Biography

William Stewart Kugler was born Aloysius Kenney on June 22, 1912 in Buffalo, New York. He was adopted at a young age and given the name William Stewart Kugler. He performed as a female impersonator in New York and Chicago in the 1930s.

Henry Joseph Jouron was born in Chicago on August 13, 1930. He also became involved in the performing arts.

Kugler and Jouron met in the late 1940s while they were each performing separately in Florida. They became a romantic couple, and shortly afterward decided to begin performing together. They created the Maurice & La Monte "Off the Record" pantomime act and staged their first shows in Florida. The act paired music made famous by other performers (and used in the act with their permission) with visual jokes and physical comedy. Maurice & La Monte wore simple black costumes to emphasize the individual costume pieces they used to create different characters (a colorful scarf, for example). Jouron made all of the costume pieces for the shows (he also made costumes for other female impersonators); they did each other's make-up.

The act toured in gay night clubs across the nation, with Kugler and Jouron working their way north from Florida to New York, then west to Chicago, and even further west to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Performing was difficult for the duo because of laws against female impersonation, particularly in California. Kugler and Jouron were plagued by police; they were even jailed briefly for impersonating females.

In 1965, Maurice & La Monte performed with Judy Garland in her last performance in Las Vegas, at the Thunderbird Hotel. Later, Maurice & La Monte often performed with Judy Lynn, a lesbian and Judy Garland impersonator. Maurice & La Monte performed through the mid-1980s, mostly in California and Hawaii. Kugler died in Los Angeles on January 29, 1993. Jouron died on March 11, 2006, also in Los Angeles.

Source:

Maurice & La Monte Papers, Coll2008-033, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California