Class News
Toby Tompkins ’64 on his conspiracy theory about JFK
September 13, 2020
Toby Tompkins emailed: “While waiting for some publisher to decide that my novels are what the world has been waiting for, sell them, and make me rich beyond the dreams of avarice, I keep a blog. It's called Ragbag Mind.
I'm including an entry, “Mr. Wonderful,” detailing my conspiracy theory about the assassination of JFK, which I posted about 15 years ago.
“Mr. Wonderful,” A JFK Conspiracy Theory
by Toby Tompkins
John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation” is based on a study by the controversial psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose conclusion maintains that anyone alive during a given time period can trace his or her connection with anyone else alive in the same period in six links or less. Humans are social animals (even the antisocial ones), and we are all hooked up. My most interesting linkage began with my Aunt Judy.
In the summer of 1960 she was 28, only nine years older than I was, living in Dallas with her two little girls, Shawn, four, and Randy, two, fruit of her dissolved marriage to a genial drunk from Savannah. She was a singer-dancer, and she’d been cast in a revival of Sammy Davis Jr.’s Broadway musical vehicle “Mr. Wonderful.” I had just graduated from prep school, where I’d gotten involved with theater, and Judy knew I was stage-struck. She invited me to spend the summer with her, promising to get me into the show.
At first I wondered why Judy was living in Dallas instead of New York, because she was a little dynamo in the Gwen Verdon/Shirley MacLaine mode, a natural hoofer with a belting mezzo-soprano voice. But the Apple, then as now, was a tough place for a single mother trying to raise her kids while competing with hundreds of equally talented but unencumbered women for scarce jobs on Broadway. And Dallas, at the time, was part of a chain of southern showbiz towns ranging from Miami through Atlanta, Biloxi, New Orleans, and Houston, whose Big Apple was Las Vegas. “Making It,” for performers on the southern circuit, meant a gig at the Sands, Flamingo, Castaways, or another of the neon casinos which sprang up after the Mafia created Sin City’s Strip. Chorus ponies dreamed of backing up headliners like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis Jr. himself. Meanwhile they could hone their skills and make decent livings in Dallas and the other towns on the southern circuit. Housing was cheap if you weren’t picky, and the competition was less intense.
Despite its scrubbed Southern Baptist face, Big D was a hustler’s paradise. The oil-patch billionaires and corporate titans, the banksters who fattened on them, and the politicians who bent over for anyone with money, operated at the highest and most respectable level of what passed for society, but they were served by a raffish subculture, equally interconnected, which provided the city’s entertainment. Dallas had to tap-dance a bit to keep the good times rolling while still stayin' raht with Gawd. For example, it was semi-dry: liquor was sold at package stores, but restaurants served only mixers, so you had to brownbag. But there was a gaping loophole in the rule: “private clubs,” open to anyone who walked in and paid a five-buck membership fee, could stock all the booze they needed. In such a wink-wink town, the Mafia throve.
Back then, one of the most successful of Dallas’s showmen was a young fellow named Breck Wall, born Billy Ray Wilson in Jacksonville, Florida. He arrived in Dallas in the late 50s, and with his companion Joe Peterson, opened the Playbill Club, which featured a spicy revue called “Bottoms Up.” It catered to businessmen looking for a night out, and was also a magnet for members of Dallas’s officially invisible gay community. Judy had worked in “Bottoms Up,” and after Breck and Joe closed the revue to revive “Mr. Wonderful,” she was hired for the chorus. Breck knew an aspiring Vegas entertainer named Johnny Bashman who may not have been in Sammy Davis Jr.’s league but was dying to get there. And Johnny had a complete nightclub act which only needed backup singers and dancers. Since “Mr. Wonderful” was originally conceived purely to showcase Sammy Davis Jr.’s own act, Johnny was a natural.
The rudimentary plot of the musical concerns a black entertainer with a white girlfriend whose chance at the Big Time — an engagement at the Hotel Fontainebleau in Miami — is threatened by the Jim Crow rules of the time. Naturally, Davis’s character, with a lot of help from his girlfriend and his loyal manager, jumps Jim Crow, takes the gig, and triumphs.
“Mr. Wonderful” is a pretty silly show, but it reflected a daring theme for Broadway in the days before Dr. King, joining 1947’s quirky “Finian’s Rainbow” in making institutionalized racism a subject for musical theater, and anticipating “West Side Story,” which opened in 1961.
Tiny problem: Johnny Bashman was white.
Well, of course Breck and Joe knew that in Dallas Bah Gawd Texas in 1960 you couldn’t have no nigra kissin’ no white gal in no play nohow. Hail-fahr, they was laws agin it. But Breck didn’t care about plot integrity. He was doing the play on the sly — I don’t think he even bothered to get the rights to it before he started casting and rehearsing. It didn’t seem to concern him that with a white leading man, things got a little surreal:
“Oh, honey, I have to go to Miami! It’s my Big Break!”
“Of course you do, darling.”
“But I can’t take you with me. Things could get…dangerous.”
“I don’t care! I’m coming anyway!”
And the audience going, “Say what?"
Never mind. The stars of “Bottoms Up” were hired to play Bashman’s supporting cast, and rehearsals began. Breck had never directed a full-scale Broadway musical before, and in addition to Judy and the other pros, he needed to fill out the stage with a few warm bodies who could move around and sing a tad. He also needed stagehands and general flunkies (of course the show was non-union).
So I learned a lot about stage carpentry, once staying up all night to make ten plywood nightclub tables with another guy, only to watch Breck and Joe pitch a hissy next morning which turned physical. They began trying to bash each other with the flimsy prop tables, and broke most of them. Another all-nighter. But I did get a walk-on speaking part, managed to master a few basic dance steps, and lent my voice to the big production numbers. And I learned one hell of a lot about sex and showbiz.
“Mr. Wonderful” opened at the Margo Jones Theater on Maple Street, named for the legendary producer-director who had dragged Dallas’s rich boors and their culture-hungry wives into her little temple of Serious The-ah-tah. But she was dead, and the travesty playing on her stage should have caused local temblors as she spun in her grave. For starters, all the men in the production, from Breck and Joe and Johnny on down, were flaming queens. They kept their bottoms up saucily, and they wore more makeup than the women, who were pretty fluid about gender preference themselves, but less flamboyant.
It was a cheap production, and Johnny Bashman’s nightclub act was sleazy even by the standards of the time and place, relying on nigger and kike jokes between stale impressions of people like Ed Sullivan and campy send-ups of popular songs. Breck told us that he intended to take the show to Las Vegas after the Dallas run.
Judy snorted about that. “Tobe, the last I heard, Sammy Davis is straight, black, and Jewish. Up in Vegas he might have a few things to say about the coon and hymie stuff, and the fact that Johnny is a big white fairy. So what the hell, enjoy it while it lasts.”
She was needling me, because I’d come to Dallas as innocent as a pink-and-white baa-lamb about sex in general, and she knew my experience was turning out to be educational, but not necessarily enjoyable. I was by far the youngest member of the cast, and I got hit on by every man in the show, including my fellow stagehands. Judy, who still looked about nineteen, also received avid attention — from the women. The two of us formed a mutual defense pact, strengthened by the fact that Judy’s little girls accepted me as a sort of goofy big brother. We lived in a small, beat-up house with no air conditioning, making do during the Dallas summer with “swamp-coolers,” old truck radiators set on the floor with fans behind them, delivering a misty breeze.
As long as someone remembered to refill the radiators about once an hour, they kept us comfortable, if damp, but they tended to make our clothes moldy. So at home Randy toddled around in nothing but a diaper and Shawn went buck-nekkid. To preserve our own clothes between expensive trips to the laundromat, Judy and I took them off the moment we came in, rinsed them in the tub, hung them on a line in her tiny back yard, and wore our underwear.
At seventeen, afflicted with the usual chronic trouser-tumor, it took me awhile to get used to semi-nudity with my pretty aunt. But the dressing area for the minor players at the theater was a single unisex room, and Judy certainly wasn’t into incest. So by the time we got a housemate, I thought I was used to the company of more or less naked women.
Judy had a boyfriend named Buck, a guy from New Orleans who was vague about what he did for a living. He’d pop in every now and then, get drunk, make loud love with Judy, and vanish. She didn’t trust him, but she adored him, bless her — she never did have any sense about men. So when Buck asked her to take in a friend who had fallen on hard times, enter June.
She was a New Orleans hooker recovering from a botched abortion in those pre-Roe v. Wade days. A frail, pale blonde, she might have been a road-company Blanche DuBois but with a cracker accent, drifting around in a satin slip at all hours. The little girls were shy of her at first, because she was spooky. But she was a kindly enough soul, too beaten-down to offer harm to anyone, and she was sincerely grateful to Judy for offering her asylum. Of course she made the little house even more cramped, but she helped with the cooking and the dishes and tried to minimize her presence.
But even that minimal presence bedeviled me. I mean, June had actually fucked men for money! And although it was clear to me that after her recent ordeal by coat hanger, or whatever vile procedure it had been, fucking was the last thing on her mind, I couldn’t ignore the ripple of illicit sex which clung to her like the shiny contours of her slip. She wasn’t as pretty as my aunt, and she was more modest, never taking off that slip except to wash it in the tub when she bathed. But I couldn't block out lurid fantasies of the wild stuff June and her Johns must have done.
June knew she fascinated me, and she wasn’t above teasing me from time to time, leaning over to give me a glimpse of titty, grazing her hand over my butt when we passed going in and out of the bathroom. Professional habit, maybe, but I think she just needed reassurance that she was still a full, intact woman who could at least keep a teenager's pecker up.
Meanwhile, the show went on. One of my jobs was working the box office. I took reservations, sold tickets, arranged press comps, and tried to explain to Johnny Bashman that he had to stop calling me every morning on the box-office phone to talk dirty. And once a week Breck Wall brought me a sealed envelope, to be handed over, generally around noon, to a man from the “laundry service.”
Like everyone else in the cast, I knew the envelope was a payoff. In Dallas you couldn’t operate a club, let alone put on a Broadway show, without a cash tribute to the wiseguys. Most of the laundrymen were nondescript types who blew in and out like a cool breeze without even glancing at the envelopes.
But one noontime Breck himself showed up with a man he treated with elaborate, even flirtatious courtesy, and this one caught my attention, because he came on like a bad actor playing a mobster. Stocky, pale, with a five-o’-clock shadow and a tough-guy scowl, he insisted on counting the money, and he even licked his thumb between bills. Breck tried to make a joke about the B-movie mannerism. The man just grunted and went on counting.
It was a time when all businessmen wore hats, but in summertime Dallas the hats were Panamas or lightweight straw Stetsons. Breck's special laundryman wore a dark-gray felt fedora with a satin band and a wide brim, old-fashioned even then, and he kept his suit-jacket on. He was dripping with sweat, but it didn’t seem to bother him, the one aspect of his bad Cagney imitation that impressed me. Of course Breck didn’t tell me his name, and he never came back.
“Mr. Wonderful” closed abruptly after six weeks. Judy and I arrived at the theater for a Saturday matinée to find the marquee blank, the doors locked, and the other chorus people and supporting actors standing around looking pissed. Breck, Joe, and Johnny, with the principal cast, had split for Vegas with the week’s gate, to put on “Bottoms Up” at Castaways. They stiffed us on our pay, but there was nothing to be done; as I said, the show was non-union.
By then Judy was already working days as a secretarial temp for a bank, and she got put on full-time. June had recovered, and Buck showed up to take her back to New Orleans. There was something of a scene, because she didn’t want to go with Buck, and Judy had finally fallen out of lust with him. The two women’s shrill protests scared the little girls, and in a musical comedy world I would have confronted the bastard. But I was seventeen, and Buck had twenty pounds of muscle and about a thousand years of violent experience on me. Like Blanche DuBois being taken away by the sinister shrink, June finally went meekly, but relying on “the kindness of strangers” probably didn’t work out for her any better than it did for Tennessee Williams’s character.
I worked for awhile as a pump-jockey at a gas station, but I wasn’t bringing in enough money to pay for what I ate, so I went back north. I entered Yale that fall, acted in plays, and the next summer I signed on as an apprentice at an Equity theater and began working for my card. I was a professional actor for about thirty-five years, and I was always grateful to Judy for showing me, however accidentally, everything that could possibly go wrong in the theater. Nothing I encountered later fazed me, until a final betrayal which has no place in this story. And despite my total immersion in gay culture at 17, I remain, as Johnny Bashman once said after he finally gave up trying to get into my shorts, “hopelessly heterosexual.”
I forgot about the B-movie gangster until November 22, 1963, when I was a senior at Yale. Classes had been suspended, and the play I was in was canceled that night. I went over to my cousin Barry’s rooms — he was a junior, and he and his two roommates had one of the few student TVs on campus. We watched the man in the fedora pushing through the crowd of cops and reporters with a revolver in his outstretched hand, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s anguished grimace as the bullet hit him. The shooter was seen from the back, but as the live coverage continued, there was a frontal shot of him being hauled away. The cops didn’t let him cover his face. And I blurted, “Holy shit, I know that guy!”
Barry had never heard about my Dallas summer, and of course neither he nor his roommates believed me. I didn’t press the point. The TV was small, and the black-and-white images were blurry. And I wasn’t sure myself if the thuggish laundryman who had collected Breck Wall’s payoff was actually Jack Ruby.
But a couple of months ago the History Channel ran another conspiracy-theory program about the JFK assassination, this one dealing with the notion that the Mafia was involved in it. Ruby figures largely in this scenario. As a night-club operator he paid protection money to the mob, but he was also a cop groupie (not strange, given the symbiotic relationship between the Mafia and the DPD at the time), which is why he had access to the corridor outside Oswald’s holding cell and a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Ruby also had links to Cuba before Castro, when the Mafia ran the gambling resorts on the island. And of course Oswald was a big Fidel fan. The History Channel show tickled my memory of a certain deposition in the Warren Report.
On the 5th of August, 1964, Breck Wall testified in Las Vegas in front of the young Arlen Specter, then a lawyer working for what was officially known as the President’s Commission. Specter was very interested in Wall’s relationship with Jack Ruby, and he grilled the obviously terrified man relentlessly. Breck readily admitted that he and Jack had been “close” in both their business and personal relations. When he and Joe Peterson lost the Playbill Club in 1959 (possibly for failing to make a payoff), Ruby put on “Bottoms Up” at his own Sovereign Club, which later became the Carousel strip joint he was running at the time he killed Oswald.
But Ruby and Wall had a falling-out, and Ruby took over the revue, cutting Wall and Peterson out. In retaliation, Breck stole the principal performers in “Bottoms Up” to put on “Mr. Wonderful.” My memory of the laundryman in the fedora, and Breck’s flirty way with him, began to make more sense.
It was a reconciliation scene, not only between a couple of mobbed-up hustlers, but between lovers. Breck was dipping from the till to pay off Jack Ruby so that he could get “Bottoms Up” back, but he was also trying to repair a busted personal relationship. As soon as Ruby was happy, Wall closed “Mr. Wonderful” and took his regained “Bottoms Up” to Vegas.
What struck me when I re-read Breck Wall’s deposition was the statement that he had visited Ruby in prison several times. Given that the man who killed the man who killed the President was supposed to be locked up so tightly even sunlight couldn’t get in, I concluded that the Feds knew all about Breck’s special relationship with Jack, and hoped that the close-mouthed man might open up to a lover.
Wall revealed nothing of substance, but he did say that during his last visit, Jack Ruby told him that he knew things about the JFK assassination which he could never reveal. Specter abruptly ended the questioning, thanked Breck for his testimony, and dismissed him. There is no record of anyone in government following up on Ruby’s teasing hint, although in 1964 the Feds would have him in custody for two more years before cancer killed him.
Breck Wall himself did fine in later years. As of November 2005, according to an interview in a Las Vegas paper, he was still alive and well at 71 and, astonishingly, putting on yet another incarnation of his ancient “Bottoms Up” revue, starring himself. I wish my dear Aunt Judy were still alive — she kept her figure, her big voice, and her knack for cranking up the lights every time she entered a room, until she succumbed to cancer five years ago. She’d be only a year older than Breck, and she might have gotten to Vegas, finally, last November, a geriatric chorine belting out the songs and swaggering through the dance routines.
Did I actually meet Jack Ruby during that swamp-cooler summer in Dallas, three years before the events which changed history, mostly for the worse? And even if I did, why should anyone care? Well, we are all headliners in our own bad nightclub acts, and the “six degrees” game provides us with some ego balm when our acts bomb. OK, I may be a nobody, but I knew the guy who knew the guy who knew the guy.
In my Google search I never found a “Johnny Bashman,” even though I spelled his last name in every conceivable way. But Breck Wall seems to have survived, feeding off his notorious link to Ruby. Try the linkage yourself on the JFK murder. You may not wind up in Dallas’s gay mobbed-up underground in 1960, but you might find yourself only six jumps away from Arlen Specter. If you do, ask him about the six degrees of plausible deniability which keep the assassination an impenetrable mystery.