CHARLESTON and ROWAN & MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as "Sock it to me!" has died. He was 86.

Unknown to many is the fact that an bizarre event in Charleston became fodder for a great Laugh-In joke. In October 1971 a Charleston woman named Dawn Langley Hall gave birth to a daughter Natasha. Nothing unusual about that ... right?

Well, when Dawn had arrived in Charleston in 1962 she was called Gordon Langley Hall ... yes she was a man. But on September 23, 1968, after successful surgery at John Hopkin's University's Gender Identity Clinic, Gordon became Dawn. Gordon claimed he had been a woman his entire life, but had mis-identified at birth as a man. (Yeah, right.)

Dawn became engaged to a black man named John-Paul Simmons. But in 1968 the South Carolina state constitution prohibited the “marriage of a white person with a Negro or mulatto or a person who shall have one-eighth or more Negro blood.” Dawn hired a lawyer and changed South Carolina law. Charleston's first inter-racial marriage of record took place for January 22, 1969.

For several months during the spring and summer of 1971, Dawn walked the streets of Charleston wearing maternity clothes. Some claimed she would have a big belly beneath her dress one day, and a flat stomach the next. Someone claimed to see a military surplus blanket stuffed beneath Dawn’s dress. Anna Montgomery worked at a baby store on King Street and waited on Dawn. Anna claimed in the Charleston Chronicle that Dawn looked like a pregnant woman, “he forgot to tie down the strings of a pillowcase stuffed with cotton."

Dawn was convinced that white Charleston wanted to kill her unborn half-black child. She claimed there were numerous threats against her, so she decided to move seven hundred miles north to Philadelphia to give birth at the University of Pennsylvania hospital – or maybe to better hide whatever deception she was trying to pull. John-Paul remained in Charleston.

According to a birth certificate on file at the Department of Health Vital Statistics in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, on October 17, 1971, Natasha Marginell Manugault Paul Simmons was born. After her return to Charleston, Dawn pushed Natasha up and down the streets in an old-fashioned British baby carrier just like the one the Queen had for Prince Charles. She kept the birth certificate handy to flash at all doubters. Even John-Paul wasn’t impressed. He knew exactly where Natasha came from – one of his girlfriends.

“I’d been going with her for eight months –constantly had sex, sex, sex, all the time with this girl,” he said. “She was about twenty-three. She got pregnant." John-Paul claimed that the girl’s daddy knew Dawn wanted a baby, and the daddy didn’t want his daughter to have an illegitimate daughter with a black man. Dawn gave the father $1000 for the baby. The first time John-Paul saw Natasha he commented, "Whoever saw a blue-eyed nigger?"

Dawn’s announcement of the birth of her daughter became the fodder for TV comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, hosts of the wildly popular Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, a show with more than forty million viewers. The opening monologue contained the following exchange:

Dan Rowan: News flash: Charleston, South Carolina. Noted transsexual Dawn Simmons hast just given birth to a daughter.
Dick Martin: We can only hope she grows up to be half the man her mother was.

For the complete story of Dawn Langley Hall you can read the following:

• Wicked Charleston, Vol. II: Prostitutes, Politics & Prohibition by Mark R. Jones (yours truly) Chapter Five is titled "The Queen of Ansonborough".


• Dawn: A Charleston Legend by Dawn Langley Hall. Dawn's memoir of her life.


• Peninsula of Lies by Edward Ball. A kind of detective story that refutes some of the claims made by Dawn in her memoir.