According to Charles Washburn, it was Minna who delivered the standard good-conduct lecture to new female arrivals.
“Be polite, patient and forget what you are here for,” Minna would explain. “Gentlemen are only gentlemen when properly introduced. We shall see that each girl is properly presented to each guest. No lining up for selection as in other houses…Remember that the Everleigh Club has no time for the rough element, the clerk on a holiday or a man without a check-book.
“It’s going to be difficult, at first, I know. It means, briefly, that your language will have to be lady-like and that you will forgo the entreaties you have used in the past. You have the whole night before you and one $50 client is more desirable than five $10 ones. Less wear and tear. You will thank me for this advice in later years. Your youth and beauty are all you have. Preserve it. Stay respectable by all means…We’ll supply the clients; you amuse them in a way they’ve never been amused before. Give, but give interestingly and with mystery. I want you girls to be proud that you are in the Everleigh Club.”
The girls felt like ladies, and they were proud—and so were the customers who had an opportunity to be’ with them. As a result, their customers came from the highest echelon of every profession and business. Understandably, some of the most celebrated customers—“a certain famous actor, a certain famous dramatic critic and a certain famous novelist,” as well as a renowned aviator of the period—did not wish their names made public, and they never were. But many others were as delighted to speak of their adventures in the Everleigh Club as they were to reminisce over their best days at Harvard or Yale.
Edgar Lee Masters remembered one highly regarded Chicago attorney who spent his annual two-week vacation in the club. “Colonel MacDuff, a mighty Chicago lawyer, used to stay for days in the Club. Grown weary, to the point of madness, of trying cases, he would go to see Minna and her girls. Handing Minna $500 or so, he would retire where he could drink wine and eat fried chicken, and discuss the perplexities of life with Maxine or Gertrude or Virginia.”
There were numerous other front-page figures who occasionally visited or were habitues of the Everleigh Club. Among these were celebrities of the literary world such as Ring Lardner, George Ade, and Percy Hammond; celebrities of the sporting world such as James J. Corbett and Stanley Ketchel; celebrities of the theater such as John Barrymore; celebrities of the gambling world such as “Bet a Million” Gates; celebrities of the circus such as The Great Fearlesso.
The club was a haunt for millionaires. In 1905, the thirty-seven-year-old Marshall Field, Jr., was found alone in his Prairie Avenue mansion, dead from a shot in the abdomen. Headlines, based on rumors, shouted that he had been murdered in the Everleigh Club and then removed to his own quarters, although Minna vehemently denied that he had ever visited her house and police officials stated that the fatal shot was self-inflicted and accidental.
The club’s clientele ranged from gangsters to government officials. Pat Crowe, a bank robber who also kidnapped young Cudahy, was often a guest. Once, the members of an august Congressional committee arrived in Chicago from Washington, D.C., bent on investigating something or other of national interest, and after their daytime researches, the congressmen did all of their nighttime homework inside the club.
For the Everleigh sisters, it was a profitable and gay life, but it was not an easy one. Persistently, they were troubled by rival bordello owners, criminals, and reformers. In 1910, Nathaniel Moore, son of the Rock Island Railway magnate, was killed in another brothel through the use of knockout drops, and then he was robbed, and an effort was made to plant his corpse in the Everleigh furnace. But the Everleighs, forewarned of the plot by some admirers, prevented the act in the nick of time. Once, the proprietors were held up by a dope addict who had entered the club, and only quick thinking by Aida saved their jewels. On another occasion, a guest in flannel underwear tumbled down the stairs to shout that the house was on fire. When the Chicago Tribune learned of this blaze, the night editor desperately tried to locate reporters to cover the story. The editor discovered that his three top reporters were already occupied in the club at that very moment.
But reformers created the greatest problem for the sisters. Some were harmless. Once, Lucy Page Gaston, head of The Anti-Cigarette League, burst into the club and cried out to Minna, “You alone can stop your girls from going straight to the devil!” Cooperatively, Minna inquired, “How, Miss Gaston?” And Miss Gaston shouted, “Make them stop smoking cigarettes!”
Other reformers were more dangerous. Gipsy Smith, the London evangelist, invaded Chicago, gathering crowds, and entreating them with fervor, “A man who visits the red-light district has no right to associate with decent people in daylight!” To acquaint Chicago’s young men with the evil that was rampant in their city. Smith led a march of twenty thousand persons into the Levee for a glimpse of hell. After the march ended, at least a fourth of the males, who had never been in the Levee before, stayed behind, and the greatest number made their debuts in sin at the Everleigh Club that same evening. “We are glad for the business,” Minna told the press, “but I am sorry to see so many nice young men coming down here for the first time.”
In order to survive the attacks of their enemies, the Everleigh sisters openly bought police and political protection. Minna once told the police that in twelve years, the houses of prostitution in the First Ward had paid $15 million in graft. Of this sum, the Everleigh sisters had paid $120,000, plus special assessments needed to buy off state legislators in Springfield and encourage them to vote against bills unfavorable to brothels. Most of this money had gone to two colorful aldermen on the City Council, John Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who were the political powers of the First Ward. The aldermen, in turn, had bribed the city police force and the legislators.
Despite this continuing drain on their resources, the Everleigh sisters made an annual profit (in a day when the income tax was negligible) of $120,000. While they dwelt amidst luxury, it was a business-required luxury arranged primarily for their guests. As for themselves, they were careful with their money, and invested it wisely. Before their middle years, if their business had continued as usual, they could have expected to be millionaires several times over.
But business did not continue as usual. There was a new mood in the land, a mood of growing community pride, and this infected the citizens of Chicago deeply. Churches of all denominations united to exert pressure, and the Chicago City Council was forced into establishing a Vice Commission and into allocating the sum of $5,000 to pay the investigators on this commission. In 1910, the commission issued its 399-page report. In Chicago, alone, said the report, there were 1,020 brothels occupied by 4,000 prostitutes, and managed by 1,880 madams, and among the foremost of the madams were Minna and Aida Everleigh. The commission unequivocally damned this traffic in flesh, stating, “Is it any wonder that a tempted girl, a girl who receives only six dollars a week working with her hands, sells her body for twenty-five dollars per week when she learns there is a demand for it and men are willing to pay the price?”
Little was done about this report until a new election placed in office as mayor the reform-minded Carter Harrison. At first, he moved slowly, issuing a general ukase that ordered “disreputable women” moved from their places of activity and “disorderly flats” closed. He was still reluctant to shut down one of the city’s most favored attractions. But then, one day. Mayor Harrison was shown an illustrated brochure that the Everleighs had published. With disbelief, he read:
“While not an extremely imposing edifice without, it is a most sumptuous place within, 2131 Dearborn Street, Chicago, has long been famed for its luxurious furnishings, famous paintings, statuary, and its elaborate and artistic decorations…Steam heat throughout, with electric fans in summer: one never feels the winter’s chill or summer’s heat in this luxurious resort. Fortunate indeed, with all the comforts of life surrounding them, are the members of the Everleigh Club.”
&nb
sp; The blatancy of this advertising, a blot on his fair city and his regime, infuriated and finally prodded Mayor Harrison into action. He summoned his police chief and aldermen, and they came on the run. He demanded that the Everleigh Club be closed at once. He would listen to no reason, no entreaties. The Everleigh Club must vanish from the Chicago landscape and the sisters must be banished forever.
There could be no reprieve from this executive order. On October 24, 1910, Minna and Aida were informed that the end had come. Their protectors could no longer protect them…although possibly, just possibly, a $20,000 assessment, wisely distributed, might stay the closing order, at least temporarily. Minna would not have it. If it was over, she was ready to quit. She and Aida took the bad news philosophically. Their thirty girls dissolved in tears. And so the front door was locked to “members,” the shutters fastened, the furniture draped, the servants dismissed, and the girls packed off to lesser houses in more hospitable communities.
Minna and Aida decided to go to Europe, mainly to visit Rome, and relax and absorb culture, and see if the bluenoses of Chicago would meanwhile change their minds. After six months, they returned, and hearing that they would have protection once more, they opened a new Everleigh Club on Chicago’s West Side. This was in August of 1912. But when, to their normal protection fee, another sum of $40,000 was added, and when the city’s reform government appeared more intractable than ever, the Everleighs agreed that a comeback was impossible. They auctioned off their luxurious furnishings—all except Aida’s beloved piano, and Minna’s own beloved marble-inlaid brass bed, leather-bound books, favorite paintings, and several other sentimental ornaments—and they left Chicago forever.
They did not go empty-handed. In addition to furniture and artifacts worth $150,000, they departed from the Midwest with $1,000,000 cash, $200,000 in jewelry, and $25,000 worth of unpaid bills run up by trusted clients. They also took with them happy memories, no residue of bitterness, and an intimate knowledge of the opposite sex. Minna had learned, for one thing, that most men preferred to gamble with dice or cards rather than to make love to a woman. “Real men, we found,” said Minna, “would rather gamble any day than gamble with women.” This, she felt, was because dice were less unpredictable and less risky than women. Both sisters believed that they owed their success to married men who attended their club, and that they would have earned another million “if it weren’t for the cheating married women” who competed with the club’s girls. Had the madams ever indulged themselves in love affairs with their clients? Minna remained silent on this subject. Aida was always ready to speak of one wealthy young lover, who had wished to take her to New York as his wife. Why had she refused to legalize their affair? “My sweetheart took a terrible dislike to our gold piano,” said Aida. “He said it was unbecoming. I couldn’t forgive him for that,”
In 1913, when they embarked upon retirement, Minna Everleigh was thirty-seven years old, and Aida Everleigh was thirty-nine. They wanted only peace and anonymity. At first, they could find neither. The recent past trailed after them, wherever they fled. When a close friend and a former client—Big Jim Colosimo, an amiable gangster—was murdered in his Italian restaurant in 1920, supposedly by a former aide, Johnny Torrio, or by the young Al Capone, the Everleighs were found and questioned. When a skeleton was dug up behind their old property in 1923, the Everleighs were again interrogated by the police. When a prostitute who had worked for them for six years was found murdered in New Orleans, her hands cut off and her jewels stolen, the Everleighs were once more visited by the police. When Mrs. W. E. D. Stokes tried to divorce her millionaire husband, and he countercharged that she had once been an Everleigh girl, the sisters were hounded by the sensation-seeking press.
Peace, they realized at last, could be gained only through complete anonymity. And so, having given up the Everleigh Club, they now gave up its name and their name forever. Burying their past, their old identities, and calling themselves by yet another name, they became two retired, independently wealthy ladies, dwelling off Central Park in New York City.
The Everleighs disappeared from public notice so entirely that after several decades it was assumed that they were dead. And except for alumni of the old club, they were forgotten. But from time to time, there appeared in print a hint that they might still be alive. In 1936, Charles Washburn stated in his book, Come into My Parlor, that the sisters were very much alive and that he had visited them. He had seen the remaining marble-inlaid brass bed, the gold piano, the books and oil paintings, and the statue of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne. The sisters traveled extensively, he wrote, they attended the Broadway theater, and they read books and newspaper columnists. They had lost a good part of then- invested fortune in the stock-market crash of 1929, but they still retained most of their jewelry. They rarely had visitors. They had purchased a radio, but except for that, they usually avoided outside companionship—and there were no gentleman callers. “They own a home in New York, free and clear,” Washburn reported. “All they ask for the remainder of their lives is a roof and one quart of champagne a week.”
Eight years later, there was a suggestion that they might even then still be alive. In a 1944 issue of Town and Country magazine, Edgar Lee Masters stated: “[Minna and Aida] knew too that the people who were throwing stones at them might well have been stoned for sins of their own. Still, they kept their peace. They disappeared with smiles upon their faces, and, when last heard of, were living lives of unobtrusive gentility in New York City.”
And so it was in 1944 that I made up my mind to learn whether the Everleigh sisters were really alive, and if they actually were, to learn exactly what names they had assumed and precisely where they were residing. Perhaps I was inspired by the adventure of a Bostonian, Captain Edward Silsbee, the ardent Shelleyite, who had learned, fifty-seven years after Shelley’s death and fifty-five years after Byron’s death, that Shelley’s friend and Byron’s mistress, Claire Clairmont, was still living at the grand old age of eighty-two in Florence. Silsbee had determined to meet her. And he had met her, and this, in turn, inspired Henry James to write his novelette. The Aspern Papers. In this, the hero-publisher learns the mistress of a great romantic poet, long dead, is still alive in Venice, and resolves to meet her. As Henry James’s hero reflected, “The strange thing had been for me to discover…that she was still alive: it was as if I had been told Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or the famous Lady Hamilton, for it seemed to me she belonged to a generation as extinct. ‘Why she must be tremendously old—at least a hundred,’ I had said.”
Thus, I, too, was inspired, and determined, to meet Minna and Aida Everleigh, almost a half century after they had reigned as two of history’s foremost caterers to the pleasure of the human male.
In April of 1944, while I was a sergeant in the United States Army Signal Corps, I was ordered to Washington, D.C., and New York City. Before that special assignment, I had been excited by the idea of doing a three-act play loosely based on the lives of the Everleigh sisters and their club. Nights, when I had time, I had jotted endless notes on the construction of this play. The notes were fragmentary, but among them were:
“Setting of Act I is the Golden Room of the Everleigh Club in 1905…Problems and conflicts for sisters: Attractive gentleman wants to marry Aida Everleigh and take her away from it all…Fictional judge, based on real Chicago attorney who took his annual vacation in club, has vacation interrupted when given information that he has been picked to head Vice Committee investigating club…Minna trying to help a married client who is having troubles with his wife…New and dangerous madam down the block trying to get club raided and steal Everleighs’ best girls…Enemies in Levee, or single reformer outside, pressing to pin responsibility for a murder on Everleighs…Then last straw: Everleighs’ respectable and chaste niece arriving, accompanied by her older brother, from Kentucky, to stay with her respectable aunts, the Everleighs, while she meets family of rich young man who wants to marry her (his father is a meat-pa
cking millionaire)…Sisters desperate to keep little niece from knowing what they do and desperate to keep truth about their house a secret from her. Sisters must figure out how to disguise brothel and girls, maybe set up a Potemkin facade…Act I curtain is, of course, arrival of niece in midst of tumultuous and embarrassing situation in club…Act II curtain is when niece’s potential father-in-law, the meat-packer, an occasional visitor to house, discovers the niece there among the girls…Act III Minna must save impending marriage of niece as well as solve a municipal political crisis, thereby saving the club from being closed.”
Since I wanted to use the Everleighs as characters, their club as the setting for the play, and some episodes from their lives, it was imperative that I discover if they were alive. If they were, I would have to obtain their permission to do this play. More important, as I have indicated, play or no play, I simply had to meet them to satisfy my own curiosity.
Now, knowing that I would be in the East on an army assignment shortly, I bestirred myself to locate someone who had known the Everleighs personally in the good old days, and who could tell me if they were still around, and if so, how they could be reached. I wrote to Charles Washburn and Edgar Lee Masters, and received no response from either. Then I remembered that Jack Lait, editor of the New York Mirror, had known them, and perhaps still knew them. But it would not do, I suspected, to confront Jack Lait as a stranger. If he knew the Everleighs’ secret, he would be loath to share it with someone whom he did not know. And so I sought for a go-between, a friend of mine who might also be a friend of Lait’s, and I found this necessary link in the person of a well-known public relations man, the late Mack Millar.
A week later, in New York, I telephoned Lait at the Mirror and invoked the name of our mutual friend. I told him that I’d like to see him for a few minutes about a personal matter. He invited me to come right up. I found Lait at his desk, pencil and copy in hand, looking busy and suspicious.
The Sunday Gentleman Page 5