by Karen Abbott
The sisters said they never chased boys—who needed them, really? They grew up believing Daddy was the only man who mattered; marriage was a trap silly girls fell into. Nevertheless, Minna claimed, she was only sixteen when a “southern gentleman” flattered her into dating him, then coaxed her into marriage. (“Lester” was his name, the story went, although she also alternately implied that was her maiden or middle name.) She demanded a grand ceremony at high noon, recalling her father’s wry warning to be wary of men after dark.
Order whatever you please, her father said, and Minna—perhaps remembering the parties she had witnessed at the Walnut Hills mansion—later described a lavish reception that impressed society. She strove for simple elegance: glossy invitations, a modest spread of mushroom-and-clam bisque, boiled breast of bone chicken, hominy pyramids with cheese, rolls, olives, nuts, ice cream, and, of course, champagne. She and the bridesmaids carried bursting arrangements of lily of the valley. A rose motif latticed the damask tablecloth. Rose-petal candies, rose etchings on the crystal goblets.
The cake must be round, to assure eternal love. The mere mention of a rectangular confection shocked Minna into dismissing the caterer. The new chef draped her cake with blossoms to match her bouquet, and treasures lay hidden beneath the icing. She cut the first piece herself; then, in turn, each member of her party cut a slice, hoping to find a lucky trinket. There were sets of fortune’s tokens: a ring to foretell the next to be married; a dime to indicate the wealthiest (a custom from which Minna suggested John D. Rockefeller Sr. got the idea for his “Rockefeller dimes”); a wish-bone for the luckiest and a thimble to signify the old maid. The bridegroom had his own cake: dark chocolate, rich and laden with fruit. To close the festivities, servants tucked pieces in small white boxes and handed them out as souvenirs.
Minna devised a bleak ending for her fairy tale. Her husband proved to be a brute, she claimed, often closing his hands around her slender neck, fingers nearly meeting. He applied enough pressure to make his point, leaving red imprints on her skin. “No other man,” he warned, “shall ever take my place.”
She calmed her husband by agreeing with him but confided her misery to her sister. Ada wrote herself into Minna’s story, adding an identical plot-line. She married another “Lester,” the brother of Minna’s husband, and he, too, had a penchant for strangulation.
Enough was enough.
Within the year, Minna packed her things, telling her sister that any fate was better than a silent windpipe, and took a train to Washington, D.C. Ada joined her a few days later. Good riddance to Louisville and Victorian marriage, to the horrors of a half-known life. They never went back, advising their beloved parents to forever extinguish the window lamps lit on their behalf.
“It is doubtful if Minna and Ada Everleigh ever forgave the brutal treatment they had received from their husbands,” wrote Charles Washburn in 1936. “Theirs was a stored-up bitterness toward all males from which they could not escape. The way they studied men, their insight into the whims of men and their determination to make men pawns in their parlor were the antics of the spider and the fly.”
Washburn was a friend and helped perpetuate the myths about their privileged Kentucky upbringing and cruel husbands. But his words were essentially true, reflecting the sisters’ experiences—ones they never acknowledged or discussed—during all those missing years. Men in general, the sisters concluded, were gullible but not to be trusted; greedy but frivolous with money; predatory but easily trapped.
Naturally, Minna gave a different impression in her remarks to Irving Wallace.
“Irving,” the former madam spider cooed, “I love men. I esteem your sex highly.”
After fleeing their marriages, they joined a traveling stock company, saving money and meeting characters unlike anyone they’d known back in Kentucky. While on the road, the sisters said, they learned of a $35,000 inheritance (the equivalent of about $816,000 today). Their father died, according to one version (Montgomery Simms, of course, was still very much alive and well), while others made oblique reference to “estates in the South.” By 1892, however, even Montgomery’s scheming brother Isaac had a run of bad luck, losing most of his wealth and land during the Cleveland administration, and it’s unlikely that the sisters’ newfound fortune was acquired through a family connection.
Their last show was in Omaha, Nebraska, where they found themselves stranded, unsure of what to do next. A casual remark from one of their cast mates sparked an idea they never would have had on their own.
“My mother would be angry if she knew I was on the stage,” she joked. “She thinks I’m in a den of iniquity.”
Now there’s an idea, the sisters thought. What about a high-class resort? Men were brutes—let them pay to be made fools of. The sisters could enjoy revenge and comic relief at the same time.
There was another underlying motive. Minna and Ada noticed they were none too welcome among Omaha’s women. Although “polite society” typically shunned show folk, the sisters were deemed sophisticated enough to attend several local parties. Yet there were never any second invitations. Pity we’re too charming and worldly—and intimidating—for Omaha’s housewives, they mused. As a test, Minna and Ada hosted a grand luncheon, but only a few townswomen graced the occasion with their presence.
The sisters were furious. So the women refused to visit, but their husbands surely would—especially if the invitations were to a brothel.
What a hilarious, delicious idea. It took one uproarious weekend to develop a plan, and the rest of their careers to weave these revenge tales into legend.
In 1989, a Virginia woman named Evelyn Diment wrote to Irving Wallace, adding another possibility to the sisters’ missing years:
Dear Mr. Wallace:
I have just received and started to read your book, THE GOLDEN DOOR [sic]. In your AUTHOR’S NOTE: How it Began, you write at some length about your meeting and friendship with the Everleigh née Lester sisters, Minna and Aida…almost all of what they related as their family history which they told you was a fabrication of the truth (a total lie), I know, because these two women were my Great-Aunts. The real truth of their career beginnings were sordid and they were subjected to degradation, not even spoken about ever until the last several years.
I am sorry to have to say this, after your “long friendship” with Aunt Minna and Aunt Aida, but they hoodwinked you from start to finish about their family background and lives before they opened their, perhaps, never to be rivaled House of Pleasure. I suspect that they were trying to protect their real family from embarrassment, and managed to do so quite effectively.
My eldest brother, who is now sixty-six years old, was rushed to New York City after swallowing, as an infant, an open diaper pin which lodged in his throat. The family stayed with Aunt Minna and Aunt Aida while in New York during this family crisis.
I wish I could know with certainty where “your” truth and fiction overlap in your book, because in your first page, in which you have Aunt Minna recounting the story of their Kentucky background, lawyer Father, etc., to the young reporter—there was not one word of truth in it.
I wish I had known you around 1944, you could have gotten, at least, a portion of the unvarnished truth of their beginnings, et cetera. Not the concocted version Aunt Aida and Aunt Minna told you.
Most sincerely,
Evelyn E. Diment
Evelyn further claimed that the sisters “lied about their background. They were struggling because they were at the end of the Civil War and there were very few ways to make money. Their plantation was lost because they couldn’t pay the taxes. They began as prostitutes and they became madams. Their father put them in the business, and then these women made a marvelous success out of it…. Southern families have away of keeping things very quiet. And if anyone knew anything, they kept their mouth shut.”
Whatever may have happened during the family’s hardships, the sisters cared enough for their father to have his body relocate
d from Missouri to Virginia after his death in 1915. Today they are buried alongside him, their mother, and little sister Willie in St. Paul’s Cemetery in Alexandria.
Minna and Ada rest side by side, together in death as they were in life. If they didn’t marry men named Lester—if Lester is, in fact, a name they adopted, in the grand tradition of prostitutes, upon entering “the life”—then it is a secret the sisters took literally to the grave.
In bold lettering, their markers read:
MINNA LESTER SIMMS
1866–1948
AIDA LESTER SIMMS
1864–1960
In Omaha by 1895, the sisters were ready to invest their $35,000 “inheritance.” Most likely they convinced a powerful acquaintance—a cattle baron, maybe, or a railroad mogul—to back their burgeoning enterprise. “It is hardly conceivable,” wrote Real West magazine, “that a couple of amateurs could break in without proper connections and set up an elaborate brothel in competition with existing houses at any time.”
They found a run-down parlor house at 12th and Jackson streets, a shabby, fraying part of town, and began renovations. Ada sent notice to their old actress friends who sought work, promising good money and clean quarters. The sisters sat for painted portraits, Victorian-style glamour shots more suggestive of European royalty than the proprietors of a whorehouse. Ada donned a hat topped with a sprig of flowers and a lacy-sleeved, swollen gown so tightly corseted that her breasts seemed to beg for emancipation. Minna wore a bonnet and a dress layered with frothy ruffles. She reclined on a velvet chaise longue, one leg extended, a high-heeled foot pointed daintily.
Business was steady, but Omaha had seen better days. The financial panic of 1893 had ravaged the town, but its leaders—mindful of how expositions had benefited other cities like Louisville, Cincinnati, and, most notably, Chicago—had a solution. The town’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition was to run for five months, from June 1 to November 1, 1898.
The sisters sensed an opportunity to corner the market on exposition visitors, and rented a building in the downtown business district at 14th and Dodge streets. Such an optimum locale was bound to lure fairgoers who tired of the usual attractions and sought bawdy midnight indiscretions.
The exposition grounds were laid out in a fashion similar to those of the Mall in Washington, D.C., covering 108 city blocks. Myriad recent inventions were among the 4,062 exhibits—flushing toilets, faucets, X-ray machines, incandescent light bulbs, and an incubator for premature infants—all of which consistently drew large, drop-jawed crowds. Visitors tasted Jell-O and Boston baked beans for the first time. They saw Buffalo Bill Cody, by this time one of the most famous men in the world, and the same cast of scouts, cowboys, rough riders, and crack shots that had awed the crowds at the Chicago World’s Fair.
More than 2.6 million people passed through Omaha during the exposition, and the sisters welcomed their share of the visitors. Though mentioned only in prudent, late night whispers, Minna and Ada made a lasting impression on the locals. A Mr. Tom Knapp, who grew up to be the Omaha city welfare director, delivered telegrams as a young boy to the Everleighs at their place of business.
“They were some punkins,” he recalled seventy years later, in 1968. “They were some lookers.”
By the time the exposition closed in the fall, the sisters had doubled their initial investment. What should they do with $70,000, and where could they go? The moneyed crowd fled as soon as the fair displays were hauled away, and Omaha’s native population—a blue-collar mix of Germans, Swedes, and Danes—was not interested in champagne and $10 admission fees.
There was nothing left for them there.
While dives across the country specialized in the defloration of young virgins, beatings, bondage, and daisy chains—a continuous line of girls pleasuring one another with fingers and mouths—the Everleighs proved that madams could conduct business with decency and class. Some situations couldn’t be helped. Many courtesans suffered from chronic pelvic congestion, a dull, persistent pain caused by continuous sex without orgasm. The latest medical books described a woman’s most fertile period as during and after menstruation, but working girls knew better. Still, mistakes happened, and older women, usually retired madams, ran baby farms for prostitutes’ children. Girls died from all manner of horrid abortion procedures, and syphilis was a dreadful hazard.
“It is claimed that this disease originates in the underworld,” mused a madam named Josie Washburn, who worked in Omaha shortly before the sisters, “which is not wholly true, as it can be found scattered among all classes. The underworld is obliged to be on its guard all the time to elude it.”
There were precautions one could take, sheaths made of animal skin, but clients often balked—“wet, flabby sheep’s gut,” as one man put it. Leave it to the French to improve upon the idea, offering products supposedly pleasing to both parties, with fanciful names like “le Conquérant” and “le Porc-epic.” But even when harlots were appropriately vigilant, they often emphasized efficiency instead of fantasy—the “anti-Balzacs,” as the Everleighs might say.
One laborer’s experience in a modest brothel in New Orleans’s Storyville was typical:
“You wouldn’t believe how fast those girls could get their clothes off. Usually they’d leave on their stockings and earrings, things like that. A man usually took off his trousers and shoes. New girls didn’t give you a second to catch your breath before they’d be all over you trying to get you to heat up and go off as soon as possible…. When it came to the actual act, though, the routine was standard…. I think the girls could diagnose clap better than the doctors at that time. She’d have a way of squeezing it that, if there was anything in there, she’d find it. Then she’d wash it off with a clean washcloth. She’d lay on her back and get you on top of her so fast, you wouldn’t even know you’d come up there on your own power…. I’d say that the whole thing, from the time you got in the room until the time you came, didn’t take three minutes…. Most all the married women you run across are just a different kind of whore. But a man keeps looking for somebody he can just feel—well, like he isn’t always alone.”
The sisters packed their finest dresses, lists of influential clients, and collections of butterfly pins and set off, two country girls eager to return Chicago’s thrilling embrace. On the way, sitting face-to-face in their Pullman Palace car, they determined to enforce the same standards that elevated their Omaha resort—no wringing a client’s body as if it were a piece of wet laundry. Courtesans would be encouraged to perform orally as often as possible; there was less risk and more money involved. A man who came to their house would see everything he wanted to and nothing he didn’t, and he would never feel rushed or cheated, disillusioned or alone.
The sisters also edited the story of how they became madams and planned to redefine what it meant to be one. A rejection of their impeccable standards would mean nothing less than war—against both prostitution as it should be and the invented histories they longed to have.
THE STORIES EVERYONE KNEW
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—HAVELOCK ELLIS
As the century drew to a close, white slavery narratives began spreading beyond midwestern lumber camps. The sheer volume of stories bolstered the notion of a “traffic in girls”—especially in bustling urban centers like Chicago.
“Never before in civilization,” wrote Hull House founder Jane Addams, “have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The city’s status as a major rail center made it an ideal location for unscrupulous madams and procurers. How easy it was to feign a welcoming presence at the train stations, to talk of opportunities behind counters or desks, of stardom on stages. The girls came by the hour, bodies tilting from the weight of their bags, stepping from the platform into a world of unrelenting clamor and smoke and si
n, knowing they’d just left a place they might never see again. Under the headline MISSING GIRLS, the Chicago Inter Ocean explored the mysterious disappearances of young women in the city and suggested an “agony column” listing all their names.
Reform organizations reflected this progress. The New York Committee for the Prevention of the State Regulation of Vice went national, reinventing itself as the American Purity Alliance. They planned for their first National Purity Congress, to be held in Baltimore in October 1895.
Two hundred delegates attended, representing philanthropic organizations from across the country. In subsequent months, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York hosted additional conferences. Subscription rolls for The Philanthropist, now the official journal of the American Purity Alliance, doubled in size by January 1896. One year later, they had circulated more than a million pages of literature—including a 472-page monograph of speeches from the inaugural Baltimore Purity Congress. One address, penned by a former journalist and WCTU missionary named Charlton Edholm, was titled “The Traffic in Girls.”
In her first version of this address, Edholm spoke of “an organized, systematized traffic in girls,” basing her case solely on evidence proffered by Englishman William T. Stead. But in 1899 she issued a revised edition—one that revolutionized the white slavery debate in America just as the Everleigh sisters arrived in Chicago, preparing a revolution of their own.
Edholm hails Stead in her prelude as “the deliverer and protector of little girls from human gorillas,” but this time the substance of the report is based on investigations in America. “We have used facts which have come under our own observation,” Edholm stresses. “There is a slave trade in this country, and it is not black folks this time, but little white girls—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen years of age—and they are snatched out of our arms, and from our Sabbath schools and from our communion tables.”