Betsy
04-02-04, 01:22 PM
Rocky Mountain News
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A sex-change soap opera
By Karen Algeo Krizman, Special To The News
April 2, 2004
Three years after her death, Dawn Langley Simmons still can't rest in peace.
Simmons first gained notoriety in the early 1960s when she was a he known as Gordon Hall, an author who wrote biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Margaret and Lady Bird Johnson. In 1968, Hall announced that he was really a woman who had been wrongly identified as a male at birth because of a genital anomaly. He underwent one of the first sex-reassignment surgeries in the world to correct the mistake.
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A year later, while living in the still-segregated South, Simmons caused an uproar when she married a black man. Then, two years after her controversial nuptials, Simmons gave birth to her husband's child and even had a legal birth certificate to prove it.
The New York Times did stories about Simmons. She became the subject of jokes on Laugh-In. And all the while she was sending out press releases offering personal interviews and photo sessions.
Dawn Langley Simmons' life was a soap opera, each episode of which is finely detailed in Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love.
Author Edward Ball, who won the National Book Award in 1998 for Slaves in the Family, questions whether Simmons was indeed a woman her entire life and if she was not, what was the "psychological truth" behind her actions.
"What would possess a rich and comfortable author to do these things?" Ball writes.
"The main reward a transgender person could expect was ostracism, and in the South, to flirt with a black man made a white woman into a social criminal. Putting them together, Dawn invited trouble on a lifetime contract. Why?"
Finding the answer to these questions wasn't easy. Having never met Simmons, Ball had to rely on interviews with family members, friends, doctors and transgender experts to re-create her persona. He also studied 43 boxes of her personal papers and crossed the Atlantic to look for answers in England, Simmons' birthplace.
The author's efforts don't go unrewarded, though. He's able to shed truth on some of the rumors that swirled around Simmons life - many of which she set in motion herself.
Taking place mostly in Charleston, S.C., Peninsula of Lies is reminiscent of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
The "whodunit" in this case is: Who gave birth to Simmons' daughter? Could it possibly have been Simmons?
It's a captivating question that moves the story along at a fast pace, but at times Ball stumbles as he delves into the historical and scientific aspects of intersex births and transgender people. Fortunately, though, Simmons' life story is so compelling that Peninsula of Lies doesn't get derailed for long.
Simmons' parents were servants at Sissinghurst Castle, the English estate of biographer Harold Nicolson and his novelist wife, Vita Sackville-West.
As a boy, Simmons visited the castle and met Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West's lover. (Woolf made Sackville-West the subject of the novel Orlando: A Biography, which bears a striking resemblance to Simmons' own dramatic life story.)
After leaving England as a young man, Simmons befriended acting great Bette Davis; cotton-gin heiress Isabel Whitney; and Dame Margaret Rutherford, who won a supporting actress Oscar for the movie The V.I.P.s.
Simmons became a sort of surrogate son to Rutherford, but it was Whitney with whom he was most enamored.
The two were inseparable, and Whitney bought a historical house in Charleston with plans to share it with Simmons after its restoration. When Whitney died in 1962 before moving into the Southern mansion, Simmons inherited the home and a small fortune.
In the years that followed, Simmons became a much sought-after guest on the Charleston social scene, which had its own secret gay enclave.
"So many of the men in Charleston, especially married men, walk two roads," Simmons wrote in her journal. "They marry a rich society matron that might not be very good looking, and try to find somebody on the side. When I (as Gordon Hall) showed no particular interest in the feminine sex, there were those who decided I must be a homosexual.
"I would be invited to a dinner party as a very eligible bachelor, and be brought home by the hostess' husband. He would suddenly produce a bottle of liquor out of his pocket . . . and I would practically have to fight for my honor on the doorstep."
Hall's popularity waned, though, after the sex reassignment surgery and completely vanished when she became Mrs. John-Paul Simmons. In the end, acquaintances say it was her marriage to a black man in the segregated South that became her downfall.
"I think people in Charleston could take a sex operation more easily than they could take a marriage to a black man, which was more forbidden, in a way," said John Zeigler, a Charleston book seller who knew Simmons.
"Remember, we still have all these Confederate people all over the place. I don't think the sex switch bothered people nearly as much as it did that Gordon married John-Paul."
Having given up her social standing for love, Simmons eventually lost most of her personal wealth as well. She died in poverty on Sept. 18, 2000. But, the scandal lives on in the Peninsula of Lies.
Karen Algeo Krizman is a freelance writer living in Littleton.
Copyright 2004, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
To print this page, select File then Print from your browser
URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/books/article/0,1299,DRMN_63_2773232,00.html
A sex-change soap opera
By Karen Algeo Krizman, Special To The News
April 2, 2004
Three years after her death, Dawn Langley Simmons still can't rest in peace.
Simmons first gained notoriety in the early 1960s when she was a he known as Gordon Hall, an author who wrote biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Margaret and Lady Bird Johnson. In 1968, Hall announced that he was really a woman who had been wrongly identified as a male at birth because of a genital anomaly. He underwent one of the first sex-reassignment surgeries in the world to correct the mistake.
Advertisement
A year later, while living in the still-segregated South, Simmons caused an uproar when she married a black man. Then, two years after her controversial nuptials, Simmons gave birth to her husband's child and even had a legal birth certificate to prove it.
The New York Times did stories about Simmons. She became the subject of jokes on Laugh-In. And all the while she was sending out press releases offering personal interviews and photo sessions.
Dawn Langley Simmons' life was a soap opera, each episode of which is finely detailed in Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love.
Author Edward Ball, who won the National Book Award in 1998 for Slaves in the Family, questions whether Simmons was indeed a woman her entire life and if she was not, what was the "psychological truth" behind her actions.
"What would possess a rich and comfortable author to do these things?" Ball writes.
"The main reward a transgender person could expect was ostracism, and in the South, to flirt with a black man made a white woman into a social criminal. Putting them together, Dawn invited trouble on a lifetime contract. Why?"
Finding the answer to these questions wasn't easy. Having never met Simmons, Ball had to rely on interviews with family members, friends, doctors and transgender experts to re-create her persona. He also studied 43 boxes of her personal papers and crossed the Atlantic to look for answers in England, Simmons' birthplace.
The author's efforts don't go unrewarded, though. He's able to shed truth on some of the rumors that swirled around Simmons life - many of which she set in motion herself.
Taking place mostly in Charleston, S.C., Peninsula of Lies is reminiscent of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
The "whodunit" in this case is: Who gave birth to Simmons' daughter? Could it possibly have been Simmons?
It's a captivating question that moves the story along at a fast pace, but at times Ball stumbles as he delves into the historical and scientific aspects of intersex births and transgender people. Fortunately, though, Simmons' life story is so compelling that Peninsula of Lies doesn't get derailed for long.
Simmons' parents were servants at Sissinghurst Castle, the English estate of biographer Harold Nicolson and his novelist wife, Vita Sackville-West.
As a boy, Simmons visited the castle and met Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West's lover. (Woolf made Sackville-West the subject of the novel Orlando: A Biography, which bears a striking resemblance to Simmons' own dramatic life story.)
After leaving England as a young man, Simmons befriended acting great Bette Davis; cotton-gin heiress Isabel Whitney; and Dame Margaret Rutherford, who won a supporting actress Oscar for the movie The V.I.P.s.
Simmons became a sort of surrogate son to Rutherford, but it was Whitney with whom he was most enamored.
The two were inseparable, and Whitney bought a historical house in Charleston with plans to share it with Simmons after its restoration. When Whitney died in 1962 before moving into the Southern mansion, Simmons inherited the home and a small fortune.
In the years that followed, Simmons became a much sought-after guest on the Charleston social scene, which had its own secret gay enclave.
"So many of the men in Charleston, especially married men, walk two roads," Simmons wrote in her journal. "They marry a rich society matron that might not be very good looking, and try to find somebody on the side. When I (as Gordon Hall) showed no particular interest in the feminine sex, there were those who decided I must be a homosexual.
"I would be invited to a dinner party as a very eligible bachelor, and be brought home by the hostess' husband. He would suddenly produce a bottle of liquor out of his pocket . . . and I would practically have to fight for my honor on the doorstep."
Hall's popularity waned, though, after the sex reassignment surgery and completely vanished when she became Mrs. John-Paul Simmons. In the end, acquaintances say it was her marriage to a black man in the segregated South that became her downfall.
"I think people in Charleston could take a sex operation more easily than they could take a marriage to a black man, which was more forbidden, in a way," said John Zeigler, a Charleston book seller who knew Simmons.
"Remember, we still have all these Confederate people all over the place. I don't think the sex switch bothered people nearly as much as it did that Gordon married John-Paul."
Having given up her social standing for love, Simmons eventually lost most of her personal wealth as well. She died in poverty on Sept. 18, 2000. But, the scandal lives on in the Peninsula of Lies.
Karen Algeo Krizman is a freelance writer living in Littleton.
Copyright 2004, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.