I emailed José and was promptly invited to an apartment uptown for tea. Their home felt like a maximalist movie set. Monkey sculptures knelt in prayer on gilded pedestals. A living room was decorated with Louis XVI furniture, a collection of Catholic saints, and a male nude in bronze. Lighting was by chandelier. Seating was in leopard. An opera played from hidden speakers.
“Should we get out of the street?” I asked, warily eyeing the oncoming taxis a few blocks up.
“You think they will say anything to me? I am José Castelo Branco!” José declared, as if this explained it. I wondered if the expedition was a performance for my benefit. Genuine disorganization also seemed possible.
By the time we reached the office of plastic surgeon Ramtin Kassir on 66th and Park, José was panting. It took us three minutes and one receptionist to get Betty and her chair over the half step at the office door. I took out a camera to film what appeared to be a tense moment but soon felt bad and jumped in to help. When we finally made it into the exam room, José was exhausted and went outside for a cigarette. Betty looked straight at me and got to the point: She preferred not to be jostled around to this extent. It wasn’t that she wanted to stay home and do nothing—she liked seeing people. But José pushed her too far.
Betty Grafstein and her second husband, the Belgian-American diamond dealer Albert Grafstein, on vacation in Cannes in the 1960s.Courtesy José Castelo Branco.
José with his first wife, the model Maria Arlene, and their son, Guilherme Castelo Branco Vieira, in the early 1990s in Portugal.Courtesy José Castelo Branco.
José came back into the exam room and pulled out a phone. The tension evaporated; now they were making content.
“Darling, what you doing Betty?” José cooed, holding the camera.
“I’m doing what I’m always doing—my very famous and favorite doctor in the whole world who I love so so much,” Betty responded, smiling, in a warbly Queen’s English.
“And you’re going to have what?” asked José.
“Fil-ler,” Betty responded, enunciating each syllable.
José and Betty met in the early ’90s, after a mutual friend brought the recently widowed Betty to an opening at José’s art gallery in Cascais. At first they were friends. At a party one day, José saw Betty rebuffing a suitor. “I realized she was a real lady, and it created in my subconscious the desire to protect her more. It turned me on,” José said in his native Portuguese to an authorized biographer in 2010.
José and Betty at their wedding in 1996.Abel Dias.
José, in his early 30s at the time, assumed Betty was in her 50s. Too polite to ask, José found out otherwise a few days before their wedding. José remembers thinking, She’s over 60? Betty soon began to look even younger. Her hair went from red to blond. She lost weight and wrinkles. José changed physically too, embracing androgyny and, eventually, femininity. More recently if you were to see José hosting at the NYC nightclub The Box, in a party photo with Amanda Lepore, or on a runway, you might assume she was a beautiful trans woman. José, who is deeply Catholic and attends Mass every Sunday, prefers not to use such labels: “I’m very well resolved. I’m a she, but in the other side, I’m still a he. Who cares?”
In the Portuguese biography, José describes the decision to embrace both masculinity and femininity as a reaction to a life of hardship. As a naturally androgynous teenager, José suffered bullying, as well as sexual assaults starting at age 11. “I was very traumatized. One day I said to myself: ‘That’s enough, José!’ I was a trailblazer in this country. I paved the way for people to feel free to be themselves.”
José was born in Mozambique in 1962, to a family of African, Portuguese, and Indian descent. An older brother, Sérgio, became a cabinet minister in the nation’s newly independent government. (A second cousin, António Costa, went on to become Portugal’s prime minister, resigning last year.) A young José looked up to his iconoclastic brother, who rebelled against their colonial family. But even the socialist revolutionary Sérgio never accepted his sibling’s style of rule breaking.
José and Betty’s mainstream notoriety began in 2003, when the couple was apprehended at the Lisbon airport with 2 million euros’ worth of undeclared gems. They claimed the 100-some diamond necklaces, bracelets, rings, and watches were for personal use. Soon José and Betty were minor celebrities, with footage of José leaving jail broadcast prime time. (José was eventually acquitted and the state returned the jewels.)
Then reality TV producers called. Celebrity Farm, in 2004, was José’s first show—she won and became easily the most famous cast member, chasing donkeys in designer sunglasses. Later, in First Battalion, José joined the army. In Splash! Celebrities, José appeared in flashy swimsuits and took diving lessons. In Celebrity Circus, José tamed lions. Lost in the Tribe, from 2011, still goes viral. The premise: José is sent to live in the Namibian bush. Much of the storyline revolves around the “tribe” members’ confusion about whether José should integrate with its men or women. It is an extremely cringe, fascinating artifact of 2000s reality TV, and of someone cannily harnessing the spectacle of their own ostracization.
One night in New York, I asked Betty, who calls José “my husband,” for her thoughts on gender. “I never thought of those things,” she said. “I love everybody.” Femininity, according to Betty, was one of José’s many talents: “He can paint, he can sew, he can do so many things! But he’s just his own worst enemy. The way he acts. He’s not put together properly. You accept it after a while. We’ve been married a long time.”
In the months I worked on this story, José had a number of public feuds. There was a fashion designer with whom José canceled a collaboration less than a week before a planned runway show. The designs “would have given Betty a heart attack.” There was a security guard at an Upper East Side physical rehab facility where Betty was being treated who offended the couple by asking them to use a back entrance. José pushed through the front door anyway. Police were called. “Try to make me to go to the back door. Like a common,” José told me. “Never.”
“One of the things I like about him is that he’s a little bit punk,” said José’s friend, stylist David Motta. “He refuses to entirely be a product.” Motta recalled once helping José organize a messy part of the house. Motta discovered his friend had secretly hidden thousands of pairs of false eyelashes. “If the world goes into a big war and I have to fight for myself and Betty, I will look my best,” José explained matter-of-factly.
Betty was the member of the couple I observed to be more obviously performing. She would muster energy for cameras, going quiet again once they had stopped rolling. She became most animated talking about her past, especially lesser-known anecdotes of hardship.
During World War II, Betty remembers going to school on England’s southern coast as bombs dropped. Betty fell in love with an American GI and moved to New York to marry him. But her first husband was abusive, she said. “He broke my jaw when I found out he had a girlfriend,” Betty told me. She said he was in the Mafia. I was skeptical until I found his RICO conviction from 1991. The couple separated, and Betty went to work at a dentist’s office and at PepsiCo before marrying diamond dealer Albert Grafstein in 1959. She created a jewelry business of her own. A 1969 WWD article described Betty as a “real hidden gem” of a designer, beloved by private clients who shopped for diamond-and-coral mushroom pins and emerald rings in her “sparkling east side apartment.” (Betty said Joan Crawford was among her clientele.)
