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What's My Line?: Daly & Dorothy.... The Stalwart & The Tragedy   As the 1964-65 television season launched, Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater were embroiled in a Presidential campaign that was a no contest. The Civil Rights Bill passed Congress in August. Goldwater voted no, saying years later his opposition was because he felt the bill was not comprehensive enough. Jack Ruby was convicted of the murder of accused Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. His attorney, Melvin Belli, called the Dallas judicial proceedings "a kangaroo court." The Warren Commission ruled Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as President Kennedy's assassin. The head of that panel, Chief Justice Earl Warren, had connections to What's My Line?. His son-in-law was the game's moderator.John Charles Patrick Croghan Daly Jr. was born in 1914 in Johannesburg, South Africa. His father was a geologist who tragically contracted tropical fever and died. His mother took the family to Boston. Young John eventually graduated from Boston College. He had some aspirations toward a law career but was pulled early on toward journalism. He started out for Washington, working a series of odd jobs before landing work as a reporter for NBC Radio Network. Eventually, Edward R. Murrow hired him as a correspondent for CBS News, first covering the Roosevelt White House and then World War II. He was the first to report the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and was a decorated war correspondent. Despite his youth and his talent in radio, Daly had a fear of the impending medium of television. He sought a shift to newspapers when he took a shot on a pioneering panel show, Celebrity Time. Daly jealousy guarded his image as a journalist but entertainment appearances, even in the primitive days of television, paid better than radio. Daly and NBC's John Cameron Swayze became arguably television's most frequently moonlighting newsmen. Swayze, a bit of a foppish character, was NBC's pioneer nightly anchorman. His Camel News Caravan saw Swayze engineer catchphrases such as: "Let's hopscotch the world for headlines," and "Glad we could get together." The minute Swayze was dumped in 1956 in favor of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, he never returned to news. Long a pitchman for Timex ("it takes a licking and keeps on ticking"), Swayze also went the game show route. He was originally a top candidate to host To Tell the Truth, along with Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace. When Bud Collyer ultimately was tapped, Swayze was one of the earliest Truth panelists. Daly may have been a favorite to become the first face of CBS News on television but, along with a number of Murrow's boys, his fear of becoming an early television casualty kept him away from the desk. The nod instead went to a little-known CBS radio correspondent Douglas Edwards, who kept the job for 14 years. Instead, based on his early work on entertainment television, Daly was hired as the first anchor (and president) of ABC News. The fact that ABC had few affiliates in the 1950s and that more than a quarter of its affiliates did not even carry the network's newscast was inconsequential. "He was ABC News," wrote the late sportscaster Howard Cosell in his first autobiography. Cosell, who became one of the most polarizing, if respected, figures in television sports, revered Daly and credited the newsman with giving the outspoken sports commentator his first break at the network. Daly, in fact, stood firm for Cosell in the face of ABC executives who felt Cosell's staccato Brooklyn accent and tangential views were a turnoff. For more than a decade, viewers watched Daly chart the panel on What's My Line? through its paces on Sunday nights and those in the limited cities with ABC affiliates watched his straightforward delivery on ABC News with John Daly weeknights at the dinner hour. Daly anchored three quadrenniums of political conventions for ABC. In his 10 years at the helm, ABC News had virtually no budget, far fewer correspondents than its two counterparts and fought the constant battle of getting affiliate clearances. A scan of a TV Guide in 1961 for the Salt Lake City-Boise region revealed three ABC stations and only one carrying the Daly news. In addition to What's My Line?, Daly crossed over for three years as the host of CBS's Monday night It's News to Me, which threatened to become Goodson-Todman's third major panel favorite but never gained the traction of Line and I've Got a Secret. In 1958-59, he was ABC's Monday night host for the prestigious Voice of Firestone. Yet, despite his journalistic premiums, most of America identified with Daly as the host of What's My Line?. In Gil Fates' book on the series, the executive producer said Daly was probably the second best emcee he ever saw aside from Garry Moore. In the realm of what he did, Daly was in an elite category. He remains the only host in television history to carry a network prime time game nearly 18 years. He developed a precision and an act that was both formula and anticipated. On a night when a contestant's line was that he raised cows, Arlene Francis asked: "Do you need to have physical training to do what you do?" Responded Daly: "Miss Francis, do you mean training as in the measure of physical activity which requires daily exercises or active dexterity?" Arlene: "Well, yes, John." Daly: "That's four down and six to go, Mr. Cerf!" Daly was responsible for several key catchphrases which entered daily American conversation in the '50s and '60s. His call for a contestant to "enter and sign in please" was arguably his most noted, as well as the rhythm and tempo of his "one down and nine to go" or "two down and eight to go" for every "no" answer. Viewers waited weekly for Daly to call for a "small conference" to discuss a confusing answer based on a panelist's question (said Steve Allen one night: "I wonder what will happen if John ever calls for a large conference."). Some of his explanations of a contestant's answer were of encyclopedic proportions. The entire pattern worked because Daly never disappointed the audience. He had the act down as Richard Burton did "Hamlet." In 1960, ABC took an ill-fated gamble when it asked Daly to move the network newscast to 10:30 p.m. in the East. The idea was for counterprogramming and the possibility of clearing more stations. Both moves failed. The ABC News Final with John Daly could not even generate an average 1 rating and in key cities, repeats of Highway Patrol and first-run episodes of Sea Hunt frequently turned up instead. After one year of bleeding ratings, Daly's contract was up and he and ABC mutually agreed to part company. ABC hired a promising backup anchor who had substituted for Walter Cronkite on CBS. Ron Cochran did not carry a following with him. After two and a half years, Cochran was canned. Daly continued with What's My Line?, which had by the early 1960s become an American tradition. Fates said as the show became older, subtle suggestions were made to loosen the Line format in the direction of what the syndicated version ultimately became. Daly would have none of it. On more than one occasion, Fates wrote, Daly ended all hints of altering the structure by saying CBS could "get themselves another boy." He still jealously guarded the newsman image. While Daly moonlighted in the movies with "Bye, Bye Birdie" and on CBS sitcoms Green Acres and Pistols 'n' Petticoats, his roles were always those of a journalist. He remained in context. He and Francis stepped outside of the Line tradition to serve as balcony anchors for The Miss Universe Pageant during its first five years on CBS as Gene Rayburn and Jack Linkletter alternated as onstage hosts. Even in an appearance as the main celebrity guest on I've Got a Secret, host Steve Allen was quick to say about Daly: "He doesn't do this kind of thing very often." The segment was to test the panel's ability to identify major news headlines from classic wire service photos. At one point, after daytime To Tell the Truth became a success on CBS, speculation surfaced in TV Guide of the prospect of a daily version of What's My Line?, predictably because by 1963, CBS owned Line. One TV Teletype report by Neil Hickey suggested Daly nixed any possibility of doing a five-day-a-week version of Line. So identified was Daly after 13 years at the helm, that a daytime version of Line was shelved. Arguably, Daly was as indispensable to What's My Line? on Sunday nights as Gene Rayburn was to Match Game and Monty Hall was to Let's Make a Deal. His work was as a master craftsman. His elocution of the language was impeccable. His ability to bring out the best in his panel while maintaining a firm control over the half-hour was on the same par as Peter Marshall's work on Hollywood Squares. Yet, Daly's name is never mentioned today in any top ten lists of the great emcees of all time. Perhaps the consignment of the black-and-white repeats to the wee hours is in no small part responsible because largely the hardcores and DVD librarians are its audience. Possibly the fact that Daly, though he was only 53 when Line was canceled on CBS, never did a followup show erased his image from viewers' minds faster than other classic emcees. Even further, Daly may have been a victim of his own talent. He was so good at making others look good on Line that he may have suffered from the same fate as did Andy Griffith on his own sitcom. Griffith, in reigning himself in after a half-season to become straight man to his zany Mayberry cast, was so good in throwing the show to others that he never won an Emmy. In fact, Daly's long-running prime time success is perceptibly as impressive as Bob Barker's 35 years on The Price Is Right. The stakes were always higher and the vulnerability to cancellation greater in nighttime television because of the major advertiser dollars on the line. Consider this: of all entertainment personalities in the history of CBS, only Ed Sullivan and James Arness enjoyed a longer consecutive run than Daly in a lead role (three of Red Skelton's 19 years were on NBC). What's My Line?, while on the verge of dropping out of television's top 30, was still time period dominant at the end of the 1964-65 season. That campaign itself was wacky in that by December 1964, CBS chief programmer James Aubrey changed the time slots of 17 of his network's shows abruptly without any consideration to advertisers. So quick were the alterations made, they failed to make the week's TV Guide listings and those of many major newspapers. Even Sunday night's anchor Mister Ed was dispatched to Wednesday and two failing comedies which filled the hour between The Ed Sullivan Show and the Candid Camera-What's My Line? combo (My Living Doll and The Joey Bishop Show) were moved. Line, ever the immortal stalwart, maintained its Sunday at 10:30 slot. Yet in the season to come, change would come to What's My Line? in a most unpredictable fashion.  The jury remains out to this day on two things concerning Dorothy Kilgallen: whether she was really the panelist America loved to hate and whether conspiracy theorists are in the ballpark with the ideas of sinister circumstances surrounding her 1965 death.Kilgallen was on the What's My Line? panel from its February 1950 launch. By the time America learned on a Monday night of her startling death, Kilgallen had visited in their homes on more than 700 Sunday nights. Some loved her high-pitched laugh at amusing lines of interrogation. Others were put off by her tenacious competitiveness. As executive producer Gil Fates wrote in his 1978 book about Line: "She cared about our silly game." That juxtaposition made her virtually irreplaceable on the panel---perhaps literally. Journalism was in Kilgallen's genes. Her father Jim was a respected wire service correspondent. At 26, after toiling for six years for the New York Journal American, Kilgallen established her "Voice of Broadway" column. Some analysts have suggested she was a precursor to Barbara Walters and had her background not been in print, Kilgallen may have been a contender to become a television news anchor. Mark Goodson was enamored with journalists. He loved his Monday night panel show It's News to Me with Daly (and later Walter Cronkite) because it focused on the week's news stories and newsmakers. On To Tell the Truth, Goodson used New York columnist Hy Gardner for the first two years on the panel. Columnist Bob Considine once subbed. Years later, Cindy Adams of The New York Post was an occasional panelist on a daytime version of Truth. Kilgallen covered some of the great murder trials between the 1930s and the late '50s, most notably the case of Dr. Sam Sheppard---who was ultimately freed after the trial for the murder of his wife. She was 37 when she joined poet Louis Untermeyer and two fellows named Hoffman on the first Line. The production values were horrid. The set was primitive. Yet, Kilgallen and host John Charles Daly immediately rose above their counterparts like fizz rising in an Alka-Seltzer. Kilgallen and Daly would survive. The others would not. If Steve Allen invented the phrase "is it bigger than a breadbox?" during his stints on the Line panel, Kilgallen patented the question "could I hold it in my hand?" when quizzing about a contestant's product. She put the word "dexterity" into common language, frequently asking if manual dexterity were necessary in the performance of one's service. Miss Francis' son Peter Gabel, in a 2007 interview with TVgameshows.net, suggested the concept of Kilgallen as the panelist viewers loved to hate was exaggerated. "Dorothy may have had her detractors but she had a lot of fans," Gabel said. "My mother and Dorothy were friends and the entire panel frequently had a tradition of going out for a late dinner after the show was over on Sunday nights. They were like a family. You had to be to last as long as they did on prime time television." To say the least, Kilgallen was a complex woman. In her years of reporting on the hoi polloi of New York, she was considered by some analysts as out of touch with mainstream America. Married to Broadway writer/producer Dick Kollmar, Kilgallen was also linked to singers Johnnie Ray and Bobby Short. Her name was in the lyrics of a popular fifties song. Frank Sinatra loathed her for what he considered to be libelous remarks about him in her column, yet he never sued her. In a 1956 column on Sinatra, Kilgallen wrote: "Now that he is rich and famous, with the world on a string and sapphires in his cufflinks, he is still hot-tempered, egotistical, extravagant, and moody." Sinatra responded with a tirade, including pointed lampooning of Kilgallen's nose and chin. In 1961, she made her lone appearance as a mystery guest on Line. For the two weeks prior, Kilgallen was hospitalized and off the show. The reasons were kept tight-lipped but published reports in the years since suggest she may have incurred treatment for an alleged alcohol addiction. Daly, himself, at one point only spoke to her for nearly a year for the purposes of doing What's My Line?. The reason, according to Gil Fates: Kilgallen, in a blind item in the Journal-American, wrote Daly had fellow ABC interviewer Mike Wallace (later of CBS's 60 Minutes) barred as a mystery guest on Line because of professional differences between the two. Daly abhorred what he considered Wallace's incisive interviewing style. The host considered the Journal-American story a violation of professional trust because Kilgallen never asked him directly about the details. Kilgallen and Daly ultimately patched up their professional differences but they still maintained a political division. After the death of President Kennedy, Daly's father-in-law and Chief Justice Earl Warren was appointed to head a commission to investigate the assassination. When the report was issued in 1964, Kilgallen was outspoken in her disagreement with the findings. She had interviewed the convicted murderer of accused Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, while Ruby was in jail in Dallas. She attended his trial. Kilgallen had full intent of writing an investigative story to destroy the credibility of the Warren Commission Report. Scores of journalists have researched the Kilgallen-JFK connection, including popular game show announcer Randy West. In 2002, West published his own account, which included information West obtained from a conversation with Line creator and production manager Bob Bach. From West's story: "She had not been shy about claiming to have the makings of the story of the century. Shortly following a trip to Dallas, she repeated the comment to a number of people, including her next door neighbor, her hairdresser, her agent, her publisher, staffers from What’s My Line, and the producer and host (Les Crane) of the (ABC late night) TV program Nightlife." Crane, in an ill-fated attempt to compete with Johnny Carson, went after probing material on Nightlife. Executive producer Nick Vanoff was nervous at the prospect of Kilgallen spouting off about the Warren report. Writes West: "She had arrived at the studio with a folder full of pertinent and explosive notes and documents. She kept the folder closed throughout the interview. After the live program, Vanoff asked Bach to send her 'a dozen long-stemmed roses.'" In West's account, he indicates Kilgallen pursued a counterinvestigation into the Warren findings when a copy of the report "was leaked....to her a full month before the Report was published." The Line panelist uncovered what she believed to be conflicting statements from Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry concerning where the shots which killed Kennedy and wounded Texas Gov. John Connally originated. Eventually, according to West's story, the FBI conducted an investigation into who leaked the Warren Report to Kilgallen and why. More than one published report suggested Kilgallen's personal and business phones were tapped by the FBI. Continued West: "Dorothy Kilgallen ran one last column on the JFK assassination on September 3, 1965. In it, she asserted that if Marina Oswald (widow of the accused assassin) could explain the 'real story' it would undoubtedly cause a 'sensation.' She closed by vowing, 'This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive---and there are a lot of them.'" The evening of Nov. 7, 1965, starlet Joey Heatherton was the mystery guest on What's My Line?. Kilgallen made an early guess, suggesting a hunch the challenger was singer Peggy Lee. That was not atypical of Kilgallen's gamesmanship in the previous month. That evening, according to Fates' book, Bennett Cerf, who had given Kilgallen a then-astronomical $10,000 advance to write a book on the celebrated murder trials she had covered, found his colleague in the dressing room in tears. Her melancholy was brought on by her failure to identify a contestant's occupation for three weeks. The following night, midway through The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC, co-anchor Chet Huntley reported the overnight death of Kilgallen. In an era long prior to round-the-clock cable news and celebrity worship, the story consumed all of 18 seconds with no video, only a slide of Kilgallen's face over Huntley's right shoulder. On CBS, Walter Cronkite---who abhorred any news outside of Washington and the world and was never a fan of Kilgallen---did not report the story. In the years since, more than 50 books, research papers and lectures have speculated on the cause of Kilgallen's death. Conspiracy theories are as prevalent concerning the columnist as are the requisite hypotheses surrounding Kennedy's assassination. The official cause of death: a toxic combination of alcohol and sleeping pills. Contrary to some accounts, Kilgallen's death was never ruled a suicide. To this day, plausible theories continue to be offered of the possibility of murder. In Lee Israel's book, "Kilgallen," the author supports the idea of both an accidental death and foul play. Israel suggests Kilgallen may well have been despondent over a broken relationship with Ray and the decline of the Hearst newspaper chain. On the other hand, Israel details police and medical reports which placed Kilgallen in a bed in which she was never known to sleep and no pill bottle was found on the bedside table. The clear intent of conspiracy theorists is that Kilgallen was murdered to silence her dogged investigation into the Warren Commission Report. As seen in occasional repeats on GSN, the live What's My Line? episode of Nov. 14, 1965, began with a genuinely shaken Daly delivering a 45-second recap of the events of the previous week. As he had more than nine years earlier when Fred Allen died, Daly said Kilgallen's family insisted the appropriate decision should be to proceed with a conventional episode. Steve Allen came in from California a night early before his usual Monday night I've Got a Secret chores to join the panel. Mark Goodson brought in Kitty Carlisle from To Tell the Truth to sit in Kilgallen's chair. The latter decision was easy. Carlisle, long a Goodson-Todman mainstay and a Truth veteran, would not create any suspicion that she was leaving her seat next to Orson Bean in order to replace Kilgallen (though the company and CBS did receive some letters suggesting Kitty would be an excellent choice). At the episode's end, the panel and Daly provided heartfelt tributes to their colleague. Cerf was visibly moved. The entire half-hour was one in which the regulars and the emcee appeared to be relieved to reach its conclusion. None of the lines were identified and the evening reeked of the players trying too hard amid their grief to do the show "as Dorothy would have wanted." Kilgallen did not make the rounds of other Goodson-Todman shows in the same fashion as Miss Francis, Allen and even Cerf, though she did turn up on the original Match Game on NBC in the 1960s for a week. In answer to Gene Rayburn's question, "Name something football players do on the field," Kilgallen responded, "Bunt." Rayburn let fly with that trademark cackle and the audience roared. Said Rayburn: "Dorothy, I've never been to a football game where that was done. Baseball maybe." Kilgallen: "Well, I thought they bunted when they kicked the ball." To New Yorkers, Kilgallen was as unpredictable as the path of a tornado in her columns, which made her one widely-read writer. However, to most of America without access to the New York Journal-American, she was that woman who was the most tenacious player of What's My Line?. Some viewers loved her. Others could not stand her. But they watched. As in families, television series have to go on after the death of a lead performer or character. Line went though the trauma in 1956. CBS and NBC both experienced major talent losses from sudden deaths in the early '60s. Ward Bond, the mainstay of Wagon Train, dropped dead of a heart attack in 1960. While the show continued for another five years, it was never the same without its incomparable Major Seth Adams as wagonmaster. CBS encountered two losses of major supporting actors in 1962 and 1963. Joe Kearns, the long-suffering Mr. Wilson of Dennis the Menace, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in February 1962. While the great Gale Gordon was signed to a replacement role as John Wilson, ostensibly George Wilson's brother, Kearns---with that signature slow burn---was too identified as Dennis' foil and the series only lasted another year and a half. The next year, veteran actor Larry Keating---Mister Ed's next-door neighbor Roger Addison---died of leukemia. While the comedy continued for another two years after Keating's passing, the chemistry of the crusty old curmudgeon who could not stand Ed was never truly fulfilled by the fine actor Leon Ames in a new neighbor role. Arguably, the death of Dorothy Kilgallen was the most shocking and difficult to digest for viewers at that point in television's young history. Kilgallen had been the faithful and steady visitor in television homes for more than 15 years. Something was right with the world when Johnny Olsen and his predecessors introduced her and she began the introduction of either Cerf or the guest panelist with "and on my left........." The vast majority of Americans who never read a Kilgallen column ended their weekend with her as if it was an expected date or appointment. On her final night on What's My Line?, Kilgallen looked at the evening's guest panelist and, as she had on more than 700 occasions, said: "Come again." Considering the fate of CBS's longest-running game show less than two years down the road, Kilgallen's colleagues and producers would no doubt have loved to make the same plea of their friend. As Fates wrote: "Dolly May was something else." Part 2: What's My Line? 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