Well, time for some fun. James Kirkwood, a playwright who wrote "Chorus Line," attended Clay Shaw's trial and wrote American Grotesque. It's a terrific book, and I strongly urge everybody to buy a copy and read it. Some of the reporters at the trial penned limericks, and he put James Phelan's in his book:
Cried Big Jim, the world owes me praise.
And, I'll get it, come one of these days.
Earl Warren, the dunce.
Solved the killing just once.
But I solved it seventeen ways!
Last February I traveled to Boston University to go through the James Kirkwood papers. He compiled a whole file of limericks, and I copied some of the best.
Kirkwood was gay and, as Don Carpenter said in his terrific book, Man of a Million Fragments: The True Story of Clay Shaw, they "captured the spirit of the overtones of homosexuality that hung over the entire case."
Here we go:
There was a Feller, Mark Lane
Who Shrank when put on a train
Clay Shaw, heard of this
And on Lane took a piss
causing Lane to melt down the drain.
The next one is about Colonel Pierre Finck, one of JFK's autopsists, who, when he testified at the Shaw trial, spelt out a lot of words.
There was a colonel named Finck
Spelled F-I-N-C-K, as in 'sinck.'
When asked to relate
Our President's fate
He said, "I only spell, I don't thinck."
A hip talking lawyer named Dean
Cased quite a stir at the scene
a fag wedding he's sworn
was where Bertrand was born
And Jim's case was all just a bad dream.
There was a young witness named Perry
who said he was friends with a Ferrie
He said he played ball
with Oswald and all
But his statement was very contrary.
A D.A. by the name of Big Jimsy
Had a fantastical whimsy
But he screwed up the trial
And missed by a mile
For the case that he had was flimsy.
The jury got horny as hell
Their cocks were beginning to swell
They questioned the judge about sodomy
He said sure, if it relieves the monotony
But don't tell the press
And don't make a mess
Or I'll order a frontal lobotomy.
There was a young witness named Perry
Who persuaded a fairy named Ferrie
With his medical skill
To concoct a pink pill
That made any young man yield his cherrie.