Rat Pack Party Girl: From Prostitute to Women’s Advocate

by McCormick, Jane

  Months later I got a call from Dick that Mom was diagnosed with acute leukemia. Upset and frantic about the news, Sue bought me a plane ticket to Los Angeles to be by her side. They told me that she had one year to live and when I returned to Chicago, I told Sue I wanted to quit my job and take care of her.

  Sue supported me and put in to relocate her job and the two of us sub-leased the apartment, rented a trailer and packed the car with as much as we could carry. Then the night before leaving I got another call from my brother that she’d passed away at four in the morning.

  Driving to California was one of the worst trips I’d ever had. When we arrived at the funeral home I remember seeing my mom in the casket. I bent over and kissed her on the cheek and I will never forget how cold her cheek was to my lips. I always loved my mom. The two of us had become good friends, resolving many conflicts I had as a child before she died. She reflected on her life and later began to understand the choices she’d made—the wrong choices in her life in regards to my abuse. I understood finally, and accepted that she truly loved me and she thought she was doing the best she could to raise me at the time. I can live with that now.

  After the funeral, my mom’s husband, Roger, was very cold to me. He wouldn’t let me come to the house and he didn’t return any of the jewels, dresses and fur coats that I’d given to her. Sue and I rented an apartment in Fullerton. She got another job with U.S. Post Office and I landed a Quality Control position at Hughes Aircraft.

  Not long after that Grandma MoMo died and we moved into her house. My grandma had left the house to both Dick and me, so I had to take out a loan to pay my brother off for his share of the property. It made me sad because I took care of grandma when she was dying and the only thing he did was to take her to a nursing home where she died. He didn’t want her historically old house, but it meant everything to me. He had his beautiful four-bedroom home with a Jacuzzi and pool and he went out and bought a new Corvette and that was all he wanted. I loved Dick but I wish he could have given me a break.

  Sue and I lived there for six years and during that time we’d gotten to know our straight neighbor named Liz. She was a divorced blond in her twenties who went to a religious retreat for a month after her husband left her. We tried to help her and her daughter Betty. They liked to stop over and visit us and we’d barbecue for them and I’d buy cute little dresses for Betty.

  I landed in the hospital for a month and in a wheel chair for the following six months. A year later I ended up on Social Security and Disability for the rest of my life, which summed up to about three hundred and forty dollars a month because I never paid into it for all those years that I was in Vegas. During that time Sue began to party a lot with Liz.

  A couple of months later Sue and I had Randy and Ross over, our young handsome gay friends from Minnesota. We’d met a couple of years earlier when the two of them were here on vacation. Randy is a soft-spoken small framed man who always said he was the son that I’d lost in my abortion in Vegas. At first this was a thought that was hard to swallow, but it became an endearing arrangement between the two of us; I’d call him “son” and he’d call me “mother.” It was sweet.

  We decided to play a game of cards. We were sitting around the dinner table when the phone rang. It was the neighbor Liz calling Sue, who jumped up and said, “She needs me to come over and help her for a minute,” and she left.

  We continued to play cards and after two hours had passed, I decided to go across the street to see what was going on. I walked up to the back of the house and could hear them fucking.

  I threw my cocktail through the bedroom back window and yelled, “Mother fucker, don’t you ever come back to my house again!”

  All of a sudden my life had changed. I ran back to my house and told Randy and Ross what I heard. They were both amazed.

  Sue and I had been together for nearly ten years and she’d been loyal to me until now.

  I blew my temper and ran like I always had in the past, taking off to San Diego with Randy by my side. We stopped at a liquor store and bought an ice chest and a case of beer and drank all the way there. Ross decided to stay and take care of Buster, my golden retriever.

  We stopped at a gay guest house when we arrived in San Diego. I knew the guy that owned it and we left our bags and took off to the local gay bars. We drank and danced into the night and all of a sudden there were four gals and three other guys sitting with us.

  I was telling one of the gals how I’d been with my girlfriend for ten years and how I’d caught the straight bitch in bed with her cause Liz wanted to find out what it was like to be with a gay woman. She might as well have stabbed me in my heart because it killed all the love I had for Sue. That was the end of our relationship.

  Chapter 29

  Entrepreneur and Meeting Patti

  I sold my house in Fullerton and rented a four-bedroom home in Garden Grove, California. I subleased three bedrooms to two gay guys and a gay girl. All I had to pay was the electric.

  I had parties all the time. I would go to all the gay bars and bring back anyone who wanted to party. One night there were about fifteen people in a bar and there was one gal who kept staring at me. Tracy was a brunette with big brown eyes, a good smile and a “butchy” attitude. She was at least ten years younger than me but had a hard time keeping up with my fast pace. I started dancing in the living room and she joined me. Before I knew it, she started kissing me. She was in the Army Reserves and had to leave early to report to duty the next morning. After everyone left that night I couldn’t help but think about her.

  The next day she came back to see me and we ended up in bed for the next three days. I fell in love with her. She was an auto mechanic and with ease she replaced my car water pump. She could fix anything when it came to it. Tracy was everything I wanted and more in a relationship that I’d never gotten from anyone else I’d been with.

  After a year, Tracy was kicked out of the Army Reserves because she was found out to be gay. The two of us decided to move to Brandon, Florida where her parents owned a small two-bedroom house that was promised to her. Tracy got a job at a convenience store.

  We were so happy with each other that just two months later we decided to have a Holy Union, which is what we called a marital commitment back in the 80s. It’s interesting that today gay marriage is a matter of equal civil rights.

  One day when Tracy was at work, I was out detailing my Cadillac and a couple of neighbors stopped by to admire my work. I was always very meticulous about my vehicle, and after they watched me clean the inside with a Q-Tip and a toothbrush one of them said, “Wow, you do a really good job! How about you do my car next?”

  “Yeah, for seventy-five bucks I’ll do yours,” I said.

  The man brought his BMW over and after three hours of detailing I made it look like a brand new car. Within the next week he had four of his friends’ cars in our driveway and I had to ask Tracy for help because the process aggravated my neck and back, having permanently injured it after falling down the stairs at Hughes Aircraft. I showed Tracy how to properly wax and buff the outside of the car with an electric buffer. We had enough work to last for months.

  Soon I received my Social Security and Disability back-pay and I decided to call a landscaper and have the backyard professionally done because I wanted to invest in the property that was going to be half mine.

  As a hobby I learned to prune, pot and maintain tropical plants. I had a cement slab put down and a screened-in porch added with French doors, and completed the project with a six-person Jacuzzi. By the time I was done, we had a professionally decorated backyard with a pond full of koi fish, yard lights, a naturally wood chipped pathway surrounded with flowers, banana trees and shrubs. To finish it all off, I got two sweet cats to control the mice population and a cuddly golden retriever puppy. It was heaven.

  I started growing plants and eventually added a greenhouse and started selling a variety of Pathos plants and Fichus trees right out of our drivew
ay. With that success the neighbors supported me with small starter plants to grow for them and they called me Jungle Jane because I had plants hanging everywhere. For fun I had a cardboard life-sized picture of Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimmer and later movie star who played Tarzan in the famous films, inside my garage, and with my Polaroid camera I took photos of my friends holding their beautiful house plant next to Tarzan in his loin cloth. They paid me with a bottle of vodka and orange juice for the photo. The women ate it up and it gave us a lot to laugh about.

  Later that year, everything seemed to be going fine between us, and then Tracy’s father showed up with another woman. He said that this was his house and that we had to move out. We had no legal recourse.

  I told Tracy I was going to sell everything that I’d invested, and I did.

  After losing a home that I’d worked hard to build, I was let down again after having no place to call home.

  We decided to move back to Huntington Beach, California and after finding an apartment I had to live on my disability check, which was half of nothing. All these hardships started Tracy and me down a dark road, and after eleven years together, I ended up finding her in bed with one of our friends. So just as easily as our life together had started, it was over. I was heartbroken.

  Upset, I called Randy, and he offered me an opportunity to move in with Ross, his partner and him—promising to take me fishing on White Bear Lake, Minnesota.

  In the summer of 1994, I packed up my things and Ross flew down to meet me and we drove to Minnesota. They owned a three-bedroom rambler with a swimming pool and they loved to have pool parties.

  After a few months of fun-fun-fun I learned that some of our friends were dying of AIDS. Upset that they hadn’t found a cure and that there wasn’t much support for the victims, I decided to start a fund-raising benefit by performing on stage at the Town House, a gay nightclub in St. Paul.

  I lip-synced popular female vocalists to raise money for HIV/AIDS victims. This deadly disease broke out in 1981 among gay men and was first called “GRID” (gay-related immune deficiency), stigmatizing the gay community as carriers of the disease. The gay community praised my efforts and they donated bikes, sewing machines, jewelry, and much more for me to auction off during my performance. Not long after doing it alone a group of girls asked to join me and I called the show Jane’s All Girl Review. Many of them exercised their talents through singing, dancing and performing various skits and I acted as the host, raising money to bring to victims in need.

  Then one night I met a lady named Sharon and we became best friends. Sharon was a native of St. Paul and she enjoyed showing me the town. We partied down by the Mississippi River, played cards at her house, and one afternoon we went to Club Metro in St. Paul, where I wanted to bring Jane’s All Girl Review.

  It was that afternoon that a group of about fifty women were celebrating a fifty-something birthday party. How silly it was to see so many of these gals, who all knew each other, up on the stage and acting like teenagers again. Sharon and I were sitting at the bar sipping our drinks when I noticed a tall, fine-looking gal in her forties standing alone near the DJ booth wearing a burgundy blouse and black leather jacket which accented her curly styled hairdo and simple made-up eyes that highlighted her high-cheeked face.

  My heart thumped and I told Sharon that I was going to meet her. But just before I left my chair a gal went over to talk to her.

  At first I thought it was her girlfriend and decided to wait and see what happened. After the song finished, all the girls from the stage went back to their tables and some of them stopped to talk to her, and when the next song started again almost all of the girls jumped back onto the stage and danced willingly together except the girl in the black leather jacket who stood back and watched.

  Finally I got up and walked by her but she didn’t seem to notice me. I turned around and walked back and stood right by her, but another girl came over to her and started to talk to her so I went back to my seat at the bar.

  After a song or two had gone by I turned around and there she was right next to me at the bar. She ordered a beer and I said, “Hi,” and smiled sweetly. “How are you? My name is Janie. What’s your name?”

  “My name is Patti,” she said, “I’m fine,” and she reached out her hand and shook mine.

  “Do you know all these people?” I asked.

  “Yeah. It’s a birthday party for Cheryl, the tall gal on the dance floor. Her birthday was a couple of weeks ago and they changed it to today, November 5, which is my birthday.”

  “Well happy birthday, Patti. Let me buy you that drink!” I said as the bartender delivered her order.

  “Thank you,” she smiled.

  Then I turned to Sharon and said, “This is Sharon, she’s my friend who brought me here this afternoon.” I explained that the two of us had met last month after I moved here from Florida. Sharon was showing me round St. Paul. We clicked like two peas in a pod.

  As we stood and watched the girls dance I went on to tell Patti about my All Girl Review project and Patti told me that she’d just lost some good guys to AIDS and asked if she could help with any kind of graphics.

  Patti was a computer graphics artist. I told her I needed a business card with a sexy red high-heeled shoe and long stem rose logo on it. She said she’d be happy to help me with that. We exchanged phone numbers and a week later we met again and she gave me my cards. They were perfect!

  During the next few weeks I started having shows and raising money for the AIDS victims in the nearby town of Stillwater and that’s when Patti started to come around more often to help. I raised two-thousand dollars in one afternoon at Club Metro, and the man that was dying of AIDS was amazed at the girls who donated their time performing for my All Girl Review. As word got out, I was able to schedule more shows at many gay bars including Foxy’s and the Townhouse in St. Paul and the Gay ’90s in Minneapolis.

  During that time I was beginning to see that Patti and I were a lot alike in many ways, and that both of us cared about people and wanted to help AIDS victims unconditionally. That was something we shared that was different from any of my past relationships.

  Then one night at Rumors, a nightclub on Robert Street, I put on my purple tailored dress and just after the show started, Patti walked in and I could see her standing near the door. After finishing my first set of three songs, I walked over to get her and brought her back to where Sharon, Randy and Ross were with about ten others.

  All of a sudden, one of the gals at the table stood up and said, “Oh my god, how you doing Patti?”

  I couldn’t believe that Kathy, a friend of the guys, knew Patti and they’d known each other since they were teenagers. They knew each other because they played softball together in the Amateur Softball Association Nationals in Satellite Beach, Florida in 1971.

  I felt like our relationship was meant to be. While everyone stared at Patti, Kathy quickly took her aside to talk while I singlehandedly continued to introduce other lady performers for my show.

  When it was my turn to perform, I started to sing to Patti, gazing straight at her while I lip-synced Because You Loved Me by Celine Dion, and You Light Up My Life by Kasey Cisyk. It was at the end of one of my song sets that Patti and I had our first kiss. It was so romantic that everyone from our table and from around the room stared at us with raccoon eyes.

  By the end of the night I’d raised four thousand dollars, which I gave directly to the victims suffering from AIDS. I never gave it to the organizations because the victims needed the money directly for their personal needs.

  After the show was over, I invited Patti to come over to Randy and Ross’s. It was cold out and we partied until early morning’s light. We both were happy and she slept with me. We were both nervous because neither of us wanted to be hurt or to hurt the other’s feelings. We talked about it and agreed that we had a good set of beliefs, morals and values.

  I was nervous at first to tell her about my breasts. I didn�
�t have much left after the doctor removed my silicone-injected breasts that had turned gangrenous back in Chicago in the ’70s.

  But she didn’t flinch when she saw them and after a few tears ran down my face, she took her two hands and put them on my cheeks and pulled me close, looking in my eyes and said, “I love you as a whole person. Not just for your beautiful body, but for you, the person that you are inside and out. Don’t ever think that the loss of your breasts would ever change the way that I love you. Just be the fun gal that you are.”

  “Oh my god, I love you also honey. Your saying that to me means more than you’ll ever know! You make me feel like a woman should feel. Thank you honey! I will try to relax when I’m in your arms now and forever.”

  That afternoon, I woke Patti up with a gentle kiss. After a cup of coffee we realized we had fallen in love and that was all that mattered.

  Then one night Patti invited me to have dinner at the Metro Club on New Year’s Eve and she came to the house to pick me up. Randy was more excited than I was and I’ll never forget how Ross had embarrassed me when he put a whoopee-cushion under the couch cushion where she’d sat down. Ross loved to pull funny pranks and it was enough to break the ice as we all started to laugh aloud.

  Our friends loved to see us together and afterwards she swept me off and took me to dinner and then to see Howie Mandel at Coffman Union on the University of Minnesota campus. We sat in the front row and watched Howie perform Bobby. It was a time to remember. Afterwards we went back to Ross and Randy’s and she stayed with me for the second time. It was a night that I’ll always remember, as we made love and laughed quietly so the boys wouldn’t hear us rocking the bed.

  One morning she took me fishing at a Minnesota State park. She rowed the boat out and told me to put my fish line in the water. Before I knew it, a big fish grabbed hold and started to pull us across the lake.

  With no anchor Patti yelled, “Grab the lily pad and hang on Janie!” I held onto the lily pad for dear life. There was no way I was going to let go of that fish!