by Mark Shaw
CHAPTER 31
Targeting the logical suspect who betrayed Dorothy Kilgallen by leaking details of her JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald assassination investigation to those fearing disclosure requires close attention to her inner circle.
This Judas needed to earn Kilgallen’s trust in order to learn secrets about both her private life and her professional career. Since she was not one to confide in too many people, it had to be a special relationship, one built over time. The relationship had to be genuine since Kilgallen was an expert at spotting phonies.
As November 1965 appeared, those in Kilgallen’s inner circle were few. They included husband Richard, hairdressers Marc Sinclaire and Charles Simpson, family companion and tutor Ibne Hassan, friends Bob and Jean Bach and Marlon Swing, actress Joan Crawford, and Johnnie Ray. Kilgallen’s fellow panelists on What’s My Line? were certainly friends, as was host John Charles Daly, but they were not considered close friends she shared secrets with on a regular basis.
Curiously, the only new member of Kilgallen’s inner circle appeared shortly after she covered the Jack Ruby trial. He was also her companion as she continued her JFK and Oswald assassination investigations. His name was Ron Pataky, the new love in the famous journalist’s life a year and a half before her death. As of the printing of this book, he is still alive but retired from the newspaper business.
Pataky, by all accounts, was Kilgallen’s second major extramarital affair after Johnnie Ray. During his videotaped interview, Marc Sinclaire did not try to excuse Kilgallen’s having affairs with both. The only mention of this matter was when Sinclaire stated, “[Dorothy] was lonely, really lonely,” an apparent reference to the discord in her marriage with Richard including the absence of any sexual relations. Recall Johnnie Ray biographer Jonny Whiteside writing that shortly after Kilgallen and Ray met, “They found themselves in bed—a cascade of violent release and deep passion.…”
Twelve years her junior when he met Kilgallen (51) in June 1964, three months after the Ruby trial, Ron Pataky (39) had a murky past. Consensus appears to be that the two met during a 20th Century Fox European press junket for three upcoming films: The Sound of Music, The Agony & The Ecstasy, and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.103104
During that June, Kilgallen wrote in her Journal-American column about the terrific reception she had received in London: “Since I’ve been in Europe for four days, not keeping up with the newspapers at all, I don’t know how things were going at the United Nations, but I could testify that as of this minute in London, British-U.S. relations seem to be better than ever in history. The sun was smiling on England when I landed at London Airport, and the Londoners were smiling on the Americans.” She then added three examples of how well the trip was progressing. The first: “At the airport, Ron Pataky, the Columbus Citizen-Journal columnist, invited me to ride into town with him. He said to the cab driver: ‘I haven’t any pounds with me, would you take American money?’ The hackie grinned. ‘Hop in governor,’ he said. ‘It’s the best money in the world.’”
When author Lee Israel conducted the first extensive interview with Pataky regarding his relationship with Kilgallen in the 1970s, he provided varying versions of when they first met and what transpired from 1964 until Kilgallen died some 17 months later. According to Pataky, the first encounter happened in Salzburg, Austria, not London, on the set of Sound of Music. Pataky said Kilgallen tripped while entering a bus and he caught her whereupon she acted “flirtatiously” leading to their having drinks at a local restaurant.105
Pataky covered entertainment for his newspaper. His sturdy build and good looks had already captured the hearts of celebrity women. They included Frank Sinatra’s future wife, Mia Farrow and Italian operatic singer and sultry actress, Anna Maria Alberghetti. At one point, Alberghetti and Pataky were engaged to be married.
Midwest Today publisher Larry Jordan asked Pataky during a mid-2000s audio-recorded interview why he was attracted to Kilgallen, a woman so many years his senior. He replied, “For all of her brashness in print, she was very poetic…[Dorothy] was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, to be sure. A very soft person. I never saw her angry. I don’t think, other than strictly business, something like discussing the Jack Ruby thing, Dorothy and I ever had a serious conversation…. She was a sweet lady, my best friend in the whole world.”
Pataky, who told Jordan he introduced Kilgallen to his mother, swore the year-and-a-half affair was platonic in nature. He said, “[We’d] shuck the rest of these phonies and go off and do our thing. And we made trips together. We went to Florence together, we went to London together…We’d kiss hello on the cheek if I was coming to town [New York City]. But there was no goodnight kiss when I dropped her off, and I dropped her off a lot of times. Because it wasn’t that kind of relationship. Never. I had my girlfriends. She knew about them…we never, ever spent any time in a hotel room.”
Pataky’s blanket denial appears dubious. The couple had traveled to Rome and Florence in October 1964. No proof exists that they shared a hotel room or spent time in one together but author Lee Israel, based on her extensive research, noted, “In her girlish fiction, Dorothy Mae could not have fantasized a more romantic ambiance for a love affair” adding that the two walked the streets of Florence enjoying each other’s company as they surveyed the historical landscape.
Kilgallen’s hairdresser Marc Sinclaire disagreed with Pataky’s version of his relationship with the famous columnist. In early 1965, Sinclaire recalled, daughter Jill, married at the time, visited the townhouse. Pinpointing minute details, the hairdresser stated in his videotaped interview, “It was chilly because Jill had a sweater on and she was very angry. I was doing Dorothy’s hair when she walked in from the service entrance and stood in the corner. She leaned against the dresser and stared at Dorothy. She and I were surprised the way [Jill] stormed into the room with venom in her voice and eyes.”
According to Sinclaire, Jill confronted her mother. The hairdresser said Jill, “was very angry. She mentioned Pataky by name and said she was highly infuriated because her mother was going out with this man and sleeping with him all over town.” Jill added, according to Sinclaire, “It’s just too embarrassing to be seen in public with you.”
When Jill left, Sinclaire said Kilgallen cried. Then she said, “I don’t know why Jill wants to behave this way. She knows about her father and his indiscretions. I’ve told her. And she knows a lot of other things. I will never see Jill again in public.” “And she never did,” Sinclaire added.” They were never able to patch things up before she died.”106
Sinclaire recalled that the argument was so ugly he walked away from fixing Kilgallen’s hair. He stood to the side while anger prevailed. Kilgallen’s friend Marlon Swing also was aware of the argument. How Jill learned of the affair her mother was having with Pataky is unknown.107
In his videotaped interview, Sinclaire, who said Pataky wanted to “keep the affair very quiet,” speculated on where the couple may have rendezvoused. He said, “[There] were several places [Kilgallen] could have [gone] with Pataky. One was my apartment, and there was [interior designer] Howard Rothberg’s house. She could have gone to either. She had a key to [my apartment] and she had a key to his [Rothberg’s]. When Sinclaire asked Kilgallen “Why are you going to a hotel?” the hairdresser said Kilgallen told him, “He [Pataky] wants to.’”
These hotels included the Regency where Pataky, who had Kilgallen’s unlisted “Cloop” telephone number,108 resided when he was in New York City. According to a woman who handled room assignments, Kilgallen had booked the room for Pataky, stating, “The keys were given to her.” Sinclaire confirmed this fact in his interview “I know she met Ron there. They kept a room upstairs that she would go to. They often met there. Dorothy liked that place because you could go in two, three different entrances, the lobby and go into the bar, you could go off the street and go in the bar, and you could go through the back entrance ar
ound to it.”
The 2007 Midwest Today article mentioned a note discovered from Kilgallen to Pataky. Romantically themed, it mentioned “our little room on the 19th floor.” By all accounts, it was at the Regency, now the Loews Regency at 540 Park Avenue in New York City.109
Asked in his videotaped interview whether Pataky had a “romantic streak,” Marc Sinclaire said, “[Pataky gave her] notes and cards. I don’t know about flowers. Once he sent her some cut-out valentines. And they all strung apart. Which she showed me.”
Dorothy Kilgallen’s Ron Pataky romance raises issues with his complicity in her death.
Kilgallen’s friend Marlon Swing disagreed with Pataky’s assessment of the relationship stating, “She was like a little girl after her first date, going on about how they’d met, how marvelous he was, the moonlight and the clouds and the poetry he had recited to her. It was obvious that he had become very important.”
Pataky’s feelings for Kilgallen apparently were conflicted. “Ron swore to me he had never had intimate relations with Dorothy,” Larry Jordan told this author, “and spoke of the mere idea as being repugnant to him due to her unattractiveness. But yet he heaped praise on her and called her his best friend.”
During their interview, Larry Jordan confronted Pataky with the love note from Kilgallen to him. He also mentioned the romantic relationship between the two, something “her hairdressers confirmed.” Jordan said “Pataky was still so insistent he was not sexually involved with Dorothy.”
Kilgallen’s letters to Pataky appear to say otherwise. Each has the sense of being from a woman interested in much more than a “friendship.” One, signed in Kilgallen’s handwriting, reads:
Interpretation of what Kilgallen meant by “I wanted you” is subject to conjecture but suggests Kilgallen had intimacy on her mind. At the least, the letter points to a previous rendezvous between the couple at the Regency Hotel.
A second letter, written September 22, 1965, is more revealing. Written within a short time before Kilgallen died, but after, as Marc Sinclaire noted, her trip to Switzerland, it reads
Use of the words “Sweetie” and “Kisses” and her admitting, “I miss you,” again portend of more than the simple friendship Pataky swears he had with Kilgallen before she died. When shown the letters, he dismissed any noting of intimacy telling author Israel there was no reference to “his body” or any sexual relationship.
* * * * *
Focusing on Kilgallen’s death and curious as to whether Pataky may have been involved, Larry Jordan asked the columnist his whereabouts on the day she died. Pataky defended himself stating, “…I was in Columbus, Ohio—in my office—at eight in the morning. That’s where I was horrified to receive the news of Dorothy’s death…with a newspaper city room utterly jammed with witnesses all of whom knew Dorothy from her visits to my office. Moreover, phone records, from Columbus—placed me here until well past midnight that night.”
Pataky’s “alibi” conflicts with other accounts. Investigative reporter Kathryn Fauble revealed to this author that one of the main “alibi witnesses” Pataky mentioned did not back up his story.
Pataky said that “a fashion editor named Jane Horrocks” read the sad news of Kilgallen’s death from the newspaper newswire to him. Fauble contacted Horrocks who wrote Fauble a 1998 letter this author has read. In it, Horrocks, whose byline in 1965 was Jane Kehrer before she changed it to Jane Kehrer Horrocks following a marriage, wrote, “I most certainly remember Ron Pataky. We shared an office at the Citizen-Journal…Ron was one of the busiest on the paper and was of necessity frequently out of the office…So it was that I took a number of telephone calls for him and Dorothy Kilgallen was frequently among those who called.” Recalling November 1965, Horrocks added, “At the time of her death I was covering fashion showings in California so I cannot furnish any details.”
Larry Jordan confronted Pataky with his suspicions that the journalist was being less than truthful about his whereabouts on the weekend of Kilgallen’s death. Jordan said Pataky became belligerent. He then stated, “The next day [Monday] I had been in my office [in Columbus, Ohio] from 8 o’clock on,” before asking, “What did I do…hire my own jet, fly [to New York], kill her, and then fly back in a hurry?,” a response that surprised Jordan who had not accused Pataky of any wrongdoing or even brought up the subject.
Also countering Pataky’s claim that he was in Columbus was Kilgallen’s friend Bob Bach, the What’s My Line? associate producer. He was the same person who met Kilgallen at P. J. Clarke’s for a short time immediately after her WML? appearance on the night of November 7th. Recall that Bach said Kilgallen told him she had a “late date” but later explained that he “was under the impression the date was with Ron Pataky.” The reason: there was no one else at that time that she would have called a “date.” That the “late date” was at the Regency Hotel where Pataky stayed adds credence to Bach’s assumption.
Pataky’s refusal to admit he was in New York City on November 7th or 8th included his resistance to admit he was at the Regency Hotel Bar that weekend. Lee Israel had apparently located three people who believed Kilgallen was meeting Pataky after going to P.J. Clarke’s. He continued to deny this happened while stating that his mother had told him about Kilgallen’s death in Columbus. He also stated he did not recall being in New York City for two to three weeks after she died.
Pataky never acknowledged a visit to New York City to rendezvous with Kilgallen between September 22 and November 8. He did admit, to author Israel, to speaking to Kilgallen on the telephone at 12:30 a.m. early morning Monday, November 8. Pataky said he could not recall the exact substance of the conversation but that it wasn’t memorable. Based on eyewitness accounts, Kilgallen would have been in the Regency Hotel bar at the time.
In a mid-2000s interview, this time with an associate of investigative reporter Kathryn Fauble, Pataky varied his story a bit. He said it was his “best memory that we talked the night before Dorothy died” since “we usually called on the weekends.” While telling Fauble that he could not recall what the two talked about, Pataky then stated, “the last time we spoke she was in great spirits. When you lose someone close to you, you remember that. She was alright with the world.” Closing the interview, Pataky recalled that he heard about Kilgallen’s death “while sitting in the office. It [Kilgallen’s death] was on the wire. All hell broke loose.”
Regarding the 12:30 a.m. telephone call with Kilgallen, Pataky also mentioned it during his interview with Larry Jordan. He swore she was not suicidal, that “she was just normal. She always called herself my New York secretary and Suzie Creamcheese.” Pataky also admitted, according to Jordan, “to circulating in the underworld, to knowing mobsters including Sam Giancana.” Asked to be more specific, Pataky said, “I knew Sam Giancana110 through [singer] Phyllis McGuire.111 Drunk one night, I tried to put the make on her. That didn’t work....”112 Jordan said Pataky, “bragged he knew all those guys [in the underworld]. He also knew mobsters who were involved with Hollywood. He knew a lot of people.”
Like author Lee Israel, Larry Jordan had reservations about Pataky’s credibility. Jordan suspected that Pataky was almost “too helpful” during his interview. One journalist who requested anonymity while speaking to this author went a step further. She said of Pataky, “He was either a nice guy who had gotten a bad rap through the years from the media or a pathological liar.”113
To Larry Jordan’s surprise, Pataky telephoned Jordan in September 2014 after they had not spoken for many years. Among the revelations Pataky told Jordan was that New York City police interviewed him after Kilgallen’s death. Asked how the authorities would have known about him, Pataky said they discovered a note with his name on it on the nightstand in the bedroom where the authorities found Kilgallen’s body. This story appears dubious since no mention of any note or the police contacting Pataky appeared in any report. Recall that Detective John Doyle never told
Lee Israel of the note or any knowledge of Pataky even existing in Kilgallen’s life let alone contacting him.
Pataky also never mentioned either the note or the police contacting him before in any of the many interviews he has given. This included the one with an associate of investigative reporter Kathryn Fauble.
More revealing is that Pataky disclosed to Larry Jordan, “Dorothy lived in a lavish townhouse but I never set foot in it.” He also suggested that she could have died of an overdose since “she was a boozer and pill popper.” Pataky then admitted, “I saw her take pills, many times. I saw them in her medicine cabinet.”
Most curious was Ron Pataky’s failure to attend Kilgallen’s funeral despite their lengthy relationship. He did not explain why to Lee Israel or Larry Jordan.
103 The cover for the July 6, 1964 issue of Box Office magazine featured a Lufthansa Airlines photograph of media invited on the junket. The text read, “The working press section on the tri-roadshow flight which took 110 newsmen to three location sites in Europe.” Inside, the list of “junketeers” was posted. Included were the names of Dorothy Kilgallen and Ron Pataky along with Army Archard of Variety and Herb Dorfman of ABC-TV.
104 Louis Sobel wrote in the Journal-American that Kilgallen attracted as much attention as the movie stars did during the junket. They included Charlton Heston and Julie Andrews. Sobel said Kilgallen called Heston “Chuckles”; he called her “Dottie.”
105 A Canadian broadcasting network crew from the program This Hour Has Seven Days joined the junket and seven months later, on January 10, 1965, it aired a segment including interviews with several of the three film’s stars including Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Charleton Heston and Sarah Miles. Kilgallen is on-camera several times and also interviewed regarding time spent with Heston. Lurking in the background is Ron Pataky as he takes photos of Julie Andrews. Video available at www.TheReporterWhoKnewTooMuch.com.