Paul Cummings grew up in Southern California. In high school, in the 1940s, he tried out for the choir. He recalled:
“I was always told to sing lower, but I wanted to be a soprano.”
Cummings had been told he would outgrow his soprano voice, but he didn’t. Instead, he developed into what’s called a “split-voice” singer, with the ability to sing as a baritone (in a lower, masculine male register) as well as a soprano (higher, female style).
“Don’t call it a falsetto, though. I never liked that term. It suggests the voice is false, and it wasn’t. It was very real to me.”
After high school, some friends took Cummings to audition at a gay nightclub owned by mobster Mickey Cohen. This led to a career as a female impersonator, a man who dresses as a woman and sings and performs on stage. Paul chose his stage name - Laverne Cummings.
The best, most glamorous looks required expensive human hair wigs. Cummings found a cheaper alternative: he grew out his hair. Cummings often joked on stage that he was the only person in the troupe who couldn’t cut his hair because of a clause in his contract.
Cummings eventually moved to Florida, where he joined Jewel Box Revue, a touring company of female impersonators who traveled and performed at clubs across the country. Unusual for the era, the troupe was racially integrated, with white, black, Latino, and Native American performers.
After years of non-stop travel, Cummings decided to settle down in San Francisco. There he was hired at the “world-famous” Finocchio's Club.
(Finocchio, by the way, is Italian for fennel, but it became a derogatory slang word for homosexual. Finocchios were young male prostitutes.)
Cummings started at Finocchio’s with just a bit part in 1956. But he soon became the headliner and performed there for 26 years.
Cummings occasionally worked as an actor on television. In 1979, he appeared in the TV movie “The Golden Gate Murders” as a— you guessed it— female impersonator.
In 1982, Cummings’ voice was impacted by recurring asthma, and he retired from the stage.
“Hey, life goes on. To have had that for as long as I did was good.”
He moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he occasionally worked as an actor or an extra in movies and television shows filmed in Las Vegas.
Sadly, Cummings died in a traffic accident in March 2018.
