Empire of Sin (21 page)

The high-toned houses of Basin Street, despite their pretensions, were likewise operated with an eye to a maximally efficient revenue stream. And the smaller brothels could be virtual assembly lines of sex. “
Those places were organized to take
all
your money,” one customer explained. “Let’s say you went into a so-called two-dollar house. Well, you couldn’t very well sit down in the parlor without buying a little wine or at least putting some change in the player piano. It would cost you usually a couple of dollars before you even got around to the business you came for. Clever girls, once they got you in a boudoir, would always offer little ‘extra’ services, for ‘extra’ prices, naturally—and you’d
pay
! Things are not easy to resist at such times.” And lest the laborers of the District waste their time trying to exploit an already-spent resource, customers were typically sent on their way with
a lagniappe—a little bonus, like a rose for their buttonhole or a feather for their hat, “so that the hustlers in the bars and nightclubs would know you’d already had it for the night.”

If Storyville was indeed an industry, then its chief industrialist—the Andrew Carnegie of the carnal—was none other than Thomas C. Anderson. According to at least some reports, there was no transaction that occurred in the District of which he did not get a cut. Anderson was, according to Jelly Roll Morton, “
the king of the district.” And like a king, he took tribute from all of his subjects. When Lulu White, for instance, had a free-spending group of celebrants in her house, she would send someone down Basin Street to the Annex for
a quick delivery of the really good Champagne. White would charge her customers $5 per bottle—a hefty sum in 1905 currency—but Anderson would get no less than $4 of that. It was easy money for very little effort, but Anderson was the man with connections to the liquor distributors, and so it was paid.

Given his political connections, his commercial dominance, and his considerable personal magnetism, he was now arguably one of the most powerful men in New Orleans, dispensing advice, protection, charity, and patronage wherever they were needed. And to those who dwelled in his eighteen-square-block realm—now called Anderson County by newspaper wags—his word was law. “
From time to time,” one Storyville memoirist explained, “the highly honored and respected Tom Anderson would send forth an order: ‘Close all the houses ’til the heat’s off!’ [or] ‘No gambling, the police’s gonna raid all the joints!’ ” Compliance was instant. “Doors would be locked and all lights put out. The joints would be abandoned and deserted … until Anderson sent word that the heat was off and they could resume business.”

Soon his establishment on
the corner of Basin and Iberville (the new name for Customhouse Street after 1904) was becoming nationally, if not world, famous. When a writer for
Collier’s
magazine visited New Orleans, he wrote about the reigning vice lord with barely concealed incredulity:

Tom Anderson overtops the restricted district; He is its law-giver and its king. In his shadow flourish the unblushing street-open shame of Iberville and Conti and St. Louis Streets; the saloons with their wide-open poker and crap games; the dives where Negroes buy, for fifty cents, five cents’-worth of cocaine. He is, too, the [buffer] between the poor, foolish, awkward law written in the books and the people who dwell under his kindlier law. For example, when a woman of “Anderson County” commits robbery, and when the victim complains so loudly that she has to be arrested, Tom Anderson comes down and gets her out. He does not even have to give cash bail.…

But the bad publicity—that eternal oxymoron—merely brought more and more people to the District. Many of them were celebrities. When the actress Sarah Bernhardt visited New Orleans, she took the obligatory tour of the Storyville District. She showed particular interest in a street-corner performance by Emile “Stalebread” Lacoume and his Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band of youngsters playing on homemade instruments (though her tip to the band was, according to one witness, “
below whore scale”). At the Annex, Anderson would play
host to some of the greatest sports figures of the era, including boxer “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and baseball legends Babe Ruth, Frank Chance, and Ty Cobb.
When George M. Cohan showed up at the bar one night, he amused everyone by performing tricks with his derby hat, rolling it up and down his arms in time to the music of the resident jazz combo. And Anderson was nothing if not a considerate host. When boxer John L. Sullivan, late in his career, came to town for an exhibition bout and got too drunk to walk straight, it was the mayor of Storyville who escorted the aging warrior home from the Annex to his boardinghouse on Rampart Street.

But this was the way of Tom Anderson, who, as despots go, tended toward the benevolent. According to those who knew him, he was always “
immaculate, cool-headed, and calm,” no matter what the situation. He was especially polite to women, even those who were drunk. “
He listened to their love problems, when their men were there and when these women came in alone,” one friend said. And Tom’s advice was always palliative and reasonable: “Take it easy,” he’d say. “Everything will turn out for the better. Don’t do nothing drastic; you may regret it.”

No wonder, then, that he was such a popular figure—not only among the denizens of the Tenderloin, but also in the halls of the state legislature in Baton Rouge. Anderson had an easy amiability and wry sense of humor that could disarm even his most rabid political enemies. When making a long argument against a proposed coal bill in 1904, his speech—even in the opinion of the usually hostile
Picayune
—was “
characteristically humorous, and provided much merriment in the chamber.” It also succeeded in getting the measure quashed.

For although the papers would rarely admit it, Tom Anderson was actually
a fairly effective representative, and one who espoused some unquestionably noble causes. He was a member of the Ways and Means Committee and took a special interest in improving the atrocious conditions at many state institutions, especially the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson (where Buddy Bolden was incarcerated, though there’s no evidence that the two actually ever met). In 1905, when Louisiana faced one of its periodic epidemics of yellow fever, Anderson, as proprietor of the Record Oil Company, generously donated a large supply of oil to the city. (Oil was used to kill mosquito larvae that bred in the city’s ubiquitous water cisterns.) And later that year,
when President Theodore Roosevelt came to New Orleans as a gesture of solidarity with the fever-stricken city, the Democratic mayor of Storyville was
named to the honorary committee that welcomed the staunchly Republican president.
A picture of the two of them shaking hands would adorn a wall behind the Annex bar for many years to come.

Not that some of his pet causes couldn’t be viewed as somewhat self-serving. When Representative Anderson sponsored
bills to raise the salaries of New Orleans police and court stenographers, he was surely implementing the lesson he had learned early in his career—namely, that favors produced friends, and that friends in turn produced favors. Naturally, it didn’t always work. The New Orleans Police Department in this era was still too fractured by rivalries and competing factions for any politician to be friends with
everyone
on the force. And although Anderson was chummy enough with Chief John Journée to invite him to his daughter’s wedding, he still faced occasional police harassment. Even then, however, Anderson had ways of appeasing his antagonists. When, during one of the police department’s occasional grandstanding efforts to enforce the widely ignored Sunday Closing Law, Anderson was
arrested, tried, and convicted (by one Judge Skinner), the amiable saloonkeeper did not hold a grudge. After the case was appealed and overturned in a higher court, he made sure to send over
a large supply of liquor and cigars to Judge Skinner, to be shared among all members of the lower court. After all, why let something like a little misdemeanor conviction come between two men of the world just doing their jobs?

Prospects for Anderson—and for Storyville in general—improved significantly with the results of the municipal election of 1904. That year
a Ring stalwart named Martin Behrman, from the Algiers district just across the river, was elected mayor, and his attitude toward the city’s vice industry was as accommodating as any sporting man could ask for. The ultimate anti–silk stocking, Behrman had little use for the high-minded moralizing of the Garden District elites, and he scoffed at their attempts to meddle in the serious business of running a big city. To Behrman, the typical silk stocking was the kind of citizen who “
always knew what [had] led to the fall of the Roman Empire, but did not seem to know that the bulk of the voters were more interested in schools, police, firemen, the charity hospital, the parks and squares, and labor troubles than the Roman Empire.” And while Behrman admitted that he might be—as the
Times-Democrat
called him—somewhat “
uncouth,” he at least knew what the common people of New Orleans wanted.

Virtually all of the city’s newspapers had opposed the election of such an unpolished machine politician. “
Mr. Behrman does not rise to the standards [of public office],” the
Times-Democrat
wrote during the campaign, “but represents the very elements that would assure misgovernment of the city and seriously hinder and check its prosperity.” But Behrman’s most vociferous detractor was none other than W. S. Parkerson, the blue-blooded paragon who had led the parish prison lynching back in 1891. Still active in reform politics,
Parkerson accused Behrman of all kinds of malfeasance, including “grafting” for the Edison Electric Company and making illegal use of a railroad pass. The campaign turned out to be one of the bitterest in recent memory (“
I would rather be a maggot in the suppurating carcass of an insane mule than [be] that man Parkerson,” one Behrman operative announced at a rally). But Behrman ultimately emerged triumphant. And in this new mayor, Storyville and its people could not have found a better friend.

Meanwhile, the District was maturing, so to speak, into a full-fledged subculture, as colorful as it was profitable. A list of the neighborhood’s extensive cast of characters—including prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, and various hustlers—would include such names as
Steel Arm Johnny, Mary Meathouse, Gold Tooth Gussie, Bird Leg Nora, Titanic, Coke-Eyed Laura, Scratch, Bull Frog Sonny, Snaggle Mouf Mary, Stack O. Dollars, Charlie Bow Wow, Good Lord the Lifter, and many more. The exploits of most of these notorious individuals have been lost to history, though a few—like Boxcar Shorty and Boar Hog—were later immortalized in the lyrics of jazz recordings. And although some historians claim that the
rate of violent crime was actually relatively low in Storyville (at least by the standards of New Orleans as a whole, which from 1900 to 1910 had a per-capita murder rate three times that of Chicago), this was hardly a peaceable bunch of men and women. According to Jelly Roll Morton, one Storyville tough by the name of Aaron Harris (“
no doubt the most heartless man I’ve ever heard of or seen”) had no fewer than eleven murders to his credit.

Even some of the Basin Street madams were known for their readiness to resort to guns or knives to settle their disputes. In 1904, Lulu White was arrested on a weapons charge after firing two shots at her white lover, George Lambert, who apparently had left her for another woman. Unable to contain her jealousy, White had gone to her lover’s home to confront him as he was playing poker with some friends. According to the
Daily Picayune
, “
Lulu dashed into the room where the poker players were. Seeing Lambert, she began abusing him and fired two shots at him.” The shots missed—as perhaps they were intended to—and one of the other poker players pulled the pistol from her hand before she could fire again. White ultimately was charged, but with nothing more than carrying a concealed weapon, a crime that in New Orleans rarely led to any serious consequences.

Such colorful episodes were relatively harmless and easy to dismiss, but there were increasing signs in recent years that the debauched goings-on in Storyville might be getting too outré for even the most open-minded New Orleanians. Of course, some of the wilder stories told about the District are surely more folklore than history. The fact that they were told at all, however, indicates a growing disgust in the city at large regarding the monster that had been created some ten years before. One story held that Lulu White began offering her customers
a discount book of fifteen tickets, each depicting a different lewd act—said act to be provided to the bearer simply upon presentation of the ticket. And there were other, more lurid tales: of deflowering auctions, mother-daughter harlot teams, erotic animal acts, and one so-called dancer—
Olivia the Oyster Queen—who allegedly could shimmy a shelled, glistening bivalve over her entire naked body without ever touching it with her hands. Many of these reports centered on one brothel: Emma Johnson’s House of All Nations at 331 Basin Street. Johnson herself—described as a tall, rangy, and very masculine Cajun lesbian—was getting on in years by the first decade of the twentieth century, but her house offered some of the youngest (the very youngest) prostitutes in the District. They purportedly gave nightly “
sex circuses” in which every form of fetishism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism was engaged in.

“
They did a lot of things that probably couldn’t be mentioned … right before the eyes of everybody,” reported Jelly Roll Morton, who often played piano at Johnson’s house. “A screen was put up between me and the tricks they were doing for the guests. But I cut a slit in the screen, as I had come to be a sport now myself, and wanted to see what everybody else was seeing.” But Morton’s breezy knowingness aside, this was where the Storyville pretense of harmless racy fun showed its depraved underbelly. To most sensibilities of the day, pedophilia, bestiality, and sodomy were outrages that even isolation in a restricted district could not make tolerable.