Life Worth Living (7 page)

Faced with my barrage, he would leave the room, looking stricken.

After two years, during which my health began to suffer – I had severe headaches and developed allergies – I could finally take no more. Yet again I went to Mummy, who took the message to Daddy. This time I insisted that I was taken to a doctor who knew something about the subject. These doctor’s visits were becoming something of a ritual. Again, Daddy arranged for the latest ‘best’ doctor to see me. This time, the man was a racing crony of his, which filled me with misgivings, but at least he knew about things like chromosome and ketosteroid tests. When they came back with an unacceptably feminine result, however, he confirmed my earlier reservations by announcing that such tests were unreliable and therefore inconclusive. I could hardly believe my ears.

Here I was, now seventeen years old, eighteen in a few months, and I was being told yet again that I could not have my proper
gender. As luck would have it, I had read only a few weeks before in
Time
magazine about something called the gender identification clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. I knew if I could just get my case referred there, this ridiculous pussyfooting would have to come to an end. Banging my open hand down on the doctor’s desk, I shrieked,

‘I’m sick and tired of being messed around. Everyone else has their sex. I want mine. I will not be brushed aside like a dead fly. I demand that you send me to Johns Hopkins. They have a gender identification clinic there, and since you all seem to be having so much difficulty in taking me down the only road open to me, maybe they’ll have the guts you lack.’

If you could have seen the looks on the faces of the doctor and Daddy you would have laughed. Neither of them had heard of the clinic, of course, but the doctor promised to make the necessary arrangements. A few weeks later, I took off for Grand Cayman with Aunt Marjorie, Uncle Ric, Sharman, Margaret and Suzy Surridge. I was due to go to school in New York that September, and the arrangement was that Mummy would take me to Baltimore first. The relief I felt was overwhelming. Although life had taught me never to count my chickens until they were hatched, at last I had real hope.

Quite what went wrong, I will never know. I have heard several versions of the same story, none of which makes sense. My own opinion is that Daddy had already made up his mind to leave the ultimate responsibility to me once I turned twenty-one. He realised that Johns Hopkins would force his hand, and as a delaying tactic, he had to fob me off with an excuse. Whatever the truth, I was informed when we returned to Jamaica that the visit was off. Having come so close, I was in despair.

As so often happens, in the midst of this drama, something even more awful happened. Uncle Ric, plagued by ill health since Grandpa’s murder, died of a heart attack, in front of Auntie, who found herself widowed at forty-one.

Uncle Ric was a great favourite of everyone in the family, and we all felt his death acutely. Mickey, Sharman, Margaret and I took it in turns to go up to Auntie’s house and sleep with her. It was there that I resolved to do something to make Daddy take action. I went into Liguanea Pharmacy, where I was on cordial terms with the staff, and found out what the safest maximum dosage of Valium was. In Jamaica in those days, you could buy any drug you wanted over the counter. Valium, amphetamines – you name it, it was yours for the asking. Armed with as many Valium tablets as I could take without actually killing myself, I went home and chose my moment carefully. To be on the safe side, I waited for an evening when everyone was at home and there was no chance of me not being found.

I went into the kitchen, poured a glass of water, swallowed the tablets and went into the study to wait for them to take effect. I had naïvely imagined that I would pass out within moments, but when several minutes had elapsed and I was still as alert as ever, I walked up to the pool, where Michael Silvera and Mickey were chatting on the verandah of the pool house. By this time, I was half convinced that the pharmacist had misinformed me
and I had taken too mild a dose, but, to avoid frightening them in case the tablets did start to work, I told them what I had done. Like a typical elder brother, Mickey said, ‘Don’t chat rubbish. You haven’t done any such thing,’ and asked me to drop him up at Auntie’s.

On the way back from her house, the tablets took effect. God knows how I drove home, for I have no recollection of doing so. Nor of parking the car in the garage. Mummy told me afterwards that it took her half an hour to get it out, so I must have jammed it in. I staggered into the house and collapsed in the family dining room in full view of everyone who was watching television on the adjoining back verandah. Had I planned it I could not have come up with a more dramatic scene.

Mummy quickly realised what was happening when she smelled no alcohol on my breath. She telephoned the family doctor, who was there within five minutes. In Jamaica in 1967, anyone who was taken to a hospital with a drug overdose had to be treated as a potential suicide. Because killing yourself was a criminal offence, the hospital was obliged to call in the police, which could result in criminal charges and, in instances involving a well-known name, embarrassing publicity. Daddy and the doctor therefore decided to treat me at home. Instead of pumping my stomach, he gave me salted water to induce vomiting, followed by strong black coffee as a stimulating antidote to the tranquillisers.

For the next several hours he and Mummy walked me round and round and round the dining and drawing rooms, until he adjudged it safe for me to be allowed to sleep.

I remember nothing of this, but my cry for help certainly caught my parents’ attention. Neither of them had any idea that I had stage-managed the whole episode, so the question of my gender was back on the agenda in a big way. Daddy even went as far as asking the family doctor to arrange for me to be seen by a famous hospital in New York the following month, when Mummy was due to accompany me there to school.

‘What I want to know is, does that hospital have as much expertise in coping with cases like mine as Johns Hopkins does?’ I inquired of my father.

‘Yes.’

‘Then why doesn’t it have the same reputation as Johns Hopkins?’

‘It’s as g–g–g–good a hospital,’ Daddy stuttered. ‘Ju–ju–ju–st because you ha–ha–haven’t heard of it, it d–d–doesn’t mean it’s no good.’

By this time, I was too world-weary to be satisfied by any reassuring noises. The question I wanted answered was simple: was this a step in the right direction, or had Daddy found another way of fobbing off both me and his conscience with medical help that was really nothing but hindrance?

N
ew York represented liberty. I loved the city even before I laid eyes on it. This was just as well, for in this particular race, I was one filly who would prove far stronger at finishing than at starting. The Fashion Institute of Technology, where I was to be a student, was then, as now, the finest design school in the world. A college of the State University of New York, its academic requirements were stringent. No student could graduate without the requisite credits in subjects such as chemistry, biology, and English literature, which had to be pursued along with the technical disciplines complementary to one’s artistic major. Mine was apparel design, for my ambition was to become a dress-designer.

This ambition did not last past the first semester, when I made the Dean’s honour list. I was as pleased as Daddy to have my talent quantified, but no amount of success could conceal the fact that I had chosen a career which already bored me. There was much about apparel design that appealed. I enjoyed the creativity of draping garments and sketching designs, and could happily do that for hours. The precision and attention to detail required drove some people mad, but I found it absorbing.

My problem was more fundamental. I simply could not summon up enthusiasm for a profession which was not intellectually challenging in any way. I needed a profession where new ideas were continually required, not one where they entered into the equation in the beginning, when one was sketching and selecting designs for a collection, but thereafter became statics which had to be translated from paper into cloth and could not be changed.

I was still registered as a boy. The embarrassment of just getting through each day was so acute that that alone made life unbearable right from the start. Each instructor looked at the list of students, saw my name and the gender ascribed, looked at me, and delivered a variation on the same theme:

‘There must be a mistake here. It says you’re male and you’re obviously not.’

Although I had long since learned how to maintain my dignity by deflecting embarrassing questions with enigmatic retorts, each time something like this happened I wished I could simply disappear. Naïvely, I had expected to blend in, because FIT was a fashion institution whose students and instructors covered the sexual spectrum so comprehensively that it was sometimes hard to tell whether you were in a college of queens, city of straights, mid-town Manhattan or on the isle of Lesbos. Yet instinctively, people picked up, as they had at St George’s, that I was not a gay boy.

Whereas the earthiness and lack of sophistication of native Jamaicans had led them to trust their instincts and call me a girl, here, in America, where people thought more and trusted their observations less, they were in a dilemma. If I wasn’t a gay boy, what was I? This question seemed to so perturb one or two busybodies that I was hassled on more than one occasion by the school authorities. Once an instructor asked me in front of the whole class if I could try to look less like a girl, to which I replied, ‘I’ll try if you can make an equal attempt to look less like a swine.’

To her embarrassment, the class erupted into laughter, and it was she, not I, who was left looking like a jerk.

As people got used to me, the novelty of my appearance wore off. Thereafter, everything was fine until the beginning of the next semester, when the school psychologist called me into his office and told me there were concerns about me. He offered to help me define my sexuality, whatever that meant.

‘And how do you propose to start?’ I asked naturally, having learned the art of giving people enough rope to hang themselves with.

‘Maybe we can start with you not wearing nail polish,’ he replied.

‘I don’t,’ I said, looking him straight in the eye.

He actually had the temerity to grab my hand to check my nails before saying, ‘Well, even if you don’t wear nail polish, you wear lipstick, and it offends people.’

I informed him that I did not wear lipstick either, and that I could hardly be blamed if my diet was so healthy I had lips with colour in them.

The encounter with the psychologist was the final straw. I went to see Dean Brandriss, told her I wished to withdraw from her school, and left. Knowing that Daddy would not approve, I did not tell my parents until afterwards.

What to do now? Whatever career I chose, I intended to start living in my true gender full time from now on. Money was not an immediate issue, as I had enough to last me for the remainder of the school year. But I would have to work to support myself in the longer term, and quite possibly to pay for whatever medical treatment I was going to need. In the meantime, the basics were taken care of: I had an apartment in London Terrace Gardens on West Twenty-Third between Ninth and Tenth – a beautiful, pre-war complex with its own swimming pool, hairdresser and just about everything else.

My father was also covering my medical bills, which as far as I was concerned were a massive waste of money. Twice a week, every week, I had to take the subway up to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where I was under a psychiatrist. There was absolutely no need for this, for my problem was not psychiatric, as the Jamaican psychiatrist had rightly stated. It
had become apparent to me within ten minutes of my first visit to Columbia Presbyterian with Mummy that they did not have the facilities or expertise for coping with a medical condition like mine. They had no specific department as Johns Hopkins did. There was a wealth of discussion between various doctors about whether I should be turned over to an internist, an endocrinologist or a psychiatrist. Finally, they settled upon the psychiatrist, using my overdose as a rationale and stating that the most appropriate course to follow would be to have the psychiatrist confirm my mental health before any other course of treatment were considered.

I complained to Mummy as soon as we were alone. ‘I want to go to Johns Hopkins. They’re only a few hours away from New York and they won’t have to embark upon a long debate as to which department I should be treated in. They have their
own
department for treating people like me. It’s the gender identification clinic.’

‘This hospital had been recommended to Daddy as the finest in New York. He won’t consider anything but the best for you.’

Knowing from bitter experience that it was impossible to change Daddy’s mind once an idea took root, I resolved to co-operate and try to enlist the help of the psychiatrist, who, I hoped, would refer me to Johns Hopkins when he had given me a clean bill of health. So twice a week, every week, I boarded the ‘A’ train and headed uptown for visits which the psychiatrist later told me were a pleasure.

In the meantime I thought I would try my hand at writing. I had always loved everything literary, and with writing, even the most tedious subject has intellectual challenge built into it. This choice of career also had the merit of being suitably blue-stockinged for my father, who gave his assent. In those days, one did not go to university to learn to become a writer. One got a typewriter, chose a subject and got started. One evening, on the
David Susskind Show
on television, I saw a group of male models being interviewed. I decided that would make a fitting subject for an article. It was glamorous and unusual without being too quirky or uncommercial. I hoped to place my piece with one of the women’s magazines such as
McCall’s
or
Cosmopolitan
. Instead, I opened up a whole new world for myself.

The Paul Wagner Agency, where I interviewed the model Nick Cortlandt, had both a male and a female section. When I had finished the interview, Zolie, who ran the agency, asked me if I had ever thought of modelling myself.

‘No,’ I replied truthfully.

‘If ever you do, give us a call. We could do something with you. You’re a beautiful girl, but more than that, you look like yourself. Most girls look like someone else, which is great for catalogue models, but you have the potential to be another Jean Shrimpton or Twiggy or Penelope Tree. Just look at that nose! I’ve never seen a straighter nose. Look at those eyes. Look at that skin,’ he rhapsodised to his colleagues. ‘And you’re so thin. How much do you weigh? Ninety-eight pounds? A hundred?’

I actually weighed 104lb. I’d spent all my teenage years trying to put on weight. I used to order various fattening-up formula foods advertised in American magazines, and I ate like a horse. But I gained maybe a pound every six months (ah, for those days now). Yet here I was being compared to the quintessence of contemporary beauty, and for the first time in my life, I was pleased that God had made me as thin as he had.

I embarked upon my modelling career with relish. The first step was to get a book of test shots together. These were obtained by traipsing around from photographer to photographer asking them if they would like to take free photographs of you. If they agreed, and the pictures turned out well, you had more shots to add to your portfolio and so did they. Models’ portfolios had to be comprehensive, covering the range of your possibilities, for you were hired partly on the basis of how your ‘book’ showed you. If you had the versatility to go from infinitely grand to charmingly rustic, you did better than girls who could not carry off conflicting ‘looks’. The result was that most models ‘tested’, even after years in the profession.

At first I found the whole business great fun. For someone who had not even realised that she was passably attractive until recently, it was a treat to be praised by photographers for the beauty of my nose/ eyes/ mouth/ neck/ shoulders/ hands/ legs/ forehead/ hairline/ skin/ shape of face. Zolie decided that I would be best suited for ‘head-and-shoulders’ and legs-and-hands work, as I was on the short side, being a quarter-inch under the absolute minimum of five feet seven. Soon, however, it emerged that I photographed tall because I had long limbs, a long neck and a head that was small in proportion to my body. ‘Fashion’, where the majority of the work, if not the money, lay, now beckoned as a possibility.

Within two months, however, the gilt was off the lily. The work was one long, dreadful slog. Looking glamorous in front of the camera required you to be little more than a baggage attendant behind it. Because they had to be prepared for any eventuality, models always carried huge bags containing several pairs of shoes, changes of underwear, differently coloured tights, various outfits, wigs and hairpieces, a full range of make-up and hairspray, false nails and bottles of nail polish in all the fashionable colours. All this had to be dragged around the pavements of New York City, along with one’s ‘book’, which was a large black leather photograph album measuring about two by three feet. We all used to joke that the reason why models had such long arms and graceful carriage was not that we had good proportions, but that the book and the bag had lengthened our arms and strengthened our spines.

Modelling could be fun when you were not called upon to twist yourself into poses that would have challenged a gymnast, or asked to hold a pose beyond endurance, both frequent occurrences. Contrary to what people may think, it did involve a certain amount of inventiveness and creativity, for you had to project moods and messages. What I found less appealing was having to go home and practise a whole range of poses and emotions in the mirror. I understood that this would help me to deliver the goods the photographer wanted quickly and
effectively, but I became self-conscious whenever I did it. Moreover, one’s judgement was liable to be influenced by mood, with the result that an angle that looked acceptable one day seemed doubtful the next. This, I discovered, was a common problem among the girls.

Another difficulty was a genuine ambivalence about one’s own looks. Few of the models I knew, or the beautiful women I have known since, for that matter, liked their faces unconditionally. Not only did they realise that different tastes mean that no one is universally beautiful to everyone, but they were also aware of their faults. This tendency towards extreme self-criticism was compounded by the professionals one encountered on a daily basis. Some of the photographers were nothing but sadistic jerks who delighted in crushing the girls’ confidence, telling someone with a perfect nose that she should have it ‘done’, for example. Female solidarity was also often in painfully short supply, as some of the models did their level best to undermine anyone they perceived as competition. And the bookers, who were arguably the most powerful people in the agencies, were a law unto themselves. Many of them were lesbians, and woe betide any model who did not butter them up and deflect the advances they frequently made with charm and tact. They were quite capable of damaging the careers of models they did not like, and I was warned at the very outset to be gracious to one and all, but to keep my distance.

It was now 1968, and the Sexual Revolution was at its peak. So, too, were the penises of just about every other photographer a girl went to see. In their vernacular, few were fussy whether they ‘got laid’ or you gave them good ‘head’. At first, I was frankly offended and disgusted when man after man unzipped his trousers and displayed an erect penis without so much as a word of warning or an iota of encouragement. What, I asked myself, was I doing wrong? Why did so many men behave like that with me? I soon discovered that I, as a person, had nothing to do with it. Far from doing anything wrong, I was doing everything right. They liked what they saw, and ‘scoring’ was the name of the game. They never gave a thought to whether their attentions might be unwelcome. The sad truth is that many girls played along. I made up my mind that I would not be so stupid as to prostitute myself on the off-chance that some creep might employ me. No photographer ever got even the chastest of chaste kisses from me, much less a ‘blow job’ (penetration was in any case out of the question until my labiae were surgically unsealed). If they did not want to use me, that was fine by me. No job was worth giving favours to men one would not otherwise even spit upon.

Whether I would ever have achieved the ambitions Zolie had for me will never be known, for, just as my career was about to be launched properly, my father found out about it. Having finally conquered his antipathy towards leaving Jamaica a couple of years previously, he boarded a plane and flew up to New York with Mummy to take me back home. That’s what he thinks, I said to myself, and refused to see him until we met at my psychiatrist’s office.