Free The Gay Metropolis by Charles Kaiser Page B

they walked around in underwear and they had the big scene with Crystal in the bathtub. She stood up and had a jockstrap on. But it was done straight. The only one who wasn’t was the one who played Sylvia, the Rosalind Russell role, who really was a bitch, and that was obviously the real McCoy. Even I knew that. But nobody said boo. And they played it very seriously: ‘How dare you take my husband!’ Clare Boothe Luce ran up onstage, took a bow, and said: ‘Crystal has the prettiest back of any Crystal I’ve ever seen.’ Of course I thought nobody in the world knew about this production but me. It never occurred to me that they would do anything like that. God! The army was a strange place.”
    Even Dwight David Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe, put his official imprimatur on these transvestite performances. “You are not fighting with machine guns—but your job is just as important,” he told the all-male cast of the Yard Bird Review in Algiers. “As long as you are doing your job well—and you are doing it extremely well—you will be rendering a service and a great one, to your fellow soldiers and your country.”
    BACK IN MANHATTAN , the steady influx of thousands of men and women in uniform created scores of new locales with homoerotic undertones—everywhere from the balconies of 42d Street moviehouses to six-year-old Franklin Macfie’s living room on the Upper West Side. In 1943 young Franklin was living with six older sisters and three older brothers. “My sisters were all teenagers and older than teenagers during the war. It was very sexy to me because they were all so pretty. In my eyes, they all looked like Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. They had tons of boyfriends, and the house was like the USO. There were always uniforms sitting in the living room waiting for the girls, and I was bounced on their knees, being as cute as I knew how to be.”
    Macfie also went to Central Park with his sisters: “The lawns were littered with absolutely lovely girls in summer dresses and sailors and soldiers, you know, lying and not quite making love but being very close to making love. Necking and so on. By the tennis courts, when I was veryyoung, we often saw people fucking because the back of the tennis courts was very hidden.” Dimouts and blackouts made the parks particularly amorous after dark.
    JERRE KALBAS was twenty-four in 1942. She was working on the assembly line at the Ford Instrument Company in Queens, and she didn’t know how to do “
any thing
feminine. I couldn’t carry a purse. I had a paper bag with my comb in it and my cigarettes in it and my change; I didn’t even think to get an envelope.” Then she met Patty, a professional dancer ten years her senior who looked a lot like Gertrude Lawrence—tall and slender—and they wore their hair the same way. At seventeen Patty was dancing all over Europe: “She even doubled for Garbo in
Mata Hari
. Garbo sent her roses. But Patty’s mother sent them back.”
    Kalbas moved into Patty’s house on Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, and often they dined out on popovers at Patricia Murphy’s popular restaurant nearby. “Patty was a very bright girl. She could do anything! At the time we could get parachutes for $3. She took them and dyed them green. And those were our drapes in the apartment.” Patty was also “ultrafeminine,” and she went to work on Kalbas. “I was walking like a truck driver, and she was making me into a lady. There were no nylons available because of the war, and she taught me how to use makeup to draw stockings on my legs. She even drew the lines on her legs, but I wouldn’t do that—that was going too far!”
    The spirit of war opened lives up in all kinds of surprising ways. “People sort of did with their gay behavior what they did with everything else. Which was take