The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (25 page)

That year, 1973, Norma and Wayne went to Bubba and Nan Ease’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. Bubba’s limp had become more pronounced because of the arthritis he’d developed. Norma said to Nan Ease, “Look at him.”

“Don’t worry, girl,” Bubba said, “one of these days, you’ll be limping too.”

“Oh no, Bubba,” Norma told him, “you’ll never see this old whore limp.” Then she added darkly, “You’ll never see this whore get old.”

At first Wayne thought that he had no sexual feelings for other women. He was so used to Norma’s touch that he could hardly get aroused with anyone else. But women kept finding Wayne, and he started going to bed with them. And some nights he didn’t make it back to Poplarville.

Norma cried. “Why, Wayne? What went wrong?”

Wayne didn’t know how to articulate what had gone wrong. He felt terrible that he was hurting Norma so badly, but something pulled at him, something that made the guilt seem small and inconsequential, maybe even necessary if he was to move on with his life. He
told Norma he didn’t know what had gone wrong, but she demanded an answer. Finally he said, “We’re just not compatible, that’s all.”

That was when she told him that if he married a younger woman and had a bunch of kids, he’d have to work like a dog until he was sixty. He just shrugged. “You always knew this couldn’t last forever, Norma.”

He couldn’t look at the pain on her face. But in a clear voice she said, “I told you if you weren’t happy and you wanted to leave, there’d be no hard feelings. I meant that, Wayne.”

He held her and they made love that night and Wayne wasn’t so sure he wanted to leave at all.

Wayne was working a construction job near Franklinton, Louisiana. At noon he stopped at a convenience store in town to get some lunch. He got in line to buy his sandwich but found himself fumbling with his money when he got up to the counter. The girl holding her hand out for his change was a good-looking petite blonde with very short hair that gave her a gamine look. She had on a halter and a pair of cutoffs. She hardly gave him a glance as she took his money. Wayne was intrigued.

Thereafter he stopped at the store as often as possible, trying not to go until the breakfast crowd had dwindled or the noon rush was over. Her name was Jean. They spent a few weeks talking to each other in the store. He liked her voice, a little throaty—sexy. He liked her coolness; she wasn’t all over him. She was seven years younger than he was, recently divorced, and had two little boys. He thought that was fine too.

It wasn’t easy telling Jean about his marriage and how unhappy he was. He explained that Norma was older, that she’d told him if he wanted to leave there would be no hard feelings. Jean seemed to be able to deal with it. She and Wayne started going out together.

Early 1974 found Norma in a downward spiral. Her health was good, but she was surviving many of her friends. Elmo had been gone six
years now; Pete Herman had died in 1973; in May 1974, J.G. died. Wayne went to the funeral with Norma, but his mood was dark and edgy. He sat out in a waiting room by himself, not even attending the service. Helen asked Norma where he was. Norma told her and added, “I need to get rid of Wayne. He’s too young for me.”

She’d said that cavalierly enough; she went a step further with Sarah: “Wayne needs to find himself someone younger.”

“Oh, Norma,” Sarah replied, “Wayne would find someone young if he wanted to. He wants to be with you.”

They went back to Poplarville—Wayne going off to work; Norma, waiting, remembering, afraid. About the time Wayne met Jean in April, Marie had decided to return to New Orleans. So Norma was alone in the woods, without her confidante and companion of many years. Her closest friends, Bubba and Elise Rolling, knew little about the demise of her marriage. Elise was Wayne’s aunt, and Norma, with strong feelings for family herself, did not want to put her friend in a position that might force her, if the marriage totally disintegrated, to choose.

Norma put a couple of steaks out to thaw so she could cook if Wayne came home. She got dressed in her red pantsuit that she knew he liked. She went out the back door with Rusty, her Irish setter, for their last walk of the day. They went down the path, past the barns and into the woods. Rusty, running ahead of her, began to bark fiercely. When Norma got to him she saw the diamondback rattler coiled, ready to spring.

She told Rusty to come with her, and she went back to the house. She got her .410 shotgun and took the path again, past the barns and into the woods. The snake was still there. Norma was a crack shot, and it took only one round. The snake lay headless.

But she was shaking after she killed the snake. The long night stretched ahead of her. She sat on the red-velvet sofa, listening for a car, hoping for a phone call. The twilight faded.

Norma decided to finish taping her memoirs. She pulled out the recorder with something like determination. She told the story of the suicide of Mr. McCann; then she spent the rest of the evening telling about the deaths and death scares that had happened at her houses,
beginning with the man who died in flagrante at Louise Jackson’s house over a half a century ago. Then she told about a wealthy man from the North who’d stayed on the third floor on Dauphine Street, his ticker so bad that he could hardly make it up the stairs, drinking himself into a stupor every night until Norma telegraphed his family and put him on a train home. She remembered another man who was under doctor’s orders not to screw because his heart was so bad. He was a trick all right—he’d tricked her into letting Terry give him a blow job. When she heard a few days later that he’d died, she wondered what she would have done had he died there on Conti Street—rolled him out into the alley and waited for someone to discover him?

All she could think about was death. She put the machine away. She needed to face reality: She had no love and she had no work. She couldn’t stand this any longer, not knowing when he would come home. She couldn’t bear to be in the woods, so afraid, one more day. It was time to make a move.

Wayne was furious when she told him. They’d had a bitter argument about his staying out all night again, and Norma had said, “You’re not leaving me alone in these damned woods.” Then she told him she was going to sell the place.

“I’ve put my heart and soul into it, Norma,” he said angrily. He loved the property, and he was hurt.

They fought some more. Norma told him how she’d followed him since he’d started working with Eddie and come home with beer on his breath. She’d disguised herself and sat in a bar in Biloxi; she’d followed him once to New Orleans and questioned the barmaids.

“Those motherfucking barmaids,” she said.

Norma didn’t understand how Wayne could love the property and not want to leave it when he was hardly there anymore.

“You always said I could go, Norma.”

Norma didn’t seem to hear him. “We’ll find another piece of property that you can love. We’ve just got to get rid of this property. I’m telling you, Wayne,” she said miserably, “I can’t be out here alone.”

She was just getting back at him; she knew how much he loved this land and the house he’d built. But Mississippi isn’t a community property state. The property was in Norma’s name, like everything else, and he’d let her do it that way. He had no one to blame but himself.

Nevertheless, he told her he wouldn’t agree to sell the place unless they could make a killing, knowing full well he wouldn’t get a dime out of it if she didn’t want him to. But she agreed. They sat together in silence after that. To Norma selling the property was another way to control him if he dared to run around on her. She could do it to Mac, but even now no one ran around on Norma Wallace.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Obsession

These days Rose Mary Miorana ran an operation out of Kenner, a suburb of New Orleans, calling girls to meet men at a swank apartment on St. Charles Avenue. She made a living, but she had no ambition to run a large call-girl operation or have a house or be in the life in any way. She wanted, more than anything, to have a baby and live quietly in the suburbs. But it wasn’t easy. Problems with pernicious anemia had prevented her from getting pregnant for years during her first marriage. When she met Sidney Scallan, who became her second husband, she had been praying in earnest for a child, boy or girl, ill or insane or crippled—none of that mattered. She would take care of it and devote her life to her child. God answered her prayers and delivered her a test of their sincerity: Rose Mary’s baby was born with cerebral palsy.

Rose Mary, Sidney, and Sidney Jr., the baby, lived on Georgetown Drive in Kenner. Rose Mary stayed home with her baby while Sidney worked as a butcher at a nearby grocery store. They became friends with their next-door neighbors, Bill and Elaine Newton, who had four children. During the day Rose Mary and Elaine would get together and talk babies. Both brunettes, they dyed their hair blond. On weekends Bill and Sidney barbecued.

Rose Mary kept her promise to be a devoted mother. She took little Sidney to the best doctors and learned from physical therapists how to work with him; she went to her church for help raising money when he needed surgery. She knew she would spend the rest of her life caring for her son, because he would never be able to care for himself. And that was all right with Rose Mary.

But Sidney was not at ease in suburbia. He liked life in the fast lane, not the daily grind of working in the meat department and then going home to a squawling baby. Growing up, he had learned the lessons of life from the underworld characters in a rough section of Carrollton. He knew how to make money other ways than the eight-to-five shift. He had been a player in the drug world since his teens, breaking and entering when he needed money for the heroin habit he was acquiring. By the time little Sidney was born, his father had already served time in Angola for burglary.

Sidney knew he was going to let Rose Mary down one day. So when he heard through the underworld grapevine that Norma was living in Mississippi, he thought he’d surprise Rose Mary, do something nice for her. She talked about Norma a lot, about how much she missed her. He called Norma, and the following Sunday he took Rose Mary and little Sidney to the Poplarville woods.

The reunion came at a time when Norma truly needed a friend and confidante. She fell in love with little Sidney. He was bright, cheerful in spite of his painfully twisted body, and although still an infant, he already showed signs of a good sense of humor. Norma put him on the big bear rug in front of the fireplace and talked to him. The two women reminisced about Conti Street, and Norma gave Rose Mary her big black book, which she’d kept all those years, a ledger with everything—the men’s names, their body marks, and the money they spent—written in code. But she told Rose Mary she was glad she was out of the business and living the life she was clearly meant to live: Norma thought motherhood had made Rose Mary more beautiful than ever.

Wayne, Rose couldn’t help but notice, had hardly a word to say. He stayed outside the entire time the Scallans were there and the next time they visited as well. Rose Mary had no idea what was wrong until Norma broke down and told her everything.

Wayne came through for Norma, though, when Howard Jacobs of
The Times-Picayune
went to Poplarville to interview her in June 1974. He posed for pictures with her, playing the adoring young husband. Norma repeated some of what she had taped for her autobiography, and the two-part profile ran that summer—a provocative, thoughtful, and amusing portrait of a shrewd, powerful woman. But it held none of the excitement for Norma that the
New Orleans
magazine article had. She was moving on.

The Poplarville property sold almost immediately to a New Yorker for eight hundred dollars an acre, eight times what Norma had paid for it. Ida May Ard, the caretaker’s wife, told Norma about a piece of property in the town of Bush. Norma went to see it, an acre on Dad Penton Road, a slithering cut through the woods, but not nearly as isolated as the Poplarville place. A covered patio stretched the width of the house in back and looked out on a large, fenced pasture beyond. Norma thought Wayne would like it and decided to buy it. She wrote to Wayne’s mother, telling her about the house, how much it reminded her of Tchoupitoulas with its dormer windows, the banks of azalea bushes, and the oak, wild cherry, and pine trees around it. She never mentioned the shambles their marriage was in. She packed up the Poplarville house, and in September she and Wayne moved, along with the dogs, the cats, a couple of horses, and the foulmouthed parrots, to Bush, Louisiana.

Wayne moved his possessions into the house and, with Dutz Stouffert, set to work on the property. Norma wrote to Rose Mary, “Wayne will never be the same, he asked a big price for the Mississippi place but he really didn’t want to sell. He is pouting with me.”

She tried talking to Wayne, asking him why he thought they were so incompatible all of a sudden. And he tried to explain, telling her that he wanted to be able to go to football games, do normal things like that. Norma told him she could go to football games, he was just going to have to tell her what was going on for a while. They went to a game in Bogalusa the next weekend, and Wayne called the plays for her halfheartedly. He was moody, silent. She understood that the problem was more than incompatibility.

Norma did not know it at the time, but the move to Bush had put Wayne closer to Jean. He started staying out all night again, though he had agreed to go with Norma to the Phil Harris roast, taking place on October 17. Norma tried to keep busy. She asked Rose Mary to come see her. She called Pershing Gervais, who had returned from Canada and the witness protection program, where he’d been very unhappy, in time to recant at the pinball trial, which ensured that Jim Garrison was acquitted while the other defendants (including Freddy Soulé) went to jail. Norma was too overwrought to get any joy out of Soulé’s fate. Gervais told her he would get to Bush as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Norma began to take Valium so she could sleep.

On the night of October 17, Norma dressed in a new black suit—flowing silk pants with a camisole top and a jacket. She put on her red cashmere coat with mink collar and cuffs, and she and Wayne drove into New Orleans to the Roosevelt Hotel for the testimonial dinner in honor of Phil Harris. In
The Times-Picayune
Norma had been listed as one of the celebrities attending the event, along with Bing Crosby, Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, and Mayor Moon Landrieu. Phil had arranged for Norma and Wayne to have a room close to his and Alice Faye’s and to be seated at his table, along with the governor.

It was quite a gala affair, and everyone complimented Norma on how good she looked. After a five-course dinner the notables mounted the rostrum to roast their friend Phil Harris—but not Norma.

Then there was dancing. Norma and Wayne got out on the floor for a few numbers, but a couple of hours into that part of the evening, Phil still had not asked Norma to dance. He’d hardly looked her way the entire evening. All of a sudden Norma turned to Wayne and said, “Let’s go.”

Wayne thought they’d been having a good time. He asked Norma why. She wouldn’t answer him. Her mouth was set in that way that told him there was no point in arguing. She did not speak to Phil before leaving but passed by the table to tell Bubba and Elise goodbye. When Bubba heard they were going home, he told them they shouldn’t drive the Causeway, the twenty-four-mile bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, because the fog was so thick that night. Norma refused to hear his protests. She and Wayne left.

In the car she said, “Who the hell does he think he is?” Even though Wayne tried to get her to talk about why she was so upset, she didn’t say another word all the way to Bush. But Wayne knew what the problem was: Norma liked everything with a big bang, and with Phil Harris the bang just wasn’t there anymore; here was her old compadre, and he wasn’t giving her a high note, and here was her young lover, her husband, slowly slipping away.

Wayne moved the trailer from Poplarville to Jean’s mother’s place in Franklinton, where Jean lived with her two young boys, taking only his clothes from the Bush house. He had told Jean that once he and Norma sold the place in Poplarville and he got her settled in Bush he would leave. Jean relaxed into the relationship after Wayne moved, but not for long. Norma started calling her mother’s for Wayne, and every time she did Wayne was off like a shot, back to Bush. Jean noticed that he never, ever said anything against Norma. She was jealous; Wayne was telling Jean he was with her, yet he was still married to that woman, running whenever she needed him.

Then one day she and Wayne were driving in Bogalusa when Wayne blatantly began giving the eye to some girls standing on a corner. It wasn’t the first time she’d caught his roving eye. Jean had a quick temper; she elbowed him hard in the stomach. “What’s wrong with you?” he shouted at her.

“You son of a bitch,” she told him, “you better keep your eyes on the road.” From being jealous of Norma and angry with her for calling Wayne, she began to feel some sympathy.

Another night in Bogalusa, they went to a restaurant. “You sit here,” Wayne said, and held a chair out for Jean. She was reading the menu when she noticed him flirting with someone at a table behind her, a very young woman sitting with two older women—her mother and aunt, Wayne told Jean later. “She can’t be more than sixteen,” Jean yelled. “What do you want—to get brought up on statutory?” She never let him seat her with her back to the restaurant again.

Wayne and Jean were on again, off again. When Wayne put his wandering eye on another woman once too often, Jean told him to
get the trailer off her mother’s property. Wayne moved it to Bogalusa, and he and Jean didn’t speak for a couple of months.

Norma wrote to Rose Mary, “In our eleven years, Wayne always was a model husband but if he wants to go, go, just don’t do me this way. I would have bought a house in or near New Orleans had I known this. Being here alone is rough.”

In another letter she wrote Rose Mary, “If I didn’t have these dogs I would take off and get an apartment in the Quarter but I can’t desert them.” Rose Mary came to Bush the following weekend, and Norma tried to get her to take home all the boxes still stacked in the living room. Rose Mary refused. “I want you to move to New Orleans, Norma. If I take those boxes, I’ll never get you out of here.” The state Norma was in, though, made another move seem impossible.

Norma didn’t know that Wayne and Jean had split up. When Wayne finally told her he’d moved the trailer to Bogalusa, he let her think it was because of a job he’d taken there. But he refused to put a phone in the trailer. Norma continued to call him occasionally at Jean’s mother’s house, which meant she had to wait until someone could track him down and give him the message, but for once Wayne was coming and going as he pleased.

At last Norma decided to call Jean. She wanted to know if these were at least nice people; perhaps if she could talk to the young girl, it would make her feel better. But the day she called she got Marsha, Jean’s younger sister, who told her Jean was at work. She got in her car and drove to the convenience store in Franklinton.

The girl Norma saw behind the counter was a nondescript blonde with her hair chopped off, in cutoff blue jeans and a tank top. How could Wayne leave her for this cheap little tart? What could this young girl possibly have that she didn’t? Ah, but there was the answer—youth. Norma went home and took a Valium.

Pershing Gervais tried to be with Norma as much as he could during the week, but it was difficult for him, he told her—all the driving. And if he stayed in the house with her, they argued—two older people set in their ways. She gave him money, and he bought a
small place in Sun, next to Bush, so he was nearby. Then he went into New Orleans on the weekends, when Rose Mary and Sidney came to Bush with the baby.

Wayne showed up at the house the next week, after Norma hadn’t seen him for several days. She tried to talk to him, but he only said hurtful things to her. He said he wanted someone young to run through the fields with; he fabricated wild tales of group sex, three women at a time. He wanted her to shove him away. Instead she cried. For the first time since Wayne had known her, Norma looked old.

When Rose Mary arrived the next weekend and saw how many bottles of Valium were in the house, she was frightened. But Norma told her it was the only way she could sleep, repeating Wayne’s night-marish sexual adventures. Rose Mary began to hate Wayne. She tried to convince Norma to leave him behind, to move to New Orleans with her.

“I’ll take care of you,” Rose Mary said.

“I know you would, honey,” Norma replied, “but why should you have to?”

“Because I love you. Because we’re friends.”

“You’re an angel, you’ll go straight to heaven,” Norma told her, “but you have this baby to take care of. Anyway,” she added, “I don’t want to get too old; I don’t want to be bedridden or handicapped. I want to look at least decent when I die.”

Then she laughed and told Rose Mary that Wayne was styling his hair in an Afro now, which Rose got to see for herself when he stopped to pick up some more of his belongings that Saturday. Norma made fun of Wayne’s hair, to his face, in front of Rose Mary and Sidney; she too could be cruel. But if it got to Wayne, she couldn’t tell—he just shrugged everything off. The frustration of trying to get to him was more than she could bear. She began to feel that she would have to either kill him or die.

From one weekend to the next, Rose Mary didn’t know how she would find Norma, desperate or immobile or rampaging. Sometimes she’d try to get Norma out, and Norma would despondently tell her that going out wasn’t the answer. She confided that her marriage wasn’t in such good shape either. Norma immediately took her to a dealer and
tried to buy her a new car, so she could be independent of Sidney, but Rose Mary refused. She told Norma to keep her money for the move to New Orleans. Norma became incensed and took off in her Gran Torino with little Sidney, leaving Rose Mary stranded at the lot.