The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  Mrs. Patterson put her finger to her lips and motioned for Wayne to go with her to a small screened porch off her bedroom. They sat in the dark and listened for a moment to the country sounds, frogs croaking, cicadas scratching, until Mrs. Patterson’s near whisper came to him on the balmy breeze. “I’m not Mrs. Patterson,” she said.

  “Okay,” Wayne said laughing, “I’ll bite: Who are you?”

  “I’m Norma Wallace.”

  Wayne’s hands hung over the arms of the rocking chair he sat in. He lifted them, holding them open for a second, fingers splayed, and let them fall. “Whatever you say.” He laughed again.

  Norma took one of his hands. “Wayne, do you remember, a long time ago, Bubba took you to a house in the French Quarter?” Wayne’s eyes were wide open, the whites nearly glowing in the dark. “A lot of pretty girls?”

  “I remember.”

  “I ran that house.” She paused, to let it sink in. “Now I’m running it here.”

  “Son of a gun,” Wayne said calmly. And that was the beginning of a little bit of excitement, as Wayne liked to say in his understated way.

  Norma kept the fact that she was running a whorehouse from the people in Waggaman as long as she could, but a few things happened that blew the lid right off the action. First the washing machine broke down. This was a critical piece of machinery in the operation, because Norma was not about to use a commercial laundry and risk the IRS counting her towels as they had Marie Bernard’s. To expedite matters, Norma called Sears and charged a new washing machine to Wayne’s mother’s account. When Helen Bernard saw the bill, she hit the roof. Wayne tried to explain, giving her cash to pay it, but Helen demanded to know what Wayne was doing at Mrs. Patterson’s. So Norma had a long visit with Helen one afternoon, after which everything calmed down. Then, when Wayne went to his parents’ house, Helen would ask, “How is Mrs. Patterson?”

  Finally one day Wayne said, “She’s not Mrs. Patterson, Mother.”

  “That’s all right,” Helen said. “I just love Mrs. Patterson.”

  “Mother, she’s Norma Wallace.”

  “Well then,” Helen responded cheerfully, “I just love Norma Wallace.” Wayne realized that if she even knew who Norma Wallace was, by that time she didn’t care.

  Once Wayne’s family knew that he was living with Norma, the situation became a little looser. Wayne stopped hiding the Rambler in the back and began driving Norma’s Cadillac around. But he made the mistake of driving it to work. All the men in the yard stopped working and watched as Wayne got out of the car. Then they started riding him. He told them, “I just borrowed the lady’s car.” They said, “You borrowed your ass!” They’d seen his pink car at Mrs. Patterson’s house. They’d seen those nieces too. They got wise to the nieces, and the next thing, they wanted Wayne to make a connection for them. They bought him beers; it wouldn’t cost them nothin, would it? At Norma’s suggestion Wayne retired from the shipyards.

  Not long after that a girl named Betty called the house and said she was Wayne’s friend. She told Jackie she wanted to go to work for Norma Wallace. “That slut,” Norma said and suggested that the girl was looking for trouble.

  Trouble, though, was much closer to home. Wayne was feeding the horses in the stable behind the big house one afternoon when one of the girls, Cindy, a cute blonde, joined him. She didn’t waste much time, only giving the time of day before she ran her hand up Wayne’s thigh and said, “Norma’s not home. Wanna get together?”

  Wayne had no time to react, which he later considered lucky. He heard a noise at the other end of the barn, where the washing machines were. Marie, the maid, stood there looking at them. Wayne didn’t know what to make of Marie. She was a pretty, light-skinned black woman with reddish hair who was very quiet. Norma had told him that men offered large sums of money to sleep with Marie but she always refused. Marie was mysterious, somewhat intimidating because of her silence. Apparently Cindy thought so too. “Maybe later,” she said to Wayne and hurried back to the house. She never approached him again.

  But even bigger trouble was on the horizon. Word had spread about Norma’s presence in Jefferson Parish, and it had reached Sheriff Alwynn Cronvich. Bubba Rolling, who was Cronvich’s chief of detectives at the time, gave Norma as much protection as he could. But one evening, just as a date’s car parked at the top of the horseshoe drive, Norma spotted the men on the levee across River Road. The date was ringing the bell as Norma rounded up the girls and told Wayne to take them across the field and hide them.

  “Where?” Wayne asked.

  “I don’t care,” Norma answered, “Just go now!”

  So off they went, streaking across the field, then through the woods toward the railroad tracks. The girls weren’t exactly dressed for hiking. As they went he heard a series of staccato female tones. “Shit!” “Oh, hell!” “Damn!”

  “Keep it down,” Wayne told them. It only got worse.

  The woods were so thick in the back that when Wayne reached the tracks, he thought it would be prudent to walk them, unless a train happened to come along.

  “Please don’t let a train come through here now,” he repeated over and over. He turned in the direction of his parents’ house and told the girls to hurry. He headed for their barn. When they got there Wayne saw that the girls were bleeding from the thorns and barbed wire. Some had shredded stockings hanging around their ankles and blood running down their legs. One girl was in shorts, and her legs looked as if Bubba’s fighting cocks had been working out on them. Another girl was missing a shoe and trying to pick the burrs out of her foot.

  They looked at each other, huddled in the barn, and they began to laugh. Wayne’s father, joined by Snapbean, came out to see what was going on. He looked at them, scanned the girls’ legs, and left without a word, never said a word to Wayne about it either. He just thought the world of Mrs. Patterson or Norma Wallace or whatever she wanted to call herself.

  “Where’s Mrs. Patterson?” Snapbean wanted to know. He’d called her that for so long that he was having trouble remembering her name was Norma. He loved her too. Wayne’s father came back and had to drag Snapbean off with him. For a minute Snapbean thought it was his lucky day.

  After that first brush with Alwynn Cronvich’s deputies, in early fall of 1963, Norma shut things down for a while and decided that she and Wayne should take a trip to Mexico.

  When Norma’s hairdressers, Francis Davis and Janice Roussel, first heard that Norma had been seen running around with someone in blue jeans, they were astounded. “Not Norma!” they said. McCoy had always been so well dressed, nothing but the best—raw-silk suits, custom-made shirts, Italian loafers of snakeskin and alligator.

  “Oh no,” Norma told them, “I spent my money dressing the others, but I’m not dressing this baby.”

  She may have meant what she said, but her good intentions fell by the wayside early on—the first outfit she bought Wayne was a red jumpsuit made out of a stretchy material that fit him like a second skin. But Wayne wasn’t a jumpsuit sort of guy. He put it on, took it off immediately, and was back in his blue jeans.

  The trip to Mexico called for another shopping excursion. Norma bought Wayne several suits and herself a wardrobe of dresses, nothing casual—they were going to be dressed to kill the entire trip. One of the dresses was sequined, a long, tight tube of a dress that looked as if it were made of thousands of tiny opals and must have weighed ten pounds. Wayne thought Norma looked quite sharp in that dress.

  Their first stop was Mexico City. Norma wore her sequined gown, Wayne a classy continental-cut suit, and they went to dinner at the restaurant of the hotel where they were staying. They were shown to a table near the mariachi band. Norma, as usual, sat so she was facing out, with a view of the room. Wayne faced her; the only view he had was the scenery outside the windows. She had on dark glasses, which she wore all the time now, day and night.

  Wayne studied the menu, looking for the biggest steak on it. He looked up to see Norma with
a seductive smile on her face, her head tilted, flirting—not with him but with someone behind him. He looked over his shoulder. The castanet player winked at Norma.

  “What the hell is going on?” Wayne asked her. Norma’s face broke into a big smile. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said, but she wasn’t. She’d wanted to see how he would react, and she liked his reaction. Wayne went back to reading the menu.

  After Mexico City they went to Acapulco, where they stayed at the Hilton Hotel, famous for its cliff divers. Their first night they dressed up again, Norma ultraglamorous in her opalescent gown and dark glasses, Wayne sharp in an Italian suit, and went out to have drinks by the pool. It was getting late and people started going in for dinner, but Norma and Wayne stayed to watch the stars come out. Hand in hand they walked to where they had a view of the cliffs in the moonlight. As they were coming around the pool, Wayne stepped in front of Norma, dropping her hand. He heard a splash behind him. Norma had walked right into the deep end of the pool!

  Wayne knew she hated water and couldn’t swim. And he figured she sure as hell couldn’t swim with that dress on. He was ready to jump in after her when she shot to the surface like a geyser, her dress sparkling in the underwater lights. He lifted her out, and she didn’t have her feet on the ground before she was laughing. Then Wayne laughed. They got hysterical. Two waiters on the other side of the pool stopped gawking and started laughing. Norma called them over. “Get my purse out of there, will you?” She pointed to a little beaded bag at the bottom. The waiters scooped it up in a net. Norma opened it to give them a tip, and Wayne saw rolls of hundred-dollar bills. Norma had five thousand wet dollars in her purse.

  The next day they went shopping again and bought all casual clothes. They stayed in Acapulco, eating, drinking, walking, and making love on the beach until the money dried out, whereupon they spent every dollar of it.

  Back in Waggaman, the dates started coming up the horseshoe drive again, and Sheriff Cronvich’s men spied from the levee. One evening Norma saw them coming down the slope onto her property. Wayne wasn’t home, so she led the girls herself out to the railroad tracks. Again their clothes caught and ripped, thorns flayed their skin. Rose Mary said, “Goddamn, Norma, there went the heel of my shoe.”

  “Shut up and keep running,” Norma told her.

  “Oh, this is great, just great. Then what? I’ll spend the rest of the night opening the door with twigs in my hair?”

  “Would you rather be in jail?”

  “I would. I’d rather be in jail than out here getting run down by a train. As long as you and I are in different cells.”

  “You’d have made a great actress, Rose Mary.”

  “Yeah, I’d be right up there with you. You have more faces than Eve. Where the hell are we going, anyway?”

  “To Bubba’s.”

  “Oh great. That’s just great, a bunch of whores hiding out at the chief of detectives’ house.”

  “What the hell, Rose Mary? Who’d think of looking there?”

  In April 1964 Bubba Rolling had an automobile accident that blinded him in one eye, left him with a limp, and forced his retirement from the sheriff’s office. He told Norma that he wouldn’t be able to give her protection anymore. He told her to shut it down tight.

  Norma listened to her friend. It seemed that times had changed, that the tolerance of the last four decades was at an end, not so much because corruption was on the wane but because busting prostitutes was an easy way to get headlines, concrete proof that a sheriff or DA was doing his job.

  Norma needed to find a way to square up for good. She decided to turn her house into a restaurant, and Norma Wallace, maven of the demimonde, went legit.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Tchoupitoulas

  Norma chose Tchoupitoulas Plantation Restaurant as the name for her new establishment. It was of no consequence to her that the original name of her property was Cedar Grove Plantation and that the original Tchoupitoulas Plantation was on the other side of the river. She loved the sound of the Indian word, loved that it meant “big water.” She also believed people would remember it by the name and be sure to come again.

  She and Wayne moved to the smaller house on the property, and Norma began to plan her menu and amass collectibles—copper pots and kettles to hang around the brick fireplace, lanterns for the bar, crystal and silver objects for the mantels. She bought comfortable captain’s chairs and, for the first time, retained a linen service. She spent a small fortune on salt and pepper shakers that looked like cut crystal and cost thirty dollars a pair. Wayne planted more azaleas and camellias, a wisteria vine at one corner of the front porch, and painted the buildings. He erected a rustic cypress sign with the name of the restaurant branded into the wood, along with “Built 1812” and hung it in a black iron wagon wheel. Norma bought a flock of peacocks to roam the property.

  Norma had in mind a small operation: hire a good chef, serve just one thing—great steaks—and come up with a signature drink. She and Wayne concocted what Norma called the Southern Belle—gin, rum, brandy, lemon juice, orange juice, and passion fruit. After their experiments to get the perfect mix, they could attest to the fact that the Southern Belle was every bit as potent as Pat O’Brien’s Hurricanes.

  But when her friends found out what she was up to they said, “Norma, do you think men will risk taking their wives or girlfriends to your restaurant? You’ll take an awful beating.”

  Norma didn’t want her notoriety to hurt the place’s chance for success, so she hired Ray Dulude, veteran restaurateur, and put him in charge. Then she decided it would be his restaurant; she would collect rent. She was thinking that she and Wayne had had such a wonderful time in Mexico, why not Europe? She made no plans, though, waiting to make sure that Ray was off to a good start.

  But a month went by, and he wasn’t making it very well at all. Norma’s friends from her former life—like Dolores, one of her girls who’d married a state trooper, and Duke Dugas, a fence and the only man Norma had ever allowed her girls to roll—came to support her. Pershing Gervais arrived, larger than life, with his big appetite, but he wanted a free meal. Mac sent Norma a check for twenty-four hundred dollars along with a note, “The Marines have landed,” but she was going to lose her entire twenty-thousand-dollar investment if she didn’t do something soon.

  Elmo came up with an advertising scheme. Over the years he’d had some big ideas to promote his lounges. Once he advertised free gumbo at the Gold Room, but just as the promotion was drawing people in, the cook failed to show. Panicked, he ran to the corner and asked the newspaper lady if she could fill in. She was glad to do it, and the gumbo acquired a new ingredient—the rubber bands from her newspapers. After that Elmo decided to stay clear of food altogether. When he needed to attract customers at the Moulin Rouge on Bourbon Street, he came up with quite a gimmick. Everyone else had gorgeous showgirls dancing at their bars; Elmo hired obese women. The only problem was that he hadn’t considered that three- and four-hundred-pound women would need a lot to eat to keep up their energy.

  Norma was skeptical, but Elmo insisted, so she ran a newspaper ad. But it only attracted one couple, a Singer sewing machine salesman and his wife. Norma gave them a free meal.

  Norma thought good food and word of mouth were the best ways to get people in. She went to a nearby golf club and told a few men there, “Come on out to Tchoupitoulas. It’s beautiful.” And then she found herself saying, “It’s my place.” The next Saturday night they came in droves.

  Norma’s small operation turned into a large operation fast, and after only a couple of months she invested another thirty thousand dollars to rebuild the kitchen. The first three months, though, she could have been serving greasy-spoon hash. She’d hired an experienced steak chef, and the food was delicious, but her patrons were coming for an entirely different reason. The women wanted to see what a real madam looked like; they wanted to know about her life, the kind of place she’d kept. And the men, many of the
m former customers at Conti Street, brought their wives to introduce them to Norma. She, of course, continued in the tradition of discretion, though she decided to hang the paintings of the nudes that she’d kept from Conti Street. She put them all in one room, her former bedroom, which she painted Chinese red and called the Art Room. As she’d expected, it became the most popular room in the house.

  One night a lady whose picture appeared frequently on the society page came with her husband, one of the Good Men, and another couple. The man called Norma over to introduce her to his wife. The woman began to drink Southern Belles, and after she’d been hitting them for a while, she started asking Norma what was going on upstairs. When Norma went into the restaurant business, she’d told her girls to stay away, to forget her and she’d forget them, but she couldn’t convince this woman that no whores were upstairs screwing the customers between courses. Finally, she took the woman on a tour, showing her the upstairs rooms, which she used to store linens and tableware. Miss High Society was terribly disappointed. She said, “Ah, Norma, you’ve taken away all the glamour.” Norma was insulted; she thought that Tchoupitoulas was very glamorous. Later one of the waiters told her he’d seen the woman pocket of pair of salt and pepper shakers on her way out. Norma sent her a bill for sixty dollars, twice what they cost. She received a check and a note of apology, as well as the woman’s gratitude that Norma hadn’t embarrassed her in front of her friends. When a lawyer, a former client who had always been slow to pay, stole a pair of the shakers, Norma got so angry that she decided to give them away to her friends as souvenirs rather than have them lifted.

  Norma had changed the telephone number and, to avoid suspicion, she hired no waitresses, only black waiters, but people continued to ask her if she was turning tricks at Tchoupitoulas. “I’ll take a lie detector test,” she told them.