Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  What the reporter didn’t know was how avidly the sisters, generally speaking, disliked his gender.

  Minna took charge, ordering her boy to please sit and make himself comfortable. Yes—on that silk divan. She and Ada settled across from him. Edmund, the butler, appeared with a flute of champagne, which Carson downed in one zealous gulp. Minna signaled to keep the bubbly coming.

  Carson asked what they knew he would ask. If Marshall Field Jr. had indeed ventured into the Levee on the night before he was shot, where else would a man of his stature go but to the Everleigh Club?

  Minna and Ada smiled but said nothing.

  Had Field, as one nurse alleged, been pierced by a paper knife and not a bullet?

  The sisters replied that they had no idea.

  If the Everleighs really had no involvement in or knowledge of the tragedy, why not dispel the rumors and just say so?

  Edmund arrived on cue, offered their guest another drink. Carson, like all the others, left with a giddy champagne buzz but no story.

  But Marshall Field Jr. wasn’t dead yet, not in any sense of the word.

  Chicago was changing. Every day it awoke a new city. Its leading citizens no longer recognized it as the place that had raised them.

  The stream of immigration that flowed in the 1890s became a deluge during the first decade of the new century. More arrived every day from Italy and Germany, France and China, Russia and Greece, bringing with them their odd customs and habits, their peculiar religions and strange tongues. They joined the thousands that had descended during the 1893 World’s Fair, disreputable men and women who stayed long after the Ferris wheel was dismantled and Buffalo Bill skipped town. Together these interlopers built their own cities within the city, block after block of gambling parlors and opium dens and brothels where inmates dangled bare breasts from windows and did unspeakable things with animals. What depravity went on inside a dive named the Bucket of Blood? Did a street called Bed Bug Row belong in a town like Chicago?

  The horrors were spreading to respectable neighborhoods and solid homes. Young women were no longer content to sit with suitors on front porches or in parlors. Ten months earlier, in January 1905, a teenage girl from a good family guzzled a mug of chloroform and died on the floor of 33rd Street’s American Dance Hall. There were whispers about syndicates of evil men, foreign men, who lured girls to the city, drugged and raped them at “clearinghouses,” and sold them for $50 to enterprising madams.

  Advertisements in newspapers seeking secretaries and clerks and leads for musical productions were best read skeptically. The taxi driver could deliver a girl straight to evil’s door. The nickel theaters were moral suicide. Not even the ice-cream parlors were safe. If things continued as they were, the Levee district would corner Chicago and swallow it whole, this fine, proud city that wielded its triumphs like a scepter and wore its reputation like a crown. Surely the rest of America would not be far behind.

  The Marshall Field Jr. shooting was a seismic boom with aftershocks that rattled the Everleigh Club. The sisters would be hit from both sides, the law and the outlaws, two diametrically opposed groups who disdained them for precisely the same reason. The Club was the gleaming symbol of the Levee district, shining too brightly on those who operated best in the dark.

  “They were the Angels of the Line,” wrote journalist Charles Washburn, twenty-five years after the war over the Levee, “and, as angels, hated and persecuted.”

  But on that fall night, as Minna Everleigh watched the reporter disappear into the murk of Dearborn Street, she did not fret about what trouble might come, or who would be behind it. She and Ada had work to do: keep books, prepare the courtesans, and greet their boys, watching each man admire the seesaw sway of a girl’s rear as he followed her up the stairs. Would he like a warm bath, or something scrumptious from the Pullman Buffet, or a favor far too naughty to say aloud?

  They ran the most successful—and respected—whorehouse in America and had no reason, yet, to believe that would ever change.

  PART ONE

  THE

  SCARLET SISTERS

  EVERLEIGH

  1899–1905

  STRIPED SKUNK

  AND WILD ONIONS

  South Dearborn Street. (The Everleigh Club is at near right.)

  An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I’m

  afraid we are in for the time of our lives.

  —THE EVERLEIGH SISTERS

  In the winter of 1899, a train clattered toward Chicago, fat coils of smoke whipping the sky. Minna and Ada Everleigh sat together in a Pullman Palace car, sipping wine served by porters wearing white jackets and gloves. Velvet curtains framed the windows, and thick rugs absorbed the curved heels of their boots. The sisters checked their reflections in bevel-edged French mirrors, reclined on Marshall Field’s most luxurious bedsheets, ate in a dining car where woodcock and prairie chicken were presented on tables set with Belgian linen and expensive English china. The train, lit entirely by electricity, was fitted with a new contraption—“vestibules,” accordion-shaped passageways that connected the cars, shutting out the fumes and wind. The air inside their car hung heavy and whisper quiet, but the sisters were restless, giddy with plans: They would build upon what they had learned as madams in Omaha, Nebraska, and create the finest brothel in history.

  Their grandiose scheme could be expected in an era when consumers, whether seeking a car or company for the night, were becoming royalty. The world was, for the first time, a market where every need could be met, every idea coaxed to fruition. Two brothers named Wright were experimenting with the idea of human flight. Druggists stocked $1 bottles of Hibbard’s Herb Extract, a “wonderful cure” that soothed “itching, burning, and smarting” and cured “Female Weakness.” McClure’s Magazine marveled at how Marconi’s wireless sent messages “at will through space.” The country’s first major automobile show would take place on New Year’s Day. The economy fine-tuned itself as mass production replaced craft production—an admirable feat, but the precise inverse of what the Everleigh sisters had in mind. A man would pay and pay well to feel as though each of his parts, considered alone, was greater than his total.

  Obsession with self-fulfillment began to mold the national ethos, a concept Theodore Dreiser explored in his soon-to-be-published Sister Carrie. Country girl Carrie Meeber, walking past posh Chicago department stores, feels keenly her “individual shortcomings of dress and that shadow of manner which she thought must hang about her and make clear to all who and what she was.”

  Chicago in particular had taken municipal confidence to new levels; the blustery talk of civic leaders—and not Chicago’s weather—had inspired the “Windy City” moniker. Eight years before New York Sun editor Charles Dana popularized the nickname during the battle to host the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, it appeared in the Cleveland Gazette, headlining an article about Chicago politics.

  The city’s boosters had always been more persuasive than most. After the Great Fire of 1871, propagandist William Bross traveled to New York. “Go to Chicago now!” he commanded. “Young men, hurry there! Old men, send your sons! Women, send your husbands! You will never again have such a chance to make money!” His prediction that Chicago would have a population of 1 million by 1900 came true ten years earlier, and by the time the Everleighs arrived, nearly 1.7 million people called the city home. Visitors were equally impressed by the city’s tireless ambition. “She outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them,” Mark Twain wrote of Chicago. “She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”

  The Everleighs vowed to continue this perfectionism and constant reinvention, a nineteenth-century amalgamation of Martha Stewart and Madonna. Over dinner in the Pullman car, the sisters concocted back-stories for themselves suffused with glamour and drama. They were southern debutantes from outside of Louisville, Kentucky, with a wealthy lawyer father, a doting mother, and finishing school pedigrees.
After marrying two men—make them brothers—who turned brutish and physically abusive, the sisters escaped and ran far away, ending up in Omaha, Nebraska. Their entrée into the madam business was a fortuitous accident, two proper Victorian ladies who decided that creating a fantasy for others was better than pretending to live in one.

  Preternaturally savvy about the importance of marketing and image, the sisters also lied about their ages. Ada, thirty-five, would pass for twenty-three; and Minna, thirty-three, became twenty-one again.

  During the previous year, 1898, when the Everleighs decided to move their burgeoning careers as madams from Omaha to a busier town, they scoured red-light districts across the country in search of the best fit. In these waning days of the Victorian era, every significant American city, along with many smaller ones, had a designated neighborhood where prostitution, though technically illegal, was practiced openly; “segregation” was a term that referred primarily to sex rather than race. Here men were free to indulge sexually without sullying their homes or offending the fragile sensibilities of their wives.

  “Respectable women, it was held,” the Chicago Tribune mused years later in an article that compared the Everleighs with Al Capone, “were safer from rape and other crimes if open prostitution was maintained and ordered as an outlet for the lusts of men.”

  But the Everleighs had their own notions of prostitution and its role in society. In a good resort, they reasoned, one free from the sorrier aspects of the trade, a harlot was more than an unwitting conduit for virtue. An employee in a business, she was an investment and should be treated as such, receiving nutritious meals, a thorough education, expert medical care, and generous wages. In their house, a courtesan would make a living as viable as—and more lucrative than—those earned by the thousands of young girls seeking work in cities as stenographers and sweatshop seamstresses, department store clerks and domestics. The sisters wanted to uplift the profession, remove its stain and stigma, argue that a girl can’t lose her social standing if she stands level with those poised to judge her.

  Traveling to major and minor cities alike, the sisters gathered ideas and consulted with each locale’s most prominent madams. They sought a distinguished town with class and style that lacked a preeminent parlor house. Theirs would be “the most celebrated banging shop in the world,” although clients, naturally, would never hear such language.

  “Frisco Tessie” Wall, in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, ran a decent business but was too old school, in the sisters’ opinion; and Nell Kimball, with her philosophical musings, was downright depressing. Like many madams, Kimball kept someone on staff to “work over” her courtesans if they got out of line. “A drunk is no good as a whore,” she advised. “You can’t hide her breath, and she doesn’t do her work in style. Hookers are mean but sentimental. They cry over dogs, kittens, kids, novels, sad songs. I never cared much for a girl who came to work in a house because it was fun for her. There was a screw loose somewheres.”

  Walking the district, the sisters noticed that the harlots of each bordello, from Tessie’s place to the lowest “cow yard,” kept business cards on hand and distributed them at every opportunity. Most featured, simply, the name of a girl and the house to which she belonged, but some women chose to be infinitely more descriptive:

  BIG MATILDA

  THREE HUNDRED POUNDS OF BLACK PASSION

  HOURS: ALL HOURS

  RATES: 50C EACH: THREE FOR ONE DOLLAR

  The sisters threw away the cards and shook their heads. They believed in advertising, but also in subtlety.

  On to New Orleans. The famed Storyville district offered Belle Anderson’s mirrored rooms and expert dancers, and Madam Lulu White’s opulent bordello on the corner of Basin and Bienville streets. The city’s Blue Book, a catalog that listed every house, its specialties and “stock,” offered a kind description of White’s establishment:

  “Nowhere in this country will you find a more popular personage than Madame White, who is noted as being the handsomest octoroon in America…her mansion possesses some of the most costly oil paintings in the Southern country. Her mirror parlor is also a dream. There’s always something new at Lulu White’s that will interest you. ‘Good time’ is her motto.”

  A lively place, New Orleans, but the district overall wasn’t to their liking—did they really want to operate up the street from a hall called the Funky Butt?

  St. Louis was tolerable, but Babe Connors, a revered black madam who ran a brothel called The Palace, monopolized the city. In her house, the great Polish artist Ignace Paderewski once sat down at the piano, and a cadre of Republican politicians wrote their national platform. A large woman with a round, rambling body, she had a smile that gripped her face. Her teeth, the Everleighs were delighted to discover, were inlaid with diamonds. Tacky but fabulous. Madam Connors took Belle Anderson’s mirror innovations one step further, installing an entire floor of reflective glass in her parlor. Minna made a mental note—wherever they settled, mirrored rooms would definitely be part of the décor.

  New York City, with its hectic Tenderloin district, was marvelous, but Madam Rosie Hertz, the so-called godmother for prostitutes in the city, had already cornered the elite clientele, running several sporting houses on the Lower East Side while living on a moneyed block in Brooklyn. Rose Hicks dominated Philadelphia, “Lucky” Warren ruled Cincinnati, and Annie Chambers claimed Kansas City. Minnie Stevens in Boston and Belle Stewart in Pittsburgh had plenty of “wick dipping” going on, as the saying went, but their districts, too, were well below Everleigh standards.

  Washington, D.C., with its bustling “Division,” was a possibility. During the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth was a reputed regular in the district, favoring a sporting house on Ohio Avenue. The sisters checked into the Willard Hotel and looked up Cleo Maitland. This madam was an old-timer, they’d heard, and could offer some sound advice.

  Madam Maitland operated in a brick row house on D Street, posing as a landlady, with several girls living with her as female “boarders.” She welcomed the Everleighs inside her brothel, kissing their cheeks with dry, puckered lips. Her face was a topographic map, intricately rumpled and lined, but she sat spryly and alert while Minna talked. They’d finished their research, Minna explained, but had yet to find an appropriate city, one with plenty of wealthy men but no superior houses.

  The madam had the answer. Chicago, Illinois! she said. An abundance of millionaires, a well-protected red-light district, and not one dominant brothel; the city’s best madam, Carrie Watson, had retired to the suburbs a few years earlier. Madam Maitland even knew of the perfect building: two adjoining three-story mansions with fifty rooms, built for $125,000 just before the World’s Columbian Exposition. The brothel’s current proprietor, Effie Hankins, wanted to retire and had told Madam Maitland to keep an eye out for a possible buyer.

  “See Effie,” the old madam urged, escorting the sisters out. “She’ll listen.”

  The engine bell began its raucous clamor, and the train windows offered a brilliantly vile panorama: slaughterhouses, steel mills, factories, silos, coal piles that doused the sky with black. “She-caw-go! She-caw-go!” the brakeman called, and the train sputtered to a stop beneath a long roof made of glass and steel. A porter took the sisters’ gloved hands in his and helped them down the stairs, where a hansom cab waited. Dodging insulated ice wagons, streetcars, and droves of private carriages, the Everleighs’ hansom pulled up to 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street.

  The imposing stone mansion boasted two mahogany staircases that spiraled gently upward. Broad windows dotted the façade, greedily inhaling the light, topped by strips of molding curved like haughty frowns. The place stood like a peacock amid pigeons.

  Madam Hankins welcomed the sisters inside and told them to take their time, look around. Minna could see the brothel needed work—the 2133 side wasn’t yet habitable, and both buildings would benefit from plusher rugs, fresh paint, art, statues, books, and mirrors, of course—but it was righ
t. The feel of that staircase under her palm, so solid and heavy, was like gripping a piece of permanence.

  “It’s home to me and all I have,” Madam Hankins said, poking teary eyes with a handkerchief. “For fifty-five thousand dollars it is yours even though I hate to part with it.” She turned, tucked two fingers inside her mouth, and blew a shrill whistle. “Come, girls,” she called, “let my guests see how nice you look.”

  Her harlots obliged, heels scuffing the floor as they trudged into a listless single file. The scent of cheap perfume soaked the parlor. Flesh bulged in all the wrong places. And their faces…Three words registered in Minna’s mind: sloppy, uncouth, hardened. These harlots simply wouldn’t do—not for the prices she and Ada planned to charge. With all due respect to Madam Hankins, these girls looked as if they’d logged more miles than the Chicago Limited.

  “Thanks,” Minna said, and Madam Hankins shooed the harlots away. “How much for the rent?”

  “Five hundred a month…not high when you consider there are two buildings.”

  They struck a deal. The sisters advanced $20,000 and agreed to pay the remaining $35,000 within half a year, plus the subsequent $500 monthly fee.

  “We have catered only to the best people,” Madam Hankins insisted, shaking each sister’s hand.

  “Oh, yeah,” Minna replied, voice rimmed with sarcasm.

  She felt Ada’s elbow poke her side, a clear warning to watch what she said. She knew Ada worried that her candor would one day bring them trouble.