Christine Jorgensen

IT WAS meant to be a private affair, a quiet series of operations that would change the 26-year-old Bronx photographer into a woman and, in the process, exorcise the personal demons that had haunted him since childhood. But even before she left the Copenhagen hospital in February, 1953-transformed from George Jorgensen Jr. the 98-pound ex-GI, into Christine Jorgenson, "the convertable blonde"-word had leaked out. Overnight, it became the most shocking, most celebrated surgery of the century.

By Michele Ingrassia

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And while transsexual surgery has hardly become commonplace since it was pioneered in Europe in the 1930s, it certainly has become less-than-scandalous in most quarters. Indeed, by 1982, when news spread that a Nassau County police officer had undergone a sex-change operation and was planning to return to the force, the response, from the county executive to the police commissioner, was more support that embarrassment. "It (the surgery) wouldn't get on the 95th page of the newspaper if it happened today," Jorgensen said last year in an interview with the Los Angeles Time. "It's not news anymore."

But it was news-scandalous news-when Jorgensen did it.

In those pre-feminist days, there was no end to the cutting appellations: The press described her variously as mankind's gift to female species," "The latest thing in blonde bombshells," "tops in swaps" and "the turnabout gal." In and out of the press, she became subject of endless conversation and the butt of thousands of titillating jokes. And that was just the beginning. While Jorgensen was still in Denmark, she had sold the rights to her life story to the Hearst Corp.'s American Weekly Magazine for $20,000. But that contract did little to dissuade other journalists-and evryone else-from besieging her.

On Feb. 12, 1953, when she stepped off the plane from Denmark, at what was then Idlewild Airport, Jorgensen was greeted by more than 350 "admirers, autograph hounds and just plain curious people." Not to mention hordes of reporters and photographers who catalogued everything from her baggage (13 pieces of luggage) to her destination ("the Swank Carlyle Hotel" in Manhatten) to her first beverage in America (a Bloody Mary "containing two shots of vodka and tomato juice") From then on, wherever Jorgensen went, neither the press nor the attendant carnival atmosphere was far behind. Every detail was grist for the mill: Her size 9-AA shoes. Her $10 contribution to a volounteer fire department in her new Long Island's hometown. Her first Easter bonnet, which landed her on the front page of Newsday on Easter weekend in 1953, a much-vaunted accolade traditionally reserved for Long Island's society matrons.

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