One Monday morning in 1958, Nina Lawson, Mistress of Wigs at the Metropolitan Opera, came into work to discover that someone had stolen thirty thousand dollars' worth of wigs from the Met. The theft made national headlines, and the FBI joined the hunt for the culprits. Show notes and full transcript below.
Above: Alexandre Lunois Family Goods Store (1902). To be honest, this image has no connection whatsoever with the content of this episode. I just thought it looked cool.
SHOW NOTES
The “Old” Metropolitan Opera House as it appeared in 1966. Located at 39th St. and Broadway, the Old Met opened to the public in 1883. Despite protests from preservationists, the building was destroyed in 1967, following the opera company’s move to its current location at Lincoln Center. [Photograph by Jack E. Boucher. Courtesy of the Library of Congress]
The stage of the Old Met (in 1966). Claudia and Josephine tarried on the stage for a few minutes to take in the vintage glamour of the auditorium, before proceeding to ransack the Wig Room. [Photograph by Jack E. Boucher. Courtesy of the Library of Congress]
Publicity for Club 82. Located in the Lower East Side and owned by Mafia bride Anna Genovese, Club 82 was the city’s premier venue for female impersonation. (This image has been rescued and published by theater and nightlife historian Joe E. Jeffreys. Link the his website here: https://www.queermusicheritage.com/fem-cl82.html )
Club 82’s bread and better were straight tourists from small towns and suburbs. For $2, you could get a souvenir photo of you and your spouse enjoying your walk on the wild side. [Digitized by Joe E. Jeffreys]
Another photo of an evening’s entertainment at Club 82. There’s a female impersonator in the center, bantering with the apparently inebriated guests. [Digitized by Joe E. Jeffreys]
Pioneering female impersonator Robbie Ross. At the time of the wig heist, Ross was working at the Jewel Box Revue—a traveling female impersonator show with particularly high production values. Ross was among approximately 10 people who served time for purchasing wigs from Claudia and Josephine. [Digitized by Joe E. Jeffreys]
J. Edgar Hoover, surrounded by FBI underlings, attending the opening gala for the 1952-53 season of the Metropolitan Opera. Hoover’s familiarity with the Met may explain why the Bureau bothered to investigate its missing wigs. [Courtesy of the New York Public Library]
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
--Boughton, Kay, “Nina Lawson Goes to Their Head,” The Yorkshire Evening Post (April 30, 1953), p.4
--Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
--de Alba, David. David de Alba Interviews Robbie Ross. TGForum (website): https://tgforum.com/david-de-alba-interviews-robbie-ross/
--Goodman, Elyssa Maxx. Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City. New York: Harper Collins Press, 2023.
--Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
--Olsen, Craig. P.S. Burn This Letter Please. London, UK: Sphere Press, 2023.
--Queer Music Heritage (website): https://www.queermusicheritage.com/fem-cl82.html
--Robinson, Francis. Celebration: The Metropolitan Opera. New York: Doubleday, 1979.
--Seligman, Michael and Jennifer Tiexiera (directors), P.S. Burn This Letter Please (Motion Picture Documentary), 2020.
--Sontag, Susan, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
TRANSCRIPT
Monday is everybody’s least favorite day, but some Mondays are worse than others. New Yorker Nina Lawson could have done without the one that fell on September 15, 1958. Lawson went into work at the Metropolitan Opera House early that morning. Born in rural Scotland, Lawson grew up shampooing and combing the tails of horses. This early experience gave her a fascination with hair, one that ultimately inspired her to study hairdressing in Glasgow. Upon graduation, Lawson worked at the Sadler’s Wells Opera, where she collaborated with a guy named Rudolf Bling. Bling became the director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1950.
Before Bling’s tenure there, the opera company had rented its wigs from third parties. As part of a suite of far-reaching reforms, the new director hired Lawson to help him acquire and maintain a permanent inventory of hairpieces. Thus, the newly anointed Mistress of the Wigs Department packed her bags and moved to the Big Apple. She worked at the Met for thirty-one years, during which time she also styled the hair of the entire cast of every Met production.
It was a big job, but Lawson—thin, refined, and impeccably dressed no matter what day of the week it was—had a reputation for efficiency and unflappability.
But these traits did not prepare the cool-headed Scot for what she encountered when she reached the fifth floor of the opera house that Monday. To her confusion, the door of the wig room was not only ajar, but barely on its hinges. Someone had kicked it in. When Nina Lawson entered her workshop, she was confronted by dozens of empty wig stands, many of them toppled over. 33 of the Met’s newly acquired, hand-made wigs were gone.
The theft of these hairpieces initially puzzled police, until a lead led them to an unlikely location, a mob-owned drag bar on the Lower East Side. Today, we’ll meet the perpetrators of New York’s biggest wig heist, hear about how the FBI got involved in solving the case, and look at the recent discovery that brought the memory of this colorful caper back to life. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to another episode of Crimes of Old New York…
WIG HEIST!
Where It All Began: The Cork Club
The story of the wig theft at the Metropolitan Opera begins a few years earlier, uptown at a restaurant/bar located at 250 West 72nd St. It was sometime in the mid-1950s—an evening like any other. But for Brooklyn teenager Claudio Díaz, it was a night that would transform his life. A friend had invited Claudio out for drinks at the Cork Club, in New York’s Upper West Side. You could see the Cork from a block away. It had a neon sign and an impossibly long awning that stretched from the front door to the edge of the sidewalk. The Club certainly stood out from the more mundane businesses that surrounded it—a grocery store, a tailor, a dry cleaner. Passing those establishments, Claudio turned toward the open door of the Cork, passed by the hat check, and descended the stairs to a smokey, dimly lit bar below.
As he and his friend enjoyed their drinks, Claudio’s attention wandered over to a striking figure just beyond him in the backroom. Standing close to six feet tall and clad in a show-stopping pink dress, the stranger chatted with a group of admirers while smoking from a long, pink cigarette holder. When Claudio went to steal a second look, their gazes intersected.
In the mid-1950s, the Cork Club was one of a handful of New York nightclubs that catered to a gay and lesbian clientele. The liveliest place in the Cork was its backroom. Furnished with four capacious tables with booth seating, this was not your average V.I.P. area. On any given evening, you would see a mixture of heterosexuals, gay men, and drag queens—black, white, and brown—seated together, laughing and having a good time. The Cork was also atypical in that it knowingly served men dressed in women’s clothes. In the 50s, homosexuality was criminalized in New York—and public gatherings of LGBTQ people were always vulnerable to police raids. Such crackdowns often resulted in the indiscriminate arrest of everyone who failed to escape.
Amid this inhospitable climate, the Cork Club was a known refuge not only for gay men and lesbians, but also for drag queens. It was this reputation that drew Claudio and the figure in the pink dress to its rollicking backroom. Claudio eventually learned that the stranger in the fashionable gown sometimes went by the name Roberto Perez. The two had a lot in common. Both were of Latino descent. Roberto moved to New York from the Dominican Republic as a teenager. Claudio’s family was Puerto Rican. Both lived in Brooklyn with their relatives.
But the two differed in one obvious regard. By day, Roberto worked as a hairdresser’s assistant in Chelsea. By night, he transformed into one of the city’s most glamorous and recognizable drag queens. His family and neighborhood acquaintances knew him as “Roberto.” In his nocturnal life, he went by “Josephine Baker”—a tribute to his favorite singer. When they met at the Cork Club, Josephine took an instant liking to Claudio and initiated him into the secret world of New York drag. A short time later, Claudio also gained a second name to be used while out on the town: “Claudia.” At the time of their fateful meeting at the Cork, Josephine and Claudia probably didn’t realize that they would become lifelong best friends.
They certainly could not have predicted that, within a few years’ time, they would be at the center of one of the most audacious heists in New York City history.
A Whole New World
In the meantime, with Josephine’s help, Claudia was introduced to a shimmering new social world. On any given night, they would take the subway in from Brooklyn to a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, which they rented with some friends. Because they lived with their families, who disapproved of drag, Josephine and Claudia had to store their feminine attire in this cheap flat. It was in this tiny studio that they dressed up before a night out. Once fully frocked, the dynamic duo often went to the Cork Club to drink with friends and meet new people. At other times they went to one of several bars in Greenwich Village or the Upper East Side, many of them owned and operated by the mob, who paid police to look the other way. On rare occasions, they would crash dances and other events at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
There was also a lively seasonal calendar. As we discussed in the episode on Mae West, Harlem played host to several annual drag balls. These parties inspired West’s controversial 1927 play, The Drag, and were still drawing huge crowds of participants and spectators thirty years later. Like most of their friends, Claudia and Josephine looked forward to these lavish shindigs for months, taking great pains to piece together a splashy new outfit for the occasion.
Though they enjoyed life to the utmost, Josephine and Claudia understood that what they were doing was risky. Drag queens were vulnerable to arrest every time they appeared in public, thanks in part to a state law passed in the mid-19th century. In 1845, New York introduced an anti-masquerading statute, in response to the so-called “Rent Riots,” during which tenant farmers disguised themselves as Native Americans in order to evade rent and tax-collectors.
The text of the statute threatened to punish anyone “Being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration, [or who] loiters, remains or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked or disguised, or [who] knowingly permits or aids persons so masked or disguised to congregate in a public place.” In the 1950s, this obscure corner of the penal code empowered the NYPD to apprehend men and women who wore anything that was deemed inappropriate for their gender. Even a little bit of eyeliner could count as “unusual or unnatural attire or facial alternation” and land a man in jail.
However, the same anti-masquerading law carved out exceptions for activity undertaken “in connection with a masquerade party or like entertainment if…permission is first obtained from the police or other appropriate authorities.” It was this loophole that enabled the existence of Harlem’s annual drag balls. As long as the organizers obtained permission from the proper authorities, they were good to go.
As Claudia became immersed in the drag scene, she familiarized herself with the colorful slang of that subculture, a language that was full of double meanings that only the initiated could understand. It’s worth taking a second for a vocabulary lesson, partly because drag lingo will play a crucial role in the discovery of the wig heist at the Met Opera and partly because drag vernacular is just so funny. “A steak dinner” was a man who would pay for an evening at a restaurant. A person who “painted” applied makeup before going out in public. If someone told you at a party was “the end,” they were saying that it was the greatest party of all time. If they said that they had “pulled a scene,” they were telling you that they had successfully orchestrated some sort of caper. (On its own, the word “scene” meant any high-spirited or elaborate bit of trickery.)
Even the phase “drag queen” had a different connotation than it does today. In the 50s, men who were paid to perform as women in clubs or at parties were not called “drag queens,” but rather “female impersonators.” To them, the distinction mattered. Female impersonators arrived to their jobs at the nightclub dressed in men’s clothes. Once inside, they changed into their elegant costumes in the dressing room, and then changed out of them at the end of the show. Most lived their everyday lives dressed as men. These paid performers distinguished themselves from “drag queens” like Josephine and Claudia.
In contrast to the female impersonator, the drag queen—also known as the “street queen”—went out in various public places dressed in women’s clothes without being paid to do so. To call someone a “drag queen” was also to suggest that they might be involved in sex work and other misdemeanor activity.
Finally, there was “mopping,” a term of the utmost importance to our story. To mop meant to shoplift or steal. Josephine and Claudia had a mopping problem. Even their closest friends regarded the pair as inveterate thieves. They made off with countless sweaters, dresses, and bolts of cloth, under the noses of inattentive salesclerks. While they usually got away with these escapades, it was perhaps just a matter of time before their “mopping” landed them in hot water. We’ll hear about the Met wig heist after a quick break.
Mopping at the Met
The afternoon of September 13th, 1958 was a quiet one at the Metropolitan Opera House. It was Saturday, and there were no performances scheduled for the entire weekend. Today, the Met is one of the most recognizable opera venues in the world, with five towering arches adorning its elegant clean-lined façade. Nestled amid other renowned cultural institutions in Lincoln Center, the modern-day Met was designed by architect Wallace K. Harrison and opened to the public in 1966. However, in 1958 the Metropolitan Opera was still housed in its original theater, also known as “The Old Met”—at Broadway and 39th St.
Which brings us back to that quiet Saturday afternoon in September of 1958. Josephine and Claudia were walking down Broadway, past the Old Met, when something caught their attention. Whenever the opera house went dark, as it had today, the gated arches in front of the building were sealed shut by enormous padlocks. On this particular Saturday, however, the padlock on the center gate were not fully closed.
Within seconds, Josephine and Claudia made the decision to see the Met for themselves. Slipping through the central arch and into the ground floor, they made their way up to the auditorium. They marveled at what they found, a performance space gilded and stuccoed in the grand 19th-century style. Claudia wandered onto the stage from behind the scenery and kneeled on the floor, awestruck. After poring over the theater’s gilded ornaments and ornate ceiling paintings, she closed her eyes in concentration. Josephine walked onstage a moment or two later and asked, “What are you doing?” Claudia, who had never seen anything so beautiful before, replied, “I’m making a memory.”
The drag queens considered ending their unauthorized tour of the opera house there, but the duo was curious by nature—and the Old Met completely devoid of other people. Exploring the corridors behind the scenes, Josephine and Claudia ascended to the fifth floor, where they were greeted by a door with a sign that cried out “WIG ROOM”, painted in large letters. The two looked at each other. While we don’t know what kind of debate, if any, they may have had, what we do know is that Claudia kicked down the door. I like to imagine that she did so in heels, but sadly the record is silent on that matter. What they saw inside dazzled them. Throughout the room were wig-making masterworks: blonde and red, brown and black, short and long—all carefully perched atop head-shaped wooden stands. Josephine and Claudia wasted little time in snatching up a pair of trash bags. Like locusts at harvest time, they descended on the wig room, plucking dozens of hairpieces and stuffing them into their bags. Mindful that they might not be alone for long, they worked quickly.
Having scored more than thirty wigs, they rand down the stairs and exited the opera house the way they had entered. Josephine and Claudia had mopped like crazy at the Met. The heist went undetected until Monday morning, when Nina Lawson reported to work. Initially distressed, Lawson didn’t have to wait long for a glimmer of hope that the wigs she had painstakingly acquired and maintained would find their way back to the Met.
Phase Three: Profit!
The ransacking of the Met’s wig room was a spontaneous, opportunistic crime, undertaken in a hurry. As a result, Josephine and Claudia purloined several hairpieces that, with the benefit of hindsight, were not entirely to their taste. There was an obvious solution to this problem. They could keep the wigs they liked—and sell the ones they didn’t. Josephine and Claudia were friendly with several female impersonators, who were always on the lookout for fashion bargains to incorporate into their nightclub acts. They were the perfect market for this sudden windfall of high-end wigs.
Claudia and Josephine approached a group of performers who worked at the 82 Club, the city’s most glamourous female impersonation venue. The 82 Club—also known as “Club 82”—was situated in a scruffy quarter of the Lower East Side, near 4th and Bowery. Its owner was Anna Genovese, estranged wife of Vito Genovese, head of the infamous Genovese crime family, which held a virtual monopoly on the female impersonation industry in New York. Upon arrival at the 82, you entered the double doors and immediately descend a dark, impossibly steep staircase. The steps would just keep coming and coming until you finally found yourself at another doorway, deep underground.
This door opened up onto a glitzy, kitschy wonderland—a dramatic contrast to the seedy neighborhood streets (and even seedier stairwell) that had brought you there. It looked like a futuristic vision of Miami. The zebra-print wallpaper was offset by the tall plastic palm trees that vaulted up toward the ceiling. There were mirrors everywhere. Dapper waiters—lesbians in tuxedos—darted back and forth from the buzzing cocktail bar to thirsty customers seated around small, intimate round tables. These tables, covered in elegant white cloths, were arranged around an imposing stage, where all the action happened.
Each night, the 82 mounted 3 lavish song-and-dance spectacles. Anna Genovese spared no expense on the glittery sets, costumes, and lighting design. The stars of the show were the female impersonators, who danced, sang live, and bantered with the crowd. Perhaps surprisingly, heterosexual travelers from small-town America made up the bulk of the audience. In fact, the 82 Club successfully positioned itself as an exotic tourist attraction, one that would promise a unique night out for married couples visiting from places like Peoria or Kalamazoo. Customers could even pay a staff photographer to take a picture of them seated at their tables, as a memento of their walk on the wild side.
The establishment also attracted big-name celebrities, including Judy Garland, Erroll Flynn, Gretta Garbo, Burt Lancaster, and Tennessee Williams. Salvador Dalí, a frequent patron, reportedly developed an obsession with female impersonator and 82 Club headliner Ella Funt. Dalí repeatedly drew sketches of the performer on cocktail napkins, sending them backstage as a token of his appreciation. Probably a bit creeped out by Dalí’s attentions, Ella Funt would instantly crumple these offerings into a ball and chuck them in the trash.
Josephine and Claudia used to hang out with many of the Club 82 performers at the Cork Club and knew they would be interested in their ill-gotten wigs. They swung by the 82 and hawked quite a few, smiling to themselves as they pocketed the cash. They then moved on to friends that worked at the Jewel Box Revue, a traveling female impersonation extravaganza that was currently touring theaters in and around New York City.
Robbie Ross
The performer known as “Robbie Ross” was among the impersonators who bought a snazzy wig from Claudia and Josephine. Robbie was born Robert Arthur Bouvard, in Wichita, Kansas on December 12, 1936. When he was still a child, his family moved to San Jose, California, where he became a theater kid and competitive skater. Growing up, he admired female stars Ava Gardner and Cyd Charisse, whose elegance would eventually be an inspiration in his career as a female impersonator. Robert came of age and joined the Airforce as a radio controller. Stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi, he spent his leave time in nearby New Orleans. There, he frequented gay bars and made friends. It was through these relationships that Robert first appeared in drag at Mardi Gras, in a rhinestone-studded gown made of aqua blue velvet and black Chantilly lace. Eventually, the military found out about his escapades and handed Robert an “undesirable discharge”—which denied him any and all benefits as a veteran. Cut loose from his career, he became a hairdresser and wigmaker. He also began performing as Robbie Ross at the My-O-My Club, a female impersonation venue in New Orleans. Once Robert had some experience under his belt, he successfully auditioned for the Jewel Box Revue, which took him all around the country.
In 1958, he was in New York. When he examined the lace-front wig that Josephine and Claudia were offering to sell him, his expert eye appreciated its quality workmanship. It had clearly been imported from Italy. With an asking price of $75, the wig was a steal. Robert purchased the merchandise from his bar-friends. Like his counterparts at the 82 Club, he would later regret this transaction.
The FBI (Glamour Division)
Word of the wig heist spread quickly. Newspapers reported that some of the missing hairpieces belonged to opera superstars Roberta Peters and Vivian Della Chiesa. In total, the thieves had sashayed away with 33 wigs, worth a grand total of $3000. This crime had targeted a high-status institution, vexed a brace of glamorous divas, and deprived the Met’s Wig Room of the modern equivalent of $33,000 in theatrical hairpieces.
Even so, it is still a bit surprising that the FBI came in to help investigate the case, not least because it lacks a Fashion and Glamour Division. However, the Head of the Agency—J. Edgar Hoover—was a fan of the Met Opera and may have been personally interested in the theft for that reason. Hoover had attended the opening night of the Met’s 1953-54 season. (There’s a picture of him at this event, surrounded by a flock of top-hatted FBI underlings, on the Art of Crime website.) It’s also possible that the nature of the crime itself triggered Hoover’s gaydar. The late ’50s and early ’60s saw increased interest in policing New York’s queer subculture, at both the federal and municipal levels. Throughout the ’50s, the FBI actively surveilled New York businesses frequented by gay men and lesbians, including the Cork Club. Between 1959-60, the City systematically denied liquor licenses to establishments that permitted “homosexuals & degenerates on the premises.” As a result, many of these clubs went out of business. Whatever the reason for the FBI’s involvement, its agents applied themselves to tracking down the Met’s missing wigs. Meanwhile, the two culprits took note of the media attention that the case was attracting. In a letter to a friend named Reno Martin—nicknamed “René”—Josephine related the tale of the Met caper. Now’s the time to test your knowledge of 1950s drag-queen slang. See if this letter makes any work to you:
Dear René:
Well, the latest scene was that Claudia and I mopped at the Met. 35 Paste ons—all gorgeous—white, red, brown, black, every color you can think of. The END of wigs! Most of them flew already for $75 and $50. Well, I’m going to bed now so write soon. I called Billy Baker. She was surprised you haven’t written her. She’s making my silver beaded sheath.
Goodnite,
Josephine Baker
(P.S. BURN this letter please.) (That scene at the Met was in the papers!) (Don’t dish.)
Disobeying orders, Reno Martin chose not to burn the letter. But to his credit, he didn’t dish.
Unfortunately for the thieves, someone else did. The Costume Department of the Metropolitan Opera was located down the hall from Nina Lawson’s Wig Room. The wardrobe master had recently hired a new tailor, proud union member Henry Arango. When Arango first heard about the burglary, he had his suspicions. In an astonishing coincidence, before going to work at the Met, Henry had been a female impersonator at Club 82. To his mind, this was the kind of crime that only a couple of drag queens would commit. It’s possible that Arango heard some gossip from friends who continued to work at the 82—or perhaps it really was just a hunch. But what is certain is that he went to Nina Lawson to air his suspicions. The Mistress of the Wigs listened to Arango’s thoughts on the matter and found them convincing enough to share with the authorities. Not long after, federal agents and local police—accompanied by Lawson and Arango—raided the dressing rooms of the 82 Club. A line of performers sat opposite their mirrors, doing their hair and makeup for the show that was about to begin. Nina Lawson scanned the room. Suddenly, she recognized one of the Met’s missing wigs, perched atop the head of one of the female impersonators. Within minutes, they located several others. Those who had purchased the wigs were rounded up and arrested. Across town, agents also apprehended Robbie Ross, who insisted that he did not know his wig had been stolen when he bought it. In total, 10 people were detained on charges of Possessing Stolen Goods. They all served jail time. With the information gathered from these busts, it was only a matter of time before the cops caught up with Claudia and Josephine. Indeed, they were apprehended by the NYPD on December 10th, 1958. The arrest was reported the following day in a syndicated newspaper article that titillated readers across the country. This sensationalized version of the story was how I first found out about the case. The sources that I consulted later suggest that the news item in question uncritically parroted government claims, some of which were misleading, if not entirely untrue. This story converts a simple crime of opportunity into a masterfully choreographed heist, in which Claudia and Josephine disguised themselves as dancers to infiltrate the Met. According to the author, Claudia and Josephine disguised themselves as dancers. The source for this newspaper story clearly wanted the public to believe that this was a premeditated crime and appears to have enhanced the facts accordingly.
Ultimately, prosecutors did not try Josephine and Claudia for burglary. Instead, the merry moppers were convicted on a Trespassing charge. Showing little mercy, the judge sentenced them to the notorious Ryker’s Island Penitentiary for an entire year. With that, the wig heist at the Metropolitan Opera faded from public memory. Then, in 2014, a surprise discovery revived interest in the case—and in the lives of Josephine, Claudia, and their friends. We’ll hear about the remarkable rediscovery after a quick break.
Reno
Remember Reno Martin, also known as René? He was the recipient of the “Don’t Dish!” memo. Martin frequently exchanged letters with not only Josephine, but several other New York drag queens. In fact, “Reno Martin” was a pseudonym. The person whom Josephine called “Reno” or “René” was born in the New York suburb of Mount Vernon on July 3, 1936, and christened “Edward Frank Limato.” As a youth, Ed joined an Italian street gang. He also realized that he was attracted to other men. Bored of life in Mount Vernon, Ed went whenever he could to New York City. In a short time, he started hanging out in Greenwich Village, where he made a group of drag-queen friends—among them Josephine Baker. While in the city, Ed went by the name of “Reno Martin.” Reno became the central figure in the friend group. In the mid 1950s, he left New York for New Orleans, where he became a popular radio DJ and continued to go by the name “Reno Martin.” Over the next several years, Josephine and other members of Reno’s clique wrote him upwards of 200 letters.
Then, one night in New Orleans, police caught Reno making out with another man in a car. He was tried and sent to state prison. This marked the end of his radio career. When he got out from behind bars, he took a job at the My-O-My Club, the female impersonation bar that had launched the career of Robbie Ross. Restless by nature, Reno tired of life in the Big Easy and moved to Europe to take a job as assistant to Italian film director and serial pervert Franco Zeffirelli.
Through his film-world connections, he landed an entry-level position at a talent agency in New York, where he discarded the name “Reno Martin” in favor of his given name. For the rest of his life, Ed Limato amassed more and more power and influence as a showbiz agent. Limato moved to Los Angles to work for the mega-talent-agency William Morris, where he eventually became Senior Vice President. During his illustrious career, he represented countless A-list celebrities, including Denzel Washington, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steve Martin, and Nicolas Cage. He worked in the talent industry until his death on July 3, 2010. He was 73 years old.
At some point after his stay in New Orleans, Ed Limato lost touch with Josephine and the crew. In fact, those who knew him best had no idea that he had ever been part of the drag queen scene in 1950s New York. Indeed, as an older man, he emphatically expressed his distaste for drag. However complicated his views on drag culture had become, he carefully preserved the letters from his friends including the one that Josephine had urged him to burn. These documents went unread until a friend of Limato’s cleaned out one of his storage units in 2014, four years after Ed’s death. The friend in question was artist and filmmaker Craig Olsen. Olsen discovered an enormous stack of letters—more than 200—addressed to Reno Martin, a name that he had never heard. As he read the correspondence between Martin and what appeared to be several New York drag queens, he became increasingly fascinated. The voices of the letter-writers were so vivid. The stories they told conjured up a world as foreign as it was fascinating. Gradually, Olsen figured out that Reno Martin and Ed Limato were the same person, making this stack of papers all the more intriguing to him. As a gay man and drag performer himself, Craig understood the historical significance of what he had unearthed.
Because the 1950s were a risky time to be openly gay, it was uncommon to hold onto documents that could potentially get you—or your friends—arrested. As a result, there are relatively few historical sources from the period that were written in the voices of sexual minorities. Turning all of this over in his mind Olsen decided to make a documentary based on these rare and unusual letters. So, he teamed up with directors Michael Siegelman and Jennifer Tiexiera to produce the 2020 film P.S. Burn This Letter Please, a title taken from Josephine’s letter about the Met heist. In 2023, Olsen published a companion book with the same title.
Olsen and his collaborators pounded the proverbial pavement in search of the authors of the letters. Some, including Josephine, had died during the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. But surprisingly, many more were still alive in 2020. Now in their 80s or 90s, they described the underworld drag scene of the 1950s in humorous and deeply moving detail. The documentarians spoke with Robbie Ross, the female impersonator who ended up in jail after purchasing a wig from Claudia and Josephine. They also caught up with Henry Arango, who had been working at the Metropolitan Opera for six decades at the time of his interview. He was also still performing in drag.
One of the most breathtaking interviews in the film features a man by the name of “Claude Díaz”—who in the 1950s went by the names “Claudio” and “Claudia.” Díaz offers a first-hand account of the wig caper, one that corrects the police misinformation that we talked about earlier. Díaz also lovingly reminisces about his friendship with Josephine. In a more somber vein, he talks candidly about police harassment and his difficult family life, which included a brief confinement to a mental institution for being gay.
These experiences naturally made him mistrusting and resentful of authority. At a particularly dramatic moment in his interview, Díaz removes a handbag from under the table, reaches in, and pulls out a glossy red-brown wig, which once featured in a Met production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. It was one that he had stolen that day at the Met. How did he still have it? Didn’t the police force them to return the purloined hairpieces? The authorities had asked them to return the stolen wigs, and Claudia and Josephine had given them wigs—just not the ones they nicked. Instead, the thieves replaced the Met’s high-end hairpieces with cheap synthetic substitutes, wagering that the cops wouldn’t know the difference. Turns out they didn’t. Díaz kept the Rigoletto wig as a souvenir of his caper with Josephine and as a middle finger to law enforcement. After debunking the false claim that the duo disguised themselves as dancers to gain access to the Met, Díaz adds a few choice words for the police. Be warned; they include offensive language, which I’m leaving in because the statement loses all impact without them: “Fuck you, NYPD! Two faggots from Brooklyn outsmarted the whole lot of you…and you still don’t know how we got in!” If there is a more New-York way to correct a record, this humble podcaster hasn’t heard it.
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