Suits Me the Double Life of Billy Tipton Review

Chapter Ane

Suits Me
The Double Life of Billy Tipton

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By DIANE Wood MIDDLEBROOK
Houghton Mifflin Company

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Built-in Naked

21 Jan 1989

Yous're built-in naked and the residual is drag.
-- Drag queen RuPaul, Lettin' Information technology All Hang Out

One SATURDAY Morning in January 1989, an emergency telephone call summoned paramedics to a trailer park on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, the dwelling house of Baton Tipton, an aging white jazz musician. Tipton had been very ill, likewise weak to leave his bed, just had resisted all attempts to get him to a doctor. His adopted teenage son, William, had been looking after him. That morning, after carrying Billy to the bathroom, William had airtight the door and, out of earshot, telephoned his mother, Kitty. They hadn't spoken for nearly a year. Divorce had dispersed the family almost a decade earlier, and Kitty had remarried, but she could yet be counted on in a crunch. She advised William to dial 911 and have Baton moved to a hospital. William made the call, so went to carry his father to the breakfast table. Baton Tipton gave a deep sigh and slumped against his son, unconscious.

    That sigh was a cloak-and-dagger escaping. The medics arrived almost immediately, lay Tipton on the flooring of the trailer, squatted over him, and opened his pajamas to feel for a heartbeat. I of them turned to William and asked, "Son, did your father have a sex change?" William stepped forward and caught a glimpse of his begetter's upper torso, so stumbled back confronting the screen door and down the trailer'due south steps. What had he seen? "I was in awe. I had no thoughts--just looked up at the sky, thinking it was some hallucination from drugs. If my father had lived as a adult female, she would have had big breasts."

    Nobody simply Billy had seen that nude torso for nigh forty years, not even the women who had lived with him as wives. Billy was a very private person, they explained later on. He invariably locked the bathroom, where he done and dressed. People who knew his habits knew that he always wore binding on his chest to support the ribs that had been fractured when the forepart terminate of a Buick had plowed into his body -- or so he said.

    And many, many people knew Billy Tipton. Spokane had been one of the regular stops on his trio'southward excursion in the early on 1950s, during the brief heyday of legal gambling in private clubs in Washington State, when a band could brand a practiced living backing strippers, magicians, jugglers, tap dancers, any sort of variety act that would draw customers into the clubs to drink and play the slot machines. In 1958, Billy settled in Spokane, and the Billy Tipton Trio became the house band at a downtown nightclub called Allen'southward Tin Pan Alley. Baton bought a house in the Spokane Valley and started earning a 2d income as an agent in the Dave Sobol Theatrical Agency, booking the musicians.

    In Spokane, out of professional respect, Billy Tipton was referred to as a jazz musician. He referred to himself equally an entertainer, for he had long before given up trying to make a living at jazz, though he smuggled it into floorshows he worked up with other members of his trio, playing a repertory of swing standards on saxophone and piano. Oklahoman past nascence, he was attuned to the stingy provincial audiences he had to please in Spokane, and he had a flair for showmanship. As an emcee, he adopted the gregarious style of the businessmen who were regular customers at the clubs, and female fans were attracted by his boyish skillful looks and his meticulous style of dress.

    Afterward Billy married Kitty in 1962, they adopted iii sons and involved themselves in the PTA and the Boy Scouts. In his work life likewise Billy was an exemplary denizen. If a charity wanted to hold a trip the light fantastic or a fellow musician was downwardly on his luck, Billy Tipton was the one who would organize a benefit. He led an active public life in the community for 30 years.

    Simply by the fourth dimension of his death, Baton was near destitute. Non much business walked through the doors of the booking agency, where he still worked on commission. He showed up in a fresh shirt every morning nonetheless, with a joke on the tip of his tongue to greet anyone who dropped by the seedy lilliputian role. He was a heavy smoker and chronically short of breath, and often quipped that ulcers and hemorrhoids were occupational hazards in the music business organization, but he brushed off questions virtually his health. Untreated, hemorrhaging ulcers finally killed him.

    Baton Lee Tipton was pronounced expressionless in the emergency room of Valley General Hospital that Saturday, never having regained consciousness, leaving a mystery as his most substantial legacy. He was dead. Just who was she?

    A buzz began after the autopsy on the Mon afternoon following Billy's death. The autopsy report, written past a pathologist enlightened of Billy'due south history, established that the torso was that of a normal biological female person past menopause. The coroner signed the pathologist'due south written report, and then placed a telephone call to a local journalist offer a scoop. "Become concur of Billy Tipton'south expiry certificate," he told the journalist. Billy had been a prominent figure in the entertainment business in Spokane. Didn't the public have a right to know?

    One person who didn't think then was Billy'southward former wife Kitty, now Mrs. Robert Oakes. She contacted a funeral managing director, swore him and his staff to secrecy, and bundled for cremation of the body. When she learned that the local newspaper was planning to publish the discovery of Baton's hidden identity, she paid a visit to the managing editor and demanded privacy for the family. Merely i of Billy'south sons had already granted an interview, and this constituted sufficient family permission to override Kitty's objections. The editor compromised by holding the story until afterward Billy's memorial service the following Mon, and by keeping it off the front page. "Jazz Musician Spent Life Concealing Fantastic Secret" was published Tuesday morning, 31 Jan, in the newspaper'southward regional department.

    The wire services picked up the story at in one case. Even the New York Times carried a respectful, faintly marveling obituary for Billy Tipton. Media companies followed with proposals for feature films and made-for-TV movies, and Kitty and the iii Tipton sons were greatly in demand for talk-testify appearances.

    The spotlights revealed a family unit at war, with the ii older sons, John and Scott, allied against William, the youngest, and Kitty. A tabloid published a story called "My Hubby Was a Woman and I Never Knew," in which Kitty said she believed that she and Billy had been legally married and legally divorced and that she had never been physically intimate with Billy because of her own poor health. The two older sons claimed that they had non known Billy'southward sexual activity -- "He'll always exist Dad to me," said John -- though before Baton's death, both had begun using the family names of their biological mothers every bit aliases. But John and Scott did non believe Kitty'due south claim to ignorance nearly Billy's identity. Calling Kitty "a imitation," they assigned the rights to their story to a flick company. The enmity between the two camps was poignantly expressed later on Billy's cremation by a sectionalisation of his ashes into ii boxes, one entrusted to John and Scott and the other to William. Every bit a announcer observed, "Fifty-fifty now, ironically, in that location are two Billy Tiptons."

    As many of the articles written about Billy Tipton pointed out, Billy was not unique in solving an economic problem or seizing a tempting opportunity just by donning trousers. Throughout history, women had been putting on men'due south work clothes in guild to perform piece of work reserved for men. Some went to ocean, similar the Pirate Jenny of Kurt Weill's song, who had a number of real-life counterparts. Some went to war; a nurse who served during the American Ceremonious War estimated that she had observed as many every bit iv hundred cross-dressing women in the Union Army alone. Some wrote their memoirs. Amongst the most colorful on record is a Spanish nun named Catalina de Erauso, born in 1592, who fled the convent to go a soldier in Panama and, after disclosing her sex, received papal impunity to continue wearing men's clothes. In former age, she wrote a tell-all autobiography that was adapted for the stage. The French writers George Sand, in the nineteenth century, and Colette, in the twentieth, likewise cross-dressed and told. But some of the cross-dressers we know about were exposed, like Billy Tipton, merely afterwards their death. James Miranda Stuart Barry (1795-1863), for case, served every bit a physician and surgeon for forty-half dozen years in the Medical Department of the British Army, where he rose to the rank of inspector general. The bellboy who laid out the body for burial discovered Barry'due south sex activity, simply the data was suppressed in order to preserve the dignity of the army. Dr. Barry is credited with performing the first successful cesarean delivery in the British Empire and is now recognized every bit the showtime British woman medico, but of course conducted this medical career entirely in the guise of a human being.

    But Billy Tipton was non history, Billy was today, and with no credible caption for his motivations coming from anyone close to the source, the earth was free to make of Billy Tipton what it would. The globe was prepare. During the years in which Billy's style of music had been going out of fashion in the amusement concern, gender had come up into its ain as a theme in fine art and politics. The very term "gender" was now a marker on the grave of venerable assumptions most the importance of sexual practice divergence. Billy Tipton literally became a poster boy for raising consciousness about the confusion of sex (biological) and gender (culturally meaningful physical and social attributes) when, soon afterward his death, his image appeared in San Francisco on the comprehend of a how-to book addressed to cross-dressers and transsexuals. Artists, likewise, appropriated Billy as a symbol. A group of avant-garde female jazz musicians from Seattle dubbed themselves the Baton Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet; Baton'due south obituary provided the story line for an opera titled Billy, produced in Olympia, the majuscule of Washington State. Thinly disguised versions of Billy'due south story likewise formed the plots of several plays that received wide disquisitional attention. I, titled Stevie, past Eduardo Machado, was staged at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles by the British actor and producer Simon Unconversant. Another, The Slow Drag, by Carson Kreitzer, was produced Off Broadway in New York and as cabaret theater in London. Academic researchers immediately took an involvement in explaining Billy, while on the Internet, Baton'south name became autograph for a whole host of issues amid groups with list names across a range of identifications from "sappho" (lesbians) to "boychicks" and "f2mlist" (female person-to-male transgenderists).

Generalizations and symbols volition take us merely then far in thinking about an individual life, however. What could exist learned about Baton'due south reasons for adopting men'southward clothing and a masculine identity? Billy, information technology turned out, had left plenty of clues, beginning with a legal volition. Early in their spousal relationship, Billy and Kitty Tipton had owned a sure corporeality of holding. With a lawyer's assistance, Billy had fatigued up a will in 1965, afterward the adoption of their first child; updated it in 1971, after the adoption of their youngest son; and updated information technology once more in 1982, later he and Kitty separated. In every version of the will, Kitty was named executor of the estate. Past the time Baton died, his estate consisted mainly of debts, plus the alto and soprano saxophones he had never pawned and the diamond band he had ever worn while playing the piano. Those relics of his career in show business went to William. The older sons, John and Scott, were best-selling with one dollar each.

    The other documents found in Baton's files revealed mainly how shrewd he had been in fugitive the attending of officialdom. He had a social security number but lived in poverty during his terminal years rather than claim benefits. No marriage or divorce was ever recorded for the William L. or Baton Lee Tipton in question, though, equally would after be discovered, a sequence of women had called themselves Mrs. Tipton on their commuter's licenses. Wisely, Billy had generated few medical records, since the intention to pass as a man would have been diagnosed every bit pathological during nearly of his lifetime. Not much evidence of Billy's inner life was to be found, either. There was no personal periodical among his papers, and merely a few letters survive from amid the hundreds written to family unit members during the years Billy spent on the route, traveling with various bands.

    Nor had much of Billy Tipton'due south art been recorded for posterity: a couple of demo tapes from the 1940s, a couple of LPs on generic labels produced during the late 1950s. Billy had not fabricated a serious effort to become a recording star and had mainly earned his living playing dance music of the kind popularized by pocket-sized jazz ensembles in the 1930s and 1940s. At his best, he sounded as much equally possible like Benny Goodman's piano thespian Teddy Wilson. If Billy Tipton possessed a measure out of Teddy Wilson'due south talent, still, he did not strive for Teddy Wilson'southward visibility. On the occasions when success approached, Billy retreated.

    Yeah, Billy had covered her tracks. Withal a collection of personal letters found among her professional memorabilia suggests that at the finish, Billy decided to let her accomplishments exist known. She had been in contact with 2 affectionate women cousins, whom Kitty had never even heard about earlier Billy's death. The cousins, it turned out, had been actively corresponding with Billy for years and knew all about Billy'due south family life: the matrimony to Kitty, the adoption of the children, the divorce. For the past several years, they had been trying to persuade Baton to join them in the Midwest and take up life as a woman once more -- the woman they still called Dorothy. Why had Baton turned down the opportunity to skid away once her sons were grown? Wasn't it because she wanted to have a posthumous bow? The young musicians Billy booked at the Sobol agency recalled Billy'due south stories about the onetime days in the music business organization, traveling with the likes of Jack Teagarden, Bernie Cummins, Russ Carlyle, Scott Cameron. The stories were non always true, just they testify the states that Billy hoped to be remembered as belonging to a legendary era in American music, even though her participation required a lifelong disguise. The dramatic way she surrendered her secret at the time of her death suggests that she wanted the disguise to get part of the record too.

    Billy Tipton had come of age every bit a musician at the same time that technology was inventing ways to split the musician's trunk from the musician's audio. Take the example of Teddy Wilson, Billy's idol, one of the beginning black men to play with a prominent grouping of predominately white artists. Benny Goodman'due south integrated orchestra reached its huge audiences over the radio and on records. The music flowed right into the bodies of white listeners without rousing the necessity to condemn this kind of intimacy with the black man. Billy Tipton probably fabricated the acquaintance of Teddy Wilson's elegant piano mode in 1936, listening on a car radio to Camel Caravan, broadcast over CBS from New York. Baton studied Wilson's recordings until he could imitate Wilson'southward style, and later, when he had a small grouping of his own, adopted the Goodman quartet's "Flying Home" every bit a theme song. For Billy, the title of this song was loaded with private meanings that reached back into her childhood equally Dorothy and evoked her relationship with her father, an aviator. But the Billy Tipton Trio's false of the Goodman group's "Flight Home" was purely applied, for bands similar Billy'south succeeded best when they most closely duplicated the recorded audio of jazz celebrities. At the summit of Baton'due south career, every successful small-fourth dimension musician was to some extent a skilled impersonator. For instance, Baton's trio frequently performed "Exactly Like Y'all," made famous by Louis Armstrong. Billy caught the multiple meanings of this clever title early in her career as a musician, and improvised on it for the rest of her life, in undetected drag.

    Undoing Billy's disguise raises intriguing questions. Baton worked almost exclusively with men, in close quarters, for years at a stretch. Happily, the plot of Baton's story lets us watch ane woman'due south assuming solution to gaining a certain amount of recognition in what was largely a homo'south world. But how did she compensate for being raised as a girl and trained to play music as a girl? Would a professional career have been possible if Baton had lived openly equally a woman? After all those years of playing a man, was Billy a adult female, or only female?

    Other questions rise in the wake of what can exist learned most Billy'southward sexual practices. His former wife Kitty causeless that because in that location was no sex activity in their marriage, there was no sexual practice in Billy'southward story. "Everybody wants to know the wrong thing," she often said in response to intrusive questions about their private life. Only Kitty was only the last woman in Billy's life to exist called Mrs. Tipton -- the concluding of at least v. At least ane of these women knew that Baton was a woman; at least two of them made dearest with Billy for years thinking that Billy was a man. What is actually the "wrong" thing in Billy's story, then -- deceitfulness? Gaining erotic satisfaction from women who would non have permitted the same intimacies if they had known Billy's sex activity? And what did Billy want? What was in it for her when she chose non but to adopt the role of a man but to play information technology in every scene, including those nosotros call up of as the most confiding?

    Precisely because nosotros can proceeds so little access to Billy's thoughts and feelings, to respond such questions we have to directly our gaze toward Billy's skills as an artist. The most important of these was a gift for mimicry. Billy deployed well-worn vaudeville traditions of impersonation in the nightclub skits he wrote. He parodied Elvis Presley and Liberace, and he played rubes ("Goofus," "Cindy") and kids ("Little Playmate," "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Forepart Teeth"). Billy never impersonated adult women, but he often donned a sunbonnet to play the role of little girl in acts such as "My Wubba Dolly" and "Little Nell." Hidden under the broad comedy of these standard routines was an actor'south talent for adopting and using the torso language of some other person. Billy was both acting the role and acting the thespian who played it.

    Baton's near-lifelong stint of male impersonation seems on get-go impression akin to the overt use of drag by contemporary performance artists, such every bit David Bowie's androgynous persona Ziggy Stardust. Or transvestite supermodel RuPaul'south how-to interviews on his personification of a glamour queen. Or Madonna'south impersonation of Michael Jackson. Or Laurie Anderson'southward cool, technologically assisted, sporadic appropriations of masculinity onstage. All of these artists make visible the stylizations by which gender is communicated as "natural."

    But Billy is different. A perpetual improviser, never out of character, Billy drew her cloth from the gender fundamentalism of everyday life: the full general belief that gender difference arises from anatomical sexual practice difference in human beings and that gendered beliefs is the natural consequence of sexual practice difference. Playing a sequence of roles historically reserved for the "opposite" sex, Baton demonstrated by her accomplishment that gender, unlike sexual practice, is in large part a functioning: she was the player, he was the function. And if her first act of cantankerous-dressing was a brilliant, trouble-solving prank, Baton quickly plant that being taken for a man provided admission to almost everything she wanted -- music, travel, the love of adventurous and caretaking women.

    Inevitably, death ended the act and exposed the actor. Billy was prepared. An adept illusionist to the terminate, she had done away with her sex-concealing gear, for the trailer was empty of the jockstrap and bindings familiar to Baton's wives and sons. Billy had prepared to emerge from backside his screen similar the Wizard of Oz, to dissolve the magic into wisdom, revealing past her nakedness in death that the "difference" between men and women is largely in the eye of the beholder. And locked away in Baton'south office closet, along with the advisedly worded and updated will, was the record of a lifetime'due south achievements: clippings and photographs documenting the transformation of Billy from she to he and the annotated routines, musical arrangements, and program notes in which Billy makes eye contact with posterity. These professional files show how, night after dark, Baton scattered clues and riddles about the drag she wore, including risque gags most homosexuality and jokes that called attention to the costume. Some have been placed at the heads of chapters and on the endpapers of this book, as though they were Billy's own comments on the story, for her handwritten versions convey an artist'southward pride in craft and discipline. They suggest that Billy was anticipating our admiration of her skill, our curiosity about her strategies, and, yes, our pursuit of her secrets.

(C) 1998 Diane Wood Middlebrook All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-395-65489-0

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/middlebrook-suits.html

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