Dawn Langley Pepita Simmons (15 October 1922 — 18 September 2000) was a prolific English author and biographer. Born "Gordon Langley Hall", Simmons lived her first decades as a male. As a young adult, she became close to British actress Margaret Rutherford, whom she considered an adoptive mother and who was the subject of a biography Simmons wrote in later years. After sex reassignment surgery in 1968, Simmons wed in the first legal interracial marriage in South Carolina.
Simmons' parents were servants at Sissinghurst Castle, the English estate of biographer Harold Nicolson and his novelist wife, Vita Sackville-West. Simmons was born in Sussex as "Gordon Langley Hall" to Jack Copper, Vita Sackville-West's chauffeur, and another servant, Marjorie Hall Ticehurst, before they were married.
As a child, Simmons was raised by her grandmother and at one point visited the castle and met Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West's lover. Woolf made Sackville-West the subject of the novel A Biography, which bears a striking resemblance to Simmons' own life story.
Simmons exhibited an early talent for writing...with the first poem published at the age of four. At nine Simmons wrote a column for the Sussex Express, once interviewing Mae West while sitting in the visiting star's lap.
In 1953, Simmons emigrated to Canada after the grandmother's death. Still living as a man, she crewcut her hair and became a teacher on the Ojibway native reservation on Lake Nipigon, experiences from which were translated into the best-selling Me Papoose Sitter (1955)...the first of many published books.
After a stint as an editor for the Winnipeg Free Press, Simmons moved back to England in 1947, to teach theatre at the Gregg School in Croydon. She moved to the United States in 1950, and became the society editor for the Nevada Daily Mail in Missouri before moving to New York to as the society editor of the Port Chester Daily Item. Shortly after moving to New York, Simmons met artist Isabel Whitney, beginning a friendship that would last until her death in 1962.
During this time, Simmons began a prolific writing career, including a series of biographies which covered personalities such as Princess Margaret (1958), Jacqueline Kennedy (1964), Lady Bird Johnson (1967), and Mary Todd Lincoln (1970) among many more. While living in New York, Simmons was introduced to Margaret Rutherford and her husband Stringer Davis, who treated him as adoptive parents. That same year, Simmons and Whitney purchased a house in Charleston, South Carolina, though Whitney would die two weeks later, leaving Simmons the house and $2 million.
The mansion Simmons purchased with Whitney, was located in the Ansonborough neighborhood of Charleston, a neighborhood known for housing the city's queer elite. Simmons began restoring the house, and designed the interior with early American antiques and furniture by Thomas Chippendale. Her pursuit of Chippendale pieces brought her into contact with Edward Ball, a journalist who owned a Chippendale commode and who would later write a biography about her.
In her autobiographical books, Simmons said she was born intersex with ambiguous genitalia, as well as an internal uterus and ovaries, and was inappropriately assigned male at birth. Simmons underwent sex reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1968, carried out by Dr. Milton Edgerton in 1968. In Ball's Peninsula of Lies, he disputes Simmons claim that she was intersex, suggesting instead that Simmons had male genitalia and was unable to bear children.
Simmons legally changed her name to Dawn Pepita Langley Hall, and became engaged to John-Paul Simmons, then a young black motor mechanic with dreams of becoming a sculptor. Their marriage on 21 January 1969 was the first legal interracial marriage in South Carolina, and the ceremony was carried out in their drawing room reportedly after threats to bomb the church. After a second ceremony in England, the crate containing their wedding gifts was firebombed in Charleston, and Simmons received a ticket the next day when the charred remains were obstructing a sidewalk.
On 17 October 1971, her daughter, Natasha Margienell Manigault Paul Simmons, was born, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
After an intruder raped Simmons and broke her arm, the family moved to Catskill, New York.
In 1982, she divorced John-Paul Simmons, who had been abusive and suffered from schizophrenia. After spending several years in Hudson, New York, she moved in with her daughter and three grandchildren, who had returned to Charleston. In 1985, while back in Charleston, Simmons was featured as an extra in several scenes of ABC's miniseries North and South. In 1996, author Jack Hitt profiled Simmons in an episode of This American Life titled "Dawn". Hitt, a native of Charleston, had grown up down the street from Simmons, and used an interview with her to discuss transsexualism, interracial marriages in the South, and the rumors that she had voodoo powers and had hosted a full fledged debut for her chihuahua.
In her final years, Simmons developed Parkinson's disease, and died at her daughter's home on 18 September 2000.It is Gordon Langley Hall to whom the character Marwood refers in the 1985 film Withnail and I when he reads from the newspaper "I had to become a woman".
