Murray Cooper, female impersonator (Toronto Star)
marilyn...@aol.com
DEBRA BLACK
STAFF REPORTER
It's rare that your first and only acquaintance with someone is when he
is dying. But that's how I met Murray Cooper.
He was dying at Toronto's Grace Health Centre's palliative care unit.
And I was there to write a story about dying. And yet when I think
about Cooper, I don't think so much of his weak and fragile body, but
more about his spirit and exuberance for living.
I will always have this image of Cooper strutting down the halls of the
palliative care unit on the sixth floor getting ready for his 55th
birthday party.It was a Friday night late last year. On another
occasion, he might have been holding court at a club. But on this
night, his friends were coming to celebrate at the hospital and
balloons hung from the ceiling of the lounge. He wore a blue
embroidered caftan and woolly socks, and he refused to use his walker.
"Darling," he said as I approached him on the night of his party. "You
look fabulous."
"So do you," I said.
Cooper was a truly unusual man: a well-known Toronto stylist, a female
impersonator and a nightclub owner. He died last Thursday at the
palliative care unit at Toronto's Grace Health Centre.
Everything about him was larger than life. "I always wanted to be a
star," he said when interviewed late last year.
For the past two weeks, he hovered close to death as the ravages of
liver disease, hepatitis C and diabetes continued to take their toll,
said friend, singer and actress Dinah Christie.
One night, he turned blue, had only a weak pulse and was hardly
breathing. Staff at the Grace thought it was the beginning of the end.
They called Christie. She came immediately and watched over him, held
his hand and spent the night and the morning serenading him with a
little song she had written him to help ease the pain.
Then she switched gears and sang every Judy Garland song she had ever
known, including "Meet Me In St. Louis."
The music revived Cooper. He suddenly sat up and began talking to
Christie and another friend. He lived miraculously for another week,
Christie said in an interview Sunday as she packed up his apartment.
When he finally died last Thursday, he lay wrapped in a blue-green
pashmina and was surrounded by pictures of angels. The staff at the
Grace sat with him until he took his last breath.
He had hoped to winter one more time in his former home of Eleuthera in
the Bahamas but had come to grips with the fact he was dying.
"The grand thing is I have no regrets," he said when interviewed about
his impending death. "I have cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes and
hepatitis C. Any one of those could kill me. Now it's finally caught up
to me and I've resigned myself to it. You can't really fight it. You
can medicate it. You can slow it down. You can just be very nice to it.
But that's about it."
For Christie, life without her friend won't be the same.
She recalls one of her favourite moments with him back in the
mid-1980s. They were in Calgary shopping. Some of the locals were
shocked by Cooper's attire. He was dressed in an off-white muumuu and
had short dyed blond hair with rhinestone blue studded eyeglasses. As
Christie retells it: two very tall cowboys walked by and looked Cooper
up and down. Christie expected a scene. But instead the cowboys broke
out into a fit of giggles, obviously enjoying Cooper's flamboyant
clothing.
"They let go of their façade and I could see two very gay cowboys,"
said Christie. "I loved that."
Another favourite memory of hers involves another shopping trip, this
time on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Cooper was mistaken for Elton
John, Christie said. A flock of very chic kids came up to him and asked
for his autograph. Later, when Christie asked him what he'd written, he
told her he'd signed his name as Amelia Earhart. It was perfect Murray,
she said. Perfect.
Cooper leaves behind his elderly parents, his brother and his devoted
dog, which has been adopted by one of the Grace staff.
No service is to be held. But Cooper was cremated and his ashes will be
spread in Eleuthera at the end of January.