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

by Karen Abbott

  MILLIONAIRE

  PLAYBOY SHOT—

  ACCIDENT OR MURDER?

  A young Madam Vic Shaw.

  The Everleighs, as always, were in the middle. All blind alleys in a Levee mystery led to their door.

  —CHARLES WASHBURN

  On November 27, 1905, five days after he’d been shot, Chicago heard and spread the tragic news that thirty-seven-year-old Marshall Field Jr. had died. The cause given was paralysis of the bowels.

  Coroner Peter M. Hoffman vowed that he would conduct an inquest and get to the bottom of the matter once and for all. On December 1, he addressed the jury. “I desire to make a statement for the protection of my office and for the sake of the family and friends of Mr. Field,” he intoned. “Because of his position, his wealth, and his prominence many superfluous rumors have been circulated as to how this shooting occurred. I say superfluous, because, although they came from many sources, I have been unable to find any foundation for them. Since the day of the shooting I have spent days and nights hunting down the rumors and have found that there was no cause for their circulation.”

  The jury, immediately and unanimously, found that the shooting was indeed accidental. But by then a rush of questions and theories had tainted that conclusion, and would continue to do so even long after the war against the Levee. “When young Marshall Field was shot in a Chicago resort,” wrote a former police reporter, “I was one of the coterie who wrote that artless story of how he came to his death while cleaning a revolver in the privacy of his own room. You see, the young man died, and some sort of explanation was necessary…. And so long as the Marshall Field interests continue to advertise extensively, no newspaper will publish the story.”

  In 1924, nineteen years after Marshall Field Jr.’s death, a former Chicago resident named Vera Scott was arrested in Los Angeles in connection with a series of frauds. A onetime chorus girl who had danced in productions of Hanky Panky and Hoity Toity, Scott told police she shot Marshall Junior by accident during a wild party at the Everleigh Club. The heir, she said, was bloodied and weak but coherent, and he insisted on going home alone in a taxi. Afterward, the elder Marshall Field paid her $20,000 to leave Chicago and never mention the incident again. A spokesman for Marshall Field & Company dismissed Scott’s story as “the ravings of a drug-mad unfortunate.”

  A year later, a New York millionaire named W. E. D. Stokes took the stand in his high-profile divorce trial and testified at length about his efforts to prove that his estranged wife had once been an Everleigh Club girl. During an extensive tour of the old Levee district, he stopped by the Everleigh Club, still cared for by the sisters’ longtime housekeeper, Etta Wright. After he showed his identification and offered proof that he’d spoken with Minna, Etta ushered him past the Club’s darkened entrance and led him to the first parlor on the right. The maid pointed to a mantel upon which rested a delicate, ornate vase.

  “If that vase could speak,” she said, “it could tell who murdered Marshall Field Jr. It was in this room that he was murdered.”

  Stokes, still seeking information about his wife, next tracked down Monsieur Emond, the Everleighs’ French dressmaker. Emond first told his visitor, “If you’ve come to inquire about that Marshall Field murder, I won’t tell you,” but later he showed Stokes photographs of two Everleigh harlots. One, a Spanish girl, was Camille, and the other had the last name of Hughes—he couldn’t recall her first. Emond told Stokes that “those two girls were mixed up in the murder of Marshall Field” and then added, “If I had not been a fool then, I could have got $50,000 for opening my mouth.”

  Arthur Meeker, who was a young boy in 1905 and a neighbor of the Field family, was playing with his sister on Prairie Avenue that fateful day. Marshall Jr., he later wrote, “stopped to speak to our nurse before going off to get himself shot at the Everleigh Club—if it was the Everleigh Club.” He added, “It’s impossible to say now what happened. All we can be sure of is that the version the family gave out and forced the papers to print—that the accident occurred while he was cleaning a gun at home in preparation for a hunting trip—had no truth to it. That, again, is something that couldn’t be put over today; the power of the press would prevent it.” (A reporter for the Tribune, John Kelley, would conclude the opposite: “There was no foundation for such a malicious story, but it spread to all parts of the city, and even to distant states. If such a thing had occurred in the Everleigh bagnio all the millions which the young man’s father possessed could not have kept the ‘boarders’ from blabbing.”)

  Chicago magazine revisited the controversy decades later. In a 1984 piece titled “Good Rumors Never Die,” a Highland Park resident claims his grandfather Henry Korr was a partner in a real estate and tax management firm. One of Korr’s clients was the estate of E. J. Lehmann, a Chicago merchant who had opened his department store, the Fair, on State Street in 1871. As managers of this estate, Korr doled out a staggering allowance of $1,000 a week to Lehmann’s son, Ernest, a playboy who reportedly enjoyed slumming in the Levee district with fellow department store scion Marshall Field Jr.

  On that night in November 1905, according to Korr family legend, Henry Korr’s phone rang. It was Ernest Lehmann, calling from the Everleigh Club. “I’m in trouble,” he said. “There’s been a shooting.” Korr was frantic, thinking that Ernest himself had been shot, and he raced to the brothel—only to find, upon his arrival, that the victim was actually Marshall Field Jr., whom they rushed to Mercy Hospital.

  If Marshall Field Jr. did indeed go carousing in the Levee, his logical destination would have been the Everleigh Club. As Field family scholar John Tebbel noted, “It is not unlikely that Field Jr. was an occasional visitor at the Everleigh, where liquor, women and roulette wheels were equally obtainable. If so, he would have been in good company, with the respected sons of Chicago’s most respectable families.”

  Minna and Ada, for their part, insisted thirty-one years after the shooting that the young heir had never been a guest of the Club, and said they’d hired a private investigator of their own to look into the tragedy (he ultimately espoused the same explanation offered by the Field family). Given their adherence to discretion, their steadfast refusal to comment one way or another on matters either sensitive or personal, it is curious that the sisters said anything at all.

  But at the time, in 1905, they were relieved to hear the coroner’s public dismissal of “superfluous rumors.” Unlike the unfortunate incident in the Japanese Parlor two years earlier, this shooting was attached to a Chicago name so prominent that there was no chance of it fading away quietly on its own. Hopefully, all that talk about blood in their parlor—blood on their hands—would finally cease. The papers let the rumor go, even if gossipmongers across the country hadn’t, and they believed the matter to be put to rest. But the incident caused the first true fracture in the sisters’ empire—one that, as the voices around them amplified, would continue to separate and spread.

  Pony Moore, owner of two Levee dives, the Turf Exchange Saloon and the Hotel De Moore resort, started life as a black man—or, as he’d grown accustomed to being called, a “coon”—but he believed he could alter his destiny. To that end, during the early 1890s, he sought the help of specialists, who slathered his face with lotions and creams, took his money, and advised him to keep coming back. He did go back, and also took the added step of dousing himself with bleach, again and again, until eventually there was a Rorschach test where his face used to be, splotches of brown skin lingering like stains on a favorite shirt.

  Moore, who called himself “the Mayor of the Tenderloin,” was a familiar character in the Levee, albeit one with less muscle than he projected. He had some influence over the black vote, and hoped his clout would increase as more of his people came to the city. And they were coming: Chicago’s black population grew from 6,480 in 1880 to more than 50,000 in 1905, most of them migrating from the South in search of jobs in the new industrial economy. The Chicago Defender, a newspaper that railed a
gainst prejudice, published its first issue in May 1905 and quickly attained national prominence, portraying Chicago as a progressive city that welcomed its burgeoning black population. The new Chicagoans settled mostly in the South Side, where rents were cheapest, near railroad terminals and the Levee district. They found work in steel mills and factories but also learned to operate a much more important machine—the one that governed Chicago politics.

  Pony Moore wasn’t the first black vice lord. That honor belonged to John “Mushmouth” Johnson, who, after working as a waiter in the Palmer House, opened his own saloon and gambling house on State Street in the heart of Whiskey Row. Calling himself “the Negro Gambling King of Chicago,” Mushmouth Johnson cultivated the usual arrangement with Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink, delivering votes and protection payments in exchange for legal immunity and the title “Negro political boss” in their First Ward. While not worthy of such a grand official designation, Pony Moore was a lieutenant of sorts, and even scored a measure of respectability by joining the National Negro Business League.

  Because the Bath and Hinky Dink knew who he was and appreciated his efforts to rally the black vote, Moore kept his gambling saloon and resort operating despite flagrant violations of the law. But throughout 1905, the city administration, under increasing pressure from religious leaders and civic reformers, revoked the licenses of a number of disreputable establishments.

  It started in January, when a twenty-two-year-old named Mabel Wright, pretty and middle-class, swallowed a mug of chloroform and died on the floor of the American Dance Hall. “Dance halls killed my child,” Mabel’s mother wept. “The dissipation and false glamour had warped her perspective of life.”

  The American was shuttered, but it wasn’t enough. Ministers excoriated Mayor Carter Harrison II and his successor, Edward Dunne, for allowing saloons to remain open on the Sabbath day, and declared the Levee should be eliminated altogether. Dunne demurred—“When vice is segregated,” he reasoned, “nobody need find it who does not go hunt for it”—but in September he did close Freiberg’s Dance Hall, an edict that lasted only a month. And Pony Moore was the latest reform victim: Police Chief John Collins, citing a complaint from a “fine colored lady” and “honest Christian” whose husband bedded a “low white female strum” and bought home a “nameless disease,” snatched the Turf Exchange Saloon’s license in early November.

  The Mayor of the Tenderloin was dejected. He craved social standing; he needed to be needed. Pony spent weeks drinking until the world seemed to operate in triplicate, admiring the framed news clips hanging behind his bar (including one that described the enormous diamond stud he wore secured to his collar with a silver bolt and small padlock) and various other collected artifacts that brought to mind a more auspicious time in his life.

  And one night, shortly after Marshall Field Jr.’s death—when he was sure he’d been forgotten altogether—the phone rang.

  It was Madam Vic Shaw. She cooed her words, calling him “chicken,” and asked if they could schedule a meeting. She needed to see Pony Moore as soon as possible.

  Pony Moore sat, at the madam’s behest, in the parlor of her resort. The piano professor was on duty, playing Scott Joplin’s “The Ragtime Dance” and lustily crooning the words:

  I attended a ball last Thursday night, given by the dark town swells…

  Ev’ry coon came out in full dress alright, and the girls were society belles…

  The hall was illuminated by electric lights, it certainly was a sight to see;

  So many colored folks there without a razor fight…

  ’Twas a great surprise to me.

  Madam Shaw was a large woman, with a swelling, tidal-wave bosom that looked ready to break over her corset. Her head bore an elaborate hat impaled with a wayward gathering of feathers. She wagged her finger at Moore, and his head pulled forward as if attached to an invisible string.

  Here’s the plan, she said. He’d get $40,000 if he could somehow frame Minna Everleigh for the death of Marshall Field Jr.

  Moore let the idea spin in his mind, and then he saw how it could be done. Easy. All he needed was an accomplice, and half the population of Chicago, given the right circumstances, would delight in assuming that role. Besides, one didn’t get to be the Mayor without learning how to cut a deal.

  On Christmas Eve, Minna indulged in her afternoon routine, gathering an armful of newspapers and lounging in the Gold Room. Scanning the headlines, she was struck by an article in the early edition of the Chicago American. Headlined POLICE DOOM VICE CENTER OF CHICAGO, the report claimed that Mayor Dunne and Chief of Police Collins finally would shut every resort in Custom House Place by May 1, 1906—no exceptions. Collins estimated that the district’s “undesirable population” was as high as one thousand and that every brothel held “unfortunate women” in captivity.

  “It is the plague spot of Chicago,” Collins said. “Hundreds of girls have been brought there under the pretense of giving them employment. Girls have been lured from as far as Paris under promise of work in millinery shops. In three months we have rescued eight girls from the place.”

  There was that white slavery chatter again. But Minna was sure of one thing: She and Ada could expect new neighbors in the Levee district. The more industrious Custom House Place madams and pimps and saloon keepers would rather move their dives than quit altogether.

  Minna folded the paper, nervously fingering her butterfly pin. It would be a hectic day. They had errands to run, banknotes to deposit, and holiday festivities to plan. She started up the stairs to find Ada but stopped midway. Vanderpool Vanderpool was warming up already, hard at work at the golden piano, and the cheery strains of “I’m a Jonah Man” took over her thoughts. She knew that was Van’s sly signal to the girls to watch their step around a certain trick:

  My hard luck started when I was born, so the old folks say,

  Dat same hard luck been my best friend up to dis very day

  When I was young my mamma’s friends, to find a name they tried

  They named me after my Papa, and the same day Papa died.

  The phone rang meekly beneath the music. Once, twice…There was silence, and then a butler called out for a courtesan named Nellie.

  Minna, still stalled on the middle of the stairs, listened for the sound of the harlot’s footsteps. The last few times Nellie had hung up the phone, she’d slunk away stealthily, as if the words she’d said over the line were following her. Minna crept up the remaining steps and closed the door of her own suite. She lifted her receiver—all of the lines in the house were connected—so she could hear who Nellie’s caller was and what he wanted.

  A male voice was on the line, strange and muffled. He identified himself as Pony Moore and told Nellie she knew the deal. After she and another harlot named Phyllis made it to his place, and after they’d enjoyed a little party with him and his friend, they’d go to the police station and Nellie would tell the sergeant that she saw Minna Everleigh shoot Marshall Field Jr. And she thought making money on her back was easy….

  “Come right over,” Pony Moore slurred. “Bring along Phyllis and the $20,000 is yours.”

  Minna listened to the pair exchange vulgar good-byes and hang up. Her mind was a tangle and she worked to unknot it, thought by thought. Within minutes Nellie and Phyllis approached, asking to be excused for an hour.

  Minna pushed her lips into a smile. Sure, she said. Take the time out. The butler swung open one side of the double doors, letting in the wind’s mournful whine, and the girls were gone.

  Alone, panic conquered composure. Minna scrambled, as fast as heels would allow, to the phone and dialed Bryant, a sergeant and friend at the 22nd Street police station. Vic Shaw was behind this, she just knew it. The officer came on the line. Minna’s words shot out in a dry rasp: Meet her on the corner of Dearborn…. Yes, now. Hurry—she was about to be framed for murder.

  Dollops of icy slush covered the street. Cold seeped through her shoes, bit her toes, and the
wind shoved her to one side. She skidded, catching herself. Bryant’s arm slung around her, and for once in her life she let herself be led.

  The officer opened the Turf Exchange’s door for Minna, and she was greeted by a belch of stale air. Bottle shards covered the floor, broken chairs tilted against walls. Positively horrid. They made their way to a closed room at the back of the bar. Bryant gave no warning—just raised his boot, launched his leg, and kicked open the door.

  Four of them—Pony, a strange black man, Nellie, and Phyllis—sprawled across a worn sofa. Nellie straddled Pony and Phyllis his friend, gowns and petticoats bunched at their waists, the men sorting through layers of ruffles and fluff.

  Pony finally noticed Minna and stared, but his eyes couldn’t seem to focus. She recognized him, that sadly comic face that looked like a mushroom gone half-rotten, and he stood up, pushing Nellie aside and yanking at his pants.

  “What do you want, you murderer?” he asked Minna.

  His wagging, bejeweled finger caught a shaft of sunlight.

  Minna would not dignify Pony with a response, and she held out a hand—Don’t you dare—when Nellie tried to force an embrace. The courtesan caught the madam’s furious gaze and couldn’t look again. When she spoke she addressed the floor.

  “We didn’t do anything, Miss Minna,” she said. “Honestly, we didn’t do anything. Pony said he would give us $20,000 if we said you did it.”

  Minna didn’t respond, and Nellie couldn’t lift her face. The madam could see the harlot rummaging through her junk drawer of a mind, discarding this excuse and considering that.

  “I owe you some money,” Nellie said finally, “and I thought this would be the easiest way to get it. I’m sorry, Miss Minna. I’m sorry. Take us home, please take us home.”