by Gary Krist
NEW Orleans’ jazz culture, meanwhile, was not faring much better than its vice industry. There were still plenty of musicians in town during the 1920s, and many of them still found work, though not enough to keep them playing full-time. Guitarist Danny Barker described what it was like being a young New Orleans jazzman at this time: “So many musicians stopped playing, died, left town—I heard of them but never saw them in person. And many halls were demolished for newer buildings.” Some extreme reformers were even discussing the idea of prohibiting jazz entirely, just like alcohol.
The attrition of jazz greats, moreover, just continued throughout the decade, with dominant figures like Kid Ory and Bunk Johnson joining the likes of Bechet, Keppard, and Lorenzo Tio in the search for better opportunities elsewhere. (“With the nightmare of constant raids staring in my face,” Ory later wrote, explaining his departure for Los Angeles in August of 1919, “I knew I’d never make it and decided not to operate [in New Orleans] anymore.”) By now, the age of true jazz innovation was all but finished in New Orleans anyway, and its nightlife scene was just a shadow of its former self. When Jelly Roll Morton returned to the city in 1923, after years of successful ventures in Chicago, California, and elsewhere, he pronounced the town “dead” and didn’t linger long before moving on.
By that time, of course, even little Louis Armstrong had left the Crescent City—though not before experiencing his share of adolescent adventure and tribulation. Still a teenager when Tom Anderson’s empire was toppled, he had continued playing around town through the good times and bad. But he couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, especially after crossing paths with a woman named Daisy Parker—the “prettiest and badest [sic] whore in Gretna Louisiana,” as he himself put it. He first saw her while he was playing a date at the Brick House, a honky-tonk on the other side of the river. “Daisy kept on flitting across the floor in front of the bandstand where I was blowing the blues,” he later wrote, “giving me the wink with the stuff in her eyes.” During a break, he went up to her and said, “Lookheah’ Babes—Suppose you wrap it up for the night? And—spend the rest of the night with me upstairs?” Daisy agreed, and they were soon infatuated with each other.
In May of 1918, Louis and Daisy married and moved in together (with Louis’s adopted son, Clarence) in a two-room flat on Melpomene Street. But the relationship was stormy from the start. “All she knew how to do was fuss and fight,” Armstrong later recalled. Daisy was jealous, unstable, and quick to resort to razors or bread knives when angered. After one particularly ugly fight that ended with the two of them shying bricks at each other on the street, Armstrong realized that the marriage was doomed and began looking for some kind of exit.
That exit presented itself in the form of an offer to play on one of the Streckfus Brothers’ excursion riverboats, the SS Sydney, under bandleader Fate Marable. For young Louis, this would prove to be a learning experience as important as his time at the Waif’s Home. Marable insisted that all of his players be able to read music on sight, so Louis would gain much-needed technical training on the boat. But the job would also provide him with his first glimpse of the world beyond Louisiana and the city of his birth. (“What are all those tall buildings? Colleges?” Louis asked when he first saw the St. Louis skyline.) He ended up playing with Marable for only two seasons, returning to New Orleans during the winter, but his experience on the Sydney was crucial to his development as a musician. It also reinforced his growing conviction that there could conceivably be a life for him beyond the hostile confines of his native New Orleans.
Back home, Armstrong, unlike some other jazzmen, continued to find work without much trouble. Kid Ory had already left by this time, so Louis began playing with a small ensemble led by violinist Paul Dominguez at Tom Anderson’s cabaret on Rampart Street. He also joined the prestigious Tuxedo Brass Band under trumpeter Oscar “Papa” Celestin. But already he was hearing the siren call of opportunity elsewhere. Ory had tried to persuade Armstrong to come to California, but he had demurred. “I had made up my mind that I would not leave New Orleans unless the King [Joe Oliver] sent for me,” he later wrote. “I would not risk leaving for anyone else.” And that day finally arrived. In the summer of 1922, Oliver sent him a telegram, offering him the job of second cornet with his Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens in Chicago (for $52 a week—a princely sum). “I jumped sky-high with joy,” Louis said, and prepared to leave immediately—and to end his “four years of torture and bliss” with Daisy Parker.
On the day his train was to leave—August 8, 1922—Armstrong played a last gig with the Tuxedo band at a funeral in Algiers. Afterward, he crossed the river and headed to the station. “It seemed like all New Orleans had gathered at the train to give me a little luck,” he later wrote. His musician friends, the “old sisters” from his neighborhood, and of course his family were all there to see him off, Mayann with a pair of woolen long johns and a trout-loaf sandwich to sustain him on his trip to the frigid North. Many tears were shed, but Armstrong was determined to leave. He didn’t want to be “Little Louis” anymore, and he was eager to try his luck in a place where a hardworking black musician could conceivably win “a living, a plain life—the respect” that he deserved. The reformed New Orleans of 1922 was not that place.
And so Louis got on that train bound for Chicago. “My boyhood dream had come true at last,” he would later say. He would not return to New Orleans, even for a visit, until nine years later, when the world had already given him the fame and respect that his hometown had never afforded hm.
BUT the victory of reform in the Crescent City, which had seemed so commanding after the 1920 elections, would eventually prove fleeting. The new administration of Mayor McShane did keep a lid on sin in the city for a time. By 1922, the city’s clergymen were praising him for his successful efforts, which, according to one Pastor L. T. Hastings, gave heart to “all decent, self-respecting citizens of New Orleans.” Hard-line reformers like Jean Gordon were still not satisfied and did not rest, maintaining pressure on the new administration to keep all of its promises on vice suppression. (Miss Gordon also didn’t rest on the eugenics issue, advocating to her dying day for a state law to sterilize inmates at institutions for the insane and feebleminded. As her sister Kate said after Jean’s death in 1931, “When Jean was convinced that the thing was right, it did not matter what it cost her; she would brave public opinion, no matter how unpopular, in its behalf.”) But McShane proved to be an inept politician, and his ODA coalition of reformers and Ring apostates soon fell apart. When the next municipal elections came around, the winner was none other than Martin Behrman, the old Ring standard-bearer, rising like a soiled phoenix from the ashes of his 1920 defeat. McShane’s administration had proven so incompetent that even the Times-Picayune, the nemesis of the old Ring, had supported the return of the mayor it had despised just a few years earlier.
For Behrman’s old friend Thomas Anderson, there was to be no such rehabilitation. Tom had decided to stay out of politics—and out of the vice business—for good. He contented himself with living in sin with his concubine, Gertrude Dix, and looking after his oil company. At Christmastime in 1927, while vacationing at his luxurious weekend house in Waveland, he suffered a stroke so serious that a priest was called in to give him last rites. Tom eventually recovered, but the stroke left him with a weak arm and a pronounced limp. More important, his brush with death brought the old vice lord to religion. He became a devout Catholic, attending Mass every day and even bringing Dix into the Church. But though he made a promise to his priest to mend his ways, he did not marry his longtime concubine, at least not yet. After three marriages, none of which had lasted more than a year or two, he was apparently not eager to take on a fourth.
Another consequence of his stroke was an order from his doctor to move out of his current apartment on Rampart Street, which was on the third floor and required more climbing of stairs than Tom could handle. So Anderson decided to build a one-story home for himself and Dix on
Canal Street, on the lot next door to the home he’d given his daughter back in 1907. But this proposed move would prove to be the undoing of his family. Irene, now a widow and living with her four children, was appalled when she heard of her father’s plan. One day in April or May of 1928, she went to him at the offices of Liberty Oil on St. Charles Avenue.
“Daddy,” she asked him, “is it true that you intend to build next door to me and my family?”
“I was thinking about it.”
Irene launched into a vehement tirade against this plan, which would inevitably bring her respectable family into close proximity with a notorious ex-prostitute. Did Anderson not have any respect for her or for his own grandchildren, she asked. Tom seemed taken aback by her reaction, and told her he would think it over. But he was definitely upset. “It’s a pretty condition when your own flesh and blood go against you,” he complained to his old friend Billy Struve.
Sometime later, Irene repented her harshness, and wrote her father to apologize. “As your daughter, I am sorry for speaking as I did to you,” she wrote. “I was so vexed to know that you have chosen such a person [Gertrude Dix] to guide you. You have completely forgotten the respect you owe the good name of your mother and mine, and the promise you made on your dying bed, to the Almighty God, to live a better life if God spared you. I will always pray to God to help you, and someday reunite us with the same love I have always had for you.”
Rather than pacifying her father, this apology just ended up enraging him. He wrote a lengthy letter back to her (addressed simply to “Mrs. George Delsa”), bitterly resenting Irene’s characterization of Dix as “such a person” and insisting that Irene’s mother, Emma Schwartz, had been “such a person” herself. He vigorously defended Dix, noting that she had nursed him selflessly through his recent illness, and told Irene that he intended to marry his concubine before the week was out. He closed by warning Irene that he would someday tell her more about her own history—something that might make her reconsider her sanctimonious attitude toward Dix.
Still fuming, Anderson then went to his lawyer to rewrite his existing will, which split his estate evenly between Irene and Gertrude Dix. “I want to disinherit my daughter Irene,” he told P. S. Benedict, the lawyer who had represented his interests for years.
Surprised, Benedict informed him that under the Civil Code of Louisiana, a son or daughter could only be written out of a parent’s will if certain conditions were met. “First,” Benedict said, “did she marry without your consent?”
“Oh, no,” Anderson replied. “She married with my consent.”
Benedict proceeded to enumerate the other allowable reasons for disinheriting a child—striking a parent, for instance, or refusing to bail a parent out of jail, or being guilty of cruelty to a parent.
“No, none of those things apply,” Anderson said.
“Then I think you cannot disinherit your daughter.”
Anderson pondered this for a while. Then he seemed to decide something. “Friend Benedict,” he said finally, “I am going to tell you something you don’t know. [Irene] is not my legal daughter. I was never married to her mother.”
This, of course, seemed like an awfully convenient revelation, given the circumstances. Whether Benedict actually believed it or not is unclear, but he did agree to rewrite Anderson’s will, leaving all of his estate to the new Mrs. Gertrude Anderson. But just to make certain that his wishes would be carried out, Anderson also wrote a letter to three of his closest associates, to be opened after his death and only if Irene contested the will. “To whom it may concern,” it began. “I am not the father of Mrs. George Delsa, known as Irene Anderson. While I called her my daughter, [this] was for her benefit and protection. I was never married to her mother, Miss Emma Schwartz, [n]or was I her seducer. I met her like all young men meet such women. When she took sick and gave birth to her child, I took charge of her at her mother’s request.…”
This was spite carried to an almost obscene level of bitterness. Tom Anderson, the man who had built an empire by being loyal to his friends and helpful to everyone, was ending his life with an act of utter betrayal toward his own daughter and grandchildren. That Irene was in fact the issue of a legal marriage between Anderson and Emma Schwartz is certain. The evidence—as it emerged in the inevitable and ugly trial that resulted when Irene contested the will—was all but indisputable. Even the judge at the trial remarked on the startling resemblance between Irene Delsa and the deceased man. Ultimately, in fact, all of Anderson’s written denials were thrown out of evidence as obviously fraudulent, and Irene inherited one-third of her father’s $120,000 estate.
But thanks to the dispute between them, Anderson and his daughter were never reconciled during his lifetime. Instead of moving next door to her on Canal Street, Anderson bought a palatial $35,000 mansion on upper St. Charles Avenue and moved there with his new wife—about as far away from Irene and his grandchildren as he could get.
Late on the night of December 9, 1931, Tom and Gertrude Anderson were home alone at the St. Charles Street house when Tom began complaining of shortness of breath. This was not particularly unusual—Tom was now seventy-three years old and had been sickly for some years. So he merely went to bed, hoping to feel better in the morning. But he awoke a few hours later in considerable distress and called for Gertrude. He discouraged her when she proposed calling the doctor at that hour (it was one A.M.), but she insisted. Tom scoffed. “I’ll be all right before the doctor even gets here,” he said.
He died of a massive heart attack a few minutes later.
The front-page obituaries the next day were effusive. “Mr. Anderson,” the Daily States wrote, “was widely known. He was beloved by hundreds who had known and enjoyed his bounties.” The papers extolled him for his long service as a state legislator, as a political leader in the Fourth Ward, as a prominent businessman in the oil industry, and as a philanthropist to many charities. No reference was made to his other career as a vice lord, racing and boxing entrepreneur, cabaret owner, and restaurateur. Even two of his four marriages (to the prostitutes Catherine Turnbull and Olive Noble) were conveniently forgotten. The closest anyone came to suggesting his other life, in fact, was the comment by the States writer that Anderson’s favorite quote was the biblical injunction “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” These official obituaries were clearly for Tom Anderson’s right hand alone. It was as if the left—the hand of the old mayor of Storyville—had never even existed.
BUT although Tom Anderson’s death had made the front pages of the newspapers, Anderson and his world had long ago become old news for most people in 1930s New Orleans. The revival of the Ring in 1925 had proved ephemeral. Martin Behrman had died less than a year after his surprise reelection. His successor was a mediocrity, and the old Ring organization was plunged into disarray once again, leaving a statewide power vacuum. It was soon filled by Huey P. Long, now a rising young politician, who would lead New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana into its next chapter of infamy.
The Crescent City, meanwhile, was not doing well in the new era of economic depression. The reformers’ attempt to turn the city into an efficient manufacturing powerhouse in the ’20s had not come off. Business was stagnant, and New Orleans had fallen behind other Southern cities—such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Houston—in industrial development. Desperate to revive their sagging fortunes, city fathers in the late ’30s tried to reinvent New Orleans yet again as an interesting destination for travelers. And in their efforts to grow the city’s tourism industry, they came to a realization—namely, that the city could actually exploit its checkered and exotic past as an enticement to visitors from the rest of the country and around the world.
This realization precipitated a radical change in the city’s attitude toward many of its previously suppressed idiosyncrasies. The French Quarter and its Tango Belt, for instance, would no longer be regarded as a run-down immigrant slum embarrassing to businessmen; instead, it would be rest
ored as an intriguing holdover of a romantic foreign past that people might pay to see. The city’s jazz culture, rather than something to be suppressed and condemned, became something to be revived and promoted (albeit as a much whiter phenomenon). Before long, even the city’s reputation as a den of sin and iniquity was being turned into a plus rather than a minus. The re-creation of wicked old New Orleans on Bourbon Street, complete with strip clubs and raucous dance halls, began to attract fun-seeking masses from all over—and ended up bearing more than a passing resemblance to Storyville in its heyday.
Granted, the city’s racial atmosphere would take more time to loosen up. When Louis Armstrong, now an international star, was invited back to his hometown in 1949 to receive the key to the city, that key apparently opened only the doors to black New Orleans; the beloved Satchmo was forced to stay at a “colored hotel.” And some journalists of the 1960s were quick to note the stark irony of using African American jazz culture to attract visitors to a place “still shackled by the iron grip of institutionalized racism and apartheid.” But the tourist reinvention of the city did at least preserve some of the culture of the past, and a more genuine version of the city’s former self did eventually emerge, especially after the demise of Jim Crow. And when the oil bust of the mid-1980s threatened to send the local economy into crisis, it was New Orleans’ notoriety as a destination for jazz, sex, alcohol-soaked nightlife, and exotic culture—the very things the old reformers had tried to stamp out—that enabled the city to weather the bad times.
