Christine Jorgensen
By Michele Ingrassia
The press couldn't get enough of Jorgensen. The press was there on Feb. 26, 1953, when she took her drivers test in Garden City. A Newsday reporter noted on the occasion, "She, then he, had once been employed as a chauffeur. But her license had expired and so, said one wag, had the sex of the owner."
The press was there on May 8, 1953, when Jorgensen made her debut at Hollywoods Orpheum theater, narrating a 20-minute travel documentary she filmed in Europe: "Her paycheck is reported to be $12,500 for a weeks work." And the press was there a week later, on the flight back to New York, when Jorgensen announced that she planned to make her home in Massapequa, on a 150-by-100-square-foot parcel of land where her father, George, a carpenter, would build a six-room, $25,000 ranch-style house, complete with the most up-to-date burglar alarm system. "Long Island," she said, "[is] a lovely spot to settle." It became her home base until 1967, when her parents died and she moved to California. But if the press fueled the furor over Jorgensen, it was feeding a public that couldn't get enough of her and a society that didn't know what to make of her. Was she some sort of side show freak? Or a modern pioneer? There was no consensus. While gossip columnist Walter Winchell ridiculed her, hostess Elsa Maxwell feted her. While the Stork Club banned her, the Waldorf-Astoria welcomed her.
Jorgensen, from the beginning never regretted what she did, "I regretted at the beginning, that the press got hold of it and made my life such an open book," she said in a 1979 Newsday interwiew. "But the publicity, too, hasn't been altogether bad. It's enabled me to make an awful lot of money."
Although Jorgensen preferred to be known as "the noted colour photographer"-she even went to London in 1953 to photograph the coronation of Queen Elizabeth-she made her money, and her mark, from her celebrity. The offers of Hollywood stardom that poured in from film producers when she returned to the United States never panned out. Nevertheless, Jorgensen decided that if the notoriety that was following her wasn't going to die out, she might as well cash in on it.
During the '50s and '60s she earned a more-than-comfortable living on the talk show and lecture circuit and, most notably, as a stage actress and nightclub performer. The act, which she took from the Latin Quarter in New York to the Interlude in Los Angeles to clubs in Havana, Caracas and throughout England and Australia, was both serious and fun. With a straight face she sang "I enjoy being a Girl." With tongue-in-cheek, she performed "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" as a parody of her life before the operation.
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