Fort Gordon and the "bomb plant" bringing in people and jobs.
Kilgallen was assigned to to write an article on such boom towns for Good Housekeeping Magazine.
Chronicle editor Louis Harris did what he could to keep Killgallen happy – HE TOOK HER TO A BAR.
Specifically to the Bon Air Hotel and plied her with cocktails. He took her to the Colonial Club for socializing. She also went to the Town Tavern for lobster, which she said was pretty good for $3.50.
Kilgallen saw all the commerce and construction and said of our town: "It is as if Scarlett O'Hara had come home from the ball, wiggled out of her satin gown, and put on a space suit."
But Kilgallen was at heart a reporter, and she quickly found another side of Augusta that most boom towns seem to share - gambling.
A lot of it.
When her article came out in April 1953, Kilgallen described visit after visit to Augusta's many gambling establishments.
This was sort of embarrassing because Mayor Hugh Hamilton had run for office the year before on a vow to get rid of it.

After the article came out, Mayor Hamilton demanded an apology..
The Richmond County grand jury vowed, however, to, dutifully announcing it on The Chronicle's front page.
Well, you know what happened?
Not much.
There does not seem to be any follow-up news coverage of grand jury actions or developments.
As for Kilgallen she dashed off to England to cover the June 2 crowning of Queen Elizabeth.

She continued to maintain a high media profile, and was known for having excellent sources within the Washington spy community, frequently offering scoops on Castro and the CIA.
But it was the last years of Dorothy Kilgallen's life that grew very, very interesting.
A Hollywood insider, she knew President Kennedy and his girlfriends and hinted at liaisons with movie star Marilyn Monroe.
After Kennedy's death in Dallas, Kilgallen went to Texas to cover the case. Jack Ruby, the bar owner who shot assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on national TV, gave her private interviews. She told her friends that she was writing a book that would tell the story of who really killed JFK
That book was never written.
In late 1965 -- soon after returning from interviews in Dallas -- Kilgallen was found dead in her New York home.
They said she was sitting up in a bed in a room she never used, apparently reading a best-seller she had already read and not wearing her glasses, without which she could not see.
Oh, and her notes on the Kennedy case were missing. They were never found.
Initially, the story was she'd died of a heart attack. However, further tests indicated a curious alcohol-drug overdose, some said similar to Marilyn Monroe’s.
Louis Harris -- by then the executive editor -- wrote a nice column about Dorothy Kilgallen for the paper.
It was the same paper that JUST months before had unleashed its investigative and editorial staff on what would become one of The Chronicle's most talked about efforts ever -- an undercover series on the problems of gambling in Augusta.

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