The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (27 page)

Norma still had the pistol in her hand. Sidney didn’t touch it, but he saw the small sofa pillow, and he put it under Norma’s head. The gun fell from her hand. She was still alive, wheezing hard, one arm waving, the other side apparently paralyzed, because she was looking at him with only her right eye. He looked back at her long enough for that image to be imprinted on him forever before he turned away to call the ambulance.

When Rose Mary saw the car on Dad Penton Road, she started screaming that her aunt had been shot. The Sun sheriff’s deputies brought her back to the house. Rose Mary gave the deputies the letters, and when the ambulance arrived she got in it with Norma.

Norma opened her right eye, and Rose Mary cried, telling her, “I’ll take care of you, Norma.” But Norma, groaning as if to tell Rose Mary to help her, kept trying to rip the oxygen mask from her face. The ambulance made a sharp turn, and Norma rolled toward Rose Mary. Rose Mary thought the whole side of her head had been blown off.

At the hospital Rose Mary passed out for a while. When she awoke she was clutching a bag with Norma’s bloody clothes in it—the beautiful red pantsuit they’d cut off her body and the shoes with Rusty’s hair all over the soles. Rose Mary’s purse with Norma’s jewelry and money in it was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Last Word

A knock on the trailer door interrupted Wayne’s quiet Saturday afternoon. He was surprised to see Jean’s sister. Marsha had driven over to tell him that the police had called and wanted Wayne to come to the house of his estranged wife. She didn’t know why.

Wayne drove the fifteen miles from Bogalusa to Bush in a state of dread, trying to keep a rein on his imagination. Once he was on Dad Penton Road, he slowed enough to navigate the sharp turns, then bumped his yellow El Camino across the cattle guard onto the property.

Norma’s two-tone blue Gran Torino was pulled up in the gravel driveway, no police or police cars in sight. Wayne parked a couple of car lengths behind the Torino. He stood with the door to his truck open and listened to the ominous silence. Then a blur of dark red caught his eye on the other side of the front yard. Rusty, their Irish setter, bounded from the honeysuckle and azaleas and raced toward him, twigs flying and leaves fluttering in the whirlwind. Norma didn’t usually let Rusty roam without her.

With the dog Wayne walked around the house. The side door was wide open, strange because of the chill in the air, strange because Norma didn’t use that door much. He went around back and crossed the patio to the kitchen door. It too was open.

Wayne went into the kitchen and practically walked into a pool of blood. He didn’t think; he mechanically skirted it to the bathroom, got a couple of large bath towels, and wiped it up. He called Rusty in, closed up the house, and drove to the St. Tammany Hospital. There he was told that his wife had been transported by ambulance across Lake Pontchartrain to the Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans, with a gunshot wound to the head. When Wayne arrived at Ochsner, Norma was in surgery. She died less than an hour later—at 5:07 p.m., December 14, 1974.

When Wayne arrived at Ochsner and saw Sarah, he fell to his knees and buried his head in her lap, holding her so tightly that she was finally forced to tell him he was hurting her. He went home that night with Sarah and Gus.

When Norma’s ashes were returned from the crematorium two days later, Sarah took on the task of disposing of them. Norma had told her that she wanted to be cremated and her ashes spread along the streets of the French Quarter. But Sarah hated the French Quarter after having worked Elmo’s clubs for so many years. She told Wayne she wouldn’t put Norma’s ashes downtown. Wayne gave Sarah no argument when she suggested that they take the ashes to Lake Pontchartrain, even though he knew Norma hated water.

Sarah turned the urn over and let Norma’s ashes fall into the choppy water. As she did so, she thought to herself, Poor thing, she don’t know, but the fishes will be eating her pretty soon.

Upstairs in the house in Bush is a room filled with Norma’s things. Her four-poster bed from Waggaman is there, along with her mahogany dresser and its matching mirror, a boudoir chair left over from Conti Street, a small antique drop-leaf table from her family, and a sliding-door rattan cabinet. Some of the dresser drawers are still lined with the flowered paper Norma put in them. In one is a heavy gold-tone metal belt, part of the costume she wore to a gay Mardi Gras ball; in another is a hairbrush, strands of Norma’s white hair still tangled in its bristles.

A couple of years ago some of Jean’s relatives came to spend Halloween weekend with the Bernards. One of the women spent the night in Norma’s bed upstairs. It was an unseasonably warm Halloween night, but in the middle of it, the woman woke up shivering and aware of a most unpleasant odor. She slept fitfully for the next few hours, huddling beneath the light blanket on the bed, covering her nose with it to block the smell. In the morning she told Wayne and Jean about her strange night.

Wayne laughed. “Well,” he said, “you were sleeping with your head just a few inches from the urn that Norma’s ashes were in.” Not knowing what else to do with the urn and unable to part with it, he had sealed it in the wall behind the bed.

A couple of months after Norma’s death, Wayne and Jean got back together, and Jean went to live in the house in Bush with her two sons, Jim and Darby; that was when Wayne decided he needed to do something with the urn.

Even with Norma gone, Wayne and Jean’s relationship was rocky, and Jean returned more than once to Franklinton, thinking she should end things with him. But Wayne and her older son, Jim, who had never known his father, had formed an attachment by then. “I was doing what a man my age should have been doing,” Wayne said of that time. “I had a son.” Jean and her sons had helped get Wayne back into ordinary life. When Wayne and Jean married a couple of months later, he adopted Jim.

But even for a while after they were married, Jean wasn’t sure that they would make it. She began to get superstitious. In their bedroom she thought she could see Norma’s face where two knotholes formed eyes, and other markings in the blond paneling created an oval face and waves of hair, like Norma’s. She tried hanging pictures over the spot, but she always felt weirdly compelled to take them down. She thought Norma had put a jinx on her and Wayne, to keep them from staying together.

Not only that, Norma’s old dog, Rusty, had an overwhelming dislike of Jean. He wouldn’t go near her, and he snapped at her a couple of times; at night when she and Wayne tried to go to bed, Rusty would sit in the middle of the bed and growl. Jean thought Norma’s spirit had taken over the animal.

But it wasn’t Jean that Rusty finally went after; it was her younger son. Rusty bit Darby in the face, an unforgivable act in Wayne’s eyes. He shot the dog.

Norma’s rival hadn’t been just a younger woman; it had been children. Norma had never wanted children; she’d always said her animals were her children.

When Wayne first left Norma, he wanted to go wild. He wondered if Norma had felt as smothered in her marriage to Charles McCoy as he’d come to feel in his marriage to her. But as strong as his need had been to break free, when Snapbean, whose heart was broken over Norma’s death, cried and wouldn’t speak to Wayne for some time, it brought Wayne’s guilt into sharp focus. Bubba saw what his nephew was going through and told him he was lucky Norma hadn’t killed him that Thursday night he’d spent on the sofa with her. “It’s the kind of thing people do,” Bubba said, having seen it enough times during his years as a cop.

But Wayne felt completely responsible. He had returned to the Bush house to find Rusty curled up on Norma’s robe at the foot of her bed. He mourned with the dog. He thought that if he had only done things differently, if he’d really believed her when she said she was going to kill herself, if they’d never gone to Mississippi in the first place, none of this would have happened. He blamed himself for being nothing but an old country boy who couldn’t see that he should have taken more of a role at the restaurant, gotten into the business end of it so that all Norma would have had to do was get dressed up in her fabulous dresses every night and tell her stories. He blamed himself for not moving her to New Orleans, getting her back to friends, to a life of her own to grow old. He blamed his own passive nature, going back in time as if to will it away and make room for other possibilities.

In the end, though, character is destiny. Wayne’s passive nature was perfect for Norma’s need to be dominant and in control, and his indifference both frustrated Norma and made him more desirable to her—a deadly combination.

When Norma told her sister-in-law that she needed to get rid of Wayne, that he was too young, part of her was speaking to
self-preservation. But the matter was far too complicated, because from the start she’d wanted Wayne in her life for exactly that—self-preservation. Wayne had enhanced her image; his presence had kept her from facing up to the fact that she was aging.

Norma came of age in the 1920s, when for the first time in American history youth-oriented culture prevailed. She was a woman ahead of her times in many ways and one in a profession that capitalized on youth, beauty, and sensuality. Norma wanted to remain young and sexy at any cost. When she married Wayne, a man young enough to be her grandson, she was proud of her achievement. What she didn’t see was that this pride would overcome her.

When Norma was a girl, Mr. McCann, her parents’ tenant, committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid; her own mother had tried to kill herself many times. But in the underworld, to which Norma escaped, you never waited until you were cornered. “You jump the gun,” she told Wayne. “Do it to them first, never lay back and wait. That’s kept me rolling for many years. It cost me here and there, but I’m still going, and I’m the last one that had a big, open house, girls actually living in it.”

That was a good philosophy for life in the underworld, and Norma carried it into her marriages as well. She borrowed money, put it in Wayne’s name, and gave him no access to it; she wrote him a paycheck that she put back into her business. She was always covering herself.

Norma denied that she was suited for marriage at all, yet she married five times. Her husbands, by and large, were respectable men; Pete Herman was the only one with ties to the underworld, but, because of his boxing titles, the establishment and law enforcement looked the other way. Norma wanted the respectability marriage gave her, and she needed a man to love her, but she didn’t want the traditional roles that marriage forced upon women, domesticity and motherhood. With one foot in the world of respectability and one in the underworld, Norma was in the same conflict between love and work that, at the time of her death, more and more women were having to face.

Norma identified strongly with her masculine side. She knew how to make money, vast sums of it, both legitimately and illegitimately, during a time when most women were not concerned with making
money and very few had any real moneymaking capabilities. She wanted the kind of power a man had with his associates. Her associates were policemen and underworld figures, and she wielded considerable power with them.

But the most intriguing aspect of Norma’s desire for power revolved around sexual power. She wanted total control over her marriages as well as the freedom to have affairs. “I want to be free,” she said, “like a man.” She cheated on her husbands, left one for another, liked to go to bed with young men, wanted a young man to take her arm. She had said of Charles McCoy, “He was young and beautiful, of course; I was susceptible to young and beautiful people.” In the end, though, the one man she never cheated on, the youngest of them all, left her for another woman. The one time she should have jumped the gun and been the first to leave, she found herself powerless.

When Norma opened the Tchoupitoulas Plantation Restaurant to crowds and acclaim, she turned infamy into fame. When she was honored at the Press Club after making the cover of
New Orleans
magazine, her notoriety became celebrity. When she accepted the key to the city, she seemed like any other legitimate businesswoman, beloved and respected for her achievements.

New Orleans, with its European heritage and sensibility, has always had a large tolerance for sins of the flesh. More than just a pre-dominantly French or Spanish ancestry, though, came to bear on this tolerant attitude: The mostly male populace of the old colony was concerned with a much more practical consideration—the shortage of women. While prostitution undoubtedly ruined many poor girls, it provided opportunity for others, as it did for Norma, a way to make more money than in any other occupation open to women, or a path to a more traditional way of life, either marriage or legitimate enterprise. So many women wanted to avail themselves of this opportunity that, by the late nineteenth century, no thought was given to eradicating prostitution, the effort was only to contain it, and thus Storyville came into existence.

Storyville’s fame and the enduring romance associated with it make it easy to forget that the area had a very short life, less than twenty
years, in the history of one of the oldest cities in the country. The openness of the red-light district obscures the fact that unpopular, repressive laws also existed and were in part responsible for the city’s developing certain salient characteristics that earned it the name Sin City and gave it its reputation for corruption.

While New Orleans was still a colony with a shortage of women, white women specifically, free women of color were legally prohibited from engaging in sexual relations with white men. This led the Creole men to institute a custom of their own, the secret system of
plaçage
, in which they kept free women of color as their mistresses or actually set up second households with them in close proximity to their legitimate families. This custom was practiced clandestinely, but it was a “public secret,” getting a nod from the clergy while the law looked the other way.

Because of such laws and the customs that rose from them, New Orleanians developed an exotic, secretive way of life and a romance with the underworld, much as what happened during Prohibition, when bootleggers and gangsters were seen as romantic individualists.

Early on in the city’s history, American visitors found the way of life in New Orleans foreign and some of the residents, with their European habits, like keeping taverns open on Sundays, shocking. They viewed the city as rife with sin and corruption. New Orleanians liked the reputation, and they liked to tell stories about themselves. After all, New Orleans is a river city that was the last stop on many hard journeys. It was always (and still is) a place to disembark, get a drink, find a card game, have a good fight, and go off with a woman. Even as businessmen and politicians were trying to drag New Orleans out of the Old World and turn it into a progressive American city, the wide open aspect of the city throughout the first half of the twentieth century acquired mythic proportions, and legends about loose women, strong drink, and corrupt politicians proliferated.

New Orleanians like nothing better than exploiting their own myths and legends, though the times have changed and the city is not as open as it once was. In an uneasy alliance with the media, politicians and city administrators clamor for its attention and, at the same time, accuse it of sensationalism and invasion of privacy. A house like Norma’s could never be the “public secret” it once was. Now the
news broadcasts incidents of policemen taking payoffs from operations masked as massage parlors and escort services, and New Orleans vice becomes the subject of national television newsmagazine shows.