July 14, 2005
From GI to Glamour Girl
By JACKIE McGLONE
ONCE SHE WAS the most notorious woman in the world, as glamorously beautiful and exquisitely dressed as any Hollywood star. Today, though, who has heard of Christine Jorgensen, "the convertible blonde" who lived one of the most eventful double lives of any woman in the last century?
In her 60-odd years, she was a soldier, a librarian, a noted photographer, a nightclub entertainer and a reluctant celebrity whose sensational autobiography sold millions of copies. Truly, a woman of many parts. She may sound like some obscure Danish actress, but Jorgensen was an ex-GI who turned from man to woman more than 50 years ago, transforming George Junior into Christine, becoming, according to the tabloids of the day, "mankind's gift to the female species", "the latest thing in blonde bombshells", "tops in swaps" and "the turnabout gal". With her sleek platinum blonde hair, smoky voice, willowy figure and chic clothes, Jorgensen - a shy, 26-year-old photographer from the Bronx - became the most celebrated transsexual of the 20th century after undergoing surgery in a Copenhagen hospital in 1952.
She was one of the first people in the world to go public about her sex change. Britain's most famous transsexual, a merchant seaman from Liverpool also called George, did not have the operation which turned him into April Ashley until 1960. Jorgensen's story is told in a thought-provoking new play, Christine Jorgensen Reveals.
Created and performed by Bradford Louryk, a New York-based actor and avant-garde performance artist, the play is a lip-synched re-creation of an historic recorded interview given by Jorgensen to Nipsy Russell - a black American male entertainer and comedian - in 1958. Jorgensen speaks candidly in the interview about her life, sexuality, gender and tolerance, despite being the subject of much prurient curiosity and controversy. However, as another journalist who interviewed her once wrote, she speaks with "all the aplomb of a movie queen".
Louryk - tall, dark and handsome in his boho black clothes and colourful bandana - has, at 26, been voted one of New York's most eligible bachelors. He discovered an LP of the Jorgensen interview in a record shop in downtown New York.
"The cover was pinned to the wall and the image was so striking," he says. "It showed a stylish blonde woman in a smart green dress, with a radio mike hanging down and a man with his back to us, smoking a cigarette. I had no idea who Christine Jorgensen was, but I bought it for $150 (£85) and took it home, although I had no means of playing it on my CD system."
He forgot about the recording until, some months later, a friend was throwing out an ancient record player. "Before he did so, I asked him if I could play the old 78 on it. The recording itself was a mess, but when I heard Christine telling her story, I was mesmerised. It was a complete revelation - and it's such a testament to the strength of the interview and to Christine's eloquence and intelligence that everybody who hears it falls in love with her; I certainly did." He persuaded two sound designers to clean up the recording and transfer it to CD. Now, he says, "it sounds so sparkling, so clear. You are in the room with her. So I set out to find out more about Christine and spent a lot of time researching her story. I became obsessed."
What emerges when you listen to the interview today is a woman more womanly than a real woman. When we meet in a New York café, Louryk quotes Jorgensen on how, as George, she always knew she was different: "My only answer is that I am more of a woman than a man." Upon divesting himself of the last trappings of masculinity, George became Christine - as a grateful tribute to Dr. Christian Hamburger, the Danish surgeon who performed the operation - and originally planned to return home to the US to lead a very private life, working as a colour photographer, the job for which she had been trained. In 1953, she even flew to London to photograph the coronation of the queen.
However, headlines proclaiming "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty" greeted her arrival in New York. She stepped off the plane to be greeted by "more than 350 admirers, autograph hounds and just plain curious people". Not to mention hordes of reporters and photographers who catalogued everything from her baggage (13 pieces) to her destination ("the swank Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan") to her first beverage in America ("a Bloody Mary containing two shots of vodka and tomato juice").
Deluged by offers for photo shoots, personal appearances, nightclub acts and the 1950s equivalent of Oprah Winfrey-cum-Jerry Springer exposure, Jorgensen was at first repelled, but eventually she turned her notoriety into a lucrative cabaret performance. Her theme song was I Enjoy Being a Girl.
The gossip columnist Walter Winchell ridiculed her, while the society hostess Elsa Maxwell fêted her. The Stork Club banned her, but the Waldorf Astoria welcomed her.
"I could never understand why I was receiving so much attention, but I decided if they wanted to see me, they would have to pay," said Jorgensen, although she said she firmly believed that her life paved the way for more tolerant social attitudes towards matters of sexuality. "Some people may find it easy to live a lie," she once said. "I can't. And that's what it would have been - telling the world I was something I'm not."
Her celebrity was astonishing, given that this was America's age of innocence, when discussions about sexuality, much less transsexuality, were taboo. Was she some sort of sideshow freak? Or a modern pioneer? When she died of cancer in 1989 at the age of 62 one of Jorgensen's obituarists wrote that here had been no consensus.
At first Jorgensen regretted that the press had got hold of her story and made her life such an open book. "But the publicity, too, hasn't been altogether bad. It enabled me to make an awful lot of money," she confessed. She did the talk-show and lecture circuit and, in 1967, wrote her much-censored autobiography. She never talked about sex and she never married, although she was engaged twice. "I've been deeply in love twice," she said. "I was never engaged to the men I was in love with, and I was never in love with the men I was engaged to." Looking back on her life, just three years before she died, she said: "I realise it was the beginning of the sexual revolution, and I just happened to be one of the trigger mechanisms."
That, says Louryk, is one of the reasons he's passionate about Christine Jorgensen Reveals. "I think the timing of this piece is important. I feel the political climate is such that we should examine her life again. There's so much discussion about sexuality and identity now, particularly in the wake of the wave of moral righteousness that swept the country after George W Bush was elected. Everything in the States is so Right right now!"
Louryk has played a clutch of female roles, most notably tragic Greek heroines in his acclaimed 2001 one-man show Klytaemenestra's Unmentionables, recently analysed in a scholarly work, Dionysus Since 69, published by Oxford University Press. He uses the lip-synching of drag performance to explore "the complexity and subtlety of the female body, the female voice".
For Christine Jorgensen Reveals, he's been working with the legendary drag artist John "Lypsinka" Epperson, as well as several male and female playwrights, to create what he hopes will be a tribute to a woman of "extraordinary intellect, charisma, poise, and grace". His work is much influenced by Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company and Ethyl (James) Eichelberger. "Never for one moment do you believe he's a woman when he's performing, but he's re-created great women of history, playing the roles no one would ever have cast him in," explains Louryk.
No-one would ever cast Louryk as Elektra or Medea, although he's played both in his own shows. "I always feel the great parts are the women's roles. If women want to play men's roles, do so. There are many levels of distance - here's Christine, a man who became a woman, being played by a man pretending to be a woman who was once a man, while lip-synching to a recording of her speaking. She sounds like a screen star, a contract player at MGM. When you listen to her, it's like hearing Joan Crawford or Norma Shearer. It's impossible to ignore her - and we should never forget her."
• Christine Jorgensen Reveals, Assembly Rooms, George Street, 6-29 August.
