by Chris Wiltz
To open an account, the bank charged a dollar. Norma estimated the cost of the clock to be about fifty cents. “But, oh, what a price I paid for that clock. I put all my money in, the bank went down, and I lost almost everything"—close to $90,000.
Still, Norma counted herself lucky. Many of her friends were not faring nearly as well. Some of the cabdrivers, especially the ones with families, had it rough. She brought syrup from Shady Pond, her Pearl River farm, and gave it to the drivers, along with butter that they could trade for oleo. She freely gave out groceries and clothes, and bought one chauffeur’s children bicycles for Christmas. That cabbie appreciated what she had done for his family so much that when he got on his feet again he presented her with a new Frigidaire for the house.
All through Prohibition Norma had continued cheating with near beer and whiskey at 410 Dauphine. At a dollar a setup each for the men and girls, it had been too good a deal not to take the chance. Then in 1933 the Volstead Act was repealed, ending Prohibition and enabling Norma to open a bar again.
Norma had hoped to buy herself a house as well. She didn’t like the street entrance on Dauphine, the box steps coming right down to the sidewalk, visible to anyone watching, as was the gate to the alley, the only other way to enter the property. She kept her lease at 410 Dauphine, but without the perfect location Norma wasn’t certain that she wanted to stay in the business. She decided to take what money she had left and go to New York.
She arrived by train. At Grand Central Station, she told a cab-driver to take her to the Hotel Monticello on Sixty-fourth Street. He gave her a funny look. “Have you ever been in New York before? Do you know that hotel?”
“Is there any reason I shouldn’t go there?” she countered, assuming that there must be hustling girls at the hotel. In her suit, hat, gloves, matching shoes and purse, she was sure she didn’t look like that kind of girl.
Sure enough, characters—underworld characters—sat all around the lobby. From them she found out why the driver had grinned and squirmed: the gangster Legs Diamond had been shot down in the Monticello by an old friend he’d double-crossed.
One of the characters befriended Norma. He took her to an opium den in Chinatown where moving contraband for the so-called mayor of Chinatown gained him entrance.
They climbed many steps. Chinese children played on the landings. When they got to the third floor, to Norma’s surprise a big blonde answered the door. Her name was Dolly, and she was distraught. That very day her Chinese boyfriend had been sent up for the tong wars; his sentence was fifteen years.
She welcomed Norma and her friend into a living room. Norma’s eyes could hardly take it in—all around were poodles. Not live dogs. They had died and Dolly had had them stuffed. They were sitting, standing, lying all around the opium den. Norma had never been in such a place. She had never smoked hop—she didn’t even smoke cigarettes.
They were taken into a room with bunks. Her friend bunked with one Chinaman; another took Norma off to another bunk. He rolled the ball, heated it, and let it burn. Then he loaded a pipe and gave her a big draw. The Chinaman took his draw and sat back with a seventh-heaven smile on his face.
Afterwards Norma’s friend took her to a Chinese restaurant where they were the only Caucasians. The food was incredible; Norma was starving.
She asked her friend, “Did you get sick when you smoked?” He said he hadn’t. “I didn’t either,” she said.
“You’re supposed to get sick the first time you smoke,” he informed her. “It upsets your stomach.”
Norma had seen him lay down a hundred-dollar bill, and she hadn’t seen him get any change. “Well,” she said sympathetically, “you sure wasted a lot of money on me, because I don’t know how to inhale!”
But what an experience she’d had. “I don’t know why I was so amazed, because I knew girls in New Orleans smoking hop over on Tulane Avenue, where Chinatown used to be. But I felt wicked. I thought, Here I am smoking hop in New York City with a bunch of goddamned stuffed poodles!”
Norma returned from New York short on money but with a long lease left on her beautiful house at 410 Dauphine Street. Within a couple of years her business became more solidly established than it had been before the 1933 bank failure. But even better times were ahead.
In 1936 Robert Maestri, who owned Maestri’s furniture store on Rampart Street, as well as a lot of the property that had once been the site of Storyville, became mayor. In a lucrative deal he sold this property to the city, which erected several acres of two-story red-brick, four-family dwellings, the same kind of housing project the city was considering for the land the French Quarter occupied.
Maestri continued to corrupt the city’s political infrastructure during his tenure as mayor. He was party to the graft and scandal that had often infiltrated city politics, and under him the spoils system flourished. He had legitimate civic achievements as well, such as decreasing the city’s debt significantly, and under his leadership New Orleans supported cultural organizations like the ballet and the symphony, restored historically important buildings, and improved garbage collection. But the inbred practice of graft continued. The price tags at the Maestri furniture store, where all the madams bought their furniture, still included a markup, as they had through the twenties, sometimes more than a hundred percent, that went directly to police protection. With Bob Maestri mayor and George Reyer chief of police, the town was as wide open as at any time in its history.
In the wake of Huey Long’s rule in New Orleans, Maestri didn’t hear much hue and cry from concerned citizens about vice and corruption. Perhaps they were relieved to have money moving again and banks and business functioning normally. To keep up appearances Maestri appointed a respected doctor as commissioner of public safety. But Frank Gomila was not interested in reform. To ensure public safety, he included in his duties a twice-weekly inspection of the girls at Norma Wallace’s house.
Norma bought influence when she bought furniture at Maestri’s store, but as Clint Bolton said in his New Orleans magazine article, “Influence is not always a matter of dollars and cents.”
At the top of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 1936 was a hoodlum named Alvin Karpis, who was sought for bank and train robbery, kidnapping, and murder. Karpis fancied the girls at cathouses, and during the spring of that year all the hookers and madams in town seemed to know that a man who fit the FBI’s description of Karpis was on the prowl in the New Orleans area. Circulating with his description was the detail that he sported a huge diamond ring.
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, particularly wanted Karpis and had put out the word to every police chief in the country. George Reyer was the one who delivered. Bureau agents arrested Karpis at the corner of Canal and Jefferson Davis Parkway without a shot being fired. Hoover was whisked to New Orleans for a photo opportunity that made it look as if he’d been in on the capture.
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 repu
tation 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 al
l 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.”
