In praise of trailblazers in petticoats

CULTURE SHOCK: The late Danny La Rue was one of the best known, but Ireland has produced its fair share of cross-dressers who corssed boundaries

BEFORE HE became Danny La Rue, Danny Carroll made his debut as a female impersonator in a skit of the now-forgotten melodrama White Cargo. He was 18 at the time, and serving in the Royal Navy. John Gielgud saw his performance and urged him to become a professional entertainer, which, after the end of the second World War, he did. What is interesting, though, is that in that burlesque of White Cargo, he played, not just a woman, but a black woman.

The hit play (filmed in 1942) is set in the Congo and centres on a love triangle whose apex is Tondelayo, a young native girl desired by two white colonials. The young Corkman played a parodic version of Tondelayo, crossing the boundaries not just of gender but of race and ethnicity.

What’s striking about this is that it harked back to an Irish tradition of male performers appearing, not just as women, but as black women. In 19th-century America, Irish performers were a mainstay of the minstrel shows.

Within that dubious genre, a strange speciality emerged – the so-called “prima donna”, a male transvestite tenor. One of the star prima donnas was the Irish-born Foley McKeever, who performed as Ricardo. The two biggest stars – Patrick Francis Glassey and Tony Hart, both also from Irish backgrounds – were among the highest-paid performers of their era.

Glassey’s stage name was Leon, and his impersonations themselves spawned so many impersonators that he later traded as “The Only Leon”. Like La Rue, he captivated male audiences with a kind of idealised female delicacy, fetishised in lavishly expensive costumes. One 1881 article on him divulged that: “The reporter blushingly asked Leon if he wore underskirts, and in reply the artist produced several of those garments in spotless white, and trimmed with costly embroidery.”

Leon played both white and black women: one surviving poster has him costumed as both Sarah Bernhardt and the creole performer Rose Michon.

Tony Hart had a similar double doubleness. He performed femininity so well that the ace detective Bill Pinkerton swore that he was in fact a woman. But he also alternated between Irishness and blackness. As well as playing black women characters in the skits of his partner Edward Harrigan, he also played the Widow Nolan, one of the precursors of a long line of feisty Irish widows played by male vaudeville stars, including Jimmy O’Dea’s Biddy Mulligan and Brendan O’Carroll’s Mrs Brown. One writer noted that Hart “has been described as the finest wench of his day, in either black-face or Irish make-up”.

If all of this is enough to make a semiotician’s head hurt, it also points to something that is relevant to the sustained success of Danny Carroll’s invention of Danny La Rue. It suggests that while feminists – reasonably enough – have tended to see female impersonation as a misogynistic charade, there has often been a lot more to it than that. It exploits some deeper desire to slip through the limits of identity. The fact that, both in 19th-century America and in 20th-century Britain, its most successful practitioners were Irish suggests that that desire may have as much to do with ethnicity as it has with gender.

Broadly speaking, there are two quite distinct traditions of female impersonation in the English-speaking world. One is quite specifically English. It is rooted, perhaps, in the Tudor period when women were banned from the stage and all female parts were played by men. It was carried on through all-male public schools, in which drama remained an important activity and boys got to play Lady Macbeth and Cordelia. That tradition, I would suggest, is essentially comic and now exists primarily in British TV comedy, from Monty Pythonto The League of Gentlemento Little Britain. It is essentially about men in drag being funny.

The other tradition is Irish. It has its roots in vaudeville, through figures such as Leon and Hart. And in itself, it has two aspects. One of these is the Widow Nolan/Biddy Mulligan thread of men playing working-class, generally middle-aged women, with a mixture of comic parody and genuine admiration. The extent to which this tradition can be called Irish is illustrated by the fact that even non-Irish performers invented Irish women characters.

The most famous of these was Old Mother Riley, enormously popular in music hall, radio and film from the 1930s to the 1950s. Mother Riley was a Dublin washerwoman, but she was played by the English comedian Arthur Lucan. Essentially, Lucan (with his Irish wife Kitty McShane playing his daughter) brought this aspect of the Irish vaudeville cross-dressing tradition into English popular culture.

But the other strand of Irish theatrical transvestism is the more complex one. Instead of being stuck in a single character like Mother Riley or Biddy Mulligan, its performers moved in the opposite direction, staging a radical escape from identity itself. In this mode, being female was not primarily about being a woman. It was a gateway into a kind of protean persona, in which class and ethnicity, as well as gender, were up for grabs.

Thus what made Danny La Rue interesting was the deliberately incomplete nature of his transformations. He used his own big, male voice, and liked to break the illusion with a gruff “wotcha mates!” Neither male nor female, He could shift between a range of identities from Marlene Dietrich and Zsa Zsa Gabor to Bette Davis and Sophie Tucker. He could also be black – he played Shirley Bassey so well that she, half-jokingly, accused him of trying to replace her. And he could be both English and ostentatiously rich – the flagrant expense of his costumes was one way in which in a working-class Irish immigrant could engage in a non-threatening display of affluence.

La Rue always insisted that he was not a drag artist, and in this he was right. He represented the last blast of a strange Irish tradition in which male performers did much more than parody femininity. They played out a fantasy of escape – from everything that was involved in being white, Irish and male.

fotoole@irishtimes.com