Why the British Love to Dress in Drag

It is a Great Help for a man to be in love with himself. For an actor, however, it is absolutely essential. Self-love is the most enduring and satisfactory emotion of which human life is capable. I have little patience with anyone who is not self-satisfied. I am always pleased to see my friends, happy to be with my wife and family, but the high spot of every day is when I first catch a glimpse of myself in the shaving mirror. At the same time, I am aware that my fans and I cannot always continue to grow old together. Some of them must, alas, fall by the wayside or grow too old and infirm to totter down the aisle even at matinees. They must, of necessity, content themselves with their memories of my performances in earlier and happier days. My problem, therefore, since memory pays nothing at the box office, is to entrap others who have so far evaded the net that I have so assiduously cast in the small pond of which I own the fishing rights. I have never been a deep-sea fisherman; it is not in my nature to trawl in the vast oceans where Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud and Robards defy the elements. I avoid the great play as I would the great wave. I prefer the ripples of laughter (continued on page 306)British Drag(continued from page 151) and when I am becalmed or capsize, I have only to step from the boat and wade ashore. Enough of metaphors; the problem that faces me these days is to find a role for a septuagenarian who isn't either a mad scientist or a heartbroken academician or even a gin-soused old circus clown. Nor am I attracted to the part of an octogenarian butler who dies mysteriously in act one.

I have a lifelong friend who directs meaningful plays by little-known Bulgarians. He descends on me whenever I am out of work, bearing a play he is about to direct for some worthy but obscure provincial festival with the serious intention of transferring it later to Shaftesbury Avenue, when all the contracts can be renegotiated. "It is not the sort of part you usually play," he informs me, "but it has one wonderful scene where you are under a motorcar trying to change a tire. We never see your face, but it would be a splendid chance to act with your feet. To really act, you understand. I know you could do it, if only you would give yourself a chance."

"I like to show my face," I tell him. "Furthermore, I like it to be seen right through the play and I like to be standing upright or, better still, sitting down center stage."

"Oh, well," he tells me as he drives off after luncheon, "at least I've tried to get you to act properly. But if you won't, you won't."

"I won't," I shout after him as he turns out of the drive, "and I never will!"

But after one of his visits this past spring, just as I began thinking that perhaps acting with one's feet couldn't be all that bad, a man named John Wells, a fellow contributor to Punch and once a master at Eton College, arrived at my home with clean paper and carbons and his own typewriter, insisting that I sit in my armchair while he pound away at my desk. In four days, he captured three acts of a play that had been flitting aimlessly in my head for months.

Little did I dream when we finished Picture of Innocence that it was to attract the sort of fish I always suspected swam in my pond but hitherto had lurked in the darker waters of despondency.

The play is about transvestism; the tale of three fairly happily married men, two of whom have kept their wives in ignorance of their compulsive hobby. My characters' determination that all should share their secret leads to complications--and a fairly disastrous tea party. It is a very English play.

A play about transvestites does not necessarily attract transvestites to pay to come and see it. It is the greatest theatrical fallacy to assume that because the world is mad about football, you have only to construct a third act in the goal mouth to have the theater filled with hearty kickers.

Imagine my delight, therefore, when even before the rehearsals started, we were contacted by one of the founding members of the Beaumont Society, an organization that exists to see that any transvestite who joins shall continue to be a happy transvestite and not despair of his hobby, dress himself up for the last time in his wife's petticoat and await her return hanging from the banister. Because you are a transvestite, there is no need for drastic action, the society informs its members. And it is a mistake to wear your wife's petticoat, anyway, as you will inevitably stretch it.

While Picture of Innocence was still turning over in my mind, I had visited my younger son in Australia. He is a theatrical impresario who recently co-produced a play titled The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, which deals with an elocution teacher who brings down the wrath of Melbourne, or just possibly Sydney, on his head by venturing forth in drag and being wrongly accused of child molestation. Transvestites, as far as I know, never molest anyone, and the play, as all good plays should, sends the audience home to ponder man's inhumanity to man.

In the course of rehearsals, my son had had the benefit of advice from the Sea Horse Club, a world-wide organization with roughly the same high purpose as the Beaumont Society, and it was arranged that I should entertain the club's secretary at dinner. He called herself Petrina and she came, of course, enfemme. My initial reaction was one of embarrassment. For one thing, I felt she was not wearing the right wig. For another, I had qualms about venturing into the hotel restaurant with a lady who so patently was not quite what she seemed.

Petrina, I found, had no real desire to be mistaken for a woman. "Does the waiter suspect?" I asked her when he had retired after serving the smoked salmon.

"He'd be a fool if he didn't," she replied. "I talk like a man."

"Then what on earth is the object of it all?" I asked.

"I am not sure there is an object," she told me. "It's just that dressed as women, we all feel more relaxed, more comfortable than we do in business suits."

Petrina, or Peter, as she is called by day, belongs to the dreaded profession of business efficiency experts who follow executives around their offices with a stop watch, noting their potentiality for wasting time. "As a rule," she remarked, "we are a ruthless crowd; try to avoid doing business with us, for we usually get the better of you."

Petrina was unusually frank about Peter's ability to suggest to employers where they were overstaffed. Did it worry her that Peter's recommendations sometimes led to dismissals?

"Not particularly; it's what I'm paid for."

As Petrina, however, she seemed to have a heart of gold and cared deeply for the plight of those who felt themselves cut off and lonely.

"Some men," she told me, "will take a room at a hotel for the night and just dress themselves up and sit alone, staring into a mirror, not daring to telephone room service. Then, in the morning, they will pack up their dresses and make-up and throw them out of the car or hand them over to the Red Cross, vowing never again to give in to their other personality. Of course, it never works. A month later, they are shopping around frantically for a new frock. In time, they learn economy, if not courage."

"Can you learn courage?" I asked.

"If you belong to the Sea Horse Club, we try to give you courage. We insist, for example, that new members attend in costume and not sneak in and try to change on the premises. To go out en femme is the supreme release."

"When they arrive, do you compliment them on their dress?"

"No, not often. We might criticize one another if we discuss one another at all, but usually we are more interested in asking the new ones how we look."

"Do you wish to attract men?"

She found that a difficult question to answer. "I am not a homosexual, but I like men to think how well I wear my clothes. It's really people I know who afford me the most satisfaction. If I'm in the supermarket, I'm delighted if one of my neighbors who knows me as both Peter and Petrina tells me how nice I look. The neighbors matter to me."

"What about your children?"

"They still call me Father. I would like them to call me Petrina, like my wife does, when I am dressed, but they never remember. I don't think children should be nagged.

"The other day," Petrina went on, "I thought it would be nice to open a separate bank account that I could charge my clothes to. A lot of the stores have special departments for our lot. I went (continued on page 384)British Drag(continued from page 306) along to my bank manager and explained I wanted to open a separate account for her. He thought at first I was talking about my girlfriend."

"And when he found out?" I asked her, thinking that an Australian bank manager might have suggested she take both accounts elsewhere.

"He invited me to the Rugby Club, of which he is secretary. He thought the members ought to know about it."

"How can you bear," I asked Petrina, "to get up in the morning, bathe and have to dress yourself for work as an efficiency expert, and then come home in the evening and go through the whole boring process again? How long does it take you?"

"I have never timed myself," she told me, "only other people. But you're right, of course. As I get older, I do it less and less and never when I am by myself. Nowadays, it has to be a party or an occasion such as this. Transvestism is really a young man's game, sometimes a child's. A worried parent consulted me the other day about his seven-year-old who was always trying on his mother's shoes. 'In public?' I asked. 'Does he do it while you are watching him?' 'Of course,' he told me, 'he does it all the time.' 'No cause for worry,' I assured him. 'He is not a true transvestite unless he does it in the dark, quite alone.' That's what it used to be like for all of us, quite alone in the dark. But now, at least, they're turning up the lights. Or, in your case, the footlights."

"Can you remember how it all began?" I urged.

"At a wedding," he answered. "I was a page and there was a child about my age who was a bridesmaid and I suddenly found myself praying. It wasn't the service, you understand, just the rehearsal the night before, so I thought I'd given God plenty of time. 'Please, God,' I asked, 'let the bridesmaid fall down dead and because there's no one of her size around, let them dress me in that long yellow frock and give me the posy to carry.' It didn't happen, of course, but for five years afterward, I would fantasize that it had."

The Sea Horse Club of Australia publishes its own magazine, Feminique. It has a distinctly period flavor, partly because snapshots of the members mostly reveal them dressed in the sort of clothes their mothers were wont to wear when they were girls. Australian ladies go in for hats and these not so much complement the frock as challenge it. They favor the white turban or the plain straw with the large rose. The hat is more than a hat, it is a cry from the heart. Life is a garden party, it shouts. Where is the long, cool glass of lemon squash? Where is the queen?

Sea Horse members hold their own garden parties, but they usually gather where the light indoors is kinder and where security is achieved by hiring a private room. Sometimes the festivities last the full weekend. Buffet luncheon, tea and a formal dinner demand frequent changes of wardrobe. There is often a dance to which the wives are invited to round off the celebrations. The magazine records the festivities, gives notice of forthcoming events and fills its pages with letters from readers recording their gratitude to the editor and their adventures and misadventures in the role of women.

On the whole, they seem a happy crowd and Feminique, which goes out free once a month to registered members, has the appearance of a parish magazine to which slightly overexcited parishioners contribute accounts of local happenings and photographs of themselves and their friends setting out in search of adventure posed, traditionally, just outside their front doors and ready, one suspects, to bolt inside, should danger threaten in the guise of the milkman.

It is rather like reading an Alcoholics Anonymous publication in praise of alcoholism. At transvestite conventions, professional advice is sought from beauticians and deportment teachers. There are classes throughout the day in makeup and wig dressing, with particular attention being paid to how to look younger and cover a beard and the correct way to walk, sit, bend and bear oneself up and down stairs. The wives are not encouraged to attend instruction periods but are made welcome in the evenings for the succession of parties that include the Sugar 'n Spice Night Carousel Dinner (informal) and the Pink Banquet, at which Miss Dream is selected after The Fashion Show. There's a trophy for the lucky winner, cakes for the runners-up and certificates presented by the previous year's Miss Dream to all who have completed the course.

•

I am not a great one for hobbies. I play no game in the open air, am not attracted to camping in the high Alps or canoeing over Niagara Falls, nor have I been able to listen with very much enthusiasm as my friends recount their experiences in and around golf or cricket clubs. But I can understand a man collecting Teddy bears or letters written by soldiers about to the in the Boer War. I can even understand why a friend of my youth used to strip himself to the buff before donning a mackintosh and venturing forth to his friendly neighborhood drugstore, only to whip the wrapping away before the startled gaze of the young lady behind the prescription counter. It was always her, of course. He was often arrested, fined, once imprisoned and usually beaten up by irate bystanders, but his compulsion continued through the years. "Does it still persist?" I asked, meeting him only the other day at a luncheon party.

"Alas, no," he told me. "What would be the use? The most excitement I could expect would be to be tapped on the shoulder by the lady behind me in the queue and urged to move over, as she hadn't got all day to waste!"

We are, I suppose, sobering up as the great earth on which we live does the same. In the years to come, indeed, it may be impossible to dress distinctively as a member of either sex. But, meanwhile, transvestites still play happily in the short time that remains to them. They sit before the tea table on their "at home" evenings, much as my grandmother used to do, awaiting the callers, always announced by three discreet rings of the doorbell. Fewer than that they don't answer, at least not until they've disrobed and unwigged. There would be too much explaining to do, for although there are three transvestites in every 1000 men, the odds are still against one's milkman or minister being of like mind.

"I had one," a successful bishop told me after he'd seen Picture of Innocence. "He would wear ladies' cam knickers under his vestment and became highly excited during a service attended by the queen. 'If only she'd known I was wearing my frillies,' he kept remarking afterward. 'What do you suppose she would have said?' 'Nothing,' I told him. 'Royalty make it a habit to say nothing on such occasions.' All the same, I watched him pretty carefully next time."

What might shock the faithful luckily seldom affronts the theatergoers, who, from Terence's time, have delighted in the joke of men pretending to be women or, better still, eunuchs. I made a few mistakes initially with Picture of Innocence, expecting the audience to relish more a scene lifted from Charley's Aunt. The public, I find, gets used to everything, even to the fact that I have thicker ankles than I would wish these days. But I don't think once my role is finished in the play I shall continue to primp and preen. For one thing, it takes an inconscionable time to get dressed.

Waiting at the stage door one afternoon was an elderly gentleman who had seen my play. "I enjoyed it very much. You got nearly all of it right. You are, of course, a fellow transvestite?" I told him I was only pretending. "I am," he went on, "a retired bank manager. Of course, in my job, I had to be discreet and, again, my wife was never very keen on the idea. 'Do wait until I'm dead,' she used to beg me, and now she is and I am very lonely. As you get older, it seems sadder, but I thought I must cheer myself up before coming to see you, so I went shopping, something I haven't done for months."

"What did you buy?" I inquired.

"Not much at all--talcum powder and a very expensive petticoat."

Most of us, when we are young, want to be railroad engineers, and not many achieve our ambition. We are lucky, perhaps luckier than transvestites, who just wanted to be girls, little girls, big girls, even old girls, and were given their wish at a price the rest of us might think was rather too high. We can't beat them and thank God we don't want to join them.

"Little did I dream that 'Picture of Innocence' was to attract the sort of fish I suspected swam in my pond."