The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  If a man only writes well when drunk, I would tell him: Get drunk. And if he said to me that his liver suffers because of that, I would answer: What is your liver? It’s a dead thing that lives as long as you do, while the poems you write live forever.

  If Fernando Pessoa had more selves than he could handle, the English writer Dawn Langley Simmons (1937–2000) had only one, but she had two different bodies. Her life veered wildly between vaudeville and Greek tragedy, beginning as Gordon Langley Hall, the illegitimate son of Vita Sackville-West’s chauffeur. Later she was adopted by the English character actress Margaret Rutherford and had one of the first sex-change operations performed in America. In 1969 she broke another taboo by marrying her black butler in Charleston, South Carolina, the first legal mixed-race marriage in the state. As one of her obituaries commented: “It is a measure of the ascending scale of prejudice that, of all her transgressions, it was her crossing of the racial divide that most shocked her Southern neighbors.”

  Dawn Simmons was born either with both male and female genitalia, or—as she always insisted—with female genitalia that an adrenal abnormality had caused to look male. In any event, although she always felt female, her family brought her up to be a boy called Gordon. “He” was raised by his grandmother Nelly Hall Ticehurst and spent the holidays at Sissinghurst, home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. As a small boy, their son, the writer and publisher Nigel Nicolson, played with Gordon, known to everyone as Dinky. Sackville-West was famously the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), in which a boy is transformed into a beautiful woman. Simmons would later write in her autobiography: “Had she lived a little longer, Vita would have been intrigued to know that the child ‘Dinky,’ as she called me, would become a real-life Orlando.”

  Gordon started writing early, having his first poem published at the age of four and his first interview—conducted sitting in Mae West’s lap—appearing in the Sussex Express when he was nine. In 1953, his grandmother died and he emigrated to Canada, becoming a teacher on an Ojibwa native reservation. Despite having had periods through “her” teens and “his” voice not having broken, Gordon still at this stage appeared male, and he wore a crew cut. He turned his experiences with the Ojibwa into a bestseller, Me Papoose Sitter, published in 1955, and soon after moved to New York, where he worked as a journalist and society biographer, writing critically acclaimed lives of Mary Todd Lincoln, Princess Margaret, and Jackie Kennedy. Witty, eccentric, and ostentatious, Gordon made friends across a very broad swath of New York society, from fellow writers like Carson McCullers to actresses like Joan Crawford and sportsmen like the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. A distant relative, the wealthy painter Isabel Whitney, took to him at once and invited him to live with her in her West Tenth Street mansion. Here Gordon met Margaret Rutherford, the matronly actress still best remembered as Madame Arcati, the medium in the 1945 film of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Rutherford had come hoping to be cast in the role of the grandmother in the proposed film of Me Papoose Sitter, but was immediately smitten by the person of Gordon himself. She described him as “a child… with large brown eyes inherited from some long dead Andalusian ancestor… a large green and red Amazon parrot named Marilyn on his shoulder.” When Isabel Whitney died of leukemia in 1962, Margaret Rutherford and her husband legally adopted Gordon. He was twenty-five.

  Whitney left Gordon her house and $2 million estate. He used the proceeds to buy a faded 1840s pink stucco mansion in the gay neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina. Gordon displayed impeccable interior design sense, filling the house with Chippendale and early American furniture and transforming the garden with designs sent over by Vita Sackville-West. He was regarded as a fixture in Charleston high society: an eligible, if undeniably camp, bachelor. He once threw a coming-out party for two of his dogs, where the pooches were displayed on velvet cushions, dressed in chenille, long gloves, and pearls.

  Then, in 1968, it all changed. Gordon checked himself into the brand-new Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and underwent corrective genital surgery and a course of counseling. One of the psychiatric reports noted with a hint of foreboding that despite her high intelligence, as far as men were concerned, the newly female Dawn had “the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl.” So it was to prove. She returned to Charleston as Dawn Pepita Hall, sporting “a Dippity-Do hairstyle—a dowdy doppelganger of Jackie Kennedy” according to one neighbor—and within a very few months announced her engagement to a black motor mechanic, butler, and aspiring sculptor, John-Paul Simmons. “His black hand touched my white one; it was as simple as that,” she wrote in her autobiography.

  Charleston was outraged. Bomb threats meant the ceremony had to take place in their front parlor, and Newsweek claimed the event had “shaken the Confederacy.” It certainly didn’t shock Margaret Rutherford. She told Time magazine, “I am delighted that Gordon has become a woman, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of another race, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of a lower station, but I understand the man is a Baptist!” She offered practical support, too, leaning on the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher (with the help of her friend Tony Benn), to organize a second, English, ceremony in Hastings.

  In Charleston, things went from bad to worse. The crate containing the couple’s wedding presents, sent over from England, was deliberately set on fire in the street. The local police chief arrived personally to serve Simmons a ticket, claiming that the smoldering remains of the blaze (which his own men had swept into the street) were obstructing the highway. The couple’s dogs were poisoned; they were shot at on the street for walking hand in hand; there were rumors of a Mafia contract taken out on Dawn’s life. The birth of her daughter, Natasha, in 1972 was the final straw. Charleston denounced it as a stunt, but Margaret Rutherford was able to produce a Harley Street surgeon to confirm that Dawn Langley Simmons had a fully functioning womb. Shortly afterward, the baby was attacked by an intruder who proceeded to rape Dawn and left her with a broken nose and severely injured arm. The Simmonses decided enough was enough and moved to Catskill, New York.

  By then, however, their marriage had turned sour. John-Paul was drinking heavily. She claimed he was also beating her and selling her possessions to buy whiskey. In 1974 he left her for another woman “who had shot and killed her first husband,” but soon afterward he was committed to a mental institution, suffering from schizophrenia. Dawn divorced him, but continued to look after him until her death in 2000.

  In 1981, when Dawn was still living as Gordon in Hudson, New York, working as a teacher in a Catholic school, he/she was commissioned to write a biography of his/her adoptive mother, Margaret Rutherford. Her own autobiography, Dawn: A Charleston Legend, followed in 1995. Both were well received and widely reviewed. Dawn’s final years were spent back in Charleston with Natasha and her three granddaughters, to whom she was a proud and devoted granny. The city that had once tried to ruin her now happily accommodated her as a much loved, if slightly wacky, local celebrity.

  After Dawn’s autobiography was published in 1995, Nigel Nicolson wrote a moving piece about her in the Spectator. “I have maligned her in the past, mocked her strange fate and refused to meet her,” he wrote. “She had asked me for help in arranging an English marriage, and when she called on me, I hid.” He had even refused to meet her when he visited Charleston. It was only when he saw her interviewed on television and saw pictures of his own mother on her wall that he relented. “For the first time, I was touched.” He added that, in spite of his unkind behavior toward her, “there is not a word of reproach for me in her book. Like everything else about Dinky, it is gallant, resilient and unfailingly generous.”

  The unlikely and optimistic story of Dawn Langley Simmons concludes this catalog of men and women assailed by bizarre and unlooked-for misfortune.

  As we have seen, such disaster may not bring self-knowledge (Santa Anna), victory (Stuyvesant), love (Florence Nightingale),
longevity (Lambert), or happiness (Pessoa), but (the appalling Santa Anna apart) it always produced a change for the better, giving each of them an assured place in history.

  The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed that difficulties were necessary for health. They offer potential for change, most particularly a change of attitude. The Stoics of ancient Athens based a whole school of philosophy on this idea, but it is the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (whose only misfortune was to have an even more brilliant and famous brother) who expressed it most succinctly:

  I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Monkey Keepers

  Oliver Cromwell—Catherine de’ Medici—Sir Jeffrey Hudson—Rembrandt van Rijn—Frida Kahlo—Madame Mao—Frank Buckland—King Alexander I of Greece

  Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats—all human life is there.

  HENRY JAMES

  Unlike cats, monkeys demand active husbandry, deep pockets, and endless patience. No one keeps a monkey by accident. More people than you might imagine have taken on the job. As well as the eight mentioned in this chapter, other notable monkey keepers include Peter the Great, Lord Byron, Alexander von Humboldt, Francis Galton, Meher Baba, and Michael Jackson.

  As Queen Victoria remarked after being introduced to Jenny the orangutan at the London Zoo, monkeys and apes are “frightfully and painfully and disagreeably human.” Monkeys are bonsai people: They remind us of ourselves.

  The long and controversial career of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) almost didn’t happen. His parents were regular visitors to Hinchingbrooke, the country estate of his grandfather, Henry, and it was there, shortly after Oliver was born, that he was abducted by grandpa’s pet monkey. The creature grabbed the baby from his crib and made for the roof. Servants rushed to bring mattresses into the courtyard to soften his fall if the animal dropped him, but for several minutes the monkey ignored them, hopping from ridge to ridge with young Oliver clamped under his hairy arm. The assembled company at last enticed the beast down, and the future Lord Protector of England was returned unharmed. There is no record of how they did it—though modern monkey handlers recommend that a dish of jam usually does the trick.

  As far as we know, Cromwell never kept a pet monkey himself—it would have been rather surprising if he had—but in the frontispiece of a 1664 satirical cookbook, purporting to be by his wife, Elizabeth, she appears with a monkey on her shoulder. The illustration portrays her as a plain-looking frump and the anonymous author refers to her throughout as “Joan” (the stock name for a scullery maid), mockingly remarking that Whitehall had been turned into a dairy and that her “sordid frugality and thrifty baseness” was “a hundred times fitter for a barn than a palace.” The monkey on her shoulder is there to make a monkey out of Mrs. Cromwell, letting everyone know she is a jumped-up country bumpkin and reminding readers of the old proverb, “the higher the monkey climbs, the more you can see of its arse.”

  For several centuries, monkeys had been the favored pet of queens: “Joan” Cromwell’s monkey also implies that she was “aping” her royal betters. Monkeys that appear in portraits of actual queens are coded symbols for lust, childish exuberance, bad decision making, or a weakness for the occult. All these qualities were brought together in the most famous of all monkey-owning queens, Catherine de’ Medici (1519–89). Also known as the Black Queen, Madame La Serpente, and the Maggot from Italy’s Tomb, she was the most powerful woman in Europe for more than forty years.

  Catherine was the great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the man who bankrolled the Florentine Renaissance, but she didn’t have an easy start in life. As a merchant’s daughter, she was technically a commoner and, within weeks of her birth, an orphan, too. Things looked up a little in 1523, when her cousin was elected Pope Clement VII. Aged only four, she became a bargaining chip in the endless marital poker game of European royal politics. Then, in 1527, the Medicis were overthrown in Florence. Catherine was taken hostage and imprisoned in a series of convents.

  By the time she was twelve, she had been made to ride through the streets on a donkey, had been jeered at by an angry crowd, and had survived a planned attempt on her life that would have seen her lowered naked in a basket outside the city wall in an attempt to trick members of her own family to shoot at her. (They were besieging “their” city at the time.) When Florence surrendered, Catherine was summoned to Rome by her papal cousin, who greeted her with tears in his eyes. Within months, he had wangled her engagement to Henry, Duke of Orleans, second in line to the French throne. Pope Clement was delighted. With the usual Medici gift for understatement, he proudly announced “the greatest match in the world.”

  Henry’s father, Francis I, was also pleased and very keen to help. On the couple’s wedding night in 1533 he stayed in their bedchamber until he was sure “each had shown valour in the joust.” Despite this promising start, it was ten years before Catherine bore Henry a child. That she survived as his wife bears testimony to her strength of will and shrewd political instincts.

  It certainly wasn’t her looks that did it. Although she was said to have “delicate features,” she was short with a “too large mouth” and the trademark bulging eyes of the Medici. Despite her trim figure and a beauty regime that involved applying a daily face mask of pigeon dung, the Venetian ambassador was moved to say that she looked good “only when her face is veiled.” Yet she had a definite sense of style, shocking the French court with her racy two-inch-high heels and her steel corsets, made by her husband’s armorer and the secret of her thirteen-inch waist. She was a game girl, too—she hunted enthusiastically until she was well into her sixties and introduced riding sidesaddle to the French (thus showing off her shapely calves, one of her few visual strong points).

  Catherine’s other fashionable innovations were broccoli, artichokes, cauliflower, and the fork. She also pioneered the wearing of perfume, hair dye, and underwear; and despite never touching alcohol, she was an enthusiastic early adopter of tobacco. She was an avid collector, garlanding her palaces with imported china, minerals, dolls, stuffed crocodiles, and a host of live pets, including her favorite, a long-tailed monkey from the Indies. She fussed over it continually, calling it her lucky talisman.[4]

  Catherine set a new European standard for opulent parties, masques, and balls. Her entertainments, which deployed the finest artists, dancers, architects, and musicians of the day, were known as les magnificences. One highly effective novelty was her “flying squadron,” a group of eighty ladies-in-waiting whose services added spice and intrigue to the conduct of international diplomacy. At one memorable magnificence in 1577, they served supper topless. These ladies also established the new fashion of not shaving or plucking their pubic hair, on Catherine’s strict orders (bald pubes might mean pox). Her rival, the straitlaced Jeanne, Protestant Queen of Navarre, wrote of Catherine’s court: “I knew it was bad, I find it even worse than I feared. Here women make advances to men rather than the other way around.”

  During her barren years, Catherine’s position as queen was under constant threat, particularly when Henry proved his virility by fathering a child with a servant. Roused by this, he took Catherine’s famously beautiful cousin, Diane de Poitiers, as a mistress. Catherine refused to give up trying to conceive, downing large drafts of mule’s urine, wearing stags’ antlers, and dressings of cow dung, and consulting her friend Nostradamus for advice. She even bored a hole in the floor of her husband’s bedchamber so she could stand underneath to spy on Henry and Diane and pick up any practical tips. Some historians credit the royal physician, Jean Fernel, with the decisive breakthrough. He had noticed some “irregularities” in the couple’s organs of generation and suggested a way to solve the problem. Whatever it was, after her first child was born, Catherine had no further trouble conceiving. She produced nine more children, seven of whom survived i
nto adulthood. Three of her sons became kings of France and two of her daughters married kings. She outlived all but two of them.

  Her sole aim through her years as consort, and then as the guiding power through the reigns of her three sons, was to keep the Valois dynasty of her husband in the ascendant. To do so, she had to navigate her way through the French Wars of Religion, which threatened to tear the country apart between 1562 and 1598, by shrewdly playing off Catholic against Huguenot. In defense of political stability she was capable, when necessary, of acts of startling viciousness, even toward her own children. On discovering that her teenage daughter Marguerite was sleeping with the son of her archrival, the Duke of Guise, she dragged her out of bed, ripping her nightclothes and pulling out handfuls of her hair. Later, when Marguerite was caught again (this time being unfaithful to her husband, King Henry of Navarre), Catherine had the lover executed, cut Marguerite out of her will, and never spoke to her again.

  Catherine’s last months were plagued by bouts of gout and colic (she was always a big eater and once nearly died after consuming a vat of chicken-gizzard stew). After her death, a chronicler observed that “no more notice was taken of her than of a dead goat.” Her bones were later thrown into a pit by the Revolutionary mob. Her lavish buildings have mostly been destroyed. Even her power broking and intrigue didn’t outlast her. Just eight months after her passing, three hundred years of Valois rule ended with the murder of her son, Henry III. Her long-suffering son-in-law, Marguerite’s husband, became Henry IV of France, founding the Bourbon dynasty. Despite having suffered serial humiliation at the hands of both Medici ladies, he was surprisingly generous about his former mother-in-law, commending her “wise conduct” and commenting, “I am surprised that she never did worse.” Perhaps the best epitaph for Catherine’s ambiguous legacy comes from a contemporary who wisely chose to remain anonymous: “She had too much wit for a woman, and too little honesty for a queen.”