Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

by Gary Krist

  Oliver started taking a special interest in his young disciple and began to give him cornet lessons. He also frequently invited the boy over to his house, where Mrs. Oliver would stuff him with that New Orleans staple, red beans and rice (“which I loved,” said Armstrong). Oliver even gave Louis one of his old horns—a beat-up York cornet that the boy accepted with unctuous gratitude. “I always knew, if I’m going to get a little break in this game,” he later recalled, “it was going to be through Papa Joe, nobody else.”

  But Louis was already playing well enough to make his own breaks. One evening shortly after his discharge from the Waif’s Home, “Black Benny” Williams, an enormous (and notoriously combative) bass drum player from the neighborhood, took him to hear Kid Ory headlining at National Park. The real star of the night, however, proved to be Armstrong himself. “Benny asked me if I would let Louis sit in with my band,” Ory recalled years later. “I remembered the kid from the [Labor Day] street parade and I gladly agreed. Louis came up and played ‘Ole Miss’ and the blues, and everyone in the park went wild over this boy in knee trousers who could play so great.” Ory was so impressed that he urged the young horn player to sit in with the band anytime he wanted to. “Louis came several times to different places where I worked and we really got to know each other,” Ory said. “He always came accompanied by Benny, the drummer. In the crowded places, Benny would handcuff Louis to himself with a handkerchief so Louis wouldn’t get lost.”

  Black Benny grew so proud of his little protégé that the drummer was soon singing his praises to anyone who’d listen. “You think you can play,” he told Sidney Bechet when the two met one day. “But I know a little boy right around the corner from my place, he can play ‘High Society’ better than you.” Intrigued (and likely a little put out, accustomed as he was to being regarded as the local wunderkind himself), Bechet said, “Well, I’d like to see that boy.” So they arranged to go hear him play. “It was Louis,” Bechet explained in his autobiography, “and I’ll be doggone if he didn’t play ‘High Society’ on the cornet.…[The tune] was very hard for clarinet to do, and really unthinkable for cornet to do at those times. But Louis, he did it.”

  Bechet had of course already heard Armstrong sing, but this was the first time he’d listened to the boy play cornet, and he was amazed at the quick progress Louis had made on the instrument. So he hired Armstrong to play with him and a drummer on a little advertising gig he’d set up to promote a show at the Ivory Theatre. The drummer and Louis were paid fifty cents each; Bechet kept a dollar for himself. But there were no hard feelings, apparently. “We went out [afterward] and bought some beer with the money and got those sandwiches—Poor Boys, they’re called,” Bechet recalled. “We really had good times.” Even so, the two recognized each other as rivals. And as Bechet’s biographer points out, “For the rest of their lives the two geniuses of early jazz treated each other with the utmost caution.”

  That Little Louis had Benny as a protector was fortunate, since New Orleans in the teens had become a very dangerous place, particularly for black musicians playing in low-down dives and on the increasingly perilous streets. Sometimes the problem was just low-level harassment on the parade routes. (“All the bands wanted Benny to play the bass drum in parades,” Armstrong recalled. “Any time anybody give us kids trouble, Benny’d hit ’em over the head with the drum mallets.”) But often the violence could be life-threatening. Despite the newly beefed-up police presence in the city’s entertainment districts, shootings and knife fights between rival miscreants remained common, and musicians were often caught in the crossfire. “Our bandstand was right by the door,” Armstrong wrote of one tonk he played at, “and if somebody start shooting, I don’t see how I didn’t get hit.” Sometimes the calls were very close indeed. One night in 1915 at Pete Lala’s, Bechet and Oliver were enjoying a drink at the bar when a customer was shot dead right in front of their eyes.

  Little Louis himself had a harrowing experience on a Sunday morning at Henry Ponce’s. Armstrong was talking with the owner in the doorway of the tonk when he noticed several men—apparently friends of Ponce’s rival, Joe Segretta—gathering in front of the grocery across the street. “All of a sudden I saw one of them pull out his gun and point it at us,” Armstrong remembered. Their shots missed Ponce, at which point the club owner pulled out his own revolver and started pursuing the shooters, firing as he ran. But Armstrong just stood there in fright. “I had not moved,” he later recalled, “and the flock of bystanders who saw me riveted to the sidewalk rushed up to me. ‘Were you hit?’ they asked. ‘Are you hurt?’ When they asked me what they did, I fainted.… I thought the first shot had hit me.”

  The racial atmosphere of the city was also growing more volatile in the mid-teens. Often police would have to break up parades to prevent violent confrontations between black and white spectators and participants. Sometimes the police themselves were the aggressors. “Lots of times the both races looked like they were going to get into a scrap, over just nothing much,” Armstrong wrote about those years. “[And] even if the colored are in the right—when the cops arrive, they’ll whip your head, and then ask questions.”

  For the city’s black jazzmen, the situation in New Orleans—despite the growing popularity of their music among young whites—was becoming untenable, and the possibilities elsewhere ever more tempting. More and more of them were seriously considering the offers of jobs outside of New Orleans. “People were hearing a lot of excitement about what was happening up North,” Bechet said of this time, “and I had this idea in my head that I was to see other places.… We’d heard all about how the North was freer, and we were wanting to go real bad.”

  UP on Esplanade Avenue—far from the ongoing turmoil in Black and White Storyville—retired madam Josie Arlington had fallen gravely ill. Sometime in early 1913, right around the time of the Tuxedo shootings, she had taken to her bed and had been declining ever since. By autumn, she was experiencing periods of delirium and had lost control of her bladder and her bowels. Whether this was a case of late-stage syphilis or some other disease is unknown. She was only forty-nine years old, but Josie Arlington had led a difficult and presumably unhygienic existence for much of her life, despite the luxury and ease she had more recently enjoyed as Mrs. Mary Deubler Brady.

  Anna Deubler, now twenty-nine, was her aunt’s principal caregiver. According to the testimony of family friends, the two were still absolutely devoted to each other. And while there were others in the house to help—Anna’s mother, her aunt’s cousin Margaret, a nurse named Mrs. Jackson, and a family friend named Mrs. Walker—it was Anna who was mainly responsible for looking after the invalid. Once she even injured herself while trying to lift her now rather stout aunt from her bed. It was hard work for the slender young woman, but apparently Anna felt it was the least she could do for the person solely responsible for giving her the comfortable, respectable life she had enjoyed since birth.

  Sometime in November of 1913, her aunt Mary became more forthcoming about her past. “Little girl,” she said one day when the two were alone, “how I have been fooling you.” She explained that she wanted Anna to help her write a book about her life—“a book for the protection of young women.” Anna was confused at first, but then, in a rush of confession, her aunt revealed everything. She told her all about her former life as a prostitute and then as Josie Arlington, queen of the demimonde, the famous madam of Basin Street. She also revealed that she and “Uncle Tom” had never been married, that even cousin Margaret had once been a prostitute, and that Margaret’s son—Anna’s own cousin Thomas—was a bastard, born in Josie’s first brothel on Customhouse Street.

  Anna, understandably, was appalled. She ran out of the bedroom, found her uncle Tom, and asked him whether any of this was really true. “Child,” Brady said, “go back to Auntie and pay no attention. You know she is delirious.” But then Anna asked Mrs. Walker, who reluctantly confirmed everything. “My God,” the older woman lamented, “how much
would Auntie not have given to spare you this.” Frantic, Anna went back to Brady and asked again if the story was true. Brady felt he could lie no longer. “Yes,” he said finally. “I’m sorry to say, it’s true.”

  This sudden revelation was “simply horrible,” Anna would later say. She seemed especially upset by the fact that the whole family had been aware of the truth and hadn’t told her. “My father knew it; my brothers and my mother knew of the existing circumstances, and they countenanced it,” she said. “But I didn’t.” In a state of high dudgeon now, she demanded that Brady turn over all of her jewelry—“because I didn’t intend to live under the roof where such things existed.” The irony was stark. Having taken great pains over the years to turn this day laborer’s daughter into a refined young woman, the Bradys were now going to have to suffer the consequences of her impeccable middle-class scruples.

  Eventually, however, the impressionable and pliable young woman was mollified. Perhaps realizing that she had absolutely nowhere else to go, she gradually allowed herself to be talked out of leaving. Her beloved aunt needed her—no matter what her history or current living situation. And all of her immediate family lived in that capacious house on Esplanade, a place where she had felt happy and cared-for. So she did not run away after all. She decided simply to continue going on as she had before, nursing her lifelong benefactor amid the comforts and luxuries she had long ago become accustomed to.

  But Miss Mary Deubler—for now she could be known by her real name—just grew sicker. And when it became clear that the matriarch was not going to recover from her illness, it occurred to Anna’s parents that the future of their family was hardly assured. Mary Deubler had always been secretive and rather grudging about her financial affairs—“Miss Deubler was a very tight proposition,” as Tom Brady would later put it—and the contents of her will were unknown. Deubler had told several friends that she intended to leave her entire estate to Anna. But in early 1913 she had signed papers to transfer ownership of the Esplanade mansion to Brady, ostensibly in exchange for $25,000 in cash that Brady had given her “at various times during the last twenty years.” Worried that the ailing woman might also have left the rest of her estate to her longtime inamorato, Anna’s mother began to concoct a plan whereby the Deubler family might ensure their future prosperity. One day in late 1913 or early 1914, she broached a sensitive topic with her daughter. Wouldn’t it be a “wonderful thing,” she said, if Anna were to marry Tom Brady after Aunt Mary died? That way she would guarantee that everyone could continue to live together in the Esplanade house—as one extended family—the way they had been living until now.

  Anna at first found the whole idea outrageous. Could it be that her mother actually wanted her to marry the man she had regarded as an uncle for her entire life? A man twenty-one years her senior? The man who had been living and sleeping with her dear aunt for well over a decade?

  One can certainly understand the young woman’s initial aversion to the proposal. (Tom Brady, apparently, had no objection to it.) But Anna—sheltered as she had been all her life, and perhaps intimidated by the prospect of facing the world without the bulwark of her aunt’s fortune—was susceptible to persuasion. Over the next weeks, she talked with other members of the household about it. “Mrs. Jackson,” Anna said to the nurse one day. “Isn’t it awful? They are talking about me marrying Mr. Brady as soon as Auntie dies.” Mrs. Jackson confessed to being surprised, but didn’t necessarily think the idea was all that awful. “Mr. Brady can do you no good, but you can do Mr. Brady a world of good,” she said. “You cannot take Mr. Brady from the sphere he has been in and raise him to your level … but you can do him a world of good.” Mrs. Jackson also agreed with Anna’s mother that the marriage would keep the family together, and make it respectable for all of them to be living together under one roof.

  The two priests Anna then consulted also saw wisdom in the plan. Father Anselm Maenner and Father Philip Murphy both felt that, under the circumstances, Anna would protect herself from scandal by marrying Brady. “If you love him and he loves you,” Father Murphy said, somewhat disingenuously perhaps, “I think it is the best thing to do.”

  Eventually, Anna was convinced that she needed a protector, and that Brady would serve admirably. “I needed someone who would guide me,” she later explained, “and since Mr. Brady, all during my childhood, had shielded me and protected me, I thought he was the one most capable of doing it.”

  At six P.M. on February 14, 1914 (Valentine’s Day, appropriately enough), Mary Deubler, aka Josie Arlington, aka Mrs. Thomas Brady, died, eight days before her fiftieth birthday. Her funeral that Sunday was an elaborate affair, with “a line of flower-freighted carriages” winding from the Esplanade house to nearby St. Boniface Church, where the service was conducted by Fathers Maenner and Murphy. In attendance were many members of New Orleans’ political and sporting circles—including, of course, Tom Anderson, her longtime friend and business partner. But as the Daily Item pointed out, “Though her life had been spent among the women of the demimonde, none attended the funeral. The only homage received at the hands of her companions were wreaths of flowers sent to the home and laid upon the tomb.”

  Exactly one week after Mary Deubler’s death, Anna Deubler and John Thomas Brady were married at their home on Esplanade (with Tom Anderson again in attendance). Anna’s father, Henry, who later claimed that he was presented with the marriage plan as a fait accompli, was not happy, and he apparently showed up at the ceremony quite drunk. But he was eventually persuaded to give his daughter away at the appropriate time. (“Take her, Tom,” he allegedly said to the groom. “You helped spoil her, now take your own medicine.”)

  Mary Deubler’s will had been read the day before, after a locksmith broke open the safe whose combination had gone with the deceased to her grave. In that document, dated June 29, 1903, Mary Deubler left small bequests to her brother Henry, her cousin Margaret, and their children. But everything else, including the brothel on Basin Street, went to Anna—and so to Tom Brady as well.

  The will, however, would not go uncontested. Three weeks later, Henry Deubler, claiming that he was “done up in this deal” between Brady and his daughter, would file suit to nullify not just the will but also the earlier transfer of the Esplanade mansion to Brady. Apparently, the prospect of having a wealthy daughter was not enough for the man; he wanted his fair share of his sister’s treasure. He did not win his challenge, however, and the estate eventually went as dictated to the new Mrs. Brady. She and her aging husband went on to enjoy a seemingly happy marriage that soon produced two children. But the Bradys apparently spent through Mary Deubler’s fortune quite rapidly. By 1918, they were already being sued by their old friend Tom Anderson for failure to pay back some loans he had guaranteed for them. High moral standards, it would seem, could be very expensive to uphold.

  In the meantime, Storyville had lost its reluctant queen. And on the very same day as her death, the District had suffered another blow. The Daily Item published a pointed editorial that day under the title NO NECESSARY EVIL. In it, the paper expressed the city’s growing discontent with the whole idea on which Storyville had been predicated—that prostitution and vice were necessary evils that could safely be segregated and regulated rather than prohibited. “Segregation of immoral women has always failed,” the paper contended. “The result has been a worldwide awakening to the fact that the wages of sin is death, and that the welfare of the race is threatened by the widespread indulgence in vice.”

  The message was clear: Just “putting the lid” on vice in New Orleans was no longer enough. The campaign to abolish the segregated district entirely would now begin in earnest.

  SHORTLY AFTER SIX P.M. ON A TUESDAY EVENING IN February 1915, a stout, bespectacled man stepped down from the car of a local train at the tiny station of North Shore, Louisiana. The man had come to spend the night at the Queen and Crescent camp, a rustic country lodge owned by the exclusive New Orleans social club of the same n
ame. The camp—located amid the marshlands and piney woods of the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, some thirty-five miles northeast of the city—was a popular retreat for well-heeled urbanites in certain seasons. But now, midweek in February, it was all but deserted. Aside from the caretaker of the place, Walter Santa Cruz, no one else was there.

  The arriving guest was W. S. Parkerson, and he was not looking well. “I’m tired,” the now fifty-seven-year-old reformer said to Santa Cruz. “I haven’t slept in three nights, and I need rest.” Refusing the offer of dinner, Parkerson requested nothing but a cot in the dormitory with “three or four blankets,” and asked that he not be disturbed until morning. Santa Cruz quickly made up the bed and then left him alone.

  At eleven the next morning, the caretaker went to the dormitory to light a fire and awaken his only guest. Parkerson was still in bed, wrapped in blankets. “Never mind about the fire,” Parkerson said when the caretaker moved toward the fireplace. Asked if he would come down to the dining room for breakfast, Parkerson demurred. “I’ll be off soon,” he said. “I don’t want breakfast.”

  The remark was puzzling. No train was scheduled to leave the North Shore station for several hours, so where would Parkerson be off to? But Santa Cruz said nothing. He merely left the dormitory and went about his duties.

  Three hours later, however, Parkerson had still not emerged from his room. Concerned that his guest might be late for the train going back to the city, the caretaker returned to the dormitory to rouse him. He found Parkerson awake but in desperate condition. “He looked as if he was bleeding to death,” Santa Cruz later told reporters. “Blood was all over the bedclothes. He was cut in the neck, and he held an ordinary two-bladed pocketknife in his right hand. I tried to take the knife away from him, but he wouldn’t let it go.”