It would take quite a story to live up to the melodramatic title of Edward Ball's Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. Fortunately for the reader, the bizarre and highly compelling tale of Gordon Langley Hall and his transformation into Dawn Langley Hall is quite a story indeed. Novelists couldn't have dreamed up a more fascinating central character than Hall. Born the son of British servants, Hall, as a boy, befriended Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West. As a young man, he made his way to New York, becoming a biographer of some society figures and endearing himself to others including heiress Isabel Whitney who left him an inheritance that allowed him to move to Charleston, South Carolina, and gain entry to the colorful world of Southern society. In 1968, Hall underwent a sex change operation, claiming that the procedure was corrective and that she had actually possessed female sexual organs all along. Further complicating matters for the people of Charleston was Dawn's marriage to a young black mechanic and the appearance of an infant daughter. Author Edward Ball (Slaves in the Family) first came into contact with Hall through a uncover more about her. Although it is a biography of Hall, Peninsula of Lies is also equal parts mystery as Ball tracks down key figures from Hall's life, attempts to separate truth from legend and find the points at which the two intersect. As the facts of her life are brought into the light, Hall's psychology and motivation become more inscrutable and we are left with more questions than answers. Edward Ball's investigative persistence is tempered by a kindness toward his interview subjects, which, combined with his rich descriptions of 1960s Southern living, make Peninsula of Lies a lively read. But it is the impression left by the enigmatic Dawn Langley Hall that is sure to linger after the book is over. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
Gordon Langley Hall (1922-2000), a biographer who underwent one of the most celebrated gender switches in the 1960s, is the focus of this meandering expose of Southern snobbery. English by birth, Langley Hall was the son of a maidservant at Sissinghurst Castle (made famous by Vita Sackville-West in the 1930s). Leaving England in the bleak postwar era, he eventually made his way to New York, where, after befriending an elderly heiress, he inherited enough of her money to start a new life in the "Peninsula of Lies," Charleston, SC. There Langley Hall started an antiques business and mixed with Anglophile society who ignored his quasi-Cockney accent and origins. At age 45, he met a teenage garage mechanic, John-Paul Simmons, and promptly made an appointment at the new Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins, the first U.S. hospital for sex change operations. Newly a woman, "Dawn Pepita Hall" married her mechanic in a lavish church ceremony, defying in one stroke gender expectations and the racial codes of the American South, for she was white, her husband black and the year 1969. Most perplexingly, she emerged two years later with a baby girl, Natasha, whom she said was her own. Edward Ball, who won the National Book Award in 1998 for Slaves in the Family, had enough material here for a longish Vanity Fair piece; through judicious padding and an unstoppable barrage of irony, he has made a murky, garrulous detective story. If there are easy ways to try to make transsexuals look silly, then in the machinations of his hero/heroine, he's got a whole barrel of fish to shoot dead. Unfortunately, Ball never lets us sees what might have motivated either Gordon or Dawn. In his evocation of a tawdry, snooty Charleston, populated with colorful coots, he keeps trying for that old John Berendt magic, and missing every time. Photos.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
That a young Strom Thurmond had sexual congress with his family's black maid did not curl the hair of those who've long understood the earthy passions that disrupt the South's storied miscegenation taboo. Now comes Edward Ball with a saga about a British transsexual (male to female) who landed in 1960s South Carolina and married a black laborer with whom she claimed in 1971 to have a child. Yet for all the race-mixing, gender-bending, miracle-birth angles of Peninsula of Lies, Ball's narrative, like the Thurmond story (thus far), leaves readers hungry for a deeper probing of love, lust and rebellion in Dixie. Ball is the author of Slaves in the Family, an acclaimed 1998 book that chronicles the mixing of bloodlines in his socially prominent South Carolina family. As he tells it, Peninsula of Lies was inspired by a query he received, in 1999, about "the Ball commode chair," an 18th-century family heirloom that the letter writer, Charleston socialite Dawn Langley Simmons, claimed to have once owned. "Although I had no idea where the [toilet] might be, the chair created a link between this stranger and me, through the warmth of the seat, you might say," he writes. Upon further investigation, Ball discovered that Simmons (whose death in 2000 precluded their meeting) had been born male in England, in the early 1920s, of servant-class roots he found it painful to acknowledge. Then named Gordon Hall, he eventually made his way to New York where, at age 30 and conflicted about his sexuality, he became an intimate of an unmarried, 69-year-old heiress to the Whitney fortune (of cotton gin fame). Ball quotes a friend of the "December-May" pair: Gordon "became the accommodating male whenever Isabel [Whitney] needed a companion. . . . He went everyplace she wanted to go that she needed an escort -- and in exchange, Isabel gave him a place to live, and paid his expenses." When Whitney died in 1962, Hall inherited a cache of stocks, real estate, jewelry, art and antiques valued today at about $6 million. Accompanied by his pets (a parrot and two Chihuahuas), Hall soon left for Charleston in a car driven by a uniformed chauffeur. "Within a few weeks . . . [Hall] had followed the custom of the showy rich, hiring a black cook . . . and an elderly black butler," the author writes. Here Ball blows the chance to discuss, if only briefly, the intriguing stories of other wealthy American women who bequeathed major portions of their estates to men who had befriended them in their waning years; artist Georgia O'Keeffe and tobacco heiress Doris Duke come immediately to mind. Instead, Ball takes readers on an uninspired trek through a famous Charleston cemetery where, he notes, many putative practitioners of "same-sex love" are interred. "This man was gay," effuses Ball's local graveyard guide, noting a towering, phallic-shaped tombstone. But as a reconstruction of Southern sexual scandals, Peninsula of Lies is hard pressed to trump Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt's rousing 1994 book about homosexuals and society life in Savannah, Ga. That John-Paul Simmons -- "a skinny, happy black guy who looked like he'd stumbled into a good time" -- does not appear, in full flesh, until page 163, bespeaks the major problem with Ball's book. After all, Ball suggests, this is the person (variously described by others as a gardener, deliveryman, mechanic, fisherman and "Negro steward") for whom Gordon Hall, in 1968, underwent an operation that enabled him, as Dawn Pepita Langley Hall, to marry a black man. (The Supreme Court had overturned anti-miscegenation laws in 1967.) More egregiously, Ball introduces readers to Simmons (in his late fifties and mentally unstable) for the most part through secondary sources. Testimony here, from one of Hall's upscale friends, is typical of the "dish" the author chooses to relay: "John-Paul spent money, and went through that income -- millions of dollars! . . . [He] was ugly as sin. He didn't have enough intelligence to get out of a shower of horse manure. . . . I think Dawn was trying to do anything to attract attention, but [she] went about it the wrong way. . . . If [she] had picked up with a white boy and done this thing, nobody would have paid a bit of attention. But it was the way it was done. . . . It just put a bad taste in people's mouth." Ball belatedly summarizes the brunt of the scandal: "She'd gone from man to woman, but when she 'married black,' Dawn crossed another threshold." But there was more to come! Two years after her marriage to Simmons, Dawn began to show signs of pregnancy. In October 1971, after a brief trip to Philadelphia, she informed friends and family that she'd given birth to a seven-pound daughter. Her relationship with Simmons was steadily deteriorating, so Dawn soon moved with the light-skinned infant (christened Natasha) to upstate New York. Medicated and accompanied by a psychiatric aide, John-Paul Simmons eventually met with Ball and shared memories of his life with Gordon/Dawn Hall. Ball writes: "When he talked, his mind came alive, and his story carried strong emotions -- shame, amusement, curiosity -- all of which he still felt. I could see him shaking off the sedation, like a man coming out of the waves, trying to breathe, and holding his truths above the water." Indeed, for all the bad-mouthing he endured, John-Paul, while clearly flawed, emerges as the honest broker in Peninsula of Lies. To his credit, Ball also includes the valiant voice of Natasha Simmons. Now in her mid-thirties, she is a determined young woman who, as readers will come to know, was rightly cherished by the unorthodox couple she loved as mom and dad. Reviewed by Evelyn C. WhiteCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Dawn Langley Simmons, an author who was born Gordon Langley Hall, underwent one of the first sexual-reassignment surgeries. Hall's transsexuality is the hub of this story, but like a wheel's spokes, other tales come out from the center. Ball, a National Book Award winner for Slaves in the Family (1998), shares a Charleston heritage with his subject and became intrigued by her story after Simmons wrote him about an antique from the Ball family. As a man, Hall had been a companion to Isabel Whitney and inherited part of her fortune. He hoped the money would ease his way into Charleston society, and it did, a little, but society frowns on sex-change operations; if that weren't enough scandal, Simmons married a young black man and later claimed to have his child. Ball milks all this sensational material quite nicely, treating the biography as kind of true-life mystery, although he tends to string the reader along, teasing out the facts, when the outcome is not all that surprising. Still, it's hard not to be caught up in a story with so many juicy elements. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Peninsula of Lies is a nonfiction mystery, set in haunting locales and peopled with fascinating characters, that unwraps the enigma of a woman named Dawn Langley Simmons, a British writer who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1960s and became the focus of one of the most unusual sexual scandals of the last century. Born in England sometime before World War II, Dawn Langley Simmons began life as a boy named Gordon Langley Hall. Gordon was the son of servants at Sissinghurst Castle, the estate of Vita Sackville-West, where as a child he met Vita's lover Virginia Woolf. In his twenties, Gordon made his way to New York, where he became an author of society biographies and befriended such grandes dames as the actress Margaret Rutherford and the artist and heiress Isabel Whitney, who left him a small fortune. The money allowed Gordon to buy a mansion in Charleston and fill it with period furniture, providing a stage for him to entertain more great ladies and to climb the social ladder of the Southern gentry to its heights. However, Gordon's world changed instantly in 1968, when at The Johns Hopkins Hospital he underwent one of the first sex-reassignment surgeries, returning to Southern society and scandalizing Charleston as the new Dawn Langley Hall. Dawn Hall furthermore announced that her surgery had been corrective, because she'd actually been misidentified as a boy at birth. Three months later, Dawn raised the stakes in still-segregated Charleston when she arranged her very public marriage to a young black mechanic, John-Paul Simmons. In due course, Dawn appeared around town pregnant; finally, she could be seen pushing a baby carriage with a child -- her daughter, Natasha. National Book Award-winning author Edward Ball (Slaves in the Family) has written a detective story that deciphers the riddle of Dawn Simmons, a once rich and infamous changeling who died in 2000, her sexual identity never determined. Peninsula of Lies is an engrossing narrative of a person who tested every taboo, as well as the confidence of observers in their own eyes.


About the Author
Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia; graduated from Brown University; and was a writer for The Village Voice. His first book, Slaves in the Family, won the National Book Award. He is also the author of The Sweet Hell Inside.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Born in England sometime before World War II, Dawn Langley Simmons began life as a boy named Gordon Langley Hall. Gordon was the son of servants at Sissinghurst Castle, the estate of Vita Sackville-West, where as a child he met Vita's lover Virginia Woolf. In his twenties, Gordon made his way to New York, where he became an author of society biographies and befriended such grandes dames as the actress Margaret Rutherford and the artist and heiress Isabel Whitney, who left him a small fortune.

The money allowed Gordon to buy a mansion in Charleston and fill it with period furniture, providing a stage for him to entertain more great ladies and to climb the social ladder of the Southern gentry to its heights.

However, Gordon's world changed instantly in 1968, when at The John Hopkins Hospital he underwent one of the first sex-reassignment surgeries, returning to Southern society and scandalizing Charleston as the new Dawn Langley Hall. Dawn Hall furthermore announced that her surgery had been corrective, because she'd actually been misidentified as a boy at birth.

Three months later, Dawn raised the stakes in still-segregated Charleston when she arranged her very public marriage to a young black mechanic, John-Paul Simmons. In due course, Dawn appeared around town pregnant; finally she could be seen pushing a baby carriage with a child - her daughter, Natasha.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

1968, an eccentric middle-aged English writer named Gordon Hall scandalized his adoptive home town of Charleston, South Carolina, by undergoing a sex change. Returning from surgery as a woman called Dawn, she married a black mechanic nearly three decades her junior, and set tongues further wagging by appearing with a baby daughter whom she claimed as her own. Ball’s genteel detective story, attempting to get at the truth behind Dawn’s self-invention, charts the course of an almost absurdly colorful life. Born illegitimately to a servant on the Sackville-West estate at Sissinghurst, Gordon moved to New York in 1952, where he was taken up by the actress Margaret Rutherford and the heiress Isabel Whitney. The latter left him a fortune, which, after he moved to Charleston, was frittered away on the opulent life of a Southern gentleman, then belle. Life took a sadder turn after marriage. Dawn’s husband, mentally unstable, beat her and was institutionalized. Dawn herself died, almost destitute, in 2000.

Publishers Weekly

Gordon Langley Hall (1922-2000), a biographer who underwent one of the most celebrated gender switches in the 1960s, is the focus of this meandering expose of Southern snobbery. English by birth, Langley Hall was the son of a maidservant at Sissinghurst Castle (made famous by Vita Sackville-West in the 1930s). Leaving England in the bleak postwar era, he eventually made his way to New York, where, after befriending an elderly heiress, he inherited enough of her money to start a new life in the "Peninsula of Lies," Charleston, SC. There Langley Hall started an antiques business and mixed with Anglophile society who ignored his quasi-Cockney accent and origins. At age 45, he met a teenage garage mechanic, John-Paul Simmons, and promptly made an appointment at the new Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins, the first U.S. hospital for sex change operations. Newly a woman, "Dawn Pepita Hall" married her mechanic in a lavish church ceremony, defying in one stroke gender expectations and the racial codes of the American South, for she was white, her husband black and the year 1969. Most perplexingly, she emerged two years later with a baby girl, Natasha, whom she said was her own. Edward Ball, who won the National Book Award in 1998 for Slaves in the Family, had enough material here for a longish Vanity Fair piece; through judicious padding and an unstoppable barrage of irony, he has made a murky, garrulous detective story. If there are easy ways to try to make transsexuals look silly, then in the machinations of his hero/heroine, he's got a whole barrel of fish to shoot dead. Unfortunately, Ball never lets us sees what might have motivated either Gordon or Dawn. In his evocation of a tawdry, snooty Charleston, populated with colorful coots, he keeps trying for that old John Berendt magic, and missing every time. Photos; 100,000 first printing; 10-city author tour.(Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

While most likely to be compared to John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil because of its forays into the curious corners of Southern subculture, this eminently readable book is sui generis. National Book Award winner Ball (Slaves in the Family; The Sweet Hell Inside) is drawn into investigating the intriguing life of self-appointed Charleston society "matron" Dawn Langley Simmons, born Englishman Gordon Langley. Retracing Dawn's steps into transsexualism, Ball attempts to account for both her transformation and her adamant claim that she gave birth to a daughter. Thus, he tracks down and interviews all of the key players in her life, from Dawn's sister and daughter to Harold Nicholson, whose family employed Dawn's parents, and John-Paul Simmons, the schizophrenic African American man who married Dawn. Moreover, Ball consults scientific literature and interviews experts on transsexualism to investigate Dawn's claim about giving birth. His solution to the mystery may not entirely surprise, but it will certainly captivate. Recommended for all gay, lesbian, and transgender studies collections, as well as for larger public library collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/03.]-Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews