Empire of Sin (45 page)

Lulu White, on the other hand, had no such happy ending. She also continued living in her old Basin Street brothel, but kept it operating as a clandestine house of prostitution. She tried to pass off the new establishment as a transient hotel, but no one was fooled, and her place was subjected to numerous raids by the McShane administration’s newly conscientious police department. “
I could not do anything wrong [even] if I wanted to,” she later complained to a judge. “The police would come in and wake up the boarders and ask them their names and where they came from; Captain Johnson gave his men instructions to go into my house every five minutes, and if the door was not opened right away, to break open the door.”

Despite her protestations of innocence, she was arrested no fewer than eleven times for violations of the ordinance that had abolished Storyville. One arrest in 1919 on federal prostitution charges, however, proved more serious. Found guilty, she actually was sent away to the federal penitentiary in Oklahoma to serve a term of a year and a day. Lawyers petitioned for an early release because of her ill health, but were unsuccessful. Finally, she herself wrote a letter to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington: “
I am suffering dearly every day,” she wrote. “I am full of fistroyer [fistula], rheumatism, and the doctor says I have two or three tumors in my abdomen—[I] can hardly walk and it is a matter of a short time I believe I will die. For God sake do not let me die in this place!”

Palmer proved surprisingly sympathetic, and he passed her letter on to President Woodrow Wilson. He—perhaps just as surprisingly—agreed to commute White’s sentence. She was released on June 16, 1919, after serving just three and a half months.

Her health now apparently improved, she turned Mahogany Hall over to a real estate agent on a ten-year lease and moved into
the saloon next door, which she had bought in 1912. Here she opened up an alleged soft-drink company—but of course it was just another brothel. She was arrested again in November 1920 for operating a house of prostitution, and four more times during the 1920s for possessing and selling alcohol. Her last arrest came in February 1931, for running a disorderly house on North Franklin Street. By now, she truly was in ill health; she had grown to “
Amazon proportions” and was reduced to panhandling on the street. Lulu White died just before her case came to trial—on August 20, 1931, the year that so many of the old Storyville figures would end up passing from the scene.

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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
beg
an 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.

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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.”