"Gossip Columnist" Earl Wilson Hand Written Note On Letterhead For Sale

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.