Spending her adult years until 33 taking care of the saintly “old maid” aunt who’d raised her, Rutherford was considered an old maid herself by the time she joined London’s Old Vic repertory company in 1925, living on her aunt’s bequest.

While living in Whitney's New York townhouse in the 1950s, Simmons was introduced to Margaret Rutherford and her husband Stringer Davis.Although she claimed to have been born with an unusual condition that resulted in the swelling of her genitals with the result that she was mistakenly identified as a boy, Charleston author Edward Ball's book Peninsula of Lies (2004) states that she was born male.Still living as a man, she crewcut her hair and became a teacher on the Ojibway native reservation on Lake Nipigon, experiences from which were translated into the best-selling Me Papoose Sitter (1955)—the first of many published books.She was a master at bringing sincerely realized comedy to even the most fleeting incidents, her large, unpretentious face registering the subtlest shifts in expression.The Observer said she could act with her chin alone, while a Tatler review declared: “To see her Madame Arcati get up from an armchair is a lesson in eccentric observation.” Success was hard-won for Rutherford.