Manhattan’s theater district at midday is a neighborhood full of disguises. Actors, singers and dancers thread between the crowds on their way to evening performances, a costume of American normality – sweat pants or jeans – their best camouflage.
No one understands this game quite like Norah Vincent. Strolling into an empty French bistro on a recent Wednesday afternoon, the tall, strikingly attractive journalist has just finished the acting gig of a lifetime.
For a year and a half, she passed as a man.
“It was mad,” says Vincent, now dressed as herself, not Ned, the alter ego she painstakingly created and then trotted out into the real world. “It was like changing the channel, or going to a foreign country, where the customs are highlighted because they’re not your customs.”
The result of this experiment is Vincent’s first book, “Self-Made Man” (Penguin, 304 pages, $24.95), in which she describes how with the help of acting coaches, a weight-training regimen and a new wardrobe she infiltrated the inner sanctums of maleness and observed them with fresh (female) eyes.
Vincent certainly covered a lot of ground. She tried her hand at selling door to door, she lived in a monastery. She embarked on a men’s-movement retreat and got in touch with her inner man-child. She even hit the dating scene.
“I had my three-date limit,” says Vincent, who is married to Lisa McNulty, a theater producer. She found several women were more than happy to go to bed with her after she revealed “Ned” was in fact “Norah.”
Before this seems like an elaborate ploy to turn straight women gay, Vincent says the experiment went both ways. “This isn’t in the book, but I went on three dates with a gay man initially. And that was a good exercise unsurprisingly in male sexuality, in being different. He wasn’t mad. But he just basically absolutely instantaneously lost interest in Ned.”
Subverted by bowling
Costumes and disguises, “Crying Game” moments – this all sounds so redolent of Janet Malcolm’s idea that journalism is essentially a dance of betrayal that one is tempted to wonder if Vincent isn’t wearing a disguise even now, dressed as herself. “It’s sort of like the Capote thing,” says Vincent, asserting her sincerity. “If you give a man the mask and he’ll tell the truth. The whole idea of going undercover is that people just won’t be honest in general.”
Being a man turned out to be harder – or at least more stressful – than Vincent thought. For starters, there were basic levels of competence that she did not possess. In one chapter, Ned becomes part of an all-male bowling league. This is a problem, because Ned bowls “like a girl” and cannot throw a strike to save his life. “This one guy took me under his wing and tried to teach me,” Vincent says, laughing. “And he never got upset. It was like he just didn’t like beating me when I wasn’t at my best.”
The dating world turned out to be murder. Approaching women at a bar, Vincent describes how Ned was constantly spotted in his approach, judged quickly and then ignored. “That was the other prejudice I had,” says Vincent, “that as a woman in a man’s body I’d find that the metrosexual was king, but actually I felt really sort of weedy and small, and it made me feel insecure as a guy.”
The need for kinship
In this experience, Vincent discovered that most men desperately need women, and so their self-esteem is terribly dependent on being received well. “It’s not just sexual decisions,” Vincent says, but approval that counts. “I think if women could only appreciate how much it hurts when you just completely, you know, wipe the floor with (a guy), and how easy it is for you to do that. You got a lot more power than you know.”
Experiencing these humiliations and then overcoming them, Vincent was brought into the powerful circle of male solidarity. Expecting ridicule for Ned’s failures, Vincent found support. Guys helped Ned on the job. They gave him a pound on the back when he opened up about his father problems. “What I don’t think people understand is that men need each other. They absolutely need each other’s company because women never understand. It’s one thing to talk to your wife or girlfriend, but it’s not the same.”
When Ned took over
Eventually, not surprisingly, Vincent had enough of Ned – in fact way too much. At the end of the experiment, she experienced a quiet but powerful mental breakdown, checking herself into an institution before she did herself harm. Ned needed to be expelled from Norah.
Vincent sees this reverse birth as simply an acting experiment gone awry, something she will keep in mind for future projects. “I re-consulted my acting voice coach at one point,” says Vincent, “who said, ‘You know, I should have told you. I have that problem with actors sometimes when they do a part for a long time where they kind of disappear into the role. You gotta decompress at the end of the day. Otherwise, you really will kind of crack up.’ If I had known that, I probably would have had a better time of it.”
For this reason, Vincent will not appear at book signings as Ned, nor will she spend time undercover as him again. In fact, soon after the project was completed, she planned a “Ned’s Dead” party for her friends. To this day she speaks of him in the third person.
“He wasn’t me,” she says, by way of explanation, “he really was a character. It was also an attempt to create some psychological distance, which obviously didn’t work.”
There are some benefits to this experience, however. In addition to her new perspective on men’s hidden vulnerabilities, and how women sometimes neglect them, Vincent believes she has a lingering purchase on the thing men are taught to possess, even when they don’t really have it: confidence.
And with that attitude, Vincent is off to her next project. She says it’s going to be another book on immersion, having to do in part with America’s health-care system – something she learned a whole lot about recently.
John Freeman lives in New York.
