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Overnight, it became the most
shocking, most celebrated surgery of the century. And even if the
furor eventually waned, the curiosity lingered, following Jorgensen
to her death Wednesday at San Clemente General Hospital after a 2
1/2-year battle with bladder and lung cancer. She was 62.
“I could never understand why I was
receiving so much attention,” Jorgensen said in a 1986 interview.
“Now, looking back, I realize it was the beginning of the Sexual
Revolution, and I just happened to be one of the trigger mechanisms.”
Christine Jorgensen - with her sleek
hair, smoky voice, slender body and smart clothes - exploded into
the nation’s consciousness in the halcyon days of the postwar Baby
Boom, in the placid I-Like-Ike, I- Love-Lucy era when issues of
sexuality, much less transsexuality, were strictly taboo. It didn’t
take much to propel her private, two-year odyssey from man to woman
into the object of international debate - and ridicule. “EX-GI
BECOMES BLONDE BOMBSHELL,” screamed the headline in the Daily
News, which broke the story on Dec. 1, 1952, after it was leaked
word about the second of Jorgensen’s three operations.
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On Feb. 12, 1953, when she stepped
off the plane from Denmark at what was then Idlewild Airport,
Jorgensen was 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 of luggage) 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”). From then on,
wherever Jorgensen went, neither the press nor the attendant
carnival atmosphere was far behind. Every detail was grist for the
mill: Her size 9—AA shoes. Her $ 10 contribution to a volunteer
fire department in her new Long Island hometown. Her first Easter
bonnet — which landed her on the front page of Newsday on Easter
weekend, 1953, a much—vaunted accolade traditionally reserved for
Long Island’s society matrons.
The press couldn’t get enough of
Jorgensen. The press was there on Feb. 26, 1953, when she took her
driver’s test in Garden City — as a Newsday reporter noted on
the occasion, “She, then he, had once been employed as a
chauffeur. But her license had expired and so, said one wag, had the
sex of the owner.”
The press was there on May 8, 1953,
when Jorgensen made her debut at Hollywood’s Orpheum theater,
narrating a 20—minute travel documentary she filmed in Europe:
“Her paycheck is reported to be $ 12,500 for a week’s work.”
And the press was there a week later, on the flight back to New
York, when Jorgensen announced that she planned to make her home in
Massapequa, on a 150-by-100-square-foot parcel of land where
her father, George, a carpenter, would build a six-room, $ 25,000
ranch-style house, complete with the most up-to-date burglar
alarm system. “Long Island,” she said, “[is] a lovely spot to
settle.” It became her home base until 1967, when her parents died
and she moved to California. But if the press fueled the furor over
Jorgensen, it was feeding a public that couldn’t get enough of her
and a society that didn’t know what to make of her. Was she some
sort of sideshow freak? Or a modern pioneer? There was no consensus.
While gossip columnist Walter Winchell ridiculed her, hostess Elsa
Maxwell feted her. While the Stork Club banned her, the
Waldorf-Astoria welcomed her.
Jorgensen, from the beginning, never
regretted what she did. “I regretted at the beginning, that the
press got hold of it and made my life such an open book,” she said
in a 1979 Newsday interview. “But the publicity, too, hasn’t
been altogether bad. It’s enabled me to make an awful lot of
money.”
Although Jorgensen preferred to be
known as “the noted color photographer” - she even went to
London in 1953 to photograph the coronation of Queen Elizabeth - she made her money, and her mark, from her celebrity. The offers of
Hollywood stardom that poured in from film producers when she
returned to the United States never panned out. Nevertheless,
Jorgensen decided that if the notoriety that was following her
wasn’t going to die out, she might as well cash in on it.
During the ‘50s and ‘60s, she
earned a more-than-comfortable living on the talk-show and
lecture circuit and, most notably, as a stage actress and nightclub
performer. The act, which she took from the Latin Quarter in New
York to the Interlude in Los Angeles to clubs in Havana, Caracas and
throughout England and Australia, was both serious and fun. With a
straight face, she sang “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” With
tongue-in-cheek, she performed “Bewitched, Bothered and
Bewildered” as a parody of her life before the operation.
Throughout the years of living under
a magnifying glass, Jorgensen retained her sense of humor. But in
her 1967 book, “Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Biography,” it
was obvious that she had considered life before the operation
anything but joyous. As a child growing up in the Bronx, Jorgensen
said, she was a “frail, tow—headed, introverted” little boy
who “ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games.” When
she was 5, she wrote, her Christmas dream was for “a pretty doll
with long gold hair.” Under the tree, there was a red railroad
train.
A graduate of Christopher Columbus
High School in the Bronx - Class of ‘45 - Jorgensen was
drafted into the Army a few months after the end of World War II, as
a 19-year-old who admitted years later that he felt like a woman
trapped in a man’s body.
The road to Jorgensen’s transsexual
surgery in Copenhagen began in New York, with years of independent
research. At the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistants’ School,
Jorgensen devoured information on the subject of sexual hormones and
glandular imbalances. Then, through a friend who was a physician,
the young man discovered it was possible to obtain sex change
treatments and operations in Scandinavia. In 1950, George Jorgensen
Jr. left for Denmark, staying with friends and keeping his plans a
secret from everyone, including his family. It was not until two
years later - on the eve of the second operation - that
Christine Jorgensen finally wrote to her parents in New York:
“Nature made a mistake, which I have corrected, and I am now your
daughter.” Although Jorgensen’s parents were shocked by the
news, they welcomed their child home.
Jorgensen herself never married, but
there were countless reports of liaisons: In 1952, a Texas GI told
the world that he had dated her in Copenhagen “and she had the
best body of any girl I ever met.” In 1959, she became engaged;
her fiance later broke the engagement. “I’ve never been
married,” she said in the Newsday interview, “but I have been
engaged twice, and I’ve been deeply in love twice. 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.”
When the notoriety died down,
Jorgensen settled into a fairly private existence. After she left
Long Island in 1967, she lived quietly in California, first at the
Chateau Marmont, the historic apartment—hotel on Hollywood’s
Sunset Strip, then in a four-bedroom house in Laguna Niguel, 60
miles south of L.A., and for the last two years in San Clemente.
Although she had dropped out of the
lecture circuit for 15 years, she returned onandoff during the
1980s. She had also been planning a sequel to her autobiography and
had been trying to find a U.S. distributor for a Dutch-made
documentary on transsexuals, lesbians and female impersonators.
After she was diagnosed as having cancer in 1987, she confessed that
one of her remaining dreams was to appear on the hit TV show,
“Murder She Wrote.”
Jorgensen never found even fleeting
fame on TV. But she didn’t need it. To many, she had won more
enduring recognition, as a pioneer, as a man-turned-woman who
broke down at least one of society’s sexual barriers. For her own
part, though, she saw it as nothing more than a case of
self-preservation. “Does it take bravery and courage for a
person with polio to want to walk?” she once said. “It’s very
hard to speculate on, but if I hadn’t done what I did, I may not
have survived. I may not have wanted to live. Life simply wasn’t
worth much. Some people may find it easy to live a lie, I can’t.
And that’s what it would have been - telling the world I’m
something I’m not.” |
