Myra Breckinridge, Raquel Welch, travels from Copenhagen after undergoing a sex-change and returns to America a transformed presence who aims to shake up a traditional world she sees as stagnant. She rides into Buck Loner's acting school with a daring claim: she is the widow of Myron Breckinridge and, under Myron’s supposed will, deserves half the school or a payout of $500,000. Buck Loner, John Huston, is wary but agrees to give her a teaching position while he quietly investigates the truth of her demands. The arrangement sets a tense, uneasy tone as the new arrival begins to maneuver within the faculty and students, testing loyalties and exposing cracks in a smoothed-over system.
Although Myra is officially assigned to an etiquette class, she uses the classroom as a stage for more than manners. She pushes into semiotics, dissecting the Golden Age of Hollywood and interweaving it with provocative ideas about power and gender. Her conversations slide into controversial territory, and she engages in ongoing debates with an informal counterpart named Myron, a physical manifestation who appears to discuss their shared scheme. Through these clashes, it becomes clear that Myra’s stated goal is more radical than personal gain: she envisions “destroying the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race” to realign the sexes, reduce population, and supposedly uplift human happiness by entering a new social era. The tension between her rhetoric and the reactions of others on campus builds a charged, uneasy atmosphere.
On the campus grounds, Myra becomes fixated on two young people who symbolize what she sees as quintessential American gender norms: Rusty Godowski, and Mary Ann Pringle. Rusty Godowski, Roger Herren, embodies the swaggering, conventional masculine role, while Mary Ann Pringle, Farrah Fawcett, embodies a more modern, desirable femininity. Myra’s interest in them quickly intensifies into a dangerous fixation. Under a pretext of arranging a routine physical, she executes a brutal assault by tying Rusty to a table and raping him with a strap-on, a moment that triggers a cascade of personal consequences—Rusty withdraws from his relationship with Mary Ann as a result. Concurrently, Myra nudges Mary Ann toward experimenting with bisexuality, deepening the entanglement of desire, power, and consent in ways that ripple through their social circle.
Simultaneously, Myra’s ambitions echo in the orbit of Leticia van Allen, a shrewd female casting agent who habitually uses her influence to attract the young men who come to auditions. Leticia, played by Mae West, enters the story as a predator figure who claims Rusty as her own lover after he becomes entangled in Myra’s schemes. The two powerful women briefly cross paths when Leticia visits the school to scout for talent, a scene that intensifies the competition for control over the male figures who populate the students’ lives. The interplay between Myra and Leticia adds another layer to the campus drama, underscoring themes of manipulation, fame, and the commodification of desire.
As Buck keeps digging, he uncovers troubling archival evidence: Myron never died, and no death certificate exists for him. Confronted with this chilling discovery, Myra acknowledges the truth and strips naked before Buck, an act that exposes a crucial piece of the physical mystery surrounding her transformation. Buck’s response—suggesting that Myra did not have her testes removed during surgery—casts doubt on the narrative of radical change and hints at unfinished business, both personal and political, within Myra’s identity and the broader social project she embodies.
Myra’s pursuit of Mary Ann continues even after the hospitalizing confrontation, but Mary Ann rejects the idea of becoming part of Myra’s envisioned reordering. She tells Myra that she wishes she were a man, a line that crystallizes the gendered tensions at the heart of the story. The next day, the movie shifts as the figure of Myron—still a disruptive force—drives after Myra in a car, a literal and symbolic reminder that her ambitions may be spiraling beyond her control. The pursuit ends with a car crash that marks a new turn in the narrative, signaling that the very plan to redraw gender boundaries may have unleashed consequences beyond the characters’ intentions.
The film then pivots to reveal the opening act: Myron’s presence is not merely a danger to Myra’s project but a real force whose needs and impulses trump the scheme she has built around gender experimentations. In a twist that reframes the events, Myron’s awakening in the hospital anchors the story in a cycle that began with the accident, not a simple gender transition. Mary Ann, now the nurse at his bedside, provides an intimate, human counterpoint to the grand philosophical aims that opened the film. A magazine lying on Myron’s bedside table features a feature on Raquel Welch, a meta touch that closes the loop on the film’s fascination with celebrity, performance, and the spectacle of gender.
Overall, the narrative threads a provocative meditation on power, sexuality, and transformation within a satirical and controversial frame. It juxtaposes the glamour and myth of classic Hollywood with a radical, destabilizing reimagining of gender roles, all set within the charged microcosm of an acting school where fame, ambition, and personal identity collide. The result is a dense, deliberately provocative portrait of imagination clashing with reality, ambition colliding with ethics, and the seductive lure of rewriting cultural norms against a backdrop of performance, illusion, and the ever-present glare of public gaze.
