by Chris Wiltz
But no one, including Sheriff Cronvich, seemed convinced that only food and drink were on the menu at Tchoupitoulas. One night the sheriff’s men stormed the restaurant just before closing, all wearing black turtlenecks and packing guns. Wayne was at the front cash register. Under the counter he had a .357 Magnum, which he nearly used on what he thought was a band of robbers. A few weeks later Norma heard from a woman that Cronvich had propositioned a relative of hers to try to get Norma. “Honey,” Norma told her, “I was propositioned straight to Parish Prison. Joe Giarrusso took care of that. When he was made superintendent of police, he saw to it that was the end of me.”
One night another of the Good Men came in. He put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and asked Norma to get him a girl. The old temptation rose in her like a fever, but she forced herself to say, “No, darlin, I’m sorry, I’m finished in that business,” and she walked away.
But Norma couldn’t turn down an old friend, a judge, when he asked if he could use the little house. He was meeting his young girlfriend. Norma reluctantly gave him the keys and told him to use the guest room. When he tried to leave a couple of hours later, his Cadillac wouldn’t start. Norma asked Wayne to give him a push. Wayne pulled his pickup truck behind the Cadillac and pushed the judge out to River Road. Then he put the pedal to the metal. The judge was frantically waving out the window for Wayne to slow down, but not for long—he had to keep both hands on the wheel. Wayne laughed all the way to the gas station, and the judge never asked Norma for a favor again.
Within the next month business exploded at the restaurant. The new kitchen wasn’t quite finished, and one night the orders got so backed up that Norma had to go out to the dining room and apologize for the long wait. She told everyone that drinks and dinner were on the house that night. It cost her a couple of thousand dollars, but almost everyone there became a regular customer. Norma started booking reservations, three and four hundred people for lunch alone. She hired Elise Rolling to keep her books and fill in as bartender. She immediately began expanding the kitchen, and Wayne, with the help of his handyman, Dutz Stouffert, built a new bar. In another six months they needed more tables. Wayne and Dutz enclosed the front porch.
The hours were long and the work relentless. Wayne dug out the old septic tanks and put in bigger ones. He laid a larger patio and made a fountain out of an old iron sugarcane pot. In the middle of the patio and in front of the fountain he also laid two small brass plaques that read, NORMA BADON, 10-24-64. He maintained the ten acres, kept the buildings repaired and painted, came in to work the lunch crowd, and went on into the night, everything from bartending and cashiering to parking cars.
Norma handled the money, did all of the ordering, and took care of the personnel. She told Wayne, “The only bad thing about the restaurant business is you have to buy the stuff and have it here. The whorehouse business, you don’t have to have anything but a few tail towels around.”
The personnel were always calling to say they couldn’t come in, and Norma would have to get on the phone for substitutes. And she knew the help stole things too. One time she saw her day chef, who was also a preacher, coming out of the kitchen looking as if he’d gained thirty-five or forty pounds. She put her arm around him; he’d packed steaks all over his body. Norma’s anger became legend after that. She cursed him in front of all the help. “Lawrence Jacobs,” she yelled at him, “I pay you well and you treat me like this? All you had to say is you wanted some steaks, I’d have given them to you. A god-damn preacher,” she said with disgust. “I never did like that you were a preacher.” Jacobs was on his knees begging. Norma didn’t fire him; she made him go home and pray over it for a week while the night chef took double shifts.
The help’s stealing wasn’t new to Norma. She’d once told Wayne, “I know Jackie slips a little extra in her pocket, but here are you and me, we’re out on the town, and I know everything’s going all right. So if she takes an extra fifty or a hundred, what the hell?”
Norma was easygoing unless things weren’t going her way, and Wayne was hardly immune from her rages. She bawled him out after he mixed a gallon of Southern Belles one morning and spilled it all over the electrical panel, shorting out the entire restaurant. She got angry with him one day while they were still at the little house and threw a huge brass ashtray at him so hard it stuck in the side of a French door.
Norma was too busy for anyone to contest the orders she gave. But her young lover just let her rages slide off him. He didn’t protest when he signed his paychecks over to Norma or that he didn’t have his own checking account. He just went along with the flow, doing his work, doing whatever came naturally. And that, as it turned out, was the rub.
When people found out who Norma was, they’d stay at the bar and drink with her until as late as three in the morning. Even if they knew her, they’d stick around to hear her stories. People were drawn to her; Norma never met a stranger. Wayne, admiring Norma and giving her all the credit for making the restaurant what it was, watched her dress up every night and welcome people—every night in a different fabulous outfit, with her diamond rings and her stories. She was the center of attention, and she loved it.
But what she couldn’t abide was the attention Wayne got from other women. When she saw a woman talking to him at the bar, it would drive her into a frenzy. Wayne would ask, “What am I supposed to do, Norma? Turn my head on a customer? Not talk? We can’t run a business like that.”
Norma considered this reasonable, but it didn’t help. She decided that she and Wayne should get married. She told him that her lawyer suggested it would ease their tax situation. But she needed no excuse; Wayne was happy to marry Norma.
They applied for the marriage license, and the next time Norma went to the Davis Beauty Salon, she announced that she was going to take the leap again. She glibly told Franky, “I’ve married so many. It can’t be all of them; it must be me.” She took the responsibility for her marriages, then tossed it off. This time, of course, things would be different.
Norma and Wayne were married on February 18, 1965. The honeymoon lasted a few months. Big Mo came to dinner at Tchoupitoulas often. Bubba and Elise joined in, and they would reminisce late into the night. Phil Harris heard about Norma’s venture and arrived with Alice Faye, his daughter, Alice, and his mother. As always when Phil Harris was around, there was a lot of laughter. Alice Faye and Norma found they had a love of animals in common. And Norma was proud to show off her handsome young husband.
It was always a memorable evening when Norma’s former lovers, male friends, and ex-husbands came to Tchoupitoulas. But it was a different matter when the visitors were women who’d known Wayne before Norma.
The Hamiltons had once lived in the house that was now a well-known restaurant. Elise knew them and was delighted they’d stopped by. She introduced them to Norma and told her, to their daughter’s embarrassment, that Wayne and Jeanie had once had a little puppy love—they couldn’t have been more than twelve—they were so cute, holding hands and gazing at each other.
Jeanie was all grown up now and quite a dish at that. Norma excused herself to find Wayne. She flew to the back, where he was behind the bar, and threw him the keys to the car. “Hurry, Wayne. We’re running out of French bread. Get five or six loaves. I don’t care where you have to go to get them.” She hustled him out the back door.
Later his aunt asked him if he’d seen the Hamiltons. I’ll be damned, he thought. He would have loved to have seen the Hamiltons, but he didn’t like to rock the boat, so he never said a word.
Norma and Wayne started looking for a getaway place in Mississippi. They found some beautiful land near Poplarville—rolling hills, pines and hardwoods, good pastureland too. Norma bought seventy-five acres, all in her name. When the property next door went up for sale, she bought another hundred and five acres. Wayne began building a house, moving a trailer onto the land so they had a place to stay. Whenever they could, they took a couple of days off from the restaurant and we
nt to Mississippi.
Progress on their Poplarville house was slow and stopped for a while when Elmo got sick—complications from the tuberculosis. He stayed at the little house with Wayne and Norma for several months. His wife, Sarah, faithfully came every day with food she’d cooked especially for Elmo, and she continued to maintain his downtown lounge, though Elmo had hired a manager by that time. He stayed at Tchoupitoulas to recuperate so he could see both his wife and his mistress, telling Sarah that he didn’t want to contaminate their house. Sarah, naïve or happy to be on her own or averse to confrontation, never questioned any of Elmo’s actions. Elmo’s mistresses came and went, but he stayed married to Sarah. As long as he did, Norma considered Sarah family, and she was generous with her sister-in-law, giving her jewelry and other gifts. Eventually Elmo went home, his illness continuing its progress until he was too weak to care about mistresses.
Norma wore the diamond rings that Andy Wallace and Golfbag Sam had given her every night in the restaurant. If a waiter dropped a tray or anything crashed in the kitchen, she’d go out to the dining room and tell her patrons, “That was one of my diamond rings. It fell off my finger.”
The patrons loved it, but Bubba Rolling, a cop to his core, told Norma she shouldn’t wear those rings. “One night,” he said, “some-body’s going to be waiting for you, girl.”
“I don’t have these rings so they can sit in a box, Bubba.” Norma was used to putting on seventy thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry and walking over to Bourbon Street to have a drink at Dan’s International.
One evening in 1967 she donned an apron and rubber gloves and performed the ritual she ended every evening with—cleaning the stoves and wiping down the hoods, making sure her establishment was spotless. When she finished she walked over to the little house. She could see Wayne walking to the front to close the gates.
When Norma entered the little house, her dog Rusty greeted her, along with two men wearing ski masks and holding guns. They demanded the diamond rings. A gun aimed at her nose, Norma began twisting first one ring then the other, but she hadn’t removed them for so long that she couldn’t get them off. She told the robbers that.
“Take them off or we’ll cut off your fingers,” one of them responded.
Norma frantically worked the rings, but not quickly enough. The robber who’d done all the talking produced a pair of metal snips. Norma was horrified. “Please,” she said, weak with horror as he grabbed her hand roughly. He cut both rings off, and Norma felt her fingers to make sure they were still there.
She heard the screen door to the house opening and wheeled around, but Wayne had seen the bandits before Norma could open her mouth. Quick as a gazelle, he jumped the fence and ran to Bubba’s house.
It sounded to Bubba as if someone was trying to beat his door down. He limped to it as fast as he could. One word from Wayne and Bubba threw him a huge Magnum shotgun, scooping up another for himself, and the two men went back to the little house.
The robbers were gone, but Bubba went out front and ducked behind some bushes. He saw a car make four passes in front of the property, and he knew that the robbers were still on it. He looked over at the thick canes growing on the property line and he waited.
Three cars and six deputies arrived within minutes. Bubba told them that if they searched in the canes, they’d find the men. But no one took any initiative; Bubba watched them looking at each other until in exasperation he said, “I’ll go in the canes. You cover me.”
He entered the thick growth, breaking through it, steeled for a gun blast, at a serious disadvantage because of all the noise he was making. He looked out for his backup. Hell and be damned if they weren’t all walking, the six of them, over to the restaurant! He couldn’t yell out to them; he couldn’t run because of his leg; all he could do was abandon the canes and go after the deputies at his snail’s pace and risk losing the robbers.
Bubba was so angry that he lay in bed that night nearly crying with frustration and rage. “Going to get coffee! I’d fire every last one of ’em if they worked for me,” he told Elise. The next morning he told Wayne to look in the canes and see what he could find. Wayne found parts to his guns, Confederate money they’d taken from the house, more than enough to indicate that Bubba had been right and the bandits had probably spent three or four hours in the canes before they could come out. They’d also been in the little house for quite some time before Norma walked in on them, because all of Wayne’s guns had been taken apart and everything had been rifled. But apparently it was only Norma’s rings they were interested in; they left other pieces of jewelry untouched and didn’t take any of the guns.
Wayne could see that some of the fire had gone out of Norma, that the robbery had knocked off some of her spunk; she simply wasn’t her same brazen little self any longer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Striking Out
After the robbery Wayne and Norma began spending more time in Poplarville as Wayne continued working on their house. The cypress he used came from Pershing Gervais’s house near the Fair Grounds in New Orleans after a hurricane hit the city.
Gervais had bought the house because it had a view of the race-track from the upstairs windows. Through his binoculars he watched the races and made book. In a test of nerves and timing, he waited to see which horse won, then took bets from New York and California before the results were official.
The hurricane blew the roof off Gervais’s house and landed it on his neighbor’s, closing down another of his scams. The damage was extensive enough that he decided to tear the house down instead of repair it. Wayne, Snapbean, and Dutz Stouffert signed on for the job, and Norma paid Gervais for the lumber they hauled away.
Norma wanted a huge fireplace in the country. So on one trip Wayne loaded their station wagon with bricks, and he and Norma set off for Poplarville after a busy weekend at the restaurant. On the way they had three flat tires. After the third, as they waited for help, Norma said, “If people could only see me now.” She had not yet abandoned her role as proprietor of a famous restaurant, but already she was uncomfortable with country life.
Nevertheless, as she had once before, Norma gave up her working life for a move to the country. In 1968 her brother Elmo died, which removed the last obstacle to a decision to sell Tchoupitoulas and move to Mississippi. The restaurant sold quickly. Norma and Wayne moved into their nearly finished country house, and Marie, Norma’s faithful maid of many years, moved into the trailer.
The land was incredibly isolated, much deeper in the woods than Norma’s Pearl River farm had been. This property was two and a half miles off the main highway, the road to it a long twist of gravel that took a good fifteen minutes to negotiate. And it was more isolated from family and friends, nearly a three-hour drive to New Orleans.
At the beginning, though, isolation was an ideal, not an issue. Wayne loved the land and took his time finishing the house, then building four barns and fencing part of the property. He liked the slower pace and gave little thought to the lucrative business he and Norma had left behind. Norma named the place Waynewood and, relieved of the long hours at the restaurant, and of having to keep an eye on the impression her handsome young husband made on other women, she decorated the house and catered to him and their occasional guests. She gave up thoughts of travel; she had everything she wanted right at home. At night she and the man she called the greatest love of her life would sip wine in front of the fire, and, at one word from Wayne, Norma would reminisce about her scandalous past. They made love on the contour sofa and the big bearskin rug in front of the fireplace.
The green-eyed monster was not dead, though. One afternoon Mr. Ard, who had taken care of the property when Norma and Wayne traveled between New Orleans and Poplarville, arrived in his pickup truck filled with his numerous daughters, all leggy, long-haired beauties wearing short shorts and halters. Norma had Wayne in the car before he knew what was happening. She waved to Mr. Ard, calling from the car window that they had an appoint
ment and were late, and she took Wayne to lunch at a popular Poplarville eatery, where she sat him with his back to the restaurant.
Other small incidents began to erode the good life in Poplarville. One night the woman in the ticket booth at the movie theater told Norma she had a good-looking son. Furious, Norma informed the “hussy” that Wayne was her husband. They left without buying tickets. But the locals became curious about this older woman with the young man, and Norma’s reputation followed her into the woods. The Poplarville constabulary made a surprise visit on a weekend evening, apparently expecting to find a prostitution operation in full swing.
Norma thought it would be fun to spend a little more time in New Orleans. But the French Quarter was no longer the same, and she had been away for several years, too long to have changed with it. She felt somewhat an outsider as she and Wayne sat in Jackson Square surrounded by long-haired hippies or walked down Bourbon Street, which was full of cheap dives instead of the nightclubs she remembered. So many of the old places were gone—Dan’s International, Gaspar’s—and Pete’s had already changed hands a couple of times (it was a gay bar one day, a screaming rock ’n’ roll club the next). Instead of the Chinese café across the street from Pete’s or the tailor, there was now a tourist attraction, the Wax Museum. Otherwise, the whole neighborhood seemed rotten with age, terra-cotta and pastel stucco falling away to reveal crumbling red brick underneath. Time, heat, and humidity had touched many of the buildings with decay, not the prototypical elegant decay of New Orleans but the result of neglect. The house on Conti Street was no exception. The third-floor gallery was gone, the side wall was beginning to bow, the marble steps to the entrance were chipped and covered with a film of urban grime. The fluted columns flanking the door were rotting, and, between the columns, the fancy scrolled ironwork of the gate was all rust and peeling paint. The house had the sad and weary look of an aging courtesan.
