The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (24 page)

Progress on their Poplarville house was slow and stopped for a while when Elmo got sick—complications from the tuberculosis. He stayed at the little house with Wayne and Norma for several months. His wife, Sarah, faithfully came every day with food she’d cooked especially for Elmo, and she continued to maintain his downtown lounge, though Elmo had hired a manager by that time. He stayed at Tchoupitoulas to recuperate so he could see both his wife and his mistress, telling Sarah that he didn’t want to contaminate their house. Sarah, naïve or happy to be on her own or averse to confrontation, never questioned any of Elmo’s actions. Elmo’s mistresses came and went, but he stayed married to Sarah. As long as he did, Norma considered Sarah family, and she was generous with her sister-in-law, giving her jewelry and other gifts. Eventually Elmo went home, his illness continuing its progress until he was too weak to care about mistresses.

Norma wore the diamond rings that Andy Wallace and Golfbag Sam had given her every night in the restaurant. If a waiter dropped a tray or anything crashed in the kitchen, she’d go out to the dining room and tell her patrons, “That was one of my diamond rings. It fell off my finger.”

The patrons loved it, but Bubba Rolling, a cop to his core, told Norma she shouldn’t wear those rings. “One night,” he said, “some-body’s going to be waiting for you, girl.”

“I don’t have these rings so they can sit in a box, Bubba.” Norma was used to putting on seventy thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry and walking over to Bourbon Street to have a drink at Dan’s International.

One evening in 1967 she donned an apron and rubber gloves and performed the ritual she ended every evening with—cleaning the stoves and wiping down the hoods, making sure her establishment was spotless. When she finished she walked over to the little house. She could see Wayne walking to the front to close the gates.

When Norma entered the little house, her dog Rusty greeted her, along with two men wearing ski masks and holding guns. They demanded the diamond rings. A gun aimed at her nose, Norma began twisting first one ring then the other, but she hadn’t removed them for so long that she couldn’t get them off. She told the robbers that.

“Take them off or we’ll cut off your fingers,” one of them responded.

Norma frantically worked the rings, but not quickly enough. The robber who’d done all the talking produced a pair of metal snips. Norma was horrified. “Please,” she said, weak with horror as he grabbed her hand roughly. He cut both rings off, and Norma felt her fingers to make sure they were still there.

She heard the screen door to the house opening and wheeled around, but Wayne had seen the bandits before Norma could open her mouth. Quick as a gazelle, he jumped the fence and ran to Bubba’s house.

It sounded to Bubba as if someone was trying to beat his door down. He limped to it as fast as he could. One word from Wayne and Bubba threw him a huge Magnum shotgun, scooping up another for himself, and the two men went back to the little house.

The robbers were gone, but Bubba went out front and ducked behind some bushes. He saw a car make four passes in front of the property, and he knew that the robbers were still on it. He looked over at the thick canes growing on the property line and he waited.

Three cars and six deputies arrived within minutes. Bubba told them that if they searched in the canes, they’d find the men. But no one took any initiative; Bubba watched them looking at each other until in exasperation he said, “I’ll go in the canes. You cover me.”

He entered the thick growth, breaking through it, steeled for a gun blast, at a serious disadvantage because of all the noise he was making. He looked out for his backup. Hell and be damned if they weren’t all walking, the six of them, over to the restaurant! He couldn’t yell out to them; he couldn’t run because of his leg; all he could do was abandon the canes and go after the deputies at his snail’s pace and risk losing the robbers.

Bubba was so angry that he lay in bed that night nearly crying with frustration and rage. “Going to get coffee! I’d fire every last one
of ’em if they worked for me,” he told Elise. The next morning he told Wayne to look in the canes and see what he could find. Wayne found parts to his guns, Confederate money they’d taken from the house, more than enough to indicate that Bubba had been right and the bandits had probably spent three or four hours in the canes before they could come out. They’d also been in the little house for quite some time before Norma walked in on them, because all of Wayne’s guns had been taken apart and everything had been rifled. But apparently it was only Norma’s rings they were interested in; they left other pieces of jewelry untouched and didn’t take any of the guns.

Wayne could see that some of the fire had gone out of Norma, that the robbery had knocked off some of her spunk; she simply wasn’t her same brazen little self any longer.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Striking Out

After the robbery Wayne and Norma began spending more time in Poplarville as Wayne continued working on their house. The cypress he used came from Pershing Gervais’s house near the Fair Grounds in New Orleans after a hurricane hit the city.

Gervais had bought the house because it had a view of the race-track from the upstairs windows. Through his binoculars he watched the races and made book. In a test of nerves and timing, he waited to see which horse won, then took bets from New York and California before the results were official.

The hurricane blew the roof off Gervais’s house and landed it on his neighbor’s, closing down another of his scams. The damage was extensive enough that he decided to tear the house down instead of repair it. Wayne, Snapbean, and Dutz Stouffert signed on for the job, and Norma paid Gervais for the lumber they hauled away.

Norma wanted a huge fireplace in the country. So on one trip Wayne loaded their station wagon with bricks, and he and Norma set off for Poplarville after a busy weekend at the restaurant. On the way they had three flat tires. After the third, as they waited for help, Norma said, “If people could only see me now.” She had not yet abandoned
her role as proprietor of a famous restaurant, but already she was uncomfortable with country life.

Nevertheless, as she had once before, Norma gave up her working life for a move to the country. In 1968 her brother Elmo died, which removed the last obstacle to a decision to sell Tchoupitoulas and move to Mississippi. The restaurant sold quickly. Norma and Wayne moved into their nearly finished country house, and Marie, Norma’s faithful maid of many years, moved into the trailer.

The land was incredibly isolated, much deeper in the woods than Norma’s Pearl River farm had been. This property was two and a half miles off the main highway, the road to it a long twist of gravel that took a good fifteen minutes to negotiate. And it was more isolated from family and friends, nearly a three-hour drive to New Orleans.

At the beginning, though, isolation was an ideal, not an issue. Wayne loved the land and took his time finishing the house, then building four barns and fencing part of the property. He liked the slower pace and gave little thought to the lucrative business he and Norma had left behind. Norma named the place Waynewood and, relieved of the long hours at the restaurant, and of having to keep an eye on the impression her handsome young husband made on other women, she decorated the house and catered to him and their occasional guests. She gave up thoughts of travel; she had everything she wanted right at home. At night she and the man she called the greatest love of her life would sip wine in front of the fire, and, at one word from Wayne, Norma would reminisce about her scandalous past. They made love on the contour sofa and the big bearskin rug in front of the fireplace.

The green-eyed monster was not dead, though. One afternoon Mr. Ard, who had taken care of the property when Norma and Wayne traveled between New Orleans and Poplarville, arrived in his pickup truck filled with his numerous daughters, all leggy, long-haired beauties wearing short shorts and halters. Norma had Wayne in the car before he knew what was happening. She waved to Mr. Ard, calling from the car window that they had an appointment and were late, and she took Wayne to lunch at a popular Poplarville eatery, where she sat him with his back to the restaurant.

Other small incidents began to erode the good life in Poplarville. One night the woman in the ticket booth at the movie theater told Norma she had a good-looking son. Furious, Norma informed the “hussy” that Wayne was her husband. They left without buying tickets. But the locals became curious about this older woman with the young man, and Norma’s reputation followed her into the woods. The Poplarville constabulary made a surprise visit on a weekend evening, apparently expecting to find a prostitution operation in full swing.

Norma thought it would be fun to spend a little more time in New Orleans. But the French Quarter was no longer the same, and she had been away for several years, too long to have changed with it. She felt somewhat an outsider as she and Wayne sat in Jackson Square surrounded by long-haired hippies or walked down Bourbon Street, which was full of cheap dives instead of the nightclubs she remembered. So many of the old places were gone—Dan’s International, Gaspar’s—and Pete’s had already changed hands a couple of times (it was a gay bar one day, a screaming rock ’n’ roll club the next). Instead of the Chinese café across the street from Pete’s or the tailor, there was now a tourist attraction, the Wax Museum. Otherwise, the whole neighborhood seemed rotten with age, terra-cotta and pastel stucco falling away to reveal crumbling red brick underneath. Time, heat, and humidity had touched many of the buildings with decay, not the prototypical elegant decay of New Orleans but the result of neglect. The house on Conti Street was no exception. The third-floor gallery was gone, the side wall was beginning to bow, the marble steps to the entrance were chipped and covered with a film of urban grime. The fluted columns flanking the door were rotting, and, between the columns, the fancy scrolled ironwork of the gate was all rust and peeling paint. The house had the sad and weary look of an aging courtesan.

Bubba and Elise Rolling visited Norma and Wayne for the weekend as often as they could—Bubba liked to get in some deer hunting.

Bubba was always joking about something, but on one visit he told Norma (in all seriousness) that she shouldn’t let Pershing Gervais come around—he’d heard there was a contract out on him. Norma
laughed it off, so later Bubba told Wayne, “If Pershing’s here and you hear a car on the road to the house, hit the woods running and don’t stop—they’ll kill everyone in sight.”

It seemed that the volatile Gervais, with his appetites for money, women, lies, and vengeance, had been “playing results,” as he liked to call his system of operating, and gotten himself into big trouble.

Gervais had quit as the district attorney’s chief investigator when Jim Garrison started his probe into the Kennedy assassination. He went around telling people that Garrison had “gone off half-crocked over the Kennedy thing,” and the old army buddies had an irreparable falling out.

Several years later Gervais found he was in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, and to bail himself out he told the feds that Garrison had been taking bribes from the amusement company operators for years to protect illegal pinball gambling. As a result Garrison was indicted for bribery and the pinball operators for bribery conspiracy, illegal gambling, and obstruction of justice. Since Gervais was the chief witness for the government, Bubba reasoned that any number of people would have been glad to take him out.

But Gervais never visited Poplarville again. Instead he called one day; Norma and Wayne left immediately for New Orleans. They drove directly to a seedy motel in East New Orleans, where Norma and Gervais had a private confab. That was the last time Wayne saw Pershing Gervais.

On the way back to Poplarville, Wayne asked Norma what was going on. She said, “It’s better that you know nothing about this business. I don’t want you to be involved.” She told him she was protecting him by keeping him in the dark.

It may have sounded romantic to Norma when Golfbag Sam told her that thirty years earlier, but for Wayne it was old news: Norma didn’t want him involved in her business, legitimate or illegitimate. Pershing Gervais disappeared—into a witness protection program, as it turned out. And Wayne began to feel that he had been put away too. But the closer Norma tried to keep him, the further he slipped away.

•
•
•

In 1972 the journalist Clint Bolton went to Poplarville to write a story on Norma for
New Orleans
magazine. The two got along famously, Norma saying that Bolton was “her kind of man,” one who liked to laugh and tell stories late into the night as he knocked back a few drinks. Norma told her stories to Bolton—about her early life, her loves, her houses, and her restaurant. She told him about the raids on Conti Street and Freddy Soulé’s big moment that sent her to jail; she could hardly disguise her glee that he was now in trouble himself. Soulé had been arrested as part of the pinball conspiracy, for bringing payoffs to Gervais intended for Garrison, taking his cut—a bagman, Norma called him. Sixty-three thousand dollars was found buried in his backyard in a pickle jar, a detail that Norma relished. Now it looked as if he would go to jail. Norma and Clint Bolton laughed about the ironies of life, and as the profile took shape, the idea came about quite naturally that it should be turned into a book. At the end of the article, in a brazen “Epilogue,” Norma promised that “if the truth will make you clean, I’ll come clean . . . all the way.” She added, “I don’t want to be bothered with judges, juries, lawsuits, and all that. But if that does happen, I won’t take the Fifth, and a lot of people had better stand back.”

The article itself prompted letters to the editor, some irate, condemning its reportage of immoral practices as inappropriate subject matter for a magazine of high caliber. Yet when Norma was invited to the Press Club on August 12, 1972, to speak and be presented with a key to the city, people flocked for the ex-madam’s autograph.

In line to see Norma were many of her former clients. One of them, a lawyer who had gone to her house when he was a Tulane student, brought his new wife to see Norma, never thinking for a minute that this infamous woman would remember him. He stepped up to the table with a copy of
New Orleans
for her signature. He didn’t see her eyes meet his from behind her dark glasses. “Hello, Waterproof,” she said, taking the magazine and scrawling her name across her photograph on the cover. The lawyer was astonished. “Oh, I remember you,” she went on, as if to say, “I remember everybody.” Rumors spread about her black book; the whole city enjoyed speculation about who would be named in Norma’s autobiography.

At seventy-one years of age, Norma was still powerful, a woman to be reckoned with. It was an exciting time for her. Because of the magazine profile, she heard from people she hadn’t talked to in years, and she got in touch with old associates from out of town. She mailed a copy of the magazine to J.G. and Helen Badon, her half brother and his wife, and she decided to send one to their son, Johnny, and his wife, Pat. It was clear from the letter she wrote to the young couple that she was afraid the life she’d led might cause them embarrassment. After so many years she was still worried about what people, especially the progeny of her father’s respectable family, thought of her.

Respectability be damned, though; she attacked her memoirs with energy. She began to tape her stories, but a peculiar thing happened: Norma found that her habit of reticence was too deeply ingrained; she couldn’t name the names she’d promised in Clint Bolton’s article. Her soul, as she’d told Joe Giarrusso so many years ago, was the soul of discretion. She had a code—a code of honor, a moral code—and she could not violate it.

Nevertheless, Norma continued taping her life story, talking into the recorder as she sat on the contour sofa in her living room in Poplarville; Bolton, in his French Quarter apartment, listened to the tapes and started writing the book. Tantalizing references to Norma’s autobiography appeared in the newspapers’ gossip and society columns. But only three chapters into the book, Bolton had a serious heart attack. He returned Norma’s papers to her in Poplarville.

Norma stopped taping for a while and searched for a new writer. After interviewing two from New York, she decided she wanted a New Orleanian to write her story and chose a young woman who wrote for
The Times-Picayune,
Patsy Sims. She gave Patsy a copy of the New York madam Polly Adler’s best-seller,
A House Is Not a Home,
and told her that was the kind of book she wanted Patsy to help her write. But Patsy was offered a job in Pennsylvania and decided to take it. Norma began to be frustrated.

Wayne had watched Norma put her lipstick on hundreds of times. She carefully applied it outside her lip line to make her lips appear
fuller. Teasing her one night as they prepared to go out, Wayne said, “You missed your lips.” Norma lit into him with the ferocity of a trapped viper. The making-up part, which she had always said made the fight worth it, often got eliminated these days: Their sex life, after ten years, had slowed markedly.

Yet Norma’s jealousy remained unabated. Her sister-in-law, Sarah Huff, who had remarried after Elmo’s death, visited Poplarville one weekend with her pretty young niece, Linda. Wayne and Linda made eye contact once too often, and Norma berated Sarah for having the nerve to bring Linda with her, not caring that Wayne and Linda could both hear her.

Wayne let it all slide off him, as was his habit, but he wasn’t quite as imperturbable as he’d once been. He too was without work, having finished the fence and the barns. He would be out in the pasture or tending to the animals, all this beautiful country around him, the rolling hills and far-reaching vistas, a place he loved, yet in all this open air he felt as if he was suffocating.

Wayne decided to take a job. Eddie, a contractor friend of his, needed help with some construction on the Gulf Coast. The site was close enough that Wayne could drive from Poplarville and be home at a reasonable hour. Norma didn’t want him to take the job, but Wayne overrode her, for the first time. “I need something, Norma,” he told her. “I need something to do.”

At first Wayne came home, extremely tired, watched a little TV, and went to bed. Then one night Eddie suggested that they stop for a drink on the way home. Eddie was about Wayne’s age. They sat at a bar and talked. It was the first time Wayne had talked about football in he didn’t know how long; Norma had no idea what a football game was. Another night they went to a juke joint, and Wayne realized he’d never heard some of the great music from the sixties and seventies. Eddie couldn’t believe it; he had to tell Wayne about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Wayne began to get the feeling that his life was passing him by. All he was doing was reliving Norma’s life with her. He kept going to the
bars and juke joints with Eddie. He started noticing the younger girls. He looked around and saw what other young people were doing, going to the races, dances, football games—the things young people do. All he did when he got home was watch TV and go to bed. Norma was there, but he’d already started asking himself where that was going to get him. He was tired of sitting with his back to the restaurant. He was tired of Norma’s anger if he wanted to go out alone or if he as much as looked at someone female. He was tired of being left out of the big decisions. Norma hadn’t bothered to ask him if he wanted to give up the restaurant. Or if he wanted his paychecks, five hundred and sixty dollars a week, which he’d turned right back over to her. But he had his own money now, and there was nothing Norma could do about it. He knew he was making her very unhappy, but there was nothing
he
could do about
that.
He needed something, all right; he needed something besides Norma.