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

by Karen Abbott

  They came to see the Moorish Room, featuring the obligatory Turkish corner, complete with overstuffed couches and rich, sweeping draperies; and the Japanese Parlor, with its ornately carved teakwood chair resting upon a dais, a gold silk canopy hovering above. (The Tribune noted that the Japanese Parlor was “a harlot’s dream of what a Japanese palace might look like inside.”) In the Egyptian Room, a full-size effigy of Cleopatra kept a solemn eye on the proceedings. The Chinese Room, entirely different from the ambiguously named Oriental Room, offered packages of tiny firecrackers and a huge brass beaker in which to shoot them—where else but at the Everleigh Club could a man indulge his adult and childish impulses?

  “Next week,” Minna often joked, “we are contemplating putting in a box of sand for the kiddies.”

  Ada, especially, grew obsessed with the Club’s maintenance. On the rare occasions when she joined Minna in the parlors, she spent half her time wiping smudges from the mirrors, straightening the oil paintings, checking the gold piano for unsightly water marks. “It was a happy day,” she said, “when we conceived the idea of using rubber washers from Mason jars on the bottoms of the glasses.”

  The gold piano, Ada hinted, had become the love of her life—even when one client vied valiantly for the title. A man, whose name Ada never revealed (sex, both sisters agreed, was a subject best confined to business), visited often and confessed he was wild about the elder Everleigh. Ada’s admirer brought her flowers—a gesture, wrote Charles Washburn, akin to “bringing a glass of water to a lake”—and presented her with a three-carat diamond ring, which she accepted gratefully, though her jewelry collection included, among other pricey baubles, a necklace worth more than $100,000. He sent her candy, composed love notes, watched her as if she might vanish should he even briefly avert his eyes.

  But her paramour’s business called for him to relocate to New York. He wrote to Ada, inviting her to join him, promising marriage. Ada was tempted—it sounded like quite the adventure. She replied to his letter, but kept postponing the trip. The man wrote again and again, pleading his case, and finally involved a newspaper reporter who happened to be a mutual friend. Ada’s lover sent the journalist a copy of her letter and asked what he could do to win her over. The reporter rushed to the Club to put in a word for his friend.

  “Your letter to him plainly indicates how you feel,” he said. “I never read such a charming note. It’s literature; it’s sentimental—it’s everything. What’s the matter with you?”

  Still, Ada couldn’t bring herself to go. Minna had her theories as to why: Perhaps, after the antics and glamour of the Club, her sister would be bored to pieces stuck in a marriage?

  That wasn’t it, Ada said.

  The reporter ventured an opinion. “Maybe you didn’t care to leave your sister?”

  Ada turned to Minna, and the sisters shared a wordless exchange. The reporter had come too close to the truth, an unacceptable prospect to two women who believed facts could be rewritten and improved upon. Ada’s tone lightened, and she gave an answer that sounded like something the very sister in question might say.

  “I don’t think it was entirely that,” she quipped. “My sweetheart took a terrible dislike to our gold piano. He said it was feverish and unbecoming. I couldn’t forgive him for that. I would have sacrificed my diamonds, anything, but not the gold piano.”

  To keep the piano shining, the mirrored walls intact, the rugs clean, and the perfume jets shooting, the sisters allotted $18,000 per year in renovations. It would be worth it, they reasoned, when patrons returned as eager to see the updated décor as the new selection of girls. It was time for the Gold Room, Minna’s and Ada’s favorite, to be entirely redone in gold leaf. A team of laborers replaced the gilt on everything from the goldfish bowls to the spittoons. It looked stunning, Minna thought, the whole room glittering from corner to corner, but that night a guest accidentally smeared a panel. The metal was still soft, and the man left a clear imprint. This wouldn’t do, and Minna couldn’t wait until next year’s renovation to have it fixed. She called in a dauber right away.

  “Come, I’ll show you where a man put his hand last night,” she said, leading the handyman upstairs.

  He hesitated and seemed nervous. It occurred to Minna what he was thinking, but she didn’t rush to clarify. Why ruin what was sure to be a perfectly good punch line?

  “If it’s all the same to you,” he replied after a moment, “I’d rather have a glass of beer.”

  Literary sensations like Ring Lardner, George Ade, Percy Hammond, Edgar Lee Masters, and Theodore Dreiser came and listened to stunning creatures recite poetry classics. “Until at last, serene and proud, in all the splendour of her light,” the Everleigh butterflies murmured in between sips of champagne, “she walks the terraces of cloud, supreme as Empress of the Night.”

  The Club entertained sports icons like James J. Corbett and Stanley Ketchel and, on one fateful night, Jack Johnson; theater celebrities like John Barrymore; a circus star named the Great Fearlesso; and gambling virtuosos, most notably “Bet a Million” Gates, who enjoyed good luck among the harlots even as he ridiculed their attempts at sophisticated discourse. “That,” he joked to the sisters, “is educating the wrong end of a whore.”

  Pioneers of the automobile industry came. The production of “horseless carriages” had evolved considerably since two models—the prototype Morrison electric and a gasoline-powered car from Germany—were exhibited, with little fanfare, at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1895, the Chicago Times-Herald sponsored a round-trip race from Chicago to Evanston, and two cars finished despite the foot of snow that buried the metropolitan area. No mere publicity stunt, the race launched Chicago’s auto-manufacturing industry.

  Within five years, 22 local companies began building and selling horseless carriages, and by the century’s turn, 377 of them vied for space on the city’s clogged streets. The ensuing chaos—collisions with wagons, lax enforcement, arbitrary traffic signals and laws—failed to dampen the public’s enthusiasm for cars, in Chicago or elsewhere. Crowds cheered as New York drivers raced thirty miles through the streets from Kingsbridge to Irvington-on-Hudson, north of the city; and in Detroit, a man named Ransom E. Olds invented an assembly line to churn out hundreds of his Curved Dash Oldsmobiles, sold to eager consumers for $650 each. Bicycles were passé, but cars signified money, modernity, and romance. Every man sang the new hit song “Come Away with Me, Lucille, in My Merry Oldsmobile” even if he couldn’t afford to own one.

  Chicago hosted its first major auto show in July 1900, five months after the Club’s grand opening. After the presentations at the official Coliseum headquarters, the men retired en masse to the Everleigh Club. They were welcome anytime—manufacturers were known to spare no expense when wooing important dealers—but Minna and Ada, for the next eleven years, always designated one “Automobile Night” during the week of the show. Companies were welcome to set up corporate and expense accounts at the brothel for their employees. A man gained admittance only by flashing an official exhibitor’s badge and was treated to a lavish feast at the Pullman Buffet, a bottle of wine, and a trip up the mahogany staircase.

  Wealthy ranchers came to the Club from the Southwest; bankers and Broadway troupes sojourned from the East Coast; congressional committees indulged during breaks from the capital; and on March 3, 1902, royalty visited from overseas.

  Prince Henry of Prussia had arrived in New York harbor in the dwindling days of February to accept a yacht built for his brother Kaiser Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany, and to present the United States with his own gift, a statue of Frederick the Great. Prominent Americans viewed the prince’s trip as an opportunity to showcase the country’s brightest thinkers and shrewdest capitalists, and to flex its developing imperial muscle. The United States now claimed Hawaii and Puerto Rico as territories and prepared to trade with a newly autonomous Cuba. With the eyes of the world poised to judge Prince Henry’s reception, America would spare no expense.
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  “England’s only chance to get even,” joked the Chicago Daily News, “is to send us over a live prince as soon as we have recovered from Prince Henry.”

  The prince spent a few days in New York. He attended a fête in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and lunched at Sherry’s with J. P. Morgan, Adolphus Busch, Charles Schwab, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison.

  Debate raged in the Second City, meanwhile, over an appropriate itinerary for Prince Henry. Chicago’s twenty-thousand-plus German immigrants planned to line a brilliantly lit Michigan Avenue and roar as the prince traveled past, on his way to an elaborate banquet at the Auditorium Hotel. There he would dine with 165 “representative men” of Chicago, including J. Ogden Armour, Potter Palmer, Oscar Mayer, Marshall Field Jr., and Mayor Carter Harrison II. The planning committees also approved a choral festival at the First Regiment Armory, a tour of Marshall Field’s department store, a trip to Lincoln’s grave, another stop at the Auditorium Hotel for a grand ball, and a lunch and reception at the Germania Club. The visit, all told, would cost the city $75,000.

  But the committee nixed a tour of the gory Union Stock Yards (“Prince Henry probably will brush the committee aside and visit the Stock Yards anyhow,” the Daily News sniffed. “He will want to learn how Europe feeds its armies and navies”) and remained ambivalent on whether visiting royalty should enjoy the “old feudal privilege” of kissing Chicago’s debutantes. “It won’t hurt the prince,” one committeeman argued, “to get a taste of real American hero worship.”

  If Prince Henry did kiss the debutantes, he never told.

  The sight Prince Henry most desired to see, however, was neither discussed by the planning committee nor detailed in the press. Such discretion benefited the Everleigh sisters, who in anticipation of the prince’s arrival at the Club on midnight, March 3, were in the midst of frenzied planning. None of the Everleigh butterflies had heard of Prince Henry of Prussia before he announced his intention to visit, so the sisters prepared lessons—not about the German royal family (who cared?), but about how to entertain them properly.

  Minna stood in front of her thirty courtesans, arms waving, a conductor nearing crescendo, and told them how it would be done. Prince Henry, she announced, was the sort of man who knew exactly what he wanted. So as Everleigh girls their job was to give him something he’d never even considered.

  They would enact a mythological celebration centered around Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, agriculture, fertility of nature, and—closest to Minna’s heart—the patron god of the Greek stage. She’d contacted an old friend from her theater days and ordered real fawnskin outfits for them to wear, with nothing—that’s right, nothing—underneath. No petticoats, no stockings, no corsets. Not even shoes—at least not right away. Come now, they had to begin practicing. The ritual was complex, commemorating the dismemberment of Zeus’s infant son at the hands of the Titans. There would be a cloth bull and some raw meat involved.

  Around midnight on March 3, Prince Henry and his party rang the Club’s bell. A tall man, the prince had an unruly sprig of a beard and skin like a cracked egg. High, shiny black boots hugged his legs, making his pants bunch out in tufts over his knees. The members of his entourage wore sweeping capes and frowns that stretched to their necks. Expressions improved markedly once Minna greeted her boys and escorted them to the Pullman Buffet for dinner.

  At 1:30 a.m., Minna came to round everyone up, telling the girls the show was about to start—touch up their makeup one last time and don’t forget they weren’t to wear shoes. The harlots yanked pins from their hair and shook it out, slicing strands with their fingers, the messier the better. They rushed down the spiral staircase and into the parlor, where they found Prince Henry and his entourage at a long table. The girls whooped and swirled in circles, kicking, backs arching like drawn bows. The decisive clang of cymbals punctuated every move. One girl thrashed her way across the room, heading directly for Prince Henry, and just as she reached him she leapt, turned a half circle in midair, and landed on his lap, latching on to his neck. The others followed suit, and soon every man at the table was grappling with an Everleigh butterfly.

  Minna dimmed the lights, the signal for the second act of the show. In rehearsals she’d used real torches but found that they’d “smoked up the room,” so she’d decided to improvise during the real event.

  A servant wheeled a bull made entirely of cloth into the room. The girls raced toward the structure, punching its head and biting its hide, spitting white flurries of cotton. Minna watched, nodding with approval. It was perfect, she thought. This was exactly how the infant Dionysus-Zagreus had been killed. For sound effects, a male butler bellowed each time a mouth clamped down on the bull. Then Minna pointed a finger, and servants fetched platters piled with uncooked sirloin. For ten minutes, the harlots tore into the raw strips, ripping the meat with feral bites, their faces stained with pink slashes of animal blood. The Germans loved it.

  When the platters were empty, Minna threw on the lights. She would now take their visitors for a grand tour of the Club. The harlots trooped back upstairs, changed from their fawnskins into evening gowns, pinned up their hair, wiped the blood from their cheeks. A few girls brought dignitaries to their boudoirs, eager to display other talents besides playacting Greek mythology, and hurried downstairs to join the champagne toast when their guests were satisfied.

  Minna instructed everyone to raise their glasses, toasting the kaiser in absentia and the prince in the flesh (although the kaiser, after learning of his brother’s visit to the Club, cast a mild insult by asking the vintage of the wine served). She was delighted when the prince returned the favor, comparing Chicago with Berlin, pointing out the American city’s ever growing German population. He called his new friends, Minna and Ada Everleigh, “fräuleins.” Ada, who never drank beer, showed her respect by gulping down a tall mug of pilsner.

  Minna then ordered the table cleared. She had one more surprise.

  Two butlers helped Vidette, the best dancer among the Everleigh butterflies, up to the mahogany surface. The orchestra struck up “The Blue Danube,” and the harlot kicked again and again, her feet flying higher each time, legs meeting and parting like a pair of scissors possessed. In the middle of her routine, one high-heeled silver slipper launched from her foot, sailed across the room, and collided with a glass of champagne. Some of the liquid spilled into the shoe, and a nearby man named Adolph scooped it up.

  “Boot liquor,” he called, raising the slipper high. “The darling mustn’t get her feet wet.”

  Without further comment, he tilted back his head, drained the champagne from the shoe, and tossed it back to its owner.

  “On with the dance!” someone yelled.

  “Nix,” said another guest. “Off with a slipper.” He lifted a harlot’s leg, resting it against his waist, and removed her shoe. “Why should Adolph have all the fun?” he added. “This is everybody’s party.”

  Prince Henry’s entire entourage rose, yanked a slipper from the nearest girl, and held it aloft. Waiters scuttled about, hurriedly filling each shoe with champagne.

  “To the prince.”

  “To the kaiser.”

  “To beautiful women the world over.”

  Prince Henry of Prussia departed Chicago by 2:00 p.m. the following afternoon, but his slipper sipping began a trend that long outlasted his visit. “In New York millionaires were soon doing it publicly,” wrote Charles Washburn. “At home parties husbands were doing it, in back rooms, grocery clerks were doing it—in fact, everybody was doing it…it made a more lasting impression on a girl than carrying her picture in a watch.”

  While the Everleighs made special accommodations for European royalty, they also welcomed those from the opposite end of the social scale. Madams couldn’t be part of the underworld and entirely exclude the underworld—thieves, kidnappers, burglars, safecrackers. The sisters knew, from their own history, that those who subverted the official rules often created better ones, tha
t the right sorts of lies could become the bones of truth.

  They believed there were two types of men, “depraved blue nosers and regular fellows.” If a member of the former group lodged a complaint, Ada was summoned to smooth things over. “There, there,” she soothed, blaming the trouble on the heat, on an inferior grade of champagne, on a girl’s lack of refinement—never on the client himself. Minna handled the bruisers, the visitors who would sooner throw a punch than notice the label on a bottle of wine. “What kind of a man are you?” she’d chide. “Brace up, pardner, you’re not that sort, and we are sure you can lick any man in the house.” Then she would convince him, discreetly but firmly, that he didn’t want to. Minna’s men, just like most of her butterflies, were products of the lower classes and also considered on a case-by-case basis.

  Clarence Clay was one hoodlum who made the cut. A thief with impeccable manners, Clarence would dart down to the Cort Theater near Randolph Street, crack open a safe, pillage the contents, and return to the Everleigh Club as if he’d slipped away to use the bathroom. Minna always knew what Clarence was up to but never betrayed him. He was amiable, never hurt anyone, and spent plenty of money.

  The Everleighs had to be mindful, too, of criminals among the ranks of their courtesans—some of whom weren’t as harmless as Clarence. “Honesty is its own reward,” Minna told her girls, and in her own interpretation of the concept, she meant her words sincerely. “Never have any black marks on your record. What would your future husband say if he suspected you had mistreated a man? Keep on being good girls, even if it hurts.” The sporting life wasn’t shameful, Minna emphasized, but some of the people attached to the business were. Vic Shaw, for one—no doubt livid that Prince Henry steered clear of her house during his tour—interfered with Everleigh courtesans at every opportunity, encouraging them into “vicious pathways.”