Homecoming

MANNERS & MORALS

Homecoming Early last December, in one of the year's outstanding contributions to tabloid titillation, the New York Daily News led the pack in discovering Christine Jorgensen, the ex-G.I. from The Bronx who reported that Danish doctors had converted him into a woman (TIME, Dec. 15). Last week, fittingly, it was the News which best answered the "who, what, when, where" as it reported Christine's gala homecoming. Said the News: "Christine Jorgensen, the lad who became a lady, arrived home from Denmark yesterday, lit a cigarette like a girl, husked 'Hello' and tossed off a Bloody Mary like a guy, then opened her fur coat. Jane Russell has nothing to worry about."

The News, however, no longer had Christine to itself. At New York's International Airport to welcome home the blonde who used to be George Jorgensen were some 350 curious citizens and a phalanx of photographers and reporters. When Christine appeared, a woman in the crowd turned to her little girl and said: "Look, Ruthie. She used to be a man" wrote the News with high disdain: "Ruthie stared popeyed. All she needed was a bag of peanuts and a bottle of soda."

The assembled reporters could have done with some peanuts and soda themselves. No sideshow mermaid ever got closer scrutiny than Christine. Her technique with high heels, agreed the tabloids, was poor. "If you shut your eyes when she spoke, you would have thought a man was talking," said the News. To Daily Mirror reporters her voice was "a lilting, feminine soprano" dropping to "a husky, masculine contralto" as she grew tired. All in all, the sight of Christine in the flesh took some of the anticipatory gleam out of the newsmen's eyes. "Her legs, what could be seen of them, were smooth and trim," said the News. "However, the planes of her face were flat, hard."

Once the reporters had had a chance to take inventory, Christine moved on to a $52-a-day suite in Manhattan's Carlyle Hotel. This week, with Christine safely hidden away "in the country," the first chapter of her memoirs appeared in Hearst's American Weekly. In it Christine explained why (beyond a reported $30,000) she had decided to tell her story in print. It was, she said, to help others suffering in "the no-man's-land of sex."

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