http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,799319,00.html

Move over, Darwin

'I used to drive to a town 40-50 miles away. In a quiet
spot, I would stop, put my wig and high-heeled shoes
on, make up and generally make myself presentable. Then
I would drive to town as a lady from the shire on a
shopping trip'

Francis Wheen
Saturday September 28, 2002
The Guardian

In 1971, the writer Colin Wilson received a 521-page
typescript through the post. Since making his name in
1956 with The Outsider - a philosophical bestseller -
Wilson had written more than two dozen books on sex,
crime, philosophy and the occult. Surely he would see
the point. In an accompanying letter, Charlotte Bach
PhD explained that her text - Homo Mutans, Homo
Luminens - was merely the "prolegomenon" to a projected
work of about 3,000 pages which would demonstrate
beyond doubt that sexual deviation was the mainspring
of evolution.
Wilson felt daunted by its length, its difficulty and,
not least, by the fact that Dr Bach used an all-capital
typewriter on orange paper. He glanced at the first 50
pages, groaned and set it aside. A few weeks later,
confined to bed with flu, he tried again. "It was hard
going," he recalled, "but my real misgiving was that
she was just an absurdly conceited female. She
dismissed everyone she disagreed with - Monod, Russell,
Desmond Morris - with a lofty contempt... Yet as I
persisted, this unpleasant first impression was
outweighed by a sense of tremendous intelligence and an
impressive grasp of European cultural history. Whether
or not the theory was correct, there could be no doubt
that she possessed a powerful and original mind."

He wrote and told her so. "I feel rather as some of the
critics of my Outsider professed to feel - startled
that anyone can have built such a huge edifice so
quietly, without help. Even more astonishing, if you
don't mind me saying so, because it comes from a woman,
who are seldom notable for great Hegelian
constructions... I think it could well be Nobel Prize
stuff . . . If you are right, then it could be as
important as the theory of relativity." In reply, Dr
Bach told Wilson that she had wept for joy on reading
his comments. She signed herself, "Love, Charlotte".

Who was Bach? On one of his visits to London, Wilson
invited her to dinner. He encountered a
broad-shouldered mammoth of a woman, about 6ft tall,
with a deep masculine voice and a heavy central
European accent. Afterwards, Wilson took her back to
the flat of the painter Regis de Bouvier de Cachard,
where he was staying. Over several more drinks, the two
men began to learn something of her history.

Charlotte had lectured in psychology at Budapest
University, where her husband was a professor; they had
been driven out by the communists in 1948. In 1965, her
husband had died on the operating table, and only two
weeks later her son was killed in a car crash. ("At
this point she burst into tears," Wilson wrote, "and it
took a good 10 minutes to soothe her.") The shock of
this double bereavement had plunged her into depression
and, in an attempt to fight it off, she began compiling
a dictionary of psychology. While researching the
section on perversions, she interviewed many people
with unorthodox sexual tastes. And then came the Eureka
moment: it dawned on her that perversion was the engine
of human evolution.

About two in the morning, Charlotte departed in a taxi,
paid for by Colin Wilson. "I gave her a kiss, and she
also kissed Regis. And when we got back indoors, he
said: 'You know, when she kissed me, she stuck her
tongue halfway down my throat.' We laughed about it. My
own conclusion had been that Charlotte was probably
lesbian, but this seemed to disprove it. It was only
after her death that I realised that this was what she
intended me to think."

In the spring of 1972, Charlotte began giving weekly
talks at a friend's flat in Belsize Park, which she
advertised in the Observer and the New Statesman. About
a dozen people turned up most weeks. They were expected
to pay a "voluntary contribution" of 50p, which
disconcerted some visitors, since Dr Bach was so
obviously an aristocrat. Hardly anyone realised that
she was probably the poorest person in the room.

Charlotte's penury, though a nuisance, did not trouble
her unduly. What preoccupied her was a craving for
recognition. Introducing herself as the leader of a new
intellectual movement, she wrote to journalists and
television presenters - Katherine Whitehorn, David
Attenborough, the chat-show host Simon Dee - proposing
that they alert the world to her discoveries. All
thanked her politely, but declined. She was too odd for
most academics to accept her; too digressive and too
damned difficult for the general public, even had they
been able to get their hands on her magnum opus. And so
she remained a cult figure, revered by a few devotees,
but otherwise ignored.

By the spring of 1981, the once majestic figure had
shrunk to a frail, weary old lady who often complained
of "having the shits" - brought on, she assumed, by
food poisoning. Don Smith, a gay sadomasochist with
whom she was collaborating on a book called Sex, Sin
And Evolution, found her jaundiced and exhausted when
he came to call on June 10. He alerted another of the
inner circle, Dr Mike Roth. When Roth visited the flat
the next day, he was forced to shout through the
letterbox. "Go away," Charlotte commanded. "I want to
die."

On Wednesday June 17, noticing that she hadn't taken in
her milk since the weekend, one of Charlotte's
neighbours called the police. A constable climbed
through a window and discovered a body lying across the
bed. On the bedside table was a medical dictionary open
at the page dealing with cancer of the liver. A
postmortem concluded that this was indeed the cause of
death, but also discovered something rather more
startling. When the corpse was undressed in the
mortuary, the ample breasts proved to be foam rubber,
and the removal of her knickers exposed a penis.

Karoly Hajdu, the child who became Charlotte Bach,
entered the world on February 9 1920. His birthplace
was a small, plain, one-storey dwelling in Kispest, a
working-class town near Budapest. His father, Mihaly
Hajdu (pronounced hoy-doo), worked as a tailor; his
mother, Roza Frits, was a coalminer's daughter. In
1923, Mihaly moved the family to Budapest, renting a
small tailoring shop on Raday Street. They were still
poor, all living in one little room upstairs. Mihaly's
customers, by contrast, included many rich and cultured
gents, whose amplitude of knowledge and experience made
a profound impression on young Karoly.

Karoly started his elementary education in 1926 and
progressed four years later to the Andras Fay
Gimnazium, the Hungarian equivalent of a grammar
school. He was an insatiable autodidact. "When I was 11
years old, I read a six-volume history of the world -
2,300 pages. At 12, I read Freud's Introduction To
Psychoanalysis and The Interpretation Of Dreams. At 15,
I read Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason. Mind you, I'm
not pretending that I understood most of it; it's just
that the Boy's Own type of reading did not appeal to
me. I gave up reading novels at the age of 10." With
such precocious interests, it is no surprise that
Karoly had few friends of his own age: he was regarded
as a very odd boy indeed.

"Up to about 14, my best friend was my sister," Karoly
Hajdu said. "After that, my brother." At the age of 15,
he was transferred to the Bolyai Technical High School.
It was also at 15 that he lost his virginity to a
prostitute. His most resonant and abiding memory of
this otherwise unsatisfactory encounter was the sight
of the woman putting on her silk stockings afterwards,
as she dressed for her job as a barmaid.

In one of her manuscripts, Charlotte Bach reflected on
the interior life of the cross-dresser. "Most
transvestites mention, mostly with some pride, fairly
long periods in their childhood, usually between the
ages of six and 11, when they behaved as ordinary boys
with no more than a minor predilection for girls' games
and dressing up, though, unlike most boys, they always
enjoyed girls' company. Then, usually about the age of
10 or 12, they come face to face with the larger
realities of the external world." The boy has
disappointed his parents, and is resigned to his
inadequacy. Ambition wilts. He senses that if he were a
girl, he would be loved more. "Then he comes across
something soft and silky. This is something that has
never left him. From early childhood, when his mother
was in a not-so-close mood, he found solace in a soft,
silky pillow or something soft and silky that belonged
to his mother."

Karoly Hajdu dropped out of school. Nor was he in any
hurry to find a job. When his call-up papers arrived,
after Hungary declared war on Russia in June 1941,
Karoly somehow managed to obtain a "student exemption"
for a year. Yet he was not entirely idle. At an early
age, from observing customers in his father's shop,
Karoly had realised that there were plenty of wealthy
people who could be parted from their money. The trick
was to meet them. In October 1942 he forged a birth
certificate on which he renamed himself Karoly Mihaly
Balazs Agoston Hajdu, son of the Baron of Szadelo and
Balkany. He had cards printed with the baronial title,
and acquired a cigarette case embellished with a coat
of arms and the letters "SB".

In 1943, German soldiers became a common sight in
Budapest. The Hungarians had installed a
collaborationist regime, but suffered what amounted to
an occupation by the Nazis anyway. Jews were rounded up
and sent to the death camps. Some of Karoly's relations
suspect that he may have been looting abandoned houses.
He certainly seemed remarkably prosperous, and said
that he was "helping Jews".

After the war, Karoly enrolled in the economics
department of the Technical University in Budapest, but
after the end of the first half-year semester, he seems
to have given up attending classes altogether.

His sister Vilma, who had been employed during the war
by the electrical manufacturer AEG, left Hungary to
start a new life in Venezuela when she heard that the
communists were rounding up anyone who had worked for
German firms. Karoly decided that he, too, must escape.
On April 22 1948, after a long train journey across
Europe, he boarded a boat to Harwich.

Britain had plentiful opportunities, and he felt well
equipped to seize them. He was tall, good- looking and
smartly dressed. Unlike most of his fellow passengers,
he spoke English. Britain still had an aristocracy:
perhaps he could find a niche there. In the course of
the journey he had anglicised his name to Carl and
started working up the fiction that he had been a
university lecturer.

Carl's friend from Budapest, Joe Marfy, reached England
a few months after him and was despatched to the
Staveley iron and steelworks in Yorkshire. One cold
winter's morning, the foreman told Marfy that an
important person wished to see him in the general
manager's office. It was Hajdu, impeccably attired in a
tweed coat and velour hat. He winked, and murmured in
Hungarian: "Call me Baron." Once they had been left
alone, Carl explained that a title would enable him to
succeed, adding that it had already given him an entrée
to "good social circles".

The flood of refugees into Britain ceased in April
1950, and with it Carl's duties as an interpreter at
the Ministry of Labour office in Harwich. He found a
job as receptionist and book-keeper at the Valley Of
The Rocks Hotel in Lynton, North Devon, and then
temporary work as a general assistant at the British
Council in London.

Two years later, at the end of 1950, his incipient
transvestite feelings surfaced - prompted, it seems, by
depression, or even desperation. He was living in a
boarding house in Earls Court, but after finishing at
the British Council he had no job and no prospect of
one. One day a friend left a suitcase of his wife's
dresses and underwear with Hajdu for safe keeping. Carl
tried them all on. The next morning, disgusted with
himself, he asked the friend to remove the case.

It was in Brighton, working at the Hotel Metropole,
that he met his future wife, Phyllis, a divorcee who
dreamed of becoming an actress. He returned to London
and found a job as a barman at the Pigalle, a famous
nightspot in Piccadilly, and Phyllis followed
dutifully, installing herself in a flat in North
Finchley. Her seven-year-old son, Peter, who had been
staying with an aunt, moved back with his mother.

Short and plump, certainly no great beauty, Phyllis
nevertheless dressed with theatrical panache. As a
connoisseur of women's clothing, Carl admired her
style. "When I married her, I was sure all my
transvestism was over," he recalled, "yet for some
inexplicable reason I didn't throw my things away, but
put them into storage. For five years I paid
half-a-crown a week for the contents of a couple of
suitcases which I had no intention of using."

Phyllis's brisk efficiency appealed to him, too. It was
she who came up with the idea of starting an
accommodation agency. Three months after the wedding,
from a small office over a restaurant in Paddington,
the K Bureau opened for business. Adverts for the
bureau in the local paper offered rooms where "children
and coloured people" were welcome. Had Carl been
offering a fair deal, this inclusiveness would have
been exemplary. But honesty was never his policy. This
was the era of Rachmanesque landlords, and Carl was
happy to capitalise on the plight of the homeless.

The nemesis of Baron Carl Hajdu can be dated to January
13 1957, from the moment the Sunday Pictorial reached
the news stands. Alongside a photograph of a dapper,
mustachioed character (captioned merely "The Baron"),
it carried the following story by Comer Clarke:

A flat-finding agent who claims to be a baron admitted
last night: "I have collected £2,000 for Hungarian
relief, BUT - I am afraid I am going to have some
difficulty in showing in the balance how it was spent."
Pale, blue-eyed, Hungarian-born "Baron" Carl Hajdu, 37
- it is a Hungarian title, he says - runs the Apartment
Lessors' Association, of Edgware Road, Paddington,
London. When the Hungarians rose against the Reds last
November, he organised the Hungarian Freedom Fighters'
Assistance Committee. In two days he raised £2,000 to
send a contingent of English "freedom fighters" to help
the Hungarians. Scores of eager young men volunteered.
But no "freedom fighters" went to Hungary . . .

In the spring of 1957 Carl and Phyllis were evicted
from their Chelsea house for non-payment of rent. In
October he was declared bankrupt.

How did Carl deal with this humiliation? Michael
Karoly, another of Carl's personae, provides the
answer. In his book Hypnosis, published in 1961, Karoly
wrote of the liberation experienced by a transvestite
(or "eonist", named after the cross-dressing Chevalier
D'Eon) when he shrugs off man's attire: "He even thinks
of himself as a woman, and in fact assumes another
personality... This complete change of mental viewpoint
creates a door through which the eonist can step into a
nicer, more refined life, where his own feelings of
inadequacy, originating in his lack of sexual vigour,
are left behind with his manly personality. When he is
a man he is, unlike the homosexual, masculine with all
his manly virtues and shortcomings. When he is a woman
he is the woman of his ideals, free of the grime of
everyday life."

During the crises of that year, Carl turned up at the
Harley Street consulting room of the Canadian
hynotherapist WG Warne-Beresford, complaining of
"nervous problems". Carl Hajdu's aspirations had been
comprehensively thwarted. Very well then: he would find
new aspirations - and "another personality" which could
embody them. Having approached Warne-Beresford as a
patient, he soon enrolled as one of the
hypnotherapist's pupils under the name of Michael B
Karoly.

Michael B Karoly was a far more dashing character than
Carl Hajdu, with a taste for pork-pie hats, dark
glasses and fast cars. To qualify for membership of
Warne-Beresford's organisation, the British Society of
Hypnotherapists, trainees had to study for a year and
then sit an exam in "anatomy, physiology, biology,
neurology and practical hypnotherapy". The results of
Michael's class can be found in the Times of September
5 1958; his name is not among the successful
candidates, but this didn't deter him from using the
initials MBSH and touting for business.

Few of his clients are now traceable. Only one is
certain that he was successfully hypnotised: Michael
performed the party trick of making the man lie across
three chairs and then removing the middle one. But all
felt that their money - £5 a session - had been well
spent. No one would have paid for the psychological
insights of an unsuccessful flat-agent from Paddington,
but after acquiring an arsenal of bogus qualifications
- "Michael B Karoly, ScSc (Budapest), D Psy, CPE
(Cantab), MBSH", his writing paper now boasted - he
suddenly found himself in demand as a man with
something to say.

After meeting Michael at a party in the autumn of 1960,
the literary agent Peter Tauber recommended him to the
features editor of Today, a weekly general-interest
magazine, and by the following January he was a regular
contributor - billed as "Today's psychological expert".
He seemed able to turn his hand to anything: "My Frank
Advice To Eva" (the divorce of Eva Bartok), "Should Big
Girls Be Spanked?" (disciplining teenage daughters),
"Is This Man A Brute?" (baby-battering fathers) and
"Why Oh Why Do I Steal?" (shoplifting).

Later that year, Michael started renting a small flat
at 23 Hertford Street, London W1, in the shadow of the
newly built Hilton Hotel. Intended only as a consulting
room, whose Mayfair address might impress prospective
clients, the flat soon became a more permanent refuge
where he could escape from Phyllis's chiding and
indulge his fantasies. The following story turns up in
one of Michael's "case histories":

I used to keep my gear [ie, women's clothes] in the
office and sometimes, after a hard week, I would go in
over the weekend pretending to do some urgent work. I
would dress up and just lounge around for a few hours.
It is impossible to describe the effect it had on me. A
week's Mediterranean cruise or a month of golfing at St
Andrews isn't a patch on it.

Once I had a rather bad year. Nothing seemed to go
right. Bills were piling up and money wasn't coming in.
That's when I went out for the first few times. I used
to get dressed in the office, put my shirt, tie, jacket
and trousers on top, dash to the car and drive to a
town 40-50 miles away. In a quiet spot I would stop,
take off the top clothes, put my wig and high-heeled
shoes on, make up and generally make myself
presentable. Then I would drive into the town as a lady
from the shire on a shopping trip...

The "client" is eventually arrested when a passer-by
guesses his secret and complains to the police. One
would be tempted to dismiss this as another Karoly
fiction, were it not for a news item that appeared in
the Hertfordshire Mercury on April 26 1963:

A man dressed completely in female clothing walked into
a Hertford hotel on Good Friday, and was later arrested
as he drove - still dressed as a woman - to Knebworth,
it was stated at Hertford court on Thursday of last
week...

Karoly was 43 and alone in the world: his second
adolescence had been sabotaged by the onset of a
midlife crisis. He had once again been exposed in a
Sunday newspaper, this time for a spurious therapy
group he weas running, Divorcees Anonymous; he was
parted from his wife, and Siobhan, a much younger woman
with whom he had a brief, passionate affair, had left
him. Shortly afterwards, his wife Phyllis died. And
within a few weeks, her son Peter would also be dead,
in a car crash.

Michael shut himself away from the world in Phyllis's
flat - waking at three in the afternoon, watching
television continuously until closedown, then returning
to bed and reading trashy novels, works of philosophy
or whatever else he could lay his hands on. With
characteristic self-aggrandisement, he later suggested
that these few weeks were his equivalent to Jesus's 40
days in the wilderness ("an archetypal shamanistic
crisis"). He also bought himself an automatic camera.

When Charlotte Bach died, her dressing table drawers
were found to be stuffed with dozens of photographs of
the then Michael dressed in his wife's clothes, the
earliest of which had been taken two months after
Peter's death. There is the ageing tart with the
come-hither look, giving the camera an eyeful of her
long legs; the dutiful, domesticated hausfrau, forever
ready with a brush and dustpan; and, rather more
convincingly, the elegant and mature hostess, cigarette
and wine glass in hand as she awaits the guests'
arrival at her sophisticated salon.

Michael claimed to have written three novels during his
long mourning. The first was Siobhan - which, with
breathtaking insensitivity, he despatched to the woman
who had inspired it, even though she was now happily
married to someone else.

The second novel (and the only other one that he seems
to have completed) was The Second Coming, a
science-fiction saga. "I think I am becoming a woman,"
Michael told a friend at the Stanislavsky Studio in
1966, and his plot summary for The Second Coming
confirms that such metamorphoses were a growing
preoccupation.

Gradually, Michael came to believe that the
vicissitudes of his life, which had hitherto seemed no
more than a "meaningless tangle" - the sexual and
financial disasters, the battles with officialdom - had
their own complex pattern. If only he could discern its
shape, he would know what to do next.

His persecutors were ready to assist, unwittingly, by
precipitating yet another crisis. In May 1966 Michael
was up before Bow Street magistrates charged with 13
offences of obtaining credit under false pretences and
of carrying on trade as a psychologist under the name
Michael B Karoly without disclosing that as Carl Hajdu
he was an undischarged bankrupt. He was jailed for
three months and then another month when the
electricity board started legal proceedings and he was
unable to afford the £150 fine.

On the back page of his Pentonville prison notebook,
Michael Karoly drafted the following letter:

Dear Sir,

I saw and liked your advert in the London Weekly
Advertiser. I have recently moved to London and don't
know anybody, so I'm taking a chance on replying to
you. I am in my late forties, a widow, lost my only son
too at the same time as my husband. To be frank, I have
no intention of remarrying nor am I interested in sex
for sex's sake, in fact not in any form. What I hope to
find is a reasonably presentable and articulate friend
as a theatre, cinema, concert, etc, companion - and
nothing else - on an expenses shared basis.

For your further information, I am rather tall (5ft
11), wear glasses and use a hearing aid and cannot by
any stretch of the imagination be called beautiful. As
against that, I think I am quite well-dressed and
well-groomed, ie, suitable for a man to appear in
public with, a couple of years at university (sociology
and economics) to my credit, having stopped just short
of graduating.

If under these conditions you are interested, I am
awaiting your reply.

Unencumbered by family, Michael could now write his own
script. As the letter shows, he was already preparing
for his most daring feat of method- acting even before
his release from Pentonville in February 1967.

Charlotte greatly admired a passage from William
Golding's novel Free Fall, in which the narrator asks a
woman: "What is it like to be you? ... What is it like
in the bath and lavatory and walking the pavement with
shorter steps and high heels? What is it like to know
your body breathes this faint perfume which makes my
heart burst and my senses swim?" What modern science
failed to notice, Charlotte argued, "is that this
seemingly romantic and unimportant fantasising is the
root of the entire evolutionary process".

Many acquaintances of Carl or Michael had always
thought him a bit odd, which may have made his final
reinvention as Charlotte less of a shock. Even so, it
is a tribute to his remarkable powers of persuasion
that almost everyone accepted.

The dreams of fame and Nobel Prizes may have been
absurd, but by carrying her secret almost to the grave,
she did "make the grade". Transvestism is not simply a
matter of changing one's wardrobe: every aspect of
behaviour has to be re-learnt, and a new sense of self
created. The task was all the harder for Charlotte,
with her deep voice and mannish physique. Yet she
carried it off with style, conviction and courage. In
her final identity she achieved an authenticity that
gave her far more pleasure and fulfilment than any of
the feckless personae she inhabited previously.
Mightn't one reasonably conclude that it was her life
as a man that had been the masquerade - that Baron
Hajdu and Michael Karoly were the great pretenders,
whereas Dr Charlotte Bach was not only her finest
creation but also her true self?

· © Francis Wheen 2002

This is an edited extract from Who Was Dr Charlotte
Bach? by Francis Wheen, published on October 7 by Short
Books at £9.99. To order a copy with free UK p&p, call
0870 066 7979.