'World's Oldest Drag Queen' has a Purple Heart and a broken heart — but no plans to leave the stage

ST. LOUIS • In the early days of Bonnie Blake’s time on stage, the hair was stacked to heaven, the songs performed were country classics by Tammy, Loretta and Patsy, and the law in St. Louis barred a man from dressing as a woman.

But in East St. Louis, during the late 1950s, no such ordinance frowned on what at the time was referred to as cross-dressing, or masquerading. So it was on the East Side where an audience witnessed the coming out party for Bonnie, the beginning of a career that has not yet ended but slowed down substantially.

Understandable when you are 90.

Bonnie has been around so long that the person who created her, John Chaney, is often called by his stage persona, even when out of the wigs, dresses and heels, which is most of the time. Chaney doesn’t mind.

“‘John,’ ‘Bonnie,’ you can call me whoever.”

John created Bonnie, but Bonnie helped define John. A boy growing up in the Arkansas Delta before gay became a term for a sexual orientation. Before there was an LGBT movement.

At Chaney’s birthday party in August, Bonnie took to the stage along with other performers of a certain age. It was there she was honored as “World’s Oldest Drag Queen.”

It’s a title still unofficial, but initial research by the St. Louis LGBT History Project was solid enough for the declaration to be made, said the organization’s founder, Steven Brawley.

The celebration, with a brightly lit cake and catty jokes about aging, was held at Bar:PM, next door to Chaney’s antique store on South Broadway. Bonnie performed about a half-dozen songs, including one that has been pleasing crowds for half a century.

“If you like ’em painted up, powdered up, then you oughta be glad. ’Cause your good girl’s gonna go bad.”

Tammy Wynette is Chaney’s favorite.

“She had a hell of a life,” he said.

So has Chaney, although nowhere near the tragic arcs of Tammy, Loretta or Patsy.

But Chaney’s life does play out like a country song, one he says still has a verse or two left in it.

‘I knew I was different’

Growing up in a tiny town on the Arkansas-Louisiana border, Chaney was one of 15 kids, a family in need of dozens of hands to help with cotton farming.

At age 6 or 7, Chaney took a fancy to an older sister’s dresses. Soon, he was wearing them.

“I would put her clothes on and she would have a fit,” Chaney said. “She’d tell mother, ‘Make him stop wearing my clothes.’”

He did, but only after his father told him: “Next time I go to town, I’m going to get you some dresses.” And he did. Three of them.

“I knew I was that way. I knew I was different,” Chaney said. “Boys would tease me about being a girl and this and that.”

Chaney migrated north when he was 17, moving in with a cousin in St. Louis. A city larger than Boston, San Francisco and Houston in the mid-1940s. His first job in the big city was selling pillows to bus travelers crisscrossing the country before there were interstates.

One night, when Chaney was downtown with his cousin and her boyfriend, they went by a bar — “a boys’ bar,” as the cousin put it.

“The next night I said I was going to the show and instead went down to the bar, Uncle John’s Place. I couldn’t go in because I was only about 18 then.”

He stopped in at a bookstore next door. An older man, a doctor, approached.

“He really liked me, a farm boy,” Chaney said. It was the first guy Chaney kept company with, a relationship that ended when Chaney was drafted into the Army in 1950 as the Korean War began. He came home after two years with an injured leg from enemy fire. He was awarded a Purple Heart.

Back in St. Louis, trying to figure out what was next, Chaney’s cousin took him to a dance hall she liked to frequent. Someone there mentioned Helen Schrader’s, an East St. Louis bar.

“They have a tryout night for drag,” Chaney was told. A few nights later, Chaney and a friend walked into Helen Schrader’s. All heels, hair and makeup.

Chaney was a natural. As he tells it, the crowd went wild.

“They were screaming: ‘Do it again. Do it again.’”

And Bonnie did. Over and over again, honing the alter ego that brought to the stage lip-sync perfection of country classics that still define the performer.

“He’s the Queen of Country,” said Chaney’s niece, Belinda Rice. “My uncle looks great as a girl.”

Even all these years later.

“When I go to his shows, I try to doll up. Otherwise, I look like an old hag next to him,” said Rice, 56. “I don’t think he looks his age at all.”

The transition to Bonnie from Chaney remains shrouded in the illusion of impersonation. Chaney does not like others to see the transformation, which takes place in the upstairs of his antique store, among more than 25 wigs, “clothes, oh so many clothes,” and jewelry that would rival any Las Vegas revue.

It’s when the eyelashes go on that Chaney says he feels like he has become Bonnie.

“With them on, I fixin’ to be a girl.”

Over the years, Bonnie has moved from mini skirts and fringed cowboy boots to a look perhaps more age-appropriate.

A blazer with pants or a skirt that hits right above the knee. The heels, once a towering affair, are now more sensible.

“He’s not as steady on his feet,” Rice said. Overall, “I think he dresses a little classier. It’s really subdued, more sophisticated. When he was younger, he was a lot more sassy.

“We all were.”

No more jumping on tables

Chaney is often in his shop, John’s Furniture and Antiques, before the sun is up. An early riser. A creature of habit. He’s been a dealer in the city for about 60 years, first opening a spot on South Grand where he built his business for nearly a decade before buying the building here, in the Carondelet neighborhood. He lives above the vast retail space, a bargain hunter’s dream.

“It’s like Disneyland in there with all the goodies he’s got,” said another niece, Barbara Owen.

Usually dressed in jeans, tennis shoes and a denim or flannel shirt, the only flair Chaney wears during his day job is a ring or two, usually big and colorful. Typically costume, not fine.

He sits behind a sturdy wood desk near the front door, a large console TV tuned to daytime talk shows, the volume high. Chaney’s hearing isn’t what it used to be. Neither is the business. Prior to the internet, cars lined up outside as customers waited for the doors to open. Those days are gone.

“He needs to get some new customers, get stuff on Craigslist,” said Owen, 72, who lives near San Antonio. But for her uncle, the store is more of a social space, where friends stop by for coffee and check on each other’s welfare.

“It would be hard for him to just give that up. He wouldn’t make it very long that way,” Owen said. “Life would be very boring for him. Hopefully, he’ll keep going until he drops dead at 100.”

It would be even harder for him to give up Bonnie. Chaney has signaled before that his performing days are coming to an end. Bonnie’s appearances are sporadic. The city’s got a healthy crop of younger drag queens vying for limited stage space.

The performance at his birthday party, however, showed Bonnie’s still got it.

“It was probably one of the best shows I’ve seen him do,” Owen said. Chaney didn’t seem any older than 30 years ago, when she first saw him perform.

“He can still tear up a hall with a fast (song),” Owen said.

A key difference between then and now: Bonnie no longer kicks off her shoes and jumps on the tables to finish a late-night number.

“You knew you had to grab hold of the table and hope it had four legs and not a pedestal,” Owen said.

The birthday show was just what Chaney needed, friends and family said. A morale boost. A shot of confidence.

Five months earlier, on March 24, what loved ones had long feared might happen did.

Working alone, like Chaney has the past few years, a man came into the store about 7:30 a.m. with a small electric cooker Chaney said was worthless. The man, who had been in the store before, demanded $10 for it. Chaney said he would give him $5, in an effort to get him to leave.

Chaney turned his back to get some cash. The next thing he remembers is a punch to the mouth, hard enough to knock out two teeth and break his partial in two. On the ground, the man stood over him and stomped his chest. Chaney was choking, a piece of the partial lodged in his throat.

“I could just kill you,” the man said. Fortunately for Chaney, a nephew in town for a visit came running down the stairs, gun pulled, when he heard his uncle screaming for help.

“There was blood every place,” Chaney said. The assailant has not been caught.

“It really threw him for a loop,” Rice said. Family members suggested he move in with his baby sister, Sue Feldmeier, 77, who lives in the Affton area, his sole surviving sibling.

It’s something Chaney has considered. But what to do with the building and the thousands of items inside. A storefront with painted letters on the window marking it as his own for the past five decades.

And all the clothes, wigs and jewelry that have transformed John into Bonnie.

Happiness and heartbreak

When he was a boy, working in the cotton fields, Chaney would rush home to listen to “Portia Faces Life,” a radio soap opera that ran from 1940 to 1953. Portia Blake was the protagonist, an attorney who fought corruption in a small town after her husband was murdered.

“I loved the name Blake and put Bonnie in front of it,” he said.

As a drag queen in the 1960s and ’70s, Chaney risked arrest every time he left the house in women’s clothing. Raids on bars were common, with those labeled as cross-dressers tossed into a police van and taken to jail. It would not be until 1986, after it was challenged in court, that a city ordinance outlawing dressing like a member of the opposite sex in public was overturned.

Chaney agreed to perform at French Market, a Soulard bar, after the owner assured him that if he did get thrown in jail, “I promise I’ll get you out within an hour.” Chaney decided to go for it.

“I never got bothered at all there. Police came in and watched the show and I did real good there.”

He moved from bar to bar, singing Tammy, Loretta, Patsy and a new favorite, a little known song by Susan Raye called “L.A. International Airport,” a song Blake still performs.

“Standing in that silent hall, waitin’ for that final call, says he doesn’t love me anymore. Shaking hands, I pack a bag, trembling voice I call a cab. Slowly I start walking to the door.”

Heartbreak is something Chaney has had his share of. In the 1980s, while performing at The Front Page, also a Soulard bar, a man named Bill came in. He took a fancy to Bonnie.

He was married, but promised: “When I get divorced, we will live together.” For 20 years or so, they would see each other about twice a week.

“Then we just drifted apart. I really thought a lot of him,” Chaney said. “I still do.” But when Chaney found out the man had divorced — and remarried — that was that.

Another man who resembled Paul Newman also made Chaney’s heart flutter. It went on longer than it should have, Chaney said.

“He fell for a man who said he could show him the world,” Chaney said. When that didn’t happen, the man with movie star looks called Chaney, saying he had made a mistake. But a persistent wandering eye finally ended it.

Life is full of loss, Chaney said, especially one spanning nine decades. His sister, Lois Esco, who worked alongside him for 30 years, died eight years ago, at age 93. Two years ago, Chaney’s handyman — “he did everything for me” — passed away. Chaney found him on the sidewalk outside the shop.

As Chaney went through photos of his early years in drag, he pointed to others posing next to him.

“She’s dead. This girl got murdered in Mexico when she went there to do drag. She drowned in a wreck. This one went to prison for selling dope in New Orleans.

“They are all gone but me.”

Tammy, his favorite country star, included.

Chaney’s store is wedged between two gay clubs. Hummel’s, to the north used to be called Blake’s and was owned by Chaney. But he grew tired of the grind of the bar business. To the south is Bar:PM, in a storefront Chaney’s sister managed as part of the sprawling antique shop. After she died, Chaney sold the building to a couple who asked if Chaney would be upset if they opened a bar there. Not at all, he said.

At the time, he did not know it would be another stage for Bonnie. A welcoming venue for older performers who have been there, done that.

Who have watched drag go from an underground criminal activity to reality TV.

Last weekend, Bonnie was on the Bar:PM stage again, where patrons offered her dollar bills and pecks on the cheek. Just like they have for nearly 60 years.

“People still wanna see me,” Chaney said.

The World’s Oldest Drag Queen.

Painted up, powdered up, again.