The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  When Wayne first left Norma, he wanted to go wild. He wondered if Norma had felt as smothered in her marriage to Charles McCoy as he’d come to feel in his marriage to her. But as strong as his need had been to break free, when Snapbean, whose heart was broken over Norma’s death, cried and wouldn’t speak to Wayne for some time, it brought Wayne’s guilt into sharp focus. Bubba saw what his nephew was going through and told him he was lucky Norma hadn’t killed him that Thursday night he’d spent on the sofa with her. “It’s the kind of thing people do,” Bubba said, having seen it enough times during his years as a cop.

  But Wayne felt completely responsible. He had returned to the Bush house to find Rusty curled up on Norma’s robe at the foot of her bed. He mourned with the dog. He thought that if he had only done things differently, if he’d really believed her when she said she was going to kill herself, if they’d never gone to Mississippi in the first place, none of this would have happened. He blamed himself for being nothing but an old country boy who couldn’t see that he should have taken more of a role at the restaurant, gotten into the business end of it so that all Norma would have had to do was get dressed up in her fabulous dresses every night and tell her stories. He blamed himself for not moving her to New Orleans, getting her back to friends, to a life of her own to grow old. He blamed his own passive nature, going back in time as if to will it away and make room for other possibilities.

  In the end, though, character is destiny. Wayne’s passive nature was perfect for Norma’s need to be dominant and in control, and his indifference both frustrated Norma and made him more desirable to her—a deadly combination.

  When Norma told her sister-in-law that she needed to get rid of Wayne, that he was too young, part of her was speaking to self-preservation. But the matter was far too complicated, because from the start she’d wanted Wayne in her life for exactly that—self-preservation. Wayne had enhanced her image; his presence had kept her from facing up to the fact that she was aging.

  Norma came of age in the 1920s, when for the first time in American history youth-oriented culture prevailed. She was a woman ahead of her times in many ways and one in a profession that capitalized on youth, beauty, and sensuality. Norma wanted to remain young and sexy at any cost. When she married Wayne, a man young enough to be her grandson, she was proud of her achievement. What she didn’t see was that this pride would overcome her.

  When Norma was a girl, Mr. McCann, her parents’ tenant, committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid; her own mother had tried to kill herself many times. But in the underworld, to which Norma escaped, you never waited until you were cornered. “You jump the gun,” she told Wayne. “Do it to them first, never lay back and wait. That’s kept me rolling for many years. It cost me here and there, but I’m still going, and I’m the last one that had a big, open house, girls actually living in it.”

  That was a good philosophy for life in the underworld, and Norma carried it into her marriages as well. She borrowed money, put it in Wayne’s name, and gave him no access to it; she wrote him a paycheck that she put back into her business. She was always covering herself.

  Norma denied that she was suited for marriage at all, yet she married five times. Her husbands, by and large, were respectable men; Pete Herman was the only one with ties to the underworld, but, because of his boxing titles, the establishment and law enforcement looked the other way. Norma wanted the respectability marriage gave her, and she needed a man to love her, but she didn’t want the traditional roles that marriage forced upon women, domesticity and motherhood. With one foot in the world of respectability and one in the underworld, Norma was in the same conflict between love and work that, at the time of her death, more and more women were having to face.

  Norma identified strongly with her masculine side. She knew how to make money, vast sums of it, both legitimately and illegitimately, during a time when most women were not concerned with making money and very few had any real moneymaking capabilities. She wanted the kind of power a man had with his associates. Her associates were policemen and underworld figures, and she wielded considerable power with them.

  But the most intriguing aspect of Norma’s desire for power revolved around sexual power. She wanted total control over her marriages as well as the freedom to have affairs. “I want to be free,” she said, “like a man.” She cheated on her husbands, left one for another, liked to go to bed with young men, wanted a young man to take her arm. She had said of Charles McCoy, “He was young and beautiful, of course; I was susceptible to young and beautiful people.” In the end, though, the one man she never cheated on, the youngest of them all, left her for another woman. The one time she should have jumped the gun and been the first to leave, she found herself powerless.

  When Norma opened the Tchoupitoulas Plantation Restaurant to crowds and acclaim, she turned infamy into fame. When she was honored at the Press Club after making the cover of New Orleans magazine, her notoriety became celebrity. When she accepted the key to the city, she seemed like any other legitimate businesswoman, beloved and respected for her achievements.

  New Orleans, with its European heritage and sensibility, has always had a large tolerance for sins of the flesh. More than just a pre-dominantly French or Spanish ancestry, though, came to bear on this tolerant attitude: The mostly male populace of the old colony was concerned with a much more practical consideration—the shortage of women. While prostitution undoubtedly ruined many poor girls, it provided opportunity for others, as it did for Norma, a way to make more money than in any other occupation open to women, or a path to a more traditional way of life, either marriage or legitimate enterprise. So many women wanted to avail themselves of this opportunity that, by the late nineteenth century, no thought was given to eradicating prostitution, the effort was only to contain it, and thus Storyville came into existence.

  Storyville’s fame and the enduring romance associated with it make it easy to forget that the area had a very short life, less than twenty years, in the history of one of the oldest cities in the country. The openness of the red-light district obscures the fact that unpopular, repressive laws also existed and were in part responsible for the city’s developing certain salient characteristics that earned it the name Sin City and gave it its reputation for corruption.

  While New Orleans was still a colony with a shortage of women, white women specifically, free women of color were legally prohibited from engaging in sexual relations with white men. This led the Creole men to institute a custom of their own, the secret system of plaçage, in which they kept free women of color as their mistresses or actually set up second households with them in close proximity to their legitimate families. This custom was practiced clandestinely, but it was a “public secret,” getting a nod from the clergy while the law looked the other way.

  Because of such laws and the customs that rose from them, New Orleanians developed an exotic, secretive way of life and a romance with the underworld, much as what happened during Prohibition, when bootleggers and gangsters were seen as romantic individualists.

  Early on in the city’s history, American visitors found the way of life in New Orleans foreign and some of the residents, with their European habits, like keeping taverns open on Sundays, shocking. They viewed the city as rife with sin and corruption. New Orleanians liked the reputation, and they liked to tell stories about themselves. After all, New Orleans is a river city that was the last stop on many hard journeys. It was always (and still is) a place to disembark, get a drink, find a card game, have a good fight, and go off with a woman. Even as businessmen and politicians were trying to drag New Orleans out of the Old World and turn it into a progressive American city, the wide open aspect of the city throughout the first half of the twentieth century acquired mythic proportions, and legends about loose women, strong drink, and corrupt politicians proliferated.

  New Orleanians like nothing better than exploiting their own myths and legends, though the times have changed and the city is not as op
en as it once was. In an uneasy alliance with the media, politicians and city administrators clamor for its attention and, at the same time, accuse it of sensationalism and invasion of privacy. A house like Norma’s could never be the “public secret” it once was. Now the news broadcasts incidents of policemen taking payoffs from operations masked as massage parlors and escort services, and New Orleans vice becomes the subject of national television newsmagazine shows.

  With the scrutiny comes a feeling of loss, perhaps a loss of innocence, when cheap operations promote sex and pornography, and call girls, alone and vulnerable, work the streets, and houses like Norma’s—opulent and protected places to conduct rites of passage—are gone. It’s as if only the outsider, the tourist, can see the city as it once was: read or hear the myths and legends; wander the streets to see where the stories happened; witness Sin City on six blocks of Bourbon Street. If you come to town and expect it, you will find it. Because even with New Orleans as shut down as it has ever been, the residents are still more tolerant than in most places, and they revel in the past; they have a boastful attitude about New Orleans and a belief that it is, indeed, a wicked city.

  “I look back on it all and wonder how I ever did it,” Norma said, “but in those days there was so much going on, so much excitement, things happened and you lived with it. Running a house was always a strain, always trouble. But it was never dull. I used to wake up around noon and have my coffee and wonder what this night will bring.

  “Things are so different now in the French Quarter. I don’t like the idea of the hippies lying around on the sidewalk. I saw one the other day exposing everything. I remember the time a man peed in my alley and they took him down and fined him fifty dollars. The other day, they were peeing right in front of us in Jackson Square. I don’t like that. But I don’t actually object to the hippies, because I understand their way of life. They don’t want to wind up with a two-car garage and struggling for thirty years with the mortgage on the house. I understand how they feel.

  “And girls were more beautiful then than they are now. Maybe it was because they knew how to wear clothes. Girls have typed themselves now, with long hair, miniskirts, and blue jeans. In those days girls all had individuality, because they wore their hair differently, dressed differently, and they loved to dress.

  “As for abolishing prostitution—what’s better, to have a nice, clean, sanitary house, or what is going on in the Quarter today, fornicating in the square, parks, everywhere for everybody to see? And don’t think for a minute that every man who visited a house was only interested in a quick screw. Many of them desperately craved companionship. In some cases, houses took the strain off marriages. I know for a fact that some women were glad to be let off sexual obligations. Just because a man goes discreetly to a house doesn’t mean the marriage is shattered.

  “But the women libbers are all running around saying women are prostituting themselves keeping house, having babies. And here’s the deal—women get married for one thing, security. They sell it to one man for the rent, food, clothes. When you look at it that way, hookers get more for what they sell. If I was still in the business, though, I’d probably be sending one of those lady liberation groups a check every month. Any landlady will tell you bossy broads will sure send her a lot of customers.

  “And as dirty, crummy as the French Quarter is today, I still love it. I loved it then because it was good to me; it represented a life I enjoyed. I was very happy there all those years. Yes, it’s dirty and people knock it, and when people knock it, it hurts me.

  “The Quarter, you don’t know what it does to me. When I’m there and I have to leave it, I feel a lump comes here . . .

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but every now and then around about seven in the evening, that bell rings in my head. I still miss the action.

  “You know, in another life, under other circumstances, I might have been a captain of industry. What the hell—maybe I was.”

  Bibliographical Note

  The most important source for the writing of The Last Madam was Norma Wallace’s memoirs, which she taped during the last two years of her life. Being able to hear her voice, her laugh, her inflections, and her accent gave me a sense of the woman that added aspects of her personality and emotional depth that otherwise would have been missing from my story of her life.

  The profiles of Norma Wallace by Clint Bolton (New Orleans, June 1972) and Howard Jacobs (The Times-Picayune, June 30 and July 1, 1974) were invaluable addenda to the memoirs. Bolton’s article gave a telling glimpse of Wallace’s early life, and the original draft of his interview with her provided additional material. Jacobs, in his inimitable style, covered Wallace’s working life and love life concisely and comically, and he elicited some of her most colorful quotes.

  Louis Andrew Vyhanck’s dissertation, The Seamier Side of Life: Criminal Activity in New Orleans During the 1920s (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1979), animated the era and the street life of the city during Norma Wallace’s first working decade, and enhanced her descriptions enormously.

  Other vivid writing about that era was done by John Magill, a curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection, in two essays, “Welcome Old Man Gloom,” about Prohibition in old New Orleans, which was legend for its consumption of alcohol, and “The Dance Craze,” about the city’s obsession with the dance that named the infamous Tango Belt. Both essays appeared in The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly (vol. 6, no. 3, Summer 1988; and vol. 10, no. 4, Fall 1992, respectively).

  Rosemary James’s articles about Pershing Gervais and Jim Garrison, which appeared in New Orleans magazine during the 1970s, and Figaro, a New Orleans weekly published in the seventies, brought to life two New Orleans characters who acted on the city and changed it, as well as the course of Norma Wallace’s life.

  J. A. Walker’s nostalgic story, “Gaspar Gulotta—The Little Mayor of Bourbon Street” (New Orleans, May 1971), gave a lively look at the nightclub proprietor and cigar-smoking brother of prizefighter Pete Herman, and offered a tantalizing excerpt from the Special Citizens Investigating Committee report. The fourth volume of the report, Prostitution (April 1954), the transcriptions of the testimony linking police to prostitution, showed the close connections between the law and “the life” and was filled with vivid details and events.

  Political works that informed the writing of this book were Edward Haas’s important book, DeLesseps S. Morrison and the Image of Reform: New Orleans Politics, 1946–1961 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), a compelling and highly readable portrait of the man and his times; Silk Stockings and Ballot Boxes: Women and Politics in New Orleans, 1920–1963 by Pamela Tyler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), which shows the influence and power of women—in politics, in New Orleans, in the world; and Garry Boulard’s Huey Long Invades New Orleans: The Siege of a City, 1934–36 (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing, 1998), a superb look at the Kingfish, both the man and the politician, and an evocative portrait of the city in the thirties.

  Other essential reading included Al Rose’s indispensable and classic work, Storyville, New Orleans (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974); Herbert Asbury’s The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), an imaginative rendering of crime and street life in New Orleans before Storyville; Robert Tallant’s descriptive look at life and people in this unique city, The Romantic New Orleanians (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950); and Mel Leavitt’s A Short History of New Orleans (San Francisco: Lexikos, 1982), a deft and delightful chronicle of the city.

  To these writers and their masterful works, I am deeply indebted.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people gave freely of their time and memories while I was writing this book. Wayne Bernard’s account of his life with Norma Wallace was essential, as was the belief of his wife, Jean, that Norma’s story should be told. I thank them and the following people, who told their stories about Norma and her tim
es: Sam Adams, Johnny and Pat Badon, Frank Bertucci, Major Albert Cromp, John H. Datri, Francis Davis, Marie Delouise, Richard “Jack” Dempsey, Pete Fountain, Robert Norman Frey, Charles Gennaro, Joseph I. Giarrusso, Sarah Huff, Rosemary James, Captain J. D. Jarrell, Edgar McGeehee, Nick Macheca, Sandy Margiotta, Rose Mary Miorana (who generously lent me the letters Norma wrote to her as well), Helen Moran, Paul Nazar, Barbara Price, Alice Regan, J. Cornelius Rathborne III, Suzanne Robbins, Earl and Elise Rolling, Janice Roussel, Sidney Scallan, Earl Scramuzza, Patsy Sims, Frederick Soulé, and Kathryn Swartwood.

  Many thanks to Elaine Newton, who was a skip tracer in a former life and located many people who had been friends and associates of Norma. Her role as detective played a large part in uncovering and demystifying the story of Norma Wallace.

  Thanks, also, to Marion Tanner, Nancy Gore, and Noah Robert, who helped find the writer.

  Others whose help with finding secondary sources, locating information, and making connections was invaluable are Allain C. Andry III, Phil Anselmo, Joe Arrigo, Bob Bass, Jason Berry, Tony Buonagura, Chris Bynum, Nancy Dibelka, Susan Finch, Frank Gagnard, Beverly Gianna (Director of Public Relations, The New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau), Betty Guillaud, Leonard Gurvich, Rudolph Holzer, Hillary Irvin, Scott Jefferson, Allen Johnson, Mary Allen Johnson, Regina Kramer (curator of the Phil Harris-Alice Faye Collection in Linton, Indiana), Steve Lacy, Susan Larson, Melanie McKay, Valerie Martin, Chief Jimmy Miller, Randy Moses, Lester Otillio, Earl Perry, Diana Pinckley, John Pope, Joann Price, Lee Pryor, Bryce Reveley, Gail Ruddock, Tom Rushing, Julie Smith, Jack Stewart, Ronnie Virgets, Charles Watson, Lanier Watson, and Helen Wisdom.