Mary in the Lavender Pumps: A True Story about Love, Murder and Gender Identity (The Stacks Reader Series)

By Joyce Wadler

John Delia wore evening gowns. John Delia had an operation. John Delia became Diane Delia. Diane Delia was murdered. Delia’s boyfriend was accused of the crime. Delia's girlfriend was accused, too. One went to jail, the other didn’t.

Including an interview with the author by imprint editor Alex Belth.

About The Stacks Reader Series:
The Stacks Reader Series highlights classic literary non-fiction and short fiction by great journalists that would otherwise be lost to history—a living archive of memorable storytelling by notable authors. Brought to you by The Sager Group with support from NeoText.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Nov 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781950154982

Joyce Wadler

Joyce Wadler is a New York City humorist and journalist who created and wrote the “I Was Misinformed” humor column for The New York Times, where she was a staff reporter for 15 years. Before going to the Times Ms. Wadler was a feature writer and crime reporter for newspapers and magazines, as well as an author and screenwriter. She was the New York correspondent for The Washington Post, a contributing editor for New York and Rolling Stone, a staff writer at People and The Daily News Magazine, and a reporter at Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post. Her books include My Breast, her memoir about breast cancer, which she later adapted as a CBS television movie, and Liaison, the story of the French civil servant and the Chinese opera singer which inspired the play M. Butterfly.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

"Over the years, Wadler’s reputation as an unapologetic, exacting stylist—the best kind of pain in the ass—flourished into legend."

Some people are born writers, that’s how Joyce Wadler sees it—certainly about herself.

Growing up in the upper Catskills, Wadler read her uncle’s Mickey Spillane paperback novels before she was ten, and James Baldwin by the time she was thirteen. She edited her high school newspaper and studied journalism at New York University, but Wadler’s interest in the world around her was evident from early childhood. The world amused her. And Wadler possess the rarest of gifts—for a journalist or any other kind of writer—she’s naturally funny on the page. Unforced, no-mistake-about-it funny.

Turns out she’s no slouch as a reporter, either. Wadler’s professional career took her from the New York Post—in the midseventies, when it was still a left-wing tabloid—to the venerated Style section at the Washington Post (where she’d also serve as New York correspondent). Later she would land at the New York Times, where Wadler’s reputation as an unapologetic, exacting stylist—the best kind of pain in the ass—flourished into legend.

In addition to writing the definitive book about the M. Butterfly spy case—a convoluted tale that, in Wadler’s sure hands, not only makes sense but feels authentically tragic—and My Breast, a frank, intimate and often hilarious memoir about her bout with breast cancer, Wadler freelanced for various magazines including New York and Rolling Stone. That’s where she wrote her longest true crime pieces, including the batshit crazy story of John Delia, told with page-turning efficiency and low-key authority.

Wadler’s wry, observant prose provides a welcome balance to the unsettling series of details in this messy tale. Wadler found reporting true crime stories such as the Delia case physically exhausting, but as a reporter she knew a good story was hard to resist.

—Alex Belth

Alex Belth: You’re from upstate New York, right?

Joyce Wadler: I grew up in the 1950s near Fleischmanns, New York, a dying tourist town in the Catskills. Fleischmanns peaked as a Jewish tourist town in the 1920s. There were a lot of grand hotels, estates, and boarding houses. My parents had a boarding house/farm that was almost a hotel; there was a pool, there was a dining hall, there were outbuildings, there was also a barn with chickens and cows. Our neighbors in the winter were local farmers who had lived in the area for generations. There were only a few Jewish families that lived there year-round. In the summer, we got a lot of New York City people. So, part of my childhood was a Norman Rockwell painting with the farmer in overalls speaking at the Grange Hall meeting and the other part was know-it-all New York City kids. I was not allowed to date guys who were not Jewish so I’d have to wait until the summer when I could go out with the busboys and waiters, the Jewish guys who came up to work at the hotels.

Even though I was upstate, I was very aware of the smart kid New York City schools: the High School of Music and Art, Bronx Science, CCNY, the Little Red Schoolhouse. I was very aware of Greenwich Village. I was focused on the Village. If you were an upstate Jew, New York City was the mother ship. We didn’t have many relatives we were in touch with in New York, but I do remember visiting a dying great aunt in a dark, depressing apartment in the Bronx. My mother said, "This is the Bronx. This is where the poor people live. If we lived in New York, this is where we’d live here. My mother could capsulize entire cities: In New York, when the wind blows, a New York woman holds onto her hat and not her skirt. The flag outside Ohrbach’s—a department store that no longer exists—flies higher than the flag of the United States, which flew beside it. Totally wrong, but she didn’t care. My mother was funny—brutal" is maybe the more accurate word, but still funny. My father was funny when he was out of the house. I’m told.

AB: Were you a big reader?

JW: Yes. I think that had a lot to do with the availability of paperback books. I didn’t understand what I was reading, but I read all the time. By eight or nine I was reading my uncle’s Mickey Spillane novels. I was thirteen or fourteen when I read Henry Miller and James Baldwin.

AB: When does writing come into it for you?

JW: I think you are born with this stuff—I just knew I was a writer. My role model was Brenda Starr, Reporter, in the Daily News comics. If she had been Brenda Starr, Screenwriter, I’d be sitting in a much bigger apartment. I know that there were things that I thought were funny from the time I was little. At the boarding house, we had a cousin from the city who wanted to be a recreation director at a hotel. He was giving cha-cha lessons on the front porch. You could hear it over the PA system, One-two, cha-cha-cha, echoing around the mountains. I thought it was hysterical. I still don’t know if I can explain why it was so funny, but it was. We had these working class, middle-aged Jews who were delighted to be in