The Transatlantic accent, also called a Mid-Atlantic accent or Boston Brahmin, is a way of speaking English that is halfway between American and British. It makes you sound like you have a good education but no one can tell quite where you are from. You hear it in old Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s. It is the accent of Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, William F Buckley and (at least in some films) God.

It is also known as the the Boarding School Accent. It explains why very wealthy kids from Boston or Texas do not sound like they are from Boston or Texas, but rather from somewhere between Phillips Andover and Eton.

There is no town in the world where people grow up speaking English that way. Instead you get the accent in one of three ways:

1) Learn the accent on purpose (actors used to do that).
2) Grow up or live on both sides of the Atlantic (but that can lead to even stranger accents, like those of Loyd Grossman and Madonna).
3) Pick it up at a top boarding school in America before the 1960s.

The accent comes from American boarding schools in New England where students were taught to speak English in more of an RP or high-class British way.

In the 1930s and 1940s it was seen as a good accent to use in film and theatre since it sounded universal and not from any particular part of the world. That makes it a good accent for God and creatures from outer space. You do not hear it much any more because people have grown used to the general American accent, thanks in part to Humphrey Bogart and the extremely Middle American John Wayne.

Transatlantic English goes something like this:

Start with a mainstream American accent.
Drop your r’s at the end of words, like in “fear” and “winner”.
Say all your t’s as t’s not d’s (like in “water” and “butter”).
Use RP (British) vowels. So “dance” becomes “dahns”.
If you start from a British accent the rules are different. It is an Americanized RP accent.

It is a very particular accent and not just any sort of mix between British and American. There is even a book, now out of print, called “Teach Yourself Transatlantic: Theatre Speech for Actors” (1986) by Robert L. Hobbs.

It is a hard accent to do – people will laugh at you if you do not get it right. So it takes plenty of practice. But for the British it is an easier accent to master than a general American one.

It is a good accent for those foreign to English, strangely enough: since no one grows up speaking it, you will not sound to anyone like you have a foreign accent! Some learn it to go into business overseas.

Among those who speak with a Transatlantic accent or something close to it: Katherine Hepburn, Franklin Roosevelt, William F Buckley (in his own way), Niles and Frasier on “Frasier”, the millionaire on “Gilligan’s Island”, Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane”, Peter Jennings, Anthony Hopkins, Cary Grant, the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz”, Bette Davis, everyone in Hitchcock’s “Suspicion” (1941), Arlene Francis, Martin Gable, Agnes Moorehead, Vincent Price, and most British actors who try to sound American (but not, of course, Hugh Laurie of “House”).

—

Related accents:
Eastern Preparatory School Aristocracy
Upper Class New England accent
American Theater Standard
Main Line accent
Locust Valley Lockjaw

The so-called Boston Brahmin accent and the similar accent of the New York area, within this message board also called the “Locust Valley Lockjaw,” are distinct from each other although they share a common origin. There were, at some time, kindred accents spoken in the vicinities of Baltimore and Philadelphia as well. Today, these latter two are probably entirely extinct, while the former two are nearly so.

In television, the best instance of the Boston Brahmin accent is, as previously indicated, that of M*A*S*H*’s Charles Winchester.

Of note, neither any member of the Kennedy family nor John Kerry routinely spoke or speak in this accent. At times, some of these men may affect certain elements of the accent, but the Kennedy speech is actually much more akin to the middle-class accents of Eastern Massachusetts (North and South Shore of Boston accents, the Back Bay of Boston accent, and Cape Cod accents), which, in turn, should not be confused with the working-class accents typical of the era in Dorchester, Roxbury, and South Boston. John Kerry’s speech does, in fact, recall the Boston Brahmin accent at points in recordings of the 1970s. The bulk of his speech, even within the same words that are affected in the Boston Brahmin way, is still more alike to standard American pronunciation than any characteristic regional accent.

Regarding the accents used by others, I have labored my best to respond to each previous reference.
- Thurston Howell of Gilligan’s Island speaks with an affected accent that is similar to, but not the same as, the Boston Brahmin accent. His accent is an invented one.
- Frasier Crane and Niles Crane speak with invented accents that are significantly unlike the Boston Brahmin accent. This can be established through their lack of key broad vowels and overt rhoticity.
- Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt spoke with the aforementioned “Locust Valley Lockjaw.” It should be noted that Franklin Roosevelt, without any doubt, was strongly affected by the Boston Brahmin accent from the time of his studies at Harvard University.

Another good example of the Boston Brahmin accent was the late Senator Leverett Saltonstall.

It is unfortunate, I believe, that so many accents are being confused or mistaken, mainly through the national television media and entertainment industry. With attention to recordings of older speech patterns, however, one may discern authenticity in later speakers.

—–

I think that the leading men in those old Hollywood films still sound contemporary. Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart all sound very neutral General American to me. Of course, there were exceptions like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart who had very distinctive voices that sound quite odd by today’s standards.

But the women were something else! Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and the rest of their peers spoke in clipped, non-rhotic New England/Mid-Atlantic-style accents that they acquired in Hollywood finishing school or East Coast boarding schools. This accent makes them sound snobby, affected, and laughably old-fashioned by today’s standards. I don’t think people in the real world actually spoke this way. They also laid the drama on pretty thick and were sometimes way over-the-top. These women are still fascinating to watch, but anyone speaking and acting that way in films today would be laughed out of the business. This trend ended around the mid to late 1960s when the more naturalistic approach to acting spear-headed by Brando, Clift, and Dean in the 1950s finally caught on.

Modern Standard American English, I’m told uses the Midwest accent spoken between Pittsburg and Chicago. Before World War II it used the r-less (non-rhotic) Northeastern accent. Franklin and Elanor Roosevelt are cited as examples of people who spoke with this accent (”We have nothing to fea-uh but fea-uh itself” i.e. fear ) as well as numerous Hollywood people at the time.

Two iconic deaths on the same day. HUGE parts of my youth GONE forever.
The most important news today, to ME, was the death of Farrah Fawcett (OBVIOUSLY not the same feelings as most of America). So I post it as I see it…

Farrah Fawcett dies at 62

Her swimsuit poster launched a thousand male fantasies.
Her feathered locks made curling irons de rigueur for women and kick-started the most pervasive hair trend of the ’70s.

She was Hollywood’s penultimate golden girl. And, now, Farrah Fawcett, who epitomized the all-American ideal of beauty, has died after a three-year battle with cancer. She was 62. Her spokesman, Paul Bloch, says Fawcett died Thursday morning in a Santa Monica hospital.

In September 2006, Fawcett learned she had anal cancer. The devastating news led to a reconciliation with her on-and-off boyfriend, Ryan O’Neal, 68, the father of their troubled son, Redmond, 24. O’Neal was by her side as Fawcett went through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and the actress was declared cancer-free in February 2007. But later that spring, she learned the cancer had returned. After growing weary of ineffective treatments in the USA, Fawcett traveled to Germany in September 2007 for alternative cancer therapies.

Her friend Craig Nevius told People that Fawcett was “discouraged by the treatments she got here. The fact that it recurred after all that she went through was heartbreaking.”

At her side throughout her final difficult years: O’Neal — who himself had battled leukemia — and their son, Redmond.

Fawcett’s tumultuous personal life belied her scrubbed, wholesome good looks. Perhaps most heartbreaking for her was Redmond’s battle with drug addiction, which led to two arrests. In September, the youngest O’Neal was arrested and charged with drug possession after methamphetamine was found in his father’s Malibu residence. And on April 5, Redmond was arrested again on suspicion of trying to sneak drugs into prison, where he had been visiting an inmate. He was sentenced to drug court, an intensive rehab program, during which he was allowed to visit his ailing mother under police supervision.

Fawcett will long be remembered as the pistol-packing blonde Jill Munroe on the ’70s classic Charlie’s Angels. But her legacy may be that she was never completely victorious in the decades-long battle she waged to overcome that enduring, indelible sex-symbol image. It is fitting that Fawcett — who launched to superstardom on the small screen — also said goodbye the same way. In May, NBC aired the documentary Farrah’s Story, which chronicled Fawcett’s battle with cancer and attracted nearly 9 million viewers.

“I’m holding on to the hope that there is some reason I got cancer and that there is something, that may not be very clear to me right now, that I will do,” Fawcett said in an interview filmed for the documentary, according to Access Hollywood.

It’s hard to believe that it took just one season — and 12 million copies of an unforgettable poster — to launch a deep-seated phenomenon that would carry on for more than two decades. After only 22 episodes, Fawcett walked away from her hit show, saying it was preventing her from growing as an actress. Producer Aaron Spelling threatened to sue her for breach of contract, she agreed to guest appearances on the series and was ultimately replaced by model Cheryl Ladd.

Fawcett had no regrets about leaving. When she hit it big on Angels, Fawcett’s life was “in great turmoil,” she told LIFE magazine in 1987. “I was locked into a character who was never changing. The producers did not really want to change. They had a successful format. But on the other hand, if I hadn’t had that show, I don’t know if I’d be where I am today, even though I couldn’t really appreciate that fact at the time. You’re just never in sync.”

It took years before Fawcett was able to gain the critical notices she yearned for as a serious actress. Yet, they still stung with an awe-inspiring tone of surprise that TV’s airheaded sex symbol, indeed, had some genuine acting chops.

Critics offered praise for her first post-Angels return to television in the 1981 film Murder in Texas. Fawcett gained more critical raves and professional cachet with her 1983 leading role as rape victim in the off-Broadway play Extremities.

With the strongest role of her career — as an abused wife in the 1984 TV movie The Burning Bed— Fawcett earned an Emmy nomination and, at last, professional respect. But it would be more than a decade before she found a taste of critical acclaim in film. Fawcett seemed poised for a movie career after earning praise as Robert Duvall’s spouse in 1997’s The Apostle. But that never materialized. By the early 2000s, Fawcett was back on TV, and she earned another Emmy nomination with her work on CBS’ The Guardian.

Behind that glossy grin, all-American good looks and acting stamina, Fawcett struggled to find personal happiness.

The daughter of James, a refinery pipe fitter, and Pauline, a homemaker, Fawcett — her real name — was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she was voted one of the campus beauties. After switching her major from biology to art, Fawcett left school in her junior year and headed to Los Angeles.

The knockout with the flawless teeth and blinding smile landed an agent in her second week in Hollywood and was soon starring in Ultra Brite toothpaste and Wella Balsam shampoo commercials. She found love, too, with the future Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors. The two were married in 1973, and three years later, she was cast as one of Aaron Spelling’s Angels. In 1979 Fawcett and Majors split up, and that fall, she began living with O’Neal, marking the beginning of one of Hollywood’s most memorable love stories.

O’Neal had been married twice and had three children. His reputation as a ladies’ man preceded him, but Fawcett wasn’t deterred.

“I didn’t think about that. I just took it day by day. I was so overwhelmed by this mental and physical attraction for him that I didn’t think about anything except what was happening right there,” she told LIFE. “We just eased into it. To find someone who keeps you stimulated almost all day long — if you do happen to be with him all day long — is very rare.”

The relationship was tumultuous, however, and was chronicled in his daughter Tatum O’Neal’s tell-all A Paper Life. The two were never married but seemed unable to stay apart, and on Monday, O’Neal announced they planned to marry as soon as Fawcett felt strong enough.

Fawcett herself sometimes thwarted her attempts to maintain her momentum as a serious Hollywood actress. In the face of her lifelong quest for critical respect, Fawcett was 50 when she agreed to pose for Playboy magazine. She also released a Playboy video, All of Me, in which she paints using her much-admired body as a paintbrush. She made headlines for the wrong reasons with a dazed appearance June 6, 1997, on Late Show With David Letterman and her January 1998 brawl with then-boyfriend producer James Orr, which left her bruised. A 2005 TV Land reality show, Chasing Farrah, was short-lived and quickly forgotten.

Not even Fawcett could explain her own appeal. “But it’s something I can’t escape,” she told Texas Monthly in its January 1997 issue. “I was in Houston recently visiting my parents, and we went to one of those chicken-fried-steak restaurants. Redmond and I had just been Rollerblading. I was wearing no makeup, and I hadn’t done anything to my hair, and this 175-pound woman came up to me and shouted, ‘Farrah, how can you let yourself go like this? You are Farrah Fawcett!’ Then she asked me to sign an autograph because Charlie’s Angels had been her favorite show. I thought, ‘Sometimes it isn’t worth it. The fame is just not worth it.’ “

She got sick of her own photos, telling LIFE that “there have been way too many” of them out there of her. Her looks became the curse that she could never escape, she told Entertainment Weekly in 1996.

“I see T-shirts everywhere, with my face, my poster,” she said. “In Saudi Arabia they’re using photographs of me — not only from Charlie’s Angels but from when I did ads for Faberge shampoo — to advertise everything: clothes, food, vitamins. It’s almost like I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to.”

After years of friction and fighting her Angels notoriety, Fawcett finally embraced it in recent years and reunited with her fellow Angels at the 2006 Emmys, walking out on stage with Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith.

But Fawcett’s longing to be taken seriously and escape her larger-than-life persona stayed with her to the end.

FARRAH FAWCETT, 1947-2009

http://www.anorak.co.uk/celebrities/214637.html

———————-

This afternoon Michael Jackson had been alive or dead, depending on what channel you were watching. He managed to simultaneously be alive on Fox News, in a coma on CNN and dead on MSNBC. At one point on CNN, Wolf Blitzer was saying he was alive but in a coma while the crawl at the bottom of the screen said, “Michael Jackson dead.” Eventually, they all got in sync.
Michael was dead. Apparently from acardiac arrest.

A tragedy, HOWEVER…

As long as his albums were making zillions, Michael always got his way. Like Howard Hughes squirreled away like a hermit in a Vegas penthouse, there was always someone to cater to his every whim…and no one to tell him he was crazy.

CNN is interviewed Brian Oxman, a personal friend of Michael Jackson’s and Jackson family attorney, who said he was at the hospital where Jackson was pronounced dead. Oxman said there were concerns that Jackson was taking prescription drugs and that he was recently surrounded by people who “enabled” him perhaps to over medicate himself.

Oxman went further to cite the case of Anna Nicole Smith who died of a prescription drug overdose and indicates Jackson’s situation was the worse than hers. Again, can’t confirm but this is now out there from someone who was, at least at one point, a Jackson insider.

Michael Jackson’s former publicist, Michael Levine, just released the following statement, claiming he saw today’s tragic events coming for years.

“As someone who served as Michael Jackson’s publicist during the 1st child molestation incident, I must confess I am not surprised by today’s tragic news.

Michael has been on an impossibly difficult and often self-destructive journey for years. His talent was unquestionable but so too was his discomfort with the norms of the world.

A human simply can not withstand this level of prolonged stress.”

Michael Jackson, pop music legend, dead at 50

(CNN) — Michael Jackson, the show-stopping singer whose best-selling albums — including “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad” — and electrifying stage presence made him one of the most popular artists of all time, died Thursday, CNN has confirmed.

Michael Jackson, shown in 2008, was one of the biggest pop stars in history.

He was 50.

He collapsed at his residence in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles, California, about noon Pacific time, suffering cardiac arrest, according to brother Randy Jackson. He died at UCLA Medical Center.

Lt. Fred Corral of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office said an autopsy would probably be done on the singer Friday, with results expected that afternoon. Watch crowds gather at Jackson’s hospital »

“Michael Jackson made culture accept a person of color,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said. “To say an ‘icon’ would only give these young people in Harlem a fraction of what he was. He was a historic figure that people will measure music and the industry by.”

Jackson’s blazing rise to stardom — and later fall from grace — is among the most startling of show business tales. The son of a steelworker, he rose to fame as the lead singer of the Jackson 5, a band he formed with his brothers in the late 1960s. By the late ’70s, as a solo artist, he was topping the charts with cuts from “Off the Wall,” including “Rock With You” and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” Watch Jackson perform at a 1988 concert »

In 1982, he released “Thriller,” an album that eventually produced seven hit singles. An appearance the next year on a Motown Records 25th-anniversary special cemented his status as the biggest star in the country. Timeline: The life of Michael Jackson »

For the rest of the 1980s, they came no bigger. “Thriller’s” follow-up, 1987’s “Bad,” sold almost as many copies. A new Jackson album — a new Jackson appearance — was a pop culture event. iReport: Share your memories of Michael Jackson

The pop music landscape was changing, however, opening up for rap, hip-hop and what came to be called “alternative” — and Jackson was seen as out of step.

His next release, 1991’s “Dangerous,” debuted at No. 1 but “only” produced one top-ranking single — “Black or White” — and that song earned criticism for its inexplicably violent ending, in which Jackson was seen smashing car windows and clutching his crotch.

And then “Dangerous” was knocked out of its No. 1 spot on the album charts by Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” an occurrence noted for its symbolism by rock critics.

After that, more attention was paid to Jackson’s private life than his music career, which faltered. A 1995 two-CD greatest hits, “HIStory,” sold relatively poorly, given the huge expense of Jackson’s recording contract: about 7 million copies, according to Recording Industry of America certifications.

A 2001 album of new material, “Invincible,” did even worse.

In 2005, he went to trial on child-molestation charges. He was acquitted.

In July 2008, after three years away from the spotlight, Jackson announced a series of concerts at London’s O2 Arena as his “curtain call.” Some of the shows, initially scheduled to begin in July, were eventually postponed until 2010. Watch the reaction to Jackson’s passing

Rise to stardom

Michael Jackson was born August 29, 1958, to Joe Jackson, a Gary, Indiana, steelworker, and his wife, Katherine. By the time he was 6, he had joined his brothers in a musical group organized by his father, and by the time he was 10, the group — the Jackson 5 — had been signed to Motown. Watch Michael Jackson’s life in video

He made his first television appearance at age 11.

Jackson, a natural performer, soon became the group’s front man. Music critic Langdon Winner, reviewing the group’s first album, “Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5,” for Rolling Stone, praised Michael’s versatile singing and added, “Who is this ‘Diana Ross,’ anyway?”

The group’s first four singles — “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save” and “I’ll Be There” — went to No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart, the first time any group had pulled off that feat. There was even a Jackson 5 cartoon series on ABC. Watch reaction from Motown Studios »

In 1972, he hit No. 1 as a solo artist with the song “Ben.”

The group’s popularity waned as the ’70s continued, and Michael eventually went solo full time. He played the Scarecrow in the 1978 movie version of “The Wiz,” and released the album “Off the Wall” in 1979. Its success paved the way for “Thriller,” which eventually became the best-selling album in history, with 50 million copies sold worldwide.

At that point, Michael Jackson became ubiquitous.

Seven of “Thriller’s” nine cuts were released as singles; all made the Top Ten. The then-new cable channel MTV, criticized for its almost exclusively white playlist, finally started playing Jackson’s videos. They aired incessantly, including a 14-minute minimovie of the title cut. (”Weird Al” Yankovic cemented his own stardom by lampooning Jackson’s song “Beat It” with a letter-perfect parody video.)

On the Motown Records’ 25th-anniversary special — a May 1983 TV extravaganza with notable turns by the Temptations, the Four Tops and Smokey Robinson — it was Michael Jackson who stopped the show.

Already he was the most popular musician in America, riding high with “Thriller.” But something about his electrifying performance of “Billie Jean,” complete with the patented backward dance moves, boosted his stardom to a new level. Watch Jackson perform “Thiller” »

People copied his Jheri-curled hair and single-gloved, zippered-jacket look. Showbiz veterans such as Fred Astaire praised his chops. He posed for photos with Ronald and Nancy Reagan at the White House. Paul McCartney teamed with him on three duets, two of which — “The Girl Is Mine” and “Say Say Say” — became top five hits. Jackson became a Pepsi spokesman, and when his hair caught fire while making a commercial, it was worldwide news.

It all happened very fast — within a couple years of the Motown special. But even at the time of the “Motown 25″ moonwalk, fame was old hat to Michael Jackson. He hadn’t even turned 25 himself, but he’d been a star for more than half his life. He was given the nickname the “King of Pop” — a spin on Elvis Presley’s status as “the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” — and few questioned the moniker.

Relentless attention

But, as the showbiz saying has it, when you’re on top of the world, there’s nowhere to go but down. The relentless attention given Jackson started focusing as much on his eccentricities — some real, some rumored — as his music.

As the Web site Allmusic.com notes, he was rumored to sleep in a hyperbaric chamber and to have purchased the bones of John Merrick, the “Elephant Man.” (Neither was true.) He did have a pet chimpanzee, Bubbles; underwent a series of increasingly drastic plastic surgeries; established an estate, Neverland, filled with zoo animals and amusement park rides; and managed to purchase the Beatles catalog from under Paul McCartney’s nose, which displeased the ex-Beatle immensely.

In 1990s and 2000s, Jackson found himself pasted across the media for his short-lived marriages, the first to Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie; his 2002 claim that then Sony Records head Tommy Mottola was racist; his behavior and statements during a 2003 interview with British journalist Martin Bashir done for a documentary called “Living With Michael Jackson;” his changing physical appearance; and, above all, the accusations that he sexually molested young boys at Neverland. Watch report on legacy on Michael Jackson »

The first such accusation, in 1993, resulted in a settlement to the 13-year-old accuser (rumored to be as high as $20 million), though no criminal charges were filed, Allmusic.com notes.

He also fell deeply in debt and was forced to sell some of his assets. Neverland was one of many holdings that went on the block. However, an auction of material from Neverland, scheduled for April, was called off and all items returned to Jackson.

Interest in Jackson never faded, however, even if some of it was prurient. In 2008, when he announced 10 comeback shows in London, beginning in July 2009, the story made worldwide news. The number of concerts was later increased to 50.

Seventy-five thousand tickets sold in four hours when they went on sale in March.

However, when the shows were postponed until 2010, rumors swept the Internet that Jackson was not physically prepared and possibly suffering from skin cancer. Watch discussion of his tough life, brilliant career »

At the time, the president and CEO of AEG Live, Randy Phillips, said, “He’s as healthy as can be — no health problems whatsover.”

Jackson held open auditions for dancers in April in Los Angeles.

He is survived by his three children, Prince Michael I, Paris and Prince Michael II.

I wrote a letter to the idiots who ran this campaign…
and everyone else who thinks this campaign is just the silliest waste of time and space, please do so also:
Questions or comments regarding this site and the Think Before You Speak campaign may be directed to ThinkB4@glsen.org.

http://www.thinkb4youspeak.com/TheCampaign/Print_Gay.jpg

But what can we expect when one of the most OBNOXIOUS, UNTALENTED “actresses” (and that’s stretching the term a LOOOOOONG way) is in the commercial…
Wanda Sux…I mean Wanda Sykes:

My Letter:

To thinkb4youspeak campaign managers,
I have to write and say that your whole campaign is an insult. Gay has had 3 meanings for as long as I can remember. Gay meaning “happy”, gay meaning “weird or stupid” and gay meaning “homosexual.”. I don’t think that this campaign should tell me that one meaning is insulting!
I have been using the term “gay” as “stupid” since I was in high school. Not one gay person I know finds it insulting or innapropriate. Probably because It’s NOT.
The ThinkB4 campaign is GAY!
Why not start a campaign about people who use ACRONYMS instead of the english language…because I take it B4 is supposed to mean “before”.
GET A LIFE all of you and focus on REAL ISSUES facing our nation!!!
A concerned U.S. Citizen, elementary school teacher, and English major.

Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009

by Laura Dawn Lewis

This looks like a real prescription. It is actually an over the counter remedy.

Salvia Divinorum (Salvia) or Salvinorin A, street names Salvia, Divine Sage and Magic Mint is a legal, powerful natural hallucinogen marketed to and easily accessed by teens on the web and at times, health and spirituality stores. Health care and law enforcement officials described Salvia as an organic hallucinogen as potent as LSD. Users dispute the comparing of Salvia to LSD and insist that it is a mild, harmless perception and spirituality enhancer.

Generally it takes science a few years to catch up with new herbal remedies that create potentially harmful reactions. This may be why even the DEA cannot respond to many questions regarding Salvia Divinorum. Though the DEA may not be able to junior high, high school and college students can.

Salvia Divinorum is currently legal in every country but Australia. The Australian government banned Salvia effective as of June 2002. Salvia is a member of the sage family and a common garden plant. To date, the Divinorum species of Salvia seems to be the only member of this family with perception-altering or intoxicating capabilities. Divinorum seeds are rare.

Salvia Divinorum is not a new drug or plant. Classified in the sage/mint family the Mazatec Indians of Northern Mountains in Oaxaca, Mexico have been using the leafy plant in healing and in religious ceremonies for centuries. The drug itself provides a trip for the user that can range from mild to extreme. Cases have been documented of users falling asleep while driving and walking through glass walls while under its influence.

Referring to the above cases, a 23-year-old Salvia defender in Pittsburgh, PA commented, “You state things like, it could cause a user to fall asleep while driving. What idiot would use this while trying to drive a car?”

Users argue that the effect lasts only about five minutes. One responded to this article by stating, “When salvia is smoked the “trip” only lasts about 3 minutes.” The few medical sources we were able to find with some background on Salvia placed intoxication closer to thirty to forty minutes. Several aficionados also insist that the effects “Aren’t much more “intense” than smoking tobacco”.

User sites dispute our reader’s assertion that Salvia highs are no more intense than smoking tobacco. Search and you will see notations referring the 5th and 6th levels of intoxication, called immaterial and amnesiac. These notations dispute what many of the users are stating and do warn of the potential hazards and need for supervision. These are stressed for the highest level, Amnesiac.

“User remains conscious but loses accurate perception of actual surroundings. At this point the person should not be left alone and must have a sober person in the room. The user is in an altered reality, will wander and encounter brief periods of unconsciousness and blackouts.”

The DEA’s limited information on Salvia describes its use as follows: “Salvia is being smoked to induce hallucinations, the diversity of which are described by its users to be similar to those induced by ketamine, mescaline, or psilocybin. It is being widely touted on internet sites aimed at young adults and adolescents eager to experiment with these types of substances.”

Access

Obtaining this drug is as simple as entering a store or visiting eBay. Users adamantly defend its virtues and their right to partake in its pleasures. The following came in to Couples Company from a reader. We found this letter interesting because unlike the others it wasn’t angry but it does illustrate the allure. The writer is also mature and in his mid-thirties, showing the appeal to this drug transcends generations.


SOURCE 1
SOURCE 2

WHO KILLED DOROTHY KILGALLEN?
By Sara Jordan

Born in Chicago, she became a New York journalist and popular game show panelist.
But her mysterious death still troubles a legion of fans who won’t forget this remarkable woman

——————————————————————————–

During her 35-year career as a gossip columnist, crime reporter and panelist on the weekly TV game show, “What’s My Line?,” Dorothy Kilgallen (”Dolly Mae” to her friends), was a fearless journalist who broke major stories, and was the only reporter to interview Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby. Her biggest case yet — investigating President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and finding fault with the official story — became the last one she ever pursued. She died mysteriously in November 1965, after being threatened, but the cops never probed further. Thanks to reruns on the Game Show Network, fans are still talking about Dorothy, including Larry King of CNN, and Dominick Dunne, who wrote about her in Vanity Fair. Now, shocking new information has emerged.

Dorothy Mae Kilgallen, who was born in Chicago on July 3, 1913, to Mae and James Kilgallen, graduated in 1930 from Erasmus Hall High School. She got her first taste of journalism from her father, who was a highly regarded newspaperman, working for Hearst papers in Illinois and Indiana. She would soon follow in his footsteps, becoming a crime reporter at age 17, and attending the College of New Rochelle for a year. Dorothy was a trend-setter, as crime journalism was considered an unsuitable profession for a woman at the time.

In September of 1936, Kilgallen found out that three newspapers were sending reporters on a race around the world, and she convinced her editors at The New York Evening Journal to dispatch her as well. Only 23, she had just two days to get 16 visas and a passport. She promised her father she’d attend mass enroute whenever possible. Dorothy’s trip included flights on the Hindenburg and Pan Am’s China Clipper. It took 24 days, and she came in second (to a man who cheated by booking charter flights). Still, she became the first woman to fly around the world. Upon her return, every house on her block was decorated with American flags and her picture. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to congratulate her. Kilgallen then published a memoir on her trip. Next, she appeared in the movie “Sinner Take All,” and the following year wrote the script to “Fly Away Baby.”

By November of 1936, Kilgallen was back working for the New York Evening Journal, and received her own column entitled “Hollywood Scene.” In 1938, after her paper merged with another, Dorothy started a new column for the New York Journal-American. This one was called “The Voice of Broadway.” It represented the social elite, the famous people, the ones who ate at the fanciest restaurants, saw the greatest shows and cocktailed the night away.

In 1940, Dorothy married actor Richard Kollmar, three years her senior, who played “Boston Blackie” on the radio crime drama. The wedding was attended by 800 guests, including Thomas Dewey and Milton Berle. The couple would later have three children named Jill, Richard Jr., and Kerry.

April of 1945 brought Mr. and Mrs. Kollmar their own live radio program broadcast daily from their home and called “Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick.”

By 1950, Dorothy’s column was running in 146 papers, and garnering 20 million readers. The Kilgallen approach was a mixture of catty gossip (”A world-famous movie idol, plastered, commanded a pretty girl to get into his limousine, take off all her clothes”), odd tidbits of inconsequential information (”The Duke of Windsor eats caviar with a spoon”), and dark warnings (”Anti-American factions are planning to blow up the Panama Canal”).

Her deal “Bring me three detrimental stories concerning other stars and I will include a good piece about your client,” became the way she ran her column. She cruised New York nightspots like the Stork Club, Copacabana, Eden Roc, Delmonico’s and the Cotillion Room, picking up tidbits, writing them on matchbooks and tossing them in her purse. She frequented P.J. Clarke’s for lunch, occupying the same big round table in the back corner of the room that is still there, and like the eminence grise that she’d become, she held court with all kinds of politicos, celebrities, wits, and movie stars paying homage. Reuben’s Restaurant in New York even named a sandwich after her. The Dorothy Kilgallen was $1.10.

That same year, Dorothy became a regular panelist on the new game show, “What’s My Line?.” She would appear weekly for the next 15 years, (the series ran for 17). In Dorothy, viewers saw a highly intelligent woman, who was quick-witted, put-together, and who seemed to be enjoying herself.

Each broadcast, which was seen by 25 million viewers, also featured a celebrity guest, for whom the panelists were blindfolded. The show came out of a time when Hilton meant Conrad, not Paris, so the celebs had more heft. Among the guests were Lucille Ball, Artie Shaw, Bob Hope, Carroll Baker, Gloria Swanson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio and Peter, Paul & Mary.

The premise of the show was that contestants with unusual occupations were interviewed by the panelists. Only questions that could be answered with a “yes” or “no” were allowed, with the contestant winning $5 per “no” answer. The game ended either upon ten “no” answers, a panelist correctly guessing the player’s secret or at the discretion of the moderator. The viewers at home knew the occupation of each guest from words that were flashed on the screen at the start of questioning.

The show was broadcast live from New York on Sunday nights at 10:30 p.m. EST, from a drab, seven-story theater on West 54th Street that was later remodeled into the famed disco, Studio 54. “What’s My Line?” reruns are aired on the Game Show Network (GSN) each Sunday night at 2 a.m. The Wall Street Journal called the reruns “a bracing antidote to today’s dispiriting talk-a-thons, humiliating reality shows and hostile cable-news programs. What strikes you first is the civility.” The men wore black tie, the women evening gowns and jewels.

Becomes Celebrity Journalist

While she was having fun on “What’s My Line?,” Dorothy Kilgallen became the most famous columnist in America. She often eclipsed the stars she wrote about. When she attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, she wore a silver gown with 14,000 embroidered jewels and pearls that were encrusted at the scalloped neckline. She placed a tiara on her head, put on her white mink cape lined with silver lamé, grabbed her Western Union copy paper and headed off to Westminster Abbey. She won a Pulitzer nomination.

Dorothy and her family also moved into a five-story townhouse on East 68th Street. It was an elegant setting, with chandeliers, French doors, original art and furniture out of “Gone With the Wind.” The Kollmars were known for their glittering parties at which Dorothy excelled in charades and word games.

She worked and slept in a room on the fifth floor she called “the Cloop.” It was her sanctuary, and she did not permit anyone else to be around her there. It had chartreuse carpeting, flowered wallpaper, and embroidered organdie curtains tied back with taffeta bows. She told her dad, “I like pretty things,” and her father, Jim, smiled when he recalled, “The room was an index to her character. Even when she was a cub reporter at $20 a week, she was a spender and inclined to extravagance. Her expense accounts were high and her personal taxi bills exceeded her weekly income!”

But her father recalled, “She had an unerring instinct for news. She had a brilliant style of writing. She was accurate and had a flair for the apt phrase. She had an uncanny ability to produce scoops and an inordinate speed in turning out copy.”

Not everyone was equally enamored with Dorothy. Frank Sinatra carried on a public feud with her, cruelly deriding her in his Las Vegas act as that “chinless wonder.” She responded by reminding people of his mob ties. Kilgallen was also sued for $700,000 by a female White House reporter, to whom Dorothy had referred with a blind item in her column (but did not name). It was a ludicrous suit, which Dorothy won, but it caused her much anxiety.

Over the years, Dorothy covered a series of famous murder cases, and was instrumental in helping a man accused of killing his four-month pregnant wife gain a new trial. His name was Dr. Sam Sheppard, and DNA evidence later cleared him. In 1959 and ‘60, she wrote anti-Castro articles, with first-hand accounts from Cuban exiles living in Miami.

In a column which appeared on July 15, 1959 Kilgallen became the first reporter to imply that the CIA was working with organized crime to knock off Fidel Castro. The FBI had been surveilling Dorothy since the 1930s, and now tried to dig up more dirt on her. An internal memo to director J. Edgar Hoover dated Sept. 15, 1959 cited a confidential informant who “stated that [Dorothy and her husband Richard] have their own private lives,” that he “has been dating other women…is interested in both sexes…and has his own private apartment…”

As her husband’s attention wandered, Dorothy had begun a long-term and torrid affair with singer Johnnie Ray, 14 years her junior. Ray was a troubled man with a hearing impairment from childhood, and they were each other’s enablers. Dorothy was head over heels in love with Johnnie and flew anywhere to meet him.

On Aug. 3, 1962, Kilgallen became the first journalist to refer publicly to Marilyn Monroe’s relationship with a Kennedy. Within 48 hours, Marilyn was found dead of a drug overdose at her Los Angeles residence. The inquiry into her death was marred by numerous unanswered questions and contradictions in the medical findings.* Dorothy publicly challenged the authorities with tough questions. For instance, she wrote, “If the woman described as Marilyn’s ‘housekeeper’ [Eunice Murray] was really a housekeeper, why was her bedroom such a mess? It was a small house and should have been easy to keep tidy.” Kilgallen also wanted to know “why was Marilyn’s door locked that night, when she didn’t usually lock it? If she were just trying to get to sleep, and took the overdose of pills accidentally, why was the light on? Usually people sleep better in the dark.” And she asked, “Why did the first doctor [to arrive on the scene] have to call the second doctor before calling the police? Any doctor, even a psychiatrist, knows a dead person when he sees one, especially when rigor mortis has set in and there are marks of lividity on the surface of the face and body. Why the consultation? Why the big time gap in such a small town? Mrs. Murray gets worried at about 3 a.m., and it’s almost 6 a.m. before the police get to the scene.”

Kilgallen wrote that “the real story hasn’t been told, not by a long shot.” Such bold reporting was not common in American journalism at that time. She could not have known that her own life would end under circumstances eerily similar to Marilyn’s.

March of 1963 brought Dorothy ill health, as she was hospitalized for anemia. In her usual way she appeared positive. However, her daily radio show lost supporters in Dorothy’s absence, and in April was cancelled. Dick Kollmar, who had hosted the show with her, sank into depression.

Then John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Dorothy was devastated. Ten months before, she had taken her young son Kerry on a tour of the White House one Saturday. To their surprise, President Kennedy invited them into the Oval Office and was extraordinarily kind.

As a formidable crime reporter, Kilgallen immediately started asking tough questions of the authorities. She had a good contact within the Dallas Police Department, who gave her a copy of the original police log that chronicled the minute-by-minute activities of the department on the day of the assassination, as shown in the radio communications. This allowed her to report that the first reaction of Chief Jesse Curry to the shots in Dealey Plaza was: “Get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there.” Kilgallen noted that he lied when he told reporters the next day that he initially thought the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository.

Dorothy challenged the credibility of Howard Brennan (who supposedly gave police a description of the shooter). She wrote articles about how important witnesses had been intimidated by the Dallas police or FBI.

In the midst of her aggressive reportage on the Kennedy case, Dorothy met a man who was to intrigue her the last months of her life. He helped her on some of her JFK stories but ultimately was to come under suspicion by amateur sleuths as having been involved in her death. Questions about him were raised by Lee Israel, who wrote the 1979 biography “Kilgallen.” She never printed his name, and referred to him only obliquely as “the Out-of-Towner.” But he is Ron Pataky, and he was interviewed by Midwest Today publisher Larry Jordan.

Employed then as an entertainment writer for the Columbus Citizen-Journal, Ron first met Dorothy in June 1964 during a press junket for journalists covering the film industry. “[We were in] Salzburg [Austria] on the set of ‘The Sound of Music.’ And the bus had arrived at the set from the hotel,” he recalls. “She walked up to the door of the bus and kind of tripped and I caught her by the elbow. She was on the outside of the bus. I looked at her and I said, ‘Well, hello!’ knowing instantly who it was. She said, ‘Thank you very much. And who are you?’ flirtatiously. She giggled a lot. She was giggling the first 30 seconds we ever talked and kind of charming. And I said ‘What are you doing after we get off the [bus]?’ And she said ‘Nothing.’ And we went and had drinks.”

The well-built, 29-year-old Ron Pataky was quite a ladies’ man. He had been engaged to the famous singer Anna Maria Alberghetti, squired Mia Farrow while staying at her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan’s New York apartment, and brags that he “dated half of the females in Hollywood.” So why his interest in Dorothy Kilgallen, who was old enough to be his mother?

“For all of her brashness in print she was very poetic,” Pataky reflects. “She was a dyed-in-the-wool romanticist, 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, [that] Dorothy and I ever really had a serious conversation. I knew Dorothy better than anybody. We talked daily. If we missed a day, we were aware we missed a day. Let’s put it that way. And it was not a love affair…well it was a love affair, but not a physical love affair. She was a sweet lady, my best friend in the whole world.”

Over the next 17 months, Ron and Dorothy rendezvoused often. Sometimes she’d come to Ohio to see him, and he even took her to meet his mother. He’d frequently go to New York. “[We’d] shuck the rest of these phonies and go off and do our thing,” Pataky explains. “We made trips together. We went to Florence together, we went to London together.” Yet Pataky steadfastly insists that he and Dorothy were platonic. He says, “We’d kiss hello on the cheek if I was coming into town. 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. Not even close. I had my girlfriends. She knew about them.” Ron avows they had nothing to hide. He says that while they did openly meet at hotels “we never, ever spent any time in a hotel room.”

But that’s not what Marc Sinclaire claimed. Marc was Dorothy’s chief hairdresser and confidant. Though he later found her body, he was never questioned by the police and never spoke out publicly. His remarks are published here for the first time anywhere.

He said that one Sunday night in February 1965, as he was doing Kilgallen’s hair at her townhouse just before she left to do “What’s My Line?”, her married daughter, Jill, came by and confronted her mother. Jill “was very angry,” Sinclaire alleged. She mentioned Ron Pataky by name and “said that she was highly infuriated because her mother was going out with this man and sleeping with him all over town, and she said, ‘It’s just too embarrassing to be seen in public with you.’ And after she left, Dorothy cried. And 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.’ ” She vowed, “I will never see [Jill] in public again.” And she never did.*

“She had several places she could have [gone] with Pataky,” Marc declared. “One was my apartment, and there was [interior designer] Howard Rothberg’s house. She could have gone to either. She had a key to mine, and she had a key to his. And I told her, ‘Why are you going to a hotel?’ [And she said of Pataky] ‘He wants to.’ ” Ron admits he would stay at the Regency during his frequent trips to New York, and Dorothy would even pick up his room keys for him.

Midwest Today obtained a copy of a note Kilgallen had sent Pataky in which she romantically referred to “our little room on the 19th floor.” Another time, she sent him a newspaper clipping showing a picture of her promoting a muscular dystrophy charity with two men. On stationery marked “Dorothy Kollmar,” Kilgallen wrote: “Notice that they were the wrong guys to be at the Regency with. Where were you when I wanted you?”

Asked about this, Pataky told Midwest Today, “I had a lot of mail from her that was written in a kind of an intimate fashion. We’d flirt…” She also apparently used him as a sounding board for some of her Kennedy stories. He explains, “She would reach out if she respected you; she might well call you and say, ‘I want to read you something. Tell me what you think of it. And make any suggestions.’ And she’d read it, and then go from there.”

On Sept. 25, 1964, Kilgallen ran an interview with Acquilla Clemons, one of the witnesses to the shooting of Officer Tippit whom the Warren Commission never questioned. Clemons told Kilgallen that she saw two men running from the scene, neither of whom fit Oswald’s description.

Dorothy also approached one of Jack Ruby’s lawyers, Joe Tonahill. Surprisingly, Ruby (who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, who was suspected of assassinating John Kennedy) agreed to talk with her. Some have speculated that Ruby would not have told her anything important, but Tonahill strongly disagrees. “This interview with her was a very significant point in his classless life,” Tonahill asserts. He affirmed that Ruby “cooperated with her in every way that he could, and told her the truth as he understood it. It was just a very agreeable conversation between them. I just can’t understand people doubting the sincerity of that interview.”

The attorney, who observed the two talking, said that “I don’t think there was any doubt about it… Jack was highly impressed with Dorothy Kilgallen… Of all the writers that were down there during the Ruby trial — about 400 from all over the world — she probably was the one that, to him, was the most significant.”

Kilgallen never published any information she obtained from her private talk with Jack Ruby, but Ron Pataky says that’s because she was “saving it for a book.” She was under contract to Random House, Bennett Cerf’s company, to produce a tome that was supposedly going to be a collection of stories about the famous murder trials she had covered. Instead, says Ron, “It would have been on JFK, the entire assassination. That’s what we were really working on. Of course. Who better to write it? When she got into the JFK thing, as we all know, the world went crazy. But given her background, given the people she spoke with, don’t you think the obvious thing would be that that would be THE book?”

One of the biggest scoops of Kilgallen’s career came when she obtained the 102-page transcript of Ruby’s testimony to the Warren Commission. Readers were shocked at the hopelessly inept questioning of Ruby by Chief Justice Warren, and by Warren’s failure to follow up on the leads Ruby was feeding him. Attorney Melvin Belli called Dorothy’s scoop “the ruin of the Warren Commission.” Incidentally, John Daly, moderator of “What’s My Line?”, was married to Chief Justice Warren’s daughter, Virginia.

The FBI sent agents to Dorothy’s townhouse to interrogate her and an FBI memo reported that “she stated that she was the only person who knew the identity of the source and that she ‘would die’ rather than reveal his identity.”

Ron Pataky says now that “I helped her write the thing.” But he adds, “I was interested in the story only because of Dorothy, because she was on it.” On Sept. 30, 1964, Kilgallen wrote in the Journal-American that the FBI “might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them, which does seem a waste of time to me.”

Dorothy’s last public reference to the JFK assassination appeared on Sept. 3, 1965 when she challenged the authenticity of the famous Life magazine cover of Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly holding a rifle. She also chastised Marina Oswald for vouching for it. The incriminating photo has since been discredited by analysts who say Oswald’s head was pasted on someone else’s body.

In October, Dorothy confided to “What’s My Line?” make-up man Carmen Gebbia that she was “all excited” about going to New Orleans to meet a source whom she did not know, but would recognize. She said it was “very cloak-and-daggerish” and would yield details about the assassination. Gebbia told Lee Israel that Dorothy “said to me several times, ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to break this case.’ “

New Orleans had been a bubbling cauldron of suspicious characters, ranging from Lee Oswald to Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw and Mafiosi Carlos Marcello.*

Marc Sinclaire said that in October 1965, during the New York newspaper strike, Dorothy hired him to meet her in New Orleans. Marc explained, “She didn’t tell me why we were going. She just asked me could I go with her, and I said ‘yes.’ She told me how I was to travel, where I was to go, what I was to do. And I’d never been to New Orleans before, so I didn’t know anything about it. We didn’t even travel on the same plane together. I went directly to my hotel, we talked [on the phone], and then I went over to her hotel and had dinner. And then I went back to mine. And the next morning, I was supposed to go do her hair and make-up, and she called me at my hotel and she said, ‘I want you to go to the airport, I’ve left a ticket for you, and I want you to go immediately back to New York, and never tell anyone you came to New Orleans with me.’ And I said ‘okay’ and I left. I did not do her hair.” Somebody or something had apparently spooked Kilgallen.

Her other hairdresser, Charles Simpson, recalls, “She even told…me of her own volition…’I used to share things with you…but after I have found out now what I know, if the wrong people knew what I know, it would cost me my life.’ “

After her trip to New Orleans, strange things were afoot. “Up until then, I didn’t think anyone could touch her,” Sinclaire allowed. On October 24, 1965, only two weeks before she died, and just minutes before she was to do “What’s My Line?”, an announcement came over the theater sound system that rattled Dorothy. A voice said, “The keys to Ron Pataky’s room are waiting at the front desk of the Regency Hotel.” No one knew who made the announcement or why they hadn’t just brought her a note. She was so shaken up that as the show began and the panelists were introduced, Dorothy sat down too soon, and then quickly got up again, the only time that happened since the panelists started showing off their Sunday formal wear in 1954. That “seems odd,” Pataky concedes. “I remember that story. They weren’t my keys. I was not there then.” Was somebody trying to scare Dorothy with embarrassing personal disclosures?

Ironically, she had sent Pataky a letter saying cryptically, “I will try to call you, hopefully before you get this, but it ain’t easy.” She suggested that Ron visit New York “in late October or early November” so they could have “conferences and all that jazz.”

Sinclaire said that Dorothy Kilgallen called him on Saturday, Nov. 6, 1965, her final weekend alive. “We talked for about an hour,” Marc maintained. “Her life had been threatened. Finally, after exhausting me over what was going on, I said, ‘The only new person in your life is Beau Pataky. Why don’t you ask him if all this information that is slipping out about you is coming from him?’ Because she was concerned where people were getting the information from. I’m the one that suggested that she confront Beau Pataky with it. I call him ‘Beau’ because that’s what she called him.” Sinclaire pointed out that she was dead “two days later.”

In response, Pataky says, “It never happened.” But he admits that the Fall of 1965 “was a funny period in retrospect because I was quick to realize after these things began to come out that there’s a lot that Dorothy didn’t tell me. Clearly, she didn’t want to worry me. She danced around problems. She did not want to tell me, for example, that she’d had death threats. She said she had some weird calls. Now these are my words. I’m not sure she said ‘weird calls.’ I probably said, ‘Well, what kind of weird calls?’ and she said, ‘Oh you know, the kind we get’ and I probably said ‘Oh ya…?’ That’s the way it would have gone down.”

That final Sunday night, before “What’s My Line?” aired, Marc Sinclaire did Dorothy’s hair at her home. “She was subdued but no more than usual,” Marc recalled. “She had done something every day that week, and she was tired. But I would imagine [also] that she was upset about Beau. She was telling him so much. I think he was the snitch, [and] that’s what she found out.”

Sinclaire said, “She’d asked me if I wanted to meet her [later], because she did not have anybody she was going to meet with, and she was not dressing for a ‘date date.’ [But] I said, ‘No, I’m going to a movie.’ [So she told me] she was going home after the show.”

Dorothy had decided to wear a long, white silk file evening gown and Marc reminded her she had worn it the previous week. But she told him no one would notice. “So I said ‘okay.’ I helped her into it. She wanted to wear that dress. [It] was cumbersome, because that dress took up the back seat [of the limo]. We always discussed the clothes ahead of time, because…if it was an evening dress, I would do [her hairstyle] more elaborate, than I would do…for a shorter cocktail dress.” Marc had taken some silk flowers from a vase in Dorothy’s home, and incorporated them into her hair.

But Marc was stunned to see, when Kilgallen appeared on the program a short while later, that she was wearing a different outfit entirely: a low-cut, wing-sleeve short chiffon dress by designer Anne Fogarty (a woman who, as it turned out, would marry Dorothy’s widower 19 months later). The hairdo Sinclaire had designed for the formal gown didn’t look right with the short skirt, especially with the flowers. “She couldn’t take the flowers out because they were woven into the hairpiece,” Sinclaire explained. So “obviously [there] was something to make her change that dress at the last minute. I don’t know how she pressed the chiffon dress because there was no one left in the house to press a dress like that.” Sinclaire speculated that “after I left, I think she got a phone call [at home] from somebody, and she agreed to meet whoever it was at the Regency. That’s my belief.”

Despite the wardrobe switch, the last “WML?” Dorothy was on showcased her astuteness. She looked tired but was in good humor, sharp as ever, phrased questions with her typical shrewdness, and correctly guessed the occupations of two of the contestants. However, she did at times seem to speak a bit like she had a dry mouth, which could have been caused by nervousness.

Fellow panelist and book publisher Bennett Cerf recalled that after the broadcast, “She read me the preface of the book she was finishing for us at Random House, titled ‘Murder One.’ I told her it was great.” Marc Sinclaire insisted that based on notes that Dorothy carried around with her, and that she had opened one time in his presence, “I think [the posthumously published] ‘Murder One’ wasn’t the book that Dorothy had in mind.” He agreed with Ron Pataky that it would have been a book on the JFK assassination.

Arlene Francis subsequently reflected “that was the only night, in all the years we did the show, that Dorothy didn’t kiss me on the cheek when she said good night.”After the show, Dorothy was observed getting into her Cadillac limousine alone, apparently to meet Bob Bach, a “What’s My Line?” producer, for a quick drink at P.J. Clarke’s, as was her custom. She had told him in the past that the Warren Commission Report was “laughable” and vowed that she would “break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century.”

Clarke’s employees confirmed that Dorothy ordered her usual vodka and tonic. She told Bob that she had a “late date.” Bach and Kilgallen were on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis regarding each other’s personal affairs. He then walked his colleague to her car, “under the impression” that she was headed to meet Ron Pataky.

But Pataky denies he was in New York. Instead, he says, “I think I talked to her that night early [on the phone].” Asked if she sounded suicidal, he said, “No! No! The last time I talked to her, she was just normal. She always called herself my New York secretary and Suzie Creamcheese. ‘This is your New York secretary reporting in.’ That’s how every call began from her.”

Katherine Stone from Madisonville, Kentucky, who had just appeared as a contestant on “What’s My Line?”, was invited by the show’s staff to join them for cocktails at the Regency. She rode over in a CBS limo. She remembers walking into the opulent piano bar, which was decorated in reds and located in the basement of the hotel. “When we got there, there was this man sitting right next to [Dorothy]…and I mean close, because they were talking,” Ms. Stone explains. “Whether they didn’t want anybody else to hear, I don’t know. And I could see they both had a drink. There wasn’t any laughter. The reason I know this is I kept an eye on her because I wanted to talk to her afterwards to tell her that I enjoyed being [on the show] and I was happy she guessed my line. I’d look over to see what’s going on. That’s the reason I was paying so much attention. Back in the corner where Dorothy was, was sort of a curved [banquette]. They wanted privacy. In other words, you wouldn’t have felt like going up there. I knew they were talking serious business of some kind. I had that feeling.”

At 1 a.m., press agent Harvey Daniels ran into Dorothy in the Regency bar. He described her as being in good spirits. Daniels left the bar at 1:30, assuming her to still be seated in the dark corner.

Kurt Maier, the piano player, said that Dorothy was still in the lounge in good spirits when he got off work at 2 a.m. He added, “Of course, Dorothy was with a man. A true lady like her would not come by herself to hear me play.”

Dave Spiegel, the manager of the Western Union office, said, “Miss Kilgallen called me at 2:20 in the morning. She sounded great, as usual. She said ‘Good morning, Mr. Spiegel, this is Dorothy Kilgallen. Would you send a messenger over to the house to pick up my column and take it to the Journal-American? I’ll leave it in the regular place, in the door.’

“I said, ‘It’s always a pleasure,’ and sent the messenger. It was there, as usual…the last column she ever wrote.”

Dorothy Is Found Dead In A Bedroom In Which She Never Slept

Dorothy had an appointment with Marc Sinclaire to do her hair that Monday morning, Nov. 8, 1965, as she was supposed to be at her son Kerry’s school at 10:30. Sinclaire arrived at Kilgallen’s townhouse around 8:45 a.m. “I used my key,” he explained, “let myself in, and went upstairs” [via a back staircase often used by servants]. He went to the small dressing room on the third floor where Dorothy had her hair done. “When I entered…she was not in that room but the air conditioning was on and it was cold outside. So I turned on my curling irons and I walked into the [adjacent] bedroom, not thinking she would be there,” Marc said. That’s because, even though it was officially the master bedroom and was adjacent to the “black room” where she and Dick entertained, Dorothy hadn’t slept in that room for years, and instead slept on the fifth floor. Dick slept on the fourth.

Yet a surprised Marc Sinclaire found his client. “She was sitting up in bed, and I walked over to the bed and touched her, and I knew she was dead right away,” he recalled somberly. “The bed was spotless. She was dressed very peculiarly like I’ve never seen her before. She always [was] in pajamas and old socks and her make-up [would be] off and her hair [would be] off and everything.” This morning, however, “she was completely dressed like she was going out, the hair was in place, the make-up was on, the false eyelashes were on.” She was attired in a blue “matching peignoir and robe.” Sinclaire insisted that this was the kind of thing “she would never wear to go to bed.”

He said “a book [was] laid out on the bed. [But it] was turned upside down; it wasn’t in the right position for if she’d been reading…and it was laid down so perfectly.” The book was “The Honey Badger,” by Robert Ruark. Sinclaire claimed she had finished reading it several weeks earlier, as she had discussed it with him. Dorothy needed glasses to read, but they weren’t found in the room.

“[There was] a drink on the table, the light was on, the air conditioning was on, though you didn’t need an air conditioner. You would have had the heat on. She was always cold and why she had the air conditioner on I don’t know…”

Charles Simpson recalled that his friend Marc “called me on the phone and told me that he had found her dead. And he said, ‘When I tell you the bed she was found in, and how I found her, you’re going to know she was murdered.’ And when he told me, I knew. The whole thing was just abnormal,” Charles declared. “The woman didn’t sleep in that bed, much less the room. It wasn’t her bed.”

Strangely, she was in the middle of the bed beyond the easy reach of the nightstand. “Rigor mortis had set in on the right hand and it had drawn up the covers a little bit,” Sinclaire related. “And there was lipstick on the [left] sleeve of the Bolero jacket.

“I went back in the dressing room, picked up the intercom, and rang for James [the butler]. I said, ‘James, I am unable to wake Miss Kilgallen. Could you please come up?’ He ran up the stairs. I could hear him. He came up the front stairs and he ran like he was very excited and of course the door was locked. But I had come in from the back door. I don’t think anyone knew I was coming. So I opened the door to the bedroom and James came in, and at that time I noticed a sheet of paper laying on the floor that had been pushed under the door. And James came in and he was very flustered. He wasn’t himself at all.”

A distraught Sinclaire left the residence without knowing what was on the sheet of paper. “When I got downstairs and went out the front door, there was a police car sitting in front of the house. There were two officers in it. They didn’t pay any attention to me,” Sinclaire recalled. “I find it very strange that they were sitting in front of the house and Dorothy was dead upstairs.”

Dorothy’s husband, 11-year-old son, and the son’s tutor, Ibne Hassan, who slept in the townhouse that night, claimed to have heard nothing strange. But Hassan said that was not surprising since it was such a big townhouse. He remembers the household staff claiming Dorothy had committed suicide, but they later denied telling him that. He thought her too cheerful for that.

That morning, a New York woman named Mary Brannum received a bizarre call. “The phone on my desk rang, and when I answered a voice said, ‘Mary, Dorothy Kilgallen has been murdered.’ Before I could say anything, my caller had hung up. We put on a radio in the office and heard the news a little later. What made it odd was the anonymity of the call, and the fact that it had been made to me at all. I was hardly a reporter, just a managing editor of a couple of movie magazines.”

Ironically, that Monday, Kilgallen could be seen as a guest on a recently-taped episode of a rival game show, “To Tell the Truth.” After it aired, CBS newsman Douglas Edwards announced at 3:25 p.m. that Dorothy had died. It was only then that a police commissioner heard the news and dispatched detectives.

Her newspaper, the Journal-American, devoted seven pages to her life and death. Joan Crawford called her “one of the greatest women who ever lived.” Producer David Merrick said, “Dorothy Kilgallen was one of the great reporters of our time. Her coverage of trials were journalistic masterpieces. She was a star and gave glamour and glitter to the world of journalism.” Sammy Davis Jr. said, “Broadway won’t be the same without her.” Ginger Rogers applauded Dorothy’s “journalistic talents and her television brilliance.” Famed lawyer Louis Nizer said Dorothy had “keen insight, vivid and concise descriptive powers and an evaluating intelligence.” Ed Sullivan said he was “heartsick.”

Three days after Dorothy died, Bob and Jean Bach invited her widower Richard Kollmar over for dinner. Bob then asked him, “Dick, what was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her about the assassination?” Richard replied, “Robert, I’m afraid that will have to go to the grave with me.”

Ten thousand people filed past Dorothy’s coffin, but Ron Pataky was not one of them. Neither was her close confidant Marc Sinclaire. Though he had gone to the funeral home and fixed her hair and make-up, he commented, “I didn’t like the funeral director because he was very rude about Dorothy’s death… I didn’t like the way the family was behaving, I didn’t like the way the press was behaving. I didn’t like any of it. I knew more than they did, and I didn’t want to be party to it.” At the funeral, Dorothy’s bereaved mother, Mae, angrily confronted Dick Kollmar. Pointing a finger at him, she said, “You killed my daughter, and I will prove it.” But Marc Sinclaire said, “I don’t think he could have done it. I think more than one person was involved in Dorothy’s death.”

The following Sunday on “What?s My Line?” somber panelists paid tribute to their missing friend. Bennett Cerf said it best:

“A lot of people knew Dorothy as a very tough game player; others knew her as a tough newspaper woman. When she went after a story, nothing could get in her way. But we got to know her as a human being, and a more lovable, softer, loyal person never lived, and we’re going to miss her terribly.”

Seven days after Kilgallen’s loss, Dr. James Luke, a New York City medical examiner, said she died from “acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication, circumstances undetermined.” That was not a common phrase for his office to use. An autopsy showed her to be in surprisingly good health with no pathology, only “minimal coronary arteriosclerosis” and “no significant stenosis or occlusion.” There was no evidence of a heart attack but there was a bruise on her right shoulder. (Back in March, she had fractured her left shoulder.)

Dr. Luke said that the combination of alcohol and barbiturates had caused depression of Dorothy’s central nervous system and that this had caused her heart to stop. Dr. Luke would not speculate about the form in which Kilgallen had taken the barbiturates. “We’d rather leave that up in the air,” he said. “We don’t want to give that out because … well, just because.” Even though the circumstances of her death were listed as “undetermined,” for some reason the police never bothered to try to determine them. They closed the case without talking to crucial witnesses.

Since Dr. Luke had gone to the scene the day of Dorothy’s death and then did her autopsy, it would have been customary for him to sign her death certificate. But he did not do so. Instead, it was supposedly signed by Dr. Dominick DiMaio. Asked about this, Dr. DiMaio was nonplussed. “I wasn’t stationed in Manhattan [where Kilgallen died],” he asserted. “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. I don’t know why. I know nothing about the case. I never handled it.”

Ten days after Dorothy’s death, Ron Pataky penned a scathing attack on New Yorkers and said audiences there are “the stupidest collection of dull clods ever to set foot in a club or theater… If any of them ever had an original idea, the shock on the nervous system would send both the originator and his comrades to their great reward… They go where they hear they really should go.” Seeming to take aim at Broadway columnists like his late friend Dorothy, Pataky said, “…big people say go. The others follow suit and do just that. Then, through agony that no mortal, even these idiotic phonies, should have to endure, they pretend to like it.”

According to author Lee Israel, Dr. Charles Umberger, director of toxicology at the New York City Medical Examiner’s office, privately suspected Dorothy had been murdered, and had inculpatory evidence to prove it. He remained silent, Israel theorizes, because he understood the political implications of the matter and he wanted leverage over Dr. Luke, in an internecine feud. In 1968, he asked a chemist who worked closely with him as his assistant, to use some newly available technology to analyze tissue samples he had retained from Kilgallen’s autopsy, as well as the glass from her nightstand. Though Israel interviewed this chemist in 1978, she did not print his name. However, we can now report that he is John Broich. The new tests turned up traces of Nembutal on the glass, but this was not the same as what was found in her blood. The more precise tests on the tissue samples were able, for the first time, to particularize a deadly mix of three powerful barbiturates in her brain: secobarbital, amobarbital and pentobarbital. Broich told Israel that when he gave his findings to his employer, Dr. Umberger grinned and told him to “keep it under your hat. It was big.”

In a much more recent interview, Broich elaborated: “There was some talk…whether the body had been moved and a whole bunch of stuff. But I don’t know if it was ever resolved. I do remember that things were kinda screwed up. I think things were probably pretty unreliable. I wouldn’t trust anything, you know what I mean? When I was [employed by the medical examiner’s office], very few of the people knew what the hell they were doing. I was paranoid as hell when I was there. You never knew what was going to happen from one day to the next.”

On January 7, 1971, Richard Kollmar was found dead in bed of a drug overdose, just like Dorothy. David Susskind’s widow, Joyce, described Dick as “this guy who was always in his cups. He had the looks, he had the intelligence to do something with his life if he had not had this alcoholic cross to bear.”

In 1975, the FBI contacted Dorothy’s son, Dickie, still trying to locate his mother’s papers. Her JFK notes were never found.

Katherine Stone still lives in Kentucky. She remembers that when she learned of Dorothy’s passing, “I was shocked to death. It made me mad that everybody thought that her medicine and her drinking caused her death. And I didn’t think that at all. I thought that man probably did something to her.”

Bob Bach and his wife, Jean, who were close to Dorothy, were among those who suspected Ron Pataky knew something about Kilgallen’s demise. But Ron insists, “The next day [Monday] I had been in the office [in Columbus, Ohio] from 8 o’clock on. What did I do…hire my own jet, fly [to New York], kill her, and fly back in a hurry?” In reply to those who wonder why he was lavishing attention on a woman much older than he when he says he wasn’t interested in her romantically, Ron explains he had other platonic friendships with older women like Myrna Loy, Alexis Smith, Arlene Dahl and Phyllis Diller.

Conspiracy buffs will no doubt seize on the fact that Pataky told us, “I knew Sam Giancana through Phyllis McGuire. Drunk one night, I tried to put the make on her. That didn’t work…”

And Pataky certainly didn’t stanch the speculation about himself when he published a poem called “Never Trust A Stiff At A Typewriter.” In it, he asserts there’s a “way to quench a gossip’s stench” that “never fails.” He notes, “One cannot write if zippered tight” and that somebody who’s dead can “sell no tales!” Some see in these lines a chilling reference to Dorothy and the way she died. But Ron says he’s written 2,000 poems and asks: “How in the hell did anyone come up with that one?”

Lee Israel was quoted online as alleging that Pataky “dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts.” However, in talking with Midwest Today she emphatically denied making that statement, though Ron did attend Stanford for one year. He says that a few months after flunking out, he spent time inHobbs, New Mexico.

Decades later, Ron Pataky, then 56, went on to earn a master’s degree in Christian Counselling from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Christian Counselling from Trinity Theological Seminary in Newburgh, Indiana.

He muses, “I would probably put it at 75% that [Dorothy] died naturally. My inclination, if I think about it at all, is that she accidentally o.d.’ed. Took a little too much pill with just a little too much whiskey. She was not a big person, you know. She was a small gal. And it would not take a whole heck of a lot to just quiet her down to the point she stopped… [But] I’m not a fool. Of course she could have been murdered.”

Johnnie Ray was more convinced. He said, “Beyond question…I believe Dorothy was murdered,
but I can’t prove it.”

There’s No Statute of Limitations for Prosecuting Murder

What to make of all this? What man in Dorothy’s life was so important, and knew her so well, that he could call her at home on a Sunday night just before she left for the TV show, and make a late date with her for which she rushed to change her wardrobe at the last minute?

Dorothy obviously knew the man she met at the hotel or she wouldn’t have sat so close to him. If this person’s encounter with her was so innocent, and did not have sinister implications connected to her death, why has nobody ever come forth to admit he was there with her (as Bob Bach did at P.J. Clarke’s)?

Though she had been drinking, Dorothy was apparently functional enough to call Western Union at 2:20 a.m. and sound normal. She may have made the call from the hotel, (there was a bank of phones near the bar), having already left her column in the entryway at her residence, and remained in the bar for awhile longer. Since it was estimated that she died between 2 and 4 a.m., that really leaves only an hour and a half for her to have become intoxicated. (She had a blood alcohol level of 0.15. Based on her weight, this represents four to six drinks. She was legally drunk at 0.10.)

Since the barbiturates found in Dorothy’s system take a half hour to an hour to start working and then reach a dangerous peak level, this implies she consumed them between 2:30 and 3 a.m. The authorities should have pinned down her whereabouts at that time. As Lee Israel told this magazine, ordinarily in the case of a woman’s suspicious death, the police would “go out and at least ask pro forma questions of the people who were around her the night before.” But the New York cops “did nothing. I mean nothing.” The lead detective on the case, who had six children, abruptly resigned from the NYPD without a pension a short time later, moved out of town, and opened a pricey restaurant.

Dorothy’s favorite mixed drink, which she’d ordered that last night, included tonic, which contains quinine. Quinine has long been used by murderers to disguise the bitter taste of barbiturates. If someone slipped her a “mickey,” she could have been too intoxicated to notice.

The Regency was seven blocks from her townhouse but nobody knows how she got home. It makes sense she would have gone to her dressing room and removed her dress, because she had a big closet there. It is plausible that given her blood alcohol level, the symptoms of which can include impaired balance, movement, coordination, walking or talking, she decided to lie down in the nearest bed. She may even have felt hot from the alcohol, so turned on the air conditioner. But why would she have first put on clothes she didn’t normally wear, and grab a book to read without her eyeglasses?

The best evidence to suggest that the several drugs found in Dorothy’s blood were not self-administered is that only one drug, the one she normally took, was on the glass on the nightstand.

It’s pretty clear that Dorothy Kilgallen’s overdose did not happen in response to her having insomnia and then taking too many barbiturates. If sleeplessness had really been the problem that night, before she’d resorted to taking any additional meds, why wouldn’t she have done first the things that would have made her more comfortable to begin with, such as remove her earrings, false eyelashes and especially the hairpiece that she wore in back (rather than having to lie on it)? And remember the question that Dorothy had asked about Marilyn Monroe’s death: “If she were just trying to get to sleep, and took the overdose of pills accidentally, why was the light on? Usually people sleep better in the dark.” Dorothy’s light was on.

As the medication took hold, Kilgallen would first experience bradycardia, or slow heart rate, the classic symptoms of which are fainting, dizziness or lightheadedness. This is on top of being drunk.

One scenario is that she may have collapsed before she had a chance to put on more clothes, and injured her shoulder. Richard may have heard this, or she might have even summoned him on the intercom. (The household staff had the night off.) He might have thought she just had too much to drink. He couldn’t leave her like that, so perhaps he grabbed an outfit to put on her. He could have propped her up in bed, maybe because she complained of nausea. (A pink liquid was found in her stomach but was never analyzed. Pepto-Bismol, perhaps?) He could have assumed she’d sleep it off. But why lock the door and what was in the note?

Dick Kollmar told inconsistent stories to the police. In one version, he claimed that Dorothy had returned from “What’s My Line?” at 11:30 p.m. “feeling chipper,” that she “went in to write [her] column,” that he had said goodnight and then gone to bed.

Dorothy’s inquiry into Jack Ruby’s ties to the mob, and her relentless exploration of the Warren Report’s gross inadequacies, threatened to expose dark secrets that powerful people both in and out of government did not want revealed. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that the FBI perceived her exposés as enough of a threat that they monitored her closely.

Incredibly, the CIA had 53 field offices around the world watching her on her foreign travels. Given this context, it is hard to see her untimely death as a mere accident.

There is no statute of limitations on murder, and there are enough people alive who could be questioned. But will there be enough interest by the powers that be to pursue this? As Dorothy once reflected, “Justice is a big rug. When you pull it out from under one person, a lot of others fall, too.” Justice needs to be done in this case.

Copyright 2007 by Midwest Today. All rights reserved.

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Ready For Another JFK Conspiracy Movie? Here Comes ‘Dorothy Kilgallen’
Published by Elisabeth Rappe on Friday, October 3, 2008

Mulder and Scully may be in semi-retirement these days, but that doesn’t mean conspiracy theories are dead. Producer John Davis has optioned Paul Alexander’s soon-to-be-published book “Good Night, Dorothy Kilgallen,” an expose tying the death of journalist Kilgallen to her investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Kilgallen considered Kennedy a friend, and was obsessed with investigating the circumstances of his death. She became convinced his assassination was part of a conspiracy, and was determined to prove it. She managed to obtain enough evidence and interviews (including the only one with Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald) that the FBI kept her under close surveillance.

Alexander’s book alleges that Kilgallen was murdered after finishing her book, “Murder One,” and that all its chapters about JFK disappeared. Her death was certainly under mysterious circumstances, and many have argued that she simply knew too much. She was certainly a female Fox Mulder — in addition to investigating Kennedy’s death, she also alleged that the government had covered up the existence of UFO’s.

Davis is bringing the project to Fox (home of “The X-Files,” how appropriate!) and has set screenwriter Shane Salerno to pen the script. The movie will be a fictionalized conspiracy story, but this is definitely a story where the truth is stranger than fiction, don’t you think?

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An Open Letter to the IOC
Why you don’t want to give Chicago the Olympics
By Ben Joravsky

April 2, 2009

Dear members of the International Olympic Committee Evaluation Commission:

Welcome to Chicago!

I know you’re here for the next few days to check out our lovely city to determine if we—as opposed to Madrid, Tokyo, or Rio—have the best plan for hosting the 2016 Olympics.

Just so you know from the outset, I hope you don’t give us the games. I’ve been against it from the start, and I could fill a book with the reasons. But I’m not here to tell you how paying for the games would cripple my hometown—if you want that, see chicagoreader.com/2016_olympics. This letter is about your needs, not ours. I’m here to tell you some things about Chicago you’ll never hear from Mayor Daley, who’s acting like a used-car salesman, trying to sell you an old beater without letting you look under the hood.

Here’s the fundamental problem: We can’t afford the games. We’re broke—and I mean damn near destitute. The public school system is about $475 million in the red and the city’s facing its own deficit of at least $200 million. Just a few months ago Mayor Daley said he’d balanced the budget by raising fees and fines and slashing the city payroll, but already expenses have risen and revenues have dropped faster than anticipated. His aides have warned that more cuts could be on the way.

The Chicago Transit Authority, which runs our public transportation system, is busted too, in more ways than one. CTA officials are in the thick of their annual budget crisis, warning of fare hikes and service cuts that could affect traffic in every part of town. They don’t have enough money to replace the old buses or repair the tracks that are falling apart.

I know it’s not your concern if it takes ordinary Chicagoans ever more time and money to get to work, especially since the 2016 bid committee has made it clear that it won’t depend on the CTA to shuttle athletes, reporters, and spectators back and forth from hotels to venues.

But thousands of people here are quietly stewing over these budget problems, since they’re the ones who always have to fork over taxes, fees, and fines to make up the difference. Mayor Daley has acknowledged that citizens won’t stand for another property tax hike, especially with thousands of families losing their homes to foreclosure during the economic meltdown.

So instead he’s hiking fees that hit tourists as well as residents. It costs more than ever to park, go to a play or restaurant, or stay in a hotel. And he’s selling off pieces of public property, including Midway Airport and the city’s parking meters. It’s starting to sink in here. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t get a call from an outraged resident bitching and moaning about how much it costs now to park at a meter—or to pay off parking tickets.

And then there are the TIFs: $550 million a year in property taxes siphoned from the schools and parks to feed slush funds that Mayor Daley controls with virtually no oversight. At the moment, the public is conveniently in the dark about them because they’re too complicated for the mainstream press to cover and our tax bills don’t reflect how much we’re paying to keep them funded. But every year the TIF take rises and sooner or later the public will catch on. (If you’d like to bone up on the subject, see chicagoreader.com/tifarchive.)

Again, I know it’s not your problem if the city is selling off public assets or keeping two sets of books. But I do think you’ll want to keep these things in mind as you consider whether the bid committee’s financial guarantees are worth the paper they’re written on.

The committee says it can put on the Olympics here for less than $5 billion, since it won’t have to acquire a lot of land or do a lot of construction. Don’t believe it. London, the host for the 2012 games, is now expected to spend $16.5 billion, nearly twice what it first estimated. And Chicago has a fine track record of delays and cost overruns on public projects. The mayor may take you on a tour of Millennium Park while he’s here, but he probably won’t mention that it cost $475 million to build—a mere $325 million more than originally projected. You might like to take a stroll along the Chicago River, but the latest extension of the riverwalk won’t be finished until June. It’s cost taxpayers $22 million—double the original estimates.

Take a drive down State Street while you’re here and see the enormous construction zone between Randolph and Washington. Block 37, as it’s known, has taken the city more than 20 years and tens of millions of dollars to develop, and under those newly constructed buildings is an unfinished train station that’s cost $250 million so far—more than twice the initial price tag.

Chicago’s bid committee has told you that it’ll raise the money through “public-private partnership.” That is, they’ll get private donors to kick in all the cash, and if somehow they don’t, they’ll be able to dip into various rainy day funds, insurance payoffs, and $500 million in taxpayer money authorized by the Chicago City Council and another $250 million guaranteed by the state legislature.

Given our financial situation, where’s that money going to come from?

People around here are going to be very, very displeased if they’re asked to cover the mayor’s enormous bet. Think of the citizenry of Chicago as a big sleeping giant. One day that giant will be stirred from his slumber. Someday, possibly very soon, it will dawn on Chicagoans that all the meters they’ve been feeding, all the taxes they’ve been paying, all the fines and fees they’ve forked over, still can’t pay the teachers and the police and the firefighters and fill the potholes and collect the garbage and remove the snow, and wonder how it is that we can still afford two weeks of international fun and games. And they will erupt.

I know it sounds like a long shot. But I’ve seen it happen before. Back in 1979, when folks got so angry they ousted one mayor—a guy named Bilandic—in favor of a relatively unknown out-of-work city employee named Jane Byrne.

And if it happens between now and 2016, guess who the public will blame? That’s right—the Olympics will be public enemy number one around here. You might even have to hand the games off to some other city, like you did with the winter games back in 1976. I know you remember that fiasco. In 1970, you awarded the games to Denver. Two years later, Coloradans voted to deny public funding for the games and you wound up having to shuffle them to Innsbruck, Austria.

If there’s a revolt over the Olympics in Chicago, it will probably be a messy one, made toxic by matters of race. Mayor Daley has been careful to include pictures of happy children from a variety of backgrounds in the public relations packets he’s been sending you. Obama’s historic election-night celebration in Grant Park made us look like one big charming melting pot. And race relations are a lot better around here than they were in the 1980s, when white folks lost their freaking minds over the prospect of electing a black mayor.

But Chicago remains one of the most racially segregated cities in the country, with a nervous tension just beneath the surface that flares every now and then over issues like crime, police misconduct, or the worth of black politicians such as Senator Roland Burris or Cook County Board president Todd Stroger. Mayor Daley usually contains the animosity by plying his black political supporters with just enough patronage to keep them happy. But the Olympic plan is perceived by many as a thinly disguised urban renewal project. They worry that Olympic “improvements” will drive working-class African-Americans from the near south side.

Granted, so far there have been no large public outbursts against the Olympic bid. You can’t even find an alderman with the guts to ask routine questions before approving the mayor’s Olympic initiatives—like $86 million in public funding for the Olympic Village. If people haven’t raised a stink yet, it’s because they’re not putting two and two together yet—2016 seems so far away, and meanwhile there are parking meters to be outraged about—or they’re scared to take on the mayor.

But it’s not because they love the idea of hosting the Olympics. The mayor waves around a poll his Olympic bid committee took a year ago that found 76 percent of Chicago-area residents favor bringing the Olympics to town. But a Chicago Tribune poll taken in February found that 75 percent are against using public money to pay for them.

Several aldermen have told me that they’ve gone along with this boondoggle because they’re afraid of enraging the mayor by voting no. I know he’s probably been pretty charming to you. But you wouldn’t like Mayor Daley when he’s angry. Some aldermen—and even a few of the business leaders who’ve kicked in money to the Olympic campaign—tell me they’re hoping you’ll do the dirty work of killing the games.

So please do us all a favor: Give the games to Rio. Or Madrid. Or Tokyo. Send them anywhere but here. And let’s all pretend like this cockamamie idea of holding them in Chicago never left the confines of Mayor Daley’s skull.

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