Suits Me

"Suits Me" is the biography of a now notorious jazz musician named Billy Tipton, who grew up as Dorothy Tipton in Oklahoma City and Kansas City but lived as a man from the time she was nineteen until she died at age seventy-four. Billy Tipton's death in Spokane, Washington, made news all over the world, not because he was celebrated as a musician but because the scale of his deception - he had been "married" to five women and had reared several adopted children - and the scarcity of ready explanations endowed the skimpy available facts with the aura of myth. But locked away in Billy's office closet lay files of clippings and photographs documenting the transformation of Billy from she to he, as well as a legacy of annotated comic routines, musical arrangements, and program notes. These revealed to Diane Wood Middlebrook how Billy scattered clues and riddles night after night about the drag she wore. These hints were so bold that they helped conceal Billy's secrets.