Vampire’s Hours: Mort Sahl, JFK, and the Garrison Investigation

 

When Mort Sahl died in October of 2021, obituaries praised him as a trailblazing political comedian who “instinctively followed the tradition of inner mission and conviction of the ‘voice of one crying in the wilderness’ cited in the Book of Isaiah” in Forward’s assessment [1] and served as a one-man “shock to the comedy system,” as The New York Times words his legacy:

Other groundbreaking comedians – Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Richard Pryor among them – would pour into his wake, seizing on the awareness that audiences were hungry for challenge rather than palliation. And for social commentators who took to the airwaves in the half-century after he began to speak his mind – from Dick Cavett to Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart – Mr. Sahl was their flag bearer as well. [2]

Sahl’s career is unusual and especially noteworthy, however, for his special interest in the JFK assassination. “America has just lost the best friend it ever had,” laments researcher William Davy at Kennedys and King:

Mort smelled a rat, but began working the assassination slowly into his act. […] Later, he would wheel out the entire Warren Report and its 26 volumes on stage. Mort would read some of the more ridiculous and irrelevant sections from the Warren volumes (Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental chart for example). […]

Shortly thereafter, Mort was presented with the Nielsen ratings for his LA TV show. Ostensibly, they showed that his ratings had dropped from a 3.0 to a 1.0 share overnight. Station management told him outright that “he talked too much about the Kennedy death.” (Mark Lane had been a guest four times) Mort was fired on the spot. After a 39 week successful run, Mort was convinced “outside forces” were at work. He took to the microphone to relay his suspicions. His listeners agreed. Signs began appearing along Sunset Boulevard calling for demonstrations at KTTV. The station’s switchboard lit up and over 35,000 letters came into the mail room. Mort gave a press conference where he revealed he had received a memo from management ordering him to “lay off” the Kennedy assassination. Finally, it was admitted that KTTV had “misread” the Nielsen ratings. Although there was a drop in the first hour of the show, during the second hour the show added some 30,000 viewers. In fact, Mort had as many as 250,000 viewers per quarter hour. Instead of being fired in disgrace, Mort was given a 13-week renewal and a salary increase. His first guest after his renewal was Mark Lane. [3]

The affair of Sahl’s temporary cancellation in 1966, whether authentic or staged for publicity, helped to establish the comedian’s credibility as a fearless anti-system crusader for truth in the JFK assassination. A few months later, Sahl “boarded a plane for New Orleans and headed for Jim Garrison’s office,” James Curtis recounts in Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy: “‘I didn’t just come socially,’ he said to Garrison. ‘I want to know what I can do to help.’” Curtis continues:

The D.A. was dubious when Sahl told him that he was there to help. “Everybody who saw him said, ‘What is a big star like Mort Sahl doing in New Orleans talking to Garrison? What is he looking for?’” recalled Andrew “Moo Moo” Sciambra, who was handling field investigations for the Garrison unit. “People thought he was trying to get something. I mean, what did he expect to gain from getting involved with the assassination? So I guess you could say at first glance everybody had questions, but I think it’s fair to say that very soon people found out that the only real reason for Mort being down there was that he actually wanted to help with the investigation.” [4]

Experience with infiltration had taught the investigators in Garrison’s office to be circumspect and dubious of miraculous offers for outside assistance, but perhaps had not taught them well enough. Garrison admitted the following to Playboy interviewer Eric Norden:

First of all, I won’t deny for a minute that for at least three months I trusted Bill Gurvich implicitly. He was never my “chief investigator” – that’s his own terminology – because there was no such position on my staff while he worked for me. But two days before Christmas 1966, Gurvich, who operates a private detective agency, visited my office and told me he’d heard of my investigation and thought I was doing a wonderful job. He presented me with a beautiful color-TV set and asked if he could be of any use in any capacity. Well, right then and there, I should have sat back and asked myself a few searching questions – like how he had learned of my probe in the first place, since only the people we were questioning and a few of my staff, as far as I knew, were aware of what was going on at that time. We had been under way for only five weeks, remember. And I should also have recalled the old adage about Greeks bearing gifts. But I was desperately understaffed – I had only six aides available to work on the assassination inquiry full time – and here comes a trained private investigator offering his services free of charge. It was like a gift from the gods. So I set Gurvich to work; and for the next couple of months, he did an adequate job of talking to witnesses, taking photographs, etc. But then, around March, I learned that he had been seeing Walter Sheridan of NBC. Well, this didn’t bother me at first, because I didn’t know the role Sheridan was playing in this whole affair. But after word got back to me from my witnesses about Sheridan’s threats and harassment, I began keeping a closer eye on Bill. I still didn’t really think he was any kind of a double agent, but I couldn’t help wondering why he was rubbing elbows with people like that. Now, don’t forget that Gurvich claims he became totally disgusted with our investigation at the time of Clay Shaw’s arrest – yet for several months afterward he continued to wax enthusiastic about every aspect of our case, and I have a dozen witnesses who will testify to that effect. I guess this was something that should have tipped me off about Bill: He was always enthusiastic, never doubtful or cautionary, even when I or one of my staff threw out a hypothesis that on reflection we realized was wrong. And I began to notice how he would pick my mind for every scrap of fact pertaining to the case. So I grew suspicious and took him off the sensitive areas of the investigation and relegated him to chauffeuring and routine clerical duties. This seemed to really bother him, and every day he would come into my office and pump me for information, complaining that he wasn’t being told enough about the case. I still had nothing concrete against him and I didn’t want to be unjust, but I guess my manner must have cooled perceptibly, because one day about two months before he surfaced in Washington, Bill just vanished from our sight. And with him, I’m sorry to confess, vanished a copy of our master file. […] It’s also possible that those who want to prevent an investigation learned early what we were doing and made a decision to plant somebody on the inside of the investigation. Let me stress that I have no secret documents or monitored telephone calls to support this hypothesis; it just seems to me the most logical explanation for Bill’s behavior. Let me put it this way: If you were in charge of the CIA and willing to spend scores of millions of dollars on such relatively penny-ante projects as infiltrating the National Students Association, wouldn’t you make an effort to infiltrate an investigation that could seriously damage the prestige of your agency? [5]

Whatever Sahl’s motivations really were in offering his services to Garrison’s team, the entertainer eventually managed to overpower the district attorney’s initial suspicions and gain his unalloyed trust:

They made him an unpaid investigator, issuing him an official-looking identification card in a smart leather holder. OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF NEW ORLEANS, it said on one side. The other displayed his unsmiling photo, the unremarkable details of his height and weight, and Jim Garrison’s neatly rendered signature. He took an apartment and began coming into the office every day, covering his own expenses and asking for things to do. “We would have been glad to give him expenses,” said Garrison, “not only because of his value [in] going out and talking to some witnesses when we were short-handed, but particularly his value with regard to morale when he was brainstorming with me. … He was a real asset for his great sense of humor at a meeting of the staff, because his sense of humor comes like lightning out of the blue.” Garrison, it turned out, kept vampire’s hours and enjoyed the easy access he had to his new volunteer investigator. [6]

Sahl had developed a following at San Francisco nightclub the Hungry i and achieved national prominence through Ed Sullivan’s program and heavy exposure in Hugh Hefner’s CIA front Playboy, having been scouted in Chicago in 1957 by Hefner and his promotions director, Victor Lownes [7] – the same executive into whose circles the young Roman Polanski would be introduced in London in 1963 [8]. Sahl even stayed at Hefner’s original Playboy Mansion while fulfilling a month-long Chicago engagement in 1960 [9]. That same year saw him spotlighted on the cover of C.D. Jackson’s influential publication Time and appearing in the movie All the Young Men. It was during the period of his ascendancy in association with Playboy, too, that Sahl dated CIA alumnus Gloria Steinem [10]. Intriguingly, Sahl was also friendly with Frank Sinatra, whose label Reprise Records released Sahl’s albums The New Frontier and On Relationships in 1961. It seems to have been through moving in Sinatra’s circles that Sahl met Manchurian Candidate screenwriter George Axelrod, who was Sahl’s guest on the first episode of his television talk show [11]. 

Joseph Kennedy tapped Sahl to write “humorous jabs” for his son’s 1960 presidential campaign “with explicit instructions and no promise of compensation,” Curtis relates:

“It seemed like a pretty good exercise,” Mort says in retrospect. “I liked Jack Kennedy when I met him, but who would I be a supporter of? […] So I didn’t enlist for the duration. I also let him know that I hoped one of the benefits of his election would be that I be allowed to do what I do, as he does what he does.” […] “I did all this on the fly, at odd hours,” Mort says. [12]

“Sahl had supplied JFK with gags during the 1960 campaign but had fallen out with the Kennedy camp after the election, when he switched back to his role as political satirist and began tweaking the new president,” writes David Talbot. “Old Joe Kennedy thought you were either with the family or against it.” [13] “Sahl could be brutal (on Bobby Kennedy’s wiretaps: ‘Little Brother is watching’),” observes Gerald Nachman [14], with Curtis adding:

[…] Dorothy Kilgallen was moved to comment, “Goodness, Mort Sahl is being mighty harsh on the Kennedy family in his routine at Basin Street. His diatribes at JFK are rougher than they were at President Eisenhower.” And a month later: “Insiders suspect that JFK and the New Frontier’s pet gag man, Mort Sahl, have cooled it. In palmier days, Mort used to supply the president with smart lines – or so the legend went.” [15]

Sahl, the legend continues, ultimately demonstrated himself to be “The Best Friend John Kennedy Ever Had” when he sacrificed his own career as a comic to dedicate himself to the investigation and exposure of the conspiracy that had taken the president’s life [16] – and it somehow fails to interest Sahl eulogizers like William Davy and Mark Groubert [17] that 1967, the year the entertainer inserted himself into the Garrison investigation, also witnessed Sahl’s marriage to Playboy model China Lee, whose brother just happened to be Harry Lee, a protégé of Warren Commission member Hale Boggs [18]. Lee, who would become chief attorney and later sheriff of Jefferson Parish, was known to play cards with Boggs and New Orleans mob boss and Kennedy enemy Carlos Marcello [19]. “Billing himself as ‘The Nation’s Conscience’, Sahl began to urge Americans to engage in ‘guerrilla warfare’ in order to ‘save America’,” relates Stephen E. Kercher of Lee’s brother-in-law’s newfound sense of purpose [20]. Supporting Sahl financially during his work in Garrison’s office, curiously enough, was NBC, the network that had demonstrated peculiar hostility toward Garrison when it aired the hit-piece television special The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison, which accused the district attorney of bribing witnesses [21]. “To buy groceries and pay the rent, Mort did college concerts and TV talk shows,” reveals Curtis: “Johnny Carson, in particular, made sure he had an income when work was light, booking him once, sometimes twice a month.” [22]

One of Sahl’s major initiatives during his tenure with the district attorney’s office was arranging for Garrison to be interviewed by Playboy’s Eric Norden [23]. The magazine devoted a surprising amount of space to Garrison’s arguments, and it cannot be ruled out that the purpose of the conversation was to probe the prosecutor for sources, as this was a period when mysterious deaths of witnesses were occurring, as Garrison indicates:

The only thing I will say is that witnesses in this case do have a habit of dying at the most inconvenient times. I understand a London insurance firm has prepared an actuarial chart on the likelihood of 20 of the people involved in this case dying within three years of the assassination – and found the odds 30 trillion to one. But I’m sure NBC will shortly discover that one of my investigators bribed the computer. [24]

There is also the possibility that one of Playboy’s aims was to lure the prosecutor into sabotaging his own case against Shaw, as the line of questioning sometimes obliges Garrison to give such answers as “I don’t want to evade your question, but I can’t answer it without compromising my investigation of a crucial new area of the conspiracy” [25] or “I’m afraid I can’t comment even inferentially on anything pertaining to the evidence against Mr. Shaw, since he’s facing trial in my jurisdiction.” [26]

Another of Sahl’s major feats was booking Garrison as a guest on The Tonight Show in January of 1968. “The chance to appear on the Carson show had arisen unexpectedly through the efforts of Mort Sahl,” Garrison acknowledges in his book On the Trail of the Assassins [27]; and, though the district attorney acquitted himself with his typical coolness and trademark wit, the guest spot was clearly an attempt at an ambush, with Carson opening the discussion “by reading […] a long, rambling question of the ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ type,” as Garrison recalls [28]. “On the air, Garrison was reasonable and engaging,” recounts Joan Mellen. “Carson, however, had metamorphosed from the affable imaginary golfer to a rigid prosecutor as he read from Sheridan-authored index cards.” [29] The interview continues to be celebrated by lone-gunman propagandists like Max Holland and David Von Pein as an antidote to the plague of irresponsible conspiracy theories. “The main reason I applaud Mr. Carson so loudly with respect to this particular interview is because I was glad to see John ask such hard questions which cast doubt on the notion of conspiracy in the JFK case, instead of merely nodding in agreement with everything this fruitcake named Garrison had to say,” snickers Von Pein [30]. “Carson aptly stated that Garrison’s grand conspiracy was ‘a much larger fairy tale than to accept the findings of the Warren Report,” cheers Holland: “Carson never lost the bearings, decency and common sense he brought to television from the heartland, along with an ability to recognize a demagogue masquerading as a crusader.” [31]

A blind eye, meanwhile, seems to have been turned to Sahl’s own masquerade. For instance, the comic “claims he was dosed with LSD filled cookies by the CIA that lead [sic] to a horrific traffic crash,” reports Sahl’s admirer Mark Groubert, adding, “He knew they meant business.” [32] Groubert, who repeated this yarn on the YouTube program America’s Untold Stories as part of a tribute to Sahl’s career, furnishes nothing in the way of substantiation; it is just something people are expected to believe on the basis of Sahl’s smirking authority. The psychedelic cookies-crash, if it occurred at all, must have been deemed insufficiently interesting to be included in Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins, as he makes no mention of it. Sahl, who would go on to befriend Arnon Milchan’s recruit Sydney Pollack [33] and General Alexander Haig [34], continued to enjoy Garrison’s esteem, as indicated by his mention in the acknowledgements of On the Trail of the Assassins [35].

“During my flight back to New Orleans I found myself reflecting on the mind-set of Carson and the NBC attorneys who had debriefed me,” Garrison writes:

They were unnerved by my viewpoint, I realized, not so much because it differed from their own but because I was explicitly advocating the existence of a conspiracy in President Kennedy’s assassination. I recalled the thinly veiled contempt of the attorneys whenever they touched upon the concept of a conspiracy. I felt as if I were a German citizen back in the mid-1930s who had publicly questioned Adolf Hitler’s sanity and was being given the obligatory questioning before being shipped away to a mental institution. [36]

The passage disconcertingly captures both Garrison’s bravery and his tragic character as an honest man woefully unprepared to confront the actual nature of the forces arrayed against him.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Ivry, Benjamin. “For Mort Sahl, Being Jewish Meant Being Part of the Opposition”. Forward (October 27, 2021): https://archive.ph/rW6dU

[2] Weber, Bruce. “Mort Sahl, Whose Biting Commentary Redefined Stand-Up, Dies at 94”. The New York Times (October 26, 2021): https://archive.ph/nAmjy

[3] Davy, William. “Mort Sahl: An Appreciation”. Kennedys and King (November 18, 2021): https://www.kennedysandking.com/articles/mort-sahl-an-appreciation

[4] Curtis, James. Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, p. 240.

[5] Norden, Eric. “Playboy Interview: Jim Garrison”. Playboy (October 1967), p. 68.

[6] Curtis, James. Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, p. 241.

[7] Ibid., p. 58.

[8], K., Rainer Chlodwig von. “The Merrick Connection Revisited”. Esoteric Brezhnevism (May 16, 2022): https://rainercvk.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-merrick-connection-revisited.html

[9] Curtis, James. Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, p. 141.

[10] https://archive.ph/74RQ

[11] Curtis, James. Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 156, 214.

[12] Ibid., pp. 109-110.

[13] Talbot, David. Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2007, p. 317.

[14] Nachman, Gerald. Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2003, p. 65.

[15] Curtis, James. Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, p. 189.

[16] Davy, William. “Mort Sahl: An Appreciation”. Kennedys and King (November 18, 2021): https://www.kennedysandking.com/articles/mort-sahl-an-appreciation

[17] Hunley, Eric; and Mark Groubert. “Mort Sahl – The Comic vs the CIA”. America’s Untold Stories (November 2, 2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNwHqYYQF6s

[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Lee_(sheriff)

[19] “Allan Katz and Danae Columbus: Kennedy Assassination Anniversary Remembered by All”. Uptown Messenger (November 21, 2013): https://archive.ph/uYRaq

[20] Kercher, Stephen E. Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 437.

[21] Norden, Eric. “Playboy Interview: Jim Garrison”. Playboy (October 1967), p. 64.

[22] Curtis, James. Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, p. 241.

[23] Davy, William. “Mort Sahl: An Appreciation”. Kennedys and King (November 18, 2021): https://www.kennedysandking.com/articles/mort-sahl-an-appreciation

[24] Norden, Eric. “Playboy Interview: Jim Garrison”. Playboy (October 1967), p. 162.

[25] Ibid., p. 163.

[26] Ibid., p. 159.

[27] Garrison, Jim. On the Trail of the Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy. New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 1988, p. 208.

[28] Ibid., p. 211.

[29] Mellen, Joan. A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005, p. 245.

[30] https://archive.ph/DMqvl

[31] Holland, Max. “Carson Showed Stuff When Confronted with Conspiracy”. Orlando Sentinel (February 8, 2005): https://archive.ph/WDhzg

[32] Groubert, Mark. “Political Stand-Up Comic Mort Sahl Not Dead at 80”. Crooks and Liars (July 6, 2007): https://archive.ph/Zne7H

[33] Curtis, James. Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, p. 288.

[34] Ibid., p. 297.

[35] Garrison, Jim. On the Trail of the Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy. New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 1988, p. vii.

[36] Ibid., p. 213.