Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

by Karen Abbott

  “You may believe it or not as you please,” Butler warned, “but I think we are living on the top of an inferno, walking about on a volcano which may burst at any moment and destroy us…. Mr. Stead tore aside the curtain and revealed the abyss of crime and misery.”

  Despite lurid narratives about virgins for sale, purity campaigns in Europe would hold Americans’ attention for only so long. Trying a new tack, The Philanthropist editors shifted the focus to American victims. An article titled “The Traffic in Young Girls” warned of “an organized agency, by which, from rural districts and other cities, honest girls are lured to Chicago with expectation of work, and are then lost forever to friends, honor and hope…in one shape or another the demon of lust lies in wait at every door.”

  Still, not even a ripple of reaction among the American public. The editors continued to search for a story as dramatic as Stead’s own “Maiden Tribute.” They found it in January 1887, when authorities raided a Michigan lumber camp and arrested a group of nine women on prostitution charges.

  Eight of the women accepted their prison sentences without protest, but one spun a salacious tale of torture and forced captivity. She thought she was going to the camp for work, making $14 a week plus “extras,” but when she arrived her bosses locked her in a cage. Thirteen vicious bulldogs served as her constant guards. She was bound and gang-raped, her virtue forever lost. Few believed the den keepers’ assertions that all of the women, including this alleged white slave, knew full well what they had been hired to do at the lumber camps—a job description that made no mention of cutting trees. The public was so moved by the woman’s story that she was pardoned and released from jail.

  Newspapers across the country seized the story, and The Philanthropist followed every twist and turn, underscoring its relevance to the average American. “These atrocities are committed against the womanhood of our country,” declared one editorial, written by a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union leader. The WCTU, founded thirteen years earlier in 1874, protested alcohol partly because women, already disenfranchised, were also barred from saloons, where ward leaders mingled and men argued about politics. White slavery gave women a chance to insert themselves into political discourse; America’s women would best know how to protect America’s girls. “When we see the condition of things in which the foreigner of the North,” the editorial continued, “because all of the den keepers without exception are either foreigners or of foreign extraction, and have not been long in this country—when these foreigners of the North work as they do for the enslavement of our American girls…what shall we say of this condition of things?”

  As a result of the scandal, Michigan lawmakers passed a bill that increased fines for owning a brothel, reformers raised troubling suspicions about immigrants, and America’s sporting girls learned a valuable lesson in nuance: People reviled prostitutes, but pitied white slaves.

  LOVELY LITTLE LIES

  Ada

  Minna in Omaha, 1895.

  Everyone wants to be something in their life,

  and I was no different.

  —MINNA EVERLEIGH

  Before the Everleigh sisters could build the foremost brothel in United States history, they first had to raze their own pasts. They scattered their earliest years in disparate directions—absolutes, lies, and a litany of maybes—trying on identities the way men in lesser houses tried on whores, picking over a lineup before selecting the prettiest one.

  First, the absolutes:

  Ada and Minna Everleigh were born Ada and Minna Simms in February 1864 and July 1866, respectively, in rural Greene County, Virginia. From birth, they favored each other’s company to that of anyone else, and promised they would die for each other. Ada, Minna insisted, was “ninety-nine percent more worthy than I am.” They owned their connection, wholly and fiercely; it was the one thing that made them what they were while obscuring what they’d been.

  The sisters were striking girls, with patrician features and deftly turned bones. Minna was bold and brash, quirky and quick, and slept in whenever she could. She was Lilliputian in stature, barely five feet two and just 106 pounds. She read constantly, preferring tomes about psychology or history or culture. Sex subjects and love stories were for girls who didn’t know any better.

  “I am absolutely a freethinker,” Minna told novelist Irving Wallace in 1945, when she was seventy-nine years old (and still lying about her age). She and Ada were living under the name Lester in New York City, and her talks with Wallace would be the last interviews she ever granted. She was writing her own book at the time, titled Poets, Prophets and Gods. “No nursery stories for me,” Minna added. “My book would be heresy.”

  Ada (who sometimes spelled her name “Aida”) was guarded and reticent, more comfortable offering silent support to Minna’s words rather than chiming in with her own. Minna was the aggressor, the general who would direct their every mission; Ada was the defender and the patient, cautious aide. She had, Wallace recalled, “a voice much younger than Minna’s, a voice soft-spoken and well-modulated and faintly Southern…. This was Aida Everleigh, and she was charming.”

  Small but sturdily arranged, Ada monitored her figure so she never weighed more than 135 pounds. She, unlike the wiry Minna, benefited from a corset and used it to full advantage, flaunting her curves with fitted, tasteful gowns. Ada deliberately crafted a public persona—the southern belle with the simple, discreet charm—but saved her true personality for Minna alone.

  The sisters’ forebears were devout Episcopalians who emigrated from County Donegal, Ireland, in 1661, settled in north-central Virginia, and anglicized their surname to “Early.” Jeremiah Early, a great-great-great-grandfather, bought a sprawling plantation that traced the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their great-grandfather James Early served as a captain in the Revolutionary War and, in 1809, augmented the family’s landholdings with the purchase of nearly two thousand acres along Buck Mountain Creek. John Early, a great-uncle, acquired another thousand acres in Albemarle County, an area that today is known as Earlysville. Among the sisters’ ancestors are a presidential elector, state senators, congressmen, and one of the first settlers of Fredericksburg, Virginia; sheriffs, magistrates, lawyers, doctors, and surgeons; a man who gained a countywide reputation as a “tall tale teller” a U.S. registrar in bankruptcy; and a descendant of Andrew Jackson. Their family crest is, fittingly, a hand clenching a jeweled brass ring.

  The sisters’ father, Montgomery Simms, was born in 1834 in Greene County, Virginia, one of eight children of Lucy Thompson Early and James Simms, the county sheriff and a farmer. Twenty slaves cultivated wheat, hay, potatoes, and tobacco on the family plantation. At age twenty, Montgomery attended law school at the University of Virginia, leaving after one year. In that pre–bar exam era, a year of study qualified one to practice law. Montgomery was working in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he married his first cousin, Virginia “Jennie” Madison Simms.

  Jennie gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Lula, two years into the Civil War. Ada followed on February 21, 1864, just as General George Armstrong Custer and one thousand Union soldiers descended upon Earlysville. By the time Minna was born, on July 13, 1866, the Simms family fortunes mirrored those of the South. The War Between the States had stripped Virginia of its antebellum grandeur and prosperity, revealing, historian Harold Woodward wrote, “a grim reality of poverty and decay…. Once-fertile fields were covered with scrub oaks and stunted pines, the landscape dotted with decayed fences, half-starved cattle, ramshackle houses and the remnants of crumbling mansions.”

  Minna and Ada’s family headed back to their own tattered plantation in Greene County. The sisters’ grandparents had died, forcing their father to stop practicing law and farm the land himself, hoping to salvage what was left of their crops. Minna and Ada welcomed two more sisters, Willie Florence and Flora, and two brothers, Warren and George, but these additions to the family presented challenges rather than causes for celebratio
n. Agricultural prices were low, taxes and interest rates high, and income scarce. To make matters worse, Uncle Isaac, their father’s older brother, filched the bulk of their grandparents’ estate and ran off to Missouri.

  When Minna was ten and Ada twelve, their mother and little sister Willie both died. Blame could fall on any number of persistent nineteenth-century maladies: influenza, pneumonia, typhus, scarlet fever, tuberculosis—the sisters would never say. Shortly thereafter, baby brother George was handed over to an aunt because the family was overwhelmed. He, too, was never mentioned again. The sisters both grieved and internalized these tragedies, tucked them into their developing sense of the world. People left too often and too soon, they realized, and detachment was as vital a commodity as compassion or love. In their later years, the sisters stopped mentioning their lost siblings altogether, and claimed to be from a family of five rather than seven.

  The family moved to adjacent Madison County. Their neighbors included a former governor of Virginia and Confederate general and his five children, who lived in a mansion named Walnut Hills. Minna and Ada looked forward to their visits here, the hours spent among shiny, pretty things that distracted them from all they had lost. The sisters snacked at mahogany tables with bulbous clawed feet, let water from a bubbling lawn fountain tickle their fingers, sank into three-seater settees, velvet backs looming like the heads of Cerberus. It was a magical setting for Minna and Ada, and they realized how simple it could be to replace the realities they had for ones they wanted.

  The sisters’ most pervasive truth was that they strove not to have one. Minna in particular presented so many versions of herself, of her history, talents, and foibles, that the ever shifting composite sketch ultimately became her identity.

  When Irving Wallace first contacted Minna, she claimed she was not the former madam he was seeking. In fact, Minna declared, she and Ada were merely socialites whose names the infamous Everleigh Club owners had co-opted. Therefore, she couldn’t aid Irving in his quest to write a play featuring the brothel. Minna explained the convoluted situation in a May 1944 letter, her spidery handwriting and idiosyncratic punctuation spanning twenty pages:

  Dear Sgt Wallace,

  Aida and Minna Lester’s past is not linked with the Everleigh Club on South Dearborn Street—Chicago—Illinois…. Aida Lester and I lived in Chicago during the first decade of the Twentieth Century—but in a fashion far remote from the famous sisters’ exotic lives….

  Suffice it to say that many times false rumors linked our puritan lives with the sensational career of the sisters referred to in your letter!!…Finally we took action—Aida Lester and I—we located the sisters of Dearborn Street—Chicago!!! They proved their innocence of linking their names with ours—I will not take time explaining—plotters of the South Side Levee—their enemies—had sought to cause them trouble—prompted by political Levee gangster feuds!!! These sisters reside in New York City!!! still fearing their foes they live isolated lives…

  After receipt of your letter yesterday I visited the sisters to whom you had addressed it…. I asked them if they would consider pecuniary considerations for such assistance as they might concede to you for the setting and background of their Club on Dearborn Street—Chicago??—Their Answer was that they have an Album of photographs of the parlors and rooms of the Everleigh Club—They might part with those—but they must shun publicity…. I enclose clippings that suggest the past should be forgotten in this swift epoch!!

  Minna enclosed eleven clippings in her letter to Wallace:

  a suggestive advertisement for a lady’s slip;

  an advertisement for a new book about the marines;

  an Associated Press story about a warrant officer in the South Pacific who wanted to hear the voice of his newborn son on a long-distance phone call, but heard nothing until he asked his wife to spank the infant;

  a newspaper photograph from a Mickey Rooney film;

  newspaper photographs of a radio actress and from the film The Hitler Gang;

  a political cartoon of Adolf Hitler;

  a newspaper clipping of the actor Jimmy Stewart, at the time a major in the U.S. Army, being decorated by a lieutenant colonel;

  a picture from the New York Times drama section showing the sheet music and the casts of five Rodgers & Hammerstein musical comedies;

  and three more cartoons depicting Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler facing defeat.

  She signed off:

  Forget the Everleigh Club and the haunted past portrayed in the photographs of its vanished splendor shown in the album the sisters possess!!! Did not Byron declare “The past is nothing and at last—the future can but be the past”!! However if you still wish to have those Everleigh Club photographs—let me know!!!! Remember—the Everleigh Sisters names were Marie and Alice!!! The names Aida and Minna were borrowed from my name—and Aida Lesters when we were socialites in Chicago long ago!!!

  Perhaps the former madam was suggesting, slyly, that recent world history was more valid than her own, but Wallace was prompted to question if Minna truly recognized where her creation ended and her reality began.

  “I was strangely moved by this first letter from a sixty-six year old former madam of the world’s most elegant house of rendezvous in recent times,” he wrote, “moved by her elaborate and pathetically transparent story of having been a ‘socialite’ who had known the real Everleighs, and knew them still…. How much of what Minna had written me, I wondered, was conscious pretense based on elementary caution and how much was the sublimation of an old lady who had come to believe in a dream identity that she had invented for herself out of Wish?”

  The first time Wallace spoke to Minna on the phone, she again used the third person when referring to the Everleigh sisters.

  “The Catholics and Puritans in this country would be against such a play as you have in mind,” she told him. “The Catholic Church is powerful, you know, and it’s gaining strength…. It is against such women as the Everleighs, yet, Irving darling, when I lived in Chicago, some of the finest women I met socially were of the same class as the Everleighs…. All this condemnation of the Everleighs. They do not merit it. I know. The whole thing is like those Nazis on trial for their war crimes. Many of those Nazis followed orders. I don’t mean that they’re not guilty. They are guilty. But they followed orders, you understand. They had to do what they did. And the Everleigh sisters had to do what they did, too.”

  Minna asked Irving Wallace if he had ever seen a photograph of the Everleigh sisters, and he replied that he had not.

  “One had warm brown hair,” Minna continued, “and the other had natural golden hair, and it would be difficult to find anyone to portray them on the stage. They were very strange, not happy girls. There was so much tragedy in their lives.”

  In 1881, Minna and Ada’s beloved older sister, Lula, became the third member of their family to die within four years.

  “I had a sister, Lula, who played the violin,” Minna told Irving Wallace. “Her arm became paralyzed at nineteen, and later she died. I was fifteen then. I wanted to kill myself, but Aida wouldn’t let me.”

  After losing Lula, the sisters moved from Madison County, Virginia, to Warrensburg, a city in west-central Missouri. Several of their father’s relatives still lived in the state, including conniving brother Isaac. Their new home must have been a culture shock, a place that straddled North and South, a former slaveholding state that never seceded from the Union. A downtown, with its modest skyline, replaced rambling plantations and the unbroken profile of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Construction continued on a railroad line throughout the Civil War, and now Warrensburg was a major depot, a straight shot to St. Louis.

  If what Minna had said is true, she married a “wealthy devil of a man” here before she turned seventeen. But because she lied about her age to make herself twelve years younger, Minna’s “seventeen” was actually twenty-nine. And if Ada married the brother of Minna’s husband shortly thereafter, as legend holds it, she
would have been thirty-one, not nineteen.

  There are, in short, a dozen missing years in the sisters’ lives.

  Minna and Ada filled them in as best as they could, replacing tragedy with intrigue, parallel lives designed to fit over the ones they actually lived. They hailed not from the Blue Ridge Mountains, but from Bluegrass County down in Louisville, Kentucky. True, they said, their ancestors were a prominent Virginia family, but they were forced to flee Richmond when Benedict Arnold and his troops invaded in 1781. Minna, in fact, was even known as “Kentucky’s most intelligent woman.” (They also claimed to be from Evansville, Indiana, admitting their southern accent was part of the act. “The farm in Evansville—we couldn’t stand it,” Minna would add, laying it on thick. “This mortgage or that mortgage, the suffering, the hardships…we always liked nice things.”)

  Their father, they told friends and biographers, was a wealthy lawyer who spoke seven languages. Minna and Ada were his favorites, and he paid for their prestigious finishing school and elocution lessons—“born actresses,” he always called them. Minna learned to read before she was five, and literature was in her blood. “Do you know I’m related to Edgar Allan Poe?” she asked Irving Wallace. “You’ll laugh like hell, but it’s true. On my mother’s side we’re the same breed as Poe’s mother.” A bevy of black servants plaited the sisters’ hair when they were young and hemmed couture gowns after they became women and were careful to shield the girls from evidence that the world could be an ugly place. They were the only madams in history who had started out as debutantes instead of whores.