The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (3 page)

Early in his career Pete had been thumbed in the eye during a fight. From that time on he had problems with his eyes. Yet he continued boxing. Rapidly losing his sight, he lost his title too, but regained it with a feint-and-touch system that the New Orleans
sportswriter Marty Mulé called “boxing by Braille.” When Norma met Pete, he was nearly blind.

Norma and Pete, both five feet two, stood eyeball to eyeball on the dance floor at a juke joint in Bucktown, clear across town from the French Quarter, on Lake Pontchartrain. Bucktown is not a town, merely a few clubs and restaurants and some shrimp boats tied to rickety docks around the Seventeenth Street Canal, a large drainage ditch that empties into the lake a few hundred yards away. “It’s where all the characters used to go on Sunday nights,” Norma explained. “Pete was out there with some other fighters, and I was with my boyfriend Louis Giacona. Louie introduced me to Pete and we all sat together. After a while, Pete asked me to dance, and we liked each other immediately.”

Pete had left boxing with nearly half a million dollars. He decided to invest some of it in a nightclub and bought a place on the corner of Conti and Burgundy. “He asked me to come down when he opened his club,” Norma said. “I did, and that’s when I fell in love with Pete, and I’m sure he fell in love with me. He asked me if I wanted to move upstairs and operate over his nightclub, said that he would fix it up for me. I went to Maestri’s on the corner of Rampart and Iberville and bought all my furniture.” Robert Maestri would eventually become mayor of New Orleans.

Norma left Louise’s and moved in above Pete’s at 938 Conti, bringing three girls with her. All three were younger than Norma. One was Dora Russo, who became a notorious madam in her own right.

Pete Herman’s Ringside Bar and Lounge became a hub of nightlife in the Tango Belt. Its entrance was set catty-corner to the intersection of Conti and Burgundy. Above it was a huge neon sign featuring Pete in boxing regalia. Norma and her girls did so well there that she removed the partitions and expanded onto the entire second floor of the building. She now had an address on Conti and at 328 Burgundy. “I was quite a swinger. I worked the doorways, stood out on the street and did the Charleston—anything to attract attention.”

•
•
•

Norma had arrived in the Tango Belt, but the reformers were at it again. A roar would go up from the Lions Club, or the Kiwanians would emerge from one of their powwows crying for prostitution reform. The mayor would jump all over the superintendent of police, who would then order a crackdown, and the Tango Belt would come under siege. Captain Theodore Ray, a dignified, stodgy man, an upholder of discipline and law and order, had been given the charge to eradicate prostitution from the French Quarter, and he was arresting prostitutes all over the Tango Belt.

“I had to get around Ray somehow,” Norma said. “There were two adjacent entrances to Pete’s building on Burgundy Street. Inside one, I opened a bar. The other entrance bypassed the bar for the stairway. This gave us a great escape route. Behind the bar we put a peephole in the door. If the police came in, we could get out on both Burgundy and Conti. This arrangement gave me liberty and peace of mind.

“But the part I liked the best about it—outwitting Captain Ray had caused me to run a more discreet operation. With discretion, I got a better class of clientele. I always did say, Without the police, I’d never have made it for forty years.”

On New Year’s Eve 1923, Norma put on her long-waisted dress with its short, pleated skirt, her stylish brown cloche, and a string of fake pearls good for twirling. The stars looked frozen in the sky above the French Quarter, but she wouldn’t have to be out long to gather a few dates and take them upstairs for some holiday cheer and auld lang syne.

She strolled along the sidewalk in front of 938 Conti. The street was still noisy with celebration, but people would be clearing out soon, finding a place to be at midnight. Norma spotted Nellie Jolie, a tall, well-groomed brunette who made a great deal of money, coming from the direction of the Cadillac Club, on the corner of Conti and North Rampart Streets. She had a man on each arm, the three of them in high spirits. They disappeared behind an iron gate in a seven-foot red-brick wall. Across the street the Chinaman was open, but no one was interested in chow mein or coffee on New Year’s Eve. Another girl, Edna, passed the café and waved at Norma. Edna’s
sweetheart was Eddie, an ex-fighter and friend of Pete’s. But she wasn’t with Eddie. She and a date were undoubtedly going to rent a room somewhere. Norma saw Bobbi Hackett too. She was tipsy, tripping along the brick sidewalk, her date loud and raucous, Bobbi laughing boisterously with him, but Norma knew that she was still broken-hearted over losing her lover. A few weeks earlier he’d been murdered at the corner of Tulane and Jeff Davis Parkway, out from the French Quarter.

Norma hustled a few men upstairs and was about to call it quits so that she and Pete, after they saw in the new year at their establishments, could rendezvous for a little celebration of their own. Besides, she was cold.

She saw the two men walking toward her and waited. Two more and she’d have a full house. One of them walked with a swagger—the kind of man Norma liked, full of himself and ready to unload a roll of money on one of her girls. The men walked purposefully, straight for her. As they got closer, she noticed that they seemed awfully sober.

Norma was arrested for the first time that night, December 31, 1923. The charge was soliciting for prostitution, and the arresting officer, the one with the swagger, was Detective George Reyer, a policeman known for being as colorful as some of the characters he collared. Reyer would eventually become chief of police, and Norma would come to respect him and like him, mostly because of the hands-off attitude he developed toward prostitution. But that night Norma, along with a score of other girls caught in Reyer’s roundup, saw in the new year at night court, where sleazy lawyers grubbed for clients among the drunk and disorderly benchwarmers and heavily rouged, scantily clad women. Then she went home to business as usual.

CHAPTER THREE

Vidalias and the Good Men

Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919, and Prohibition began the following year. Norma opened one illegitimate business, a house of prostitution; then, because of Captain Ray’s crackdown on the Tango Belt prostitutes, she opened a second illegal business, a bar, to cover the first one. Ray’s determination to eradicate prostitution went against custom. Historically, the city’s attitude toward both prostitution and gambling had been tolerant.

For most of three centuries gambling had been carried out openly and behind closed doors. Cockfighting was one of the earliest, most ubiquitous forms of gambling, with pits located all over the French Quarter. Predating Comus, New Orleans’s oldest carnival krewe, which appeared in 1857, the first Mardi Gras float in 1838 depicted a giant fighting cock. (Today Louisiana is one of only five states in the country where cockfighting is legal, and in 1999 the legislature struck down yet another effort to do away with it.) The Creole millionaire Bernard de Marigny, whose estate was directly below the French Quarter and is known now as the Faubourg Marigny, introduced a somewhat more elegant form of gambling than cockfights. Heavily in debt from his losses, he introduced New Orleans to the game of craps (after
crapaud
,
French for “toad,” or in New Orleans, “toad-frog,” the
slang commonly applied to Frenchmen). The game caught on; de Marigny lost his fortune.

By the time Norma was operating in the Tango Belt, round-the-clock gambling houses had sprung up all over the city, some catering to the low life, others more sophisticated. These places enjoyed complete police protection. Once when the legislature enacted a Sunday blue law, the state attorney general struck it down in New Orleans only—no explanation forthcoming.

Gambling operations proliferated in the expected nightlife locations—saloons, poolrooms, and clubs—then spilled over into daylight businesses such as groceries and barbershops. Everybody was doing it, twenty-four hours a day, including prostitutes who took bets at the soft-drink stands they operated, once for the sole purpose of soliciting men.

Prohibition was no different from anything else illegal in the city—the law was flagrantly disregarded. Good liquor was easy to get citywide, from the elite men’s clubs like the Boston Club to the cabarets of the Tango Belt and saloons like LaMothe’s (now Tavern on the Park), where Pete Herman, his brother Gaspar Gulotta, his fighting buddies and fans liked to meet. Speakeasies went to elaborate lengths to carry out their clandestine activities and convince their patrons they were safe. One called the Bat had a one-ton steel door installed to keep out federal agents.

Norma’s bar helped her attract a more affluent and influential clientele. Early in the 1920s she established her characteristic pattern of using the very worst circumstances to improve her own. Her business acumen seemed impervious to federal agents and the local law; it certainly helped her keep well ahead of the competition and their low prices. The more she charged her customers, the more customers flocked in to hand over their money. Business was so good that one of the girls who’d left Louise Jackson’s with Norma, Dora Russo, decided to strike out on her own.

Dora had gotten into the business almost by accident. One day she had visited Norma at Louise’s, and that afternoon a ship’s captain came by looking for some company. He liked women of substance, preferably in the form of lots of soft, cushioned flesh. He took one
look at Dora and knew he’d found what he wanted. Dora turned her first trick that day and never looked back.

“Dora wasn’t anybody’s fool,” Norma said. “She was with me for about a year when she got smart.” Dora had been kept by a rich Jewish man from Uptown, she dressed well, and she knew how to talk. She decided that Norma had the right idea, not to turn tricks but to find them—and to hire the girls who would keep them coming back. She left Norma and opened her own house right across the street, at 335 Burgundy. From pre-Storyville days this block, between Bienville and Conti, was the worst in the Tango Belt. It had been known as Smoky Row in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Even after the turn of the century, residents were still finding bloodstained wallets and articles of male clothing buried in their courtyards. It was rumored that the men’s corpses had been buried too.

In no time Dora had ten or fifteen girls living with her. Some of them were legendary, like Teeny, who had killed her lover Dapper Dan Williams and beat the rap. Dora’s girls walked the streets at night; they got men out of cars. They lay naked in the window or stood on the sidewalk out front wearing only kimonos, flashing them open for passing men, even grabbing their privates and “plucking them in,” as Norma called it, with the same vehemence, sometimes violence, as the women of Smoky Row. They were so prosperous that Dora opened another house at 304 Burgundy, which put Norma right between her two thriving bordellos.

In spite of the competition Norma continued to do well above Pete’s Ringside Bar and Lounge, as did many others in the Tango Belt. Black women, who outnumbered white women better than two to one, did especially well. Camilla Turner and Juliet Washington worked only white girls out of the windows of their houses; Melba Moore drove girls around in a Cadillac to pick up men. Business was so good that both Camilla and Juliet bought property; Melba bought a second Cadillac.

There was enough business to keep everybody friendly and even take one night a week off. And there was enough liquor to keep everybody drunk during Prohibition. “Sunday night was our night for balling,” Norma said, using her shorthand for “having a ball.”
“We’d close up the house, and all the girls and their men would go to Pete’s, La Vida, or the Little Club. We’d drink champagne and dance all night. The hustlers would get drunk enough to start breaking up the place. But the next day it was forgotten and everyone was friends again.”

One Sunday night a fight broke out between a tough blonde who’d been around with prizefighters and a brunette who wasn’t shy. They had enough liquor in them to decide that they didn’t like each other much. Everyone in the bar talked them into going out to City Park at daybreak to duel it out.

“We all jumped into cars, just as full of rum as you can imagine. These two girls were into the show. They pulled hair and tore each other’s clothes off with all the characters egging them on. After a while the police came, but instead of putting everyone in jail, they just told us to get on back where we belonged, which is what we all did. We went to bed and forgot about it, and the next day was another day.”

Captain Theodore Ray continued to crack down on the prostitutes, but the Tango Belt was as rowdy as ever. To keep the peace, the chief of police put a beat cop in every block where girls hustled behind window blinds.

“The policeman would have had to be deaf, blind, and dumb not to know we were landladies and what was going on,” Norma said. “He was good protection. One night a colored man took out his tool and shook it at one of the girls. The policeman ended that. He kept the drunks from pestering us. It was nice to know he was on the block.”

Blue was a pretty redhead from Knoxville. She didn’t have a pimp, as many of the girls did; she had a boyfriend, a nice Italian fellow who actually had a legitimate job. She paid her room and board at Norma s, twenty-five dollars a week, but also had a room around the corner on Dauphine Street. Norma assumed that Blue kept the other place so she and her boyfriend could have some privacy. She liked Blue and trusted her, sometimes leaving her in charge of the house.

Every night around midnight Blue asked Norma’s permission to go out for a while. She returned in about half an hour, and she always
came back happy. Norma assumed she went to see her boyfriend on Dauphine Street.

Blue never wanted a buyout—an all-night date with a man from out of town who wanted to take a girl out to the clubs. The other girls fought over buyouts, but not Blue. Again, Norma assumed that Blue would rather spend the night with the Italian fellow.

Then Blue fell in love with the policeman on the beat; he fell for her too. Blue was happier than she’d ever been and looked even younger than her twenty-four years. But without notice she gave up her room on Dauphine Street and stayed at Norma’s house. She seemed sick. Within a week she was dead. She’d taken two mercury tablets—enough to poison her.

Later the cop told Norma that Blue had been on heroin, and he’d gotten her to take the cure. But she couldn’t stay off junk, and her policeman quit her.

Norma would not knowingly let girls on drugs work for her. “Blue was the only girl I ever worked who was on heroin, and she gave me less trouble than all those young kids I had on Conti Street years later who took pills. I had no problems at all with Blue. Of course, I don’t know what she would have done if she hadn’t had her junk. She handled it so well I never had any reason to even suspect it.” Norma paused, then said, “I should have.”

Two things Norma had absolutely no use for were drugs and pimps, which often entered her house together. Most of the girls lived at Norma’s house, many with their pimps. The pimps liked to get their women hooked on drugs so they had more control over them. During Prohibition marijuana—sometimes called muggles—was legal and smoked openly on the street. Heroin, morphine, and hop (opium) were used more covertly, as was cocaine, which went by the street name inchy, presumably because it was laid out in lines and snorted by the inch. Norma tried to keep the well-supplied pimps out of her house.

The house life of a pimp demanded that he get up, get dressed, and wait outside, whatever the hour, whenever a date (the polite term for a
trick) came. Sometimes the pimps stood on Pete’s corner, if Pete was still open, and smoked a little muggles. If it was cold they’d go over to the Chinaman’s and drink coffee until the all-clear signal came. If a man came in and bought drinks, the wait could be several hours. A pimp might just get back in bed when someone else would arrive.

“They say a pimp’s life is a tough life,” Norma said sarcastically. “They really earn their money, don’t they?”

Undaunted by the prostitutes’ being released almost as soon as he picked them up, Captain Ray intensified his crusade to clean up the Tango Belt. Norma was arrested five times in three months. At the height of the antivice campaign, one of Norma’s friends thought it would be amusing to present her with a police dog. She named the animal Vidalia.

Upriver from New Orleans, across the Mississippi from Natchez, was the town of Vidalia, Louisiana, but Norma didn’t name the dog after the town. She just liked the ring of the word. She talked to the dog as if he were human, throwing the name Vidalia into nearly every sentence. One of the cabdrivers heard her talking to the dog, saying, “Vidalia this” and “Vidalia that,” and he began calling his customers vidalias.

“How’s the vidalia coming, Norma?” he would ask. “When will the vidalia be ready?”

Then the girls picked it up and started a language in code. If a country-looking man came in, someone the girls could tell had never been in a whorehouse, one might say to another, “Here’s a vidalia on a holiday,” which meant he only wanted to spend ten dollars. A “double Friday” meant twenty dollars.

Norma began using such codes in her book instead of putting down amounts of money, as well as entering the vidalias’ and the girls’ nicknames in case the book ever fell into the wrong hands.

Meanwhile, the word
vidalia
was catching on around New Orleans as part of the street slang. First the cabdrivers used it to identify a male passenger in search of a prostitute. But its use spread, and it became a tag for a sucker from out of town.

At three o’clock one Monday morning, a cabdriver named Rocco called Norma. “I got a vidalia from New York for you,” he said. “He saw you over at La Vida the other night with Pete and wants to meet you.”

Two well-dressed gentlemen arrived, the man from New York and a man he introduced as his secretary. They didn’t want just two girls; they had Norma call every girl in the house to the bar. Boot-legged liquor began to flow. This went on all the next day and into the following night.

The vidalia finally picked a girl, but he didn’t care about going upstairs. He just wanted to drink. His secretary remained sober, went off with a girl now and again, and returned to their hotel during the day, but only to check for messages. Norma sent out for steaks and fed them.

The man from New York continued to drink. He finally took off his clothes—but only to take a bath! He brought his drink and his girl with him to the tub. When he wanted to go to sleep, he asked his girl to come to the room with him, but all he wanted her to do was go to sleep too.

“He never did screw,” Norma said.

She ran a tab for him. If a girl crossed in front of him, he would call out to Norma, “Put her down for twenty.” With some regularity he would yell, “Put them
all
down for twenty!” This went on for three days.

“Believe me,” Norma said, “my blood pressure was soaring, because a whore wants her money first, and when you have to wait for it, you’re in a bad condition.”

On the afternoon of the third day, the vidalia told Norma that he and his secretary would have to be heading back to New York.

“How much do I owe?” he asked. His bill was $4,500, the equivalent of nearly $75,000 today. “Write her a check,” he told his secretary.

A check! This was a landlady’s worst nightmare. A taxi driver’s too. Poor Rocco had stayed at the house with his vidalia for three whole days, even eating and taking his showers there so he’d be around when it came time for the payoff, a commission of twelve hundred dollars. His face was long and sad when he saw his man write out what they all were thinking was a piece of rubber.

Norma tried to get the man to send his secretary to the hotel to cash the check. “Wouldn’t that be better than having it go through with my name on it?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s not necessary. You just put it in the bank. It’s as good as gold,” he told her.