The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  The vidalia finally picked a girl, but he didn’t care about going upstairs. He just wanted to drink. His secretary remained sober, went off with a girl now and again, and returned to their hotel during the day, but only to check for messages. Norma sent out for steaks and fed them.

  The man from New York continued to drink. He finally took off his clothes—but only to take a bath! He brought his drink and his girl with him to the tub. When he wanted to go to sleep, he asked his girl to come to the room with him, but all he wanted her to do was go to sleep too.

  “He never did screw,” Norma said.

  She ran a tab for him. If a girl crossed in front of him, he would call out to Norma, “Put her down for twenty.” With some regularity he would yell, “Put them all down for twenty!” This went on for three days.

  “Believe me,” Norma said, “my blood pressure was soaring, because a whore wants her money first, and when you have to wait for it, you’re in a bad condition.”

  On the afternoon of the third day, the vidalia told Norma that he and his secretary would have to be heading back to New York.

  “How much do I owe?” he asked. His bill was $4,500, the equivalent of nearly $75,000 today. “Write her a check,” he told his secretary.

  A check! This was a landlady’s worst nightmare. A taxi driver’s too. Poor Rocco had stayed at the house with his vidalia for three whole days, even eating and taking his showers there so he’d be around when it came time for the payoff, a commission of twelve hundred dollars. His face was long and sad when he saw his man write out what they all were thinking was a piece of rubber.

  Norma tried to get the man to send his secretary to the hotel to cash the check. “Wouldn’t that be better than having it go through with my name on it?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s not necessary. You just put it in the bank. It’s as good as gold,” he told her.

  Norma knew it would take four or five days for his check to clear; by that time she’d be out of her mind. But she also knew better than to push. Her instincts told her he was legit, a fine gentleman, very high class. Norma took the check, warmly thanking both men, telling them she hoped they’d be back.

  It was too late in the day to do anything about it. She sweated it out that night, and the first thing the next morning she called a friend at a local bank. He told her he’d call New York to see if the check was good.

  While she waited she instructed the girls to do useful things like scrub the sidewalk with a pink voodoo concoction that was supposed to draw clients. When her friend called, he said, “Very prominent family. His bank said his check is good for any amount.”

  That was no vidalia on a holiday. “That,” said Norma, “is what you call a good vidalia!”

  During the 1920s Norma was arrested thirteen times, not a bad record considering that many women were arrested over a hundred times. Her charges ran from “soliciting for prostitution” to “relative to accosting from doorway” and “relative to operating an immoral house,” to which was added once “and also with insult and abuse.” Captain Ray himself was the arresting officer on more than one occasion. Never, though, did Norma spend so much as a night in jail. “Happy” Russo, Dora’s husband, was a friend of the night recorder, who let all the prostitutes walk.

  If Captain Ray was frustrated by the apparent upper hand of the demimonde in the Tango Belt, he was soon to be vindicated. Federal agents had been conducting raids in New Orleans since the beginning of Prohibition; not even the Boston Club was immune—agents confiscated one hundred bottles of liquor there in 1924. The members were outraged! They should have felt lucky—no arrests were made. After a series of raids in 1925, agents dubbed New Orleans “the liquor capital of the world,” for they netted more liquor than some claimed to have seen before Prohibition. Over the next two years they padlocked New Orleans speakeasies, more than in any other city in the nation, eighty-six the first year alone—including Bourbon Street’s famous Old Absinthe House, on its hundredth anniversary. Many of these places were in the Tango Belt—cabarets, cafés, and establishments like the Little Club, a favorite haunt of the demimonde crowd and other underworld characters. The Little Club later reopened in the Central Business District, but most places in the Tango Belt never opened again. Pete Herman’s club was one of the few that survived and stayed in the area.

  Other places that didn’t close permanently moved over to Bourbon Street, which in the late twenties began to change from a residential to a more commercial street. There were plenty of French Quarter dwellers to support it too, an all-time high of 20,000 by 1930. (The population of the Quarter today fluctuates between a shockingly low 3,500 and 5,000; tourists outnumber residents.) The irrepressible Count Arnaud, owner of Arnaud’s restaurant, saw the opportunities on Bourbon Street and in 1925—raids be damned—opened the first nightclub as we know them today, with both a supper club and a floor show, at the corner of Bourbon and Bienville.

  Changes had already been taking place on Canal Street as well. Businessmen didn’t want the city’s premier shopping district to resemble a European throwback. They wanted Fifth Avenue! They began removing the fabulous Victorian ironwork balconies and galleries from the façades of the buildings. Two of the biggest department stores, D. H. Holmes and Maison Blanche, needed warehouse space. They looked no farther than directly behind them—in the Tango Belt. The area began to resemble a freight entrance instead of the high-spirited, twenty-four-hour entertainment district it had been only a couple of years earlier.

  Entertainment in the late twenties changed too. The Orpheum, right off Canal, which had opened as a vaudeville house and billed some of the most enduring performers of our time—Houdini, George Burns, and Gracie Allen among them—was converted into a movie house. Movies proved such a powerful draw that two more great movie palaces, the Loew’s State and the Saenger, with its night-time Florentine garden setting under a star-studded azure sky, were built on Canal Street.

  There were theaters in the Tango Belt too: the two-thousand-seat Lyric on Iberville and Burgundy, with its cupola rising above the marquee, and the Greenwald, a burlesque theater which became the Palace, on Dauphine and Iberville. Most of the people who lived along Dauphine and Burgundy were black, and these theaters eventually catered only to black patrons as segregation took over the Tango Belt. (The Lyric, boasting such acts as Josephine Baker and Mamie Smith, is now a parking lot; the Palace operated as a movie house until it was torn down to build a parking garage.)

  Prohibition left its mark on the Tango Belt and made it nearly unrecognizable; once risqué and exciting, now it was merely run-down. Its cabarets gave way to laundries and plumbing suppliers, trades that contributed to the warehouse look of the once rough-and-tumble, lively, exotic streets, a look that persists to this day.

  The Tango Belt lost its name along with its identity as jazz and dancing infiltrated other parts of the French Quarter. One kind of entertainment, though, sub rosa and illegal, persisted.

  In the momentum of the cleanup by the feds, Captain Ray saw his chance to further cripple the Tango Belt. In 1928 he asked the acting mayor, T. Semmes Walmsley, to issue vacate notices, evicting land-ladies and their tenants from known houses of prostitution. On August 8, 1928, the New Orleans States reported what was called “the most telling blow yet struck against vice in the section below Canal Street formerly known as the Tango Belt”: Captain Ray’s closing of six houses of prostitution and the elimination of several soft-drink establishments.

  Dora Russo and Camilla Turner were specifically named in the article. Dora’s house at 335 Burgundy and Camilla’s on St. Louis Street were padlocked, which meant they could not be occupied for a year. Ray also brought charges against the night recorder, “Happy” Russo’s friend. Ray’s battle with the demimonde in the Tango Belt had become a war.

  “My precinct is almost free of vice,” he told the States reporter. “Almost all the women have moved out of the precinct and many have left the city. Those who have remained will find
their places pad-locked if there is a chance for it.”

  “Captain Ray was hell,” Norma said. “The last thing I needed was to have my house padlocked for a year.” The bar had been a good front, and Norma had made good money serving near beer (2.75 percent alcohol) and bootlegged liquor. Again, though, she needed to find another way.

  The name Glen Evans was never mentioned in any police roundup. For nearly thirty-five years Glen had operated a classy and very discreet parlor house next door to Arnaud’s restaurant on Bienville Street. Her girls never worked doorways. Business came from the taxi drivers and the restaurants. “She ran a very smooth operation, no publicity, but she was getting up in age,” Norma said.

  By 1928 Pete and Norma were having trouble. “We were making up and breaking up so much I decided I wanted to leave.” She and Pete continued doing business, though, with Norma sending girls to his lounge and taking a share of the proceeds.

  But when Norma leased a house at 410 Dauphine Street, it was clearly old Glen Evans’s operation that held the greatest appeal for her. Norma renovated the Creole-style house, which was long and narrow, with a double parlor up front, the kitchen in back, a warren of bedrooms on the second floor, and a private room on the third. Then she filled it with antiques and claimed it was the nicest place in the French Quarter. She hired only the best-looking girls and dressed them in formals. She gave up doorways and worked her girls under a new set of rules.

  First and foremost, if a girl had a pimp, he wasn’t allowed within half a block of the premises. Anytime a girl appeared in public, she must be dressed as a lady—no suggestive clothing—with hat and gloves, purse and shoes to match, and no open-toe shoes. Bra and panties also had to match. She must be impeccably groomed, her hair professionally coiffed, and her lips and nails painted, but in chic, sophisticated shades, nothing garish. More than once Norma was heard to inquire as a girl entered the parlor, “Where do you think you’re going, to a Mexican fiesta?” Then the girl was sent back upstairs to remove the offending color.

  Girls were never to kiss the dates; if a girl came downstairs with her lipstick off or awry, she was fired—they were selling sex, not emotion. Norma’s girls were expected to be unswervingly loyal to her and totally discreet, never divulging anything regarding the operation. They were not to take drugs, they were to be examined by the house doctor twice a week, and they were not supposed to work during their periods, although girls were known to use sponges, which sometimes had to be removed by the doctor. Finally, they must never, never roll a customer (steal his money) or shake him down (extort money). Any violation of the rules was grounds for dismissal. Utterly serious, Norma said, “My girls had to be of the highest moral caliber.”

  Norma’s immaculate girls, her strict rules, and her new house resulted in a better class of client. “I began to get the best business. My clients were local men from the exclusive clubs across Canal Street—the Boston Club, the Pickwick, the Louisiana Club. They were from Uptown. They frequented the New Orleans Athletic Club on Rampart Street. These were not the vidalias,” Norma said. “I called these men the Good Men.”

  These were the men who had the real power in New Orleans. They controlled the money. They met in the boardrooms at their banks or the cardrooms at their clubs, where they made the decisions that most affected the city, often without a single elected official present. They belonged to the old-line, secret carnival organizations—Comus, Momus, Proteus, and Rex, King of Carnival—that were all but impossible to get into without a birthright. As they ruled society in New Orleans, so they ruled politics and politicians. Their word was the last word; their power was absolute.

  Norma claimed that, at her house, Good Men were not hard to find.

  The Good Men weren’t always on their best behavior, however.

  The week before Mardi Gras, late at night, one of the Good Men arrived at 410 Dauphine Street. He was in high spirits, having just won $2,500 at a gambling house. He was also drunk, as though in training for the Mardi Gras bacchanalia. This year he was king of one of the big four carnival krewes, an honor in New Orleans akin to a royal knighting, reserved for those who have achieved prominence in business and society.

  He pretended to wave his scepter over the girls, anointing them as he called for more drinks, spending his money freely. Norma tried to get him to take a couple of girls upstairs—it would take two to handle him—but the man wasn’t interested in the beautiful girls in their ball gowns; he wanted the madam of the house. He held out a wad of money that looked like a head of lettuce in his hand. She recalled: “He started sticking money down my brassiere. He said it was mine, and, believe me, it was tempting, but I wouldn’t do it. No one respects a madam who lets men maul her or a madam who turns tricks.”

  Norma resisted him, as nicely as she could, but his expansive, generous humor began to turn sour. He asked her to dance, but he pushed her around on the slick hardwood floor of the living room. He scuffled with her, playfully at first, but got more aggressive every time she said no. Finally, during one of his scuffles, he slipped on the floor and fell, hitting his head on the small wrought-iron coin receiver to play the music box.

  Norma knew he was badly hurt, but now he was resisting her offers to take him to a doctor or hospital. In desperation she suggested a hotel, but he refused to go. So Norma called Gaspar Gulotta, Pete Herman’s brother, who owned a nightclub on Bourbon Street.

  Gaspar knew the man. He hurried over to Dauphine Street and tried to reason with him, but the man was still having none of it. Gaspar decided that the best thing to do was call the police—not an easy decision for either him or Norma to make, but Captain Ray had been promoted out of the precinct, and the French Quarter had begun to revert to its usual easygoing attitude. Gaspar didn’t think there would be a problem.

  Money was everywhere—on the floor, in the sofa, in Norma’s bra. She picked up all the bills and wadded them into a ball just the way the man had come in with it, the entire twenty-five hundred. When the police arrived, they wanted to take the man to jail.

  Norma said to the lieutenant, “Don’t take him to jail. Here, take this.” She put the wad in his coat pocket.

  They took him to a hotel. A few hours later, after the man had sobered up some and collected himself, he called the district police station. He claimed Norma had rolled him and demanded her arrest. Police from a different shift arrived to search the house and question Norma. “I couldn’t tell them the real story about where the money went; once a bribe is taken, mum’s the word. I was just going to have to take it on the chin, but when the old boy found out he had a fractured skull, he came to his senses and decided he didn’t want the publicity he was going to get if he got me put away.”

  The would-be king missed Mardi Gras altogether that year. Norma said dryly, “I guess you could say we crowned him.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Such a Wicked City

  Two cabdrivers, brothers from Alabama, were known as Itchem and Scratchem because they looked and drawled so much alike. One night in the early thirties, before the Great Depression hit New Orleans, one of the brothers picked up a fare at Southern Railway on Canal Street. She was a woman of about forty who had with her a much younger woman, a sort of child-woman, very thin and petite with a high-pitched voice. The child-woman wasn’t the older woman’s maid, but she clearly wasn’t in the same class.

  Itchem didn’t know who the woman was, but he knew that she was someone of importance. He could tell by the way she carried herself—her husky shoulders thrown back, her chin tipped upward ever so slightly; by the glamorous hairdo set in shiny, seductive waves; and by her cashmere coat, which grazed the back of his hand as he took her vanity case from her to put it in the trunk of the taxi. Her rings flashed in the soft interior light of the cab. He closed the door after she and her companion were settled. She told him what she wanted, and Itchem drove through the dark, run-down streets of the Tango Belt to Norma’s beautiful parlor house at 410 Dauphine.

  Nor
ma recognized her the moment she walked through the front door. She was an actress. Norma, a great moviegoer—she often, in a rush, threw her fur coat on with nothing underneath to catch the last feature at the Saenger Theatre on Canal Street—had seen this actress in several movies and especially liked her when she costarred with Wallace Beery, one of Norma’s favorites. Her name was Marjorie Rambeau.

  “I can only stay for a couple of hours,” Rambeau told Norma. “We’re catching the last Sunset Limited back to Los Angeles.” She was on her way from Florida, where she’d been vacationing with her husband. As she handed her coat to the maid, she gave Norma a coy but knowing look. “My husband told me not to get off the train in New Orleans because it’s such a wicked city.”

  People carried cash in those days, and Norma had seen lots of men with big rolls, but never a woman with the kind of roll Rambeau had in her pocketbook. She peeled off a hundred-dollar bill and asked for a bottle of champagne. The maid went for the champagne, Norma put on some music, and Rambeau and the straggler, as Norma immediately thought of the younger woman, settled themselves in the back parlor. Norma had no doubt that Rambeau had picked up the straggler on the train.

  Men weren’t the only ones fascinated by the madam of the house. There were ten or fifteen girls in residence that night, but Rambeau took a shine to Norma. An hour passed, then two. Rambeau missed the Sunset Limited. She gave Itchem a couple of C-notes and told him to leave. The champagne flowed faster and faster (Norma poured hers into a plant behind the sofa). Rambeau began to paw Norma; she wanted Norma to dance with her. Ever since the carnival king fell and cracked his head, Norma and the girls had not danced with the customers, but they had danced for them. Several girls danced naked for Rambeau and the straggler, who started to carry on and giggle, her voice rising higher and higher the more she drank. When Rambeau wasn’t petting on Norma, she and the straggler petted each other. Norma kept her eye on Rambeau’s purse—she felt protective of the movie star, because she, too, was prone to throwing her money around when she had had too much to drink.