QI The Book of the Dead

Hall Ticehurst and spent the holidays at Sissinghurst, home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. As a small boy their son, the writer and publisher Nigel Nicolson, played with Gordon, known to everyone as ‘Dinky’. Sackville-West was famously the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), in which a boy is transformed into a beautiful woman. Simmons would later write in her autobiography: ‘Had she lived a little longer, Vita would have been intrigued to know that the child “Dinky”, as she called me, would become a real-life Orlando.’
    Gordon started writing early, having his first poem published at the age of four and his first interview – conducted sitting in Mae West’s lap – appearing in the Sussex Express when he was nine. In 1953, his grandmother died and he emigrated to Canada, becoming a teacher on an Ojibwa native reservation. Despite having had periods through ‘her’ teens and ‘his’ voice not having broken, Gordon still at this stage appeared male, and wore a crew cut. He turned his experiences with the Ojibwa into a best-seller, Me Papoose Sitter , published in 1955, and soon after moved to New York, where he worked as a journalist and society biographer writing critically acclaimed lives of Mrs Abraham Lincoln, Princess Margaret and Jackie Kennedy. Witty, eccentric and ostentatious, Gordon made friends across a very broad swathe of New York society, from fellow-writers like Carson McCullers, to actresses like Joan Crawford and sportsmen like the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. A distant relative, the wealthy painter Isabel Whitney, took to him at once and invited him to live with her in West 10th Street mansion. Here Gordon metMargaret Rutherford, the matronly actress still best remembered as Madame Arcati, the medium in the 1945 film of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit . Rutherford had come hoping to be cast in the role of the grandmother in the proposed film of Me Papoose Sitter , but was immediately smitten by the person of Gordon himself. She described him as ‘a child… with large brown eyes inherited from some long dead Andalusian ancestor … a large green and red Amazon parrot named Marilyn on his shoulder.’ When Isabel
    Whitney died of leukaemia in 1962, Margaret Rutherford and her husband legally adopted Gordon. He was twenty-five. Whitney left Gordon her house and $2 million estate. He used the proceeds to buy a faded 1840s pink stucco mansion in the gay neighbourhood of Charleston in South Carolina. Gordon displayed impeccable interior décor sense, filling the house with Chippendale and early American furniture and transforming the garden with designs sent over by Vita Sackville-West. He was regarded as a fixture in Charleston high society: an eligible, if undeniably camp, bachelor. He once threw a coming-out party for two of his dogs, where the pooches were displayed on velvet cushions, dressed in chenille, long gloves and pearls.
    Then, in 1968, it all changed. Gordon checked himself into the brand new Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and underwent corrective genital surgery and a course in counselling. One of the psychiatric reports noted with a hint of foreboding that, despite her high intelligence, as far as men were concerned the newly female Dawn had ‘the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl’. So it was to prove. She returned to Charleston as Dawn Pepita Hall, sporting ‘a Dippity-Do hairstyle – a dowdy doppelganger of Jackie Kennedy’ according to one neighbour – and within a very few months announced herengagement to a black motor mechanic, butler and aspiring sculptor, John-Paul Simmons. ‘His black hand touched my white one; it was as simple as that,’ she wrote in her autobiography.
    Charleston was outraged. Bomb threats meant the ceremony had to take place in their front parlour, and Newsweek claimed the event had ‘shaken the Confederacy’. It certainly didn’t shock Margaret Rutherford. She told Time magazine, ‘I am delighted that Gordon has become a woman, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of another race, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of a lower station, but I understand the man is a Baptist!’ She offered practical support, too, leaning on the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher (with the help of her friend Tony Benn), to organise a second, English, ceremony in Hastings.
    In Charleston, things went from bad to worse. The crate containing the couple’s