By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 25, 1933.
“Marlene Dietrich,” said Jim Frise, “has taken to wearing men’s clothes, hats, trousers, everything.”
“She looks lovely,” said I. “I saw her picture in The Star.”
“That’s the point,” said Jim. “She looks lovely. She dresses up like a man, but she only looks like a pretty woman dressed up in men’s clothes.”
“Well, what of it?” said I.
“If she dressed like a man and looked like a man there would be some point to her dressing funny. I don’t see,” said Jim, “that we should pay any attention to her when she still just looks like a woman.”
“You don’t understand human nature,” said I.
“Of course I do,” cried Jim. “If Marlene Dietrich dressed up like a man and looked like a man there would be some point in printing her picture all over the country.”
“Well, anyway, she couldn’t,” said I.
“I bet,” said Jim, “I could dress up like a woman and really look like one.”
“With a wig and a lot of powder and paint,” I admitted.
“No, no,” said Jim. “I mean I could just put on a woman’s clothes and one of those tin pot hats they wear and I could walk through the streets and everybody would think I was a woman.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Listen,” said Jim, “I bet you $51 we could both do it.”
Which is a double-edged kind of a bet!
I offered to be his gentleman friend if Jim would dress up and walk down Bay street with me. But Jim thinks we never get the full flavor out of an adventure unless we both take part in it.
Over on Queen street west Jim found a store where they had hundreds and hundreds of women’s second-hand coats and hats and dresses where the gentleman in charge would gladly rent us an outfit for an afternoon for $1 each and a deposit of $10.
So after lunch Jim and I crept off to Queen street west and in the back room of this strange and jumbled store changed into ladies’ clothes.
Jim selected a green cloth coat with fur collar, a small brown hat that pulled down well over his head, a kind of shapeless old Jersey dress of a color neither gray nor brown. I think the owner said it was booge. We decided to keep on our own underwear and socks.
“How about shoes?” I asked. “I wouldn’t try to walk in those high-heeled things.”
“Come on,” said Jim; “they would add to your height.”
“Do I Look Like a Lady?”
I chose an old fur coat, imitation seal, a red dress that was long enough to hide rather noisy socks, and a beautiful hat. It did not pull down over my head like a pillowslip on a pillow. It sat well up. It had plumes and flowers on it and was a little large, perhaps, for the present day pancake style. But it gave me a certain dignity.
The only shoes I could find that I felt safe in, with high heels, were a little shabby. In fact, when I stood in front of the mirror I looked a little like a cartoon in Punch of a lady from Limehouse2.
“Now,” said the owner of the store, “gents, if there was only a public meeting for you to break up–“
“Do I look like a lady?” asked Jim.
“You certainly do,” said the owner. “All you need is some sort of handbag.” And he gave Jim a large parcel carrier of black oilcloth trimmed with red.
After a little practice walking up and down the store in the wobbly shoes and parading in front of the old mirror in the back room, Jim and I decided to go to the big department stores and do a little shopping.
Out on Queen street there were Chinese, Macedonians, cigarette-butt-picker-uppers, old men with beards, urchins, ladies of color3. But nobody paid us the compliment of a glance.
My feet were chilly and as I don’t wear garters I felt my socks slipping down a little on my underwear4, and I feared the dignified effect of the large hat and the seal coat was somewhat spoiled by a dowdy appearance at the extremity. The pavement was wet and the old shoes flip-flopped on the pavement. But old Jimmie was beautiful. He strolled along with little steps, pausing to look in the windows, and he never made the mistake even of looking at a cigar store window or a pet shop. He spent three minutes peering into a lingerie window.
“This is the first time,” said Jim, “I have ever had a real look in one of these windows.”
“I ought to step in and get a pair of garters,” I mumbled to him.
Farther along Queen, as we neared the department stores, a gentleman who was slightly brewed5 swayed over toward us. “Get out o’ me way!” he growled, hilariously.
Jim and I drew ourselves up the way ladies do and glared at him.
“You look like my wife,” said the gentleman, mildly astonished.
“Which of us?” asked Jim in a high voice.
“Are there two of you?” asked the gentleman.
“Can’t you see me?” I demanded in my own voice, which has still got the old army whisper in it, like a rip-saw.
And the gentleman, after a sudden stagger, hurried into a doorway on Queen street and hid.
A policeman stopped and looked sternly at us, so Jim and I walked on, a little unsteadily on account of the shoes, and headed for the stores.
We had a grand afternoon. We visited the basement and looked at all the things we had never had any reason to look at before, household utensils, kitchenware in red, blue and green, big wicker clothes baskets. Ladies’ wear, perfume, drapes, furnishings! China, fancy goods, my goodness! We priced everything. We got into dandy arguments with salesladies, especially the elderly ones.
We had an afternoon. We didn’t buy anything, but we saw and felt and fingered and patted more things in one afternoon than we had in a lifetime.
And about a quarter to five Jim said we ought to go and turn our clothes in at the store and get our deposit back.
We went out on to Queen street again, and we walked along in the dense crowd, our feet pretty weary, the big muscles on the backs of our legs aching, but there was life in the old gals yet.
There was a store with dresses in the window and a very pretty girl with gold hair looking out.
“Let’s go in and have a fight with her,” said Jim.
So, perhaps a little draggly looking, we stepped into the store.
As we closed the door the girl with the gold hair, with that perfectly cold look that women give to women and which men scarcely ever see, walked over to us and said:
“This way, please.”
She was an extremely good-looking girl. We followed her to the back of the store, into a dark and shabby hall, up a rickety old wooden stairs and along an upper hall. Jim and I click-clacked up after the pretty girl. We were a little wheezy.
“In there,” said she.
We stepped, not into a lovely fitting room, but into a dim and untidy small room filled with pails, brooms, mops, scrubbing brushes and smelling of strong soap.
Over a sort of sink a large, angry man was bending in his shirt-sleeves.
“Hurry up,” he yelled. “Hang your coats up and get busy.”
“What’s the idea?” asked Jim. And as he had been practising a high voice all afternoon he still used it. It was slightly cracked.
“Come on, get goin’; don’t you know four-thirty is the time you should get here?”
He whirled suddenly and took a fierce step toward us.
“Hey!” he roared. “Off with the coats!”
It was not a time to do anything hasty, so we took off our coats and hung them on nails on the wall.
I started to take off my hat, but Jim eyed me not to.
“Where are your aprons?” yelled the large, bleary man.
“We didn’t bring any,” squeaked Jim in his old lady voice.
“Didn’t bring none?” corrected the big man. “Here!”
And he yanked a couple of gray and terrible aprons off the wall and threw them at us.
“What a pair of birds you are!” howled the big man. “I’ll speak to Adams about this. Pick ’em up and come on.”
He led us down the dismal hall, we carrying pails and mops he had thrust at us, and went into the front store, where the girls were covering up the dresses with sheets and the girl with the gold hair was fixing her hair at a mirror.
“Start at the front and work back,” said the big man. “Get your hot water there.”
When a Lane Comes in Handy
Jim and I had not had a chance to converse, so I filled my pail and Jim crowded up behind.
“How far is this going?” I asked Jim under cover of the tap.
“I didn’t like to reveal ourselves as men to that bird,” said Jim. “You don’t know what he might have done. He might have flung us down those stairs. We’d have torn the clothes and lost our deposit.”
I stood aside to let Jim fill the pail.
“Are we going to scrub?”
“For a little while,” said Jim. “Then one of us can take sick and the other of us will have to see us home or something.”
We went back into the store, where the girls had finished covering up; the big man had disappeared and the girls were relaxing around the room on chairs to engage in a few minutes’ intimate conversation before departing for the night.
We rolled back the rug, set the chairs aside and started slathering up a good suds in our pails. Jim put his mop in the pail and the water went bloop all over the floor. We both dashed at it with our mops, but in the excitement I stepped backwards against my pail and upset it.
The girls screamed for the big man, who came running.
“Here,” roared the red-faced man. “Here. Hyah! Heeyah!”
And he treated us like no charlady6 should be treated.
But we got the water sopped up, not without getting our dresses wet and my large hat fell off into the pail and looked rather soggy. But just as we got organized and the girl with the gold hair was still standing staring at me, mostly at my feet and legs, there came from the back of the store, through the back entrance I suppose, two ladies looking a little flustered, carrying large shopping bags and looking as if they knew which end of a mop was for what.
“What is it?” demanded the purple man of them.
“We was engaged, sir,” said they.
“Who sent you?”
“Mr. Adams, sir.”
He whirled on us, glared, and Jim and I, walking sideways and wiping our hands on our pinnies7, hurried for the hallway, clattered up the stairs, got our coats and then went out the back way into a lane.
We found our way out, went along Richmond street, up York and back to the store where we had got outfitted. The owner charged us $2 each off our deposits for wetting the dresses and other injuries.
“We could have escaped that humiliation,” said I.
“But you couldn’t think of any way on the spur of the moment, could you?” asked Jim.
“So that’s what we looked like?” I mused.
“You did; not me,” said Jim.
“It was you went into the store first,” I retorted. “The girl with the gold hair decided about us when she saw you.”
“You owe me five bucks,” said Jim. “We looked like ladies.”
“I think you ought to wire Marlene some flowers with it,” said I.
“No,” said Jimmie, “I’ll wire her a hand-painted moustache cup8.”
Editor’s Notes: To explain this story, you have to understand that Marlene Dietrich was one of the biggest movie stars of the time. Starting in late January 1933, she was seen wearing men’s clothing including trousers.
Then she wore a tuxedo as seen in the article. Well, this caused quite the uproar! It was all the gossip columnists could talk about for a while.
Some people thought she was doing it for publicity, others thought she should not go out in public like that. Greg and Jim were commenting on all of this talk. She remained famous for sometimes wearing mannish clothing, most famously the tuxedo she wore as a nightclub singer in a movie to be released that November called Morocco.
- $5 in 1933 would be $113 in 2025. ↩︎
- I think at the time a Limehouse lady would be a term for a poor woman, perhaps even a prostitute. ↩︎
- Yes, this sentence had to be cleaned up due to the language used at the time. ↩︎
- Not sure what this means, but some men did wear garters to hold up their socks as the elasticity could not be that great depending on the material. ↩︎
- “Brewed” meaning “drunk”. ↩︎
- So “charwoman” was a common term to refer to a cleaning woman who was brought in for a job then left. They would use the term “maid” for someone who was live-in. This term was used up until the 1960s. ↩︎
- Pinnie is slang for apron. ↩︎
- A moustache cup is a drinking cup with a semicircular ledge inside. The ledge, called a moustache guard, allows the passage of liquids and serves as a guard to keep moustaches dry. ↩︎
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