Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  No one paid much attention to the murder, but the cops came to the Club and sat in the parlor. Could the sisters offer any insights into the case?

  Minna shrugged. “I do not know,” she said, “of any hardware dealers among our patrons.”

  The Everleighs were relieved that whatever transpired between Daisy and her robber had done so outside of the Club. No gossip for the sisters’ enemies to gather and collect, or false footnotes to ink beside their venerable name. But two madams couldn’t guard all four corners of every parlor, and Daisy wasn’t the only harlot tempted by vicious pathways. Some butterflies were limited simply by their inferior bloodlines and coarse histories; Longfellow’s poetry would never mean more than a stream of memorized words.

  Myrtle, from Iowa, whose rear end was “of the slapping kind,” as one man put it, was common in every way but her looks. She loved to show off her gun collection. Any john who was lucky enough to climb the stairs with her heard about which trinket she’d bought in which pawnshop, how much it had cost, how pretty she looked cocking it.

  “I think I’d be the happiest girl in town if I could find a diamond-studded revolver,” she told one wealthy customer, and he promptly had one made for her.

  One night, Myrtle decided to have a showdown among her most devoted admirers. She ordered them to choose a gun from a secret drawer in her boudoir and then meet her downstairs, in the Gold Room.

  Myrtle shook her bottom one last time, for emphasis, before lounging on a chaise.

  “Fight over me, boys,” she teased. “I love it.”

  Growls and threats and curses gathered in an angry chorus and filtered down the hallway, attracting Minna’s attention. The men were a fumbling knot of gray silk and derby hats. Something gleamed silver, quick flashes that played hide-and-seek amid the vortex of bodies. Minna had to look twice to be sure. Revolvers—two, three, four, five of them.

  Her body tightened; a muffled pounding filled her ears. She flung a hand and found the light switch and made the room black.

  “Gentlemen,” she cried into the dark, “you are in the most notorious whorehouse in America.” This was no time to measure words. “How would it look to your relatives and friends to see your names splashed across the front pages tomorrow morning?”

  After turning up the lights, she gathered Myrtle’s guns one by one. The men bade one another a good evening and left, properly, through the front door.

  After Myrtle’s antics in the Gold Room, the sisters, understandably, became wary of guns. When trouble came, as the sisters feared it would, it didn’t knock at the mahogany doors. Instead it waited, lying dormant inside heads and silent inside mouths until it passed, undetected, into the Club. And then it was too late.

  On May 25, 1903, a balmy spring night, a woman named Helen Hahn went out driving with Larry Curtis, a bookmaker and investor. Earlier that day, Curtis had a streak of luck at the racetrack, winning $4,500, and Helen was helping him celebrate. A stenographer at the Chicago Opera House, she lived in a modest home on the northwest side, and was curious about the way life moved outside of her own.

  “As we were returning toward town,” Helen said, “I spoke of the fascination slumming had for me.”

  Curtis asked her if she might like to see some of the parlor houses along the Levee, perhaps a certain place in particular—“one of the most gorgeous establishments that ever prospered in a red-light district.”

  Within minutes they arrived at the Everleigh Club, and navigated clusters of laughing couples until they reached the Japanese Parlor. Corks popped in quick succession, a muted series of fireworks. Roving plumes of incense smelled by turns musky and sweet.

  “I found myself in a close little room, luxuriously furnished,” Helen later said, “with colored servants going softly to and fro. There was music coming through the palms which hid what I afterward learned was the ballroom, and everything was much different than I expected…. Suddenly the sliding door between the two rooms was thrown open and a man in evening dress entered.”

  Later, on the police record and in newspaper reports, the man’s name would be given as William H. Robinson. Levee gossips whispered that he was from Chicago and the son of a well-known millionaire—so well-known that during his foray into the Levee district, he announced he was “traveling incognito” under a pseudonym.

  Whatever his real name—and the Everleigh sisters, of course, would never say—Robinson had started the evening accompanied by a friend and two showgirls. After dinner, the foursome ventured to the Everleigh Club.

  The sisters were busier than ever. Six months earlier, final renovations within the “New Annex” at 2133 were completed. The additional parlors, boudoirs, alcoves, music and dining rooms generated more traffic, but with it came a greater potential for trouble. Neither Minna nor Ada was near the Japanese Parlor when Robinson pulled open the sliding door. No one to suggest to Robinson that he shoot off firecrackers instead of his mouth, no one to remind Curtis that he wasn’t the sort to respond.

  “I was sitting at the piano,” Helen said, “but just drumming with the soft pedal on, and not playing so it could be heard out of the room,” when Robinson lurched in and said something “ugly” about her, so ugly that she turned her head and pretended not to hear.

  “[Curtis] sprang up as the man entered,” Helen continued, “but he was so startled by the man’s remarks that he did not say a word for half a minute. The intruder started for me and I turned around. The first thing I saw was a revolver and an instant later it went off.” Curtis looked at the gun in his hand as if he’d never seen it before, a strange and sudden appendage, smoke curling up from the barrel.

  Elsewhere in the Everleigh Club, its proprietors froze in midstep and quieted in midsentence, and then rushed toward the aftermath of a sound they never wanted to hear.

  Robinson lay on the floor of the Japanese Parlor, unconscious. A ring of blood bloomed above his heart. A young woman sat at the piano nearby, weeping meekly into her palms. The sisters arranged for Robinson’s transportation to People’s Hospital on Archer Avenue and told a group of courtesans to summon the 22nd Street police. Two detectives stopped Curtis from making a getaway in a closed carriage.

  Robinson’s heart was spared, but the bullet embedded between his ribs, possibly puncturing a lung. He was revived and his wounds dressed. The following morning, he told police he was “too weak” to proceed with prosecution.

  It was a lucky break for the sisters, and not the only one. Scandal, especially one involving gunshots and a millionaire’s son, could dull the shine of a high-class resort, dilute all their talk of decency and uplift. Their journalist friends reported the story—they had to—but kept the coverage shallow and benign. Salacious mentions of “wild midnight orgies” in a “resort of considerable notoriety” didn’t hurt the situation, and the Everleighs were not asked to comment at all. Hinky Dink Kenna was a doll, furnishing $1,200 for Curtis’s bond. The two showgirls who had accompanied Robinson were fired, and his friend vanished altogether. Helen Hahn threatened to kill herself until learning that Robinson survived, then returned to her quiet life as a stenographer. Her urge to go slumming was sated for good.

  Robinson became incognito once again. “The police,” the Daily News pointed out, “show little interest in the case.”

  But one person in particular was very interested. Ten houses north on Dearborn Street, Vic Shaw asked discreet questions and took careful notes, built a cache of possibility in her mind. She wouldn’t confront the Everleighs directly—“Silence,” she often said, “is louder than a brass band”—and she hoped her quiet skulked behind those sisters all day long, seeped into their dreams. Next time a millionaire playboy met with trouble in the Levee, Vic Shaw would collect all the words she had stored up, and set them into motion.

  INVOCATION

  Member of the Midnight Mission(left) and harlots.

  When I see a reformer, I put a hand on my watch.

  —BATHHOUSE JOHN COUGHLIN


  Late on a Friday afternoon in August 1904, the Reverend Ernest Albert Bell kissed his wife, Mary, and their seven children—his little “lambs”—good-bye, paid 5 cents, boarded the Oak Park elevated train near their home in Austin, a neighborhood on Chicago’s western border, and settled in for the ride downtown. The car thundered and swayed, and the city seemed to dart away beneath him. Factories spat wisps of gauzy smoke, church steeples pierced clouds, tenements stretched and leaned. Past Halsted Street, which cut a thirty-mile swath from the north end of the city to the south, the skyscrapers began their steady forward march. At the Chicago River, the El sputtered and clanked to a stop as the bridge yawned open to let a ship pass.

  Bell clutched his Bible, written in Greek, and checked his pocket for his leather diary. He carried it with him always. Its pages were crammed with daily itineraries, lists of expenses, and impromptu petitions: “Deal bountifully with thy servant, that I may live and keep thy word,” read one entry. Another pleaded simply, “Lord, help me.” Beside him on the seat rested his black case of stereoscopic views, the culmination of hours of research in the still quiet of the Crerar Library. The salary was $50 to $75 a month, barely enough to feed his family of nine, but tonight he would begin a new line of work. Tonight he would kneel in prayer with others who feared the dark parts of Chicago were conquering the light.

  He was thirty-eight years old and in a place he never thought he’d be. It was prideful to think so, but he was meant to do great things. That much was clear at birth, when his mother named him after the British prince who became George V, and again at age ten, when he passed the entrance exam for Collingwood High School in Ontario, and even more so six years later, when his father, dying from tuberculosis, laid his frail hands on Bell and whispered, “My son, I am building mountains on your head.”

  That mountain, Bell believed, was to establish an Oxford in India—a university as great as the one in England. After moving to the United States at age sixteen and graduating from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, he studied there himself, poring over John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua and mastering Sanskrit and Tamil. At night, in their sparse room in a boardinghouse on St. Mary’s Road, Bell confided his dream to his new bride, Mary Greer. “I believe,” he wrote, “that no greater work can be done in India at the present time than the founding of a distinctly Christian university in the heart of this Empire.”

  The dream burrowed deeper in 1891, when he, Mary, and their infant daughter set sail from London on the steamship Mombassa. It stayed with him during three long years as he ministered to lepers and cripples, first in Jaffna, on the northernmost tip of Sri Lanka, and then in Jubbulpore in central India. When he returned to America and settled in Chicago, he received cables from fellow missionaries, still in Asia, about the terrible famine. He became secretary of the Chicago India Famine Relief Fund but believed money without education was a shortsighted approach.

  He wrote letters to men like Andrew Carnegie and Stanley McCormick, sharing his vision, lamenting that “no rich American has yet made the sacrificial offering of himself for the work of God in foreign lands.” But his efforts were met with indifference. Bell was distraught. He had alienated his old colleagues by switching denominations too many times and had no one to turn to. Was he really as willful and obstinate as they believed? Was God punishing him? He underlined his Bible until his fingers cramped. He barely lifted his pen from his diary:

  “If it be thy will to build the University by my ministry, Empower me, if not deliver me,” he wrote. “This day is the tenth anniversary of Thy commission to me, as I have believed, to build the Christian University of India…. O Lord, will India ever be more heathenish or more ignorant, or in more desperate need of being taught?…When will India more urgently need the University than now? What is gained by delay? Defer not for thine own sake. O my God.”

  He looked for omens in the most common gestures. He tithed. He literally beat his breasts. A chance encounter in 1897 opened a new direction. One night, as Bell left the Chicago Theological Seminary, a young woman approached. At first, he didn’t understand her. Did she need change? Something to eat? A simple prayer? She spoke again, brushed his arm, lowered her eyes in an unmistakable way. He stepped back, ran home to Mary and the children. An Oxford in India remained his obsession, but he couldn’t drive the encounter entirely from his mind.

  “It startled him,” his oldest daughter, Olive Bell Daniels, later wrote. “That sin had never confronted him personally before. Now in the very shadow of the seminary buildings a harlot had tempted him.”

  It occurred to Bell, too, that he was a prophet, not a preacher. He could not say many things to the same audience, but the same thing to many. He contemplated holding nightly air sermons in the vice districts, but his duties as pastor of the Neighborhood Church in Maywood, a western suburb, sapped his energy. A few years later, in 1902, he left the congregation and preached occasionally before the brothels of Custom House Place. He learned the stories of those who had come before him—the great William T. Stead, Josephine Butler, Charlton Edholm—but only recently felt called to fight prostitution full-time. The Victorian policy of segregated vice districts should be revealed for the folly it was. “Good women are a thousand times safer where no such hells exist to manufacture degenerates,” Bell said. “Men who consort with vile women lose their respect for all women.”

  Certainly he would have greater success drawing attention to Chicago’s own third world streets—for now, at least—than those in faraway India. He would craft his message and repeat it night after night, until the city had little choice but to notice him and listen.

  Bell exited the elevated platform and lost himself in the throngs of people ending their workday. The fading sun ducked behind skyscrapers, as if afraid of the city it shined upon. Vendors called out, advertising bags of peanuts for 5 cents, their salty warmth mingling with the stench of burning coal. After turning onto South Clark Street, he looked for number 441—the same building where, for thirty years, Madam Carrie Watson offered sin for sale.

  After the madam retired, Bell’s friends, a married couple, bought the bordello. In a delightful bit of irony, they transformed it into Beulah Home, a rescue mission for white slaves (Carrie Watson, who in her prime had donated liberally to churches and synagogues, might have enjoyed a good laugh herself). As soon as every brothel door in Custom House Place was padlocked and every fallen woman saved, Bell planned to move his base of operations southward, to the newer Levee district, where a house of ill but very great fame held shameful court on Dearborn Street.

  Bell’s “saints,” as he called them, were already assembled, sitting in tidy rows of wooden chairs. Deaconesses Manley and Lucy Hall, white bonnets tied crisply under chins, bent over Bibles. There were the Reverend Melbourne Boynton and anticigarette crusader Lucy Page Gaston—an odd creature, birdlike and shifty, all angles and sharp contours. A young theological student presided over the wheezy piano. The rest sifted through hymnals and let their voices wander up and down the scales, preparing for the long night ahead.

  At 10:00 p.m., after hours of prayers and hymn singing, Bell exited Beulah Home, his saints following in a somber queue behind him. Flies swarmed in the unstirred August heat, mosquitoes pricked their necks. Behind them, a line of darkened warehouses stretched the length of the street; before them, brash lights blazed over brothel doors. Bell nodded at Boynton, silently asking him to begin.

  “The wages of sin is death,” Boynton said, speaking over the jumble of electric pianos. “We earn wages. We sin and we earn death. But life is a gift. Eternal life is the free gift of God if we leave our sin and come to Him.”

  They joined hands, kneeling in the horse litter and gutter dirt of Custom House Place, and Bell’s Midnight Mission at last came alive, took shape and drew breath.

  MILLIONAIRE

  PLAYBOY SHOT—

  ACCIDENT OR MURDER?

  A young Madam Vic Shaw.

  The Everleighs, as always, wer
e 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.”