The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  Foots Trosclair heard about the outboard, and he wanted to nail Datri and take another shot at Norma too. One night he went to Datri’s house and told him to take a ride. In the car he casually asked Datri what time it was. Datri looked at the heavy gold watch on his wrist and gave him the time.

  “Where’d you get the watch?” Foots asked.

  “You know where I got it,” Datri growled. The watch had been a gift from Norma and was engraved with both their initials on the back.

  “Give it to me,” Foots demanded.

  “Over my dead body! The only way you’re gonna get this watch is to cut my arm off!”

  Foots took Datri downtown. He wanted him to make a statement about his relationship with Norma. Datri started, “I, John Datri, am making this statement under duress and against my will.”

  “No, no, no!” Foots yelled. “That’s not what I want!” He ripped the paper out of the typewriter. Datri continued to start each statement the same way; Foots ripped out each page and stomped it on the floor. They shouted, they threatened violence. They went on like that until one of the other officers made them both go home. Foots eventually got Datri by sheer luck—he walked into a barroom brawl and found Datri in the middle of it. Datri got fired.

  But that was some time after he and Norma had drifted apart, no big scene, just a natural end to their yearlong affair. A few weeks later Datri ran into Yum-Yum at a country-western bar on Magazine Street.

  “Ummmmmm,” Yum-Yum said, “I’ve been waiting a long time.” She drove him to the Town and Country Motel. Datri had half his clothes off when Yum-Yum took him in the chair.

  Datri didn’t think Yum-Yum was better in bed than Norma—well, except perhaps in one category. “That’s why they called her Yum-Yum,” he said.

  •••

  Late one afternoon Norma drove over to the Davis Beauty Salon. It wasn’t her regular appointment day, but sometimes she popped in for a quick fix if she had special plans. Davis didn’t mind that Norma never bothered to phone ahead; she always tipped him well, often as much as fifty bucks.

  The salon was being painted, and cans of terra-cotta paint had been stored under the carport behind the building when the painters left for the day. Norma nosed her spotless white Cadillac, only a few months old, between the carport posts and crashed into the paint cans.

  Janice Roussel, one of the stylists, heard the clatter and yelled to Davis, “Franky, I told you to tell those painters to move the cans!” She was mortified when the back door opened and Norma walked in.

  “Franky, baby,” Norma said, “you won’t believe what just happened.” She leaned back in one of the shampoo chairs and closed her eyes, completely relaxed.

  Davis chuckled and kept working on his customer. Janice grabbed a handful of towels, went out to the car, and tried to wipe off the paint. She came back in, crying with frustration.

  “What the hell, Janice,” Norma said. “I can buy another Cadillac.”

  Davis was so amused by the episode that he told two hairdresser friends about it. “You do Norma Wallace?” they shrieked. They insisted that he take them to one of the girlie shows.

  Davis had never been to the house on Conti Street. Norma told him to drive to the back, where she’d be waiting at the door to the parlor. She gave the three men drinks, then took them to the second parlor off to the side of the courtyard, where a big blonde was playing the piano and several girls were dancing. They took their seats, Davis next to Norma. The piano player thumbed a run down the keyboard, gave a flourish, and a girl jumped up on the chair in front of one of Davis’s friends, where she did a slow strip. Moving to the music, she writhed and rubbed her hands down her bare body, dancing closer and closer until she was right in the guy’s face. Then she started on the next fellow.

  Just when it was Davis’s turn, there came a thumping on the outside wall. The piano player abruptly stopped, and she and the girls disappeared, swift and silent. Norma took an envelope from the drawer of a small mahogany table and stuck it through a slot in the wall Davis hadn’t noticed. Then she called the girls back, but Davis was ready to call it a night.

  “Don’t worry, Franky,” Norma said. “It’s all part of the game.” His two friends still wanted a free trip upstairs.

  But Davis was thinking about his car parked out back and newspaper headlines and the business he might lose. He didn’t care if he hadn’t gotten his turn; he wanted to leave. “I guess I just don’t have enough of the animal in me,” he told Norma, his car keys jangling in his hand.

  Norma picked up the phone. “Bubba, I got something for you, honey.” A couple of her girls had been working at the Sugar Bowl Courts on Airline Highway when they spotted four high rollers driving around in a Cadillac. Four men were wanted in connection with a series of robberies in Jefferson Parish. The previous night they’d hit the Chesterfield Southport, tied up the night watchman with venetian blind cords, taped his mouth, knocked him out, and left him in the casino.

  Bubba went out alone, riding reconnaissance as he did almost every night. Around midnight he spotted a car pulled up behind some hedges. Sure enough, it was a Cadillac, and four hoods were sitting in it. Without thinking Bubba pulled his big nickel-plated gun and approached the car. It was only after he’d announced himself and declared the men under arrest that he realized he had no idea how he was going to get four armed robbers out of the car by himself.

  Coming down the sidewalk he heard clip-clop, clip-clop, a woman out walking alone. “Hey, lady,” he called to her, “I’m from the sheriff’s office. Will you call over there and tell them I need some help here?”

  The woman looked at Bubba’s big, shiny gat and took off at a dead run. That woman ain’t gonna call nobody, Bubba thought. He held the gun steady, but he could feel himself breaking out in a cold sweat. Any minute these bozos were going to get smart enough to realize they had him.

  The howl of sirens coming from all directions was a sweet sound indeed. The robbers were caught red-handed with the money from the casino, cordless venetian blinds, and a roll of tape. They’d also stolen a sack of brand-new chips, which they planned to take back to the Chesterfield and cash in.

  Norma’s brother, Elmo, got in on the game too. In the late fifties Elmo was running a couple of lounges, one of them the Gold Room on St. Charles Avenue. He heard on the radio that a girl had been brutally murdered and found in a canal down in Plaquemines Parish, below New Orleans. He had a feeling she was the girl who’d left his lounge about four that morning with a man Elmo knew by name. He called Norma; Norma relayed the information to Bubba; Bubba called a friend in the Plaquemines sheriff’s office. About an hour later the officer called back and said, “Bubba, you hit it right on the head.” They’d located the man’s car and found strands of the girl’s hair as well as a bloody hatchet in the trunk.

  Another time Norma called Bubba to tell him that an escaped convict had been showing up at about four or five o’clock in the morning to see one of her girls. Bubba hid out in a truck belonging to the Holzer Sheet Metal Company, next door to 1026 Conti. He had a clear view of Norma’s driveway and back entrance. In the very early morning he saw a lone man coming up the drive. Bubba scrunched farther down behind the wheel of the truck. Then he sat up a bit—the guy walked exactly like someone he knew.

  The man got close enough for Bubba to see his face, and Bubba practically fell on the floor of the truck. This was a big-name judge. He walked right up to Norma’s back door. When Norma slid open the little window, the judge said, “Is the coast clear, baby?”

  “Yeah, honey,” Norma said, opening the door, “come on in.” Later she told Bubba, “He’d have soiled his pants if he’d seen you.”

  It took a few nights, but Bubba got his man, and the escapee was returned to prison. His colleagues were impressed. “What’s the deal, Bubba, you got a crystal ball?” they asked.

  “Yeah, I got me a crystal ball,” Bubba told them. He just didn’t say that it had gray hair.

  Bubb
a Rolling became chief of detectives in Jefferson Parish, but Norma never paid him one dime for protection. With Bubba, information bought another kind of insurance.

  Many big-time politicians patronized Norma’s house regularly. Most of them, like the judge, had charge accounts. Occasionally, though, these big boys would get out of hand, which was a sticky situation for Norma. She couldn’t call the New Orleans police; they would have loved to throw a few judges, or even the governor, in jail—Earl Long used to plan gubernatorial campaigns in Norma’s kitchen, then his driver would take him over to pick up Earl’s paramour, the Bourbon Street sensation Blaze Starr. So Norma would call Bubba, as she did the night the legislators came in from Baton Rouge and got drunk and rowdy, then belligerent, and started pushing her girls around. Bubba brought them back to Baton Rouge in his police car, even paid the girls for them. The next day the legislators were hungover, humble, and apologetic.

  Norma kept information on everybody who was anybody in her big black book: their identification marks, their nicknames—like Uncle, Sunshine, Shoestring, Pin, Toothpick, Licorice Stick, Cow-boy—how much they owed, how much they paid, when they were there, the girls they liked. She had them all, should it ever come to that. In the late fifties, at the height of her power and influence, someone asked Norma if there was anyone she didn’t have in her pocket. It took her a moment, then she said, “The President.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At the Mercy of the Trick

  Norma never thought she’d survive in the business long enough to see a third generation of Good Men begin frequenting her house in the late fifties. J. Cornelius Rathborne III (Cocie, pronounced “Cokie,” to his friends) went to Norma’s for the first time when he was fourteen years old. He was taken there not by one of his family elders but by a friend who was a year or so older than he was. Norma opened the little window in the back door and recognized the young man. In the parlor she asked the new fellow his name, and Cocie told her. “Oh, yes,” she said, giving him the distinct impression that the name was familiar to her. She offered the boys a beer and chatted with them about school and where they’d been earlier in the evening. Then she asked how much money they had. The going rate was twenty dollars, but Cocie had only fifteen.

  “Ten will do,” Norma said. She always left the boys a little “mad” money in case they had some emergency or needed a taxi.

  The girls came into the parlor, some dressed formally, others in sexy little dresses, all with beautiful long hair—Norma wore the only short do in the house. The boys made their choices, Cocie’s girl brought him upstairs, and he found that he was a little nervous, somewhat embarrassed too. But not because this was his first time; his father had already seen to it that he’d been initiated properly—he’d left nothing to chance and had one of his mistresses take Cocie to bed, a half Cherokee woman who told Cocie, “Make a woman happy, you’ll be happy.”

  Cocie was embarrassed this night because Norma’s girl gave him quite a look-over. She began washing him carefully, explaining to him that he’d never have to worry about getting anything at Norma’s house. Cocie saw the wisdom of this and felt better. He remembered what his father’s Cherokee mistress had told him and had a damned good time that night.

  Cocie went away to boarding school soon afterwards, but whenever he was home on break, he went down to the French Quarter. First he and his friends would go over to Bourbon Street, where they’d catch an act at one of the clubs, not dives with strippers but exotic dancers like Kalantan or Lilly Christine the Tiger Lady or Evangeline the Oyster Girl, who made her entrance out of a giant oyster shell and had green seaweed hair. Or they’d go to the Paddock Lounge to hear Fats Pichon, the Dukes of Dixieland, or Papa Celestin. Then they’d wind up the night at Norma’s, where they’d run into their friends and have a few drinks before going upstairs. They knew better than to show up drunk; if they did she wouldn’t let them in.

  One night Norma turned them down, but not because they’d been drinking. She opened the little window, and when she saw them she said, “There are some people here I don’t think you boys would want to be seen by.” Cocie assumed somebody’s father had gotten there first.

  Cocie unabashedly admitted going to Norma’s and said, “Hell, yes, use my name. I’m not embarrassed that I went there. Going to Norma’s was part of growing up in New Orleans—those of us lucky enough to have some money.”

  But not all of the Good Men were willing to be so open. Another of Norma’s third-generation clients preferred that his name not be used.

  The first time he introduced himself to Norma, she said, “I know your daddy.” She also knew his uncles, from a family of Jewish merchants. “Come on in, Sonny,” Norma said.

  Sonny and his friends had a few drinks, then Norma let them know it was time to drink up and leave or go with one of the girls. Sonny followed his girl out to the courtyard and up the stairs to the balcony. The steps were low. She said, “Watch your head!”

  “Yeah, right,” Sonny answered and walked right into a beam, which he did almost every time he went upstairs at Norma’s because his attention was always focused elsewhere—say on the nice way the girl’s dress stretched across her rear end.

  Sonny and his friends liked to sit around the parlor and drink; it was a great late-night destination after they dropped off their dates. Sometimes their dates would sneak out after they got home, take the keys to their parents’ cars, and drive to Conti Street to see if the boys’ cars were parked at Norma’s. The boys felt as if they were at their own private country club.

  But Norma’s was nothing so ordinary as a country club. For Sonny the biggest thrill came from knowing that what he was doing was against the law. He and his friends liked to talk about it afterwards; for Sonny the sex was anticlimactic.

  Sonny didn’t know that after he grew up and went into the family business he would suddenly yearn to be a police officer. Eventually he joined the police reserves and went out on night patrol; he had a beat on Mardi Gras; he chased armed robbers; he was even shot. But when he was at Norma’s he got a taste of what it was like to be on the other side of the law.

  A New Orleans lawyer whose family was from Colorado started going to Norma’s while he was a student at Tulane University. He wasn’t one of Norma’s third-generation Good Men who never needed a password; the first time he went to the house he had a password, but he had to talk his way in anyway. Norma started calling him Waterproof when he arrived one evening during a rainstorm.

  Waterproof liked the passwords and the nicknames; he liked that it was all so risqué and that the police station was only a block away. But Waterproof never felt that he was in any particular danger.

  Most of the Good Men, including the college students, went to Norma’s on a lark, with an innocent desire to live life in the fast lane for a night now and then. They were made to feel important there, and they could have sex with girls who had the reputation of being the best in the business. They might not have known that some of the Good Women were going to Norma’s too—for sex with a man who broke the law of averages with his endowments: Pershing Gervais, who once charged a wealthy Uptown woman fifteen hundred dollars for his services, or Frankenstein the cabdriver.

  But those were the people who were interested in straight sex. Some came for companionship—wealthy people who needed someone to talk to more than they needed sex. Others had indulged every hedonistic whim they could think of and went to Norma’s when they had run out of thrills. A girl like Simone would bathe them in golden showers and serve up hot lunches, fare not out of the ordinary in a lot of brothels.

  Beyond the kinky and degenerate, though, were the true deviates, those who came to Norma’s with a desperate need they were unable to satisfy anywhere else.

  One of these was a man from North Carolina. He wanted someone, anyone who would do it, to beat on his penis as hard as possible, even with a hammer. Most of the girls couldn’t handle that. They tried putting bobby pins on the skin of his prick, but tha
t didn’t satisfy him.

  He dealt mostly with Jackie, and it was several months before Norma met him. She was surprised by his looks. He was pale and terribly emaciated; she thought he looked as if he needed a transfusion. When she shook hands with him, his hand was like ice.

  He continued to make trips to New Orleans every two to three months. One trip he got Terry, but he was not at all interested in Yum-Yum’s specialty. He asked her to stick needles in his penis. Terry did. She also hammered it. She didn’t mind the blood. The crueler she was, the more pleasurable it was to him, the more orgasms he had, and the sooner he had them.

  After a while, though, needles and hammers weren’t enough; he asked Terry to cut his testicles with a razor blade and sew them back up. Terry complied. He had multiple orgasms. But this was very messy. Terry went out and bought a cover for the bed.

  When Norma saw the room after one of these episodes, she was appalled: “This room looks like you’ve been butchering hogs!” Terry told her about the razor. Norma never would have dreamed that Terry, a pretty, dainty girl she knew to be very fastidious, could do such things. Terry was unfazed. “He pays well for it,” she said, “and he leaves happy.”

  Norma, though, couldn’t get over thinking that Terry was callous. The razor blades were too much; she didn’t want the man to come to her house any longer.

  The story got around, first to the girls at the house and then to the nightspots where they went, and Terry got a new nickname. Yum-Yum became known as Terry the Cutter.