The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (23 page)

Wayne knew she hated water and couldn’t swim. And he figured she sure as hell couldn’t swim with that dress on. He was ready to
jump in after her when she shot to the surface like a geyser, her dress sparkling in the underwater lights. He lifted her out, and she didn’t have her feet on the ground before she was laughing. Then Wayne laughed. They got hysterical. Two waiters on the other side of the pool stopped gawking and started laughing. Norma called them over. “Get my purse out of there, will you?” She pointed to a little beaded bag at the bottom. The waiters scooped it up in a net. Norma opened it to give them a tip, and Wayne saw rolls of hundred-dollar bills. Norma had five thousand wet dollars in her purse.

The next day they went shopping again and bought all casual clothes. They stayed in Acapulco, eating, drinking, walking, and making love on the beach until the money dried out, whereupon they spent every dollar of it.

Back in Waggaman, the dates started coming up the horseshoe drive again, and Sheriff Cronvich’s men spied from the levee. One evening Norma saw them coming down the slope onto her property. Wayne wasn’t home, so she led the girls herself out to the railroad tracks. Again their clothes caught and ripped, thorns flayed their skin. Rose Mary said, “Goddamn, Norma, there went the heel of my shoe.”

“Shut up and keep running,” Norma told her.

“Oh, this is great, just great. Then what? I’ll spend the rest of the night opening the door with twigs in my hair?”

“Would you rather be in jail?”

“I would. I’d rather be in jail than out here getting run down by a train. As long as you and I are in different cells.”

“You’d have made a great actress, Rose Mary.”

“Yeah, I’d be right up there with you. You have more faces than Eve. Where the hell are we going, anyway?”

“To Bubba’s.”

“Oh great. That’s just great, a bunch of whores hiding out at the chief of detectives’ house.”

“What the hell, Rose Mary? Who’d think of looking there?”

In April 1964 Bubba Rolling had an automobile accident that blinded him in one eye, left him with a limp, and forced his retirement
from the sheriff’s office. He told Norma that he wouldn’t be able to give her protection anymore. He told her to shut it down tight.

Norma listened to her friend. It seemed that times had changed, that the tolerance of the last four decades was at an end, not so much because corruption was on the wane but because busting prostitutes was an easy way to get headlines, concrete proof that a sheriff or DA was doing his job.

Norma needed to find a way to square up for good. She decided to turn her house into a restaurant, and Norma Wallace, maven of the demimonde, went legit.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Tchoupitoulas

Norma chose Tchoupitoulas Plantation Restaurant as the name for her new establishment. It was of no consequence to her that the original name of her property was Cedar Grove Plantation and that the original Tchoupitoulas Plantation was on the other side of the river. She loved the sound of the Indian word, loved that it meant “big water.” She also believed people would remember it by the name and be sure to come again.

She and Wayne moved to the smaller house on the property, and Norma began to plan her menu and amass collectibles—copper pots and kettles to hang around the brick fireplace, lanterns for the bar, crystal and silver objects for the mantels. She bought comfortable captain’s chairs and, for the first time, retained a linen service. She spent a small fortune on salt and pepper shakers that looked like cut crystal and cost thirty dollars a pair. Wayne planted more azaleas and camellias, a wisteria vine at one corner of the front porch, and painted the buildings. He erected a rustic cypress sign with the name of the restaurant branded into the wood, along with “Built 1812” and hung it in a black iron wagon wheel. Norma bought a flock of peacocks to roam the property.

Norma had in mind a small operation: hire a good chef, serve just one thing—great steaks—and come up with a signature drink. She and
Wayne concocted what Norma called the Southern Belle—gin, rum, brandy, lemon juice, orange juice, and passion fruit. After their experiments to get the perfect mix, they could attest to the fact that the Southern Belle was every bit as potent as Pat O’Brien’s Hurricanes.

But when her friends found out what she was up to they said, “Norma, do you think men will risk taking their wives or girlfriends to your restaurant? You’ll take an awful beating.”

Norma didn’t want her notoriety to hurt the place’s chance for success, so she hired Ray Dulude, veteran restaurateur, and put him in charge. Then she decided it would be his restaurant; she would collect rent. She was thinking that she and Wayne had had such a wonderful time in Mexico, why not Europe? She made no plans, though, waiting to make sure that Ray was off to a good start.

But a month went by, and he wasn’t making it very well at all. Norma’s friends from her former life—like Dolores, one of her girls who’d married a state trooper, and Duke Dugas, a fence and the only man Norma had ever allowed her girls to roll—came to support her. Pershing Gervais arrived, larger than life, with his big appetite, but he wanted a free meal. Mac sent Norma a check for twenty-four hundred dollars along with a note, “The Marines have landed,” but she was going to lose her entire twenty-thousand-dollar investment if she didn’t do something soon.

Elmo came up with an advertising scheme. Over the years he’d had some big ideas to promote his lounges. Once he advertised free gumbo at the Gold Room, but just as the promotion was drawing people in, the cook failed to show. Panicked, he ran to the corner and asked the newspaper lady if she could fill in. She was glad to do it, and the gumbo acquired a new ingredient—the rubber bands from her newspapers. After that Elmo decided to stay clear of food altogether. When he needed to attract customers at the Moulin Rouge on Bourbon Street, he came up with quite a gimmick. Everyone else had gorgeous showgirls dancing at their bars; Elmo hired obese women. The only problem was that he hadn’t considered that three- and four-hundred-pound women would need a lot to eat to keep up their energy.

Norma was skeptical, but Elmo insisted, so she ran a newspaper ad. But it only attracted one couple, a Singer sewing machine salesman and his wife. Norma gave them a free meal.

Norma thought good food and word of mouth were the best ways to get people in. She went to a nearby golf club and told a few men there, “Come on out to Tchoupitoulas. It’s beautiful.” And then she found herself saying, “It’s my place.” The next Saturday night they came in droves.

Norma’s small operation turned into a large operation fast, and after only a couple of months she invested another thirty thousand dollars to rebuild the kitchen. The first three months, though, she could have been serving greasy-spoon hash. She’d hired an experienced steak chef, and the food was delicious, but her patrons were coming for an entirely different reason. The women wanted to see what a real madam looked like; they wanted to know about her life, the kind of place she’d kept. And the men, many of them former customers at Conti Street, brought their wives to introduce them to Norma. She, of course, continued in the tradition of discretion, though she decided to hang the paintings of the nudes that she’d kept from Conti Street. She put them all in one room, her former bedroom, which she painted Chinese red and called the Art Room. As she’d expected, it became the most popular room in the house.

One night a lady whose picture appeared frequently on the society page came with her husband, one of the Good Men, and another couple. The man called Norma over to introduce her to his wife. The woman began to drink Southern Belles, and after she’d been hitting them for a while, she started asking Norma what was going on upstairs. When Norma went into the restaurant business, she’d told her girls to stay away, to forget her and she’d forget them, but she couldn’t convince this woman that no whores were upstairs screwing the customers between courses. Finally, she took the woman on a tour, showing her the upstairs rooms, which she used to store linens and tableware. Miss High Society was terribly disappointed. She said, “Ah, Norma, you’ve taken away all the glamour.” Norma was insulted; she thought that Tchoupitoulas was very glamorous. Later one of the waiters told her he’d seen the woman pocket of pair of salt and pepper shakers on her way out. Norma sent her a bill for sixty dollars, twice what they cost. She received a check and a note of apology, as well as the woman’s gratitude that Norma hadn’t embarrassed her in front of her friends. When a lawyer, a former client who had always been slow to pay, stole a pair
of the shakers, Norma got so angry that she decided to give them away to her friends as souvenirs rather than have them lifted.

Norma had changed the telephone number and, to avoid suspicion, she hired no waitresses, only black waiters, but people continued to ask her if she was turning tricks at Tchoupitoulas. “I’ll take a lie detector test,” she told them.

But no one, including Sheriff Cronvich, seemed convinced that only food and drink were on the menu at Tchoupitoulas. One night the sheriff’s men stormed the restaurant just before closing, all wearing black turtlenecks and packing guns. Wayne was at the front cash register. Under the counter he had a .357 Magnum, which he nearly used on what he thought was a band of robbers. A few weeks later Norma heard from a woman that Cronvich had propositioned a relative of hers to try to get Norma. “Honey,” Norma told her, “I was propositioned straight to Parish Prison. Joe Giarrusso took care of that. When he was made superintendent of police, he saw to it that was the end of me.”

One night another of the Good Men came in. He put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and asked Norma to get him a girl. The old temptation rose in her like a fever, but she forced herself to say, “No, darlin, I’m sorry, I’m finished in that business,” and she walked away.

But Norma couldn’t turn down an old friend, a judge, when he asked if he could use the little house. He was meeting his young girlfriend. Norma reluctantly gave him the keys and told him to use the guest room. When he tried to leave a couple of hours later, his Cadillac wouldn’t start. Norma asked Wayne to give him a push. Wayne pulled his pickup truck behind the Cadillac and pushed the judge out to River Road. Then he put the pedal to the metal. The judge was frantically waving out the window for Wayne to slow down, but not for long—he had to keep both hands on the wheel. Wayne laughed all the way to the gas station, and the judge never asked Norma for a favor again.

Within the next month business exploded at the restaurant. The new kitchen wasn’t quite finished, and one night the orders got so backed up that Norma had to go out to the dining room and apologize for the long wait. She told everyone that drinks and dinner were
on the house that night. It cost her a couple of thousand dollars, but almost everyone there became a regular customer. Norma started booking reservations, three and four hundred people for lunch alone. She hired Elise Rolling to keep her books and fill in as bartender. She immediately began expanding the kitchen, and Wayne, with the help of his handyman, Dutz Stouffert, built a new bar. In another six months they needed more tables. Wayne and Dutz enclosed the front porch.

The hours were long and the work relentless. Wayne dug out the old septic tanks and put in bigger ones. He laid a larger patio and made a fountain out of an old iron sugarcane pot. In the middle of the patio and in front of the fountain he also laid two small brass plaques that read,
NORMA BADON,
10-24-64. He maintained the ten acres, kept the buildings repaired and painted, came in to work the lunch crowd, and went on into the night, everything from bartending and cashiering to parking cars.

Norma handled the money, did all of the ordering, and took care of the personnel. She told Wayne, “The only bad thing about the restaurant business is you have to buy the stuff and have it here. The whorehouse business, you don’t have to have anything but a few tail towels around.”

The personnel were always calling to say they couldn’t come in, and Norma would have to get on the phone for substitutes. And she knew the help stole things too. One time she saw her day chef, who was also a preacher, coming out of the kitchen looking as if he’d gained thirty-five or forty pounds. She put her arm around him; he’d packed steaks all over his body. Norma’s anger became legend after that. She cursed him in front of all the help. “Lawrence Jacobs,” she yelled at him, “I pay you well and you treat me like this? All you had to say is you wanted some steaks, I’d have given them to you. A god-damn preacher,” she said with disgust. “I never did like that you were a preacher.” Jacobs was on his knees begging. Norma didn’t fire him; she made him go home and pray over it for a week while the night chef took double shifts.

The help’s stealing wasn’t new to Norma. She’d once told Wayne, “I know Jackie slips a little extra in her pocket, but here are you and
me, we’re out on the town, and I know everything’s going all right. So if she takes an extra fifty or a hundred, what the hell?”

Norma was easygoing unless things weren’t going her way, and Wayne was hardly immune from her rages. She bawled him out after he mixed a gallon of Southern Belles one morning and spilled it all over the electrical panel, shorting out the entire restaurant. She got angry with him one day while they were still at the little house and threw a huge brass ashtray at him so hard it stuck in the side of a French door.

Norma was too busy for anyone to contest the orders she gave. But her young lover just let her rages slide off him. He didn’t protest when he signed his paychecks over to Norma or that he didn’t have his own checking account. He just went along with the flow, doing his work, doing whatever came naturally. And that, as it turned out, was the rub.

When people found out who Norma was, they’d stay at the bar and drink with her until as late as three in the morning. Even if they knew her, they’d stick around to hear her stories. People were drawn to her; Norma never met a stranger. Wayne, admiring Norma and giving her all the credit for making the restaurant what it was, watched her dress up every night and welcome people—every night in a different fabulous outfit, with her diamond rings and her stories. She was the center of attention, and she loved it.

But what she couldn’t abide was the attention Wayne got from other women. When she saw a woman talking to him at the bar, it would drive her into a frenzy. Wayne would ask, “What am I supposed to do, Norma? Turn my head on a customer? Not talk? We can’t run a business like that.”

Norma considered this reasonable, but it didn’t help. She decided that she and Wayne should get married. She told him that her lawyer suggested it would ease their tax situation. But she needed no excuse; Wayne was happy to marry Norma.

They applied for the marriage license, and the next time Norma went to the Davis Beauty Salon, she announced that she was going to
take the leap again. She glibly told Franky, “I’ve married so many. It can’t be all of them; it must be me.” She took the responsibility for her marriages, then tossed it off. This time, of course, things would be different.

Norma and Wayne were married on February 18, 1965. The honeymoon lasted a few months. Big Mo came to dinner at Tchoupitoulas often. Bubba and Elise joined in, and they would reminisce late into the night. Phil Harris heard about Norma’s venture and arrived with Alice Faye, his daughter, Alice, and his mother. As always when Phil Harris was around, there was a lot of laughter. Alice Faye and Norma found they had a love of animals in common. And Norma was proud to show off her handsome young husband.

It was always a memorable evening when Norma’s former lovers, male friends, and ex-husbands came to Tchoupitoulas. But it was a different matter when the visitors were women who’d known Wayne before Norma.

The Hamiltons had once lived in the house that was now a well-known restaurant. Elise knew them and was delighted they’d stopped by. She introduced them to Norma and told her, to their daughter’s embarrassment, that Wayne and Jeanie had once had a little puppy love—they couldn’t have been more than twelve—they were so cute, holding hands and gazing at each other.

Jeanie was all grown up now and quite a dish at that. Norma excused herself to find Wayne. She flew to the back, where he was behind the bar, and threw him the keys to the car. “Hurry, Wayne. We’re running out of French bread. Get five or six loaves. I don’t care where you have to go to get them.” She hustled him out the back door.

Later his aunt asked him if he’d seen the Hamiltons. I’ll be damned, he thought. He would have loved to have seen the Hamiltons, but he didn’t like to rock the boat, so he never said a word.

Norma and Wayne started looking for a getaway place in Mississippi. They found some beautiful land near Poplarville—rolling hills, pines and hardwoods, good pastureland too. Norma bought seventy-five acres, all in her name. When the property next door went up for sale,
she bought another hundred and five acres. Wayne began building a house, moving a trailer onto the land so they had a place to stay. Whenever they could, they took a couple of days off from the restaurant and went to Mississippi.