The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  Marcia, a raven-haired beauty who had a dramatic widow’s peak, arrived at the house one evening just as Norma slammed the door behind Mac. She went upstairs to get dressed for work and came down the courtyard stairway. Norma saw her and went into a rage. “Don’t you know how much I hate widow’s peaks?” she yelled. “Go upstairs this instant and get rid of it!”

  Marcia protested, “But, Norma, it’s my hair!” Norma told her to shave it off or she’d be fired. Marcia cried and begged, but to no avail. Finally, she went upstairs and shaved off her widow’s peak.

  That Christmas Norma was so angry with everyone in the house that she held back the bonuses, and instead of the large bottles of Joy perfume that were always part of their Christmas presents, she gave them small bottles. Only the animals escaped Norma’s fury, and they were like a bunch of spoiled brats. Norma doted on them, feeding them shrimp and choice liver, then getting Rose Mary to call the vet at two in the morning if a cat threw up or had the runs. The parrots were out of control. “Screw the bastard!” they shrieked as the girls led their dates up the stairs.

  Poodles were all the rage in the late fifties, and Norma had several. She called one Carmen Miranda and dressed the white miniature in a skirt and Carmen Miranda-type bra, perching a fruit hat on its head. If a banana shook, Norma would accuse Rose Mary: “You fooled with her hat.” Rose Mary wanted to strangle Carmen Miranda. Then there was the monkey, a little spider that liked to sit on a wide piece of molding above the back door. Rose Mary came in one evening and the monkey let loose on her head. “Norma!” she screamed. Norma laughed as she hadn’t for weeks when she saw the mess. “Go ahead, laugh,” Rose Mary said. “You’re two of a kind—you’re both crazy!” It got to where Rose Mary dreaded the appearance of a new pet.

  Norma began sneaking around with men. One night after she and Mac had argued until Norma ordered him to leave, Rose Mary found her standing in front of the bathroom mirror, plucking hairs and getting ready for a night on the town.

  “Oh, these little white hairs,” she said, tweezing one from her chin. She turned around. “Make sure they’re all gone, will you?” she asked, and as Rose Mary inspected her face, Norma added, “Even when I’m dead, or I’ll come back to haunt you.”

  She got dressed in one of her hot little red numbers and put on her diamond earrings. Then she told Rose Mary to keep an eye on things in the parlor and made her escape through the front door, as if Rose Mary had no idea what was going on.

  Mac had been spending most of his time in Waggaman, but, as he often did, that morning he came back sometime after four to try to make amends with Norma. The last trick had not been gone long when Rose Mary saw him park behind the house. As always he walked around to let himself in the front door. He wasn’t halfway down the driveway when Norma burst through the back door.

  “Rose Mary, Rose Mary,” she yelled, “hurry up, hurry!” She tore off her red dress and threw it on the floor of the parlor. The diamond earrings landed behind the couch.

  “You think I was born yesterday?” Rose Mary snapped. “Like I don’t know what’s going on? I know who you were out with.” Her brother John was recently out of jail.

  Norma paid her no attention. “Mess up the hair, Rose Mary,” she said. “Hurry!”

  If Norma was angry with Mac, she’d fire Rose Mary. Sometimes she’d fire her, then say, “Come on, let’s go get a drink.” They’d go over to Bourbon Street to Dan’s International or Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. When it came time to pay, Rose Mary would say, “I don’t have a dime.”

  “You should have worked,” Norma would answer, paying the bill.

  “I got fired, remember?”

  Sometimes when Rose Mary got fired, she’d take a hundred dollars from Norma’s purse and go out alone. But the next day she always told Norma that she’d taken the money.

  “Oh, so now you’re a common thief,” Norma would say, but she’d never take the money back.

  During that time Norma’s mother moved to one of the rooms on the third floor of the house. Rose Mary was getting fired so much that she decided to move into another room. That way when Norma fired her she’d just go upstairs and talk to Amanda for the rest of the night.

  But Amanda was not well. Her alcoholism had reached a point that she was sick most of the time, and she had Parkinson’s disease as well. Once, in the early morning hours, she started a fire. It was only luck that Mac had decided to hang around that night. He broke the door down and got to Amanda before she burned herself up. They didn’t know if the fire was accidental or not; Amanda had tried to kill herself several times with pills. She had a rage to match Norma’s, especially if she was drinking. She would throw bottles at Norma and scream at her. But Norma, so volatile herself, never raised her voice to her mother. She would try to soothe her and tell her everything would be all right.

  But her mother, her marriage—everything seemed to be working on Norma. She would walk through the house, pulling at her hair until it was standing on end. Rose Mary would say, “Pleeeze, Norma, go brush that hair!” And if Norma thought about it, she’d tell Rose Mary she was fired.

  By this time Rose Mary had been fired so much that she hardly even acknowledged it, unless she wanted to make a point. Norma had stopped going to Canal Street to shop. Instead, she had the stores send over racks of clothes that she tried on in the privacy of her apartment. One night after she’d just fired Rose Mary, she told her to pick a dress from the rack.

  “I’ve just been fired,” Rose Mary said. “I get fired so much that I don’t have any money to buy clothes.”

  “Oh, go ahead,” Norma told her, “pick out a dress. I’ll pay for it.” It was that night that Rose Mary found out Norma had been calling her mother, letting her know that Rose Mary was safe. She told Rose Mary to pick out a dress and go see her mother. The reconciliation made Rose Mary enormously happy, though she remained with Norma.

  •••

  And so things continued as a new decade began. The year 1960 marked Norma’s fortieth year in the business. Norma put her mother in a nursing home and took Big Mo’s violets to the ladies there. She spent time in Waggaman, though she made no pretense that her marriage made her happy. She saw men, like John Miorana, but no one in particular after John Datri.

  Norma was accustomed to having men offer a lot of money for the madam of the house, but she had never accepted those offers, no matter how tempting. Now, though, she came home more than once and held a sheaf of bills out in front of Rose Mary, on one occasion twenty hundred-dollar bills, which the man she’d been out with had offered her to spend the night with him. She took him to the Roosevelt Hotel, put the money in her purse, told him to go freshen up, and while he was in the bathroom, she left.

  “What the hell, Rose Mary?” she said, handing her five hundred dollars. “He was stupid to give it to me, don’t you think?”

  Not one man ever came back to protest. It seemed that Norma had come full circle, duping men out of money just as she’d duped Dr. Silvester so many years ago.

  Norma peered at the man standing on the other side of the parlor door. She had to put her face up close to the bars over the sliding window to see him because he was so tall. He introduced himself as Jim Garrison, a local attorney. His voice was a deep bass; his eyes were intense; he stood six foot seven. When Norma opened the door, he had to duck to get inside.

  Norma gave Garrison a drink and sat with him in the parlor. It was just after six o’clock, and the house wasn’t open for business yet; she told Garrison she’d see if any of her girls was available. But he didn’t want to go upstairs; he wanted to give her his card. He told her that he had been an assistant district attorney and now he was in private practice. He gave her an engaging smile. “It’s an advantage to know how to play both sides of the fence,” he said, adding that he’d appreciate any business she could send his way.

  Norma had left the door to the courtyard open. The phones began ringing. She got up and closed the door. Garrison clearly k
new what business she was in, but Norma didn’t want him to hear Jackie on the phone. Even though he was charming, quite personable, Norma thought that he seemed strange and she didn’t trust him. He finished his drink and left, appearing to stalk rather than walk away. She put his card in her desk and, for the time being, didn’t give him another thought.

  There were too many other things to think about. The 1960 elections resulted in a complete change of guard. Chep Morrison ran for governor of Louisiana instead of mayor of New Orleans and lost. Vic Schiro was elected mayor, Provosty Dayries resigned as police chief, Schiro named Joseph Giarrusso (a friend of both Big Mo Guillot and Foots Trosclair) as his successor—and a decade of police scandal came to an end.

  Giarrusso was the right man for the job; he was not only a capable administrator but good at public relations. He knew how to address his officers and win heir loyalty; he knew how to speak to the people and reassure them.

  Norma figured she’d better get on the good side of the new superintendent. Every evening around nine o’clock, Joe and his brother Clarence Giarrusso (who became head of narcotics) and a few of their cronies would stop in at Dan’s International, a Chinese restaurant and lounge at the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon, for a cup of coffee. Dan’s was one of Norma’s favorite Quarter hangouts. She took to arriving in time to have a drink and chat with the Giarrusso brothers. When she felt the timing was right, she arranged a meeting with Joe.

  Giarrusso agreed to meet Norma at City Park late one evening. He drove to their specified meeting place near the Dueling Oaks, parked his car, and got into her Cadillac. He had no idea what she wanted to talk to him about, and he was thinking perhaps he’d been naïve to agree to see her, but his curiosity had won over any caution. Not only that, it was possible she had some information for him. He gunned his throat, but nothing cleared his husky, watery voice. “So what’s up, Norma?” he asked, cutting straight to the chase, his vowels gurgling.

  Norma drove slowly through the empty, winding streets of the park, dark even with a harvest moon because of the dense canopy of oak trees. “What’s your hurry?” she wanted to know. She was a naturally flirtatious woman, a quality Giarrusso appreciated, but he knew she was devious too. His instincts were going against any notion that she had asked for the meeting because she’d decided she wanted to have an affair with him.

  “No particular hurry,” he said. “I’m just curious.”

  He saw her glance down at the seat beside her, where a brown envelope lay. Her manicured hand came away from the steering wheel. She picked up the envelope and tossed it in Giarrusso’s lap. “That’s yours,” she said.

  Giarrusso tossed the envelope back into the space between them. “I’m not gonna take it,” he told her.

  Norma tried her sweet talk with him, the oh-come-on-we-all-know-how-to-play-this-game routine, but Giarrusso kept shaking his head. “Why won’t you take it?” she asked.

  Giarrusso thought about it a moment. “Because I don’t trust that you won’t spill your guts one day,” he said.

  “I’d never do that,” Norma told him.

  “I don’t know,” Giarrusso said. “If you thought it would cleanse your soul to tell the truth, you might.”

  “My soul is the soul of discretion,” Norma said, “you know that.” She cut her eyes toward the envelope again. “Go on, take it.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” Giarrusso said emphatically.

  Norma drove him back to the Dueling Oaks. She’d lost this point, but now they were even, one strike each, and there would always be another match. After all, he hadn’t arrested her for attempted bribery, and anyway, the new mayor was deep in her pocket. He was getting so bold about his visits to the house that he’d begun to drive the city car over and park out front. She’d heard that Schiro’s backers had asked the mayor not to use the city car, but they certainly hadn’t gone so far as to ask him to stop frequenting the house. How could they? Most of them put in their fair amount of time too.

  Norma’s house was a New Orleans institution. What the hell—it had been an American institution ever since John Wayne, the Duke himself, had visited when he was in town, even if he didn’t go upstairs with the rest of the movie folk he was with. (He’d spent the evening talking to Rose Mary, mostly about Pilar, his wife, then he gave her five hundred dollars, “For takin up so much of your time t’night.”)

  After forty years, Norma wasn’t worried; she’d always found a way to protect herself. She still had good contacts in the police department, and new ones arriving with each class from the academy. One of those recent graduates, a smart young copper who was called Donald Pryce, had fallen head over heels in love with Terry. He was going to college at night, for which Norma respected him. Recruited for the vice squad, Pryce had learned quickly that there were many ways to supplement a policeman’s salary. He was already tipping off half the people Norma knew over on Bourbon Street, and he told Norma that he would check warrants for her as well. She added Pryce’s name to her roster of envelope recipients.

  Around that time Elmo, who was always on the lookout for a deal on liquor to supply his B-drinking business, was arrested for attempting to buy bootlegged liquor from a ship at the New Orleans port. He was sentenced to eighteen months in the federal penitentiary at Seagoville, Texas. While there he contracted tuberculosis, but the prison authorities did not consider it bad enough to hospitalize him. Sarah, Elmo’s wife, dutifully ran Elmo’s lounge, the Moulin Rouge on Bourbon Street (he’d sold the Gold Room in the business district), though she complained and said she hated the French Quarter; and Norma drove to the prison outside Dallas as often as she could, usually accompanied by Elmo’s mistress. The last time she’d gone, she’d been shocked by her brother’s appearance, but she was unable to get any satisfaction from the prison authorities.

  Early one evening shortly after that Jim Garrison dropped by. Acting against her instincts, because she was sick with worry about Elmo, Norma asked him to help her brother. He agreed to take the case. One of Norma’s girls, Faye, was in some trouble too. She’d been arrested for possessing marijuana, and her Cadillac had been seized. Garrison took Faye’s case as well, and Norma paid him a stiff legal fee. Again, he wasn’t interested in going upstairs, but he did ask Norma if he could open a charge account with her. She told him to consider it done, even while telling herself that there was something strange about him. After that he called for girls to meet him at a hotel. Never was he a trick at her house, and Norma sometimes wondered if it was because he didn’t want to be where he could be nabbed for his bill, which he was always slow to pay. Whatever the reason, Garrison proved to be an entirely different kind of trick.

  Suzanne Robbins was living out a young girl’s fantasy.

  When she was sixteen Suzanne left North Carolina after being run out of her house by her stepmother. For as long as she could remember she’d had dreams of a life of excitement and glamour, possibly wealth and fame, and New Orleans was the city of her dreams. She hitchhiked her way down, and when she saw Bourbon Street, which when Suzanne arrived in 1954 boasted good restaurants, Las Vegas—type entertainment, and classy nightclubs instead of the current corn-dog stands, strip joints, and T-shirt shops, she knew she’d found the place where at least some of her dreams could come true.

  Suzanne, a beautiful young woman with long, curly hair and a lithe, shapely body, had a natural glamour about her. But she also had a practical side, and she took the first job she could find as a cocktail waitress at a Canal Street club. She found out soon enough that the club was a B-drinking establishment. After the men got drunk, the management either kicked them out or gave them rides a distance from the lounge, then dumped them. Suzanne didn’t much like the job, but she needed money, and beyond flirtatious talk there were no requirements.

  The Bourbon Street entertainers—vocalists, comedians, and dancers—were like a big, established family, not transients taking off their clothes for a buck and then leaving town. It wasn’t long before Su
zanne became part of the family. She had an openness about her, she was vivacious and had a quick wit, and she wasn’t afraid of hard work. She became an exotic dancer, first as the redheaded Wild Cat Frenchie, the Sadie Thompson of New Orleans, then as blonde bombshell Jezebel, the girl with a thousand moves, at the Poodle’s Patio. Suzanne was one of the most popular acts on the strip. People sought her autograph; she was being featured in national magazines and offered parts in movies. Much more than the glitter and glitz of her youthful fantasies had become reality.

  Suzanne knew Jim Garrison from the club and from around the Quarter. After hours she and her friends liked to go to the piano bars, like the Old Absinthe House and Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, where they saw him sometimes. One night she saw Garrison at a party, and when she was ready to leave he offered to walk her home. When they got to her apartment, Suzanne said good night, but as she turned to go inside, Garrison grabbed her. He wanted to go in with her. Suzanne tried to put him off nicely. He wasn’t her type; he was obnoxious in the club, a show-off, and he hassled the showgirls. He was also known to pick up drag queens and frequent gay bars. Garrison did his best to talk his way into her apartment, but Suzanne was firm in her refusal. He finally gave up, saying, “You won’t forget this.”

  Over on Conti Street, Norma was wondering what Garrison was doing for his fee on behalf of Elmo. Her brother’s eighteen-month sentence was passing, and he was getting sicker. The charges against her girl Faye had been dropped, no thanks to Garrison, but Faye’s Cadillac remained city property.

  Garrison had been busy, but not with what Norma had hired him to do. In 1961 he decided to run for district attorney. He was given no chance to win, but—dubbed the Giant by the media—he made quite an impression as he campaigned for a cleanup of the French Quarter. He was especially effective on television, and people remembered him. His victory took the city by surprise, and Garrison became the newest political darling of Uptown New Orleans.