William Windsor's childhood secret didn't keep him from pursuing a very public career. Once he discovered his stage talents and tenor voice, it didn't take long to shed the outcast image he had in his first two years of high school. He still wore diapers under his jeans on occasion, and he hid diapers and baby bottles in his bedroom at home.
Jeff Newton
"I've tried to close every avenue of escape," Windsor
says.
Jeff Newton
The little girl who wouldn't grow up.
Related Content
More About
"Everybody in school thought I was a fag," he says. "I was kinda weakly, I guess. I didn't hang around with the jocks, and I played the flute. I quit playing flute, though, because I was getting razzed too much.
"But theater was my escape," he says. "I found out I was pretty damn good at it."
His parents, he says, weren't so enthusiastic. Windsor's mother rarely came to his performances, if ever, he says. His father had already moved to San Diego by the time Windsor became active in high school drama productions.
It wasn't until he moved to New York City at the age of 20 that anyone in his family even acknowledged his desire to perform. Once he got the lead role of Claude in the musical Hair, in 1971 -- the original cast opened the musical in 1968 -- it was his grandmother, Louise Hunter, who sang for the New York Metropolitan Opera until 1928, and not his mother or father, who came to see him perform on Broadway.
But Windsor was getting plenty of attention -- for the first time in his life -- from other women, fellow actors in Hair. Like Debbi Dye, his girlfriend for several months. Dye, who was the understudy for Sheila in the musical, could not be located for this story. But Windsor says they had an intense relationship that revolved around sex, theater and drugs -- pot, mostly, although Windsor says he did "smack" for about six months.
"Man, Debbi was wild," he says.
She was also one of two women at the time -- he thinks -- who knew about Windsor's adult-baby, diaper-wearing tendencies.
"We had separate bedrooms when we lived together, mainly because I wore diapers at night and didn't want her to find out," he says. "But one night she comes into the bedroom, pulls down the sheets, and says, 'I knew it!' But she promised she wouldn't tell anyone."
Beverly Bremers, Windsor's co-star in Hair (she played Sheila), says she remembers him as a "very sensitive guy, which all the girls loved about him."
"I remember he had a very childlike quality about him," says Bremers, who now teaches acting and voice lessons in Southern California. Once she learns of Windsor's present-day lifestyle, she says:
"I didn't think he was that childlike. I guess that explains why we haven't seen him at any of the cast reunions."
Once Hair closed on Broadway in 1972, Windsor toured for about three months with Jesus Christ Superstar, in the title role. (Programs from the time confirm it.) But while he believed he "had the world on a silver platter," Broadway productions never satisfied his first love: country music.
"When I was growing up, I wasn't really into the whole hippie thing, which I guess was kinda strange, considering," he says. "I loved Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and George Jones. The country standards."
So in 1976, he made his way to Nashville, where a friend had hooked him up with talent scouts and a network of songwriters and producers.
One was Rory Bourke, who had just written the country classic "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" for singer Charlie Rich. It wasn't long before Bourke, now a member of Nashville's Songwriters Foundation Hall of Fame, tried to get Windsor a singing and songwriting deal.
"Willie was such a talent," Bourke says from his home in Nashville. "And that voice! Wow, did he have a voice.
"I still can't quite figure out why Willie didn't make it."
Windsor, of course, has his own theory.
"I was always so afraid that if I made it, if I became more popular," he says, "someone would find out about the baby thing.
"I think I kind of sabotaged myself. I wouldn't go to auditions. I just didn't work very hard. I'd rather have the baby thing than the success."
Soon after he got to Nashville, Windsor met Barbara, a woman, he says, who "thought I was gonna be a famous country star!"
He provides little information about Barbara, whom he went on to marry, he says, in 1979. He says they had a child, John, a year later.
Windsor refuses to provide Barbara's contact information -- nor her current last name (she's remarried) -- because, he says, his son, who's now 24, lives with Barbara and his stepfather, somewhere in Montgomery, Alabama. He says he's not sure if his son knows about Dad, the Infantilist, but he'd rather John -- whom Willie says he hasn't spoken with in "about eight months" -- not find out from a newspaper story. (Windsor's brother, John, did confirm the marriage and the existence of Willie's son.)
After failing to garner a recording contract, or a lucrative songwriting deal, Windsor says he found himself playing Nashville bars, both solo and in his own band. But the bar gigs failed to make ends meet. So he was fortunate to meet Nashville Tennessean editor John Siegenthaler, he says, at a local talent contest.
