Jorgensen Was Able to Find Happiness as Well as Fame

Celebrity and fame come many ways, but with time, even the most notorious seem to fade from public view. It was never like that with Christine Jorgensen.

She had one of those magic names that always seemed to trigger a reaction in people. And if you weren’t quite sure who she was, you remembered as soon as someone told you.

Jorgensen’s fame was rooted in an intensely personal decision that shocked the world. In 1952, after a series of operations and hormonal treatments, then 24-year-old George Jorgensen Jr. walked out of a Danish medical clinic as Christine Jorgensen.

Though not the first of its kind, the sex-change operation made headlines around the world. And for the next 36 1/2 years, until her death in San Clemente last week, Jorgensen lived under the microscope of public scrutiny as perhaps America’s most famous transsexual.

I knew Jorgensen only because of my work. And like so many other reporters before me, I found hers to be an incredible and fascinating story.

When I first called her last year, after learning she was suffering from cancer, I was not certain what to expect. Journalism can be intrusive by nature, and when called on to interview the grieving or ailing, most of us feel uncomfortable.

But Christine Jorgensen wanted to talk--about her life, the cancer, her hopes for the future--and she did so in the rapid-fire, excited cadence of the truly happy, laughing and giggling and sprinkling her conversations with “darlings” and “dears” and “oh mys.” Cancer, she said, was just one of life’s little problems and she was going to “beat it because I really have no choice, do I? It’s like anything else. I am convinced that psychology affects your recovery.”

She promised me a long afternoon interview over lunch--”we’ll go someplace nice and sunny”--but first she wanted to finish a new book “about all the wonderful things that have happened to me and all the wonderful people I know.”

We never did get together for lunch, and quite by chance I left a message on her answering machine the day she suffered a seizure and was admitted to San Clemente General Hospital.

What I did learn from those conversations with Jorgensen was that, whatever people thought of her, this was a person truly content with her life. I was soon to learn that this was the impression Christine left with everyone who knew her.

Pam Zemanek, a neighbor of mine who works in the Mission Viejo oncology office that treated Christine, smiles and laughs when remembering the woman who “literally lit up the office when she came through the door.”

“I remember how she used to come in and there would be people sitting around sick and depressed, and by the time she got through talking to them they would all be going out for a drink,” Zemanek said. “She had a love for life that was really unbeatable. It’s hard to be sad and think about Christine because she was such an up person.”

But Jorgensen wasn’t always like that. She told me it took her years to overcome the ridicule and the name-calling and develop a positive attitude, but once she did there was no turning back.

“Oh my dear, you just have to go on,” she said. “You can’t dwell on such things. In truth, it has all been kind of exciting.”

In a 1977 interview with The Times, Jorgensen talked about the early days after the operation and her shock at how the world reacted after a family friend leaked the news to the press.

“People say to me, ‘Christine, what would you have done if the story never came out?’ Well, I had regrets 25 years ago when the story broke. I thought it infringed on my personal life. But now, in retrospect, none of these exciting things would have happened to me had the story not appeared.”

Life, she added, “is a great big farce. It’s hysterically funny. You can take it seriously, but I try to take it as little seriously as possible.”

To those who knew her, Jorgensen rarely talked about the sex change--she loathed the word transsexual--though she was known to make self-deprecating jokes about it.

“I just want to be known as a lady,” she told me. “That’s what this whole thing is about, you know.”

Judy Nowell, office manager of the oncology clinic, admired Jorgensen not only for the courage she displayed in her fight against cancer, but for the way she treated others.

“Before I met her, well . . . we all have that first impression that she is weird,” Nowell said. “But when you talked to her, you knew that she cared about you. She genuinely cared. She had so much energy.

“As far as the sex change, she would make jokes about it now and then, but she never talked about it. I would not have brought it up because to me, she was truly a woman.”

That was all that Christine Jorgensen ever wanted.