The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (6 page)

Bolton said to Norma, “Reyer alerted the FBI. Who alerted Reyer?”

Norma answered, “Karpis was in my place a night or two before the FBI picked him up. When I saw the pictures in the paper after the
arrest, I knew for a fact that it was Karpis. Especially when they mentioned his big diamond ring. Honey, that was a headlight! I figured him for something big-time, a gambler, crook, something. But he behaved well, was generous with the girls, and we always had a lot of high rollers comin’ in, so I didn’t think too much about it. Except that was a real beauty of a ring.”

In the underworld no one admitted anything unless he absolutely had to, but with the capture of Alvin Karpis, the flamboyant Reyer made a name as chief of police, and Norma became a woman with influence. Reyer dropped in at her Dauphine Street house regularly, along with his equally colorful chief of detectives, John Grosch, who cut quite a figure in a white linen suit with a fresh rose in the lapel. The local FBI agents spent time in Norma’s parlor too. She doled out the information, they doled out the protection. It was a fine line to walk—to keep her influence without getting a reputation as a stoolie. She walked it with perfect balance. With friends in high places and her wealth, Norma Wallace at thirty-five years old became one of the most powerful women in the New Orleans underworld.

CHAPTER FIVE

My Two Most Exciting Lovers

“My husbands were all better than I was,” Norma confided to her tape recorder. To Howard Jacobs she said wistfully, “All my marriages were beautiful. I’m the bossy, domineering type, and I’ll take full responsibility for breaking ‘em up. The trouble was, my husbands all considered themselves married, but I didn’t.”

Soon after Norma left her location above Pete Herman’s club in 1928, she married for the first time. On any legal paperwork filed over the years, however, she always named Pete as her first husband. Her closest friends didn’t know any different. It’s no wonder: “My first marriage was to Alex Zolman, a racetrack figure, although we’ll dismiss him because he didn’t play as long or important a part in my life as did the other four.” And she never said another word about him.

Before the other four, though, it seemed as if the men she loved the most she didn’t marry. There were three of them, Andy Wallace first. The next two were her lovers during the ten years that Norma called the most glamorous period of her life.

Near ten o’clock on a Sunday night, Norma and a coterie of her girls emerged from the shadowy streets of the French Quarter onto Canal
Street, which New Orleans businessmen had turned into the brightest, widest main street in the country in their effort to create a first-class, modern shopping district.

To Norma’s right was the palatial Saenger Theatre; to her left was McCrory’s, the five-and-dime store with an Art Deco diner. Norma sometimes ate lunch in one of its booths lined with blue mirrors before a long afternoon of shopping. The stores where she was well known for large cash expenditures lined Canal Street almost to the Custom House near the Mississippi River. There were department stores, shoe stores, liquor stores, drugstores, and the furrier where she’d bought the mink she wore over her low-cut red dancing dress on this cold January night.

Norma and the girls crossed the Canal Street neutral ground, their high heels skittering over its polished red-and-white terrazzo squares as they hurried to beat the streetcar rumbling down its tracks to the river. Burgundy Street, where they crossed, became University Place on the other side. The Meal-a-Minit’s sign, with its thousands of watts from incandescent bulbs, lit the corner in a blaze like high-noon sunlight. Half a block down a Phil Harris movie,
Double or Nothing,
played at the Orpheum. Across the street was the Roosevelt Hotel (now the Fairmont), where only a couple of years ago Huey Long had held court from a tenth-floor suite, and where the local politicos regularly convened. They sometimes called Norma to send girls, or drunkenly found their way to her house after one of their confabs.

The lobby of the Roosevelt stretched a city block between University Place and Baronne Street. Its walls were mirrored and marbled, and gilded columns ran its length. Stylish women, wearing long dresses, hats with peacock feathers, and exotic furs (Norma spotted ocelot, fox, and mink) strolled arm in arm with men in tuxedos and sharp double-breasted suits. Others lounged on the velvet-upholstered sofas and chairs, smoking and chatting while they waited for the show at the Blue Room to begin.

The Blue Room was the hottest nightclub in the city, and also one of the oldest in the country. It was a spacious room with a large dance floor under a midnight blue, star-studded sky, a padded circular bar, and candlelit tables both ringside and on terraces so the Blue Room Orchestra floor show was visible to all. Romantic, swank, and classy,
it served the famous Ramos gin fizz and headlined such sizzling acts as the tango duo Enrica and Novello.

But the headliner that January broke all attendance records. In 1936 Phil Harris was one of the most popular entertainers in the country. He had starred as himself in a 1933 film called
So This Is Harris
and won an Oscar for best comedy short subject. He was such a star that he played himself in two subsequent films.

Norma, with her girls, was on her way to see him. At the stroke of ten she breezed through the big double doors to the nightclub, barely stopping to shrug out of her mink, which fell into the hands of the waiter following her. Heads turned as she floated to her usual front-row table, compliments of the star. When Charley Bagby, the piano player, saw her, he broke into “Be Still My Heart.”

The first act was a ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen with his smart-aleck dummy Charlie McCarthy. Charlie sat on Edgar’s knee, having a little trouble keeping his head upright. Edgar asked him why he was so groggy.

“Well, Charley and I,” he said lifting his chin toward the piano player, “had a pretty rough night last night.”

“What did you do?” Edgar asked.

“We went down to Dauphine Street to visit the Queen.”

The crowd laughed, because by that time everybody knew who the Queen of Dauphine was. A reporter for the
Item
had picked up the reference earlier in the week and started using it in his column, “The Spotlight.” Also, the show was broadcast over the radio, and Harris regularly preceded his songs, such as “That’s What I Like About the South” and “Doo Wha Ditty, Oh So Small and Oh So Pretty,” with “This one’s dedicated to the Queen.” During the broadcast he’d let his friends know where to meet him after the show too—over at the Queen’s on Dauphine.

Norma had met Phil during the first week of his engagement at the Blue Room. His show was from ten to two nightly, and after hours he and his band had decamped to a bar on University Place. The bar was owned by one of Norma’s friends, Louie—not her ex-boyfriend. One night when the band members were particularly wound up and didn’t want to quit, Louie closed down his bar and took them all over to 410 Dauphine. Norma had taken one look at
Phil’s large-featured, roughly handsome face, which was rarely without a smile, and fallen in love.

Every night after the show Phil and his band would head to Norma’s, where they’d fix big pitchers of absinthe (a drink made from wormwood, a psychoactive substance that was banned in 1912), tell jokes, and play music. Phil wrote a song for Norma called “Queens Drink Absinthe in New Orleans.” Norma loved all the attention he gave her, and she had never laughed so much in her life. “I discovered that when you’re in love, everything is laughs.”

So many people were clamoring for tickets to the Phil Harris show that the band’s engagement was extended through February. Whenever they could Phil and Norma would go to her farm in Pearl River. Sometimes Jackie and a couple of the girls came along with a few guys in the band. One night Phil got a little loose and tried to bring one of the cows into the living room. They all laughed until Norma wasn’t sure they would recover.

Norma had horses at the farm; she’d bought them after a tuberculosis scare that turned out to be a case of too much nightlife. She exercised and got as much fresh air as she could now. Phil had never ridden horses until he met Norma. He loved riding with her.

All too soon Phil had to leave New Orleans, though he returned for two more Blue Room engagements. In between, Norma visited him in Cincinnati, Dallas, and Los Angeles, where he played the big, fabulous nightspots. They’d spend a few nights together, until Norma needed to get back to her business. “Or I’d send out a distress signal,” she said, “and he’d beeline for New Orleans.”

Phil’s fame and popularity continued to grow, and he joined the Jack Benny radio show. After that, on one of Norma’s trips to California, he showed her the property he’d bought, formerly the actor Adolphe Menjou’s, right in the heart of Los Angeles. But when Norma saw it, before Phil built his house, it was thick with orange trees and deer were jumping over the fence.

When Norma met Phil, he was unhappily married to a woman named Mascot, a former Miss Australia. Even though they divorced, Norma never allowed herself to think she had a future with this man who made her laugh as no one else did, one of the great loves of her life. She knew that his life would always be centered in Los Angeles
and New York. “And I had a good business, enjoying it all so that I could never have given it up for love or money,” she insisted. “I liked what I was doing too much; I liked the excitement of it all. So we enjoyed each other better knowing that it wasn’t forever.”

Phil eventually married the singer and actress Alice Faye. But he and Norma kept in touch, writing, sending telegrams, and hearing about each other through friends. Phil’s engagements at the Blue Room had begun for him a lifelong love affair with New Orleans. He returned to the city often, to play his music, to reign at Mardi Gras as King of Bacchus in 1972, and to visit one of his and Alice Faye’s daughters, who became a permanent resident of the city. He also visited Norma. “Over the years our love affair deepened into friendship,” Norma said. Whenever he was in town, they got together for dinner or a few drinks. And always for a few laughs.

One night Louie called from his bar on University Place. “Norma, send over one of your best ladies,” he said. “I got a good customer in here needs a smart cookie with athletic capabilities.”

This vidalia sounded like he could be trouble, so Norma sent Eileen, a dazzling brunette who was as smart as she was beautiful. Eileen left Dauphine Street around midnight and didn’t return until late the following morning.

“I never want to go out with that man again,” she told Norma. “I couldn’t stand him. He’s mean and he’s brazen. The word is he’s from Chicago and connected to Capone.”

That same night he called for Eileen. She handed Norma the phone. “It’s the vidalia with the machine gun,” she said, “you know, the one from last night.”

In a voice icy with authority, Norma told the man she wasn’t interested in his business. Right away he got smart with her. “Why, you little bitch,” he said. “Nobody talks to Sam Hunt like that and gets away with it.”

“Well, I just did, Sam Hunt, and I’m getting away with it. You can just go to hell.”

“We’ll see about that,” he snarled. “I’m coming over there, and I’m going to beat your teeth in.”

“You just better try that,” Norma said and hung up.

She got her 410 shotgun from the hall closet. She didn’t really expect him, but she was ready to scare the hell out of him if he showed.

A few hours later, just when she’d stopped carrying the gun from room to room with her, two men walked into the front parlor. She knew immediately which one was Sam Hunt. His frosty blue eyes had the cruelest, coldest expression she’d ever seen. She tried to remember where she’d last put the shotgun.

Standing an arm’s length away, Norma faced him. He made a surprising move—he took off his hat.

“That was you on the phone?”

“It was,” Norma said inching her shoulders back ever so slightly.

“Mind if I sit?”

She nodded. He never took his eyes off her. Before long Norma forgot she was angry with the man.

His drink was B & B. They talked into the night, and the spark they’d struck began to glow a little hotter.

Sam stayed with Norma for a week. They went out to dinner every night, they went dancing, and they slept together. Except Sam never made love to her. He’d hold her and pet her, but that was as far as he’d go. She began to wonder if he was normal.

A couple of nights later, as he held her in the crook of his arm, she decided to find out. “Sam? Are you awake?” He said he was. “Sam, there’s almost nothing I like more than being held and petted. Almost nothing.” She stopped, not sure how to go on.

Sam lifted himself on his elbow so he could look at her. The streetlight coming in through the shutters was just enough that they could make out each other’s faces.

“Norma,” he said, “I’ll never lay you until I know that you really care for me, that you’re not just turning a trick with me. I care too much.” The gangster, it seemed, was a romantic.

After a week he invited Norma to the races in San Antonio. He told her to meet him at the Southern Railway station that night. She arrived in plenty of time to settle into a compartment. She stared out the window but saw no sign of Sam. Fifteen anxious minutes went by; the whistle blew; the train was ready to pull out—still Sam
wasn’t there. Norma wondered if she should get off the train. It was beginning to move when she saw him running toward the tracks from the terminal. When he found her in the compartment, he held her and kissed her with a passion she’d never encountered before in a man. She swooned with desire. Before the train was out of the New Orleans city limits, Sam drew the window shade and pulled her into the lower berth. This time he went all the way. He made love to her off and on for the next twelve hours, until they needed to eat and drink and pull themselves together so they could get off the train. By the time they reached San Antonio, Norma was crazy for Sam Hunt.

He told her he was married, one of those spur-of-the-moment deals, and he didn’t love his wife any longer, but he had a baby daughter he loved very much. That was all right; Norma didn’t want to break up his marriage. But Louie had told her some stories of his meanness—they were hard for her to believe. And there were rumors that he’d been in on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Louie told her they called him Golfbag Sam because he carried his machine gun in his golf bag, and that he’d served time in the Cook County jail.

“I won’t ever tell you my business,” Sam told Norma, “and don’t you ever ask. I don’t want you to know anything. I don’t ever want to put you in that spot. Because I love you.”

What he did didn’t matter; it couldn’t. Norma was already in too deep.

Louie had verified that Sam was affiliated with Al Capone’s outfit. Capone was in Alcatraz, but when Sam took her to Chicago, he introduced her to Capone’s brother, who ran a whorehouse with many women in it. They all wore shorts and bras, and they turned tricks like they were on an assembly line. A girl who worked there told Norma that after six months in the place she had to have a hysterectomy because she was so beat up.

When Sam and Norma were in Chicago, they never went out alone. Another man was always with them, she had no idea why. But they vacationed on their own, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a big gambling town, and all the characters there knew Sam. Norma enjoyed every minute of it.