The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  Rose Mary, Sidney, and Sidney Jr., the baby, lived on Georgetown Drive in Kenner. Rose Mary stayed home with her baby while Sidney worked as a butcher at a nearby grocery store. They became friends with their next-door neighbors, Bill and Elaine Newton, who had four children. During the day Rose Mary and Elaine would get together and talk babies. Both brunettes, they dyed their hair blond. On weekends Bill and Sidney barbecued.

  Rose Mary kept her promise to be a devoted mother. She took little Sidney to the best doctors and learned from physical therapists how to work with him; she went to her church for help raising money when he needed surgery. She knew she would spend the rest of her life caring for her son, because he would never be able to care for himself. And that was all right with Rose Mary.

  But Sidney was not at ease in suburbia. He liked life in the fast lane, not the daily grind of working in the meat department and then going home to a squawling baby. Growing up, he had learned the lessons of life from the underworld characters in a rough section of Carrollton. He knew how to make money other ways than the eight-to-five shift. He had been a player in the drug world since his teens, breaking and entering when he needed money for the heroin habit he was acquiring. By the time little Sidney was born, his father had already served time in Angola for burglary.

  Sidney knew he was going to let Rose Mary down one day. So when he heard through the underworld grapevine that Norma was living in Mississippi, he thought he’d surprise Rose Mary, do something nice for her. She talked about Norma a lot, about how much she missed her. He called Norma, and the following Sunday he took Rose Mary and little Sidney to the Poplarville woods.

  The reunion came at a time when Norma truly needed a friend and confidante. She fell in love with little Sidney. He was bright, cheerful in spite of his painfully twisted body, and although still an infant, he already showed signs of a good sense of humor. Norma put him on the big bear rug in front of the fireplace and talked to him. The two women reminisced about Conti Street, and Norma gave Rose Mary her big black book, which she’d kept all those years, a ledger with everything—the men’s names, their body marks, and the money they spent—written in code. But she told Rose Mary she was glad she was out of the business and living the life she was clearly meant to live: Norma thought motherhood had made Rose Mary more beautiful than ever.

  Wayne, Rose couldn’t help but notice, had hardly a word to say. He stayed outside the entire time the Scallans were there and the next time they visited as well. Rose Mary had no idea what was wrong until Norma broke down and told her everything.

  Wayne came through for Norma, though, when Howard Jacobs of The Times-Picayune went to Poplarville to interview her in June 1974. He posed for pictures with her, playing the adoring young husband. Norma repeated some of what she had taped for her autobiography, and the two-part profile ran that summer—a provocative, thoughtful, and amusing portrait of a shrewd, powerful woman. But it held none of the excitement for Norma that the New Orleans magazine article had. She was moving on.

  The Poplarville property sold almost immediately to a New Yorker for eight hundred dollars an acre, eight times what Norma had paid for it. Ida May Ard, the caretaker’s wife, told Norma about a piece of property in the town of Bush. Norma went to see it, an acre on Dad Penton Road, a slithering cut through the woods, but not nearly as isolated as the Poplarville place. A covered patio stretched the width of the house in back and looked out on a large, fenced pasture beyond. Norma thought Wayne would like it and decided to buy it. She wrote to Wayne’s mother, telling her about the house, how much it reminded her of Tchoupitoulas with its dormer windows, the banks of azalea bushes, and the oak, wild cherry, and pine trees around it. She never mentioned the shambles their marriage was in. She packed up the Poplarville house, and in September she and Wayne moved, along with the dogs, the cats, a couple of horses, and the foulmouthed parrots, to Bush, Louisiana.

  Wayne moved his possessions into the house and, with Dutz Stouffert, set to work on the property. Norma wrote to Rose Mary, “Wayne will never be the same, he asked a big price for the Mississippi place but he really didn’t want to sell. He is pouting with me.”

  She tried talking to Wayne, asking him why he thought they were so incompatible all of a sudden. And he tried to explain, telling her that he wanted to be able to go to football games, do normal things like that. Norma told him she could go to football games, he was just going to have to tell her what was going on for a while. They went to a game in Bogalusa the next weekend, and Wayne called the plays for her halfheartedly. He was moody, silent. She understood that the problem was more than incompatibility.

  Norma did not know it at the time, but the move to Bush had put Wayne closer to Jean. He started staying out all night again, though he had agreed to go with Norma to the Phil Harris roast, taking place on October 17. Norma tried to keep busy. She asked Rose Mary to come see her. She called Pershing Gervais, who had returned from Canada and the witness protection program, where he’d been very unhappy, in time to recant at the pinball trial, which ensured that Jim Garrison was acquitted while the other defendants (including Freddy Soulé) went to jail. Norma was too overwrought to get any joy out of Soulé’s fate. Gervais told her he would get to Bush as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Norma began to take Valium so she could sleep.

  On the night of October 17, Norma dressed in a new black suit—flowing silk pants with a camisole top and a jacket. She put on her red cashmere coat with mink collar and cuffs, and she and Wayne drove into New Orleans to the Roosevelt Hotel for the testimonial dinner in honor of Phil Harris. In The Times-Picayune Norma had been listed as one of the celebrities attending the event, along with Bing Crosby, Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, and Mayor Moon Landrieu. Phil had arranged for Norma and Wayne to have a room close to his and Alice Faye’s and to be seated at his table, along with the governor.

  It was quite a gala affair, and everyone complimented Norma on how good she looked. After a five-course dinner the notables mounted the rostrum to roast their friend Phil Harris—but not Norma.

  Then there was dancing. Norma and Wayne got out on the floor for a few numbers, but a couple of hours into that part of the evening, Phil still had not asked Norma to dance. He’d hardly looked her way the entire evening. All of a sudden Norma turned to Wayne and said, “Let’s go.”

  Wayne thought they’d been having a good time. He asked Norma why. She wouldn’t answer him. Her mouth was set in that way that told him there was no point in arguing. She did not speak to Phil before leaving but passed by the table to tell Bubba and Elise goodbye. When Bubba heard they were going home, he told them they shouldn’t drive the Causeway, the twenty-four-mile bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, because the fog was so thick that night. Norma refused to hear his protests. She and Wayne left.

  In the car she said, “Who the hell does he think he is?” Even though Wayne tried to get her to talk about why she was so upset, she didn’t say another word all the way to Bush. But Wayne knew what the problem was: Norma liked everything with a big bang, and with Phil Harris the bang just wasn’t there anymore; here was her old compadre, and he wasn’t giving her a high note, and here was her young lover, her husband, slowly slipping away.

  Wayne moved the trailer from Poplarville to Jean’s mother’s place in Franklinton, where Jean lived with her two young boys, taking only his clothes from the Bush house. He had told Jean that once he and Norma sold the place in Poplarville and he got her settled in Bush he would leave. Jean relaxed into the relationship after Wayne moved, but not for long. Norma started calling her mother’s for Wayne, and every time she did Wayne was off like a shot, back to Bush. Jean noticed that he never, ever said anything against Norma. She was jealous; Wayne was telling Jean he was with her, yet he was still married to that woman, running whenever she needed him.

  Then one day she and Wayne were driving in Bogalusa when Wayne blatantly began giving the eye to some girls standing on a corner. It wasn’t the first time she’d caught his rovin
g eye. Jean had a quick temper; she elbowed him hard in the stomach. “What’s wrong with you?” he shouted at her.

  “You son of a bitch,” she told him, “you better keep your eyes on the road.” From being jealous of Norma and angry with her for calling Wayne, she began to feel some sympathy.

  Another night in Bogalusa, they went to a restaurant. “You sit here,” Wayne said, and held a chair out for Jean. She was reading the menu when she noticed him flirting with someone at a table behind her, a very young woman sitting with two older women—her mother and aunt, Wayne told Jean later. “She can’t be more than sixteen,” Jean yelled. “What do you want—to get brought up on statutory?” She never let him seat her with her back to the restaurant again.

  Wayne and Jean were on again, off again. When Wayne put his wandering eye on another woman once too often, Jean told him to get the trailer off her mother’s property. Wayne moved it to Bogalusa, and he and Jean didn’t speak for a couple of months.

  Norma wrote to Rose Mary, “In our eleven years, Wayne always was a model husband but if he wants to go, go, just don’t do me this way. I would have bought a house in or near New Orleans had I known this. Being here alone is rough.”

  In another letter she wrote Rose Mary, “If I didn’t have these dogs I would take off and get an apartment in the Quarter but I can’t desert them.” Rose Mary came to Bush the following weekend, and Norma tried to get her to take home all the boxes still stacked in the living room. Rose Mary refused. “I want you to move to New Orleans, Norma. If I take those boxes, I’ll never get you out of here.” The state Norma was in, though, made another move seem impossible.

  Norma didn’t know that Wayne and Jean had split up. When Wayne finally told her he’d moved the trailer to Bogalusa, he let her think it was because of a job he’d taken there. But he refused to put a phone in the trailer. Norma continued to call him occasionally at Jean’s mother’s house, which meant she had to wait until someone could track him down and give him the message, but for once Wayne was coming and going as he pleased.

  At last Norma decided to call Jean. She wanted to know if these were at least nice people; perhaps if she could talk to the young girl, it would make her feel better. But the day she called she got Marsha, Jean’s younger sister, who told her Jean was at work. She got in her car and drove to the convenience store in Franklinton.

  The girl Norma saw behind the counter was a nondescript blonde with her hair chopped off, in cutoff blue jeans and a tank top. How could Wayne leave her for this cheap little tart? What could this young girl possibly have that she didn’t? Ah, but there was the answer—youth. Norma went home and took a Valium.

  Pershing Gervais tried to be with Norma as much as he could during the week, but it was difficult for him, he told her—all the driving. And if he stayed in the house with her, they argued—two older people set in their ways. She gave him money, and he bought a small place in Sun, next to Bush, so he was nearby. Then he went into New Orleans on the weekends, when Rose Mary and Sidney came to Bush with the baby.

  Wayne showed up at the house the next week, after Norma hadn’t seen him for several days. She tried to talk to him, but he only said hurtful things to her. He said he wanted someone young to run through the fields with; he fabricated wild tales of group sex, three women at a time. He wanted her to shove him away. Instead she cried. For the first time since Wayne had known her, Norma looked old.

  When Rose Mary arrived the next weekend and saw how many bottles of Valium were in the house, she was frightened. But Norma told her it was the only way she could sleep, repeating Wayne’s night-marish sexual adventures. Rose Mary began to hate Wayne. She tried to convince Norma to leave him behind, to move to New Orleans with her.

  “I’ll take care of you,” Rose Mary said.

  “I know you would, honey,” Norma replied, “but why should you have to?”

  “Because I love you. Because we’re friends.”

  “You’re an angel, you’ll go straight to heaven,” Norma told her, “but you have this baby to take care of. Anyway,” she added, “I don’t want to get too old; I don’t want to be bedridden or handicapped. I want to look at least decent when I die.”

  Then she laughed and told Rose Mary that Wayne was styling his hair in an Afro now, which Rose got to see for herself when he stopped to pick up some more of his belongings that Saturday. Norma made fun of Wayne’s hair, to his face, in front of Rose Mary and Sidney; she too could be cruel. But if it got to Wayne, she couldn’t tell—he just shrugged everything off. The frustration of trying to get to him was more than she could bear. She began to feel that she would have to either kill him or die.

  From one weekend to the next, Rose Mary didn’t know how she would find Norma, desperate or immobile or rampaging. Sometimes she’d try to get Norma out, and Norma would despondently tell her that going out wasn’t the answer. She confided that her marriage wasn’t in such good shape either. Norma immediately took her to a dealer and tried to buy her a new car, so she could be independent of Sidney, but Rose Mary refused. She told Norma to keep her money for the move to New Orleans. Norma became incensed and took off in her Gran Torino with little Sidney, leaving Rose Mary stranded at the lot.

  In late November a letter arrived that gave Rose Mary some hope. Norma wrote, “I hope before long I can adjust and that Afro hair bastard will be not even a memory.”

  Norma had been writing in a diary; now she wrote inside the front cover, “The joy of love is only for the moment, but the pain of love is forever.” She cut out inspirational columns about aging and pasted them in the diary. One, an Ann Landers column called “Advice to the Unsure,” read in part: “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

  Norma tried God too, quoting Matthew’s Gospel: “Again, when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, they love to say their prayers standing up in a synagogue and at the street corners for everyone to see them. I tell you this, they have their reward already. But when you pray, go into a room by yourself, shut the door and pray to your Father who is there in a secret place, and your Father who sees what is secret will reward you.”

  Norma gave Rose Mary a diamond cross with a ruby at each end and wrote to her, “There is a place in heaven for you, but I worry about that as I know I won’t be able to get there.”

  Now she wrote in her diary, “Virtue consists not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.”

  She pasted a poem called “Saints and Sinners” in her book, and she pressed four-leaf clovers between its pages. But no advice or superstition, regret or prayer could calm the obsession that consumed Norma, body and soul.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Gun

  In the early fall of 1974, Sidney Scallan stopped at a metha-done clinic in New Orleans to check the action. He was taking methadone himself, but he also had a couple of bags of heroin in his pocket. A young character approached him outside the clinic and asked Sidney if he would trade a bag of heroin for a .38 caliber pistol that belonged to his father. He had the pistol on him. Sidney looked at it, liked its heft, and the exchange was made.

  About a month later Pershing Gervais called—he had some new results to play. He asked Sidney to meet him at a restaurant off Veterans Highway in Metairie. Gervais ordered a couple of steaks. As they ate he told Sidney that he had a friend who wanted someone eliminated, an out-of-state job, and was willing to pay five thousand dollars.

  “That could be done,” Sidney said, “but it would cost ten, not five.”

  “I’ll have to talk to my friend,” Gervais said.

  “Fair enough,” Sidney replied.

  Five days later Gervais called for another meeting, same place. “My friend will be with me,” he informed Sidney.

  “No way,” Sidney said. “I don’t want to know who he is, and I don’t want him to know who I am.”

  “I can deal with that,” Gervais said. They agreed on a time to meet.

  At the resta
urant Gervais told Sidney, “Five. That’s the offer.”

  Sidney, his ice blue eyes flecked with black, gave Gervais a flinty look. “Can’t be done for five.”

  Gervais returned Sidney’s stare. Sidney wasn’t going to budge on this. Gervais excused himself to call the friend. Five minutes later he eased into his chair across the table from Sidney. “Seven’s as high as he’ll go.”

  Sidney smiled. “Only made yourself three on that one, huh, Pershing?”

  Gervais ordered rib eyes and got down to business—a photo of the subject, the location, and four grand up front. Gervais started to say something about a bad gambling debt, but Sidney held up his hand. “I got what I need,” he said. The way Sidney felt, you played the game and you knew the odds, but he didn’t want to know about any particular game. The two men closed the deal with a cup of coffee and went their separate ways.

  Sidney filed the serial number off the gun the young character had traded for heroin. Then he called a friend. He gave this friend part of the money, and the job was done. Afterward Sidney buried the pistol in the woods behind the New Orleans airport, not far from where he and Rose Mary lived. He had no intention of digging it up again.

  Norma’s habit was to hide cash all over the house. Sometimes she put it in the pots and pans. If it wasn’t a lot, she put it in an early American–style lamp, in a little well on one end of the lamp’s arm that held metal rounds for balance. She took out some of the rounds and stuffed money down in the well. Another place was a huge vase in the hallway, underneath the bouquet of artificial flowers. She’d hid three thousand dollars in the vase, she thought, but now she couldn’t find it. She called Jean’s mother’s, looking for Wayne.