The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  They led her to the third floor. The place was filthy, unsanitary. McCoy asked to see her. Norma was already exhausted, and seeing Mac was almost unbearable. He seemed so hurt to see her in such sordid conditions, yet he wouldn’t stop harping that he’d known it would come to this. His visit only compounded their estrangement.

  Her next visitor was Arthur Carroll, a man she had known all her life, who had once been a policeman in the red-light district. When he left Norma was so tired that she curled up on a cot with a bare, filthy mattress, covered herself with the blanket the matrons had given her, turned her face to the wall, and silently cried. Tired as she was, only the consolation of Carroll’s promise that he’d see to it she got a cell to herself allowed her to sleep.

  During the night Norma dreamed that mice were jumping in bed with her, only to wake up and realize that it was no dream. She was scared to death of mice, so there wasn’t much sleeping after that.

  When she got up the next morning, it was only to another nightmare. The toilets didn’t have any doors, not even curtains, they just sat out in the open. All the girls sat around smirking and snickering, watching to see what she would do. She couldn’t go to the bathroom in front of an audience! She waited until the matrons brought in breakfast, some kind of pale mystery goop that made oatmeal look gourmet, and picked the one she thought would be most sympathetic. Her instincts were good; the woman, Mrs. Nix, let her use the toilet in solitary.

  The showers, the whole place, crawled with roaches. “If you want to eat something in this hellhole,” Norma told Mac dramatically, “you have to knock the roaches off first—they try to take the food away from you.” Roaches, mice, and bedbugs too, as Norma discovered when little red bumps began popping up on her milky white skin. If she got lice, she was just going to roll over and die.

  But fear of the wildlife was nothing compared with fear of a group of dirty, unkempt girls who called themselves the Gang of Six. The word was they’d whipped up on a couple of landladies, and two or three women who owned honky-tonks had been given a good going-over as well.

  The first night these girls said to her, “Get the dish rag, it’s your turn. Every newcomer has to do the dishes.”

  Norma got up, but Mrs. Nix heard what was going on and said, “Don’t do that to her. She’s tired, she’s had an ordeal. Let somebody else do it.”

  But Norma was too smart to let someone take up for her. “I’m game,” she said and started toward the sink.

  Behind her she heard a little voice say, “Wait, I’ll do it for you.”

  Norma turned. The girl was as small as a child. Her brown hair was thin, unhealthy looking; her eyes were large, doelike.

  “Who are you?” Norma asked.

  “I’m Nell,” the girl said with an exaggerated drawl that gave her name two syllables. She was from rural Mississippi, in for shoplifting and forging checks. Nell said humbly, “I’ll be your maid.”

  “And what do you get?” Norma wanted to know. Nell wanted Norma to buy her cigarettes. Done, Norma told her, and Nell went off to do the dishes.

  Already Norma felt better: She was making deals; she had her own maid. That evening Carroll came through with a private cell, and he brought seeds for the mice. Mac arrived with dinner from the Black Orchid.

  But now Norma had to deal with the Gang. Not only did she not want these girls to beat her up, she wanted them to like her. She didn’t want them to think of her as someone who had people on her side and got favors. So she bought them cigarettes too, all of them, every day. Nell didn’t object—she knew that jailhouses weren’t democracies. And when the wagon came around on Saturdays, Norma bought ice cream, sodas, whatever they wanted. She talked to them and told them stories about what went on at her whorehouse. She was careful never to act superior, or as if she was unique, that they were a bunch of dope fiends—since most of them were in on drug charges—and she was a big-time landlady. “But it turned out I was unique, no question about that,” Norma said. “They all swore they were innocent; I was the only dame in the place who was guilty.”

  Some of the girls had been in for two or three years, waiting for appeals. In all that time they’d had no yard privileges, and so no sunshine. Since the food was so terrible—what was served over spaghetti could have been chopped squirrel or the warden’s mother-in-law, for all they knew—a few of them ate only from the wagon. One of them, Linda, had terrible tooth problems because she ate nothing but sweets.

  No matter what they did, Norma never ratted on them, even when a couple of them set a fire one night. She knew that would be a quick way to get killed. They got into trouble because they had nothing else to do, not even a radio to listen to, only television at certain hours. So they found other ways to have fun.

  Behind the toilets the floor didn’t meet the wall because the building was literally falling down. On the second floor, directly underneath the girls’ cellblock, were the black men. (The jails in Louisiana were still officially segregated.) The girls would hang over the toilets and send kites down to the men, notes on strings that they would drop through the crack, then, after the men wrote back, they’d pull them up. When they went down to the yard for garbage detail, they’d write the men notes and stick them on the insides of the can covers with chewing gum.

  The matrons knew what was going on. Mrs. Nix told Norma, “You know, I sit here with fear in my heart. All those men have to do is just push the walls down and come up here and there wouldn’t be a thing we could do about it.”

  Mrs. Nix was a lovely woman, very pretty, Norma thought, and totally out of place at Parish Prison. For one thing, she was in her late seventies. She’d try to be tough, but it wasn’t easy handling a bunch of hookers and streetwalkers and counterfeiters—even a murderer, but the poor girl was only sixteen years old. She and her boyfriend had killed her mother. Norma felt sorry for her because there were a number of lesbians up there who were having their fun with the girl.

  The only diversion the jail provided was in the form of a Saturday-night revivalist, a woman who sang “Amazing Grace” in a voice as deep as a man’s and worked up a sweat thumping on the Bible. Did they really think they were going to rehabilitate a bunch of hookers, shoplifters, and dopers by reading to them out of the Bible?

  The way they treated the inmates was a crime worse than most that those poor disadvantaged girls had committed as far as Norma was concerned. She got a taste of it when she asked permission to use her blood pressure medicine and had to see the jail doctor. Right away he got nasty and started calling her the housemother. When she told him what she wanted, he acted as if she were a dope fiend because she’d asked to use her prescription. Norma got nasty back, told him to forget it, that the medicine wouldn’t do her a lick of good in that place anyway.

  Of all the women who were in jail, for all their different crimes, the alcoholics disturbed Norma the most. She watched them come back over and over again. These women—some of them had children—would get drunk, get picked up; they’d be given ten days, but they’d get out in five. The next evening they’d be right back. The alcoholics roused Norma’s childhood memories from their place of rest far away from the life she had made for herself.

  As her personal crusade she adopted one of them. The girl had three children, and Norma nagged the life out of her, telling her what it was like for her children, illustrated with stories and feelings from her own childhood. Even after they were both out of jail, Norma stayed on that girl for three years. “Like gravy on rice,” Norma said. “She wound up on a farm in Bogalusa, back with her family. I believe she was rehabilitated.

  “But if anyone was to be rehabilitated, it wouldn’t be in that fleabag joint. If those women libbers are looking for a place to start, there it is. I’d help, but they have this rule that once you’ve been in, you can’t go back to visit. It’s too bad. I would have liked to talk to the girls, because I’ve seen too many of them, beautiful girls too, go down the drain. There’s a way to get through to them, but it’s not
with bad food and preachers.”

  Norma did her six weeks playing counselor, den mother, and raconteur. When her time was up, she decided not to go back to the business. “I’d told myself many times, the day I do time in jail, unless it’s at the Roosevelt Hotel with bars on the door to a suite, I’m out of the business. Anybody is entitled to one fall, but you can’t fall twice. If I’d been stupid enough to go to Parish Prison twice, I would have been a bum. Three times, you’re a tramp.

  “I did my six weeks—an eternity in that hellhole—and it made me see the light. I was rehabilitated. Hell, I was converted.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Endgame

  Norma’s conversion—her decision to get out of the business—lasted long enough for her to put 1026 Conti Street on the market in the summer of 1962. She listed it, including most of the furniture and a three-thousand-dollar rug in the living room of her apartment, with the real estate agent Frosty Blackshear for fifty thousand dollars. She wanted nothing except out. The agent advertised the house, and many people came to see it, but no one made an offer.

  While prospective buyers wandered through the house, tour guides brought sightseers by the busload. From her apartment Norma could hear the guides telling the tourists all about her—over a microphone! She all but ran to Waggaman, moving her official residence to her house across the river. She stayed away from Conti Street. But she didn’t stay away from the business altogether. She worked some of the girls out of motels and hotels in New Orleans, others from two or three apartments. Jackie still answered the phones at 1026, and Norma stayed there occasionally or had Marie stay on the premises. She didn’t like leaving the place unattended. She’d done that once a couple of years earlier, and linens, light fixtures, even some furniture had been stolen.

  While Norma was in jail, Mac had started driving a taxi. He had hoped that during her six weeks Norma would really see the light and quit prostitution. But her intentions were clear enough to him now. He got together with a few other drivers, and they started the A Service Cab Company. He told Norma he was leaving her.

  Norma’s emotions ran the gamut as Mac prepared to go. She loved him, and she was hurt that he was leaving her. She was also angry at the way he was looting the Waggaman house, taking furnishings as well as his belongings. When Norma did the leaving, she left everything intact, but her pride was such that, even though she was stung badly by Mac’s actions, she wouldn’t let him know for hell and be damned. She hated being the one left, yet she couldn’t see going on with Mac. They had been married for nearly eighteen years, and for many of those years they had battled over desires to live completely different lifestyles. For quite some time Norma had been restless, casting about for something to ease her, and always she had looked for that something in the form of a man. She found that she couldn’t stop thinking about Wayne Bernard. She hadn’t contacted him since she’d been out of jail, but before Mac left he told her, “I know what you’ve been doing, Norma. I know you’ve been fooling around with that young boy.”

  During the time in 1962 that Norma disappeared from Wayne’s life, he began spending his time with Betty, a blonde from Marrero, and Betty started to toy with a few ideas about her future. Her plans, however, were abruptly foiled when Mrs. Patterson appeared at the Mist one night. She and Wayne picked up as if they’d just seen each other the night before, and Betty was history.

  Norma and Wayne made the rounds of the West Bank honky-tonks, then, for the first time, Norma took Wayne to her favorite haunts in the French Quarter. They had dinner at Dan’s and drinks at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. Sometimes they brought Carmen Miranda with them; Wayne would walk behind Norma, carrying the poodle on a royal blue velvet pillow with gold tassels. In Jefferson Parish they stopped in at the Town and Country Motel, where Mrs. Patterson would tip the piano player twenty dollars. Wayne watched, fascinated, as Mrs. Patterson slipped the maître d’ ten bucks, another ten for the bartenders, never calculated a tip for the waiters, just left a pile of money on the table. Wayne was making thirty-five dollars a week at the shipyards.

  Mrs. Patterson started giving him a couple of hundred dollars before they went out, telling him how to spend it. They ate at the Black Orchid and Masson’s Beach House out by the lake, Antoine’s and Arnaud’s in the Quarter. Wherever they went, they got the best seats; they were ushered in like royalty. Wayne watched Mrs. Patterson closely at the big fancy restaurants so he’d know which fork to use. Sometimes after a meal at those places, he’d still be hungry and he’d say, “Let’s stop and get a hamburger.” Mrs. Patterson would laugh, and he’d pull in at the first fast-food drive-up. Then they’d hit the West Bank and dance at Scorpio’s or the Gay Paree until they couldn’t keep their hands off each other any longer.

  Wayne was having too much fun to notice that wherever they went Mrs. Patterson always sat facing out, her eye on the crowd, and she always put Wayne with his back to the room. He was too amazed—here he was, just an old country boy, and suddenly the whole world had opened up to him.

  Norma generally stayed on Conti Street after a wild night with Wayne. Once she didn’t get up until almost seven o’clock in the evening. Jackie and Rose Mary were in the office.

  “Look at her,” Rose Mary said. “She’s still drunk or she wouldn’t be walking like that.”

  Norma, in her nightgown, fussed around in the office. “I hear you talking, don’t think I don’t hear you,” she said.

  “We’re talking about you,” Jackie told her.

  “Who else would you be talking about?” Norma demanded.

  During the next few months, Paul Nazar called her a couple of times. He was friendly, very chatty, but he always refused Norma’s dinner invitation. Freddy Soulé had told him to be careful, that it might not be a good idea to take Norma up on her offer. Nazar knew that someday he’d wish he’d had the chance to really talk to her, though, a woman of her stature and notoriety. He was officially part of the vice squad now, but he didn’t know how it could get any better than the night they busted Norma. It was his best case; other cops were jealous.

  Assuming that Nazar’s calls meant the police were still interested in the house, Norma kept the action off the premises. So it was surprising when one winter evening Rose Mary saw two men in topcoats and hats coming up the alley. She knew they were cops. She threw the buzzer and flew to the back of the house, calling for Norma and getting no response. It irritated her the way Norma ignored the buzzer.

  The parlor door was wide open. Rose Mary stepped outside. Nothing. She cautiously peered around the side of the building just in time to see Norma turn the hose on the two detectives. They yelled, “Wait, Norma, wait!” One of them got out of the stream and reached in his pocket. “We have a warrant,” he told Norma, holding out the document. She blasted it right out of his hand.

  Sometimes the temptation was just too much. The bell would ring, and Norma began to make exceptions here and there until, by spring of 1963, 1026 Conti was somewhat back in play.

  On a warm night in late April, she was at the house with a sick hangover after a night out with Wayne. She called a friend who gave her a quick cure—fresh salted tomatoes to settle her stomach. She told Leon, the porter, to go out and get her a can of tomato juice. She didn’t want to wait for him to try to find a fresh tomato in the French Quarter on a Friday night. “I’m absolutely dying,” she told him so he’d hurry.

  The front doorbell rang. She looked out and saw a man by himself. She called to him to go around the side. Through the shuttered window he told her he was from out of town and gave a local reference.

  Norma made a quick assessment. She had four girls in the house at the time. She told the man to go to the corner and she’d send one of her girls to pick him up and take him to a motel. She told her girl not to go anywhere with him unless he could produce a plane or train ticket.

  She couldn’t wait to get her girdle off and lie down. But just as she started to undress, a car pulled into the alley. She thought
it was someone taking advantage of her parking lot in the back, which annoyed her, but she was too tired to deal with it. Three men, however, got out of the car and rang the bell. They were Hispanic, very polite, speaking in broken English. Norma invited them in and called the three girls down. Rose Mary was going to have a fit when Norma told her to go with one of these Latins. She would help out in a pinch, but she didn’t like Latin men, because they always wanted to kiss and they sometimes got angry when they were told they couldn’t.

  Sandy, Barbara, and Rose Mary took the men upstairs—Rose Mary shooting Norma a look to kill. They sent down the money, and Norma put it in the desk. Leon arrived with the tomato juice, and Norma took it to her apartment. Before she did anything, though, she wanted to change her clothes. She threw her girdle over a chair and stripped down to her bra and step-ins.

  With no warning at all, Norma heard what sounded like sledgehammers on the front and side doors. She threw the buzzer, but the girls upstairs had heard the noise and already grabbed the men, running down to the courtyard and into the hideout. The cops had a hole in the side door by that time. Looking through it, Freddy Soulé saw a flash of red—Rose Mary was wearing a red kimono—and heard the clatter on the stairway. He already knew the men were in the house because he’d been staking the place out for several hours.

  Norma handed Rose Mary the black book and watched as Leon, the Latins, Sandy, and Barbara disappeared into the hideout. Rose Mary followed. At the last minute Maggie, one of the poodles, bolted in behind Rose Mary. “Maggie!” Norma called, but it was too late. The door closed. She heard the bolt slide. She rolled two plant boxes in front of the entrance; then she assumed her stance, arms folded, facing the side door. She completely forgot that she wasn’t dressed. She also forgot that she had a hangover. All she could think about was that the men’s car was in her lot and that they were foreigners. In her experience foreigners were hard to handle if they panicked. They might want out of the hideout regardless of the consequences.