Life Worth Living (8 page)

The doctor had always been sympathetic to my plight but, more than that, he admired the way I had coped. ‘You should be
insane or a suicide,’ he had observed two months previously, when he asked me to co-operate in a televised study of my case for medical research and teaching. ‘Instead, your personality is intact and you display good ego strength. You are without doubt an unusual person. I’d go as far as to say that you’ve discovered life’s most profound secret, which is how to remain cheerful and positive regardless of your circumstances. As you know, there is very little data on cases like yours. You can advance the cause of medical science, and help other people who are in positions like yours but have less developed coping skills.’

This was all very well, I thought, but my first duty was to myself. I was worried that my co-operation might result in the violation of my privacy. Sensational publicity was my great horror, as it was my father’s, and I did not want to be turned into a spectacle. I had had quite enough of that, thank you very much. All I wanted now was a normal life. The psychiatrist, however, assured me that no one would ever know my identity. The camera would be behind me, and the technicians could distort my voice so that it would be unrecognisable even to myself. It was not a chance I was prepared to take, and I felt I had no choice but to decline. I had no idea how important my refusal would prove. The psychiatrist, who was only about thirty-five, had high hopes of using me to enhance his career, and, without my co-operation, he had no incentive to fight for me to stay in New York.

I went to the meeting with my father full of confidence. As soon as we were shown into the office, Daddy launched into a diatribe. ‘You have to return home. I can’t allow you to live in New York modelling. What happens if you’re a success? Sooner or later someone is going to find out that your papers say you’re male. What then? Do you realise you can be arrested for dressing in clothes that are not of the sex on your papers? I can’t allow you to put yourself in such danger. You must come back home.’ Not for the first time, I noticed how his stammer improved when his blood pressure rose.

‘I’ve taken the precaution of modelling under a pseudonym,’ I countered, proud of my perspicacity.

‘You are so naïve,’ he said. ‘You’re begging for trouble, and you’ll get it. You have to come back home, where you’ll be safe.’

‘I can’t and I won’t.’ I looked at the psychiatrist for support. ‘Tell him how awful it is for me. He has no idea.’

‘It has been acutely painful,’ he agreed rather more sheepishly than I expected. I knew that Daddy was an energetic man with a powerful aura, but I had certainly not anticipated my all-powerful psychiatrist, with whom I had established such trust over the previous nine or so months, to crumble so quickly.

‘Tell him I can’t take any more,’ I said to the psychiatrist, as he shifted in his chair, obviously feeling he had already fulfilled his obligations to me.

‘If you don’t come back home willing, I’ll force you to,’ Daddy interjected. ‘When I get home, I’ll get in touch with the American ambassador and arrange to have you deported.’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’

‘Try me.’

‘You’re bluffing. It would cause a scandal, and you don’t want your precious name sullied.’

‘It will not cause a scandal, because no one will find out about it.’

‘Can’t you make him see what he’s doing to me?’ I pleaded with the psychiatrist.

‘It’s between you and your father,’ said Pontius Pilate.

I was not going down without a fight, though, so I changed tactic. ‘Columbia Presbyterian is not the medical centre for me. They don’t even have a specialist department for cases like mine. Send me to Johns Hopkins and I promise I’ll give up modelling.’

‘You will never model again, and you’re going nowhere until you’re twenty-one,’ Daddy said. It was my first clue to the solution he had arrived at.

‘Twenty-one?’ I screamed. ‘
Twenty-one
? That’s over two years away! What the hell do you think this is, a goddamned picnic? Do you seriously expect me to go back to Jamaica and become a neuter gender, when I can stay in New York and have a nice life?’

‘I’m your father and I know what’s best for you,’ came the old refrain. ‘If I didn’t have your best interests at heart, I wouldn’t mind you running amok.’

‘Your love has been nothing but an intolerable burden,’ I said as pointedly as I could. ‘I wish you’d just leave me alone or drop dead.’

Daddy had it all figured out. Harking back to the first psychiatrist’s analysis, he decided to treat the matter as an episode of rebelliousness. He left Mummy behind with me to close down my apartment and donate my clothes to the poor. I was absolutely broken-hearted. Life had been bad enough before I knew what it was like to have my own gender, but to have enjoyed it and then be deprived of it was cruel indeed. I knew only too well the kind of humiliations that lay in store for me in Jamaica, but not even I could foresee how completely dreadful the experience would be.

Daddy had a regime ready and waiting for me. According to his line of reasoning, I was a spoiled brat who had not appreciated being sent to college in New York and had disgraced my family. I was therefore to be made aware of the luck I had squandered by working for him. My brother, my sister Sharman and I had had experience of this throughout our teenage years in the run-up
to Easter and Christmas. ‘You children need to know that money doesn’t grow on trees,’ he would say. But I would almost have preferred to clean sewers rather than work for Daddy, because he was such a hard taskmaster. He believed that we, as Ziadies, had to set a good example to our employees. That meant we were on our feet from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with exactly thirty minutes for lunch. During that time, we were not allowed to sit down, to lean against chairs, walls, pillars, counters or any other edifice, to joke or gossip with the staff or the customers – and woe betide anyone who did not adhere to every injunction. His philosophy was that the customer was always right, that he or she should always leave having purchased something, otherwise the failure was ours; that the staff were there to cater for them willingly and happily, with a minimum of distractions, and he brooked absolutely no complaints or excuses for underperformance.

Now I can sympathise with his point of view. I’ve been to too many shops, in Britain especially, where the staff behave as if they’re doing the customer a favour, or as if his or her presence is an inconvenience to them. Running a business in a laid-back place like Jamaica cannot have been fun, either. Daddy constantly had to ‘inspire’ people to perform efficiently, and I dare say the years of doing so took their toll, until he was incapable of differentiating between a moment’s respite and the first signs of laxity. But then, we children found working for him akin to punishment. Not only did I have to work for Daddy from Monday to Saturday once he dragged me back to Jamaica, but I was forbidden to go out without his permission – and it was frequently withheld, just so that I would see who was in charge.

I was paid the princely sum of £8 a week, of which £5 was deducted for my board and lodging at home. That did not leave me enough even to buy cigarettes, much less go out to the movies with friends on the few occasions I was freed from what I now saw as my ‘prison’. But I found a way around that problem. I simply helped myself to whatever money I needed from the shop, taking secret delight in outmanoeuvring dear Daddy. Of course, I was only too aware that I had to be careful. Daddy had already threatened to put me back into the care of the first psychiatrist and her husband unless I played by his rules. I did not seriously believe that he was capable of allowing them to masculinise me against my will a second time, but I was taking no chances, so I kept my head down and placed my nose squarely on the grindstone. There were times, though, when I loathed him so completely that I wondered if he would not dissolve beneath my furious glower. If he noticed, he never let on.

It took me only two weeks to figure out my escape route. I waited another two weeks, went to Mummy, and told her how much of a mistake it had been to leave the Fashion Institute. She encouraged me to reapply for admission, which I did. Having been a honours student, I was reaccepted for the coming semester. September 1968 could not come quickly enough. As I was packing to leave, Mummy restored my faith in humanity somewhat by handing over all the money that Daddy had deducted from my wages for board and lodging. She also added something on top, warning me not to breathe a word to a living soul, which I never did until now.

My Jamaican sojourn had jolted me profoundly. I have always been fortunate in having wonderful friends, and they helped me to cope. Chief among them is Frances Bacal, a family friend who was my guardian in New York and without whom I could not have survived this period of my life. I often went to her apartment for weekends or to stay the night, just to bask in her warmth and understanding and to soak up some of the compassion which fuelled me through this ghastly time. The degradation of having to toe the line and turn up at FIT every day in what passed for boy’s clothes was torture. I felt a total fraud. Not even the fact that everyone perceived me as female until they were told otherwise was much compensation.

My three closest friends at FIT, Carolyn Kelton, Jill Sprinczellis and Jennifer McFarlane, now knew the truth about my predicament. Each was kindness itself, offering support without pity, for the one thing I did not want was pity. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with me as a person. I was not suffering from a serious or incurable disease, merely the failure of anyone to rescue me from a cosmetic malformation which had dictated my future. I tried to keep a sense of proportion and humour about it all.

How to cope with attending classes was a problem I faced squarely. Although I loathed the conditions under which I had re-joined, and was bored with the work, I knew that the school was my passport to a vastly improved quality of life. Half a life here was better than none at all in Jamaica. One had to zero in on the positive, and protect it, which entailed doing well enough to please Daddy and the school. However, I was fully resolved not to do more than I had to. I attended the barest minimum of classes and devoted the barest minimum of energy to my work, reserving the rest for my real life outside school, where I was acknowledged as the person I was.

Quite what my future held was now even more of a taboo than ever. There was no longer any attempt to placate me with ‘treatment’ from doctors whom Daddy paid to delay a solution rather than provide one. For Daddy this was the most comfortable position to be in. As long as he did not have to confront the issue, he could play ostrich (something which he had always done superbly, and would continue to excel at for the remainder of his life). To him, my problem no longer existed. Within the family, I still occupied the position of ‘child’ and was therefore not accorded the privilege of contributing to discussions about either my gender or my future. Such serious issues were the preserve of adults, while the ‘child’ was left to flounder in a sea of mystery and supposition. I was therefore no wiser as to how the anomaly would be resolved. I could only search for clues, which, with someone as reserved as my father, meant staring into an unlit pit without the benefit of a torch.

In the meantime, here I was, stranded at the height of the Sexual Revolution. No man would accept a relationship with a woman that did not include full, penetrative sex, and until my lips were opened up, I was effectively prevented from having a full relationship. That, of course, was not something I could ever
broach with my father, who would have dismissed me as ‘immoral’ and a ‘whore’. I was also under the impression that my papers could not be changed until the genital defect had been corrected, and wrongly supposed that I would have to live in legal as well as sexual limbo until such time as I could come up with the money for corrective surgery. The prospect looked bleak. Unless I was prepared to take the risk of being butchered, and of being deprived of ever being able to enjoy normal sexual relations, the surgeon who rectified nature’s error would have to be skilled. That, I discovered within a month of returning to New York, from an obstetrician and gynaecologist who also specialised in the field of sexual malformations, meant I would have to come up with something like $5,000. It was a great deal of money in 1968, especially to a student.

I had been boxed in without any realistic chance of making the money I needed to solve my problem. Unless my papers were changed, Daddy could have me deported if I worked in the US. I started to sell my designs as a freelance to chic boutiques like She on First Avenue and Abracadabra on East Fifty-Sixth Street, but it was going to be impossible for me to churn out enough outfits at profit margins of $30 to $65 to accumulate the money quickly enough. So unless I could convince my father, who had the money readily available, to pay for the necessary surgery, I was condemned to years of waiting, working and frustration. And, having already endured six years of this, I did not possess the inclination or the stamina to put up with much more. The great irony is that I used to ‘run’ sums of cash in US dollars every time I flew from Jamaica to New York. This money, which was far more than my operation would have cost, I brought for friends of my parents who were in business and needed to settle bills in the city. Had Daddy given me his own cash, I have no doubt that I’d have made off with it and put it to what I regarded as the best use, but because it was not Ziadie money, I never once even considered misappropriating it. It was only when I was well into my thirties that I realised how frequently I had had the money I needed right on my person, and that Daddy, being honourable, would have made good my misdeed. It is a testament to the honest manner in which I was brought up that the thought did not even occur to me.

This period of my New York life was not all doom and gloom. Outside of the Fashion Institute, I lived as the girl I was. My looks were fashionable at the time, and the approbation I received was like rainfall in the Sahara. I scarcely went to a party where I wasn’t swamped by admirers, all of whom competed with the most extravagant compliments about my desirability. Even walking down the street in those pre-feminist days, some presentable man would usually try to pick me up. On several occasions chauffeur-driven stretch limousines even screeched to a halt and the occupants (invariably middle-aged and unattractive to a young girl) would ask for my telephone number with a line like, ‘You’re one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. Can I call you?’