Mysteries Scandals Billy Tipton
Mysteries Scandals Billy Tipton
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00:00Billy Tipton. The name might not ring a bell, but Billy's story is one of the most intriguing you'll ever hear.
00:07In the 1940s and 50s, Billy Tipton was a well-established jazz musician who played the American nightclub circuit.
00:13For a time, Billy Tipton even had a record deal, cutting two albums with his group, the Billy Tipton Trio.
00:19But it isn't Billy's musical talent that makes this story unique.
00:22Instead, it's the almost inconceivable secret Billy kept for more than 50 years
00:27that still has people shaking their heads in disbelief, Billy's ex-wives and children among them.
00:33On this episode of Mysteries and Scandals, we'll explore the extraordinary journey of an American jazz musician.
00:39I thought he was quite a guy. He was friendly and cheerful and played very well and dressed very nice.
00:45Billy Tipton was best man at our wedding, and when our son was born, Billy was godfather.
00:54See, here's the catch, folks. Billy Tipton, musician, husband and father, also happened to be a woman.
01:00If he had tried to do it as a woman or he had unmasked himself at any point in time, he probably would have been blackballed.
01:08Could Billy have played the role of a woman dressed as a man and been successful in show business?
01:14I think so, but I don't think Billy thought so.
01:17Billy didn't do this to be cruel or unkind. He didn't set out to hurt people.
01:23I'm A.J. Benza. Join me as we unravel the truth behind one of the most fascinating stories to ever hit the world of music,
01:30Sex, Lies and Saxophones, the bizarre tale of Billy Tipton.
01:48On January 21st, 1989, 74-year-old jazz musician Billy Tipton was in deteriorating health.
01:54Although his days of nightclub performing were long behind him,
01:57Billy was still working part-time booking bands for a Spokane, Washington talent agency.
02:02Billy's adopted son, Billy Tipton Jr., cared for his father during those final days.
02:09I woke up that day as usual, got him a cup of coffee, sat down beside him.
02:14And the next thing I know, I'm holding him up. He just collapsed on me.
02:19First thing I did was I called my mom.
02:22She says, well, call the paramedics. So I did.
02:26They got there, put him on the floor and started to do CPR.
02:31She says, well, call the paramedics. So I did.
02:35They got there, put him on the floor and started to do the usual paramedic thing.
02:41One of them turned to me and said, you know, by the way, did your father ever have a sex change?
02:46And I thought, what kind of thing is that to say? Just fix it.
02:50Difficult enough to watch your father lying on the floor near death.
02:54Harder still to discover at the same time that your dad is really a woman.
02:58A shock that for most would require another stretcher.
03:01The question, of course, for Billy Tipton's friends and family was,
03:04how could he have kept a secret like that for so many years and why?
03:08Well, as you might imagine, it's a long story.
03:11Biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook is the author of Suits Me.
03:15Dorothy Lucille Tipton was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City.
03:19Her father was an aviator and a builder and racer of cars.
03:24And her mother was a very pretty woman.
03:26Lou Raines was Dorothy Tipton's childhood friend.
03:29I think if I could describe her back then, she was definitely a tomboy.
03:35But not every tomboy that I knew turned out to be a man.
03:39She had some masculine appearances.
03:42Dorothy's parents divorced when she was 12 years old,
03:45and she moved to Kansas City to live with her aunt,
03:48who gave her a very, very good education, including a good musical education.
03:53In Kansas City during the 1930s,
03:55there was a huge jazz scene that I believe Dorothy must have absorbed.
04:00Gloria Morrison has been researching Tipton's fascinating story for 10 years.
04:05She played the piano quite young, and when she was around 16,
04:10a bunch of the kids, after a dance at school, went into a jazz club,
04:15and this is the first time that Billy heard jazz.
04:19And she was mesmerized.
04:21Dorothy Tipton, who already played piano, soon became an accomplished saxophonist.
04:25But when she decided to put her talent to work on stage,
04:2818-year-old Dorothy ran into trouble.
04:31She was constantly auditioning for groups,
04:34constantly being turned down,
04:36constantly being told, if you were a man, we'd hire you in a minute.
04:40With the help of her family back in Oklahoma, Dorothy hatched a plan.
04:44Dorothy's cousins were there the day that Dorothy decided the way to get a job.
04:50They remembered tearing up these big sheets,
04:52putting a big safety pin, they bound her breasts, which were pretty large,
04:56put the shirt over it, coat and tie, she slicked back her hair,
04:59got her instrument, went off, auditioned for the job, got the job.
05:03Remarkably, Billy got away with the charade.
05:06Tipton's new life passing as a groovy male jazz musician
05:09also allowed her the freedom to explore other aspects of her personality.
05:14During those years, she played music, cross-dressing, and had a lesbian way of life.
05:19In 1934, Billy met the first person that was going to be called Mrs. Tipton.
05:25This is a woman named Non-Earl Harrell,
05:27and all the musicians who remembered Non-Earl
05:29remembered her as a show-type person, an older woman.
05:32Billy Tipton was 20 years old, Non-Earl was 32, and married.
05:37Bill Pearson was a friend and fellow musician.
05:40Non-Earl, I hate to say this, but the first time I met her,
05:44I thought she was Billy's mother.
05:46She was older than Billy, and I thought, well, men do marry older women.
05:50So quite clearly they were presenting themselves as a married couple.
05:53Billy always dressed as a man, and Non-Earl, often she wore pants too,
05:57but she was the femme part of, let's say, a butch femme relationship.
06:00Billy Tipton's double life was working.
06:03He became a popular musician in clubs and honky-tonks all over America and Canada
06:07during the late 1930s and early 40s.
06:10Can you imagine putting on the clothes, trying to get the voice,
06:15get the mannerisms, and then traveling around with a group of guys that are on the road?
06:21It must have been difficult.
06:23Abe Lincoln said you can't fool all the people all the time,
06:26but then he never met Billy Tipton.
06:28Just ahead, how did Billy convince his next four wives she was a man?
06:35In the 1940s, jazz musician Billy Tipton was living the life he always dreamed of,
06:39on the road with his saxophone and playing with various bands.
06:43But Billy was keeping a secret that if exposed would torpedo his career, or so he thought.
06:49The secret? Billy's real name was Dorothy Lucille.
06:52Whereas most musicians hope for the moment they'll be discovered,
06:55Billy Tipton's greatest fear was that he would be.
06:58Billy never knew from one gig to the next that this might be the night his house of cards would tumble.
07:03Billy's first close call happened when he ran into an old acquaintance from Enid, Oklahoma,
07:08Lou Rains, also a musician.
07:12And I said, yeah, I grew up in Enid.
07:15And he said, well, I lived in Enid.
07:17And I said, Tipton, hey, you're not in a relation to Dorothy Tipton, are you?
07:22And he hummed a little bit, and pretty soon he said,
07:26Louie, I am Dorothy.
07:29And he said, I want you to promise me you'll never tell anybody.
07:35And again, I grew up at a time that if you gave your word to someone, you dang well better keep it.
07:44Another near miss occurred at a club in Joplin, Missouri.
07:47A lot of our business was soldier business.
07:49We were playing out in the big ballroom, and I heard one of them say,
07:52weren't you a girl in Oklahoma City?
07:55And I saw Billy grin.
07:57And about that time, a friend of ours, a gambler, showed up, and whatever it was, went away.
08:04Billy Tipton was doing very well professionally.
08:07But like anybody else, Billy wanted companionship.
08:10Altogether, Billy had five women who were called Mrs. Tipton.
08:15Billy was, of course, not married to any of them.
08:17For eight years, he found happiness with Non Earl, the first Mrs. Tipton.
08:21Non Earl was also one of the few people who knew Billy's secret.
08:25Then in 1943, Non Earl left Billy and returned to her husband.
08:29But Billy didn't stay single long.
08:31Billy met the second Mrs. Tipton in the 40s, took up with a young vocalist whose name was June.
08:37I believe June found out about Billy's actual sex,
08:41and very possibly that was what terminated the relationship.
08:46Soon after the breakup of his two-year relationship with June,
08:5031-year-old Tipton found a new love, a young beauty named Betty Cox,
08:54a naive young beauty.
08:56They met at one of the clubs.
08:58She was totally infatuated with Billy, totally loved Billy.
09:03Betty absolutely, adamantly swears she never knew him.
09:08With Betty, Billy had, for the first time, a real wife.
09:11She was very hardworking, didn't seem to need much sleep.
09:14She always had at least one job.
09:16She loved the nightclubs. She just adored dancing.
09:19And she was very sexy, very good-looking woman.
09:21Although she tells me that, well, I was with this person for seven years,
09:26and we had sex every day.
09:28All right, we're all dying to know, so let's just get it over with.
09:31How did Billy Tipton pull it off?
09:33Well, two words, prosthetic device,
09:37and that's all I'm going to say about the subject.
09:39You figure out the rest.
09:41But Billy's relationship with Betty was strained.
09:43Billy's personal life began to be a little disrupted by Betty's flirtatiousness.
09:50According to all the musicians who, apparently, she did have affairs.
09:54But Betty left Billy to go back and take care of her father,
09:58who was ill in Texas in 1954, and stayed away kind of a long time.
10:03By the time Betty was ready to come back, Billy was no longer interested.
10:07However, Billy had already found another woman, a woman named Mary Ann,
10:11who was actually a call girl in a nightclub where they were playing,
10:15and was therefore not an inexperienced woman sexually.
10:20And when Mary Ann asked about Billy's need to bind his chest,
10:23he had an easy explanation.
10:25Billy told her that he had been damaged in a car accident,
10:28that his pelvis had been crushed and his ribs.
10:31He had to wear bindings around his chest to support his ribs.
10:34Whatever Billy was doing, he was very self-confident.
10:37He certainly made arrangements with the wives so that they never saw him nude.
10:42And he was able to satisfy a woman who was a sexually experienced woman
10:46with a lot of expectations of a man.
10:49By 1954, Billy had been passing as a man for nearly 20 years.
10:54He decided it was time to form his own group, the Billy Tipton Trio,
10:58bass player Ron Kildee.
11:00We had our first booking in Pasco, Washington, and that was March 15, 1954.
11:06The songs that we played for the regular music
11:09was all the songs that were popular.
11:11In July of 1956, after two years of touring,
11:14the Billy Tipton Trio got their first big break
11:17while playing a gig in Santa Barbara, California.
11:20Somebody came in and told us that they were with Tops Records
11:26and wondered if we would be interested in making any recordings.
11:30They went to L.A. They had a recording contract for it to make six records,
11:34and they made the first one, and it was just called Sweet Georgia Brown.
11:39Billy's next album was called Billy Tipton Plays Hi-Fi on Piano.
11:43Here's a sample.
11:44There are two women in very low-cut dresses
11:47leaning over the piano right down their cleavage,
11:50and there's Billy sitting there with his diamond ring on his pinky
11:53smiling up at them.
11:54The Billy Tipton Trio were now full-fledged recording artists.
11:58They start getting booked into the casinos that are being built in Nevada,
12:02and for the musicians at that time and at their level of musicianship,
12:07this is making it.
12:08Would Billy Tipton be able to keep his secret now that he was in the big leagues,
12:12or was this the beginning of the end for Tipton's cross-dressing masquerade?
12:16Straight ahead, we'll hear from Billy's adopted son, Billy Tipton Jr.,
12:19and from Billy's wife of 20 years, Kitty.
12:22How did he keep his true identity from them?
12:26By the 1950s, jazz musician Billy Tipton had created a name for himself
12:30as a popular nightclub performer, but what few people knew
12:33was that this talented musician was keeping a very big secret.
12:37As Billy Tipton's popularity grew, so did the likelihood that the revelation
12:41of his double life as a cross-dressing lesbian would destroy him.
12:45Her.
12:46Anyway, because of this, Billy began to shy away from the spotlight,
12:50which puzzled the other members of the Billy Tipton Trio.
12:53Billy was offered the job of house band at a casino in Reno, Nevada, in 1958,
13:00where they would have been immediately backing big stars like Liberace,
13:04and the boys were just thrilled at this prospect,
13:07and when Billy said no, it baffled them.
13:11Recognition in the music business for Billy carried the risk of being recognized as Dorothy.
13:16In 1958, 44-year-old Billy Tipton decided to call it quits.
13:21The band was in shock.
13:23This offer was to them the thing that they'd been working for
13:26ever since they joined Billy's band.
13:28He explained to them that he had been offered a job in a booking agency in Spokane.
13:34He was going to become a partner of their agent and go into an office job,
13:39and that was the way he was going to go off the road.
13:41So Billy and Marianne, the fourth Mrs. Tipton, moved to Spokane in 1958.
13:47Billy worked at the talent agency during the day
13:49and picked up small gigs in local clubs at night.
13:52One night, Billy met the woman he called the love of his life,
13:55a beautiful stripper by the name of Kitty Kelly, the Irish Venus.
14:00I came in to have rehearsal, and I scared Billy to death
14:05because, well, I had a reputation.
14:07When I walked into a room, everybody paid attention,
14:11and I used to wear high heels that had metal in them,
14:17and when I walked, I would clack.
14:19And Kitty clacked her way right into Billy's heart.
14:22By 1960, Billy's seven-year relationship with Marianne was over,
14:26and Kitty Kelly became the next Mrs. Tipton.
14:29The two were married in a civil ceremony on St. Patrick's Day, 1962.
14:34Obviously, this marriage wasn't technically legal,
14:36but the following year, Billy and Kitty managed to adopt a child,
14:40the first of three sons.
14:42Billy Tipton Jr. speculates about his father's desire to have children.
14:46I think he wanted somebody to love, but he also wanted somebody to love him.
14:51I know he wanted children.
14:53I think that the mother was part of him.
14:56There was, I'm positive, a part of him that was always a woman.
15:02Even though he denied it, he knew that he couldn't cancel that out totally,
15:08and I think part of that was the motherhood thing.
15:12They went to such lengths to be ordinary.
15:15Kitty just dived into such things as the Boy Scouts, the PTA.
15:20She was a full-time mom.
15:22In other words, it's a happy Tipton family here.
15:27He was a very devoted father.
15:29They went camping with him.
15:30He did all those things that dads do.
15:32Kitty Tipton was married to Billy for 20 years.
15:35To this day, Kitty contends she never knew her husband was a woman.
15:40I had no reason to question, okay?
15:42I don't know why people want me to say something else.
15:45I have no way of knowing because, no, we did not have physical contact,
15:51and that's what Billy wanted.
15:53To me, Billy was Billy, okay?
15:56Because, see, that's what Billy and I really were.
15:59We were friends.
16:00We weren't man and wife.
16:02People accused me of different things.
16:04Did they ever stop to wonder why I felt or how come?
16:08Who knew that we were going to have to explain everything we did?
16:12She lived her life and had a lot of fun.
16:15Up next, the final leg of Billy Tipton's bizarre journey.
16:19How did Billy's plan to take his secret to the grave fall apart?
16:23As pianist and saxophonist,
16:25Billy Tipton retired from the nightclub circuit in the late 1950s.
16:29For the next 30 years, he lived quietly in Washington State.
16:32Billy spent most of those years with his wife, Kitty, until their divorce in 1979.
16:38He remained devoted to their three adopted sons.
16:40But by 1989, Billy's health was in rapid decline.
16:44Bleeding ulcers, complicated by emphysema,
16:47meant the end was near for the 74-year-old musician.
16:50Billy Tipton was determined to take the secret he'd kept for more than 50 years
16:54right to the grave.
16:56Tipton had a plan, but fate stepped in instead.
16:59He had actually asked his cousins
17:03if they would promise to answer any call he might make to them
17:10to tell them he needed their help
17:13if he ever got to the place where he thought he couldn't take care of himself.
17:16Now, the cousins knew Billy was female,
17:18and the cousins were very, very eager to be useful to Billy.
17:21But Billy got too sick too fast to make that call to his cousins.
17:25He just could have stepped out of the role in Spokane, flown to Kansas,
17:29and stepped off the plane a little old lady in a pantsuit.
17:32Billy didn't do that.
17:33Billy stayed in his male persona to the very last breath he took.
17:39That last breath came on January 21, 1989.
17:43Billy Tipton, Jr. woke early that morning to find his father near death.
17:48Billy, Jr. called the paramedics.
17:50Sure enough, they went to resuscitate him with the paddles,
17:54and they opened the shirt, and, well, there was a big picture.
17:58I was the only one that saw that.
18:00I'm not really sure what I thought at that moment,
18:04but all I remember is that it shocked me so much that I fell out of the front door.
18:11Billy Tipton's death shocked and saddened his friends and family.
18:15But, of course, it was the revelation of Billy's true sexuality
18:18that turned his death into a media circus.
18:21Billy's family, especially his sons, had a difficult time making sense of everything.
18:26One of them said, well, he's always going to be dad to me.
18:29And I think the love that he fostered toward his fatherhood was a permanent legacy for them.
18:40There was no reason for me to look askance at this person.
18:45When I found out about it, I said, oh, you poor baby.
18:53Now, that was just my reaction.
18:55I felt pain for that person.
18:59Who cares if it makes sense?
19:01That's what I've always had a problem with, is the fact that I lived with this man.
19:06I knew this man for 20 years.
19:11My mother knew him for a lot longer than that.
19:15And she doesn't have a problem with it, and I don't have a problem with it.
19:20Why should anybody else?
19:22I wasn't impressed with the fact that they had found out that he was a woman.
19:27Because I was saddened by his death.
19:30So, he was a woman.
19:33So what?
19:34He was a good player.
19:36Dorothy's transformation of herself into Billy, I believe, was an unmitigated success.
19:42I believe it was the solution to the problem of being not only a musician, but of being Dorothy.
19:48I never have stopped thinking about Billy other than as a fine human being.
19:54I was just tickled pink to have the opportunity to be around Bill Tipton,
19:58and he enriched my life every time I was around him.
20:01I lost a very, very good friend.
20:05Billy was kind of a modern Huck Finn.
20:09You remember the story about Huck Finn and why he wanted to take the raft and go down the river?
20:15That person knew music, and that was the magic carpet
20:20that allowed these soaring, wonderful, beautiful feelings inside.
20:29Billy Tipton wasn't a boozer.
20:31He wasn't a doper.
20:32He never smacked anybody.
20:34So, he was a she who liked to dress up and play good music.
20:37And not one person has one bad thing to say about Billy Tipton.
20:41And in this business, that says it all.
20:43I'm A.J. Benza.
20:45Join me the next time we try to make sense out of this strange world called show business.
21:13.