by Joan Mellen
Blakey and Cornwell had insisted that Garrison’s leads be ignored, treating his investigation as worthless. Yet, between 1995 and 1997, documents reveal Robert Blakey writing to the Assassination Records Review Board requesting any information it could supply on two incidental Garrison witnesses, Layton Martens and Alvin Beaubouef.
“I am writing from the Bench,” Jim Garrison informed his editor. He was devoting weekends, evenings, and even idle moments when the court was in session, to telling the story of his investigation. “I am going to get this book published if it’s the last thing I do,” he vowed. His law clerks were enlisted: Julie Sirera to check on the date of Guy Banister’s death; Ann Benoit to locate a safe house on Napoleon Avenue and to look up Mayor Earle Cabell. Garrison mulled over titles: The Execution; The War Machine; A Game of Kings; Coup D’Etat; A Farewell to Justice.
Between 1982 and 1986, A Farewell to Justice was rejected by nineteen publishers. Finally Prentice-Hall gave Garrison a contract, only to back out. They had chosen as outside reader Sylvia Meagher, who had been wide-eyed in her support of Clay Shaw. Garrison replied with courtesy, praising Meagher’s book, Accessories After the Fact, as “excellent.” To his agent, he was more blunt. “Score one for the CIA,” he wrote bitterly, “resulting from its control of a large part of the publishing industry.”
In Zachary Sklar at Sheridan Square Press, he found an open-minded editor. Sklar suggested that he convert the book into a memoir, an idea Garrison had resisted when Ralph Schoenman had first suggested it to him. Years earlier Garrison had argued that the story was not about him, but about President Kennedy. ‘The truly new material,” Sklar now persuaded him, was his own story.
Garrison wrote On the Trail of the Assassins in his characteristic sardonic voice, relying on memory because even he was unable to gain access to the Orleans Parish grand jury transcripts held in thrall by Harry Connick. He particularly wanted to reexamine Kerry Thornley’s testimony. There are some inaccuracies. Garrison persists in the story that Russell Long awakened him to the case. He denies that he ever met Carlos Marcello, and that the Paese Sera articles came to him after the Shaw trial, an obvious memory lapse. Near the end of the editing process, he wrote to Sklar: “You must be some editor if you can cause me to weep at my own stuff.”
On the Trail of the Assassins discovered a ready audience, selling 32,000 copies in its first five months. When the distributor declared bankruptcy, a federal court injunction froze Garrison’s royalties. Nothing mattered but getting out the truth as he borrowed ten thousand dollars “with appropriate interest” from Lou Wolfson for some “effective advertising in this area.” One ad quoted Norman Mailer, who praises the book as “the most powerful case yet” that the assassination “was the work not of the Mob but the CIA.”
Grateful, Garrison called Wolfson “the only American I know who went out of his way to do something for Jack Kennedy and that makes you one of my heroes.” The widowed Mrs. Willard Robertson, whose Volkswagen dealer husband had been a founder of “Truth and Consequences,” wrote she would never forget how Garrison “stood alone in the end, never giving up hope.” The United States Supreme Court had ruled in Willard Robertson’s favor in Shaw v. Robertson, Shaw’s attempt to accuse Robertson of depriving him of his civil rights.
University courses in “The Crime Of The Century” placed On the Trail of the Assassins on their reading lists. “See,” Garrison told Phyllis, whom he loved still, “I told you I would get out of that hole. You wouldn’t wait!”
With Rosemary James, Jack Wardlaw had coauthored a hasty Garrison attack in 1967 called “Plot or Politics.” Now, in a Times-Picayune review, Wardlaw wrote that On the Trail of the Assassins was “rife with paranoia.” Yet, in the same paper Iris Kelso found Garrison’s book “riveting,” and “told in a well-modulated, wry and witty style that is Garrison at his best.” Kelso closed: “Along the way the judge has turned into an accomplished writer.” Garrison was disappointed that he could not get a hearing on a single major talk show. He told Wolfson he was even willing to go on the Larry King Show!
At the book party at the Columns Hotel, attended by two hundred people, mystery writer Joe Bosco came up to Garrison and observed “a great sadness behind his eyes.” Bosco complimented Garrison on how well he had run the district attorney’s office, and how he had drawn from Garrison’s methods for his own fiction. “I appreciate it. That’s nice of you,” Garrison said. He was the shy and humble man his son Eberhard remembers.
At the New York book party, Garrison remarked that the stories of John F. Kennedy’s affairs were FBI propaganda, to skeptical looks. When the musicians began to play Gershwin, he demanded that all chatter cease. There they were, his two great passions: the Kennedy assassination and the music of his youth.
In an elevator in Havana, his publisher Ellen Ray ran into a movie director and sold him the rights to On the Trail of the Assassins. Oliver Stone was a “man of unusual insight and courage,” Garrison soon wrote Wolfson. It did take great courage in 1991 to treat Jim Garrison’s investigation with respect. “Why didn’t you tell me so many people hated Jim Garrison?” Stone demanded of Ellen Ray, tongue-in-cheek, when JFK was already in production. Fresh from the successes of Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Oliver Stone worked unimpeded by censorship from Warner Brothers. “I was a hot director then,” he says wistfully. The attacks on Stone and JFK would persist into the millennium. Like Richard Billings before him, Stone was punished for his association with Jim Garrison, who brought news the government even now wanted suppressed.
Never having heard of Kevin Costner, Garrison wished he could have been played by Robert Mitchum, or, at the very least, Harrison Ford. Dr. Frank Minyard, a tall, defiantly handsome man addicted to cowboy boots and cowboy shirts, a jazz musician, hoped to play the part of the Orleans Parish coroner.
“We could never pass you off as a doctor,” Stone said. Jim Garrison, his hair dyed black, played Chief Justice Earl Warren. His health was failing and there were days he could not meet a call to the set. If it had not been for the movie JFK, Sallie Boyce thought, Jim Garrison would have died sooner.
He had never been a businessman; he had never been motivated by money. He granted his editor Zach Sklar 10 percent of his own royalties, and cut the publishers in on the film deal. When they insisted on renegotiating certain rights, he acquiesced. Snapper was now a young lawyer. Snapper objected. His father was being excessively generous.
“Son,” Garrison said, “these people did me a favor. They published my book when no one else would.”
With the money from the film option and the $50,000 consulting fee from Stone, Jim Garrison at last paid off the mortgage on the Occhipinti-constructed house on Owens Boulevard. The taxes were unpaid, and Liz had put the house up for auction without telling him. But Jim McPherson discovered a tiny sheriff’s posting in the newspaper. On his own initiative, McPherson attended the auction and came away with the property for Jim Garrison.
During his last years, Garrison lived alone in the family house with his cat “Maximilian Big Paws Garrison.” His private number was affixed to Max’s collar, and Max was so faithful in greeting Garrison every evening when he returned from court that his United Cab driver was alarmed when one night Max did not appear at the door. “That son of a bitch is around here somewhere,” Garrison said.
He trusted fewer people now. His driver, Steve Bordelon, thought the CIA had so pursued him as to “overload his circuits.” Judge Edmund Reggie, father-in-law of Edward M. Kennedy, and Garrison’s Tulane classmate, urged him to attend their fortieth reunion: “We need you. Surely you miss us just a little, and if only to see how badly we’ve aged.” Jim Garrison did not attend. But with Jimmy Gulotta, with whom he made another odd couple, one tiny, the other towering over him, he was always ready to debate the Kennedy assassination.
“Jim, this theory you have. The CIA, the FBI, a conspiracy, I don’t see . . . ,” Gulotta began.
“Jim, you
don’t understand,” Garrison said, and Gulotta thought he could have walked out of the room, and Jim Garrison would still be talking.
He drew closer to his children, weeping in the limousine on the way to the church for Elizabeth’s wedding. “It’s not too late to change your mind,” he said. She was marrying a man named “Fallen,” and so he called her a “fallen angel.” With his sons, he discussed the Kennedy case. “When you believe in something like this,” he told Snapper, “You never give up. You’d be killing something inside yourself.”
“When that bullet went through Kennedy’s head, it was not the same country,” he told Eb. He also recounted to Eb how Moo Moo had once asked him whether he really believed he could beat the federal government. Yes, he had said. “I never had the slightest doubt about it. I thought the truth could do it.”
“Well, you know better now,” Moo Moo had said.
“Yes, I do,” Garrison said.
He began again to write fiction. Having debated CIA asset Melvin Belli at a 1987 testimonial dinner, he produced a brilliant spoof. Innovative in challenging the boundaries of the conventional short story, the piece is in the form of an “Affidavit.” The author’s name appended is not “Jim Garrison,” but one Robert L. Russell, “also known as James Alexander II.”
Russell is a “wealthy oil man” working undercover for Robert F. Kennedy. He swears under oath that he attended a 1964 meeting with Guy Banister, “known to me at that time as an employee of the CIA.” The murder of Jack Ruby is planned by a method that will be “both undetectable and beyond suspicion of foul play.”
In “Affidavit,” Dr. Mary Sherman passes information from her cancer researches to David Ferrie, known to “Russell” as “a CIA contract employee.” Sherman had created live cancer cells that were injected into Ruby’s feet with a long needle between his toes. Ruby was finished off before he could talk, as history reveals he longed to do near the end, and as one of Bobby Kennedy’s closest people suggests he did.
In fiction, Garrison can include details he suspected but could never prove: that Ruby knew Oswald; that Ruby had transported “at least one gunman” to the grassy knoll, the Julia Ann Mercer testimony. In a jibe at James Phelan, Garrison uses hypnotism and sodium pentothal to render Ruby passive. The motive for Sherman’s unsolved murder, he suggests, was the need to keep a secret associated with the assassination. The planner of Ruby’s murder was Dr. West, “who did his best to help people and to work for the security of the United States.” West, of course, is a thinly disguised Dr. Alton Ochsner, who decrees that Ruby must die because if he won his trial, “he would hurt many people, open old wounds.” The witness to the “Affidavit” bears the names of both Garrison’s most virulent antagonist, Walter Sheridan, and his assistant, Richard Townley: “Richard Sheridan.”
Garrison studied the “narrative lines” of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and how he created suspense and manipulated point of view in The Man Who Knew Too Much through “the innocent bystander who accidentally learns that an assassination is scheduled to take place in London.” He liked how in Frenzy the point of view shifted from that of the scapegoat to that of the police inspector.
He tried out his fictional ideas on Jimmy Gulotta. One story was called “King of the Grasshoppers.” Another was about an Army colonel and a lieutenant and the detrimental effect they had on one another—done in slapstick, complete with a banana peel routine, even as it echoes Garrison’s long-ago ambiguous friendship with Pershing Gervais. Another plot featured a drive-in funeral parlor with elevated caskets where you can pay your respects as you would purchase fast food.
He had not ceased to enjoy being in the company of beautiful women, in particular, those who were his “type,” as Phyllis had put it. A film producer named Stephanie Brett Samuel was a petite, “bleached” blonde, by her own description, a film producer whose mother, Martha, Garrison had dated forty years ago when they both lived at Fanny Campbell’s boardinghouse. Stephanie Samuel was thirty-five; he was nearing seventy. Over dinner, they would talk about Robert Penn Warren, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the Fugitive Poets, and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.
Samuel was in awe. She thought Jim Garrison had lived one of the fascinating American lives of the century. She introduced him to a friend and the man said he felt as if he had just met Thomas Jefferson; they both saw Jim Garrison as an American patriot.
He was flirtatious, and gallant, a quite decrepit older gentleman wanting to feel vital and male. After dinner, a United Cab would drive him home, and then he would telephone Stephanie and read aloud to her from the “Forum” letters in Penthouse magazine. She found it frisky and sweet, a substitute erotic moment. When he begged her to marry him, this, too, seemed part of his effort to feel young, although he could scarcely walk.
Another of the young women of his acquaintance was Monique Poirrier, a friend of William Walter. Poirrier and Walter were both young and blonde and very attractive. Together one evening the three were more than intoxicated. Together they wound up in bed.
“The least you could have done was give me a blow job,” Walter said when it was over.
“Bill, a lot of people have talked about it. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve never been that way,” Garrison said. He was neither homosexual nor bisexual, he added. Denis Barry, who participated with Garrison in the escapades of their youth, is certain. “If there were homosexual feeling, I would have spotted it.”
Walter persisted. “But you invited us both up . . . .”
“That was the only way I could make her feel comfortable,” Garrison confessed. “You were the kind of guy that would go along with it.” Over the years, awkward in his approaches, he had made overtures to many women. He was unsuccessful in his advances more often than not.
Dr. Donald Richardson urged that he exercise, but all he did was walk around the block in his blue blazer and loafers, winding up at Gulotta’s house. An ice storm hit New Orleans late in 1989. It was the last working day before Christmas, but Garrison insisted on going to work. Then he took a nasty spill and broke his collarbone. At one point, the ambulance stretcher slipped and he went sliding down Poydras Street, calling out for clerk Danielle Schott to “Enjoy your Christmas!” He was in his second term as an appeals court judge, and balked at the mandatory retirement age of seventy; he didn’t want people to know his age.
In 1990, a series of hospital stays began. For a while Judge Gulotta, now retired, took his place on the bench. Garrison was unable to walk. His heart was enlarged. It became difficult for him to get out of bed. Then he refused to get out of bed.
Snapper discovered that his father had more than $85,000 from JFK in a non-interest-bearing account and suggested that he move that money. When Garrison ignored him, Snapper enlisted Jimmy Gulotta. “You ought to invest it,” Gulotta began. “At least let Snapper put it in an interest-bearing account.”
“I’m not interested in interest,” Garrison said. He named Gulotta his executor. Later, quietly, Gulotta turned the role over to Snapper.
It was the idea of Judge David R. M. Williams that Garrison remarry Liz so that the generous court pension payable only to a widow not be wasted. Liz had stood by him “in spite of his propensities.” In 1978 and 1982 wills he had named her his “administrator.”
“Do something good for a change,” Gulotta told him. It took a year and a half, but he finally agreed. He was not always clear now, and so Judge Thomas Early, tapped to perform the ceremony, insisted that if Garrison were not lucid, he would walk out. Early asked him questions and made sure that no duress had been put on him by the children. Garrison replied with dry humor.
Liz was tense as she stood by the bed. As Early spoke the words binding them in marriage once more, Liz and Jim Garrison held hands.
Liz had been there for him and was now, sleeping in the downstairs library should he need her. Nurses were present around the clock. Only two visitors were admitted, Gulotta and Louie Ivon, who with his affectionate heart still called Garriso
n “boss.”
Denis Barry had visited during Garrison’s final hospital stay. He was all skin and bones, weighing less than ninety-five pounds. Black sores popped out of his legs in which he no longer had any feeling. His heart could no longer pump fluids through his body.
“Lyle,” Garrison said, using Barry’s nickname. “You’re going to be in my will. You know the penile implant. I told Frank to give it to you as a souvenir. The catch is that it’s the biggest in the state of Louisiana and yours is too small.”
“The least you can do is tell me who killed Kennedy,” Barry rejoined. “I won’t tell a soul.”
Garrison just smiled.
“Buck, did you see the movie?” Garrison asked Ivon one day. When a cassette of JFK finally arrived, Garrison tried to watch it, but his attention wandered. Jimmy Gulotta looked over and he was not absorbed, he was not watching. It was too late.
“Are you coming back tomorrow?” Garrison asked Gulotta each day. He had been an atheist and was not about to change his beliefs now. Death, he had told Numa Bertel, was “the big sleep.”
It was an excruciating death. The scabs on the infected bedsores had to be pulled off to make them bleed. One was so bad that the bone in his back was exposed. He contracted blood poisoning. Liz called Dr. Minyard and told him that Jim should be in a hospital.
“Whatever you do,” Jim Garrison ordered the children, “Don’t let him in!”
All five children sat on the steps of 4600 Owens Boulevard waiting for Dr. Minyard.
Suddenly Minyard stood at Jim Garrison’s bedside.
“Who let you in the house?” Garrison demanded.
“I found an open door,” Minyard said.
“I’ll be OK,” Garrison said. He would not permit Minyard to touch him.
On the last day of his life, all five children stayed the night, taking turns sitting with him. They slept on the floor, not even willing to be as far away as upstairs. Each had a moment alone with their father. They told him how proud they were of him, and how much they loved him.
