Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton [Paperback]

Diane Wood Middlebrook (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999

The jazz pianist Billy Tipton was born in Oklahoma City as Dorothy Tipton, but almost nobody knew the truth until the day he died, in Spokane in 1989. Over a fifty-year performing career, Billy Tipton fooled nearly everyone, including Duke Ellington and Norma Teagarden, five successive "wives" with whom Billy lived as a man, and three children who he "fathered." As Billy Tipton herself said, "Some people might think I'm a freak or a hermaphrodite. I'm not. I'm a normal person. This has been my choice." This jazz-era biography evokes the rich popular-music history of the Great Depression and reads like a detective story.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Billy Tipton was a jazz performer who played in clubs throughout the Midwest for nearly 50 years. Tipton never made the big time as a musician and ended up working as a booking agent in Spokane, Washington. Only with Tipton's death in 1989 was it revealed that the five-times-married father to three boys was biologically female. Diane Wood Middlebrook's biography describes the transformation of Dorothy Tipton, a white Oklahoman who was not allowed to play jazz because she was a girl, into Billy Tipton, a male pianist and bandleader. The author traces the life of this itinerant jazz musician over several decades and through changing constructions of gender.

Middlebrook, whose biography of Anne Sexton was noted for its controversial use of tape recordings and notes made during the poet's psychiatric treatment, was approached by Kitty Tipton Oakes, one of Billy's former wives, to write this biography; she interviewed his/her friends, spouses, family members, and colleagues and found them to have different, yet universally sympathetic, readings of Tipton's gender. In addition to examining what gender is, Suits Me also asks to whom it belongs: the individual or the people who interact with the individual. --Rebecca Brown --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Middlebrook (Anne Sexton: A Biography, Houghton, 1991) will fascinate another large audience with her exhaustive account of the life of jazz musician Billy Tipton. Born Dorothy Tipton in Oklahoma in 1914, and reborn as Billy Tipton in 1933, Billy passed as a man until death at age 74. Suits Me uses family interviews, anecdotes from musicians, jazz fans, lovers ("wives"), and friends to tell the story of a brilliant deception. The sensitive storytelling reveals thought-provoking perspectives about gender and the traditional American family, while capturing the social history of traveling jazz bands for 40 years. The family photographs and letters are particularly noteworthy in the exploration of Billy's life between the sexes, and there are extensive, enlightening notes and a bibliography. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries and/or libraries with women's studies or gay/lesbian/bisexual collections.
-?Lisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395957893
• ISBN-13: 978-0395957899
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #237,424 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #18 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Lesbian
  • #23 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Transgender
  • #52 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Transgender

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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A compelling portrait of a unique American life., June 28, 1998

By 

Jamison Green - See all my reviews

This review is from: Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (Paperback)

When Billy Tipton died in 1989, the world rushed in and gave him, briefly, the larger fame he had once nibbled at as a jazz musician and entertainer. But in June of 1958, after 20 years of chasing the brass ring, when the door to the big time world of popular music opened and beckoned Billy in, he backed away from the spotlight, settling for playing the hotel ballrooms and clubs of greater Spokane, Washington. In Suits Me, Stanford University English professor Diane Wood Middlebrook explores both the geography of jazz and swing in the heartland of America, and the geography of gender in the middle of the 20th century. Because underneath his dapper suits and corny comedy routines, Mr. Billy Tipton concealed the body of a woman, and when he died, his sex revealed by paramedics and the coroner's report, he left hundreds of people who knew him, and millions more who heard the news, astounded by his "deception..."

Professor Middlebrook's research has been thorough, and she has spoken with most of Tipton's living relatives, former wives, business partners and many other musicians of the era. What she reveals to her readers is a fully textured portrait of an era and a man who worked hard and earned every privilege he received. She lets us almost hear the music, taste the dust from the roads Billy and his bandmates and partners traveled. She lets the people who knew him comment on whether they thought he was a man or a woman. She lays out the mystery of how others perceived and ignored or challenged Billy's gender presentation, and the l! engths to which Billy went to protect his secret, which sometimes wasn't all that hidden.

Suits Me is an amazing story filled with strange reversals: Billy had a male cousin named Bonnie, his mother's nickname was Reggie, his first "wife" had left her husband, Earl, for a life on the road and was known as Non Earl. And there were enough female musicians on the circuit in those days that cross-dressing to the extent that Billy did should not have been necessary to maintain a career, as many people have conjectured to justify Billy's behavior.

Billy's death and the revelation of his "true sex" led various groups to claim his memory as a symbol of their own cause: lesbians said he lived as a man to safely love women; feminists said he lived as a man in order to have a career; transsexuals said he lived as a man because he was a man-he just didn't avail himself of the medical technology to make himself legal. Because Billy never declared himself any of these things (although he did declare himself a man), it seems presumptuous for any group to claim such an independent spirit as their own. But Billy also acknowledged to some family members that he remained a woman in body; to one female cousin he intimated he would one day go back to living as a woman once the kids he had adopted with his last wife, Kitty, were grown and out on their own, and to another female cousin he declared that he had made a conscious choice to live as a man and that he was a normal person. It is only respectful to refer to Billy with masculine pronouns, using the male gender he so completely inhabited. Middlebrook skillfully interweaves masculine and feminine pronouns to reflect the understanding of the people Billy interacts with, and to acknowledge the reality of Billy's body. In this way, she creates a striking sense of the incongruity of gender and body that Billy lived with, and others like him still live with every day.

There is only one point of contention where I take exception to Middlebrook's analysis of Tipton'! s motivations. She assumes that the absence of breast bindings or genital prosthetics (pants stuffers) from Billy's body at his death, and from his personal effects, was an indication that he was anticipating discovery. I contend this can't be known. He may have simply grown weary of the apparatus, seeing no need for it since he had retired from public life. Perhaps he felt he had earned the right to be a man in his own skin, regardless of its shape. Perhaps it was with relief that he discarded those accoutrements years earlier. And I suspect that, unless diagnosed with a terminal illness, most of us don't realize the finality of our own death even when the moment is upon us. It is dramatic and appealing to conjecture that he staged the conditions of his discovery as consciously as he had staged the presentation of his gender identity, but I contend that the simple reality of Billy's life is more appealing: he was socially a man and physically a woman. That dichotomy fascinates us, and we struggle to rationalize it, to explain it, to defend it or to tear it apart. Depending on our allegiances, we rush to invalidate either the body or the soul that informed it. But I think both are real and valid, and that Billy Tipton's life simply illustrates one person's adaptation to his situation. Without a definitive statement from Tipton, which he never gave, his life is open to any interpretation, whether insensitive or informed. In spite of this one logical flaw in her analysis, I think Middlebrook has composed a fine portrait of an artist, one that will ultimately give readers some insight to the reality of what we now call the transgendered experience as it was lived before the modern transgender movement had established itself.

This is an important book, both for the history in it, and for its vivid depiction of the brave determination of Billy Tipton that his talent, energy and love sustained. Some transpeople may be put off by the pronoun inconsistency, feeling that the only way to treat Billy i! s as the man he wanted to be and was-the way others perceived him, for the most part, in his vibrant life. Some transpeople may find the reflection of the very real challenges Billy struggled with in his female body to be a welcome reality check for their own experience with incongruous gender and bodies. Non-trans people should find this study a stimulating, evocative read, one that pulls back the curtain just enough to expose the tantalizing mystery of a very American life.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the strangest books I have ever read., June 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (Paperback)

I remember being called by a friend when Billy Tipton died. "She GOT AWAY WITH IT", my friend crowed. I've been waiting for a biography of this amazing person ever since and was not disappointed with SUITS ME. But it's difficult to realize that the events in the latter half of this story took place within my lifetime--at times they seem to have occurred on another planet. The most surprising thing about the book is the tolerance of Tipton's behaviour shown by a great many friends and relatives in a traditionally conservative part of the country. But rural Oklahoma in the thirties seems to have been full of men with womanish-sounding names and mannishly-named women, and no one thought anything of the occasional cross-dresser (the most hilarious episode is when Tipton meets the radio announcer who also passed as a man). As one friend of Tipton's says in SUITS ME: "There weren't as many mean people around then." The unconditional love some people have for friend and family is the true message of this book.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An impressive biography that overcomes scanty documentation, December 30, 2004

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (Paperback)

Diane Middlebrook has been blessed with such a fascinating subject for this biography that it would be a poor writer indeed who sapped the story of its interest. Yet the author faces a daunting challenge because so little documentary evidence remains concerning the life of Dorothy/Billy Tipton, especially for the early years. Fortunately, Middlebrook is up to the task, and where she can't provide content she supplies invaluable context for the life of a locally famous jazz singer now known less for his musical talent than for a closeted, transgendered (and, I would argue, brave) life.

Between her birth in Oklahoma and his arrival in Spokane, Tipton somehow made the transformation from an eccentric saxophone- and piano-playing young woman to a married husband, father, bandleader, and talent agent. In the absence of any firsthand information from Tipton himself, Middlebrook has to rely on a scattered selection of photographs, a handful of letters, and on interviews with the few people still alive who knew Dorothy in Oklahoma and the many who knew Billy in Spokane. She concludes, correctly I think, that Tipton initially became a male impersonator primarily to get a job in the male-dominated jazz circuit and eventually grew so comfortable in the role that what may have begun as a career choice gradually became a social choice. Tipton's lesbianism surely contributed to the self-assured ease with which she made this transformation.

For the early years of Tipton's life, Middlebrook doesn't have a lot to go on, and I was wary when reading that she had "to substitute imagination for the absent documentation." Yet in the pages that follow this statement, the author doesn't depart far from reality: over half of the material describes Tipton's hometown through the eyes of others and a good chunk is directly quoted source material. Even when the record is vague about Dorothy Tipton herself, the reader gets a feel for the small-town culture that she undoubtedly experienced and for the Depression-era jazz clubs in which Tipton surely performed.

Middlebrook likewise speculates that Tipton's fear of exposure nixed his band's big break during the 1950s, which would have included recording contracts and the opportunity to open in Nevada casinos for such star performers as Liberace (an irony of a different sort). Tipton's double life was well-known in Oklahoma, and his success as a father and businessman certainly hinged on keeping his profile within the confines of the Northwest. The author also fills in the gaps in our knowledge of Tipton's life with tangents that are mesmerizing on their own, such as the story of Alberta Lucille Hart, another Spokane resident who became radiologist and novelist Alan L. Hart during the first half of the twentieth century.

It's impossible not to finish this book with a sense of appreciation for Tipton's daring. Tipton's first triumph, of course, is the amazing ability to pull it off. But, even more impressive, he managed to do so and leave behind him an astonishing number of people of all ages and backgrounds--wives, adopted sons, in-laws, and show business colleagues--who clearly loved and admired him and who, although stunned by the posthumous revelation that he was biologically a woman, continue to think of him fondly.