The Sunday Gentleman (5 page)

Yet, despite such unique and imaginative competition, the Everleigh Club of Chicago, from its rise in 1900 to its fall in 1910, was the most renowned and unusual brothel in the world, overshadowing all similarly exotic establishments before—and since—from Paris to Shanghai.

The founders of the club—“the most famous madams in American history,” Polly Adler called them—were two daughters of a successful Kentucky attorney: Aida (although the press often referred to her as Ada) Everleigh, born in February, 1876, and Minna Everleigh, born in July, 1878. As adolescents, the sisters were enrolled in a Southern finishing school, where both excelled in elocution and playacting.

Because of their respect and affection for each other, the sisters were almost as close as Siamese twins. “Sibling rivalry” was not yet a part of the common language. And so when Minna, at the age of nineteen, fell in love with a Southern gentleman and was married to him in an expensive ceremony, it was not surprising that Aida, aged twenty-one, married the Southern gentleman’s brother shortly afterward. Minna’s marriage was of brief duration. “Her husband was a brute—suspicious and jealous,” observed a friend. A few weeks after the honeymoon, Minna left her husband and her old Kentucky home and fled to Washington, D.C. It was only natural that within a week, for the same reasons, Aida left her husband to join her sister.

Since the Everleigh sisters had inclinations toward theatrical careers, and were attractive, they auditioned for several stock companies going on the road, and were accepted by one such company. At the time, the younger of the sisters, Minna, was the more aggressive of the pair. She was a blue-eyed redhead, slender, lively, and ambitious, with a keen business mind and a love of reading. Aida was a quiet and trim blonde, and she worshiped her younger sister.

For several months, the sisters were on the road as actresses, touring the country from New York to Texas. Disenchanted by the exhausting and uncomfortable life of the road-show player, discouraged by the lack of chances for advancement, they began to look about for a more stable and ladylike means of existence. Then a series of events occurred that would soon cast them in new roles.

En route to appearances at the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition in Omaha, they learned that their father had died and had left them an inheritance of $35,000. While wondering if they could become independent by investing this money in some lucrative field, they overheard an actress friend one day drop a remark that gave them the idea for a business. The actress had complained that her parents considered the stage no better than “a den of iniquity” and the career of actress no better than that of prostitute or madam. Although the Everleigh sisters joked about it at first, they soon began to discuss more seriously the possibility of investing their inheritance in a career which, if it was considered no more respectable than acting, nevertheless might be far more profitable.

However, before investigating this new business, they decided to meet more people and learn what else was possible. In Omaha, they quit their theatrical troupe and determined to become a part of the city’s community life. Using family connections, they got themselves invited to dinners and soirees in some of Omaha’s better homes. But their beauty and gaiety were not appreciated by their married hostesses. Soon they found themselves ostracized by the upper-class wives, and Minna began to speak darkly of avenging herself on these wives by establishing a home that their traduccers’ husbands would be only too glad to visit.

But it was not alone a desire to even the score with a handful of snobbish wives that turned the Everleigh girls to prostitution. According to one who was to become their closest friend and confidant, Charles Washburn, a police reporter on the Chicago
Tribune
in that period, what turned the Everleighs to their real career was their deep bitterness toward males in general. “It is doubtful if Minna and Ada Everleigh ever forgave the brutal treatment they had received from their husbands,” wrote Washburn in an early biography of the sisters; “theirs was a stored-up bitterness toward all males from which they could not escape. Even though they refused to admit it, their every action indicated a score to be settled. The way they studied men, their insight into the whims of men and their determination to make men pawns in their parlor were the antics of the spider and the fly.”

In Omaha, Minna Everleigh made a hasty but shrewd study of the attractions available to male customers attending the mammoth two-million-dollar Trans-Mississippi Exposition, and she found these attractions limited indeed. She determined to improve upon the amusements available. She bargained for, and purchased, a brothel that was doing poorly but was situated near the exposition grounds. With what remained of their inheritance, she enhanced the run-down house of prostitution by adding new interior decorations, the best of foods and wines, and the most attractive and talented of females, many of the latter recruited from among roadshow actresses she had met. Then she and Aida threw open their doors.

The big spenders, attending the exposition in droves, quickly found their way to the Everleigh boudoirs. By the time that the exposition ended, Minna and Aida had increased their capital worth from $35,000 to $75,000, a considerable sum for two young girls at any time, but a fortune at the turn of the century.

With the closing of the exposition, the Everleighs realized that they had lost their more affluent clientele. Big money men, among the natives of Omaha, were too few. The Everleighs looked elsewhere for a site worthy of their knowledge and gifts. Studying their atlases and their private notes, they could find no community not already serviced by a house offering what they had to offer. At last, they returned to Washington, D.C., and there they sought the advice of Cleo Maitland, the most prosperous madam in the capital city. Without hesitation, Madam Maitland advised the young Everleighs to do their prospecting in Chicago. The metropolis—Herbert Asbury’s “gem of the prairie”—had a safe and sophisticated red-light district, of considerable dimensions, in a hedonistic political district, the First Ward, known as the Levee. For courageous investors, the growth possibilities were limitless. And above all, added Madam Maitland, there just happened to be a house she had heard of that could be had for a song.

The house available in Chicago was really two adjoining three-story stone mansions, with fifty rooms, and a broad flight of steps from the street. It was located at 2131 South Dearborn Street. It had been built in 1890 at a cost of $125,000 by one Lizzie Allen, madam, as a supplementary sideshow for visitors in search of culture at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. After the fair, and shortly before her death, Lizzie Allen, madam, had leased the house and sold its furnishings and inmates to Effie Han-kins, madam. Now, Effie Hankins, full of years and wealth, was ready for retirement. She was also ready to deal with the Everleighs. She offered the huge seraglio at her bottom price—$55,000 for the furnishings, the girls on the premises, the good will, and a long-term lease at a rental of $500 a month.

On February 1, 1900, the Everleigh Club of Chicago had its grand opening—and on that day, for connoisseurs of joy and students of earthy Americana, its legend began. It was also the debut of Minna and Aida under the name of Everleigh. Their family name had been commonplace. Now, on the eve of history, they sought something uplifting and appropriate. One of their beloved grandmothers had always ended her letters to them, “Everly yours.” So Everly it was, spelled Everleigh.

For its grand opening, the house had undergone a drastic transformation. Effie Hankins’ white servants had been replaced by colored help, and Madam Hankins’ hostesses (uncouth and used wenches in abbreviated costumes) had been replaced by Aida’s hostesses (“comely and skilled…no amateurs…the choicest talent in the country” garbed in costly evening gowns). The kitchen was of the best, the wines were imported, the dishes and hospitality Southern, and the furnishings and decorations were unmatched by any similar brothel on the face of the earth.

To help make the opening night a festive one, a Washington senator sent flowers. The Midwest’s leading wine companies and packers supplied gifts of their best food and drink. The first customers were millionaire Texas cattlemen whose party spent $300 in a few hours. Despite freezing weather, the Everleigh sisters grossed $1,000 on that historic initial evening. For fledgling madams, aged twenty-two and twenty-four, it was an auspicious beginning.

During the nearly dozen years of its heyday, following its opening night, the Everleigh Club achieved a worldwide reputation largely because of the brilliance and good taste of its proprietors, the extraordinary abilities of its prostitutes, the distinction of its service, and the splendor of its interior.

To each male seeker of escape through fleshly indulgence, this was no mean house of ill fame. Once inside its doors, the customer was quickly divested of any reservations he might have held of crass commercialism. This was at once a men’s club and a great lady’s home that offered culture, beauty, domestic warmth, gracious living—and expert sex encased in the thinnest chrysalis of exotic romance.

From the moment of a customer’s entry into the Everleigh Club, every effort was made to seduce his senses. The fifty rooms, in buildings rising three stories high, were decorated by Minna Everleigh to represent a Midwestern Mohammedan paradise, captivating a client’s eyes, ears, palate, and emotions. The rooms, decorations, niceties were not expected to satiate every facet of every man’s taste. There was simply something available for every man, no matter what his peculiarities or needs.

On the main floor, there were twelve spacious soundproof reception parlors, and these were the Gold Room, the Silver Room, the Copper Room, the Moorish Room, the Green Room, the Rose Room, the Red Room, the Blue Room, the Egyptian Room, the Chinese Room, the Japanese Room, the Oriental Room. The Gold Room featured gilt furniture, gold-trimmed fishbowls, eighteen-karat cuspidors that had cost $650 each, golden hangings, and a $15,000 gold piano. The Copper Room was paneled in copper and brass; the Moorish Room had thick and priceless Oriental carpets and incense burners; the Blue Room had blue divans with leather pillows on which were sewn prints of Gibson Girls, and there were college pennants hung on the walls.

Then, still on the first floor, there was an art gallery with a reproduction of Bernini’s
Apollo and Daphne
, a library with shelves holding one thousand books (mainly classics of biography, history, poetry, and fiction, all to Minna’s taste), a vast dining room with silver dinner service, and a great Turkish ballroom with a towering water-spouting fountain centered on a parquetry floor whose woods formed mosaic patterns.

To reach the boudoirs of love upstairs, guests were led through potted palms and Grecian statuary, and up one of the two thickly carpeted mahogany staircases. In any one of the thirty boudoirs, the customer and the beautiful girl of his choice could enjoy quiet privacy and incredible luxury. The basic boudoir was furnished with a marble-inlaid brass bed, a mirrored ceiling, a shower or a gold bathtub, freshly cut roses in vases, imported oil paintings, concealed push buttons that rang bells for champagne. Yet each bedroom had its individuality. One had an automatic perfume spray over the bed. Another had a silver-white spotlight directed upon the divan. A third had a genuine Turkish mattress on the floor, covered by a white cashmere blanket. And on special occasions, Minna Everleigh, who was partial to butterfly pins on her gowns, loosed live butterflies to flutter disconcertingly about the boudoirs and parlors below.

After his first inspection of the opulent palace, Jack Lait, who was to become editor of the New York
Mirror
, exclaimed passionately (if sacrilegiously) to reporter friends, “Minna and Aida Everleigh are to pleasure what Christ was to Christianity!”

A visitor at the Everleigh Club was never rushed from the entrance to a bedroom on the second floor. He was given the illusion—at least until he received his bill—of being the guest of honor at a dinner in a wealthy home. Edgar Lee Masters, author of
Spoon River Anthology
, recalled in 1944, six years before his death, what it had been like to call upon the Everleighs. Masters, who was in his early thirties when the club was at its peak, described a visit to the brothel. He noted that, of the two sisters, Minna was “somehow the larger personality, the more impressive figure.” Often, he said, “she came to the door when the bell rang. Her walk was a sort of caterpillar bend and hump, pause and catch up. She was remarkably thin. Her hair was dark and frizzled, her face thin and refined. ‘How is my boy?’ was her cordial salutation.”

Minna’s boy was soon fine. He had been given to understand that he was expected to spend no less than fifty dollars during the evening. In the Turkish ballroom, near the splashing fountain, or in one of the colorful parlors, he would order a bottle of French wine for twelve dollars (later, if he wished another bottle sent to a boudoir upstairs, the cost would rise to fifteen dollars). After exchanging pleasantries with friends he recognized, he would listen to one of the three four-piece orchestras playing, most often, “Stay in Your Own Back Yard” or the miserable tune composed by the alderman of the First Ward and one of the two dominant political figures of the Levee, John Coughlin (endearingly known as “Bathhouse John”). This song was “Dear Midnight of Love.” The customer was waited upon, hand and foot, by colored valets and maids, and flirtatiously but decorously engaged by one of the club’s thirty attractive girls.

If he came to the club for dinner, as well as for more desired pleasures, the guest was next escorted into the dining hall. There, on damask linen, with music still echoing in his ears, he would partake of pheasant or roast turkey or guinea fowl, served with more wine. Dinner, without wine or feminine companionship, was fifty dollars minimum. If he had brought along business associates and engaged hostesses for them, his dinner party might cost him fifteen hundred dollars.