My Search for Donna Delbert
by Teller

"Have I got a woman for you!" Bob Lund announced with a procurer's wink, and heaved an apple box labeled DONNA DELBERT onto his kitchen table. His wife, Elaine, set out a pot of decaffeinated tea with some slices of poppy seed cake, and apologized that she and Bob had to go "over to the Museum to wait for the man to read the gas meter." Now, Bob and Elaine really do own a museum the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan specializing in all the magicians who were not Houdini, but I bet Elaine was lying about the meter man; Marshall is the kind of blueberry pie town where the gas company trusts you to read your own. No, they were leaving me alone with Donna Delbert's apple box because they knew I would fall for her, and l'amour is a private thing.

When they were gone, I opened the box. I like touching the personal things that belonged to the dead, things I have no right to touch. As the snow began to fall outside the Lunds' kitchen, I read Donna's letters, stroked her dainty gloves, and sniffed the torches she ate fire from. Then, in an advertising photo I saw her for the first time, peering from her own plump shadow, her vampire lips in a coy half-smirk, under plucked, painted eyebrows. She was my kind of woman, a creature of the night.

She had been notorious. Her sultry mug had graced glossy rags from Sir! to Time. Rumored to be the American widow of a British tank gunner killed in the Normandy invasion, she appeared suddenly on the English music hall circuit shortly after World War II, calling herself, "America's Outstanding Lady Magician and the Only Lady Fire Eater in the World." Agents booked her at once. A Yankee dame to the tips of her long red fingernails, she conjured, sucked the flames from torches, and snuffed candles with a crack of her whip. She was the perfect postwar woman, the Rosie the Riveter of magic.

Then one spring midnight in 1949 she was having a late supper at her boarding house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, when a policeman appeared, saying he believed she was a fugitive in disguise. Donna went silent and shook her head no. The inspector searched her purse and found an identification card for a soldier missing from the U.S. Air Force. Hours later at the city jail, in a voice an octave below her usual contralto, she confessed: she was that missing soldier, Delbert Hill, a male P.F.C. gone A.W.O.L. from the U.S.A.F. He had been living as a lady fire-eater for four years and had fooled everybody except the two women who were his lovers. Unfortunately, jealous Betty got wind of rival Edna and blew the whistle on their cheating heartthrob.

The Air Force took away Delbert's falsies, cut his brunette curls and sentenced him to two years at hard labor. Sleazy reporters showed up to sneer, but he basked in the attention. He bragged to them how he had shocked the judges by swallowing lighted cigarettes. When they asked what he would miss most in prison, he replied without missing a beat, "My corset. I can do without my high-heeled shoes, but when you wear a corset for almost four years, you get kind of used to it." He was shameless and they loved him for it. "It won't be so bad in the clink," he shrugged. "I'm going to write a book on my years as a woman. That will show them." In his diary Delbert summarized his trial: "Like Hollywood premiere. Plenty cameras and reporters." Warhol would have worshipped him.

Transvestitism is boringly popular in the 1990s Mrs. Doubtfire pulls in $27.5 million its first weekend; Divine receives a reverent obit in the Times. But Delbert was more than a crossover crossdresser he was a nut who pulled off "Mission Impossible" high-stakes ultra-drag, a magic trick on a hostile government.

He had been sent to Britain in 1942 as an entertainer in the Air Force Special Services. In those days, he did his act in a soldier's uniform, but that didn't stop him from making headlines. He was in the middle of his act in a London theatre when an air-raid siren screamed and...

While bombs fell outside and shook the building, Hill went right on thrusting a fiery torch down his throat to keep the attention of an audience on the verge of panic.

A fellow soldier emerged from the wings with a G.I. helmet and clomped it down on Hill's head. It was too large and covered Hill's eyes, but he went on with the routine.

Flames gushed from his lips and smoke crept all around the helmet. The children screamed with delight at the ludicrous sight and their mirth spread to the adults.

Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, July 22, 1944 There are those who would be abashed to have their heads on fire in public. Not Delbert he was a star and was not about to let anybody, least of all Hitler, disrupt his act. England's Queen Mary chose him for a command performance on the 4th of July to honor his coolness under fire.

In the spring of 1945 he learned that the bureaucracy had classified him out of Special Services and reassigned him as latrine orderly. Stars do not scrub toilets. So he collected his paycheck, got stinking drunk, and ran away to adventure.

Running away is a good thing. I recommend it. Twenty years ago I was a respectable schoolteacher, apt to suffer the fantods as I noticed September approaching. I ran away and now I earn my living producing roaches from top hats and trading wounds with a large man in red shoes. It's insecure and disreputable, but each fall when I hear the cheerful chant "Back to School!", and think about getting up at five in the morning to grade homework papers, something inside me does a little dance. So I root for Delbert.

He was now a hunted man with a near-compulsion to stand in the spotlight and make a spectacle of himself. But the same lack of shame that let him flambe his head and become a hero came to his rescue. In his Air Force shows, he had appeared in comedy sketches in a grass skirt and coconut-shell bra as "Dirty Gertie from Bizerti". With his plump little shape, he had considerable 1940s sex appeal. Female magicians are rare few women want to join a fraternity that uses them as decorative prop tables and meat to be sawn into bits so as Donna Delbert, ex-Private Hill was now prepared to corner the market.

Doing the act was easy, but life off stage was trickier. By calling himself the wife of a tank gunner killed at Normandy, he sidestepped dating; no decent man would hit on a patriotic widow. One season he was unemployed (which he grandly termed "resting") and took a job at the Lambert & Butler factory as a tobacco-packer as, of course, Donna, in stuffed bra and nylons. Some thought him a bit unladylike apt to dispatch a pint and demolish a cheese sandwich with manly relish and some suspected he was a lesbian. But that was good cover when, after two years of celibacy as Donna, he fell for pretty Betty in an Islington pub.

They had been girlfriends for three months when, according to Betty, "Donna asked me if I would like to share digs. I agreed. I watched her unpack. Donna had exquisite transparent cami-knickers, little lace panties, corsets, lots of nylons. We talked for a time, then Donna gave me my first shock. She asked, `Would you mind if I smoked a pipe?' Later that evening I learned the truth. From that moment we led a strange life. It was only when we had a lovers' quarrel that he used his normal deep man's voice. Other girls never guessed." She was right. Even Renee, who assisted Donna for two years and often shared the same bed, didn't have a clue.

By the time Bob and Elaine Lund got back from their rendez- vous with the mythical meter-man, I had Donna spread all over the kitchen table, and I had missed my flight home to New York. "We'll get you a room down at the motel," said Bob. "Don't worry. I know. Donna gets under your skin. Donna will drive you nuts."

The next day Elaine had fresh muffins and an assortment of fruity teas for me, and I had just opened an envelope full of papers from Delbert's prison term, when I noticed Bob peering over my shoulder. "You know," he said, "the Donna Delberts are what my museum" (Bob always accents the first syllable) "is really about. They wear capes or tights or clerical collars and dub themselves Doc or Princess. They're innocents the last of the innocents of the world. Deep down they suspect if they pitch the sugar-water with the right spiel, they just might end up curing cancer. They think there's real magic."

A mimeographed prison newsletter showed that even in jail the magic of shamelessness still worked: Delbert had used his fame as Donna (and, of course, his celebrated performance before the Queen) to book himself a star slot on the inmate talent show, "A Musical Roundup". His reviews were socko. Hungry for the latest showbiz goissip, he wrote to The Performer, the British equivalent of Variety, told the whole truth about his years as Donna Delbert, and invited his music hall cronies to get in touch. Would these people resent being lied to for four years? Would they despise him as a deviate and a deserter?

An inch-high stack of letters was my answer. His theatrical pals praised him for fooling them, and tried to cheer him up: "If you are finished with your breast pads & nylons, my mum says don't forget her? ha.ha.ha." They extended invitations: "You will be sure of a warm welcome whether you come as `Donna Delbert' or Private Hill." Agents congratulated him on his great publicity stunt. All the letters were upbeat, except the telegram from Edna, Betty's rival from Newcastle. It read, "BROKENHEARTED WILL WAIT 20 YEARS I LOVE YOU SO."

Near the bottom of the apple box there was a datebook for 1952, showing that after jail, Hill went home to Philadelphia, and was back doing his act for all the wildlife in the showbiz jungle: Lions, Elks, Moose, Legionnaires, and Boy Scouts. He evaluated each performance the New Jersey Mental Home, for example, was "better than some so-called normal audiences. The lads loved the show and I loved to do it." He was still a star.

At some of the shows he was "Col. Don Q", a Buffalo Billesque old west magician with a crepe-hair goatee, but a tearsheet from the "Magicians" listings in the Philadelphia Yellow Pages showed that his years in Britain had not been wasted. It advertised:

               DELBERT, DONNA
                     The Celebrated English
                     Magician & Fire Eater

I asked Bob whether Delbert Hill was still alive. Bob didn't know. "I think he must be dead. Nobody in show business gives away stuff like this," he said, pointing to the apple box. "But if you ever find out, let me know." In his dry, understated way, Bob is almost as shameless as Delbert Hill.

"Ohoho! Sure I knew Delbert. You never knew whether you were going to meet him as man or a woman."

I was on the phone to Harry, the Philadelphia magician who taught me how to squeeze a navy bean through my sinuses and out my eye.

"I loved him, but then I love oddballs. I remember he had all sorts of jobs one summer he went around selling ice cream from a backpack." What was Donna like? "A classy middle-aged woman, with excellent taste in clothes. Had dinner at our house and completely fooled my dear wife. But when he was a man, boy, did he have a mouth on him. Try calling Ed at the Magic Fun Shop..."

"Hmmph," said Ed, who long ago sold my parents a crucial magic kit. "Oh, I knew Delbert. Worked for me for a while until I found him becoming a partner, if you know what I mean. Last I heard of him he had a some kind of restaurant on South Street..."

"You mean the one next door to the tailor shop? Awful food? Only lasted a few months?" recalled Paul at Factotum Books on South Street. "I think it was called `Del's Diner'..."

The tailor was sitting in his shop at an ancient sewing machine. He snipped a thread, and raised his cropped white head. "Delbert Hill", he pronounced in a tone of Biblical finality, "is dead."

So I called my pal Frank, the lawyer-novelist who is either related to or knows intimately every tenth human being in Philadelphia, who called his brother-in-law Steve the magic- fan-Undertaker, who called the Pennsylvania Bureau of Vital Statistics, which led me to two social workers, Vickie and Paula.

"Mr. Hill charmed everyone at the hospital," said Paula, who met Delbert during his last bout with cancer. "He got through his illness on his wit. I offered to help, but he was extremely independent and said, `When puppies get sick, they just go off by themselves, then they either get better or they die.' And whenever I'd say something sympathetic, he would just laugh, `Don't worry about me. I'm a soldier.'"

Vickie remembered that Delbert used to come over to Graduate Hospital on South Street, eat in the cafeteria, and tell stories of life on the stage. "He had a clear, rosy complexion and a casual way about him. His apartment was full of magic and circus stuff to be honest, he really didn't keep the place up and he had a story for every poster. There were lots of women's clothes in his closets; he said they belonged to his girlfriend."

On January 10th, 1991, Vickie found him, seventy-eight years old, dehydrated and dying, in a chair surrounded by the memorabilia of his triumphs. He had refused to disclose anything about his family or make any of the conventional "arrangements", and so made his exit through an unmarked grave in Bala Cynwyd's Merion Cemetery. "You know," said Vickie, "Mr. Hill told us he once performed for the Queen of England. Do you suppose that was true?"

I told Bob and Elaine what I had unearthed in eight months of amateur sleuthing, and handed Bob the last item for his Donna Delbert file: a handsome gray death certificate. Bob thanked me.

"You're one of them, too, you know," he said, pointing at the dining table laden with envelopes full of his "innocents". "I've already got a file started on you."

So I guess this means someday I'll be in an apple box, side by side with a transvestite fire eater. I'm guessing I'll feel right at home.