Authors: Nora Ephron
March, 1974
As I suppose everyone knows by now, James Morris was four years old and sitting under the piano listening to his mother play Sibelius when he was seized with the irreversible conviction that he ought to have been born a girl. By the age of nine, he was praying nightly for the miracle. “Let me be a girl. Amen.” He went on to the army, became a journalist, climbed Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, won awards for his books, and had four children with a wife who knew that all he really wanted was a sex change. Almost two years ago, he went off to a clinic in Casablanca that had dirty floors, shaved off his pubic hair, “and went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that other self a long last look in the eye and a wink of luck.” The wink of luck did that other self no good at all: the next morning, it was lopped off, and James Morris woke up to find himself as much a woman as hormones and surgery could make him. He promptly sold his dinner jacket and changed his name.
This entire mess could doubtless have been avoided had James Morris been born an Orthodox Jew (in which case he could have
adopted the standard Jewish prayer thanking God for
not
making him a woman) or had he gone to see a good Freudian analyst, who might have realized that any young boy sitting under a piano was probably looking up his mother’s skirt. But no such luck. James Morris has become Jan Morris, an Englishwoman who wears sweater sets and pearls, blushes frequently, bursts into tears at the littlest things, and loves having a gossip with someone named Mrs. Weatherby. Mrs. Weatherby, Morris writes, “really is concerned … about my migraine yesterday; and when I examine myself I find that I am no less genuinely distressed to hear that Amanda missed the school outing because of her ankle.”
Conundrum
is Jan Morris’s book about her experience, and I read it with a great deal of interest, largely because I always wanted to be a girl, too. I, too, felt that I was born into the wrong body, a body that refused, in spite of every imprecation and exercise I could manage, to become anything but the boyish, lean thing it was. I, too, grew up wishing for protectors, strangers to carry my bags, truck drivers to whistle out windows. I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be—feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft-spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half-bad at being a woman. In contrast, Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty-seven-year-old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old
Cosmopolitan
girl. To wit:
“So I well understand what Kipling had in mind, about sisters under the skin. Over coffee a lady from Montreal effuses about Bath—‘I don’t know if you’ve done any traveling yourself’ (not too much, I demurely lie) ‘but I do feel it’s important, don’t you, to see how other people really live.’ I bump into Jane W—— in the
street, and she tells me about Archie’s latest excess—‘Honestly, Jan, you don’t know how lucky you are.’ I buy some typing paper—‘How lovely to be able to write, you make me feel a proper dunce’—and walking home again to start work on a new chapter, find that workmen are in the flat, taking down a picture-rail. One of them has knocked my little red horse off the mantelpiece, chipping its enameled rump. I restrain my annoyance, summon a fairly frosty smile, and make them all cups of tea, but I am thinking to myself, as they sheepishly help themselves to sugar, a harsh feminist thought. It would be a man, I think. Well it would, wouldn’t it?”
It is a truism of the women’s movement that the exaggerated concepts of femininity and masculinity have done their fair share to make a great many people unhappy, but nowhere is this more evident than in Jan Morris’s mawkish and embarrassing book. I first read of Morris in a Sunday
New York Times Magazine
article that brought dignity and real sensitivity to Morris’s obsession. But Morris’s own sensibility is so giddy and relentlessly cheerful that her book has almost no dignity at all. What she has done in it is to retrace his/her life (I am going to go crazy from the pronouns and adjectives here) by applying sentimental gender judgments to everything. Oxford is wonderful because it is feminine. Venice is sublime because it is feminine. Statesmen are dreadful because they are masculine. “Even more than now,” Morris writes of his years as a foreign correspondent, “the world of affairs was dominated by men. It was like stepping from cheap theater into reality, to pass from the ludicrous goings-on of minister’s office or ambassador’s study into the private house behind, where women were to be found doing real things, like bringing up children, painting pictures, or writing home.”
And as for sex—but let Morris tell you about men and women and sex. “You are doubtless wondering, especially if you are male,
what about sex?… One of the genuine and recurrent surprises of my life concerns the importance to men of physical sex.… For me the actual performance of the sexual act seemed of secondary importance and interest. I suspect this is true for most women.… In the ordinary course of events [the sex act] struck me as slightly distasteful, and I could imagine it only as part of some grand act, a declaration of absolute interdependence, or even a sacrifice.”
—
Over the years, Morris saw a number of doctors, several of whom suggested he try homosexuality. (He had tried it several times before, but found it aesthetically unpleasant.) A meeting was arranged with the owner of a London art gallery. “We had a difficult lunch together,” Morris writes, “and he made eyes at the wine waiter over the fruit salad.” The remark is interesting, not just because of its hostility toward homosexuals but also because Jan Morris now makes exactly those same sorts of eyes at wine waiters—on page 150 of her book, in fact.
As James turns into a hermaphrodite and then into Jan, the prose in the book, which is cloying enough to begin with, turns into a kind of overembellished, simile-laden verbiage that makes the style of Victorian women novelists seem spare. Exclamation points and italicized words appear with increasing frequency. Everything blushes. James Morris blushes. His “small breasts blossomed like blushes.” He starts talking to the flowers and wishing them a Happy Easter. He becomes even more devoted to animals. He is able for the first time (“the scales dropped from my eyes”) to look out a plane window and see things on the ground below not as cars and homes seen at a distance but “Lo!… as dolls’ houses and dinky toys.” Shortly before the operation, he and his wife, Elizabeth, whose understanding defies understanding, take a trip, both as women, through Oregon. “How merrily we traveled!” Morris writes. “What
fun the Oregonians gave us! How cheerfully we swapped badinage with boatmen and lumberjacks, flirtatious garage hands and hospitable trappers! I never felt so liberated, or more myself, nor was I ever more fond of Elizabeth. ‘Come on in, girls,’ the motel men would say, and childish though I expect it sounds to you, silly in itself, perhaps a little pathetic, possibly grotesque, still if they had touched me with an accolade of nobility, or clad me ceremonially in crimson, I could not have been more flattered.” The only thing Morris neglects to write into this passage is a little face with a smile on it.
Morris is infuriatingly vague about the reactions of her children (she blandly insists they adjusted perfectly) and of Elizabeth (she says they are still the closest of friends). “I am not the first,” Morris writes, “to discover that one recipe for an idyllic marriage is a blend of affection, physical potency and sexual incongruity.” (Idyllic marriage? Where your husband becomes a lady? I suppose we owe this to creeping Harold-and-Vitaism; still, it is one of the more ridiculous trends of recent years to confuse great friendships with great marriages; great marriages are when you have it all.) As for her new sex life, Jan Morris lyrically trills that her sexuality is now unbounded. But how?
Unfortunately, she is a good deal more explicit about the details of what she refers to as “truly the symptoms of womanhood.” “The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became,” she writes. “I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly, incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.… I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them.… I did not particularly want to be good at reversing
cars, and did not in the least mind being patronized by illiterate garage-men, if it meant they were going to give me some extra trading stamps.… And when the news agent seems to look at me with approval, or the man in the milk-cart smiles, I feel absurdly elated, as though I have been given a good review in the Sunday
Times
. I know it is nonsense, but I cannot help it.”
The truth, of course, is that Jan Morris does not know it is nonsense. She thinks that is what it is about. And I wonder about all this, wonder how anyone in this day and age can think that this is what being a woman is about. And as I wonder, I find myself thinking a harsh feminist thought. It would be a man, I think. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?
June, 1974
I feel bad about what I’m going to do here. What I’m going to do here is write something about Dorothy Schiff, and the reason I feel bad about it is that a few months ago, I managed to patch things up with her and now I’m going to blow it. She had been irritated with me for several years because I told the story about her and Otto Preminger’s sauna on the radio, but we managed to get through a pleasant dinner recently, which made me happy—not because I care whether or not Dorothy Schiff is irritated with me but simply because I have a book coming out this summer, and if she were speaking to me, I might have a shot at some publicity in the
New York Post
. Ah, well. It’s not easy being a media columnist. The publicity I had in mind, actually, was this little feature the
Post
runs on Saturdays called “At Home With,” where semi-famous people tell their favorite recipes. Mine is beef borscht.
Dorothy Schiff is the publisher, editor and owner of the
New York Post
, America’s largest-selling afternoon newspaper. I used to work there. The
Post
is a tabloid that has a smaller news hole than the
New York Daily News
—five front pages, various parts of which
are often rented out to Chock Full o’ Nuts and Lüchow’s. It also has a center magazine section containing mostly
Washington Post
columnists, a first-rate sports section and drama critic, and Rose Franzblau, Earl Wilson and Dear Abby. It takes about eleven minutes to read the
Post
, and there are more than half a million New Yorkers like me who spend twenty cents six days a week to kill eleven minutes reading it. It is probably safe to say that fewer and fewer young people read the
Post
, and that fewer and fewer young people understand why anyone does. It is a terrible newspaper.
The reason it is, of course, is Dorothy Schiff. A great deal has been written about Mrs. Schiff in various places over the past years, and some of it—I’m thinking here of Gail Sheehy’s article in
New York
at the end of 1973—has captured perfectly her coquettish giddiness, her penchant for trivia and her affection for gossip. It is taken for granted in these articles that Dolly Schiff is a very powerful woman—she is in fact very powerful for a woman and not particularly powerful for a newspaper publisher. What is rarely discussed is her product. In Sheehy’s article, I suppose this was partly because Mrs. Schiff had manuscript approval, and partly because the publisher of
New York
, like so many other men Mrs. Schiff toys with, thinks that someday he will buy the
New York Post
from her. But it is a major omission: There is no other bigcity newspaper in America that so perfectly reflects the attitudes and weaknesses of its owner. Dorothy Schiff has a right to run her paper any way she likes. She owns it. But it seems never to have crossed her mind that she might have a public obligation to produce a good newspaper. Gail Sheehy quite cleverly compared her with Scheherazade, but it would be more apt, I think, to compare her with Marie Antoinette. As in let them read schlock.
In 1963, when I went to work there as a reporter, the
New York Post
was located in a building on West Street, near the Battery. The
first day I went there, I thought I had gotten out of the elevator in the fire exit. The hallway leading to the city room was black. Absolutely black. The smell of urine came wafting out of the men’s room in the middle of the long hallway between the elevator and the city room. The glass door to the city room was filmed with dust, and written on it, with a finger, was the word “Philthy.” The door was cleaned four years later, but the word remained; it had managed to erode itself onto the glass. Then, through the door, was the city room. Rows of desks jammed up against one another, headset phones, manual typewriters, stacks of copy paper, cigarette butts all over the floor—all of it pretty routine for a city room, albeit a city room of the 1920s. The problem was the equipment. The staff of the
Post
was small, but it was too large for the city room and for the number of chairs and desks and telephones in it. If you arrived at the
Post
five minutes late, there were no chairs left. You would go hunt one up elsewhere on the floor, drag it to an empty space, and then set off to find a phone. You cannot be a newspaper reporter without a phone. The phones at the
Post
were the old-fashioned head-set type, with an earpiece-mouthpiece part that connected to a wire headpiece. Usually you could find the earpiece-mouthpiece part, but only occasionally was there a headpiece to go with it, which meant that you spent the day with your head cocked at a seventy-degree angle trying to balance this tiny phone against your shoulder as you typed. If you managed to assemble a complete telephone in the morning, it was necessary to lock it in your desk during lunch, or else it would end up on someone else’s head for the afternoon. The trouble with that was that half the staff did not have desks, much less desk drawers to lock anything in.