Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

by Karen Abbott

  “Whatever difficulties arose, we were told to see Mr. Coughlin,” Minna explained. “He was the final word.”

  At her prompting, he told Minna he’d gotten his nickname as a teenager. Working as a “rubber” in Turkish bathhouses, first on Clark Street and then at the posh Palmer House, he learned about politics and those who contorted its rules. He was fascinated by these men, with their silk suits and overflowing wallets, their glib talk and intricate plots of election day high jinks, their practiced jokes and slap-shoulder bonhomie. He met congressmen and senators, moguls and millionaires—Marshall Field even came, on occasion, for a plunge.

  “I formed my philosophy,” Bathhouse said, “while watching and studying the types of people who patronized the bathhouses. Priests, ministers, brokers, politicians, and gamblers visited there. I watched, and learned never to quarrel, never to feud. I had the best schooling a young feller could have. I met ’em all, big and little, from LaSalle Street to Armour Avenue. You could learn from anyone. Ain’t much difference between the big man and the little man. One’s lucky, that’s all.”

  He was the city’s poet laureate, he claimed—“lariat,” in his lingo. She’d heard of his composition titled “Dear Midnight of Love,” hadn’t she? It premiered at the Chicago Opera House right before she and Ada came to town. Newspapers all across the country called to interview him—it was a sensation. Minna read the papers, right? Good. Well, every Monday morning, the Record Herald printed a new melody of his. There was a ditty titled “Why Did They Build Lake Michigan So Wide?” But one of his best was “An Ode to a Bath-tub,” which went, in part, like this:

  I care not for ball games, nor fishing, or money unless to buy grub

  But I’d walk forty miles before breakfast to roll in the porcelain tub.

  Several of the Club’s journalist patrons confided to Minna that John Kelley, a Chicago society writer, was the creative force behind the alderman’s oeuvre—with the lone exception of “Dear Midnight of Love.” But she didn’t let on to the Bath—why blow his cover? Instead, Minna instructed her orchestra to play “Dear Midnight of Love” at least once every night in the alderman’s honor.

  The Everleighs knew instinctively to defer to Bathhouse John, and he returned the favor, recognizing how they would benefit the Levee. Shortly after the Club’s debut, the sisters were invited to an annual party called the First Ward Ball, where Levee denizens celebrated their debauchery with impunity. At the stroke of midnight, the Bath, decked out in a green coat, lavender trousers, and silk pink gloves, rose and approached the sisters. He bowed, took each on an arm, and led them around the floor of the First Regiment Armory, with every lesser madam, pimp, cadet, harlot, and hanger-on trailing behind. Thus commenced his famous Grand March, and without saying a word, he had named these newcomers, Minna and Ada Everleigh, the queens not only of the Ball, but of the entire Levee.

  The Everleighs didn’t need anyone to confirm their vaulted status, but they appreciated the gesture nonetheless—as well as Bathhouse’s vow to protect them from enemies, both inside the Levee and beyond.

  There were some, of course, who didn’t share Bathhouse John’s ardor for the sisters, who wished the Everleighs would return to Kentucky or Virginia or wherever they came from. Each afternoon, Minna and Ada took a ride to the Loop in their elegant hansom, drawn by a team of sleek black horses and driven by a crisply suited coachman. Their choicest girl, bedecked in a frilly confection of silk and glittering jewelry, perched high in the back. While the sisters sashayed into their bank to deposit the previous night’s earnings, the girl remained on display in the coach, preening and patting her hair, lifting a leg to tug at a high-buttoned shoe, letting her dress rise in the process, a curtain ascending. Afterward, the sisters rode through Chicago’s streets long enough to give passersby a good look at what they had for sale at the Club, an advertising technique that both enticed clients and made fellow madams wonder who in the hell these two up-pity Everleigh sisters thought they were, anyway.

  The proprietors of the Levee’s finer establishments were shaken when the Everleighs—novices who knew nothing about Chicago before setting up shop here—quickly surpassed them all, in terms of both volume and reputation. One brothel owner, Ed Weiss, used sheer cunning to combat the decline in business. Minna knew that Ed, who ran the resort next door, had put most of the Levee’s cabdrivers on his payroll. When a drunken reveler stumbled into a hansom and asked for the Everleigh Club, he more often than not ended up at Ed Weiss’s door—and rarely knew the difference.

  Minna, in spite of herself, had to admire the old shyster.

  But a circle of well-regarded madams lacked the innovation for such subterfuge, and hence spent most of their time stewing and sending subtle jabs the sisters’ way. They did not, for one thing, invite the Everleighs to join the Friendly Friends (the Levee ladies’ answer to the pimps’ group, the Cadets’ Protective Association), which served as a sort of labor union for madams, whose members gathered regularly for such genteel activities as knitting and tea sipping.

  Clearly, Minna and Ada were unbothered by their exclusion from this society—a nonchalance that enraged Madam Vic Shaw, whose lavish house on Dearborn Street seemed emptier each night. Didn’t the Everleighs realize every step they took within the Levee was on ground that she’d trod first? Those sisters purposely withheld deference and respect, even refusing to follow the aldermen’s rules about where to buy food and wine. Vic Shaw would never forget the last Washington Park Derby, an event Levee madams attended alongside Prairie Avenue matrons. That afternoon, as she was getting dressed, one of her harlots called out, “Come look out the window, quick.”

  “There,” Vic Shaw later recalled, “going down the street right in front of my house, were the Everleigh sisters and their girls in a tallyho! Of all things, a tallyho! With four horses, red tassels draped over their ears, and a boy on the front seat tooting a silver horn. Did my blood pressure go up!

  “Well, I marched right over to Payne’s livery and I said, ‘I want you to get me a tallyho, only I don’t want four horses, I want six.’ I draped red tassels all over them. I sent my riders uptown to be fitted for custom-made boots and cream-colored pants. I got little yeoman hats and tailored riding coats for my girls. Then I ordered a silver horn twice as long as the one the Everleighs had and we set out for the derby…. On the way, we drove around the block past the Everleigh Club four times, and I kept that poor sucker tootin’ that horn all the way. I’ll be truthful. It never dawned on me to have a tallyho. But when I got the idea, you can’t say I didn’t do it up better than the Everleighs.”

  Their whole history was nauseating, all that talk about southern roots and debutante balls and their smashing success in Omaha and being related to that spooky “Raven” poet and some such nonsense. Well, Vic Shaw got where she was without the benefit of any pedigreed background—one of ten children, the daughter of an iron mine worker in Londonderry, Nova Scotia. She ran away from home at thirteen, still named Emma Elizabeth Fitzgerald but already an “apt pupil” who “knew the answers.” First she joined a troupe in Boston and then Sam T. Jack’s burlesque show on West Madison Street in Chicago. She’d come into some money, too, not through a fortuitous inheritance from a wealthy lawyer father like certain madams claimed, but by eloping with the son of a millionaire banker. When his family discovered he’d married a minor, they arranged a quick and discreet divorce. She kept her ex-husband’s nickname for her, “Vickie,” his surname, Shaw, and half of his fortune, and opened her brothel on South Dearborn Street.

  So what if the finer points and prissy etiquette of the trade eluded her at first? Could one blame her for being beautiful and “more interested in men than in business”? One of her early clients, a wealthy Chicago businessman, told her bluntly, “You’ll have to hire better girls if you want to stay in business.” Soon after, a railroad magnate lodged the same complaint, then pressed $1,000 into her hand with the suggestion that she go to New Orleans and bring back some �
��thorobreds.” Madam Shaw did just that. “And by 1900,” wrote the Tribune, “the year the Everleigh Sisters moved in, she was established as queen bee of the brothels.”

  Vic Shaw might not have that title anymore; certain overrated, insufferable madams might have sauntered in on their red-tasseled tallyho and snatched it from her as if it were their preordained right. But Vic Shaw had recourse, little hidden pockets of savvy. She was still beautiful, her bosom ornamenting her figure like the prow of a stately ship; no one noticed the years she discarded when she claimed to be twenty-two. She had Roy Jones, a Levee vice king, whom she planned to marry. She had a good rapport with Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. She had “strip-whip” matches, during which whores stepped inside a makeshift ring, wearing corsets and boots or nothing at all, and lashed each other’s backs bloody; the Prairie Avenue set paid good money for these circuses.

  She had stunning inmates, especially Gladys Martin, who even sat for promotional photos, her blond head budding from a white fur cape. She had an enforcer named Lillie Kowalski—“Lill the Whipper”—who dressed like a missionary but brawled like a longshoreman, beating up, over the years, more than a thousand harlots. She had an open invitation to all Everleigh courtesans should they ever desire to quit the Club and work for Vic Shaw’s, the original.

  Most important, she knew how to deliver a threat.

  “Queer ducks, our neighbors,” Madam Shaw told a cop on the beat whom she knew had a taste for gossip and trouble and no qualms about spreading either around. There—those Everleigh snobs would get the message. “They’ve a pull somewhere,” she added, “but it won’t last.”

  GREAT IN RELIGION, GREAT IN SIN

  Members of the Purity Congress.

  We discovered that the scrupulously strict were

  correspondently keen to discern suggestions of sex

  where nobody else would think of looking for them.

  —MINNA EVERLEIGH

  Chicago’s turn to host the National Purity Congress came in the fall of 1901. That its red-light district had long been the wickedest in the country—a distinction recently underscored by the opening of a certain Dearborn Street brothel said to eclipse anything in Paris—only made it a more fitting locale for the reformers’ convention. The city’s myriad woes were finally matched by forces eager to solve them: the Moody Bible Institute; the Cook County Juvenile Court, the nation’s first; Jane Addams’s Hull House; the Anti-Saloon League; Graham Taylor’s Chicago Commons; and the Pacific Garden Mission, responsible for the very public salvation of Chicago White Stockings player Billy Sunday, who was one night so captivated by a sermon preached from the roving “Gospel Wagon” that he accepted Christ as his savior, declined a lucrative contract, and launched a new career as the “baseball evangelist,” traveling the world to preach God’s word.

  On October 8, a crisp Tuesday evening, delegates from nearly all fifty states and numerous foreign countries, including England, Holland, France, Canada, and India, filed into the First Methodist Church at Clark and Washington streets. The Reverend John P. Brushingham gave the opening address. England and America, he declared, are “one in language, one in God, but also one in sin, one in drunkenness, and one in the social evil.” He welcomed the visitors to “Chicago, great in population, great in commerce, great in religion, and great in sin.”

  For the next three days, the church would be filled to capacity to hear ministers and missionaries, doctors and housewives, professors and white slave crusaders all lecture on every facet of vice. A purity worker named William P. F. Ferguson kicked things off with a speech titled “Police Headquarters and the City Hall in Their Relation to Vice.”

  “Precisely the same conditions which exist in Manila may be found in the large cities,” he argued. “By a careful and exact system of fines and licenses and hush money the keepers of disorderly places hang the receipts for the payment of such exactions on the same hooks with their receipted grocery bills.” Dr. Mary Wood-Allen of Ann Arbor, Michigan, followed with a condemnation of the press—especially the comics—for “lowering the tone of the human race by ridiculing the sacred process of wooing.”

  Other addresses included:

  “The Cure of the Social Evil”

  “How to Elevate the Home Life”

  “A Strange Silence; Its Cause and Cure” (a rumination on the double standard)

  “The Influence of Diet upon Character”

  “The Solidarity of Vice and Vicious Methods”

  “Divorce Not a Matter of Choice” and

  “The Relation Between Modern Social Vice and Ancient Sex Worship”

  Closing the conference on Thursday, October 10, 1901, the attendees deemed the event a great success, marred only by one unfortunate incident. While the final speakers advocated for “purity in thought, word, and deed,” Mrs. B. S. Steadwell, wife of the president of the Northwestern Purity Association, was approached by two well-dressed men. Might they, the men asked, see some of the literature she had for sale? Mrs. Steadwell became so engrossed in the discussion, and in the prospect of selling a few pamphlets, that she laid her purse on the table. After she’d sold 40 cents’ worth of literature, the men abruptly ran off, taking the purse with them.

  Despite this “active experience with vice,” which left Mrs. Steadwell $3 poorer, the delegates were so taken with Chicago, in all its stunning achievement and shameless decadence, that they decided to reconvene there in 1906, five years hence.

  KNOWING YOUR BALZAC

  The Japanese Throne Room at the Everleigh Club.

  If it weren’t for the married men we couldn’t have

  carried on at all, and if it weren’t for the cheating

  married women we would have earned another million.

  —THE EVERLEIGH SISTERS

  Pulled or prompted, men came to the Everleigh Club. They came to see the Room of 1,000 Mirrors, inspired by Madam Babe Connors’s place in St. Louis, with a floor made entirely of reflective glass. In Minna’s eyes, this parlor paid bawdy tribute to Honoré de Balzac’s The Magic Skin—a mirror with numerous facets, each depicting a world.

  They came to hear the Club’s string orchestras—the only bordello in the Levee featuring three—and its professor, Vanderpool Vanderpool, whose repertoire included a chipper rendition of “Stay in Your Own Back Yard,” one of the most popular tunes of the era:

  Now honey, yo’ stay in yo’ own back yard,

  Doan min’ what dem white chiles do;

  What show yo’ suppose dey’s a gwine to gib

  A black little coon like yo’?

  They came to see the thirty boudoirs, each with a mirrored ceiling and marble inlaid brass bed, a private bathroom with a tub laced in gold detailing, imported oil paintings, and hidden buttons that rang for champagne. They came to eat in the glorious Pullman Buffet, gorging on southern cuisine and the creations of the Club’s nationally renowned head chef. On any given night, the menu’s specials might offer

  ENTREES

  supreme of guinea-fowl

  pheasant

  capon

  broiled squab

  roasted turkey, duck and goose

  SIDES

  au gratin cauliflower

  spinach cups with creamed peas

  parmesan potato cubes

  pear salad with sweet dressing

  stuffed cucumber salad

  carrots (candied or plain)

  browned sweet potatoes

  Minna’s favorite boys dined again after midnight on a feast of fried oysters, Welsh rarebit, deviled crabs, lobster, caviar—unadorned save for a dash of lemon juice—and scrambled eggs with bacon. For special occasions—a courtesan’s engagement, a birthday, the reappearance of a long-lost Everleigh Club client—Minna ordered the team of chefs to double the usual menu. The madam believed any event that diverted the course of a normal day was a valid excuse to host an epicurean free-for-all.

  They came to see the library, filled floor to ceiling with classics in literature an
d poetry and philosophy, and the art room, housing a few bona fide masterworks and a reproduction of Bernini’s famous Apollo and Daphne, which the sisters had failed to find in America. After learning that the original statue was at the Villa Borghese in Rome, Minna sent an artist to capture its image. She was haunted by how the exquisite nymph’s hands flowered into the branches of a laurel tree just as the god of light reaches for her. A gorgeous piece, but she admired the statue mostly for the questions it posed about clients: Why did men who had everything worth having patronize the Everleigh Club? And what if the thing they desired most in this world simply vanished?

  They came to see the ballroom, with its towering water fountain, parquet floor arranged in intricate mosaic patterns, and ceiling that dripped crystal chandeliers. They came to see the little oddities that made the Club like no place else in the world: gilded fishbowls, eighteen-karat-gold spittoons that cost $650 each, and the Everleighs’ signature trinket—a fountain that, at regular intervals, fired a jet of perfume into the thickly incensed air.

  “By comparison,” wrote Herbert Asbury, “the celebrated Mahogany Hall of Washington, the famous Clark Street house of Carrie Watson, and the finest brothels in New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans were squalid hovels fit only for the amorous frolics of chimpanzees.”

  They came to see the soundproof reception parlors, twelve in all. The Copper Room featured walls paneled with hammered brass; the Silver Room gleamed sterling; the Blue Room offered cerulean leather pillows stamped with images of Gibson girls; the furniture in the Gold Room was encrusted with gilt. And a visitor mustn’t forget the Red Room and Rose Room and Green Room, all done in monochromatic splendor.