The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (15 page)

Wayne Bernard, the boy next door who fell in love with “Mrs. Patterson,” at their getaway in Poplarville, Mississippi, 1972.

“It’s amazing what a little Bacardi and Coke will do”: Norma in the living room of Tchoupitoulas, circa 1965, when her relationship with her youngest husband was at its stormiest and most romantic.

“If the truth will make you clean, I’ll come clean . . . all the way.” Norma’s tell-all interview at age seventy-one won her an invitation to speak at the New Orleans Press Club, where she received a key to the city.

Or getting a vasectomy.

“What’s that?” he asked Norma.

“They just go clip-clip.” Norma scissored her fingers through the air.

“Wait a minute!” the Wild One yelled.

“Date-tree, you can’t go on having children like this.” His fourth had just been born. “You can’t afford what you’ve got.” Then she dared him to get a vasectomy. He went to Dr. Frank Gomila’s office and had it done.

Datri liked going to bed with Norma. He liked her body, which was better than those of some twenty-five-year-olds he’d slept with—her large, perfect, creamy white breasts, her milk white pubic hair. He liked it when she told him, “Date-tree, you Italians are the best lovers in the world,” and he’d say, “Aw, go ahead. You gotta tell that to all the dagos.”

And he liked talking to Norma. He liked her stories about the house, because he never went to Conti Street. She told him that when a girl wanted to work for her, she made her strip down. If she passed the inspection, Norma hired her and got her a new wardrobe. Norma told him that she paid the IRS every year, like religion, in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars; that she’d had a fabulous love affair with Phil Harris; that of all the movie stars who’d ever come to her place, Don Ameche was the pussiest-eatin son of a bitch she’d ever seen—"He ate every girl in the house!” And Norma told Datri why she liked younger men: “When I feel like I want to get laid, I want somebody who can get a good hard-on, not some old boy who can’t.”

Datri also liked to go out with Norma. One night they arrived at the Black Orchid just as a fight broke out. Datri spun one of the guys around and decked him. “Good shot, Date-tree,” Norma said, and they walked into the lounge as if nothing had happened.

Datri was getting his kicks. He tooled around in Norma’s gold Coupe De Ville like he owned it. At first he didn’t like the cashmere sports coat she wanted him to wear to the Town and Country—“Button the top button of your shirt,” she said, “I like the hood look"—but he got used to it and started liking it enough that she bought him another one. He liked the leather jacket too and the cigarette case with the built-in lighter and the money she put in his
pocket every night they spent together. He especially liked the outboard motor Norma gave him for Christmas. She’d sent George, her porter, to get it but told Datri, “He doesn’t know an outboard from an outhouse,” and gave him the money to get it himself.

Foots Trosclair heard about the outboard, and he wanted to nail Datri and take another shot at Norma too. One night he went to Datri’s house and told him to take a ride. In the car he casually asked Datri what time it was. Datri looked at the heavy gold watch on his wrist and gave him the time.

“Where’d you get the watch?” Foots asked.

“You know where I got it,” Datri growled. The watch had been a gift from Norma and was engraved with both their initials on the back.

“Give it to me,” Foots demanded.

“Over my dead body! The only way you’re gonna get this watch is to cut my arm off!”

Foots took Datri downtown. He wanted him to make a statement about his relationship with Norma. Datri started, “I, John Datri, am making this statement under duress and against my will.”

“No, no, no!” Foots yelled. “That’s not what I want!” He ripped the paper out of the typewriter. Datri continued to start each statement the same way; Foots ripped out each page and stomped it on the floor. They shouted, they threatened violence. They went on like that until one of the other officers made them both go home. Foots eventually got Datri by sheer luck—he walked into a barroom brawl and found Datri in the middle of it. Datri got fired.

But that was some time after he and Norma had drifted apart, no big scene, just a natural end to their yearlong affair. A few weeks later Datri ran into Yum-Yum at a country-western bar on Magazine Street.

“Ummmmmm,” Yum-Yum said, “I’ve been waiting a long time.” She drove him to the Town and Country Motel. Datri had half his clothes off when Yum-Yum took him in the chair.

Datri didn’t think Yum-Yum was better in bed than Norma—well, except perhaps in one category. “That’s why they called her Yum-Yum,” he said.

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Late one afternoon Norma drove over to the Davis Beauty Salon. It wasn’t her regular appointment day, but sometimes she popped in for a quick fix if she had special plans. Davis didn’t mind that Norma never bothered to phone ahead; she always tipped him well, often as much as fifty bucks.

The salon was being painted, and cans of terra-cotta paint had been stored under the carport behind the building when the painters left for the day. Norma nosed her spotless white Cadillac, only a few months old, between the carport posts and crashed into the paint cans.

Janice Roussel, one of the stylists, heard the clatter and yelled to Davis, “Franky, I told you to tell those painters to move the cans!” She was mortified when the back door opened and Norma walked in.

“Franky, baby,” Norma said, “you won’t believe what just happened.” She leaned back in one of the shampoo chairs and closed her eyes, completely relaxed.

Davis chuckled and kept working on his customer. Janice grabbed a handful of towels, went out to the car, and tried to wipe off the paint. She came back in, crying with frustration.

“What the hell, Janice,” Norma said. “I can buy another Cadillac.”

Davis was so amused by the episode that he told two hairdresser friends about it. “You do Norma Wallace?” they shrieked. They insisted that he take them to one of the girlie shows.

Davis had never been to the house on Conti Street. Norma told him to drive to the back, where she’d be waiting at the door to the parlor. She gave the three men drinks, then took them to the second parlor off to the side of the courtyard, where a big blonde was playing the piano and several girls were dancing. They took their seats, Davis next to Norma. The piano player thumbed a run down the keyboard, gave a flourish, and a girl jumped up on the chair in front of one of Davis’s friends, where she did a slow strip. Moving to the music, she writhed and rubbed her hands down her bare body, dancing closer and closer until she was right in the guy’s face. Then she started on the next fellow.

Just when it was Davis’s turn, there came a thumping on the outside wall. The piano player abruptly stopped, and she and the girls disappeared, swift and silent. Norma took an envelope from the drawer
of a small mahogany table and stuck it through a slot in the wall Davis hadn’t noticed. Then she called the girls back, but Davis was ready to call it a night.

“Don’t worry, Franky,” Norma said. “It’s all part of the game.” His two friends still wanted a free trip upstairs.

But Davis was thinking about his car parked out back and newspaper headlines and the business he might lose. He didn’t care if he hadn’t gotten his turn; he wanted to leave. “I guess I just don’t have enough of the animal in me,” he told Norma, his car keys jangling in his hand.

Norma picked up the phone. “Bubba, I got something for you, honey.” A couple of her girls had been working at the Sugar Bowl Courts on Airline Highway when they spotted four high rollers driving around in a Cadillac. Four men were wanted in connection with a series of robberies in Jefferson Parish. The previous night they’d hit the Chesterfield Southport, tied up the night watchman with venetian blind cords, taped his mouth, knocked him out, and left him in the casino.

Bubba went out alone, riding reconnaissance as he did almost every night. Around midnight he spotted a car pulled up behind some hedges. Sure enough, it was a Cadillac, and four hoods were sitting in it. Without thinking Bubba pulled his big nickel-plated gun and approached the car. It was only after he’d announced himself and declared the men under arrest that he realized he had no idea how he was going to get four armed robbers out of the car by himself.

Coming down the sidewalk he heard
clip-clop, clip-clop,
a woman out walking alone. “Hey, lady,” he called to her, “I’m from the sheriff’s office. Will you call over there and tell them I need some help here?”

The woman looked at Bubba’s big, shiny gat and took off at a dead run. That woman ain’t gonna call nobody, Bubba thought. He held the gun steady, but he could feel himself breaking out in a cold sweat. Any minute these bozos were going to get smart enough to realize they had him.

The howl of sirens coming from all directions was a sweet sound indeed. The robbers were caught red-handed with the money from
the casino, cordless venetian blinds, and a roll of tape. They’d also stolen a sack of brand-new chips, which they planned to take back to the Chesterfield and cash in.

Norma’s brother, Elmo, got in on the game too. In the late fifties Elmo was running a couple of lounges, one of them the Gold Room on St. Charles Avenue. He heard on the radio that a girl had been brutally murdered and found in a canal down in Plaquemines Parish, below New Orleans. He had a feeling she was the girl who’d left his lounge about four that morning with a man Elmo knew by name. He called Norma; Norma relayed the information to Bubba; Bubba called a friend in the Plaquemines sheriff’s office. About an hour later the officer called back and said, “Bubba, you hit it right on the head.” They’d located the man’s car and found strands of the girl’s hair as well as a bloody hatchet in the trunk.

Another time Norma called Bubba to tell him that an escaped convict had been showing up at about four or five o’clock in the morning to see one of her girls. Bubba hid out in a truck belonging to the Holzer Sheet Metal Company, next door to 1026 Conti. He had a clear view of Norma’s driveway and back entrance. In the very early morning he saw a lone man coming up the drive. Bubba scrunched farther down behind the wheel of the truck. Then he sat up a bit—the guy walked exactly like someone he knew.

The man got close enough for Bubba to see his face, and Bubba practically fell on the floor of the truck. This was a big-name judge. He walked right up to Norma’s back door. When Norma slid open the little window, the judge said, “Is the coast clear, baby?”

“Yeah, honey,” Norma said, opening the door, “come on in.” Later she told Bubba, “He’d have soiled his pants if he’d seen you.”

It took a few nights, but Bubba got his man, and the escapee was returned to prison. His colleagues were impressed. “What’s the deal, Bubba, you got a crystal ball?” they asked.

“Yeah, I got me a crystal ball,” Bubba told them. He just didn’t say that it had gray hair.

Bubba Rolling became chief of detectives in Jefferson Parish, but Norma never paid him one dime for protection. With Bubba, information bought another kind of insurance.

Many big-time politicians patronized Norma’s house regularly. Most of them, like the judge, had charge accounts. Occasionally, though, these big boys would get out of hand, which was a sticky situation for Norma. She couldn’t call the New Orleans police; they would have loved to throw a few judges, or even the governor, in jail—Earl Long used to plan gubernatorial campaigns in Norma’s kitchen, then his driver would take him over to pick up Earl’s paramour, the Bourbon Street sensation Blaze Starr. So Norma would call Bubba, as she did the night the legislators came in from Baton Rouge and got drunk and rowdy, then belligerent, and started pushing her girls around. Bubba brought them back to Baton Rouge in his police car, even paid the girls for them. The next day the legislators were hungover, humble, and apologetic.