The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  Too fair-minded to consider a frame, Dayries continued inspections in the mode of Big Mo Guillot. Norma, however, assessed him as a “goon,” meaning not the gangster type but someone who is not street-smart.

  Late one night she was looking out the front shuttered window toward the alley when a big Buick swooshed up fast to the door. Four men flew out of it, three uniforms and one in what appeared to be an English riding outfit—boots, whip, the whole nine yards. He strode directly to the window. Norma slammed it down. He called out, “I’m the superintendent of police.”

  Norma had never seen Dayries. Her response was to pull the shade and put out the hall light. The next thing she heard was “Break down the door.”

  Norma was home alone, and, as usual when she was in, the front door was unlocked. A few minutes later, though, down came the unlocked door. She heard one of the uniformed cops coming around from the back say, “I could have told you the door was unlocked.”

  Dayries walked into the hall and found Norma standing with her arms folded. “Now you’ve done it!” she said.

  Irate, Dayries countered, “You pulled that window down in front of my face!”

  Norma knew two of the cops who had come in with him; they’d been trying to catch her for a long time. She called them by name. “They brought you here, and you’re going to be terribly disappointed,” she told Dayries. “But come along—I’ll give you a tour of the house.”

  On every wall hung the nude paintings. Dayries looked at each one, making no comment. He stopped in front of a nude girl on a horse. Norma waited; still, he remained mum. “Superintendent,” she said finally, “isn’t that a beautiful girl?”

  He took his time answering, then amazed her by saying, “I think the horse is pretty too.”

  “Yes,” Norma agreed, “but nobody wants to screw a horse.”

  Dayries tapped his crop against his boot, then continued through the house. He knocked on walls and opened drawers and closets on the first and second floors. Norma led him up the stairs to the third floor. She knew what he was looking for; sure enough, he spied a cabinet and became fixated, but only for a moment. He moved on, bending to peep under a low bed.

  “Superintendent, please,” Norma said, “it’s dusty under there. You don’t want to crawl in all that dust, do you?”

  He rose. “I’ve had a lot of complaints about this place,” he told her. He looked out the window to the alley below. “Men come down that alley.”

  “Yes,” Norma agreed, “every drunk ever passed puked in it. They named it Puke Alley, in fact. They urinate in it too. It’s had a lot of play. One night a couple of girls had a knife fight down there. Some poor do-gooder came along and tried to put a stop to it. They cut all his clothes right off him, left him nothing but his tie.”

  Dayries made no comment but turned his attention to the cabinet. “What have you got in there?”

  “Listen,” Norma said, “I can’t hide anybody in that cabinet. It’s way too small, right?”

  “Where’s the key to it?” He rapped his crop against the door.

  “I tell you what—why don’t you bust it open and see what’s in it?”

  He looked at her. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Back downstairs he asked her for her maiden name. When she told him Badon, he wanted to know if she was kin to the Badon from Covington who had been in the army with him. She said that was her cousin, and Dayries began chatting about the army as he strolled to the back of the house. Norma’s maid, Marie, sat in the kitchen.

  “What’s she doing here?” Dayries wanted to know.

  “She’s keeping me company, Superintendent. With your permission.”

  Once he had satisfied himself that he’d been through the house thoroughly and was preparing to leave, Norma said, “Who’s going to fix my door?” Dayries didn’t reply—more of his strong, silent routine. Norma pressed the issue. “Are you going to send over a carpenter?”

  She decided she had stumped him. “Never mind,” she said dismissively, “I’ll fix the door. You can go.”

  When Morrison appointed Dayries, he asked his new superintendent how long it would take him to clean up the city. Dayries thought about it and said he could do it in two years. The mayor gave him the command to get started. But either Morrison didn’t know his man or he underestimated him. Dayries approached his charge with alacrity, high standards, and a true determination to institute change, qualities that are not always appreciated in the Big Easy.

  One evening one of the city’s politicos was being feted for his upcoming marriage. The party was taking place at Lenfant’s, a restaurant on Canal Boulevard that had an enormous banquet room. The mayor, the district attorney, the councilmen and assessors, the sheriff, judges—everyone who was anyone in city politics was there. Even the legislators had come in from Baton Rouge. Everyone was drinking and eating the mounds of shrimp and crawfish heaped on the tables. The room was dark; they were watching a movie.

  Whenever Severn Darden, the district attorney, raided a house of ill repute, he confiscated any pornographic films he found and stored them in the basement at City Hall (now Gallier Hall), where the mayor’s office was. The films were shown any time there was a stag party.

  One of the mayor’s aides was running the projector. The only sounds he heard other than the movie were the sucking of crawfish heads, the slurping of drinks, and the guffaws and whistles of the men in the room, until there was a loud bump-bump-bumping at the door. He stopped chewing and turned the volume down. The door flew open, someone switched the lights on, and the superintendent of police bounded into the room. He wore his jodhpurs, boots, and a felt hat. In one hand was his whip, in the other his police whistle, which he began to blow with a piercing breeh! breeh! breeh! stopping only to bellow, “This place is raided!” as the room flooded with uniformed cops.

  Judges, councilmen, assessors threw down their napkins, spit out their crawfish, and hauled ass to the opposite door of the room. Only two people didn’t move, the mayor and the aide running the projector. The aide calmly popped a crawfish tail into his mouth; he wasn’t about to get up for anybody. After all, he was eating his crawfish, and, anyway, he was with the mayor. What could possibly happen to them?

  Morrison wiped his mouth and slowly rose from the table. Dayries stopped the whistle screaming; he stood at attention. Behind him were naked people, larger than life, as the movie continued to roll.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” the mayor said. Then he began to yell, his voice getting louder and louder. “You stupid son of a bitch, you Uptown asshole, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He shook with rage. “If you and your men are not out of here in the next minute"—he raised a fist—"you and every goddamned cop in here is fired!”

  From his chair the aide watched as the tide changed directions. Now policemen were hauling ass out the door and councilmen and assessors and judges were turning back toward the tables. Dayries was red in the face, but with great aplomb he cracked his whip, just a little off his mark—he aimed for his boot but caught himself on the thigh. To his credit, he didn’t wince. Instead, he clicked his bootheels together and executed a perfect military turn.

  The door slammed shut. The aide was the first to break the silence in the banquet room. “Oooooo, ooooo,” he wailed, “hit me, beat me, make me write bad checks!”

  The men at the stag party went wild.

  Norma was miffed about the expense to replace her front door. When she heard about the Lenfant’s fiasco from her myriad contacts and customers in city government, she went directly to her lawyer’s office. “You tell him,” she said to Arthur de la Houssaye, himself an Uptowner and member of the Boston Club, “I’ve been inspected for lunch, dinner, and supper. They ring the bell when I’m bathing, I let them in. I get out of a sound sleep for an inspection. I’ve had it!” The truth of it was that the stiff-spined, aristocratic superintendent just wasn’t as much fun as Big Mo Guillot. He didn’t know how to play th
e game.

  De la Houssaye went to see Dayries. He reported to Norma that, without any hesitation at all, the superintendent had agreed there would be no more inspections without a search warrant.

  Dayries never went to Norma’s again, but Joseph Giarrusso, the head of narcotics and soon-to-be assistant superintendent of police, arrived with the first warrant. He’d acted on good information, but when he got to the house, Norma was home alone. Gracious as an Uptown socialite, she invited him in and offered the commander a glimpse of her collection of nudes. As they walked around the house, Giarrusso found himself wondering how old Norma was. He knew she was older than he was, but just how much older was hard to tell. She was attractive—shapely, not sloppy like some middle-aged women; she kept herself well.

  Twice more Giarrusso got warrants. Each time he was well informed and each time the house was as quiet as a graveyard. He understood that Norma was as well informed as he was.

  Years later Norma told Wayne Bernard that, after those three trips to the house, Joe Giarrusso extended an invitation of his own. “Giarrusso got Bubba to set him up with Norma,” Wayne said. “He asked her to meet him on the levee behind Ochsner Hospital, out in Jefferson Parish. She met him, but nothing took place. She said, ‘If he wants to meet me somewhere, let’s go to the Royal Orleans, the Roosevelt, someplace nice like the Blue Room. Don’t tell me to meet you on the Mississippi River levee, for God’s sake!’ “

  That’s when Norma gave Joe Giarrusso the nickname Old Bucket Head. He was to become the next superintendent of police, but even if Norma had known that she wouldn’t have cared. In the late 1950s Norma was at the absolute top of her game. She was irreverent, she was cavalier, and, above all, she picked the men she wanted to go to bed with.

  Norma spotted John Datri at the head of a Mardi Gras parade, carrying the flag. He was part of the mounted police unit. She liked his tall, lean good looks—he was dark haired and young, just her kind of man. Not only that, she liked how he looked on a horse.

  “Who’s that guy?” she asked the friend who was with her at the parade.

  “Aw, you don’t want to mess with him—he’s trouble,” her friend said.

  But Norma was looking for trouble. In the couple of years since she’d bought the Waggaman property, her marriage to McCoy had not gotten any better; it was almost finished if their sex life was any indication. John Datri was young—younger than Mac—and virile.

  On Decatur Street was a place where off-duty police met. Norma and Terry haunted the joint until they found Datri and a friend there one afternoon. Norma sent Datri a beer. He told the bartender to send it back.

  “Do you know who that is?” the bartender asked.

  “Yeah, I know. She’s that old ex-whore, that madam—I don’t want to mess with her. I get in enough trouble without looking for it.”

  Norma brought the beer back herself. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You won’t drink my beer?”

  “I don’t want to get involved,” Datri said.

  “You won’t get involved,” Norma assured him. “No one’s trying to set you up.” So he drank a few beers with her.

  She then proceeded to set Datri up. She got Terry (Yum-Yum) to arrange a double date with Datri’s friend—Yum-Yum with Datri, Norma with the friend. They were to meet at the Black Orchid. Datri’s friend had some trouble convincing him they should go, but in the end Datri couldn’t resist Yum-Yum.

  At the Black Orchid, as arranged, Yum-Yum asked Datri’s friend to dance; Norma asked Datri. They danced and talked, then Norma said, “Do you see what’s happening here?” Datri didn’t. “We’re going to swap dates.”

  “Whose idea is that?” Datri wanted to know. He’d been having a few ideas about Yum-Yum.

  Norma told him it was her idea; she told him how she’d always liked a man on a horse. When she finished she asked him, “So, do you mind?” By that time Datri didn’t mind at all.

  Datri’s friend called him off to the side. “I’ve got bad news for you,” he said. “Yum-Yum wants me.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Datri snarled, trying to keep a straight face.

  Norma called Datri the Wild One. “Date-tree,” she told him, “you’re crazy.” Datri claimed he was crazy because he’d been on the USS Enterprise when the Japanese bombed it. He would take a dare on anything, like playing chicken at night on horseback on the narrow top of the Mississippi River levee, or getting in the middle of a bunch of bikers fighting with broken bottles and breaking it up. Or throwing an envelope with his cut of bribe money in it back at a fellow police officer, saying, “Stick it up your ass.” Or cockily telling Big Mo Guillot that he knew Norma Wallace paid him off.

  Norma Wallace, 1920s, with her beloved Vidalia, a police dog whose name became a local term for an out-of-towner seeking a prostitute.

  Norma, standing behind Andy Wallace and his bootlegger cronies. She took his name and the seven-carat diamond ring she’s wearing before he eventually shot and wounded her.

  Norma, 1930s. “Whores make good wives, but madams don’t. When you’re making money in a whorehouse, that makes you independent and hard to get along with as a wife in the first place.”

  Norma with her second husband, Pete Herman, at Shady Pond, her farm in Pearl River, 1936.

  Pete Herman was twice the world bantamweight boxing champion before becoming a French Quarter nightclub owner. Norma first operated above Pete’s Ringside Bar and Lounge on the corner of Conti and Burgundy.

  1026 Conti Street, late 1940s. Once owned by Ernest Bellocq, the famed photographer of the Storyville prostitutes, and located across the street from the Greyhound station, Norma’s third business address was in many ways ideal.

  Canal Street, early 1950S. At the Meal-a-Minit, Norma disguised herself as an old lady to spy on the cops who frequented it and to learn the new faces.

  Norma first saw John Datri mounted, at the head of a Mardi Gras parade, carrying the police flag. Off duty, he would soon dress in cashmere and drive the gold Coupe DeVille that marked him as Norma’s new companion.

  Norma Wallace at her second grand jury appearance, 1954.

  In 1962, every cadet out of the police academy wanted the instant prestige that would come with shutting down Norma Wallace’s forty-two-year operation. Top left, Big Jim Garrison, the New Orleans DA, who sought to reform the French Quarter; top right, Officer Paul Nazar, whose upset stomach and Mediterranean eyes gained him entrance to 1026 Conti Street; left, Frederick Soulé (center, with bowtie), commander of the vice squad that finally busted Norma.

  Below: Norma’s house in Waggaman, later the Tchoupitoulas Plantation Restaurant, where men paid well to finally introduce Norma to their wives. The nudes that once hung at 1026 Conti (above) were transferred to the walls of the restaurant; there, however, the patrons were required to keep their clothes on.

  Wayne Bernard, the boy next door who fell in love with “Mrs. Patterson,” at their getaway in Poplarville, Mississippi, 1972.

  “It’s amazing what a little Bacardi and Coke will do”: Norma in the living room of Tchoupitoulas, circa 1965, when her relationship with her youngest husband was at its stormiest and most romantic.

  “If the truth will make you clean, I’ll come clean . . . all the way.” Norma’s tell-all interview at age seventy-one won her an invitation to speak at the New Orleans Press Club, where she received a key to the city.

  Or getting a vasectomy.

  “What’s that?” he asked Norma.

  “They just go clip-clip.” Norma scissored her fingers through the air.

  “Wait a minute!” the Wild One yelled.

  “Date-tree, you can’t go on having children like this.” His fourth had just been born. “You can’t afford what you’ve got.” Then she dared him to get a vasectomy. He went to Dr. Frank Gomila’s office and had it done.

  Datri liked going to bed with Norma. He liked her body, which was better than those of some twenty-five-year-olds he’d slept with—her large, perfect, creamy wh
ite breasts, her milk white pubic hair. He liked it when she told him, “Date-tree, you Italians are the best lovers in the world,” and he’d say, “Aw, go ahead. You gotta tell that to all the dagos.”

  And he liked talking to Norma. He liked her stories about the house, because he never went to Conti Street. She told him that when a girl wanted to work for her, she made her strip down. If she passed the inspection, Norma hired her and got her a new wardrobe. Norma told him that she paid the IRS every year, like religion, in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars; that she’d had a fabulous love affair with Phil Harris; that of all the movie stars who’d ever come to her place, Don Ameche was the pussiest-eatin son of a bitch she’d ever seen—"He ate every girl in the house!” And Norma told Datri why she liked younger men: “When I feel like I want to get laid, I want somebody who can get a good hard-on, not some old boy who can’t.”

  Datri also liked to go out with Norma. One night they arrived at the Black Orchid just as a fight broke out. Datri spun one of the guys around and decked him. “Good shot, Date-tree,” Norma said, and they walked into the lounge as if nothing had happened.

  Datri was getting his kicks. He tooled around in Norma’s gold Coupe De Ville like he owned it. At first he didn’t like the cashmere sports coat she wanted him to wear to the Town and Country—“Button the top button of your shirt,” she said, “I like the hood look"—but he got used to it and started liking it enough that she bought him another one. He liked the leather jacket too and the cigarette case with the built-in lighter and the money she put in his pocket every night they spent together. He especially liked the outboard motor Norma gave him for Christmas. She’d sent George, her porter, to get it but told Datri, “He doesn’t know an outboard from an outhouse,” and gave him the money to get it himself.