by Chris Wiltz
Bush, Louisiana, is a sleepy little town across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. A far remove from the life of a French Quarter madam, it has more in common with the Bible Belt than with Sin City to the south. Norma’s motives for moving to Bush were puzzling. If she was lonely or afraid of being out in the woods in Poplarville without Wayne, Bush wasn’t much of an improvement. Its only advantage was a shorter drive to New Orleans, about an hour door to door.
Two months before the move to Bush, Howard Jacobs of The Times-Picayune wrote a two-part profile of Norma from Poplarville, which ran June 30 and July 1, 1974. Jacobs quoted Norma: “When Wayne and I first moved here, the settlers living within twenty miles were consumed with curiosity about our relationship, and one of ’em tried to wheedle a little matrimonial information out of me. She said, ‘A lot of people are asking me what was a woman of your age doing with this young man.’ I said, ‘You tell ’em I’m a rich old lady and I’m supportin’ ’im.’ This shook her up so much that she dropped the subject like a hot potato.”
But Wayne was supporting himself by that time, collecting his paycheck and keeping it, something he’d never done at the restaurant; he’d signed all his checks there back over to Norma. Now his pay-checks gave him something he had not had for almost ten years—independence.
“After I went to work and Norma found out I was seeing a woman my own age, she told me the only thing that would come of it was that I’d have a bunch of kids and have to work like a dog until I was sixty.
“The funny thing is, Jean and I had been on again, off again; when Norma died we hadn’t been together for a couple of months. But I didn’t tell Norma that. I came over here the Thursday before it happened, and I ended up spending the night on the living room sofa. I fell asleep with my head in her lap. I woke up a number of times, and every time I did, she was still sitting there, wide awake. She’d stroke my head and I’d fall asleep again. We stayed like that all night.” Wayne paused before he said, “She always knew it couldn’t last forever.”
After Norma’s death, Wayne moved into the Bush house. He and Jean married the following year, 1975. Many of Norma’s things are still there—a copper kettle on the hearth, a ship’s lantern beside the door, both from the restaurant; and her furniture—tables, lamps, chairs, and most notably the sofa that was in her private apartment on Conti Street. It dominates one end of the dark-paneled living room. It’s a sexy sofa, a broad contour, a wide bench seat with one continuous cushion that curves into two sharp, pointed ends, hard, stylized lines that were ultramodern in the 1950s, and brass-tipped stiletto legs. The sofa once was covered with plush, sensual, siren red velvet. Now it’s covered in white Naugahyde; it has about as much bounce as a silicone job.
And the bullet hole is still visible in the ceiling of the Bush kitchen, a small, almost unnoticeable depression in the textured acoustic tile.
“Norma used to tell me she was never going to get old,” Wayne said. “She used to say she hoped her death would be that her husband caught her in bed with a sixteen-year-old and shot her.” Her vision of her death was violent, romanticized, but in that vision she was still sexy and powerful enough to command a sixteen-year-old’s attention.
Norma’s life revolved around sex, money, and power; her scandalous escapades made front-page headlines. In her autobiography she wanted to be perceived as a smart, classy, glamorous, and generous woman who was independent yet always had a powerful, sexy, and usually younger man in tow. But the reality was much more complicated, an ambitious, domineering, yet vulnerable woman who was glamorous, yes, but also vain and afraid of growing old. She proudly attached herself to a man thirty-nine years younger, saw herself through his eyes as sexy and seductive and through the public eye as outrageous and exciting, but she did not see that her pride was leading her into the dark embrace of obsessive love.
Norma Wallace made a fortune selling the art of seduction. She practiced that art in her personal life and was herself seduced by a young and beautiful man, largely because she had no vision of growing old as a privilege and an achievement. In her work life Norma’s power rose from knowledge and experience; in her personal life she relinquished her power to an obsession.
CHAPTER TWO
The Tango Belt
When Norma returned to New Orleans from Memphis in 1916, she found that the French Quarter was considerably more populated than she remembered. There were throngs of exotic people, most of them residents, since the Quarter was not the tourist mecca it is today. There were European Creoles, as well as the Creoles of Caribbean and African ancestry who plied their trades in the streets, from the vegetable vendors to the musicians, from the bricklayers to the chimney sweeps carrying the palmetto fronds they used to clean the chimneys. Norma found that life for French Quarter residents had improved in some ways, but in other ways it remained unchanged.
By 1910 sewage systems were completed in the Quarter, and over the next few years people began to use indoor plumbing. Gone were the horse-drawn wagons that collected the contents of the courtyard privies. The familiar streets Norma walked were cleaner than before, but wagons carrying coal, kerosene, ice, and wood still rumbled over the Belgian blocks that paved some of them (ballast from European ships), and the horses made their scatological contributions to the remaining filth.
The stark contrasts that visually define New Orleans were no-where more in evidence than in the French Quarter, from the diverse population to the residents’ abodes. The softly colored façades of the shuttered, stucco row houses were laced with wrought- and cast-iron balconies, intricate and beautiful, which identified the Vieux Carré, the old town, with the Old World, with wealth and the master craftsmanship of European artisans (though some of the iron was wrought by African Americans). But these ornate, airy structures overhung streets full of foul-smelling garbage that fed alarming populations of rats. Luckily, Norma had been in Memphis in 1914, when these conditions had caused an outbreak of bubonic plague.
From the time Norma was born (in 1901) until the time she left for Memphis, she’d seen the French Quarter courtyards as the center of family life, functional areas for hanging the wash and housing chickens, even cows and mules. Though she found many of them still being used this way, she also saw that some people were turning their courtyards into lush tropical havens, where they could escape the squalor of the streets. In contrast, the only way to access these hidden, verdant places of refuge was through narrow, dank alleyways.
At fifteen years old Norma saw this dirty, crowded old city through very different eyes than when she’d been living on the streets with Elmo. Then she had an eye only for survival; now she had a vision of what she wanted. She was drawn through the chaos of the French Quarter to the place where she hoped to find it. The Cosmopolitan Hotel, a half block off Canal Street, had addresses on both Bourbon and Royal Streets—its lobby ran straight through the entire block. The Cosmopolitan catered to the affluent—for a time it was called the Hotel Astor. It had a reputation as a family hotel. The ladies’ entrance was on Royal Street, but, as Norma observed, not all the women who used it were ladies—except of the night. Attracted as she had been to the Gayoso in Memphis for its wealthy clientele and its class, Norma was drawn to the Cosmopolitan to try her hustling act.
“I could see all these girls decked out in diamonds and beautiful clothes. They were eating sumptuous meals in the dining room, having drinks, having a ball. I was ready to turn out. Those girls spotted me before I walked across the lobby the first time. They told me I was too young. They said a lot of people were afraid to fool with you when you’re young. They weren’t about to let me hustle on their territory, and it seemed a pretty good idea not to find out how they would stop me. They said, ‘Why don’t you go to this or that fine house, learn how to do it?’ “
Norma returned to New Orleans, determined to learn every trick of the trade, just as Storyville was being dismantled in 1917. One of the earliest experiments to confine prostitution to a limited area, Storyville
ended with an order from the Department of the Navy, which banned open prostitution within five miles of a military installation. Politicians traveled to Washington armed with statistics proving the success of the experiment. The New Orleans red-light district (such districts were named for the red lanterns trainmen left outside the doors of brothels they visited) now had only a quarter as many prostitutes as it had had in 1898.
From the girls at the Cosmopolitan, Norma heard that Bertha Anderson’s house had the best reputation, so she went there. Bertha had worked in Storyville, as the protégée of one of the district’s most famous madams, Josie Arlington. Bertha had the foresight to get out of Storyville before it was officially shut down; she was part of the clandestine movement into the French Quarter, which began around 1913.
Bertha set herself up in a house at 335 Dauphine Street, and by the time Norma arrived she already had a thriving business there.
Bertha liked Norma. The first thing she did was try to talk Norma out of the life. But Norma told her that her family needed her support.
Neither Norma’s mother, an alcoholic without resources and well past the age that she could have made much money as a prostitute, nor her brother could fend for themselves. Through Aunt Carrie Norma stayed in contact with her father, and the same year she arrived at Bertha’s, Norma’s half brother, J. G., was born. His mother, a woman of American Indian descent, died in childbirth, and Norma could have thought this baby would need her help as well.
Bertha Anderson saw the girl’s determination and took her in. Norma celebrated her sixteenth birthday at Bertha’s house.
During the two years she stayed there, Norma learned two critical lessons. “Bertha told me about dope—how it affected people, to stay away from it and save my money. She also got me to understand that when you hit your late twenties, you were old in the prostitution racket.” So Norma started a program of self-education. “I read good books, looking up every word I didn’t know in the dictionary, learning everything I could because I was pushing eighteen. I had to get a move on.”
By her eighteenth birthday, she had decided that she wasn’t going to be a streetwalker. “I was going to be a big landlady on my own.” (The madams all called themselves landladies, never madams, a term only squares used.) This desire to be the “top dog,” as Norma called it, became a consuming ambition.
Norma had left Andy Wallace because he had shot her; she walked away with only a grazed ankle. Even so, she admitted that she returned to Memphis over the next few years to see him because he was so good-looking she couldn’t help herself. She left Bertha’s for Memphis to begin her new career. She said, “I got in the mind that I could take on Memphis.” She didn’t say if that meant taking on Andy too.
With the help of a Memphis friend, Norma found an apartment and called girls in for two or three men a day. Her clientele was hustlers and bootleggers. “The bootleggers were generous with their money. The gamblers liked to throw their money around, and the crooks were particularly loose. I don’t know whether it’s because they are lonesome and hunting company or they’re just damn fools.
“A couple of years up there and the apartment began to get hot, but I wanted to go back to New Orleans by then anyway. You can do very well other places, and I didn’t know so many people in New Orleans anymore, but I still wanted to come back. This damn place down here just draws you like crazy.”
The largest city in the South at the time, this is the New Orleans, circa 1920, that drew Norma like crazy: “The French Quarter was full of hookers, nightspots like the old Cadillac and La Vida Club, and dance halls. The Quarter runs ten blocks across and thirteen down, from Canal Street to Esplanade. From the river to Rampart I can’t tell you how many whores there were. Between Iberville and St. Louis Streets and from Bourbon to Rampart, every door had a girl hustling in it. I didn’t start it; they were there when I got there.”
The corner of the Quarter that Norma gave the street boundaries for was known as the Tango Belt, after the dance that had become an international craze by the summer of 1913. The area was thick with dance halls and cabarets, restaurants and cafés where women could wear their “tango bustles” and couples could indulge their obsession with the stylish, sensual dance—vulgar and immoral to many—twenty-four hours a day.
Jack Stewart, a New Orleans musician who founded the New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra and is also a writer and music historian, has been reconstructing the street and music scene of the Tango Belt in the 1920s. He says, “The Tango Belt was interesting because, unlike Storyville, it didn’t have the spotlight on it. It was in a section of the Quarter that was most marginal. The area was seedy.”
During the 1920s artists and writers—people like William Spratling, Sherwood Anderson, and William Faulkner—gravitated to New Orleans. So many congregated around Jackson Square that the section was called Little Bohemia or Little Greenwich Village, though John Magill, curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection, says, “Greenwich Village was part of America, and Paris was part of the twentieth century. The French Quarter was unto itself, not American, not twentieth century.”
The Quarter attracted writers and artists because it was an inexpensive place to live. It had been left in a state of decay in the latter half of the nineteenth century as many citizens fled to Esplanade Avenue or even to the opposite side of Canal Street, to the American Sector, where the wealthier ones built what is now known as the Garden District. For years some Creoles refused to cross Canal Street into the American Sector, and the median on it became known as the neutral ground, a term New Orleanians still use for the grass or concrete divisions on the wider streets and avenues around town.
The artists liked the bohemian aspect of the Vieux Carré, its exotic appearance and kinship with the Old World. They didn’t mind its shabbiness. They liked the life on the streets that couldn’t be found Uptown, a sense of community, a looseness that defied the staid Uptowners’ preoccupation with money and tradition. Life in the French Quarter was antibourgeois, adventurous, risqué.
So in the twenties, when the Quarter was experiencing some revitalization after years of being neglected, the artists were afraid that it was losing its flavor. The area they populated around the square was becoming more commercial, less shabby and cleaner. But their idea of flavor was naïve compared with what was going on in the Tango Belt. In fact, they didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on there; it was rarely written about, and it certainly wasn’t the romantic French Quarter scene most artists were painting.
The tango, by 1914, had been officially declared immoral, and dancers went through its showy steps under threat of being dragged off the floor to jail unless light was visible between the partners and they refrained from doing any demoralizing dance steps, like “snake-wiggling” at the shoulders. But the tango had started a craze for dancing, and it had helped identify a section of the French Quarter as the place to go for a good time. Little cabarets sprang up in storefronts or in the front rooms of buildings; the lewder programs, like the “freak shows,” kinky displays of eroticism, were relegated to the back rooms. Small-time local dance bands played tangos and foxtrots around the clock; hot, sexy jazz could be heard all night. From the theaters and the jazz clubs to the brothels, the Tango Belt was racially integrated, which sharpened the edge of excitement and fear associated with it. If the blacks wanted vaudeville, they could have it in the Tango Belt—it wasn’t wanted anywhere else in the city.
“You could say it was an easygoing kind of place,” says Jack Stewart, a figure from another era with his muttonchops and soft, courtly speech, “or you could say it was the armpit of the French Quarter.”
The Uptown ladies dismissed the Tango Belt as Frenchtown; others called it Shuttertown. The action in the Tango Belt was sub rosa, as Stewart says, but some of that action, according to Norma’s description, wasn’t taking place behind shutters. Girls worked the streets aggressively because competition was keen and prices were cheap. They’d take men back t
o their cribs—grimy, sordid, one-room hovels, furnished with little more than a chair and a bed—for as little as twenty-five cents. Travelers compared the place with similar districts in Marseilles, Honolulu, and Singapore.
Yet when Norma returned to New Orleans, she did not return to Bertha Anderson’s, which was in the heart of this action. Instead she went to work for a friend she’d met at Bertha’s, Louise Jackson, who had started her own house at 144 South Rampart, across Canal Street, outside the French Quarter altogether. It may be that Norma no longer had the contacts to put herself in the heart of the action.
But Louise had a good business going on South Rampart. She also had epilepsy and a man with itchy fingers. After a bad seizure that left her hospitalized, Louise asked Norma to run her house while she recovered. “Imagine me running a large house, three or four maids, and keeping her man out of the money at my age,” Norma said. She was barely twenty.
One evening a man died in the house. “The night before Louise was getting out of the hospital, a date went in the front bedroom with one of the girls. They weren’t there long when the girl ran out in the hall screaming. It seemed the man had had his pleasure and conked out. There was nothing we could do—we had to call the police. It was a good thing the girl had managed to get out from under him. After I handled the police and a dead man and kept Louise’s man out of the till as well as all of us out of jail, I figured I’d better go get my own place if I could do that good a job.”
Getting her own place might not have been so easy for Norma at that point in her life, young as she was and without much money, except that one Sunday night she met a man who would become her lover and her business partner, then her husband, and then a lifelong friend. Around New Orleans he was known as the Champ. When Norma met Pete Herman, he had won the title of world bantam-weight champion twice. He was Peter Gulotta, a bootblack and bell-hop, until he read about a flashy lightweight named Kid Herman and changed his name.