A shy, skinny waif from the Bronx who "ran from fistfights & rough-and-tumble games", blue-collar carpenter's kid George Jorgensen, Jr. managed to become the kind of crazy exception to America's puritanical sexual attitudes that seems only to occur when media exposure, wide-eyed public curiosity & a subject's narcissistic willingness to "play along" combine to create a dazzling perfect storm. While 1952's post-war conformity of values had certainly created seedy, lurid back-alleys where pent-up ids could frolic under the cover of shadows, nothing in a Levittown PTA meeting or rumpus-room Concerned Citizens coffee-klatch could prepare the newly-minted Eisenhower pod-people for George Jorgensen flying to Denmark, consulting with adventurous Dr. Christian Hamburger, having three surgeries to correct her "disparity of impulses" & returning home as the lovely, vivacious & statuesque blonde, Christine (the name was a tribute to Dr. Hamburger) Jorgensen.
Oh, and did I mention that George had been a soldier in the United States army? Well, all the headlines did.
A brain-melting social transgression like this, if played out on a local scale, could have left Christine a social outcast, a freak dependent on the pity of strangers, but as played out on a national & international scale, it made her an instant celebrity. Not that the attentions were all positive, far from it. And there was certainly a freak-show element to the attentions lavished on 26-year-old Jorgensen, but, in the end, curiosity won out over hostility. And if one needed to be semi-civil & just a little open-minded in order to catch a glimpse of this new variety of human, then it was worth it to refrain from frothing at the mouth. But a third element was necessary to keep Jorgensen from being mercilessly heckled at every turn & becoming just another Very Special Person, like Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy or Prince Randian. Unlike transgender cases before this, Christine Jorgensen was a good sport (though she had her temperamental moments) & she was rarely shy about spotlights, interviewers or cameras. She seemed preternaturally suited for stardom the minute she arrived back in NYC from Denmark in 1953.
She appeared on thousands of magazine covers, on every major radio & television talk-show, gave indelible left-field cameos in numerous television series, attended all manner of swanky soiree, toured the world's upscale nightspots with a cabaret act, wrote a best-selling autobiography, starred in five theatrical productions, was the subject of a Louis Farrakhan calypso song, inspired at least four films & countless pulp novels & was signed to Mercury Records (though these torch-song recordings never did materialize). Her cabaret act - which wowed 'em in Las Vegas, Paris, New York City, LA & London -- consisted of fairly dodgy Marlene Dietrich, Mae West & Talullah Bankhead impressions, but as the final fizz on an evening of double martinis, she was the absolute berries. AND she ended her performance by donning a Wonder Woman costume.
Not much remains of her career as a chanteuse, though one supposes there are bootleg recordings of her floating around in the kind of circles I'd sell my teeth to join. One of her final live performances, a sold-out 1983 show at The Frog Pond in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles has been officially released & you can get it online for $12 new, significantly less used.
The true oddities in her recording career, however, are these two sides, cut as a one-off 7-inch 45 for Jolt Records in 1957. "Crazy Little Men" is a distaff version of Leiber & Stoller's "Kansas City" in which a heartbroken Jorgensen, dumped by her earth-man, flies off in a spaceship to be consoled by the "crazy little men" of the moon. Charting a strange trajectory that somehow allows her to pass Venus, Mars & Jupiter on the way, our jilted darling is finally embraced by the moon Casanovas, who woo her in the chirpy, sped-up voices we know all too well from Ross Bagdasarian, Sheb Wooley & Dickie Goodman records.
Perhaps her husky-sexy reading was more than an attempt to cash in on the late-'50s "little green men" craze. After all, Jorgensen's engagement to labor union bookkeeper John Traub had recently hit the skids & another love affair with Massapequa typist Howard Knox was also turning sour. The track is swathed in amateurish reverb that gives the record a priceless end-of-career spookshow vibe. It's a bargain-basement Gotterdammerung that would radiate grotesque bathos if not for Jorgensen's effortless, wee-hour good humor. Listening to it you get the same feeling as when, half-way through an early Ed Wood film, you just can't laugh anymore & you actually start getting a transportive variety of "the creeps" as you think about Bela Lugosi, Vampira & Criswell being real people whose life work is represented in these one-of-a-kind ramshackle dreams. As Christine Jorgensen moans the names of the planets beneath the sound of a vacuum-cleaner hose held ten inches from a tired Telefunken microphone, beneath all that shabby velveteen reverb, as a guitar part recorded ten days prior chugs away robotically, in service to nothing in particular, you can feel that same desperate, cathartic loneliness. It passes, because the song is just too goddamn ridiculous to grip one's finer feelings for long, but it plucks at them just the same.
For more about this record, Jorgensen's career & a great interview from the 1958 Christine Jorgensen Reveals LP, check out this amazing site: Queer Music Heritage
No comments:
Post a Comment