The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  The night wore on, with Rambeau cracking those hundred-dollar bills for drinks and tips. She became spectacularly drunk. She wanted to go upstairs and get out of her clothes. She was at the stage of drunkenness where this was not something she could do by herself—she wanted Norma to help her.

  Daybreak was not far off, and Norma didn’t want Rambeau to fall asleep at the house and wake up feeling humiliated, so she called an entertainer at a French Quarter nightclub, the boyfriend of one of the girls, and asked him to drive Rambeau and her friend to the Roosevelt Hotel. She made sure Rambeau had all of her fabulous jewelry on, most notably the ring that Rambeau had claimed was worth twenty thousand dollars, and she made sure the boy knew that she knew exactly what jewelry Rambeau was wearing. He told Norma that he gave the two women over to the doorman at the Roosevelt, and that they’d had a hard time making it up the steps to the hotel.

  Norma knew that Rambeau had spent a considerable sum that night, but she was shocked when she tallied it—thirty thousand dollars! It had happened too many times before—a beef the next day over a large amount of money. Norma decided soon after sunrise that she’d return half of it if Rambeau showed up at the house before getting on the train. By nightfall she assumed that the actress was on her way back to Hollywood. Norma’s purse bulged with the money; it would be safely in the bank the next morning.

  But at the Roosevelt Hotel, Rambeau and her young friend were barely able to get out of bed for dinner. Earlier in the afternoon, from her prone position, she’d called the cab company, looking for the driver who had taken her to Norma’s house. Hungover, she realized she had no idea where she’d been. She became adamant with the dispatcher; she claimed there’d been a robbery, and the cab company would have hell to pay if they didn’t help her find the culprits. Late in the afternoon the dispatcher located the address on Itchem’s trip sheet. Rambeau ordered some beef broth and Coca-Cola from room service and went back to sleep.

  The next morning Norma was getting ready to go to her bank in the Central Business District when she heard the front door open, followed by the maid saying, “Ma’am, please, you can’t go in there. I’ll call Miss Norma.”

  High heels struck the floorboards as a woman hurried toward the back parlor, her voice raised in anger. “I want my money!”

  Norma hid her purse and met Rambeau at the door to the parlor. The poor little straggler was still with her, looking licked. “What money?” Norma asked.

  Rambeau got right in Norma’s face, hostile. “Look, I want some of the money I spent the other night. That’s too much to drop in one place.” Before Norma could reply, she said, “You rolled me.” Norma recognized Rambeau’s woman-on-the-tough role from her movies. “And if you don’t give it to me . . .” Instead of finishing her threat, she stalked out to a pay phone in the hallway. Near the front door, Itchem nervously fingered the brim of his porkpie hat. Rambeau got out a nickel and lifted the receiver.

  “Oh, do you want to use the phone?” Norma inquired. “Who are you going to call?” Even though she was shorter than Rambeau, she stared Miss High-and-Mighty down.

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “Okay, honey,” Norma said, “you’re throwing your weight around pretty good here. You know, if you hadn’t tried to muscle me I might have considered what you had to say. Instead, I think I’ll do a little nickel dropping myself. You call the police, and I’ll call The Times-Picayune. Now won’t they have a juicy little story.” Rambeau blanched. “I have nothing to lose,” said Norma. “What about yourself?” She took the phone from Rambeau’s rather limp hand, took her nickel as well, and started to drop it.

  Rambeau put her hand over Norma’s. “Let’s not be hasty, Norma. What do you say we have a talk?”

  “Fine with me.” Norma hung up the phone.

  The two women went into the parlor. Itchem tried to eavesdrop from down the hall. Norma gave the cabbie an arched eyebrow and banged the door.

  By the time Rambeau sank into the sofa cushions, she had recovered her good humor. “How about some champagne,” she asked, “for old times’ sake?” Norma nodded to the maid.

  Norma had been bluffed since she was nine years old, and she could smell a con coming. Rambeau kissed her, said she’d had a beautiful time, but, after all, that was a lot of money, could they talk about it? “You can’t use it anyway, because it’s all marked. My husband, when I left Florida, gave me that money, but he didn’t approve of me carrying so much, so he said he had the serial numbers recorded on all of it.”

  Norma said nicely, “If I can’t cash those hundred-dollar bills, shame on you, because you’ll be reading about it.” She let Rambeau take that in, then went on. “Look, if you had come in here right, instead of barging in and being hostile, I might have given you some of your money back. But I’ve decided there’s nothing you’re going to do about it.”

  Rambeau thought about it and recognized that Norma had the bigger muscle. “Okay, let’s just forget this. I’ll charge it off to experience, and if you ever come to Los Angeles, look me up and I’ll show you one gorgeous time.”

  She gave Norma her card, and when the champagne was poured she made a toast to the hair of the dog that bit her, but she didn’t take even a sip. Norma took a long draft as she thought, Yeah sure, old girl, I bet you’d show me a hell of a time on your stomping ground. Ain’t no way I’m leaving mine—this town suits me real great.

  The two women kissed goodbye, and Rambeau and the straggler were off to catch the eleven o’clock train.

  Itchem, who’d nearly been fired because of the stink Rambeau made, came back to 410 Dauphine to wheedle more money out of Norma. She gave him a cut, but not the 40 percent he normally made. And Norma gave the girls who’d danced naked a cut of the money too, but not their full cut (40 percent of a cab fare, 60 percent otherwise). They’d knocked themselves out in the entertainment department, but, after all, they hadn’t had to go to bed with Rambeau.

  Norma kept $24,000 for herself and bought an annuity with it—for her retirement. Before it matured, Carrie Badon Schubert, Norma’s aunt, and her husband, Billy Schubert, signed a notarized affidavit swearing that, in their presence, John Gauley Badon had given his daughter, Norma Badon, a gift of $24,000 in cash.

  Back in Hollywood, Rambeau went on to have a long and lucrative career as a character actress. She specialized in aging harlots and fallen women and appeared in movie classics such as Tobacco Road, The View from Pompey’s Head, and Man of a Thousand Faces. She was twice nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress, for Primrose Path and Torch Song. Norma saw every movie Marjorie Rambeau ever made.

  When Marjorie Rambeau’s husband (probably her third, Francis Gudger) told her not to get off the train in New Orleans because it was “such a wicked city,” he no doubt had in mind exactly the seamy scene that epitomized the Tango Belt in the twenties—naked girls lying in the windows of brothels, gambling behind every door, and incidents of people being mugged and robbed on the streets while that hot jazz played all night long.

  But the city was wicked right down to the political infrastructure. When the local writer Jack Stewart was researching the music scene in the Tango Belt, he discovered that “a politically complicated game went on to keep things going as they were.

  “After a public outcry to clean things up,” Stewart explained, “some blue blood would be appointed commissioner of public safety, or whatever title, and he’d take off like a rocket—he was going to get the job done. Then he’d realize the mess he was mired in and that he was nothing but a figurehead, a pawn in the whole deal, a scapegoat. Ultimately, he would quit.” And the status quo was maintained.

  In the late 1920s, when Captain Ray was helping to change the Tango Belt irrevocably, T. Semmes Walmsley was the commissioner of finance. Walmsley was part of the Uptown social elite, a member of the Boston Club; his father had been Rex, King of Carnival, in 1890. When Mayor Arthur O’Keefe became ill and was forced to leave office in 1928, Walmsle
y became acting mayor. He had been Ray’s biggest supporter in the cleanup of the Tango Belt. Now he appointed Ray to head the police department.

  But he promoted Theodore Ray right out of the precinct where he’d been so effective. Ray held his new post for less than a year before he resigned from the police force. No reason was given.

  At the time Norma had two good policemen on the beat patrolling Dauphine Street. She left the gate to her alley at the side of the house unlocked. Whenever the cops got tired, they’d come in through the alley, go upstairs, take one of the rooms, and go to sleep, leaving Norma’s phone number with the precinct in case a crime was committed.

  In 1928 Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana. Known as the People’s Governor, Long had a solid base everywhere in the state except New Orleans. He planned to rectify this problem by getting control of the Old Regulars, a New Orleans political machine with powerful leverage in the state legislature.

  Then, in 1929, while the country sang along with popular songs like “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” and “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the stock market crashed. Walmsley found himself mayor of a city with a crumbling infrastructure, where teachers, police, and firemen were poorly paid and poorly equipped, and there was no money in sight.

  Officially elected mayor in 1930, Walmsley became the head of the Old Regulars, which put him in direct opposition to Long. In declaring war on New Orleans, Huey Long hung a demoralizing moniker on the tall, bony-faced Walmsley. He referred to him relentlessly as Turkey Head while he starved the city into submission by preventing banks from lending it any money and, later, burying it in trash by not releasing money to pay the garbage collectors and forcing a strike during a record-breaking heat wave.

  At one point Long threatened to put New Orleans under military rule. He specifically ordered the militiamen he’d dispatched to search out prostitution in the “cesspool of iniquity” he claimed the city had become under old Turkey Head. Norma’s police friends told her to close her house for a while. “Here I had this beautiful house, and suddenly we needed a new place to hustle,” she said.

  Jackie, her housekeeper who answered the phones and made appointments, knew of an apartment on Chartres Street. The place was gloomy and overdone, with drapes made of a heavy damask and matching couches and bed canopy. But it had a phone.

  Norma stationed three or four girls in the apartment. That same evening she brought a few dates over in her car. “These were Good Men,” she said, “a few Good Men worth the risk.” Since the crash Norma wasn’t getting so many Good Men.

  As soon as the men left, one of the girls called her. “I don’t feel right in this place, Norma,” she said. “There’s something spooky here. It’s just not normal. Maybe you’d better come over.”

  When Norma got there another girl said she had something to show her. “We didn’t have enough bedrooms with three men here,” she said. She opened the closet and pointed. “So, look, I turned a trick on the ironing board.”

  “That’s no ironing board,” Norma told her, “that’s one of those boards they lay you out on when you’re dead.”

  The apartment, it turned out, belonged to an undertaker. “You should have seen those whores running out of that building, down to Chartres Street,” Norma said. “They never got over it. Every time I wanted to put them in another apartment, they had to investigate first.”

  By 1932 Long and Turkey Head had called a truce, and Norma was fully operational at 410 Dauphine again. “The police still had raids occasionally, but they were token raids. Next door to me was a colored lady, Mary. Over my alley was a balcony that looked right into her bedrooms. Whenever I had these token raids, we’d put planks from my balcony to her windows. The girls would walk the planks to Mary’s and pull the boards in behind them. Then I would open the door and let the police go through the house.”

  The war between the two politicians was ended only when Long was assassinated in 1935, after which his successor made a deal with Walmsley, who agreed to resign two years before the end of his mayoral term in return for restoration of financial self-control to the city. But the city’s political and financial travails didn’t seem to hamper Norma’s operation after 1932. One reason for this was that George Reyer became chief of police (subsequently called Police Superintendent) in 1931. As Norma told Howard Jacobs (for his Times-Picayune profile), “Reyer had a peculiar notion that real crime consisted of strong-arm plug-uglies preying on the public. He didn’t have much time for the minor vices that menaced nobody.”

  Another factor was that New Orleans was feeling the full force of the Great Depression. The French Quarter especially had deteriorated to the point that people called it a slum, and there were murmurs of a plan to tear the old buildings down on a number of square blocks and erect a vast housing project in their place. But, savvy businessperson that she was, Norma found opportunity in the very worst of times. In fact, she made her first fortune.

  Not only movie stars found their way to 410 Dauphine; so did bootleggers who carried cigar boxes full of gold coins. Norma bought more furniture for the house—antique tester beds, cheval mirrors, and upholstered Victorian boudoir chairs, along with the new furniture she purchased at Maestri’s store on Rampart Street. What a relief it must have been to enter Norma’s well-appointed, comfortable house after a night out on the town in the risqué but decaying French Quarter.

  As she continued to refine her parlor house, Norma, in her early thirties now, also found her personal style. She began buying expensive tailored suits, the kind she wore for the rest of her life—when she wasn’t wearing a smashing skintight cocktail or evening dress. Soon she would own luxury cars, usually Cadillacs, along with the odd Jaguar or Corvette. As fast as she could spend money, Norma made more. For while the Good Men were feeling the Depression, Norma had found another clientele: patrons of the seemingly endless stream of conventions that came to New Orleans even during the Depression.

  The undertakers came to town. One came to the house, and the girl he went with claimed it was the easiest money she’d ever made. All she had to do was lie there—like she was dead. Norma and the other girls made sure they knew where he was from—they didn’t want to get screwed after death!

  When a convention of Baptists was in town, a nice-looking man came to the house. He went upstairs but was back down almost immediately, spluttering and enraged. Norma asked him what was wrong.

  “Your girl won’t take me,” he told her, “says I have a dose.”

  “Well, if my girl says you have a dose, then you have a dose.”

  “I’m a preacher,” he said, nearly shaking with outrage. “I’ve never been in a house before.”

  “Okay,” Norma said, “I’ll have my housekeeper take a look. She’s a real expert in these matters.”

  Jackie took him to the next room. In less than two minutes, she was back. “Norma, that man’s got the biggest dose I’ve ever seen!”

  Norma said. “Sorry, no action,” and the man raged around, insisting, “But I’ve never been with a hooker before!”

  “Then, Reverend,” Norma said, “you better go home and have a good talk with your wife. You sure as hell didn’t get that on a toilet seat.”

  He left, fuming. But he wasn’t gone long. About twenty minutes later he was back, meek and mild. He asked Norma what he should do about his problem. She sent him to the same doctor who checked her girls.

  Unlike the Reverend, a lot of conventioneers had women with them and wanted to bring them to the house. Jackie had been trained as a classical ballet dancer, and she had a beautiful body. She and Norma came up with a way to promote her natural talent and make a lot of money.

  Jackie put on a gorgeous negligee and did what she called interpretive dance. At a strategic moment her negligee would fall from her shoulders and float to the floor. “We had the first strip shows right there at 410 Dauphine,” Norma said. “Jackie didn’t shake it up because she didn’t need to. She could have put any of those Bourbon St
reet strippers that came after her to shame.”

  The shows were such a success that the women got bolder. They came up with the “fake shows.” In these Jackie and some of the other girls would act with men as if they were having sex in front of the audience. The men, though, were gay. “The only way this boy could get a hard-on was with a device known as the wimpus. It was a glass tube with a little pump. He’d go out in the hall before the show and pump that thing until his prick got hard—and he had a big one. Then he’d go in and mount the girls like a big deal was going on, but he never had an orgasm. I saw him put on numerous shows in one night when a big convention was in town, yet he’d never have an orgasm with a girl. It was all fake.”

  The fake shows were quite popular with the conventioneers’ ladies. “We’d be booked all night, and it got to be that there were more couples coming to the shows than single men.”

  Norma talked to many men who told her that when it came time to vote on where they wanted to have their conventions, they would pick New Orleans because it was a wide open city. “That’s what made New Orleans famous,” Norma said.

  Mardi Gras was big in 1933. The banks in the city were still operating; everything seemed fine. “In New Orleans,” Norma said sardonically, “I think they waited until every last cent had been put in the banks, then they folded.”

  One day Norma was walking along Carondelet Street in the Central Business District, on the other side of Canal Street from the French Quarter, and a clock in the window of a bank caught her eye. It was the type of clock that would look great sitting on a mantel, Roman numerals on a round face embedded in antique wood. The clock was a premium for opening an account. “I always was sort of freaky for clocks,” Norma admitted. “I went in and looked at it, and I thought, What the hell?”