On the big screen, there were Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, but they dressed in 1920s flapper styles – an attractive style, but difficult for this young girl to emulate during the Jackie era.
On the small screen, Milton Berle made an occasional appearance en femme, but his femulations were strictly for laughs; they were clownish and often ugly – nothing this girl wanted to copy.
The New York newspapers occasionally had ads displaying professional femulators at Club 82 and I so wanted to dress in showgirl drag like the girls at 82, but let's be practical.
There were no femulators that dressed like women dressed in the mid-1960s... no one I could look up to for inspiration.
Finally, one evening watching television in 1964, I saw a great femulation of a mid-1960s woman on a new episode of The Munsters– of all places! In that episode, character actor Cliff Norton played a cop who disguised himself as a woman (see photo) in order to trap a guy who was accosting women in the park at night.
Norton's femulation left an impression on me for a very long time. He was not a beautiful woman, but he passed and more importantly, he was dressed like a mid-1960s woman in the styles I knew and loved and wanted to wear.
(Danger, Danger, Will Robinson! This post is a rerun!)
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| Wearing St. John |
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| Wilson Cruz femulating on a 1997 episode of television’s Ally McBeal |