Some of the Pansy acts sailed close to the wind and, as a result, the occasional run-in with the law was not uncommon. In April 1935, impresario Fay Norman (no relation to Karyl) and the entire cast of her Gay Boy Revue were charged with having committed acts of indecent exposure when they played Baldwinsville, New York. The charges were eventually dropped, but not before Judge Charles Hall had admonished the troupe with his personal wish that ‘some charge may be found on which I may sentence the whole outfit to the penitentiary’.25 The stars of the Pansy Craze were not all cross-dressers, but drag – and the blurring of sexual stereotypes – was massively important in the scene’s development. Brooklyn native Jean Malin (born Victor Eugene James Malinovsky in 1908), one of the biggest names on the circuit (he was the highest-paid nightclub entertainer of 1930), began his career in drag under the name Imogene Wilson, earning $10 a week in a tiny club called the Rubaiyat,26 but he found fame in his early 20s as an openly gay man (although he, like many others, would later marry), who bleached his hair platinum blond but dressed in expensive suits and dinner jackets when he performed. After the Rubaiyat was closed by the police,27 he soon found work elsewhere, and was directly responsible for giving ‘Broadway its first glimpse of pansy nightlife. Malin was a tremendous success and other club owners followed the lead. Before the main stream knew what happened, there was a hand on a hip for every light on Broadway’.28 Acting as emcee and club host at the Club Abbey, and introducing drag acts and other performers whilst mingling with the audience, Malin gained a reputation for cracking risqué jokes and actively encouraging hecklers to have a go at him. Today we would describe the antagonistic audience engagement and vicious verbal put-downs so much a part of Malin’s and Norman’s acts as ‘camp’; that attitude has directly influenced every drag act since. Theatre reviewer Arthur Pollock wrote ‘I don’t know what Jean Malin is, but he is clever. If his tart retorts were spontaneous, he is a smart fellow’.29 On hearing that Jean was to marry Lucille Heiman, Walter Winchell cracked the joke ‘Did you hear the news about Jean Malin getting married? … “No kiddin’ – who’s the lucky man?”’30 When Winchell bumped in to Malin a short time later, he dragged the singer off to one side and asked, ‘what is this marriage thing anyhow? Why did you do it?’ Malin’s reply was simple (although Winchell steadfastly refused to accept it): ‘Because I love her’.31 By July, Winchell was crowing that ‘the sissylebrity’ was already heading towards the divorce court, having been ‘served with melting papers’.32
That year, the management of the Argonaut, the club Malin was appearing at, threw a huge party for 500 guests to mark his 23rd birthday. Malin was a star, and associating with him could only give your career a boost. The ‘gay, glamorous and naughty’ singer Nan Blakstone, was a talented pianist and satirist who had appeared with Malin at the Argonaut, one of the clubs owned and operated by former movie actress ‘Texas’ Guinan, a ‘big, loud lesbian’ who was tight with the mob, according to writer Jimmy Breslin.33 Hailed as ‘the world’s greatest interpreter of sophisticated song,’ Blakstone had a successful career of her own, recording for a number of companies and performing in night spots in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles before retiring through ill health in 1949.
Not everybody was a fan. Columnist O. O. McIntyre wrote about how he hated ‘the loathsome antics of a Jean Malin or other pansy performers’;34 a few months earlier he had claimed that ‘the Narcissus posings of the blond and oyster white Jean Malin in night clubs was a depravity sickening even those hailing it as innovation’.35 Critic Jack Lait referred to him, poisonously, as ‘the quick-witted, Tuxedoed comedienne’.36 Columnist Gilbert Swan called Malin ‘the woops-my-dear-interlocutor’.37 Press aside, the police in New York were tired of the trouble the pansy clubs gave them, and the authorities did whatever they could to ‘put an end to the vogue for lisping, falsetto-voiced young men … word has passed around that the officials would frown on further efforts to display the cavortings of the female impersonator type’.38 In October 1931, Malin, effectively barred from working in New York by Commissioner Mulrooney, went to Boston where, according to the front page of scandal sheet Brevities (the recently launched tabloid version of the Broadway Brevities magazine) ‘Queers Seek Succor! Fairies cruise in daisy beds of Boston, making the city a lavenderish camp of love,’39 yet by the following March he was back, headlining at the Club Richman on Broadway.
In the early hours of 10 August 1933, Jean Malin was involved in a fatal automobile accident in Venice, California. Patsy Kelly, who at one time was Tallulah Bankhead’s companion, told Movie Mirror magazine in 1937 that she had a premonition about Jean’s death: ‘I went down to the Ship Café that night. I glanced up at the flashing sign over the door that said “Jean Malin’s Last Night”, and as clearly as I’m hearing you a voice said: “be careful. It is his last night.” He backed his car into the ocean off the end of the pier just one hour later. We were all submerged in the water. Adrenaline worked with me. It didn’t with Jean.’ Patsy was hospitalised for several days. Jimmy Forlenza, described in contemporary reports as Malin’s ‘room mate’ and ‘close friend’, escaped from the car with a broken collarbone and severe bruising. According to Walter Winchell, Malin had been contemplating making some major changes to his act at the time of his death: ‘Malin wouldn’t stick to his set. He wanted to leave all that stuff behind him, he remarked, and I scolded him for it, arguing that his forte was being funny, after his fashion, and not being the dude he tried to be. “You want me to be a great big sissy!” he bellowed, “I want to progress”.’40 Within weeks, his brothers, Al and William, and his widow Lucille (Malin sought a divorce in Mexico in November 1932, but at the time of his death the couple were still legally married), filed suits seeking damages for his death.
A large, powerful man who was not afraid to use his fists if necessary, Malin had written the Broadway revue Sisters of the Chorus and was originally to have been a featured player in the Clark Gable – Joan Crawford film Dancing Lady (1933), but he died three months before the film was released and all of his scenes were edited out. Malin’s one record – ‘I’d Rather Be Spanish Than Mannish’ and ‘That’s What’s The Matter With Me’ – was issued posthumously. In 1936, Lucille Malin was charged with being the mistress of three of the ‘most exclusive call houses’ in New York, for ‘sending a girl from New York to Montreal for immoral purposes’41 and for ‘violating the White Slave Traffic Act’42. She pleaded guilty.
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The Pansy Craze was not restricted to New York: while Karyl Norman, Jean Malin and Gladys Bentley made their names in the prohibition-era clubs of the great metropolis, Frankie ‘Half-Pint’ Jaxon was making his mark on Chicago. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1896, Frank Devera Jackson – who earned his nickname because as an adult he stood no taller than 5′ 2″ – was raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and he began his singing career there around 1910 before travelling extensively with medicine shows in Texas, and then touring the eastern seaboard. Called ‘a freak novelty act’43 by vaudeville reporter Sylvester Russell, his vocal range and flamboyant manner established him as a crowd favourite. By 1917, he had begun working regularly in Atlantic City (he held a residency at the Paradiso Café in 1920), and in Chicago, often with such performers as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, whose staging he helped design.
In the late 1920s, he sang with the top jazz bands that passed through Chicago, and recorded with pianist Cow Cow Davenport, slide guitarist Tampa Red and Thomas Dorsey. Half-Pint released sides on Brunswick, Decca, Supertone (as Cotton Thomas), Vocalion and other labels, both solo and as a featured vocalist for acts including Tampa Red’s Hokum Jazz Band, recording the infamous and frankly obscene ‘My Daddy Rocks Me With One Steady Roll’, and ‘How Long How Long Blues’ (where Jaxon can be heard faking an orgasm) with the latter. Another Chicago-based act styling themselves The Hokum Boys recorded a version of the song ‘Somebody’s Been Using That Thing’, featuring lyrics about a man ‘who puts paint and powder on his face’ and �
��women who walked and talked like men’. The line-up of the Hokum Boys changed with almost every disc they issued: this particular recording features Georgia Tom (aka Thomas Dorsey, Ma Rainey’s long-time pianist and a member of Tampa Red’s band) and Big Bill Broonzy. By June 1926, Jaxon was running the show at Chicago’s Dreamland Café, and the following year was headlining at the Apollo Theater, producing and starring in his own show, where he was described as ‘a fine singer, genuine talented actor and a natural born dancer’.44 That year, Jaxon recorded his most famous song, ‘Willie the Weeper’ (itself based on the much earlier ‘Willie the Chimney Sweeper’), the tale of a drug-fuelled nightmare that became the basis for Cab Calloway’s 1931 hit ‘Minnie the Moocher’.
‘Within the past six months some 35 new dim lit tea rooms … have opened on or near the North Side,’ Variety reported in December 1930, when writing about the proliferation of clubs in the white part of Chicago. ‘All have waitresses who are lads in girl’s clothing … racketeers, who have made the North Side their playground for some years have gone strong for these boy joints in a big way’.45 Frankie Jaxon could often be heard on radio with his own band The Hot Shots (the band also held down a residency at the city’s Capitol Theatre), although he was suspended from broadcasting for a time in February 1932, with the gossip pages suggesting something queer was afoot. The following year Frankie and his band were one of the highlights of the Streets of Paris, a temporary village that was built as part of the Chicago World’s Fair. Here, for a 25¢ entry fee, visitors could enjoy an approximation of Parisian cafe society, and for a further $7.50 they could attend a grand ball with entertainment from ‘the hottest jazz band at the exposition,’ led by Jaxon with ‘his clarinet, his baton and his yodelling’.46 Around 7,000 people paid for the privilege of dancing to Frankie and his group, and ‘no better music was heard on the grounds that night’.47
Known for performing in nightclubs in full drag, and for a show-stopping performance where he would duet with himself singing both the male and female vocal parts on songs like ‘I’m Gonna Dance With The Guy Wot Brung Me’, in 1941 Jaxon retired from show business for good and took a job at the Pentagon. A number of other female impersonators attempted to take his place – chief amongst them Petite Swanson (who recorded for the Sunbeam label), Valda Gray and a pair of fellas going by the name of Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrick [sic], all of whom could be found strutting their stuff in State Street’s Cabin Inn. Frankie relocated to Los Angeles sometime around 1944, where he dropped off the radar. He died on 15 May 1953.
Back in New York, things had not been the same since nightclub owner Charles ‘Chink’ Sherman had been shot and stabbed during a mob-related attack at the Club Abbey, where Jean Malin had been performing, in January 1931. That incident (which was not the first time that the police had been called to a shooting at the premises), which had seen ‘two gangs translate their enmity into a free-for-all battle with revolvers, knives and fists’48 and a police officer, Detective John J. Walsh implicated in the gangland goings-on,49 brought about a ‘police edict barring female impersonators from the local nite clubs’50, and by the end of 1933 the Pansy Craze was all but over in the Big Apple. Soon, the Harlem scene had changed beyond recognition, the white audience had moved on and many of the old clubs had closed. ‘Gladys Bentley, who used to sing and play so tirelessly in the Clam House, has gone plumb hinkty [snobbish; aloof] in her shiny tuxedo suit and is a real night club entertainer’.51 Her star in the ascendant, in 1935 Gladys was invited to take part in the entertainment for a ball held in aid of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association of Westchester County. Billed as ‘the Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Song,’ she was still plying her butch lesbian act in San Francisco in 1942, when she could be seen appearing nightly at Mona’s Club 440 on Broadway, whose slogan was ‘where girls will be boys’.
After the police clampdown and threatened curfew, Texas Guinan made plans to move her operation to Paris, but she died of amoebic dysentery in 1933, shortly before the repeal of prohibition. In advance of the 1939 World’s Fair, the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) embarked on a clean-up, applying to court for permission to close down bars that were known to serve ‘sex variants’. One such venue, the Gloria Bar and Grill on Third Avenue, had its licence revoked because, it was claimed, it allowed ‘homosexuals, degenerates and other undesirable people to congregate on the premises’. Unlike most of the bars closed by the SLA (the El Rey Tavern – also on Third Avenue – was raided around the same time), the management of Gloria’s decided to contest the case, even though the bar was run by a gay man, Jackie Mason, and was a known draw for gay men and lesbians in the city. Gloria’s argued that that the SLA could not prove that staff knew they were serving homosexuals. Their motion to appeal was denied.52
Bruz Fletcher and Ray Bourbon were the biggest names of the second wave, reaching fame as the Pansy Craze was dying down but continuing with their careers into the 1940s and, in Rae’s case, beyond. Bruz (pronounced Bruce) came from what his biographer Tyler Alpern calls ‘one of the wealthiest and most dysfunctional families in Indiana’.53 The nephew of novelist Booth Tarkington (author of The Magnificent Ambersons), his wild, drama-filled life includes running away from home at the age of eight, an attempted suicide as a young teen and a final (and successful) suicide bid at the age of 34. His mother and grandmother killed themselves in a double suicide, his sister spent some years living as a man before she was committed to an asylum and his father lost the family fortune and became an elevator operator.
Bruz Fletcher (born Stroughton J. Fletcher III) lived openly with his partner Casey Roberts, a set designer and former actor. In 1929, aged just 22, he was signed as a songwriter by Los Angeles agent Harry Weber. He had already been writing material for other acts, including the screen star Esther Ralston, and appearing as a pianist and singer in clubs in New York. His 1933 play Not a Saint was a hit but the 1936 comedy Commuting Distance was poorly received by critics. Fletcher issued many of his urbane, witty (and occasionally catty) songs on 78; his best-known release was probably ‘Lei From Hawaii’ (‘I’ve wanted a lei for so long. I can’t get one here, they’re entirely too dear, but Hawaiians get lei-d for a song’). Columnist Harriet Parsons archly pointed out (in her syndicated column of 19 August 1937) that ‘Monte Wooley and Bob Benchley [are] mailing Bruz Fletcher’s record, “Bring Me a Lei from Hawaii”, to all their pals’. It was an open secret that writer and actor Monty Wooley was gay, but humourist Robert Benchley was a famous womaniser, who had many affairs during his married life. Harriet Parsons was telling her readers that she knew exactly what Fletcher meant by the word ‘lei’.
‘Outrageous, potty-mouthed drag queen’54 Ray Bourbon claimed to have been born and educated in England55 but this was not true: he was born Hal Wadell in Texas in 1892. It’s hard to build a true picture of him, as he told so many lies about his life and career, any number of which have been accepted as fact. He claimed to have appeared in several films, as a woman, with Rudolph Valentino: he may well have appeared in Blood and Sand (St. Sukie de la Croix mentions Bourbon, as a young matador, dying in Valentino’s arms), but if he did, he was not included in the credits. What we can be sure about is that by the beginning of the 1930s he was appearing as part of a double act, Scotch and Bourbon, before performing in the revue Boys Will Be Girls in San Francisco, which Variety labelled a ‘pansy floor show,’ and which was raided on several occasions by the local police. Trouble seemed to follow Ray Bourbon wherever he went: he was convicted of ‘staging an indecent show’ in Los Angeles in 1936, and was found guilty by the jury after they heard him perform material from the show in question in court.56 He was a friend of Mae West: in July 1944 she hired Ray to perform in her Broadway production Catherine Was Great. He also appeared in her show Diamond Lil, which toured during 1949 and 1950.
In 1956, at the age of 60, Bourbon announced that – after a ‘series of operations in Mexico, which he says turned him into a woman’ – she was now to be kno
wn as Rae.57 Only a few years before, Christine Jorgensen (given the name George William Jorgensen Jr. at birth) had been the first American to become widely known for having undergone sex reassignment surgery (‘sex-change’ operations had, in fact, been carried out for decades: Danish portrait artist Lili Elbe transitioned in 1930, and British papers were reporting on a female to male sex-change in 1942). However, although Rae Bourbon issued an album entitled Let Me Tell You About My Operation, it appears that Bourbon never actually underwent surgery. Jorgensen had her operation in Denmark: the year before Bourbon made the announcement he had been forced to postpone ‘his previously announced trip to Denmark for the usual reason,’ when he was arrested and charged with reckless driving. ‘You can’t arrest me,’ he remonstrated with the cops who pulled him over ‘I’ve got to get home and feed the kids!’ The ‘kids’ turned out to be 12 dogs.58
Bourbon issued a number of recordings of songs and monologues, mostly sold under the counter or through specialist magazines, but his sex-change act brought about the end of his career rather than re-invigorating it as he had hoped. He was arrested several times for ‘impersonating a woman,’ and his act was declared ‘obscene and profane’.59 After being banned from performing his ‘lewd’ act on a number of stages, Bourbon’s twisted tale ended in 1971: three years earlier he had been accused of being an accomplice to murder. He had entrusted the care of his dogs (now numbering as many as 70) to an A. D. Blount, a kennel owner in Texas. When Bourbon failed to pay Blount’s bill for their upkeep, Blount disposed of the dogs. Enraged, Bourbon hired two men to beat Blount up. Unfortunately Blount died as a result, and Bourbon and his accomplices were arrested, found guilty and sentenced to a 99-year prison term. He died in hospital in Brownwood, Texas in 1971.
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