“I’ll whistle my way through life until I drop dead”

From the ArtLark website:

On 6th November 1924, Rudolf Schmid was born in Volary, Sudetenland (now in the Czech Republic). In 1941 he enlisted in the Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces, aged just 17 and served in the beginning of WWII at Udine in Italy. However, Schmid’s constitution was not built for the army.

“A delicate young man, he was unhappy with military life and already confused by his sexual identity. He was, as he later put it, “saved” from the army by typhoid fever, which nearly cost him his life, but also saw him invalided home. But Schmid, like many Sudeten Germans, was forced to flee as the Czechs exacted revenge for the deprivations of the war years. He fled to Munich, where his love of dressing up, singing and dancing set him on a career as a female impersonator.” (Obituary in The Telegraph)

In Munich, Schmid found success as a showgirl and shortly after started performing in the Neue Scala theatre in Berlin. Later, whilst acting in a vaudeville show as “Jeanette” at the Hansa Theatre in Hamburg, he was discovered by the Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi and his wife Soraya, who were thrilled by his performance and invited him for a private show at their home in Teheran. Schmid’s drag routine and outfits were though way too risqué for the Persian palace and in a bid to save his reputation, Schmid was advised by a friend to try whistling classical pieces, which he was good at. Jeanette then whistled a polka by Johann Strauss and Offenbach’s Barcarole and the Shah was suitably impressed; Schmid was to make her career from here on by this unusual art, continuing an old local Germanic tradition:

“The Austrian ‘School’ of Kunstpfeifen refers loosely to a small group of professional and semi-professional whistlers from the German-speaking lands, especially Austria, who were active from about 1880-1940 and whistled a repertoire consisting mainly of waltzes, Viennese folk songs, and well-known operatic arias.(e.g. Hans Tranquillini, Josef Bratfisch).With the approval of Johann Strauss II behind them, several successors followed. Before 1900, some of these Kunstpfeifer were still known for instrumental repertoire and instrumental techniques (such as nodal articulation and multiphonics) and were occasionally compared to the piccolo; but as light concert music evolved into parlour music and variety entertainment in the 1890s, the word Kunstpfeifen began shedding these instrumental associations and by 1940 was virtually synonymous with singwhistling or whistletainment.” (Dictionary of Whistling)

Schmid made a solid name for herself in show-business, mainly touring the Orient, performing on cruise ships and in private shows, even alongside stars such as Sinatra, Piaf and Marlene Dietrich. He lived in Cairo for fifteen years and there, in 1964 he finally became Jeanette by gender reassignment surgery performed by Dr Ludwig Levy-Lenz.

As she moved back to Vienna, Jeanette Schmid continued a long, more obscure career in whistling, appearing in theatres and cafes for years before director André Heller rediscovered her in the 1980s, reintroducing her to show-business under the stage-name Baroness Lips von Lipstrill. Her show travelled to Europe, then Broadway and even earned Jeanette the Austrian Decoration of Merit in Gold.

When asked at the ceremony about her plans to retire, the flamboyant artist declared, “I’ll whistle my way through life until I drop dead.”

And she practically did just that - she died at the ripe old age of 80, her performances still in demand...

You really couldn't make this stuff up.

Jeanette Schmid (6th November 1924 – 9th March 2005)

Trans-fixing cinema...

[Read more about this classic at Medium.com.]




[Get the low-down on the latter two - and more! - courtesy of Original Cinematic.]

Which is the rooster, which is the hen?

Miss Norah Blaney - Masculine Women, Feminine Men

Shaved her legs and then he was a she

"If I'm wearing pants, call me a man. If I'm wearing a dress, call me a cab!"

“The boys at the baths loved me. Of course, they were all drunk and high and would've loved a French poodle barking out "Jingle Bells"!”

“I'm tired of straight people playing drag queens. Why can't drag queens play drag queens? They're talented, they're fabulous, they're gorgeous!"

“I felt like Elizabeth Taylor! Little did I realise that not only would there be no money, but that your star would flicker for two seconds and that was it. But it was worth it, the drugs, the parties, it was fabulous.”

She inspired a timeless classic...

Lou Reed - Walk On The Wild Side

...RIP Holly Woodlawn (born Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhakl, 26th October 1946 – 6th December 2015)!

I was the main attraction

Last weekend, having realised that the 80th birthday of Miss April Ashley, Britain's first and most famous male-to female transsexual, was looming, I found myself (overjoyed at the discovery of its entirety on the interwebs) immersed in reading April Ashley's Odyssey, her fascinating biography/autobiography (written with Duncan Fallowell). It is one helluva story.

After a fairly shaky start in Liverpool - a sickly and bullied child, and having experienced a somewhat traumatic adolescence - the young George Jamieson started cross-dressing. As "Toni April" she moved to Paris in the late 1950s and joined the famous French entertainer Coccinelle in the cast of the drag cabaret at the Carousel Theatre.





Determined to realise her ultimate ambition, however, she said: "The day I wear women's clothes is the day I know I can become one." And so it came to pass...

While sweating it out in that bed in Casablanca, I was convinced that after the operation life could only be a shower of diamonds and almond blossom. But isn't it maddening? You move one mountain only to find yourself at the foot of another. Maybe some don't live like this, maybe for some life is just a frolic among molehills, but I always seem to pass from crisis to crisis. What made me able to survive these abrupt switches of fortune...was an underlying wonderment at my own transformation. No worldly distemper could obliterate my sense of the mysterious alchemical nature of the world, its ravishing possibilities, the chances for turning an idea into a fact.

Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror it was not in self-admiration or self-congratulation but in disbelief. Yes, I looked beautiful. I was told this so many times that it ceased to affect me. This is not quite the same as saying it was unimportant. One may cease to be sensitive to such flattery only to find oneself sensitive to the absence of it. ...The great gift is to feel beautiful. I never felt beautiful before the operation. And after it? Hardly a day passes without my being astonished and exalted by what was possible for me. I resist the temptation to thank God, just as I resisted the temptation to deify Dr Burou (too many sex-changes develop God-fixations on their surgeon). None the less, the fact of my transformation is a continuing source of strength.

April has some beauty tips to offer:

...without make-up my whole face is blank. It is a plain canvas on which I can paint almost anything. I'm sure that's why I gave up painting, because my face became my canvas. Making-up is also my meditation in the concentration of which I compose my inner self.

• Eyes: masses of blusher under the eyes to take away any bags or dark circles. My top eyelashes grow straight downwards and without make-up the eyes look quite small. So I apply plenty of mascara, rolling the lashes again and again to make them curl upwards. And this opens up the eyes enormously. Everyone thinks I have huge eyes but I haven't, it's an optical illusion. My eyes are deep set, so I favour a dark eye-shadow to bring them out. This also makes the irises appear much darker than they really are, almost black in fact. To separate the eyes, I thicken all the lines slightly towards the temples. Eye-shadow carried above the eyelids raises the eyebrows. My eyebrows are very high up anyway and excellently shaped with the minimum of plucking.
• Nose: I have a slightly retroussé nose and since I detest such noses I put a little white on the tip of it to make it look straight.
• Mouth: the best thing in the world for making a mouth look young is to have a very precise one. My mouth was never very precise at the best of times, so I outline it in dark pencil, then fill it in with lipstick. Then I cover it with gloss to make it last all night. The best ever was California Gloss by Max Factor. Can't we get it back? I can't imagine why they discontinued it.
• Skin: only two commandments. Clean it and feed it. That's all. Once a day before bed, with cold cream and moisturiser. Diet is not crucial. A bad diet won't necessarily kill a good skin, but it pays to be reasonable. If you drink, a lot of moisturising is essential. Alcohol, champagne most of all, is very dehydrating. Hard-drinking men would look far less haggard if they fed their skin.
• Hair: I had a lot of white in my hair which I wasn't inclined to hide. But with the place fogged with cigarette smoke, it would turn a vile yellow. So regularly I'd blue rinse it which brought up the white a pale blue and made the black very black.
• Clothes: always long because the patrons expected glamour. I was the main attraction and so of course went overboard. Once I wore jeans to work and some Americans who'd brought friends in to see me in all my finery were frightfully disappointed. They said they felt cheated, as if the understudy were on for the night, so I didn't do it.
• Shoes: the staff reckoned I walked five miles a night up and down the tables. With all that walking, you must provide the foot with a norm. Chopping and changing of height and weight and shape would soon ruin the feet. So virtually all my shoes were the same high-heeled evening sandals from the Chelsea Cobbler, in a variety of colours to match various outfits. They were very light and made from kid.

She began a rather successful career in modelling, and mixed in "all the right circles". But then the benighted tabloids caught up with her story, and the resulting furore and scandal forced April to leave for pastures new, in Spain. Her various adventures provide a fantastically gossipy and super-camp read, not least about some of the many exotic characters she encountered on her travels...

I flew to Madrid and checked into the Palace Hotel for six weeks. I spent my free time in the Museo del Prado, or at the cinema improving my Spanish, or chatting with the ex-Queen of Albania at Carita's Hair Salon - 'How's King Zog, dear?'

She hung out with Omar Sharif, Peter O'Toole and the rest while they were in Spain filming Lawrence of Arabia, and this brought with it some fascinating insights:

With a few wood and cardboard minarets Seville had been turned into a convincing pastiche of Cairo. The Military H.Q. scenes were being shot either at the Military Academy or at the Duchess of Medinaceli's palace. During the shooting at the palace a cable snapped, swung down, and demolished an important-looking statue. How could they tell the Duchess? Since she had a pash for Jack Hawkins, he was delegated to break the appalling news. 'Don't worry,' she said, 'it's only Roman.'

I was introduced to Peter's stand-in, John Fulton Short. All the stand-in does is get lit because he is of a physical type similar to the star's. But John was a personality in his own right, being the first American to achieve full matador status. Peter took me to John's flat hung with his paintings done in bull's blood. John explained why in the ring bullfighters do not wear underpants. Since the male genitalia are substantially composed of gristle, there is in the event of being gored a greater chance of those vitals sliding aside undamaged if they are unconfined.

We would never have known that without Miss Ashley!

It seems she met and socialised with just about anybody who was anybody over the years - from Princess Margaret to The Beatles, from Amanda Lear when she was a man(!) to Charlotte Rampling; Peter Sellers, Ozzie Clark, David Bailey, Kim Novak, Hermione Gingold, Mick Jagger, Viscount Maugham, Lord-and-Lady this, Baron-and-Baroness that, various Churchills, Philippe Jullian, Liza Minnelli...

...for kitschiness Danny La Rue's house couldn't compete with Lionel Bart's. Lionel had a musical staircase which played selections from Oliver when you walked up it. He also had a musical lavatory. It played Food, Glorious Food when you flushed it by depressing a large gold crown.

There were distressing times, too, of course - not least the shocking legal wrangle she had with her (somewhat crazy) first husband when trying to divorce him; the judgement of the court being that as her sex change was null-and-void in their eyes, so was the marriage. Business deals came and went, badly, for April. A later heart attack led her to seek a quieter life in the eccentric town of Hay-on-Wye (whose leading book trader declared it a new kingdom, himself ruler and April his consort).



However, she's not yet retired. She was legally recognised as a female after the passage of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act in 2004, and issued a new birth certificate with help from Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, an old friend. In 2006 she published a new memoir The First Lady - which she promoted as even more candid and revelatory than April's Odyssey. It was withdrawn from print, apparently, for some reason - but that has only piqued my interest even more. She was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) in 2012. An exhibition dedicated to her was hosted at the Museum of Liverpool last year - and there's even a film of her life (still in pre-production, it seems) to come...

April Ashley - Portrait of a Lady

Many happy returns, April Ashley, MBE (born 29th April 1935).

Gender Transgressor

From the National Portrait Gallery's description of the above painting by by Thomas Stewart (previously mistakenly held to be a portrait of an unknown woman, before being cleaned and revealing the unmistakable five o'clock shadow):

A soldier, diplomat and transvestite, the Chevalier d'Éon was one of the most colourful and celebrated characters in eighteenth-century Britain. Although born in France, he lived in London from 1762-1777 as a man, and from 1786-1810 as a woman. During both these periods he was a noted figure in international politics, high society and popular culture.

d'Éon first came to London in 1762 as part of the French Embassy and helped negotiate the Peace of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War. Despite being awarded the Croix de St Louis, he refused to return to France when recalled. Instead, d'Éon published secret correspondence that revealed French ministerial corruption and blackmailed the French King by threatening to disclose secret information about French invasion plans. To silence him, Louis XVI offered him an official pension in 1775 but made the unprecedented condition that d'Éon should henceforth dress as a woman. This command was probably due to rumours, encouraged by d'Éon himself, that he was a woman. He reputedly attended cross-dressing balls during a previous diplomatic mission to Russia and bought corsets for himself while living as a man in London.

d'Éon’s new identity as a woman brought him even greater fame. He returned to Britain in 1785 and forged a new career performing fencing demonstrations. Popular prints show him fencing in a black dress like the one in this portrait, and, as here, he wore his Croix de St Louis during these fights. In England there was constant speculation and wagering about his sex. It was even the subject of a court trial that declared d'Éon to be a woman. Because the stereotype of a woman dressing as a man to join the army, often in pursuit of her sweetheart was widely recognised, the idea of d'Éon as a woman was accepted. Despite his lack of feminine ‘delicacy’, he was upheld by pioneering feminists such as Mary Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft as a shining example of ‘female fortitude’ to which British women might aspire.

The Stewart portrait is a copy of one painted by Jean-Laurent Mosnier in 1791. It shows d'Éon at the height of his fame, wearing the full cockade of a supporter of the French Revolution. In 1792, the year of this copy, d'Éon wrote to the new French National Assembly, offering to lead an army of ‘Amazon’ women against France’s enemies. This letter was widely reported in the British press and d'Éon was praised for his courage and patriotism. His sympathy for the new regime in France ended, however, with the execution of the French royal family.

d'Éon’s celebrity status was in itself a considerable achievement. He was the first openly-transvestite man in British history and no transvestite or transsexual, until the late twentieth century, has enjoyed such public recognition. The Annual Register wrote of him, "It must indeed be acknowledged that she is the most extraordinary person of the age ... we have seen no one who has united so many military, political, and literary talents."

And so it was that I attended last Friday - as another part of the fantabulosa Camden & Islington LGBT History Month series of events - a special evening dedicated to this extraordinary creature (at St Pancras Hospital, itself host to the annual LGBT art show "Loudest Whispers", and immediately adjacent to the churchyard where the Chevalier was eventually interred). One of the speakers at the event - Chevalier d'Éon: Gender Transgressor - was artist and transman Simon Croft, whose own artwork The d'Éon Gambit is a centrepiece of the exhibition.



From Diva magazine:

Croft has carefully crafted a chess board - 'The d'Éon Gambit' (named after the sacrifice of a piece or pieces in order to gain advantage in the game overall - particularly relevant to the Chevalier's life, one might say) - where each playing piece represents a different aspect of the Chevalier's life: d'Éon is both the King and Queen symbolising his/her dual gender presentation and close relationship with the French King; the Knight is represented by the Croix de St Louis; the Rook by a sword hilt; the Bishop by St Pelagius, symbolising d'Éon's strong religious beliefs and the many references in his/her autobiography to such gender transgressing religious figures as precedents for his/her own situation; and the Pawns are represented by the Burdett-Coutts memorial in St. Pancras Old Church churchyard, where the Chevalier's name can be seen second from the top on one of the sides.

Despite using 3D printing techniques, Croft's playing pieces have remained, almost contradictorily, relatively 2D. They look both fragile and delicate hanging above a shattered board. Croft often works with this distinction between 2D and 3D, between concrete identity and variable viewpoints. A 3D object, squashed flat and restricted to one angle, may then, when hung, as these pieces are, cast literal shadows of doubt over their superficial appearance.

d'Éon left behind an autobiography, which remained unpublished until 2001. Written in French, and very much for a contemporary public, d'Éon self-refers with a mixture of masculine and feminine terms. Much of the content can be independently verified, but it is clear that some stories were invented or altered to suit the self-presentation s/he sought at different times.

In the book, d'Éon presents the life of a female-to-male transvestite (claiming to have been born a girl and raised a boy), whereas the truth seems instead to be that s/he was born and raised a boy, later choosing to live as a woman (thus, a male-to-female transgendered life). What is apparent is that d'Éon's life blurred gender binaries and we can only guess at his/her true sense of gender identity and what that might have meant at the time.

The discussion itself - chaired by art critic and writer Anna McNay, and featuring Simon Croft in conversation with LGBT sociologist Natacha Kennedy - was utterly compelling.



Mr Croft talked at length about how perceptions of gender identity shape his work and that of many other artists, ancient and modern. In particular he is keen to direct artists' attention away from the traditional "gender-bending" or "androgynous" attitudes to portraying the transgendered body, and instead to encourage more examples of abstract or unconventional representation of trans experiences and attitudes in their art.

Ms Kennedy took the discussion into another direction altogether, drawing upon the eternal paradigms of "nature vs nurture", societal attitudes, psychosexual theories (the term "Eonism" was used by Havelock Ellis to describe trans people in the nineteenth century), contrasts between cultures, and the perception of "self" in the West since the Enlightenment to draw a parallel between the conundrums in the story of the Chevalier and the difficulties faced by trans people even in today's supposedly "tolerant" times.

The audience discussion (it was very well attended for an event of its type, especially on a Friday evening) was particularly stimulating and, I felt, contributed a lot to what might otherwise have been perceived as a very "niche" topic of interest.

Having been fascinated by the fabled Chevalier d'Éon for many, many years, I was pleased to have been a participant in such an important event.

Further reading:

• The Chevalier d'Éon and his Worlds: Gender, Espionage and Politics in the Eighteenth Century by Simon Burrows, Jonathan Conlin, Russell Goulbourne, Valerie Mainz.
• The Maiden of Tonnerre: The Vicissitudes of the Chevalier and the Chevalière d'Éon by Professor Charles d'Éon de Beaumont, Professor Roland A. Champagne, Professor Nina Claire Ekstein, Professor Gary Kates.

Facts:

• The Beaumont Society, a long standing organisation for transgender people, is named after the Chevalier d'Éon.
• Remarkably, some of the best-kept papers left by the Chevalier are held at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.