Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

by Gary Krist

  But the bad publicity—that eternal oxymoron—merely brought more and more people to the District. Many of them were celebrities. When the actress Sarah Bernhardt visited New Orleans, she took the obligatory tour of the Storyville District. She showed particular interest in a street-corner performance by Emile “Stalebread” Lacoume and his Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band of youngsters playing on homemade instruments (though her tip to the band was, according to one witness, “below whore scale”). At the Annex, Anderson would play host to some of the greatest sports figures of the era, including boxer “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and baseball legends Babe Ruth, Frank Chance, and Ty Cobb. When George M. Cohan showed up at the bar one night, he amused everyone by performing tricks with his derby hat, rolling it up and down his arms in time to the music of the resident jazz combo. And Anderson was nothing if not a considerate host. When boxer John L. Sullivan, late in his career, came to town for an exhibition bout and got too drunk to walk straight, it was the mayor of Storyville who escorted the aging warrior home from the Annex to his boardinghouse on Rampart Street.

  But this was the way of Tom Anderson, who, as despots go, tended toward the benevolent. According to those who knew him, he was always “immaculate, cool-headed, and calm,” no matter what the situation. He was especially polite to women, even those who were drunk. “He listened to their love problems, when their men were there and when these women came in alone,” one friend said. And Tom’s advice was always palliative and reasonable: “Take it easy,” he’d say. “Everything will turn out for the better. Don’t do nothing drastic; you may regret it.”

  No wonder, then, that he was such a popular figure—not only among the denizens of the Tenderloin, but also in the halls of the state legislature in Baton Rouge. Anderson had an easy amiability and wry sense of humor that could disarm even his most rabid political enemies. When making a long argument against a proposed coal bill in 1904, his speech—even in the opinion of the usually hostile Picayune—was “characteristically humorous, and provided much merriment in the chamber.” It also succeeded in getting the measure quashed.

  For although the papers would rarely admit it, Tom Anderson was actually a fairly effective representative, and one who espoused some unquestionably noble causes. He was a member of the Ways and Means Committee and took a special interest in improving the atrocious conditions at many state institutions, especially the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson (where Buddy Bolden was incarcerated, though there’s no evidence that the two actually ever met). In 1905, when Louisiana faced one of its periodic epidemics of yellow fever, Anderson, as proprietor of the Record Oil Company, generously donated a large supply of oil to the city. (Oil was used to kill mosquito larvae that bred in the city’s ubiquitous water cisterns.) And later that year, when President Theodore Roosevelt came to New Orleans as a gesture of solidarity with the fever-stricken city, the Democratic mayor of Storyville was named to the honorary committee that welcomed the staunchly Republican president. A picture of the two of them shaking hands would adorn a wall behind the Annex bar for many years to come.

  Not that some of his pet causes couldn’t be viewed as somewhat self-serving. When Representative Anderson sponsored bills to raise the salaries of New Orleans police and court stenographers, he was surely implementing the lesson he had learned early in his career—namely, that favors produced friends, and that friends in turn produced favors. Naturally, it didn’t always work. The New Orleans Police Department in this era was still too fractured by rivalries and competing factions for any politician to be friends with everyone on the force. And although Anderson was chummy enough with Chief John Journée to invite him to his daughter’s wedding, he still faced occasional police harassment. Even then, however, Anderson had ways of appeasing his antagonists. When, during one of the police department’s occasional grandstanding efforts to enforce the widely ignored Sunday Closing Law, Anderson was arrested, tried, and convicted (by one Judge Skinner), the amiable saloonkeeper did not hold a grudge. After the case was appealed and overturned in a higher court, he made sure to send over a large supply of liquor and cigars to Judge Skinner, to be shared among all members of the lower court. After all, why let something like a little misdemeanor conviction come between two men of the world just doing their jobs?

  Prospects for Anderson—and for Storyville in general—improved significantly with the results of the municipal election of 1904. That year a Ring stalwart named Martin Behrman, from the Algiers district just across the river, was elected mayor, and his attitude toward the city’s vice industry was as accommodating as any sporting man could ask for. The ultimate anti–silk stocking, Behrman had little use for the high-minded moralizing of the Garden District elites, and he scoffed at their attempts to meddle in the serious business of running a big city. To Behrman, the typical silk stocking was the kind of citizen who “always knew what [had] led to the fall of the Roman Empire, but did not seem to know that the bulk of the voters were more interested in schools, police, firemen, the charity hospital, the parks and squares, and labor troubles than the Roman Empire.” And while Behrman admitted that he might be—as the Times-Democrat called him—somewhat “uncouth,” he at least knew what the common people of New Orleans wanted.

  Virtually all of the city’s newspapers had opposed the election of such an unpolished machine politician. “Mr. Behrman does not rise to the standards [of public office],” the Times-Democrat wrote during the campaign, “but represents the very elements that would assure misgovernment of the city and seriously hinder and check its prosperity.” But Behrman’s most vociferous detractor was none other than W. S. Parkerson, the blue-blooded paragon who had led the parish prison lynching back in 1891. Still active in reform politics, Parkerson accused Behrman of all kinds of malfeasance, including “grafting” for the Edison Electric Company and making illegal use of a railroad pass. The campaign turned out to be one of the bitterest in recent memory (“I would rather be a maggot in the suppurating carcass of an insane mule than [be] that man Parkerson,” one Behrman operative announced at a rally). But Behrman ultimately emerged triumphant. And in this new mayor, Storyville and its people could not have found a better friend.

  Meanwhile, the District was maturing, so to speak, into a full-fledged subculture, as colorful as it was profitable. A list of the neighborhood’s extensive cast of characters—including prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, and various hustlers—would include such names as Steel Arm Johnny, Mary Meathouse, Gold Tooth Gussie, Bird Leg Nora, Titanic, Coke-Eyed Laura, Scratch, Bull Frog Sonny, Snaggle Mouf Mary, Stack O. Dollars, Charlie Bow Wow, Good Lord the Lifter, and many more. The exploits of most of these notorious individuals have been lost to history, though a few—like Boxcar Shorty and Boar Hog—were later immortalized in the lyrics of jazz recordings. And although some historians claim that the rate of violent crime was actually relatively low in Storyville (at least by the standards of New Orleans as a whole, which from 1900 to 1910 had a per-capita murder rate three times that of Chicago), this was hardly a peaceable bunch of men and women. According to Jelly Roll Morton, one Storyville tough by the name of Aaron Harris (“no doubt the most heartless man I’ve ever heard of or seen”) had no fewer than eleven murders to his credit.

  Even some of the Basin Street madams were known for their readiness to resort to guns or knives to settle their disputes. In 1904, Lulu White was arrested on a weapons charge after firing two shots at her white lover, George Lambert, who apparently had left her for another woman. Unable to contain her jealousy, White had gone to her lover’s home to confront him as he was playing poker with some friends. According to the Daily Picayune, “Lulu dashed into the room where the poker players were. Seeing Lambert, she began abusing him and fired two shots at him.” The shots missed—as perhaps they were intended to—and one of the other poker players pulled the pistol from her hand before she could fire again. White ultimately was charged, but with nothing more than carrying a concealed weapon, a crime that in New Orleans rar
ely led to any serious consequences.

  Such colorful episodes were relatively harmless and easy to dismiss, but there were increasing signs in recent years that the debauched goings-on in Storyville might be getting too outré for even the most open-minded New Orleanians. Of course, some of the wilder stories told about the District are surely more folklore than history. The fact that they were told at all, however, indicates a growing disgust in the city at large regarding the monster that had been created some ten years before. One story held that Lulu White began offering her customers a discount book of fifteen tickets, each depicting a different lewd act—said act to be provided to the bearer simply upon presentation of the ticket. And there were other, more lurid tales: of deflowering auctions, mother-daughter harlot teams, erotic animal acts, and one so-called dancer—Olivia the Oyster Queen—who allegedly could shimmy a shelled, glistening bivalve over her entire naked body without ever touching it with her hands. Many of these reports centered on one brothel: Emma Johnson’s House of All Nations at 331 Basin Street. Johnson herself—described as a tall, rangy, and very masculine Cajun lesbian—was getting on in years by the first decade of the twentieth century, but her house offered some of the youngest (the very youngest) prostitutes in the District. They purportedly gave nightly “sex circuses” in which every form of fetishism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism was engaged in.

  “They did a lot of things that probably couldn’t be mentioned … right before the eyes of everybody,” reported Jelly Roll Morton, who often played piano at Johnson’s house. “A screen was put up between me and the tricks they were doing for the guests. But I cut a slit in the screen, as I had come to be a sport now myself, and wanted to see what everybody else was seeing.” But Morton’s breezy knowingness aside, this was where the Storyville pretense of harmless racy fun showed its depraved underbelly. To most sensibilities of the day, pedophilia, bestiality, and sodomy were outrages that even isolation in a restricted district could not make tolerable.

  Certainly the District’s excesses were becoming increasingly intolerable to Josie Arlington. Although she was by all reports making prodigious amounts of money at her palace on Basin Street, she still could not get past her persistent discomfort with her life—and her growing desperation to keep that knowledge from her adored niece Anna. According to one friend, Arlington “was in dread fear continually that this girl would find out who she was.” In 1903, faced with the quandary that Anna would soon be returning home from convent school in Paris, Arlington used some of her brothel profits to buy a house in Covington, Louisiana, safely away from New Orleans, near Abita Springs on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain. She named the place Anna’s Villa, and when the girl returned from Europe in July of 1904, she was sent directly there to spend the summer. Arlington then enrolled the girl in another convent school—this one in Clifton, Ohio—where she could be sheltered for another two years. But this could only be a stopgap measure; after those two years, Anna would be finished with her schooling, and she would want to come home to her family in New Orleans.

  Then, on the morning of December 1, 1905, some workmen painting the Arlington brothel’s top floor accidentally set fire to the building. It was eleven A.M., and the residents of the place were all still asleep, but they were quickly roused and evacuated. According to the Daily Picayune, the panicky women ran down Basin Street carrying bedsheets stuffed with whatever possessions they could grab. They then assembled—“scantily clad”—in the saloon of Tom Anderson’s Annex. Fortunately, the brothel fire burned slowly, and had only destroyed the attic and two upper floors before it was put out. But although the place was adequately insured, Josie Arlington had lost many of the beautiful paintings and furniture she had bought when traveling in Europe.

  A reporter for the Picayune took the opportunity to engage in a bit of sermonizing. He described the overdramatic women weeping and moaning—“some of them more for the purpose of exciting sympathy and attention than for [any] actual loss.” But then he saw one woman, legitimately grief-stricken, crying in a hallway. When asked why she was so upset, she said that, in the excitement of her escape, she had forgotten to rescue a picture of her mother. It was this loss that caused the young woman such pain. “Surely there was some good left in the heart of the little woman,” the reporter oozed, “who, amidst the vices by which she was surrounded, and in her degradation, yet remembered her mother, valuing the picture far above all the diamonds, jewels, and fine dresses which she was possessed of.”

  This scene from Victorian melodrama notwithstanding, Arlington and her employees were unwilling to be out of business for long, so while the house at 225 Basin Street was being repaired, they set up shop in the upper rooms of Anderson’s Annex (which henceforth became known as the “Arlington Annex”). But while the brothel’s proprietress had come through the fire physically and financially unscathed, the close call only reinforced her conviction to somehow live a more respectable kind of life. According to some reports, after the fire she began to speak gloomily to her prostitutes of the fire and brimstone that awaited all sinners after death. And her desire to keep Anna free of the taint of Storyville just grew stronger.

  By 1906, she had become prosperous enough to pull off this feat. In that year, Arlington purchased an imposing white mansion on Esplanade Avenue, in an ultra-respectable part of town out toward the City Park. This, she decided, was where she would undertake to live her second life of sober propriety. Until this point, she and Tom Brady had lived separately, she in the brothel and he in his mother’s house (though they did also have a room at the home of Arlington’s cousin where they could rendezvous whenever necessary). This was her choice, not his. Brady had actually asked her to marry him several years earlier, but she’d refused. According to Brady, she told him that since they’d gone along this far without doing the deed, they might as well go along as they were for “the balance.” But now they would live together as ostensible man and wife for all the world to see. Josie arranged for her brother Henry Deubler’s family (including his wife and three sons, Anna’s brothers) to move in with them, and of course Anna herself would join them after leaving school. In preparation, Arlington instructed everyone they knew—everyone that her niece might have any contact with—to start addressing her not as Josie or Miss Arlington or even as Mary Deubler, but as “Mrs. Brady.” If the masquerade was to work, there could be no mistakes.

  And so the Deublers and the Bradys lived the life of a normal extended family in the large house on Esplanade. Arlington put more and more of the responsibility for running the brothel on one of her surrogates, but she still enjoyed the revenue stream that made her new life possible. Some of her more presentable Storyville associates, including Tom Anderson, would occasionally be invited to family dinners and birthday parties—at the house or at Anna’s Villa. But Anna (who apparently was not a careful reader of the New Orleans newspapers) never suspected that these people were anything other than upstanding friends of her aunt Mary and uncle Tom. The young woman would in fact live for years in the house on Esplanade in blissful ignorance of the source of her family’s prosperity on Basin Street, just a few short miles away.

  But others in New Orleans did not have the luxury of being so insulated from the spectacle of Storyville. Local business reformers may still have been satisfied with the results of their 1898 experiment, but moral reformers, emboldened by the rise of organizations like the Anti-Saloon League and the Social Hygiene movement, were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to the goings-on in the city’s tenderloin. Drawing boundaries around sin had clearly not worked, and the impulse toward outright prohibition—of prostitution, alcohol, gambling, and other vices—was gaining ground all over the nation in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the Louisiana state legislature, support was growing (despite Representative Thomas C. Anderson’s strenuous efforts) for stronger legislative measures to put the lid on sin. Already in 1904 they had passed a law to close the state’s poolrooms. Another proposed
measure would prohibit horse-track betting throughout the state. And now, as the 1908 elections approached, there was talk of an even more comprehensive anti-vice law, one that would totally revamp the way alcohol could be sold in Louisiana, at the same time placing onerous new restrictions on the ability of women and blacks to work in and patronize the establishments that served it.

  For the members of New Orleans’ demimonde—the madams, pimps, saloon and dance-hall proprietors, and the prostitutes and musicians they employed—there were to be some tough times ahead. In its first ten years of existence, the city’s segregated vice districts on both sides of Canal Street had largely been left alone, and they had thrived—far too well for the comfort of many. But now there were to be some changes in New Orleans. The city’s self-styled champions of virtue and purity were finally ready to strike back.

  ON A WARM JUNE EVENING IN 1907, A SMALL, FAIR-HAIRED boy named Walter Lamana was playing outside his father’s undertaking business on St. Philip Street in the French Quarter. The boy was alone, amusing himself quietly in the alley beside the building. It was nearly eight P.M. and the amber evening light was waning—the time of day when the Quarter’s characteristic smells of garlic and horse dung and sweetly rotting fruit seemed momentarily to intensify in the dusk.

  As Walter played under the arches, one of the establishment’s horse-drawn hearses, returning from a late Saturday funeral, turned into the alley. The driver stopped and said a few words to the boy. Then he continued down the alley to the courtyard beyond, where he busied himself unhitching the wagon and settling the horses into their stables for the night.