Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton – A Biography of Jazz Era Music That Reads Like a Detective Story - Softcover

Middlebrook, Diane Wood

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395957893 ISBN 13: 9780395957899

Publisher: Mariner Books, 1999

Synopsis

The jazz pianist Billy Tipton was born in Oklahoma City as Dorothy Tipton, but almost nobody knew the truth until the day he died, in Spokane in 1989. Over a fifty-year performing career, Billy Tipton fooled nearly everyone, including Duke Ellington and Norma Teagarden, five successive "wives" with whom Billy lived as a man, and three children who he "fathered." As Billy Tipton herself said, "Some people might think I'm a freak or a hermaphrodite. I'm not. I'm a normal person. This has been my choice." This jazz-era biography evokes the rich popular-music history of the Great Depression and reads like a detective story.

About this title

About the Author

Diane Wood Middlebrook is the author of several volumes of poetry and criticism as well as the prizewinning bestseller Anne Sexton: A Biography. The recipient of many fellowships and awards, she is a professor emeritus at Stanford University, where she has also served as the director of the center for research on women.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Suits Me

The Double Life of Billy TiptonBy Diane Wood Middlebrook

Mariner Books

Copyright © 1999 Diane Wood Middlebrook
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0395957893

Chapter One

Born Naked

21 January 1989

You're born naked and the rest is drag.
-- Drag queen RuPaul, Lettin' It All Hang Out

ONE SATURDAY MORNING in January 1989, an emergency call summonedparamedics to a trailer park on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington,the home of Billy Tipton, an aging white jazz musician. Tipton hadbeen very ill, too weak to leave his bed, but had resisted allattempts to get him to a doctor. His adopted teenage son, William,had been looking after him. That morning, after carrying Billy to thebathroom, William had closed the door and, out of earshot, telephonedhis mother, Kitty. They hadn't spoken for nearly a year. Divorce haddispersed the family almost a decade earlier, and Kitty had remarried,but she could still be counted on in a crisis. She advised William todial 911 and have Billy moved to a hospital. William made the call,then went to carry his father to the breakfast table. Billy Tiptongave a deep sigh and slumped against his son, unconscious.

    That sigh was a secret escaping. The medics arrived almostimmediately, lay Tipton on the floor of the trailer, squatted overhim, and opened his pajamas to feel for a heartbeat. One of themturned to William and asked, "Son, did your father have a sex change?"William stepped forward and caught a glimpse of his father's upperbody, then stumbled back against the screen door and down thetrailer's steps. What had he seen? "I was in awe. I had no thoughts--justlooked up at the sky, thinking it was some hallucination fromdrugs. If my father had lived as a woman, she would have had bigbreasts."

    Nobody but Billy had seen that nude torso for about forty years,not even the women who had lived with him as wives. Billy was a veryprivate person, they explained later. He invariably locked thebathroom, where he washed and dressed. People who knew his habits knewthat he always wore binding on his chest to support the ribs that hadbeen fractured when the front end of a Buick had plowed into hisbody -- or so he said.

    And many, many people knew Billy Tipton. Spokane had been one ofthe regular stops on his trio's circuit in the early 1950s, during thebrief heyday of legal gambling in private clubs in Washington State,when a band could make a good living backing strippers, magicians,jugglers, tap dancers, any sort of variety act that would drawcustomers into the clubs to drink and play the slot machines. In 1958,Billy settled in Spokane, and the Billy Tipton Trio became the houseband at a downtown nightclub called Allen's Tin Pan Alley. Billybought a house in the Spokane Valley and started earning a secondincome as an agent in the Dave Sobol Theatrical Agency, booking themusicians.

    In Spokane, out of professional respect, Billy Tipton was referredto as a jazz musician. He referred to himself as an entertainer, forhe had long before given up trying to make a living at jazz, though hesmuggled it into floorshows he worked up with other members of histrio, playing a repertory of swing standards on saxophone and piano.Oklahoman by birth, he was attuned to the stingy provincial audienceshe had to please in Spokane, and he had a flair for showmanship. As anemcee, he adopted the gregarious style of the businessmen who wereregular customers at the clubs, and female fans were attracted by hisboyish good looks and his meticulous style of dress.

    After Billy married Kitty in 1962, they adopted three sons andinvolved themselves in the PTA and the Boy Scouts. In his work lifetoo Billy was an exemplary citizen. If a charity wanted to hold adance or a fellow musician was down on his luck, Billy Tipton was theone who would organize a benefit. He led an active public life in thecommunity for thirty years.

    But by the time of his death, Billy was almost destitute. Not muchbusiness walked through the doors of the booking agency, where hestill worked on commission. He showed up in a fresh shirt everymorning nonetheless, with a joke on the tip of his tongue to greetanyone who dropped by the seedy little office. He was a heavy smokerand chronically short of breath, and often quipped that ulcers andhemorrhoids were occupational hazards in the music business, but hebrushed off questions about his health. Untreated, hemorrhaging ulcersfinally killed him.

    Billy Lee Tipton was pronounced dead in the emergency room ofValley General Hospital that Saturday, never having regainedconsciousness, leaving a mystery as his most substantial legacy. Hewas dead. But who was she?

    A buzz began after the autopsy on the Monday afternoon followingBilly's death. The autopsy report, written by a pathologist aware ofBilly's history, established that the body was that of a normalbiological female past menopause. The coroner signed the pathologist'sreport, then placed a call to a local journalist offering a scoop."Get hold of Billy Tipton's death certificate," he told thejournalist. Billy had been a prominent figure in the entertainmentbusiness in Spokane. Didn't the public have a right to know?

    One person who didn't think so was Billy's former wife Kitty, nowMrs. Robert Oakes. She contacted a funeral director, swore him andhis staff to secrecy, and arranged for cremation of the body. When shelearned that the local newspaper was planning to publish the discoveryof Billy's hidden identity, she paid a visit to the managing editorand demanded privacy for the family. But one of Billy's sons hadalready granted an interview, and this constituted sufficient familypermission to override Kitty's objections. The editor compromised byholding the story until after Billy's memorial service the followingMonday, and by keeping it off the front page. "Jazz Musician SpentLife Concealing Fantastic Secret" was published Tuesday morning, 31January, in the newspaper's regional section.

    The wire services picked up the story at once. Even the New YorkTimes carried a respectful, faintly marveling obituary for BillyTipton. Media companies followed with proposals for feature films andmade-for-TV movies, and Kitty and the three Tipton sons were greatly indemand for talk-show appearances.

    The spotlights revealed a family at war, with the two older sons,John and Scott, allied against William, the youngest, and Kitty. Atabloid published a story called "My Husband Was a Woman and I NeverKnew," in which Kitty said she believed that she and Billy had beenlegally married and legally divorced and that she had never beenphysically intimate with Billy because of her own poor health. The twoolder sons claimed that they had not known Billy's sex -- "He'll always beDad to me," said John -- though before Billy's death, both had begunusing the family names of their biological mothers as aliases. ButJohn and Scott did not believe Kitty's claim to ignorance aboutBilly's identity. Calling Kitty "a fake," they assigned the rights totheir story to a film company. The enmity between the two camps waspoignantly expressed after Billy's cremation by a division of hisashes into two boxes, one entrusted to John and Scott and the other toWilliam. As a journalist observed, "Even now, ironically, there aretwo Billy Tiptons."

    As many of the articles written about Billy Tipton pointed out,Billy was not unique in solving an economic problem or seizing atempting opportunity just by donning trousers. Throughout history,women had been putting on men's work clothes in order to perform workreserved for men. Some went to sea, like the Pirate Jenny of KurtWeill's song, who had a number of real-life counterparts. Some went towar; a nurse who served during the American Civil War estimated thatshe had observed as many as four hundred cross-dressing women in theUnion Army alone. Some wrote their memoirs. Among the most colorful onrecord is a Spanish nun named Catalina de Erauso, born in 1592, whofled the convent to become a soldier in Panama and, after disclosingher sex, received papal dispensation to continue wearing men'sclothes. In old age, she wrote a tell-all autobiography that wasadapted for the stage. The French writers George Sand, in thenineteenth century, and Colette, in the twentieth, also cross-dressedand told. But some of the cross-dressers we know about were exposed,like Billy Tipton, only after their death. James Miranda Stuart Barry(1795-1863), for example, served as a physician and surgeon forforty-six years in the Medical Department of the British Army, wherehe rose to the rank of inspector general. The attendant who laid outthe body for burial discovered Barry's sex, but the information wassuppressed in order to preserve the dignity of the army. Dr. Barry iscredited with performing the first successful cesarean delivery in theBritish Empire and is now recognized as the first British womanphysician, but of course conducted this medical career entirely in theguise of a man.

    But Billy Tipton was not history, Billy was today, and with nocredible explanation for his motivations coming from anyone close tothe source, the world was free to make of Billy Tipton what it would.The world was ready. During the years in which Billy's style of musichad been going out of fashion in the entertainment business, gender hadcome into its own as a theme in art and politics. The very term"gender" was now a marker on the grave of venerable assumptions aboutthe importance of sex difference. Billy Tipton literally became aposter boy for raising consciousness about the confusion of sex(biological) and gender (culturally meaningful physical and socialattributes) when, shortly after his death, his image appeared in SanFrancisco on the cover of a how-to book addressed to cross-dressersand transsexuals. Artists, too, appropriated Billy as a symbol. Agroup of avant-garde female jazz musicians from Seattle dubbedthemselves the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet; Billy'sobituary provided the story line for an opera titled Billy, producedin Olympia, the capital of Washington State. Thinly disguised versionsof Billy's story also formed the plots of several plays that receivedwide critical attention. One, titled Stevie, by Eduardo Machado, wasstaged at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles by the British actor andproducer Simon Callow. Another, The Slow Drag, by Carson Kreitzer, wasproduced Off Broadway in New York and as cabaret theater in London.Academic researchers immediately took an interest in explaining Billy,while on the Internet, Billy's name became shorthand for a whole hostof issues among groups with list names across a range ofidentifications from "sappho" (lesbians) to "boychicks" and "f2mlist"(female-to-male transgenderists).

Generalizations and symbols will take us only so far in thinking aboutan individual life, however. What could be learned about Billy'sreasons for adopting men's clothing and a masculine identity? Billy,it turned out, had left plenty of clues, beginning with a legal will.Early in their marriage, Billy and Kitty Tipton had owned a certainamount of property. With a lawyer's assistance, Billy had drawn up awill in 1965, after the adoption of their first child; updated it in1971, after the adoption of their youngest son; and updated it againin 1982, after he and Kitty separated. In every version of the will,Kitty was named executor of the estate. By the time Billy died, hisestate consisted mainly of debts, plus the alto and soprano saxophoneshe had never pawned and the diamond ring he had always worn whileplaying the piano. Those relics of his career in show business wentto William. The older sons, John and Scott, were acknowledged with onedollar each.

    The other documents found in Billy's files revealed mainly howshrewd he had been in avoiding the attention of officialdom. He had asocial security number but lived in poverty during his last yearsrather than claim benefits. No marriage or divorce was ever recordedfor the William L. or Billy Lee Tipton in question, though, as wouldlater be discovered, a sequence of women had called themselves Mrs.Tipton on their driver's licenses. Wisely, Billy had generated fewmedical records, since the intention to pass as a man would have beendiagnosed as pathological during most of his lifetime. Not muchevidence of Billy's inner life was to be found, either. There was nopersonal journal among his papers, and only a few letters survive fromamong the hundreds written to family members during the years Billyspent on the road, traveling with various bands.

    Nor had much of Billy Tipton's art been recorded for posterity: acouple of demo tapes from the 1940s, a couple of LPs on generic labelsproduced during the late 1950s. Billy had not made a serious effort tobecome a recording star and had mainly earned his living playing dancemusic of the kind popularized by small jazz ensembles in the 1930s and1940s. At his best, he sounded as much as possible like BennyGoodman's piano player Teddy Wilson. If Billy Tipton possessed ameasure of Teddy Wilson's talent, however, he did not strive for TeddyWilson's visibility. On the occasions when success approached, Billyretreated.

    Yes, Billy had covered her tracks. Yet a collection of personalletters found among her professional memorabilia suggests that at theend, Billy decided to let her accomplishments be known. She had beenin contact with two affectionate women cousins, whom Kitty had nevereven heard about before Billy's death. The cousins, it turned out, hadbeen actively corresponding with Billy for years and knew all aboutBilly's family life: the marriage to Kitty, the adoption of thechildren, the divorce. For the past several years, they had beentrying to persuade Billy to join them in the Midwest and take up lifeas a woman again -- the woman they still called Dorothy. Why had Billyturned down the opportunity to slip away once her sons were grown?Wasn't it because she wanted to take a posthumous bow? The youngmusicians Billy booked at the Sobol agency recalled Billy's storiesabout the old days in the music business, traveling with the likes ofJack Teagarden, Bernie Cummins, Russ Carlyle, Scott Cameron. Thestories were not always true, but they show us that Billy hoped to beremembered as belonging to a legendary era in American music, even though herparticipation required a lifelong disguise. The dramatic way she surrenderedher secret at the time of her death suggests that she wanted the disguiseto become part of the record too.

    Billy Tipton had come of age as a musician at the same time thattechnology was inventing ways to separate the musician's body from themusician's sound. Take the case of Teddy Wilson, Billy's idol, one ofthe first black men to play with a prominent group of predominatelywhite artists. Benny Goodman's integrated orchestra reached its hugeaudiences over the radio and on records. The music flowed right intothe bodies of white listeners without rousing the necessity to condemnthis kind of intimacy with the black man. Billy Tipton probably madethe acquaintance of Teddy Wilson's elegant piano style in 1936,listening on a car radio to Camel Caravan, broadcast over CBS from NewYork. Billy studied Wilson's recordings until he could imitateWilson's style, and later, when he had a small group of his own,adopted the Goodman quartet's "Flying Home" as a theme song. ForBilly, the title of this song was loaded with private meanings thatreached back into her childhood as Dorothy and evoked her relationshipwith her father, an aviator. But the Billy Tipton Trio's imitation ofthe Goodman group's "Flying Home" was purely practical, for bands likeBilly's succeeded best when they most closely duplicated the recordedsound of jazz celebrities. At the peak of Billy's career, everysuccessful small-time musician was to some extent a skilledimpersonator. For instance, Billy's trio often performed "Exactly LikeYou," made famous by Louis Armstrong. Billy caught the multiplemeanings of this clever title early in her career as a musician, andimprovised on it for the rest of her life, in undetected drag.

    Undoing Billy's disguise raises intriguing questions. Billy workedalmost exclusively with men, in close quarters, for years at astretch. Happily, the plot of Billy's story lets us watch one woman'sbold solution to gaining a certain amount of recognition in what waslargely a man's world. But how did she compensate for being raised asa girl and trained to play music as a girl? Would a professionalcareer have been possible if Billy had lived openly as a woman? Afterall those years of playing a man, was Billy a woman, or just female?

    Other questions rise in the wake of what can be learned about Billy'ssexual practices. His former wife Kitty assumed that because there wasno sex in their marriage, there was no sex in Billy's story."Everybody wants to know the wrong thing," she often said in responseto intrusive questions about their private life. But Kitty was onlythe last woman in Billy's life to be called Mrs. Tipton -- the last ofat least five. At least one of these women knew that Billy was awoman; at least two of them made love with Billy for years thinkingthat Billy was a man. What is really the "wrong" thing in Billy'sstory, then -- deceitfulness? Gaining erotic satisfaction from women whowould not have permitted the same intimacies if they had known Billy'ssex? And what did Billy want? What was in it for her when she chosenot only to adopt the role of a man but to play it in every scene,including those we think of as the most confiding?

    Precisely because we can gain so little access to Billy's thoughtsand feelings, to answer such questions we have to direct our gazetoward Billy's skills as an artist. The most important of these was agift for mimicry. Billy deployed well-worn vaudeville traditions ofimpersonation in the nightclub skits he wrote. He parodied ElvisPresley and Liberace, and he played rubes ("Goofus," "Cindy") and kids("Little Playmate," "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth").Billy never impersonated adult women, but he frequently donned asunbonnet to play the role of little girl in acts such as "My WubbaDolly" and "Little Nell." Hidden under the broad comedy of thesestandard routines was an actor's talent for adopting and using thebody language of another person. Billy was both acting the role andacting the actor who played it.

    Billy's near-lifelong stint of male impersonation seems on firstimpression akin to the overt use of drag by contemporary performanceartists, such as David Bowie's androgynous persona Ziggy Stardust. Ortransvestite supermodel RuPaul's how-to interviews on hispersonification of a glamour queen. Or Madonna's impersonation ofMichael Jackson. Or Laurie Anderson's cool, technologically assisted,sporadic appropriations of masculinity onstage. All of these artistsmake visible the stylizations by which gender is communicated as"natural."

    But Billy is different. A perpetual improviser, never out ofcharacter, Billy drew her material from the gender fundamentalism ofeveryday life: the general belief that gender difference arises fromanatomical sex difference in human beings and that gendered behavioris the natural outcome of sex difference. Playing a sequence of roleshistorically reserved for the "opposite" sex, Billy demonstrated by heraccomplishment that gender, unlike sex, is in large part aperformance: she was the actor, he was the role. And if her first actof cross-dressing was a brilliant, problem-solving prank, Billyquickly found that being taken for a man provided access to almosteverything she wanted -- music, travel, the love of adventurous andcaretaking women.

    Inevitably, death ended the act and exposed the actor. Billy wasprepared. An adept illusionist to the end, she had done away with hersex-concealing gear, for the trailer was empty of the jockstrap andbindings familiar to Billy's wives and sons. Billy had prepared toemerge from behind his screen like the Wizard of Oz, to dissolve themagic into wisdom, revealing by her nakedness in death that the"difference" between men and women is largely in the eye of thebeholder. And locked away in Billy's office closet, along with thecarefully worded and updated will, was the record of a lifetime'sachievements: clippings and photographs documenting the transformationof Billy from she to he and the annotated routines, musicalarrangements, and program notes in which Billy makes eye contact withposterity. These professional files show how, night after night, Billyscattered clues and riddles about the drag she wore, including risquegags about homosexuality and jokes that called attention to thecostume. Some have been placed at the heads of chapters and on theendpapers of this book, as though they were Billy's own comments onthe story, for her handwritten versions convey an artist's pride incraft and discipline. They suggest that Billy was anticipating ouradmiration of her skill, our curiosity about her strategies, and, yes,our pursuit of her secrets.

Continues...

Excerpted from Suits Meby Diane Wood Middlebrook Copyright © 1999 by Diane Wood Middlebrook. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395957893
• ISBN 13: 9780395957899
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 326