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

by Edward Ball (Author) "The year before she died, Dawn Langley Simmons, a person I'd never met but knew from her infamous reputation, sent me a letter..." (more)
Key Phrases: sex reassignment, Gordon Hall, New York, Dawn Simmons (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
It would take quite a story to live up to the melodramatic title of Edward Ball's Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. Fortunately for the reader, the bizarre and highly compelling tale of Gordon Langley Hall and his transformation into Dawn Langley Hall is quite a story indeed. Novelists couldn't have dreamed up a more fascinating central character than Hall. Born the son of British servants, Hall, as a boy, befriended Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West. As a young man, he made his way to New York, becoming a biographer of some society figures and endearing himself to others including heiress Isabel Whitney who left him an inheritance that allowed him to move to Charleston, South Carolina, and gain entry to the colorful world of Southern society. In 1968, Hall underwent a sex change operation, claiming that the procedure was corrective and that she had actually possessed female sexual organs all along. Further complicating matters for the people of Charleston was Dawn's marriage to a young black mechanic and the appearance of an infant daughter. Author Edward Ball (Slaves in the Family) first came into contact with Hall through a uncover more about her. Although it is a biography of Hall, Peninsula of Lies is also equal parts mystery as Ball tracks down key figures from Hall's life, attempts to separate truth from legend and find the points at which the two intersect. As the facts of her life are brought into the light, Hall's psychology and motivation become more inscrutable and we are left with more questions than answers. Edward Ball's investigative persistence is tempered by a kindness toward his interview subjects, which, combined with his rich descriptions of 1960s Southern living, make Peninsula of Lies a lively read. But it is the impression left by the enigmatic Dawn Langley Hall that is sure to linger after the book is over. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly
Gordon Langley Hall (1922-2000), a biographer who underwent one of the most celebrated gender switches in the 1960s, is the focus of this meandering expose of Southern snobbery. English by birth, Langley Hall was the son of a maidservant at Sissinghurst Castle (made famous by Vita Sackville-West in the 1930s). Leaving England in the bleak postwar era, he eventually made his way to New York, where, after befriending an elderly heiress, he inherited enough of her money to start a new life in the "Peninsula of Lies," Charleston, SC. There Langley Hall started an antiques business and mixed with Anglophile society who ignored his quasi-Cockney accent and origins. At age 45, he met a teenage garage mechanic, John-Paul Simmons, and promptly made an appointment at the new Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins, the first U.S. hospital for sex change operations. Newly a woman, "Dawn Pepita Hall" married her mechanic in a lavish church ceremony, defying in one stroke gender expectations and the racial codes of the American South, for she was white, her husband black and the year 1969. Most perplexingly, she emerged two years later with a baby girl, Natasha, whom she said was her own. Edward Ball, who won the National Book Award in 1998 for Slaves in the Family, had enough material here for a longish Vanity Fair piece; through judicious padding and an unstoppable barrage of irony, he has made a murky, garrulous detective story. If there are easy ways to try to make transsexuals look silly, then in the machinations of his hero/heroine, he's got a whole barrel of fish to shoot dead. Unfortunately, Ball never lets us sees what might have motivated either Gordon or Dawn. In his evocation of a tawdry, snooty Charleston, populated with colorful coots, he keeps trying for that old John Berendt magic, and missing every time. Photos.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (March 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743235606
• ISBN-13: 978-0743235600
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,044,977 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but no Midnight in the Garden...., March 15, 2004

By	Cynthia K. Robertson (beverly, new jersey USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fear and loathing in Charleston, September 22, 2004

By	Lynn Hamilton (Tybee Island, GA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Story of Bizarre Self-Invention, April 5, 2004

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.