Customer Reviews

Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love

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I loved Edward Ball's first literary efforts, Slaves in the Family and The Sweet Hell Inside. They both touched my heart in a way that few books have managed. So I ordered Peninsula of Lies: A Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love before it was even published, anticipating great things. I must admit that I was rather disappointed. Ball follows the life of Gordon Hall, who claimed his gender was misidentified at birth. Gordon (Dawn) ends up in the 1960's living in Charleston, SC, and the book traces his sex change operation, his marriage to a black man, and the birth of a daughter.

Ball sets out to answer some troubling questions including: Was Gordon/Dawn really misidentified as a male at birth? What exactly did her surgery entail? Was her daughter really her biological daughter? And if not, where did she come from? Ball conducted lots of research including interviews with family members, friends, and even some of Dawn's doctors. As a result of this research, Ball gives us a crash course on sexual deviations including the difference between homosexuals, transsexuals, transvestites and hermaphrodites. He also recounts the history of sex reassignments (sex change operations) in the 20th century. And in the process, he unravels the mystery about the controversial figure.

Before Peninsula of Lies was even published, it was touted as Charleston's answer to John Berendt's bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Unfortunately, Berendt fans will be greatly disappointed. Midnight has increased overnight tourism in Savannah by tens of millions of visitors, as readers flock to the city to see the various sites mentioned in the book (especially the Mercer House). Peninsula of Lies will have a fraction of that impact on Charleston, if any. I can't envision Peninsula of Lies tour buses roaming the streets of Charleston. The only site I'd make an effort to see is Dawn's Society Street house.

Still, the story is quirky and interesting. Dawn was a published author, and wrote a number of books including biographies of Princess Margaret and Lady Bird Johnson. She also inherited a fortune from Isabel Whitney, but ended up spending it all rather quickly. There are a good many photographs and drawings that are quite good including photos from her wedding, of her daughter, her Charleston house, and her pets. However, this book did not live up to expectations, and it is definitely not another Midnight. It also doesn't come close to Ball's first two efforts.

Fame eluded Gordon Langley Hall as a writer, even though he was a prolific scribbler of memoirs and novels. When he became one of the first people to undergo sex change surgery in America, Hall's local notoriety in Charleston, South Carolina, was unpleasantly mixed with malicious gossip.Edward Ball's new book, Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love, may give Hall, now dead, the recognition that eluded him in life. Ball (author of the National Book Award winner Slaves in the Family) set out to settle two mysteries that have circled one of Charleston's most celebrated-and outrageous-personalities for decades. Was Hall, as he claimed, a hermaphrodite who was misidentified as a male at birth? And did Hall, as he also claimed, conceive and give birth to a daughter, Natasha?

Ball's quest to resolve these burning issues takes him from Charleston to England where, as a child of the servant class, Hall had few opportunities for economic and social mobility. Then the biographer tracks his subject to New York where Hall became the protege and, at least in some sense, the lover of Isabel Whitney, an heir to the cotton gin fortune. His liaison with Whitney, perhaps more than his subsequent sex change, altered Hall's life forever. When she died, his mistress made him a millionaire.

As a Charleston transplant, Hall charmed local society with his English accent. Charlestonians, Ball indicates, didn't pick up on the cockney overtones that would have made Ball's attempts to penetrate the upper classes a wash back in England.

Then, perversely, Hall throws away his tenuous new foothold in the Charleston party circuit by changing his gender from male to female and re-emerging as "Dawn." As painted by Ball, Charleston's high society was far too prudish and inflexible to get over that one. Then, having forever trespassed on good taste, Hall takes his adventure one or two steps further. He marries an African-American man and appears to bear his new husband a child.

Ball first gets a clue that Hall might be inventing fictions about himself when it turns out that Hall forged a document shaving 15 years off his age. From there, Ball is the relentless sleuth, separating fantasy from fact until he has the real story on Gordon Hall, alias Dawn Simmons. He interviews dozens of eccentric characters who knew Hall, and the tale of each informant is a story unto itself.

Echoing the formula of John Berendt's best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Ball's Peninsula of Lies is a must-read for people who enjoy well-crafted Southern storytelling.

Gordon/Dawn was a fascinating character and this book is intriguing reading. Just who was Dawn? How much of her story was true and how much fiction? What is sex? What is gender? Like Middlesex this book is mind-expanding.

The other reviews have explained the book itself, so I won't try to do so.

But for those readers who'd like to find out more about Dawn, read "Me Pappoose Sitter" written by Dawn as Gordon, then read "She Crab Stew" written as Dawn. Both are absolutely hilarious, especially "She Crab Stew" which is unlike anything else I have ever read! Through these 2 books, I think that we can see more about Gordon/Dawn's inner self and life outlook in her own novels, than in this book.

(Me Pappoose Sitter is semi-autobiographical, and She Crab Stew is a comic novel with a main character that seems to me to be Dawn's alter-ego.)

Charleston, South Carolina, is similar to a lot of southern cities in a description one of its citizens gave it: "Charleston is a city with Gothic tales, and what they don't know, they make up." The words are from Dawn Langley Hall Simmons, who had been Gordon Hall before a sex change operation, and no one in Charleston could have made up her story. It's far too weird. For Simmons was a well known Charlesonite, an expatriate Britton in a renovated town house who not only had changed from a man to a woman, but in 1969 married a black mechanic 25 years younger than she. Then she reported she was pregnant, and eventually produced a baby complete with birth certificate. This strange life gets a fascinating exposure in _Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love_ (Simon and Schuster) by Edward Ball. Ball has sifted through the extremely puzzling mysteries here, including the forty-three boxes of Dawn Simmons material kept by the library at Duke University. One of the most attractive features of this biography is that although it more-or-less tells Gordon's, then Dawn's, chronological story, it is a chronicle of how the author traced down leads, traveled to obscure locales that might have some memory of his subject, and interviewed some decidedly peculiar people who knew him / her. From initial bafflement to eventual understanding, a reader can join him on an illuminating journey.

Ball went to Sissinghurst Castle in England to visit Nigel Nicolson, son of Vita Sackville-West. Strangely, Gordon Hall grew up around there; he was the son of Sissinghurst servants and himself helped weed the famous gardens around the estate. Gordon would grow up eventually to move to Canada where he would school the Ojibwa children in 1946, a year he would write about in _Me Papoose Sitter_. In 1952, as in so many stories of American self-invention, he arrived in New York City. Gordon Hall, a debonair young man conflicted about his sexuality, became an intimate of the elderly unmarried artist Isabel Whitney, one of the heirs within the cotton-gin Whitney family. Whitney died in 1962, and Hall inherited a large estate of stocks, antiques, and art. In Charleston he ingratiated himself to the Historic Charleston Foundation and other locals by finding an old downtown house to renovate and stuff with antiques. There are some questions about how the flamboyant Gordon Hall spent his nights, but eventually he met John-Paul Simmons, "a skinny, happy black guy who looked like he'd stumbled into a good time." And he fell hard for John-Paul, who wasn't interested in another man. Gordon was seen in the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins soon after it opened in 1966, and underwent surgery for transformation into womanhood. Charleston had been titillated by the change from Gordon to Dawn, but the change to Mrs. Simmons with the black husband was much harder to take. The wedding announcement ran on the local newspaper's obituary page.

In 1971 was born Natasha Simmons, and at least one birth certificate shows Dawn to have been her mother; Ball's research gets to the bottom of this issue. It was the climax of Dawn's life. She was talked about all over Charleston, and was nationally famous enough that Dick Martin on Laugh-In could make a joke about her baby: "We can only hope she grows up to be half the man her mother was." The remaining decades of her life were just sad. John-Paul plowed through the family fortune and became abusive. Dawn moved off in poverty to Catskill, New York, and Jean-Paul got long-term inpatient treatment for schizophrenia. The final chapter's answers to some of Dawn's riddles are provided by Jean-Paul himself; after much hard work, Ball was able to find him, and schizophrenic or not, his answers are lucid and intelligent. It is a fitting conclusion to a mystery story, but even better is the help Ball got, throughout his quest for answers, from Natasha Simmons herself. Cherished by her peculiar parents, Natasha continues to speak with love for "Mommy," and reveals herself as intelligent and perceptive. Dawn's adaptability and pluck have paid off.

This book has definitely kept my attention. It's a book that you read and then think about a whole lot. I can't say that it was a 'fun read' but it was enlightening and most interesting. It makes me want to read more from this author and I probably will.

This story is a monumental one in its scope, and Ball did take a good crack at it. What annoys me is he seems to have dropped the ball in some areas, Hall's relationship with Dame Margaret Rutherford being one(mentioned, then largely ignored). The conclusions reached at the end are just flawed. Anyone who has ever tried to get a copy of their birth certificate knows you cannot obtain one in a state you were not born in. It seems like he started out with a lot of good intentions, but like some of Hall's writing, the story just fizzles and reaches "a" conclusion.

Edward Ball's unusual story of Dawn Langley Hall, set in the charming environs of Charleston, South Carolina, will absorb your interest and leave you still wanting answers to some of the questions it raises. Written in Ball's highly personal style, in which he injects his own thoughts and feelings into the narration, the book tells of Dawn's metamorphosis from his/her birth as a poor boy, son of a servant on a large English estate, to a society woman in Charleston. When Dawn marries a black man, she loses her position in Charleston circles. Later, when she purportedly gives birth to a daughter, she sets tongues wagging all over the city.

Was she actually the mother of the baby as she claimed? This is just one of the questions that surround eccentric, enigmatic Dawn. This fascinating book, a biography of an extraordinarily colorful life, is highly recommended.

I picked up this book after hearing it compared to "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," and needless to say, although set in a charming Southern city, Peninsula fails to live up to this billing. I think this is largely because Gordon/Dawn, although interesting, is by no means a character able to carry an entire novel. I could see her story being delivered with great effectiveness as a Vanity Fair or New Yorker longform article, but as the basis for an entire book, thing fall flat. Imagine the typical SNL sketch... great for 5 minutes on TV, unbearable in the movies at 90. Dawn, although quirky, never seems to come across as particularly sympathetic, dynamic, or intriguing. Annoying, unstable and sad, but never compelling. In "Midnight" Dawn would have been a quirky sideline character; here she becomes the protagonist, which doesn't work.

I also found that the novel ended up on a high "duh" factor. Along the way, different theories are floated as to the truth, but they never seem that plausible. The author treats the revelations of Dawn's true nature as a fitting end to the story, whereas I found things just kind of puttered out. The story is interesting, but it's just missing that something to take it to the next level.

All together, Peninsula of Lies is just okay. When I finished reading, I didn't feel particularly sorry for Gordon/Dawn, or intrigued. I was more compelled to drive her to the pharmacy and help her pick up some anti-depressants.

I really liked this book. I couldn't put it down and stayed up until 4:00am to finish it one sitting. I found the relationship between Dawn and Natasha extremely moving. They had a mother / daughter love and devotion to each other that would, and did, survive anything that life had to throw at them, which was a lot! Natasha's care giving of Dawn at the end of her life is what love is all about. Anyone who thinks that a transsexual can't make a fit parent should read this book.

Peninsula of Lies is the story of Gordon/Dawn Langley-Simmons. She was born a man in England in 1922 before moving to Manhattan and befriending a wealthy heiress (Isabel Whitney) who included Gordon in her will. After receiving the inheritance, Gordon moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he underwent a sex change, married a black man, and (allegedly) gave birth to the man's daughter.

My wife and I both read this book and we were surprised by the number of Amazon reviewers who said that the book was not interesting; it held our attention throughout. Dawn is a fascinating character and she lived "a life less ordinary," in which she invented - and reinvented - herself many times. The City of Charleston also stars in this book; the eccentrics attracted by that historic port city were, by themselves, enough to make reading Peninsula of Lies worthwhile.

Readers have unfavorably compared this book to Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil. I am not sure that Peninsula of Lies is up to that level, but it is a good story. If I had to be critical of the book, I would say that most readers will be ambivalent about Dawn. She had moxie and refused to be cowed by the prejudices of others. Yet, she undoubtedly reveled in the attention that her often-bizarre actions created. An interesting aspect of the story is Dawn's long decline; after the birth of her child, Dawn spiraled downward for several years until she died in subsidized housing in 2000. While I enjoyed these sections of the book, they create a melancholic mood that will be unpleasant for some readers.

If you enjoy nonfiction that is stranger than fiction, Peninsula of Lies is a great read.