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Up for sale "Gossip Columnist" Earl Wilson Hand Written Note On Letterhead.
ES-264A
Wilson was born
in Rockford,
in Mercer County in western Ohio, to Arthur Wilson, a
farmer, and Chloe Huffman Wilson. He attended Central High, where he reported
on the doings of the school, using his father's typewriter to write his
stories. Young Earl's mother encouraged him to pursue a career outside of
farming. Wilson contributed to the Rockford Press and the Lima Republican
Gazette, which would be the first to pay him for his writing. He also
wrote for the Piqua, Ohio Daily Call before enrolling
in college in 1925. Wilson attended Heidelberg College for two years before
transferring to Ohio State University where he worked on
the Lantern, the university’s student-run daily newspaper. He also held
part-time jobs with the Columbus Dispatch and the capital
city’s International News Service Bureau. Wilson graduated from Ohio State University in 1931 with a B. S.
in journalism. In 1935, Wilson began work for The Washington Post, meanwhile sending
samples of his work to one of the editors at the New York Post.
Later in 1935, Wilson arrived in New York to begin work with the Post,
taking a room in a boarding house on Bleecker
Street. There he met Rosemary Lyons from East St.
Louis, IL, a secretary whom he wed in 1936. The couple struggled for
several years until Wilson's work at the Post began to take off. Their
only child, Earl Wilson, Jr., was born on December 1, 1942. His column, which
he took over from a writer who went off to war in 1942, was originally
considered "filler." It eventually ran until 1983. As the column grew
in popularity and importance, Wilson worked 18-hour days, typically arising in
the late morning, telephoning news sources, and taking reports from several
assistants. In the evenings he would set out for dinner at Toots Shor's
or a similar theater district restaurant, accompanied by his wife, Rosemary,
known to his readers as "B.W." (for Beautiful Wife). The pair made
the rounds of night spots until the wee hours of the morning. By the early
50’s, the Broadway gossip columns had become an important media outlet;
columnists exercised a great deal of power in providing publicity for the
celebrities of the day. But, whereas gossip columnists as a group were not held
in high regard, Wilson had the reputation of being different: he was a trained
journalist who double-checked facts, he was much influenced by his Mid-western
upbringing and avoided innuendo and sensationalism, and he sought to cover his
stories as real news items. With a reputation for being fair and honest, Wilson
was trusted so much that celebrities willingly gave him their stories. His
chronicling of the Broadway theatre scene during the "Golden
Age" of show business formed the basis for a book
published in 1971, The Show Business Nobody Knows. He signed his columns
with the tag line, "That's Earl, brother." His
nickname was "Midnight Earl". In later years, the name of his column
was changed to Last Night With Earl Wilson. In his final years with the Post,
he alternated with the paper's entertainment writer and restaurant critic,
Martin Burden, in turning out the column. (Burden, who died in 1993, took over
the Last Night column full-time upon Wilson's retirement.) Wilson is
also the author of two books, Show Business Laid Bare, and an unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra,
Sinatra: An Unauthorized Biography. The former book is notable for revealing
the extramarital affairs of President John F.
Kennedy. In the early 1950s, Wilson was an occasional panelist on
the NBC game show,
Who Said That?, in which celebrities tried
to determine the speaker of quotations taken from recent news reports. On January 19,
1952, Wilson guest starred on the CBS live variety show, Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town, in
which hostess Faye Emerson visited Columbus to accent the
kinds of music popular in the Ohio capital city. Wilson appeared
in a few films as himself, notably Copacabana (1947) with Groucho Marx
and Carmen Miranda, A Face in the Crowd (1957) with Andy Griffith,
College Confidential (1960), and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) with Buster Keaton,
Paul Lynde
and Don Rickles.
Wilson also hosted the DuMont TV show Stage
Entrance from May 1951 to March 1952.