Tales Of A Living Legend

The Hamptons is teeming with legends—famous and infamous, some looming large and others living relatively quiet lives.

Annselm Morpurgo is one of Sag Harbor’s living legends. She has earned that status for two reasons: one is high profile but low significance, the other, just the opposite.

Many local people know Ms. Morpurgo as one of two sisters who owned the enormous Victorian home next to the John Jermain Memorial Library on Main Street. That ramshackle property has been twice auctioned (in what amounted to street theater on the steps of Sag Harbor Town Hall) and sold in 2008, though Ms. Morpurgo fought to vacate the $1.5 million sale and brought a civil rights suit for $100 million against 20 members of the village—including several high-ranking officials and her sister, Helga—claiming that the house is an historic militia lodge and should be returned to her.

What many people don’t know about Ms. Morpurgo are the intriguing, jaw-dropping details of her storied past, now revealed in her newly published book, “Odd Girl Revisited, An Autobiographical Correlate.” The volume contains accounts of her Swedish-born artist mother, Vilna Jorgen, who had sittings with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler; her Italian-Jewish physician father Baron Attilio Giacomo Morpurgo, who was recruited by Enrico Fermi to participate in the Manhattan Project but rejected as a security risk; and her sister, Helga, who was sponsored into the United States by Lillian Hellman.

In the book, Ms. Morpurgo writes of her own early life as a poet/playwright/actress and the creative director of the experimental Cafe Theatre, who earned a master’s in philosophy from the City University of New York and wrote for ad agencies and magazines as varied as Science & Mechanics and Esquire.

But Ms. Morpurgo has yet another legacy: she was an outspoken, early advocate of the gay rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Under the alias Artemis Smith she published three of the earliest gay pulp fiction novels through Beacon Press: “This Bed We Made,” “The Third Sex” and “Odd Girl.” By the early 1970s, the books became part of women’s studies curricula and set Ms. Morpurgo on a college lecture circuit that included Princeton University and Amherst College.

“Odd Girl Revisited” is two books in one—an autobiographical section of the first 20 years of Ms. Morpugo’s life, followed by the novel “Odd Girl.” At a recent interview at Provisions in Sag Harbor, she discussed her reason for reissuing the book some 50 years after its initial publication date.

“I was recently contacted by a nephew on my father’s side who’s very active in the gay movement,” she said. “I realized the need to preserve what I know from that time.”

A goal of that effort was to present the original manuscript, prior to Beacon’s editing.

“I used my crumbling copy of the Beacon edition as a guide, and reconstructed the changes I remember making during multiple versions submitted and rejected,” Ms. Morpurgo said.

Beacon’s changes started on the cover, the author recalled. She said that her title, “Anne Loves Beth,” was changed to “Odd Girl.” The sensationalist, over-the-top marketing copy, “She fought ... She struggled ... She even married a man! ...” was emblazoned under an illustration of two pin-up girls in lingerie.

“These books were made to appeal to men and mostly written by men using female pen names,” said Ms. Morpurgo. “As long as the covers said ‘This is terrible, this is wanton,’ as long as it was deprecating of homosexuality you could write whatever you wanted.”

But in 1954 the 20-year-old author wasn’t so accepting, even though she eventually went along with the publisher’s changes.

“It enraged me,” she said matter-of-factly in her light, girlish voice. “But this is how publishers had to promote the book to keep the censors away. I could live with that, knowing it was the only way to get the message out.”

“My partner, Billie Taulman, and I realized that this was the only mass-market venue available,” she continued. “That was important, particularly with ‘The Third Sex,’ which was a documentary of gay life created for a specific activist purpose.”

While most pulp fiction was dismissed by the literary community and thus lightly censored, gay novels of the genre had stricter guidelines. Endings had to be tragic. Gay characters couldn’t end up happy and they had to eventually turn straight. Somehow, editors missed those points in “Anne Loves Beth,” which Ms. Morpurgo described with a chuckle, as “Nancy Drew on steroids.”

“It showed you could have a happy life. By the time anybody realized it had a happy ending it had already sold a few million,” she said.

The autobiographical section of the new book includes work by a 16-year-old Ms. Morpurgo called “How To Be a Successful Prostitute.” This piece was presented and dedicated to “The faculty of Forest Hills High School upon their adoption of McCarthyism.”

The edgy graphic novel, “How To Be A Successful Prostitute,” best described as performance art in print, reveals an outrageously creative mind and razor-sharp sense of humor so apparent in the author’s work and public antics today.

In 1950, the faculty’s response to “Prostitute” was startling.

“The vice-principal told me she would arrange a full scholarship for me to go to Bennington, but I panicked and refused,” said Ms. Morpurgo.” She added, with that knowing, self-effacing laugh, “I told her I didn’t want to become a lesbian.”

Artemis Smith’s “Odd Girl Revisited, An Autobiographical Correlate” is available on Amazon and at Artemissmith.com.