The Professor and the Prostitute (22 page)

It wasn't just John's mother who thought his personality charismatic. Several people who knew him described him as unique and compelling, noting in particular that he had a vibrant sense of humor. It was the kind of humor that has become almost a clichéd style among drag queens, mocking and derisive. When a black man, noticing him walking the streets dressed as Diana Ross, said to him, “You're a disgrace to the black race,” John tittered, “You're a disgrace to the
human
race.” When some men in a diner noticed him sitting there dressed in drag and began commenting aloud on whether or not he was a female, he opened his shirt and, flashing a hormone-induced breast, giggled, “This ain't real?” His humor was insistent, inescapable, and his manner outgoing and forceful. “He just had this
way
about him,” was how Robyn Arnold put it. “He was the kind of person who could get you to do anything he wanted, even if you didn't want to do it. If you were tired after work and wanted to stay at home and he wanted to go out and have a good time, somehow before you knew it you'd be getting dressed and ready for an evening out.”

John's personality had a negative side, however. Like many transsexuals, he seems to have had the psychiatric disorder once known as hysteria and today called histrionic-personality disorder, a disturbance marked by highly emotional, demanding, and impulsive behavior. In an article in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, the psychiatrist Paul Chodoff vividly described the histrionic personality as “attention-seeking and sexually seductive,” noting, however, that hysterical seductiveness “has a superficial quality and is not, in fact, intensely erotic.” Further, he explained, hysterics have a poor grasp on reality. Not only do they act as if they were always onstage, but “they may become so carried away by their performances that they have difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from reality.” In addition, they have “strong and often unbridled dependency needs” that manifest themselves in clinging and demanding relationships with other people.

Chodoff might have been describing John Delia. He was always onstage, always calling attention to himself. Performing in drag before his sex change operation, he'd wear nothing beneath his dresses and, sitting, would cross and uncross his legs to display his genitals. After the operation, he would invite anyone who cared to look to examine his bandages and, once they were removed, his new biology.

He was wildly possessive. Robyn Arnold told me, “If we were in a bar and some other guys started talking to me, he'd storm through three rooms to pull me away from them.”

Above all, he was fond of scenes. He'd fly into rages. He'd get into street brawls. And he'd threaten suicide. “Delia was always making these theatrics all the time,” said Dominick Giorgio, a male nurse who knew Delia as both John and Diane and was a key witness at the murder trial. “She was always threatening to slash her wrists. Or to kill herself some other way. One time she jumped off a third-story terrace. Naturally, she didn't get hurt. You just knew she'd planned it out, because she managed to land right in the middle of the bushes under the terrace.”

John's hysterical nature became most apparent, however, in his efforts to settle on a sexual identity, a matter that for most of us is a given. He hurtled between identities the way a trapeze artist flies between bars, hoping that in grasping hold, the void would be transcended. But somehow John's reach kept exceeding his grasp.

By the time he was twenty-one, he was an avowed homosexual. He'd had affairs with a number of men, among them Robert Ferrara, a bartender he'd met at the Playroom. But it was around that time that he began to feel, as transsexuals always always say they feel, that he was not just a man who enjoyed having sex with other men but that—somewhere deep inside—he was a woman. He began seeing a psychiatrist, to whom he disclosed his intention of becoming a woman anatomically by having a sex change operation. He also started taking the hormone shots that gave him breasts. And he decided to get some plastic surgery so that he would appear more delicate. He'd had a couple of operations already, one to exaggerate his cheekbones, another to reduce his Adam's apple. Now he determined to get himself a pretty nose.

He seemed set on his course to become female until, when he was twenty-two, he met Robyn Arnold, after which, suddenly, his sexual focus changed. He began courting Robyn, who was the prototype of a suburban princess. The daughter of an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, she had been given sixteen years of ballet lessons, a Cadillac with the license plate
ROBYN-1,
and an $80,000 inheritance from her grandfather, a pediatrician. She found Delia intriguing. “I'd never met anyone quite like him,” she said later.

John stopped taking hormone shots and began lifting weights, hoping it would discourage his blossoming breasts. And the two became lovers.

Within weeks after they met, John and Robyn were an established couple. Bruno, John's father, and Patricia, his stepmother, were amazed but delighted. On Valentine's Day 1980, they invited the young couple to have dinner with them, and they beamed when they heard that John had presented Robyn with a pair of sapphire earrings.

By early spring, the families of the young lovers were getting acquainted. Robyn's parents invited Bruno and Patricia Delia to join the big gathering of Arnold cousins, aunts, and uncles at their Passover celebration. The mingling went well and when, at the dinner, Bruno said his construction company was becoming prosperous and would soon be putting up an elegant condominium, Robyn's parents discussed investing some of their daughter's money in the project.

Later that spring, Robyn went to California with John. Although he was by this time something of a celebrity at the Westchester nightclubs and had even begun to be invited to perform at some major league Manhattan discos, he had made up his mind that he wanted something bigger and better for himself than the life of an entertainer. He wanted to be a famous model or, better yet, a movie star.

On the West Coast, he tried to land a movie role, but he had no luck. Indeed, the only job he could find was as a market researcher. Robyn may have felt disillusioned with him, for she returned to New York. Yet their affair wasn't over, for John came home soon afterward, saw Robyn, and announced to his parents and everyone else who would listen that he and Robyn were going to get married.

The Arnolds took the news badly. It was one thing to socialize with the Delias, altogether another to envision their daughter marrying John. They called Bruno Delia and demanded that he discourage the match. But to Bruno it looked as if his mixed-up son had finally straightened out. He didn't try to talk him out of marrying Robyn; instead, he and his wife made plans to take John and his sweetheart to their country club.

Unknown to the Delias, however, their erratic son had by then once again begun changing his mind about his sexuality. His urge to become a woman had returned. He discussed the problem with Robyn, and she agreed that if he wanted a sex change operation he ought to have it. At last, in November 1980, at the age of twenty-three, John flew to Trinidad, Colorado, where he underwent an operation called a penile inversion.

Dr. Stanley Biber performed the intricate surgery. He removed John's penis and testicles and, creating a cavity precisely where a woman would have a vagina, used John's penile skin to line it and his glans penis to give it a cervix. He made a set of inner and outer vaginal lips out of John's scrotal skin and a clitoris out of penile erectile tissue.

The operation cost John about $5,000. It took two and a half hours.

She—for now it is necessary to change the personal pronoun—telephoned Robyn after the surgery, complaining about being in pain and feeling disoriented. And she told her drag queen friends that she simply couldn't get used to the unfortunate way in which women urinated. But taking the name Diane, after her favorite subject of impersonation, she soon cheerfully began trying to exist as a woman.

She had some luck in this. She went off to Canada, and got a job as hostess in a Montreal nightclub. Prospering, she frequently came back to New York to see her friends, and when she did, they noticed that she often arrived with a great deal of cocaine. Then, not long after the operation, she won her first—and only—modeling assignment, a catalogue shot for Avon Products. In a photograph that was eventually to become famous—after her murder, it was splashed across tabloids throughout the United States—Diane posed awkwardly in a nylon bathrobe. “Wrap yourself in luxury,” read the copy. “Totally irresistible …” (The ad caused Avon vast embarrassment, but it brought Diane, albeit after her death, the kind of recognition she had longed for.)

Her career was under way. But if the operation had made it possible for her to start making a living as a female, it had not in any way made it easier for her to feel more comfortable about herself or put an end to her attention-seeking and seductive behavior. Indeed, now more than ever she seemed to need the sexual validation craved by the histrionic personality, a validation that is most often sought in the indiscriminate seduction of others. Abandoning Canada, Diane came back to live in New York and began testing her newfound femininity by picking up strangers. One night, she flirted with an executive she'd met at a midtown bar; the conversation went well, and after a while he took her back to his room at the fashionable Helmsley Palace Hotel and they made love. Afterward, while the executive was in the shower, Diane quietly dialed Robyn and, whispering, boasted to her about the exploit.

But her tests of her sexuality weren't always so successful. On another night she picked up a man who asked her, right in the midst of their lovemaking, whether she'd ever been a man. Reluctantly, she told him yes. Abruptly, he got out of bed, got dressed, and left. Diane remained behind, weeping.

Perhaps it was as a result of such rejections that Diane first began considering getting married. Perhaps marriage seemed like a haven to her. Or perhaps she merely longed to be wedded just for the attention and notoriety the ceremony would bring her. Regardless, in the summer of 1981 she persuaded her old boyfriend Robert Ferrara that he ought to become her husband, and in August, the two drove out to Robert's hometown, Berwick, Pennsylvania, population 12,350, and applied for a marriage license.

The county clerk thought them a beautiful couple—the prospective groom a “handsome Berwick boy,” the blush-painted bride “stacked” and wearing “one of these look-see dresses.” He gave them their application, then directed them to get their blood tests and return after the four days the law required.

On Sunday night, they came back to Berwick and told Robert's parents they intended to wed. The Ferraras tried to talk them out of it. They knew Diane's sexual background. “For hours, we sat around the kitchen table and talked and talked,” Robert's mother told me. “There was no arguing. No yelling. Just a lengthy exchange of deep talk.” But Diane and Robert wouldn't change their minds, so at last the Ferraras felt they had no choice but to accept the arrangement.

Still, there was some trouble. When Diane and Robert went to pick up their marriage license the next day, the county clerk at first refused to give it to them. A neighbor of the Ferraras, having learned of the proposed marriage, had told him, “That's a boy marrying a boy.” The clerk had alerted the sheriff and the deputy sheriff, who were standing by. But Delia's operation had entitled her to become a woman legally as well as structurally. She had brought proof of the operation in the form of an affidavit signed by Dr. Biber; she even had a new birth certificate, with John's date of birth but her female name of Diane. The clerk succumbed to the evidence and handed the couple their license.

After that, it was roses all the way. The couple proceeded to the town's justice of the peace. Robert's parents and a brother went along. And Robert and Diane swiftly became man and wife.

The groom seemed to be like the “usual groom,” the justice of the peace later commented, and there was nothing especially unusual about the bride, either. In fact, the only thing that struck him as out of the ordinary was that the groom's father had seemed “relieved.” He'd paid the justice's $10 fee out of his own pocket, remarking that it was the best investment he'd ever made in his life.

The union had Robyn Arnold's blessing. She paid for the ring, a $1,400 cluster of three gold bands ornamented with seven diamonds.

For Diane, it was a storybook beginning to yet another new life. But this life ran no more smoothly than the others she had tried. Soon, she and her bridegroom were quarreling. He was turned off by her new sex. Yet she, more than ever, needed sexual approval, so just as in her single days, she went on having affairs. And just as in her single days, the affairs didn't always make her happy. One night, she tried to have intercourse with a friend from Zipperz, an auto parts salesman named Bobby Vasquez, but he kept thinking, he would eventually explain, that “she'd been a man,” and he couldn't go through with it. The incident made Diane intensely anxious.

With her characteristic impulsiveness, Diane finally decided her unhappiness was somehow being caused by her marriage and that she had best move out of her home with Robert in Yonkers and once again make her life with Robyn Arnold. Thus, on October 4, 1981, Vasquez, as well as a Zipperz DJ named Tony Poveromo and a hair stylist named Laura Schultz, helped Diane move her belongings from the shabby nuptial nest she had shared with Robert to Robyn Arnold's chic Riverdale apartment.

The move set off two days of partying. First, Robyn welcomed the movers enthusiastically and then, upon being invited to join the group, decided to change her clothes and go out with them. She slipped out of her jeans and, according to Vasquez, who was just carrying in a heavy armload of Diane's wigs and gowns, pointed at her private parts and said invitingly, “Mine are real. Not like Delia's.” Then they all went off to a diner for coffee, where they chattered and tittered and came on to one another. Robyn squeezed one of Vasquez's thighs under the table while Diane squeezed the other, and everyone got on famously.