Two own-voice impersonators

Sometimes we get only a snapshot of a person, and never find out what happened to them later.   Here are two trans woman surviving as performers, who are incidentally mentioned in books on other topics.  This is all that we have of them.

Loretta Zotto (193? - ?)

During the filming of Trouble Along the Way, 1953, about a failing Catholic college that employs a has-been sports coach (John Wayne) trying to regain his lost wife and daughter, director MichaelCurtiz (who made Casablanca and Mildred Pierce) was noticed spending time with Loretta Zotto, an extra on the cast.   Zotto was tall, beautiful, well-endowed and was compared to film-star Jane Russell.   

One night Judy Garland, Peter Lawford and Merv Griffin (who had an uncredited voice part in the film) went to the West Hollywood club, Tabu.   Judy said: “I hear there's a drag queen there who does Judy Garland better than I do”.   

They sat through three ho-hum acts, and then the star, billed as Stormy Weather, came on and performed “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St Louis, 1944 and “Over the Rainbow”.   Judy graciously conceded that Stormy sang “Over the Rainbow” better than she did.   Merv recognized Stormy, instantly, as Loretta Zotto from the film set, and Peter scored a date with her, and reported back to the other two on Stormy’s actual genital sex.   

Merv blew his chances of a better, bigger part in Michael Curtiz’s next film by telling him that they knew.

• Darwin Porter.  Merv Griffin: A life in the Closet.  Blood Moon, 2009: 213-4.

Ruth Brown (194? - )

Ruth had a troubled career, divided between church gospel, drag bars and jail.  She  took the name of the well-known rhythm and blues singer, Ruth Brown, and was even presented in a night-club as if she were the Ruth Brown (several cis women also were so presented in other nightclubs).  

She was at the Stonewall riots, and performed at Harlem drag balls.

In 1976 Marion Williams, the gospel and blues singer, appearing at New York’s Town Hall encouraged the audience to sing along, but they were unable to match her range.   It was Ruth who stepped down from the balcony and sang a duet with Marion. 

A few years later, when Anthony Heilbut had produced Marion’s album I’ve Come So Far, a group of critics and fans were invited to hear her sing.   Among them were a group of what were taken to be church ladies, but were not.  Among them was Ruth who led the ladies in holy dance.   

Heilbut then got to know Ruth. In the late 1980s, he accepted her invitation to hear her sing at Sally’s Hideaway.  He describes her act: 

“She was indeed a powerhouse, a combination of Wilson Picket and Little Richard, but better than either.  She sang a typical soul repertory, including songs that predated her audience.”

·         William G Hawkeswood.  One of the Children: Gay Black Men in Harlem.  University of California Press,1996 :86.

·         Chip Deffaa.  Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues.  University of Illinois Press,1996: 263n9.

·         Anthony Heilbut.  The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations.  Alfred A Knopf, 2012: 22-5, 30, 34-5, 48, 70, 109.

Ralph Greenson (1911 – 1979) UCLA psychoanalyst

Romeo Greenschpoon was raised in Brooklyn, by parents who were immigrants from Russia. His physician father, a Shakespeare enthusiast, had named his twins Romeo and Juliet, which created some ribbing. The boy changed his first name to Ralph.

Ralph did pre-med at Columbia University. There being discrimination against Jews at US medical schools, he studied medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and graduated in 1934. Ralph also married a Swiss woman, Hildi, and they moved to Los Angeles for Ralph to do an internship at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. They anglicised their surname to Greenson in 1937.

Ralph Greenson returned to Europe to become a psychoanalyst and was analysed in Vienna by Wilhelm Steckel (a maverick in the psychoanalysis movement, who coined the term ‘paraphilia’ which was later popularized by John Money, and who distinguished transvestism from fetishism). However 12 March 1938 saw the Anschluß Österreichs, the Nazi takeover of Austria. Steckel and his wife immediately fled via Switzerland to England. Greenson returned to Los Angeles, and resumed analysis with Otto Fenichel (an orthodox Freudian, who had written about transvestites needing a fantasy of girls with penises).

Greenson enrolled in the US Army in 1942, and initially worked in a veterans' hospital in New York state, until he cracked his skull while working in a military ambulance. This exempted him from overseas service and he served as chief of the neuropsychiatric unit at the Army Air Force Convalescent Hospital in Fort Logan, Colorado, where he became known for his work with soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress. He also observed gambling among US officers, and wrote a paper on it for the psychoanalytical journal American Imago.

Back in Los Angeles as a civilian, in 1946 Greenson bought a house at 902 Franklin Street in Santa Monica from Eunice and John Murray who could no longer afford it. The Murrays divorced, and Eunice was hired by Greenson as his housekeeper, assistant and sometimes companion for his clients.
 
He was a founding member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and was appointed to the faculty of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) medical school. A gifted raconteur, he became one of the best-known psychoanalysts in Los Angeles, famous for his lectures and teaching. Greenson was also a violinist and he and some friends held a weekly salon where they played chamber music. He became friendly with screenwriter and novelist Leo Rosten (1911-1997), also Jewish and from New York who was the brother-in-law of Margaret Mead. Psychoanalysis was then in vogue and Rosten recommended Greenson as an analyst to his Hollywood friends – Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Vivien Leigh came to Greenson’s private practice. Greenson suffered a heart attack in 1955, and afterwards he worked from home in the afternoons: many of his better-known clients who didn’t want to be spotted entering a medical facility, preferred to see him there.

In February 1960, during the filming of the movie Let’s Make Love, co-starring Yves Montand and with a script revised by her husband Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe (born 1926) had a breakdown, and her New York psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, recommend that Greenson be brought in on a temporary basis. He had fifteen sessions with her 11 February to 12 March, and was appalled by the drugs that she was taking. Greenson was considered daring in accepting Monroe because of her suicide attempts. Other psychiatrists had had their careers damaged after a patient’s suicide, and Monroe was so famous. In addition Greenson was overworked. He had already had a heart attack, and had cut down on the number of his patients, but he still taught classes at UCLA, supervised psychiatrists in training, and served on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In late August Monroe returned to Los Angeles from Nevada where she was filming The Misfits, again from a script by Arthur Miller, and Greenson revised her drug prescription. After the film she returned to New York, and in between dates with the newly elected John F Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, she saw her psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, forty-seven times in two months.

In January 1961 Kris had Monroe committed to a mental asylum at the New York Presbyterian Hospital. Only the dramatic intervention of her previous husband, the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, got her out. She no longer wanted to continue therapy with Kris, and wrote a long letter to Ralph Greenson. By June Monroe was living in Los Angeles and seeing Greenson as often as five times a week. It was as if her needs were insatiable. He wrote to Marianne Kris how Monroe called him at all hours, threatened suicide, and then improved, only to break down again.

“I had become a prisoner now of a form of treatment which I thought was correct for her but almost impossible for me”.

Leo Rosten wrote a 1961 novel, Captain Newman M.D, based on Greenson’s wartime experiences in Fort Logan, Colorado.

In December 1961 Greenson placed his friend and housekeeper, Eunice Murray (1902 – 1994), to be nurse and companion to Monroe. Murray had never seen a Monroe movie. Monroe was delighted to find that Murray was an excellent seamstress, as several of her clothes needed to be taken in. Monroe – who was still exploring alternate spiritualities – was fascinated to discover that Murray was a Swedenborgian. In February 1962, Murray helped Monroe look for a house, and they found an ideal one at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood, only just over a mile from the Greenson residence. Greenson’s sister’s husband, Mickey Rudin, a well-known Hollywood lawyer became Monroe’s agent. Greenson held analysis sessions with Monroe at his own house at the end of each day, which led to his inviting her to stay for meals and musical evenings, and she met his wife Hildi, and his grown children Joan and Daniel.

A 5-minute drive from Monroe's House to Greenson's

Hildi suffered a mild stroke in February, and Greenson needed a rest from Monroe. They left on 10 May for six weeks in Europe and Israel. Monroe had been dumped by John F. Kennedy, and was having difficulties with director George Cukor on Something’s Got to Give, and, against precedent, the Fox Studio executives ignored her birthday on 1 June (they were in panic that the filming in Rome of Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor was going to bankrupt them). The next day she phoned Greenson’s house and his children went round. They called Milton Wexler, psychiatrist, Greenson’s designated locum. Monroe had Murray phone Greenson in Europe, and he returned 6 June. He met with the Fox Studio executives, but to no avail. They fired her on 9 June, but by the end of the month were negotiating to get her back. She was then interviewed by Life and Cosmopolitan, and did her first photo shoot for Vogue.

At UCLA there were discussions about a new clinic, discussions that used the newly formulated expression: 'gender identity'.

Eunice Murray sometimes stayed overnight, and was doing so on the night of 4/5 August 1962. Around 3 am she suspected something to be wrong and called Greenson, who came round and broke into Monroe’s locked bedroom via the window. He found her dead from a drug overdose – this was confirmed by her physician, and the police were summoned. She was the only patient who died in Greenson’s care.

Later that year Robert Stoller, Richard Green and several UCLA psychiatrists founded the Gender Identity Research Clinic. This was the first gender clinic so named, although those at Johns Hopkins and Charing Cross had been doing pioneering work in the field without such a name. The UCLA GIRC was explicitly oriented to research, not to providing support and surgery to trans persons. While Stoller was the Director, Greenson was Senior Psychoanalytic Consultant. His son Daniel was also on the team as a Research Associate. At this point Greenson’s experience with trans persons was minimal.

The film version of Captain Newman M.D., starring Gregory Peck as the Greenson character, was released in 1963. Greenson had had his name completely removed from the credits for fear that one of his patients would sue him for the portrayal.

In 1964 Greenson presented a paper “Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation,” which is generally taken to be a thinly disguised account of Marilyn Monroe being promiscuous. Also that year he interviewed a trans woman who is assumed to have been Tamara Rees (who had completed transition in 1954). Greenson diagnosed her as in flight from homosexuality. He claimed that some persons had such a dread of their own homosexuality that it undermined their sense of gender identity: if I love a man then I must be a woman. However, Tamara Rees was then on her second marriage. She and her husband adopted children and remained together until his death decades later. This same stance re flight from homosexuality was adopted by the anti-gay psychiatrist Charles Socarides in New York a few years later.

Later that year Greenson took over from Richard Green the analysis of a five-year-old boy, whose mother had brought him in after neighbors and his teacher commented on his frequent cross-dressing. Greenson and the UCLA referred to the child as ‘Lance’. He treated Lance mainly at the swimming pool at his own home, where he even taught Lance to swim. Most of the sessions were comprised of games in the water. This helped Lance to overcome his fears about being alone with a male adult. He bought Lance a Barbie doll, but restricted its use. Apparently Lance stopped cross-dressing. As Greenson saw it, he replaced Lance playing with the doll by playing with an adult male. According to Greenson, Lance had had difficulty differentiating loving an object from wanting to be the object. Initially he had referred to the doll as ‘me’.

Stoller and Greenson refined the concept of ‘gender’ that was being used at UCLA, by using the term ‘gender identity’ to refer to “one’s sense of being a member of a particular sex”.

In his 1965 public lecture, “Masculinity and Femininity Reconsidered”, Greenson had this to say: “It is not true that girls and boys are identical in behavior until the phallic or oedipal phase. For example, girls do much more playing with dolls than do boys, and boys are more prone to be ‘blanket lovers.’ This is an indication of a greater tendency to fetishism in boys. Boys who play with dolls are more apt to become transvestites." and “Deep analysis of fetishism and transvestitism in men, as well as deep analysis of neurotics, indicates that there exists in men a deep wish to be a woman. This is not just a wish for castration or a defense against castration anxiety; it is an indication of a special problem in individuation. In early development it becomes necessary to differentiate oneself from the mother. In individuals who fail or who do this only imperfectly there is apt to remain a need to become a woman. Both boys and girls go through a normal phase of envying mother. The girl has a special problem in changing her love object from mother to father. The boy has a special problem in changing the object of his identification from mother to father. This has important implications for the development of masculine or feminine traits.” (Nemiroff et al, p166)

In 1967 he was able to complete his The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis,which has become a classic in the field. He advocated an orthodox approach to the therapy, not such variances as he had done with Marilyn and Lance.

In 1968 Greenson proposed a developmental theory for homosexuality: “The male child, in order to attain a healthy sense of maleness, must replace the primary object of his identification, the mother, and must identify instead with the father. I believe it is the difficulties inherent in this additional step of development, from which girls are exempt, which are responsible for certain special problems in the man's gender identity, his sense of belonging to the male sex. ... The male child's ability to dis-identify will determine the success or failure of his later identification with his father.”

In 1972 Greenson gave a lecture for West German television, and surprised them by doing so in German. The English translation was entitled “A MCP Freudian Psychoanalyst Confronts Women’s Lib”. “I was first made aware of the possibility that man's envy of women was more widespread than I had anticipated by some clinical experiences that I had at the Gender Identity Research Clinic at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. In that Clinic we see patients who desire a surgical change of gender. People come there who believe they are ‘really’ a man in a woman's body or a woman in a man's body, or who simply insist they cannot live in their assigned gender and want an anatomical, surgical readjustment. Incidentally, these patients are clinically not psychotic. My theoretical training had led me to expect that, on the basis of penis envy, most of the patients would be women hoping to achieve a male habitus. To my surprise, two-thirds of the patients were men desiring to be transformed into women. The wish in men to be a woman is far more widespread than the conscious attitudes of men and women indicate, and more than the psychoanalytic literature would lead one to expect. Incidentally, transvestism, masquerading in the clothes of the opposite sex, only occurs in men, not in women.’ (Nemiroff et al, p260)

Greenson died age 68 in 1987.

The Greenson papers on Monroe and other celebrity and rich clients have been filed with the Special Collections at UCLA and will not will available to the public until 2039.

• Ralph R Greenson. “On Gambling”. American Imago, 4,2, April 1947: 61-77.
• Leo Rosten. Captain Newman, M.D. Fawcett Publications, 1961. A novel based on the wartime experiences of Rosten’s friend Ralph Greenson, and issues with empathy and post-traumatic stress.
• David Miller (dir). Captain Newman, M.D. Scr: Richard L Breen, Phoebe Ephron, Henry Ephron, based on the novel by Leo Rosten, with Gregory Peck as Josiah J Newman. US 126 mins 1963.
• Ralph Greenson, “Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation,” presented at a conference on “Psychotherapeutic Drugs: Indications and Complications,” January 12, 1964, USLC Center for the Health Sciences.
• Ralph R. Greenson, “On Homosexuality and Gender Identity,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45, 1964. Analysis of Tamara Rees.
• Ralph R. Greenson. “A transvestite boy and a hypothesis”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 47, 1966: 396–403.
• Ralph R Greenson. The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis. International Universities Press, 1967.
• Robert Stoller. Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, Science House,1968: 144, 152-3, 161, 254, 263, 266.
• Ralph R. Greenson, "Dis-Identifying From Mother: Its Special Importance for the Boy," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 1968: 370.
• Robert J Stoller. Sex and Gender Vol II: The Transsexual Experiment. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1975: 41, 53, 104-5, 124, 293.
• Ralph R Greenson. Explorations in Psychoanalysis. International Universities Press, 1978.
• Janet Malcolm. Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. Rowman & Littlefield, 1980: 45, 74-5.
• Kenneth Lewes. The psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality. Simon and Shuster, 1988: 192, 197-8, 204, 206.
• Robert A. Nemiroff, Alan Sugarman & Alvin Robbins (eds). On Loving, Hating and Living Well: The Public Psychoanalytic Lectures of Ralph R. Greenson. Karnac, 1992.
• Luciano Mecacci. Il caso Marilyn M. e altri disastri della psicoanalis. Giuseppi Laterza & Figli, 2000. English translation by Allan Cameron. Freudian Slips: The Casualties of Psychoanalysis from the Wolf Man to Marilyn Monroe. Vagabond Voices, 2009: Chp 1.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 115, 126, 173.
• Pierre-Henri Castel. La métamorphose impensable: essai sur le transsexualisme et l'identité personnelle. Gallimard, 2003: 88-9, 432n17.
• Daniel Greenson. “Greenson, Ralph (1911-1979)” in Alain de Mijolla. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Macmillan Reference, 2005.
• Douglas Kirsner. “‘Do as I say, not as I do’: Ralph Greenson, Anna Freud, and superrich patients”. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 24, 3, 2007: 475-486.
• J Randy Taraborrelli. The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. Rose Books, 2009: 158, 164, 166, 168, 180-190, 199, 201, 203, 205, 215, 217, 224-6, 228-9, 240-2.
• Riccardo Galiani. “Un cas, deux écritures, une catégorie”. Topique, 3, 108, 2009: 143-156. Online.
• Christopher Turner. “Marilyn Monroe on the couch”. The Telegraph, 23 June 2010. Online.
• Richard Green. “Robert Stoller’s Sex and Gender: 40 Years on”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 2010: 1461.
• Lois W Banner. Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox. Bloomsbury, 2012: 164, 166, 308, 329, 332-4, 341-2, 349-350, 352, 358-9, 363-372, 375-6, 380-8, 391-407, .
• Jat Margolis & Richard Buskin. The Murder of Marilyn Monroe: Case Closed. Skyhorse Publishing, 2014: Chps 3, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25. Also p1-3, 5, 32, 34, 41-4, 47, 51-2, 55, 57-9, 61, 67, 74, 76, 83, 92-3, 98, 121, 125, 153-5.
• “Dr Ralph Greenson”. Marilyn Forever, May 10, 2014. Online.

EN.Wikipedia(Ralph Greenson)      EN.Wikipedia(Death of Marilyn Monroe)      Find a Grave
_______________

The books on Ralph Green that discuss his involvement with Marilyn Monroe don’t mention his involvement with the GIRC; those that discuss his involvement with the GIRC don’t mention his involvement with Monroe. Janet Malcolm mentions neither, nor does the article on Greenson in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis written by his son Daniel.

There are an amazing number of personal interconnections in the Marilyn Monroe case.  See the diagram on p33 of Mecacci's book.  For example Greenson's patient Frank Sinatra was also a lover of his patient Monroe.   Eunice Murray's former husband John Murray was the analyst of Anton Kris who was the son of Marrianne Kris, Monroe's New York psychoanalyst. 

If you google Greenson and Marilyn Monroe, you will find him accused of everything from having an affair with her, to controlling her life, to being complicit in her murder. Caveat lector.

Lana Wachowski (1965–) film writer, director.

Larry Wachowski and brother Andy, of Polish descent, were raised in Chicago. They both dropped out of college and ran a construction business, while creating comic books for Marvel and Epic. In 1993 Larry married his childhood sweetheart.

The Wachowskis' entry into Hollywood was with the script for Assassins, 1995, however their script was 'totally rewritten' by Brian Helgeland and they unsuccessfully attempted to have their name removed from the film.

They wrote, directed and produced Bound, 1996. In the development of the film the male lead was rethought, with the advice of Susie Sexpert, and became a female butch, and the female lead character changes during the film from a femme bimbo to a leather dyke.

In 1999 the Wachowskis took Hollywood by storm with the first Matrix film in 1999. Like the two sequels, The Matrix features several digital gender morphings. With earnings from the film, Larry and his wife bought a $1.9 million house in Venice, California, and the brothers moved their production company into a nearby building.

Larry reportedly went to several dominatrices who catered to transvestites, and in January 2001, Larry was in The Dungeon in West Hollywood which featured celebrity dominatrix Karin Winslow (Ilsa Strix) who had been married since 1998 to a trans man, the future porn star Buck Angel. Larry returned for further sessions. It soon became clear that the convention that there be no sexual or social congress between dominatrix and client outside the sessions was being broken. Ilsa reportedly offered Larry free bondage sessions that lasted overnight. Buck demanded some answers and it was arranged that the three would meet at a trans club on Santa Monica Boulevard. Ilsa and Lana arrived in almost identical outfits of fur jackets and blond wigs. Soon afterwards Buck kicked Ilsa out of their home, and filed for divorce. He then left for New Orleans. Larry's wife also filed.

Ilsa was flown to Australia, first class, where the two subsequent Matrix films were being made, and it was Lana rather than Larry who picked her up at the airport. Larry was struggling with the idea of being transgender, and how to tell their parents. Sometimes he did not sleep for days. After a phone call in which it was apparent that something was wrong, the Wachowskis' mother flew to Australia the next day. The morning after, Larry blurted out: “I’m transgender. I’m a girl". The father arrived a few days later, and accepted their eldest child as Lana, to the extent of going out with her. Shortly afterwards Lana was also on the film set.

However communication with the public on the topic was cut off. It was Larry who appeared with Ilsa at the LA premiere of Matrix Reloaded in 2003, and then again at the Cannes Film Festival. Larry looked different, androgynous, and it was supposed that he was taking female hormones. He and Ilsa moved into a $2.7 million home in San Francisco's Castro area. Later that year the Wachowskis had to attend a Screen Actors Guild arbitration hearing where Marcus Chong, who played Tank in the first Matrix film, claimed that he had been unfairly treated. Again it was noticed that Larry's appearance had changed.

Rumors without confirmation continued as to where Lana was within the transgender options. Sources close to the Wachowskis denied the rumors. One employee on the Speed Racer film pointed out to Fox News that: "on the call sheets, it still says Larry", although it is rumored that she had transgender surgery soon after that film wrapped.

Karin and Lana married in 2009. It was not until 2012 that Lana emerged for a press conference to discuss their new film Cloud Atlas, which featured its major actors in a variety of roles including some cross racial and some cross gendered.

Later that year she was awarded the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award and gave a well-received acceptance speech in which she discussed being trans.

++In March 2016, it was announced in the press that Andy also had started transition, using the name Lilly.

• Mark Miller. “Matrix Revelations: The Wachowski Brothers FAQ”. Wired 11.11 Nov 2003. www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/matrix_pr.html.
  
• Peter Wilkinson. "The Mystery of Larry Wachowski". Rolling Stone, 01-26-206. Online at: Lector.org, 07-23-2006. http://lecter.org/forum/showthread.php?t=248.
  
• Chris Hudson. "Matrix creator’s gender reassignment surgery". Pink News, 6/9/207. www.pinknews.co.uk/2007/09/06/matrix-creators-gender-reassignment-surgery.
  
• Andrew O'Hehir. "Lana Wachowski’s quiet coming-out party". Salon, Jul 31, 2012. www.salon.com/2012/07/31/lana_wachowskis_quiet_coming_out_party.
  
• Aleksandar Hemon. "Beyond the Matrix: The Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms.". The New Yorker, September 10, 2012. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/10/beyond-the-matrix?currentPage=all.
  
• Husam Sam Asi. "The Wachowski siblings (formerly brothers) seek the meaning of life in Cloud Atlas". UKScreen, October 2, 2012. http://ukscreen.com/articles/interviews/the-wachowski-siblings-formerly-brothers-seek-the-meaning-of-life-in-cloud-atlas/#.UNBtkneBMT1.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA      IMDB



______________________________________________________________________________

Both IMDB and Wikipedia do not seem to like Ilsa Strix.   IMDB lists her as in only one film (she was in at least 6 or 7)  and lists only her marriage to Buck Angle.  On the Lana Wachowshi page it lists Larry's first marriage, but not that of Lana and Ilsa.

Ilsa had a Wikipedia page but it was taken down in May 2010 for a given reason of  "Non-notable person. Being romantically involved with a notable person does not confer notability".   The text can be read in Wikibin.   She would certainly seem to be at least as notable as the others persons in the Wikipedia category on Dominatrices. 

David Wilde (1917 - 2001) writer, publisher.

David Wilde was born to rich parents in New York. He was an avid cross dresser from childhood. After doing a degree in English Literature at Yale University he married Mary Scott. They had two daughters. He became a news writer and film critic. For several years from 1949 he published The Record, a weekly in the Westchester County village of Bedford. Later he worked in public relations.

Gail in 1961

David and Mary separated in 1960, and David moved to an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan and then later to another in Greenwich Village. As Gail he subscribed to Virginia Prince’s Transvestia, and became a New York contact for the Foundation for Full Personality Expression, (FPE). Those who knew both David and Gail found Gail to be less abrasive, but both personae were negative about gays and transsexuals.

Gail met Katherine Cummings at Susanna Valenti’s D’Eon Resort, and met Darrell Raynor when the latter used the contact listings in Transvestia. Gail’s antique-filled apartment was open as a meeting place for transvestites, and she would answer the phone with “Downtown Branch” in recognition of Susanna’s uptown location.  At this time David was the publisher of Girl Talk, distributed free in beauty parlours.

In 1968 David met Joan Bennett (1910-90), the film star and member of the New York acting dynasty, at a party.   Joan had been in Bulldog Drummond, 1929, Little Women, 1933, Trade Winds, 1938, Scarlet Street, 1945. Her third husband, Walter Wanger jealously shot and injured her agent in 1951 which almost ended her career. She finally divorced Wanger, who served four months for the shooting, in 1965.

When she met David she was appearing in the occult soap opera, Dark Shadows, 1966-71. They dated for ten years. When David told her about Gail, she was initially dismayed, but afterwards she was unperturbed. David asked Harry Benjamin to talk to her about cross-dressing.

They married in 1978, shortly after she was in Dario Argento’s Suspiria, 1977. Only a few weeks later they awoke to find their Scarsdale house on fire. The police decided that it was arson, and even suspected David, but no-one was ever arrested.

David and Joan remained married almost 13 years, during which David did no cross-dressing as such, although he maintained a longtime friendship with Katherine Cummings whom he wrote to as Gail.  In 1989 David berated her when she was about to have surgery, and tried to talk her out of it for the harm that she was doing to her family.

Joan died of a heart attack at age 80. Afterwards Gail was quickly resurrected.

David committed suicide at age 84 in despair at how the world was going.

*Not the pianist/composer, nor the cricketer, nor the writer for Rolling Stone
* Not Girl Talk the pre-teen magazine.

• Darrell Raynor. A Year Among the Girls. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1966. New York: Lancer Books, 1968: 32, 42-3, 45-53.
• Brian Kellow. The Bennetts: An Acting Family. Lexington, : University Press of Kentucky, 2004: 428-9, 440-1.
• Katherine Cummings. Katherine's Diary- the Story of a Transsexual. William Heinemann Australia 1992. Revised and updated 2008: 133-8, 151-2, 195-6, 277, 317, 391.
• The Peerage: Page 29808. http://thepeerage.com/p29808.htm#i298078.

Valerie Nicole Taylor (1956 - ) model.

Freddie Lee Turner was raised in Greenville, South Carolina with five brothers and a sister. He helped out as a surrogate mother to his siblings after their mother left. He got good grades at school, but dropped out during senior year. He was arrested, once in Atlanta, and several times locally, on misdemeanor charges.

By 1979, using the name Freda, she was known as a trans woman, and was seen leaving a bar in nearby Gaffney with Billy Posey who was found shot dead the next morning in a motel room. A taxi-driver told police that he had taken Turner to Spartanburg, and that Turner had flashed a gun and confessed the killing. It took a few days to sign an arrest warrant, by which time Turner had disappeared.

Turner moved to Atlanta and Florida, and then in 1985, as Valerie Taylor, to Glendale, Los Angeles. She sometimes worked as a photographer’s model. Valerie advertized in the personals and met Dave Allen (1944 – 1999) who did visual effects in and directed movies. She was his date to the Oscars in 1986 when he was nominated for Best Special Effects in Young Sherlock Holmes, 1985. They lived together for some years, their relationship occasionally becoming violent.

In 1990 Dave Allen started to also date divorced mother of two, Donita Woodruff.

In 1991 Dave paid for Valerie’s legal name change and surgery with Dr Biber. Also in 1991 Valerie had an accident while learning to drive, and left the scene of the accident. She was sentenced to three years probation and community service.

Dave and Donita

Dave moved in with Donita and finally married her in 1995. Valerie and Donita took a strong dislike to each other. Donita researched Valerie at the Burbank city hall and obtained a copy of Valerie’s name change. She freaked out that Dave had had a relationship with a transsexual and went for an Aids test. Her psychiatrist suggested that she watch The Crying Game, 1992, and the scene where Dil shoots the IRA agent reminded her that Dave had once mentioned that he knew someone who had killed another. She became obsessed that Valerie must be a murderer, and collected evidence.

In 1996, she informed the Burbank police that Taylor was a fugitive. Taylor denied being Freddie Turner, but her fingerprints were the same as those taken from Freddie in Atlanta. She was extradited to South Carolina. In 1997, she pled self-defense and the evidence being mainly lost and witnesses having died since, she was sentenced to 15 years, suspended to three.

Valerie

All this destroyed the marriage of Donita and Dave and their divorce was finalized in 1998.

Valerie served two years in prison at the Leath Correctional Institute for women, before returning to Los Angeles and Dave Allen.

Dave died of cancer in 1999 and it is rumored that he left most of his money to Valerie. In 2002, Valerie was convicted of assault on a boyfriend, and put on probation.


Donita Woodruff published her account as a true crime book in 2005.

*Not the English actress, nor the lesbian novelist, not the shark and underwater expert.

• Jaxon Van Derbeken and Steve Getzug. “Puzzles Surface In 1979 Slaying : Sex Change One Of Many Twists In Case”. Daily News. May 20, 1996. Online at: www.thefreelibrary.com/PUZZLES+SURFACE+IN+1979+SLAYING+%3A+SEX+CHANGE+ONE+OF+MANY+TWISTS+IN...-a083932605.
• Ann W. O’Neill. “Fingerprints Implicate Transsexual in Killing”. Los Angeles Times. May 29, 1996. http://articles.latimes.com/1996-05-29/local/me-9522_1_valerie-taylor.
• Donita Woodruff. Deadly Masquerade: A True Story of Illicit Passion, Buried Secrets, and Murder. Far Hills, N.J.: New Horizon Press, 2005.  New York: St Martin’s Paperbacks 2007. 

 EN.Wikipedia(David_W._Allen)      ____________________________________________________________

The major source on Valerie Taylor is Woodruff’s book.  However Woodruff is very much a hostile witness.  Once Woodruff realizes that Taylor had been a transsexual, she constantly refers to her as ‘Freddie Turner’ and ‘he’ despite Valerie having completed both surgery and legal name change.

Woodruff comes across as very transphobic.  In her opinion a trans woman is a man for life, Dave must be gay because he had an affair with Valerie, and she is at a serious risk of Aids because of Dave.   Whenever she meets persons who had taken Valerie as herself, Woodruff writes it that they had been ‘fooled’.  Her book could be a lot more plausible if she had consulted a trans person for advice.

She is constantly being scandalized by the world as it is.  She is scandalized that the South Carolina justice system uses plea bargaining and that the justice system is imperfect.

Donita also comes across as an unreliable narrator.  In addition to detailed accounts of dialogue which she surely could not remember that precisely, several of the reviewers on Amazon find complete incidents unlikely at best.

I was amazed that Donita could go to city hall and get Valerie’s name change papers.   Are there no privacy provisions?  This is explicitly forbidden in the UK’s Gender Recognition Act, but that is another country.

In Donita’s account, Valerie is a psychopathic killer and violent, physically and emotionally, with all who know her.  In the news articles sourced above, the murder comes across as a self-defence after a night gone wrong.  It is an unfortunate fact that some people do go crazy when with a transsexual.  As stated, Donita spoils her case by being transphobic.

Valerie Taylor is not mentioned among the inmates on the Wikipedia page for Leath Correctional Institute.

The Wikipedia page on Dave Allen does not mention either Valerie or Donita.

Wallace Beery (1885 – 1949) elephant trainer, female impersonator, film star, airplane pilot.

Wallace Beery was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He joined the Ringling Brothers circus at age 16 as an assistant elephant trainer. He left after being clawed by a leopard.

He made his name as an actor doing female impersonation first on the New York stage and then in one-reel comedies in the silent era, in 30 of which he appeared as Swedish maid called Sweedie.

In the thirties he was described as as having a 'pug-ugly face, ungainly 250-pound wrestler's physique and crinkly, boyish grin [which] fascinated audiences', starred in several MGM films of that time, including The Secret Six, Grand Hotel and The Champ (for which he received an Oscar in 1932).

Louis Mayer of MGM had a soft spot for the reckless pilot who often crashed his plane in deserts and on mountains, but who flew though a stormy weather and a forced landing in St Louis to be at the bedside of dying mother in New York.

Beery remained a drag queen who would put on an evening dress and a feathered hat at the slightest provocation.

As an actor he ignored the dialogue he was given, ill-treated his co-stars, and improvised everything to the despair of the director. He was brutal with women: he bloodily raped his first wife, Gloria Swanson, on their wedding night, and without her consent got her to drink an abortificant when she was pregnant.  He was equally bad to his second wife, Rita Gilman.

In 1937 Ted Healy, a founder of the Three Stooges, was beaten to death. One account is that the beating was inflicted by Beery, Albert Broccoli (the future producer of the James Bond films) and Pat DiCicco (gangster and Broccoli’s cousin). MGM sent Beery to Europe for several months and put out a story that three students had done the beating.

Beery acted in over 230 films. One account says that he died of a heart attack on the Queen Mary at age 64. The ship owners took his body to New York and put it in a hotel to avoid bad publicity. Other accounts say that he died at home in Beverly Hills.

• Charles Higham. Merchant of Dreams: Louis B. Mayer, M.G.M., and the Secret Hollywood. New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc. 488 pp 1992: 168-9. London: Sidgewick & Jackson 1993. London: Pan Books 1994. New York: Dell 1994.
• “Gloria Swanson – Marriages”. http://home.hiwaay.net/~oliver/gsmarriages.htm
• “Wallace Beery”. Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com/name/nm0000891.
• “Wallace Beery”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Beery.
• “Sweedie”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweedie.
• “Ted Healy”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Healy.

Edward D. Wood, Jr (1924 - 1978) film-maker, pornographer

++ added later

Ed was born and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. After tentative jobs as a cinema usher, and in musical groups, he joined the US Marines at age 17 just after the US entered the Second World War, and served until 1946.


He claimed that he was in combat in the Marshall Islands, Naumea and Tarawa, that he had his front teeth knocked out by a Japanese soldier, and was later machine-gunned in one of his legs. That he was awarded several medals and honorably discharged, and that he had fought in battle with a bra and panties under his uniform. However he completed his service as an office typist.

He also claimed that after discharge he worked in a carnival as the geek and as the half-man-half-woman. He also worked in San Francisco as a female impersonator. His trick at parties was to disappear and reappear en femme, sometimes even shaving off his moustache to do so. Often he used the name, Lily.

In 1950 he worked as a drag stunt double for Ellen Drew in The Baron of Arizona. He had a special thing for angora sweaters, and would borrow one from his then girlfriend, Dolores Fuller (who would later write songs recorded by Elvis Presley). She put up with his cross-dressing for a while, but could not really handle it, and so would not marry him.

In the early fifties he was trying to break into Hollywood as a director. Exploitation producer, George Weiss, was seeking to take advantage of the media fuss surrounding Christine Jorgensen, and Wood talked himself into the film. Jorgensen, quite sensibly, wanted nothing to do with the project, so Wood rewrote the script drawing on his own experiences, and starred himself (under the name of Daniel Davis) and Delores Fuller.  ++As the film was being made, there were newspaper reports in Los Angeles of an admitted transvestite, Arnold Lowman, who was attempting to alter the terms of his divorce.  Wood made an announcement to the press that the film would not be based on that newspaper story. ++ The film was released under various names, but is best known as Glen or Glenda, 1953. It is actually a plea for tolerance of transvestites and transsexuals.

While it is made in the format of psychiatric case studies it does not have the attitude of condemnation common to the genre. However Glen or Glenda is also camp with a surreal narrator, played by Béla Lugosi completely separated from all the other characters and situated in a laboratory with smoking test tubes and human skulls, more suitable to a cheap horror film or exploitation movie, and it includes passionate psychodramas involving sex changes, bondage and flagellation.

 LA Times, Feb 17, 1953 - item in news was Arnold Lowman

In 1955 Ed married Norma McCarthy, but she kicked him out when she found that he was wearing female underwear. The marriage was annulled six months later. He then married Kathy O’Hara who remained his wife until his death.

Bela Lugosi starred again in Wood’s Bride of the Monster, 1955, and then died after shooting only a few seconds for Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1959 (which also features Bunny Breckinridge). It was largely financed by the local Southern Baptist Church, which retained the rights to the film.


Wood’s films were quickly and cheaply made, up to 30 scenes per day as compared to only one in Hollywood A-movies. Retakes were rarely done even when they were obviously needed. Wood’s films rarely made money. Other actors in his stock company included the Swedish wrestler, Tor Johnson, the psychic Criswell and television horror hostess Vampira (Maila Nurmi).

Ed’s wife Kathy reports that that when Ed and Tony Curtis were both at Universal Studios, they would borrow dresses from the wardrobe there and try them on.

Wood expanded the adventures of Glen Marker, the protagonist of the Glen or Glenda, in two of his porno-thrillers: Killer in Drag, 1965, and Death of a Transvestite, 1967, where Glen is doing contract killings to pay for a sex-change, and then, on death row, will tell all if he can die in drag.

His writing of pornography became his major source of income, although he worked with Steven Apostolof in making soft-core films.

In the 1970s he became acquainted with the science fiction writer who would later become Jean Marie Stine. Jean later wrote of his early life.

He died in poverty, of a heart attack, while watching television.

Two years after Wood’s death, he was the winner in the Medved Brothers’ Golden Turkey Awards as the worst director ever. This started his cult, that culminated in the film of his life made by Tim Burton in 1994, and in founding in 1996 of the Church of Ed Wood which has over 3,500 baptized members.

*Not the British Foreign Secretary, nor the Canadian philanthropist.

• Harry and Michael Medved. The Golden Turkey Awards: the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History. Berkeley Books. 1980:252-61, 308-16. Includes a short but unreliable biography.
• Michael Copner (dir). On the Trail of Ed Wood. US 1990. A biography of Edward D. Wood Jr, with clips from the films, interviews with cast and crew members, and a tour of his home.
• Mark Patrick Carducci (dir & scr). Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion. Scr: Lee Harris, with narration by Lee Harris, and interviews with Rudolph Grey, Stephen C. Apostolof, Harry Medved. US 11 mins 1992. A documentary about the making of Plan 9 from Outer Space, that is also a film about Edward D. Wood Jr.
• Rudolph Grey. Nightmare of Ecstasy: the Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Feral House 380 pp1992. A collage of interviews with friends, colleagues and fellow transvestites.
• Ted Newsom (dir & scr). Ed Wood: Look Back In Angora. Narration by Gary Owens, with interviews with Stephen C. Apostolof. US 51 mins 1994. A documentary about Ed Wood's life and films with clever re-editing of clips from Wood's films to illustrate his life.
• Tim Burton (dir). Ed Wood. Scr: Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, based on the book, Nightmare of Ecstacy, by Rudolph Grey, with Johnny Depp as Ed wood, Marton Landau as Bela Lugosi, Sarah Jessica Parker as Dolores Fuller, Bill Murray as Bunny Breckinridge. US 127 mins 1994.
• David C. Hayes and Hayden Davis. Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Ramble House 168 pp 2001.
• Jean Marie Stine. Ed Wood – The Early Years. Renaissance E Books. 112 pp 2001.
• "Lugosi to Appear as Weird Scientist".  Los Angeles Times:  Daily Mirror:  Los Angeles History, May 12 2011.  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2011/05/lugosi-to-appear-as-weird-scientist.html. 

EN.Wikipedia      IMDB   
_____________________________________________________________________

Glen or Glenda uses the word “transsexual” the same year that Harry Benjamin is supposed to have coined it.

Glen or Glenda is in effect the first cinematic defence of queer lifestyles, eight years before Basil Dearden's Victim, 1961.

Ed was active in heterosexual transvestite groups in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. So was Virginia Prince. But neither appears in the books about the other.

Glen or Glenda is not Bela Lugosi’s only drag movie. The year before, 1952, he had gone to England to star against Arthur Lucan in Mother Riley Meets the Vampire.

Dan Dailey (1915 – 1978) dancer, actor.

++ revised  24/01/11 to incorporate more sources, and to resort the facts chronologically.

Dailey was born and raised in New York City. He appeared in a minstrel show, and then in vaudeville before his first Broadway show in 1937. He was signed by MGM in 1940.

He served in the US Signal Corps during the Second World War and was discharged as a Captain.

In 1946 he was taking Linda Darnell's dresses from the Fox wardrobe department. Howard Hughes made him return them, but gave him a gift certificate for $5,000 at a leading department store.

He was teamed with Betty Grable in Mother Wore Tights, 1947.  He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in When My Baby Smiles at Me, 1948 – also with Grable. It is said that she also lent him some of her screen wardrobe - the best couture that Hollywood had to offer.  Dan became one of the top male leads at Twentieth Century Fox in the early 1950s.

Andre Previn, the composer, tells in his biography how Dailey turned up drunk and in female clothing for the press screening of It's Always Fair Weather in 1954.  Dailey co-starred with Johnnie Ray in There's No Business Like Show Business the same year, and was close to him afterwards. There were rumors that they were more than friends.

He married his fourth wife, Gwen Carter, in February 1955. In June Inside magazine wrote that "After every binge he shows up around the film colony, decked from head to toe in outlandish female attire". In September that year Uncensored ran an article dispelling the rumors that he was a transvestite (which was a way of repeating the stories without being sued).

In January 1957 Confidential ran "The Night Dan Dailey was Dolly Dawn" claiming that he had danced in a pink tulle dress in a New York gay bar the previous March. Betty tried to save Dailey's career by pointing to his wife and family, but his film career was essentially over by that point, although he continued in television into the 1970s.

In 1976, actress cum gossip columnist Joyce Haber was on television promoting her novel about Hollywood, The Users. Asked to dish some gossip, she mentioned that one of the top dancer-actors was a closet transvestite with a costly and beautiful wardrobe that many women would envy.

After the suicide of his only son (from his third marriage), he was an embittered alcoholic. He died three years later, just after he had played boyfriend Clyde Tolson in The Private Files of J.Edgar Hoover, 1977. He appeared in over 60 films.

• "The Night Dan Dailey was Dolly Dawn". Confidential. Jan 1957.
• Spero Pastos. Pin-Up: The Tragedy of Betty Grable.  Putnam, 1986: 76-7.
• Andre Previn. No Minor Chords: my days in Hollywood. Doubleday 1991. Toronto & London: Bantam 1993:64
• Boze Hadleigh. The Vinyl Closet: Gays in the Music World. Los Hombres Press, 1991:229-30. Republished as Sing out! : gays and lesbians in the music world. Barricade Books 1997,  Robson Books 1999.
• William J. Mann. Behind the Screen: How gays and lesbians shaped Hollywood. Viking, 2001: 314-5.
• Darwin Porter. Howard Hughes, Hell’s Angel: America’s Notorious Bisexual Billionaire, The Secret Life of the U.S. Emperor.  Blood Moon Productions 2005: 630.

EN.Wikipedia

Jeff Chandler (1918 – 1961) actor, singer.

Ira Grossel was raised by a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. He grew to be 6'4"/1.93 m. His hair started to grey at age 18.


After service in the Second World War, he became a rugged star, as Jeff Chandler, in westerns and other action films. He was often cast as aboriginals, and played the Apache Cochise in three films. He was also a singer, releasing several LPs and playing nightclubs.

He was married from 1946-52, and had two daughters.

He was apparently, and despite his height, a transvestite in his private life. His engagement to Esther Williams was broken off when she discovered his hobby. She revealed this in her 1999 autobiography.

Chandler died at age 42 from blood poisoning after surgery, which was deemed malpractice when his family later sued.

*Not the boxer, nor the American Football player.

• Esther Williams.  The Million Dollar Mermaid.   Simon & Schuster, 1999.  

Eddie Murphy (1961 - ) comedian, actor.

Murphy was born in Brooklyn, New York. His cop father left the family when Eddie was three, and was killed when he was eight.

He was famous by age 19, when he became a regular on Saturday Night Live (1980-4). His stand-up comedy routines were noted for their homophobia. He achieved Hollywood fame in the 48 Hours films, 1982, 1990, Trading Places,1983, the Beverley Hills Cop films, 1984, 1987, 1994, Coming To America, 1988, the Nutty Professor remakes, 1996, 2000, and voicing the donkey in the three Shrek films, 2001, 2004, 2007.

He played in drag in The Nutty Professor films, where he plays all members of the Klumps family, and both genders again in Norbit, 2007.

He was married to Nicole Mitchell 1993 – 2006 and they had five children.

In 1997 he picked up transy prostitute Atisone Seiuli and she was arrested in his car. Several other Los Angeles transy prostitutes including Karen Dior talked to various publications about encounters with Murphy dating back to the early 1980s.

Some later retracted when approached by Paul Barresi, a porn actor in gay films who became famous when he sold a story to The National Enquirer for $100,000 about having a two-year affair with John Travolta, and was now working for Murphy’s lawyers. Barresi offered money if they retracted.

Candace Watkins tell-all book also disappeared from the internet. Atisone Seiuli died in a mysterious fall from her apartment.

• Candace Watkins writing as Carnal Candy. In the Closet with Eddie Murphy. 1997. e-book
• Mark Ebner & Jack Cheevers. “The Bagman”. New Times. April 26, 2001. Online at: www.hollywoodinterrupted.com/archives/the_bagman.phtml.
• "Eddie Murphy". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Murphy