The Impersonator

The character named Lorraine Sheldon swirled onstage in the second act of The Man Who Came to Dinner, gaudy in mink, black satin, and black mesh stockings. "Sherry, my sweet," cooed Lorraine to the bewhiskered leading man. "Oh, darling! Look at that poor, sweet, tortured face! Let me kiss it." After that entrance it was hard to believe the program. The seductively feline manner and the shapely, shaved legs (badly nicked by a dressing-room razor) of Lorraine Sheldon belonged to an actor named T. (for Thomas) C. (for Craig) Jones.

As the comedy went on, in Pennsylvania's swank-rustic Bucks County Playhouse last week, "T. C." handled hip and handbag so well that the audience rapidly forgot his real sex. "Jones is so good that we completely forgot he was a man," said one actor after the show. "When he leaned over after one rehearsal and kissed his wife, we were all shocked." Mrs. Connie Dickson Jones herself is long past such shock. Onetime actress (she once toured the South in a tent show of Ten Nights in a Barroom) and athlete (she was once women's fencing champion of Florida), and onetime owner of three beauty parlors, she met T. C. when he came to her for a new wig. "After each performance," says she, "I still say to myself: 'What a great artist.' "

Probably the best female impersonator since vaudeville's late famed Julien Eltinge, egg-bald T. C. Jones, 39, has been working at his special skill ever since 1946, after he had abandoned study for the ministry, done a hitch in the Navy, and finally crashed Broadway. He earned critical raves when he brought his imitations of Tallulah, Luise Rainer and Bette Davis to Broadway in New Faces of 1956, did even better the following year in Mask and Gown, a sort of one-man one-woman show. This season he is already booked for the part of the prima donna in Friml's The Firefly. Still he complains that opportunities are limited. ("I was slated for a part as one of the strippers in Gypsy, but Ethel Merman nixed me.") It is a sad thing, says Jones, that "today, female impersonation is a dying art. It goes back to 300 B.C. The Roman, Greek and Japanese theaters relied on it; Elizabethan plays were done by men."

Sad though the situation may be, stocky (5 ft. 7 in., 155 Ibs., 38-28-38 in his padding) T. C. Jones is sticking to his specialty. "I'd like to play Dame May Whitty's part in Night Must Fall," says he, "or Bankhead's in The Little Foxes.Half the time people don't even know I'm not a woman. When I pulled offmy wig at the end of New Faces, one woman said audibly: 'Oh, the poordear, she's bald.' "