Jimmy James

The One and Many Voices of Jimmy James at Winter Rendezvous

Voice impersonator Jimmy James has been in the entertainment world for 34 years and will be performing Cher, Adele, Eartha Kitt and more, at the Gay Ski Weekend for the Winter Rendezvous at Stowe in Vermont. From January 18-22, the biggest gay winter party will be taking place, with skiing, skating, dancing, snowmobiling, racing, parting and just plain enjoying.

Get Out! spoke with James regarding his performance and his new YouTube hit “Fashionista,” a song he wrote and recorded and which now has 20 million views.

You will be performing at The Winter Rendezvous this year?
I did it once 10 years ago. Do you live in New York?

I do.
I lived there for 20 years. Now I’m in LA for seven years. I’ve walked through enough blizzards in my life. I’m done.

I heard from a mutual friend, Ron Russell, that you were the best Marilyn Monroe ever.
I know Ron, but I retired Marilyn in ‘97. Now my show is kind of like myself. I still paint like a hooker, but I don’t really do drag. What I do is voice impressions of famous voices, from Barbra Streisand to Elvis Presley, Sonny and Cher, Liza Minnelli, Eartha Kitt, Adele, so I have a really fun show. I took the drag out per se, because for a while people were lip-synching and stuff. I’m androgynous. In drag I am only 5’5”, and in drag people think I’m a real woman, singing female voices. So that kind of ruined everything. I’m a guy doing women’s voices, so I didn’t want people to get involved or confused in all that. It’s just more fun for me to be myself. It’s self deprecating. The drag thing is so weird to me, because it just comes off like a woman, and I don’t know how to reconcile with that. I’ve been androgynous my whole life. People didn’t know if I was a boy or a girl. It’s how I was born.

Did you have any inspirations?
I watched people like Whoopie Goldberg and Lily Tomlin perform. They do it like nothing; they go in and out of character. I was always so mesmerized by that. I thought that if I ever get to that level where I could drop all this drag…I look like a woman anyway! Why am I going through all of this? I walked into a store with flip flops, and the store person said, “Yes, ma’am, how can we help you?” Why am I suffering so much? If the thing is to look like a woman, then here I am!

But you really were Marilyn.
I was the best in the world. At some point you start to think that when you start doing it longer than Marilyn was alive, I thought, this is not going to end well.

Well, it didn’t end well for her either.
It ended for me in ‘97, so I had done it for 17 years. It was a slow turn around, but I had to turn the big ship around, from being an illusionist basically to then becoming myself to do the impressions. There was a club in New York called Pieces.

It’s still there.
From ‘95 to 2000, I did a workshop there. It was at midnight, no cover, and people would come out on a Monday night to see me work out new material. I let the audience see if they liked it. The owner told me do to anything I liked. I could do drag or not. I’ll always have a “look.” I like to call it “glamour dyke.” It was all about Jimmy James and his voice impressions, not Jimmy James in drag. I began to get confident in myself as a performer, standing on my own two feet, doing my thing, pleasing an audience without having to be in that crutch of a Marilyn Monroe drag queen. It was hard. My show always had voice impressions, but the first part of my show was always Marilyn Monroe. The audiences thought that they were just going to get Marilyn, and then they got Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, and they were blown away.

I can’t believe that you can do Adele.
The only song I can do is “Skyfall,” because I heard her in an interview, and she was pregnant when she did that, and she sung it in a lower register.

How many years did it take you to learn how to do this?
Well, since I was a teenager. I’m just going to say, I’m past the age of 36 when Marilyn died. I’ve been in this business now professionally for 34 years.

Well, if you are ever in New York, please let me know.
Thank you.

Is there anything else that you want to promote?
I wrote this song called “Fashionista,” and it went global. It’s on YouTube, it’s on iTunes. Beyond Marilyn, and all the voices I do, this song has outweighed anything I’ve ever done, believe it or not. It has over 20 million views on YouTube from fans who did videos. I never even made a video. My Marilyn stuff on YouTube was about 500,000. This is over 20 million. Little kids are singing it at slumber parties, teenagers are singing it. I’ve reached a whole other generation with my song. The older generation knows me for my impersonations, but the young kids latched onto this song. The young generation has no idea of my past.