Norma Wallace: a Madam in the City of New Orleans
New Orleans is quite different from a northern city — in language, customs, cooking, music, and dress. But it’s also quite different from other SOUTHERN cities. In a region of the country often full of conservative values and strict religion, New Orleans is a place apart.
New Orleans was 100 years old before it had many English or Yankees. The French created old New Orleans; in place of staid Yankee ideals about the perfection of man and the forward march of history, the French gave New Orleans a rich, ironic sense of humor, a benign cynicism and a sense that the world is not progressive; it’s a great wheel turning.
Also, the French felt if you’re not enjoying life, you’re missing the point, and New Orleans grew up in that image. The streets have names like: Desire, Amour, Abundance, Pleasure, Treasure and Joy.
But it’s a big mistake to think of New Orleans as simply a transplanted French city. The Spanish put up most of its oldest buildings in town. There’s an Irish Channel in New Orleans where Irish immigrants once lived while working the canals. The Muffaleta sandwich, another New Orleans classic, is Italian. And beneath the French and Catholic and European influence is a lot of funky African and Caribbean stuff. New Orleans has many small frame homes which are Haitian in style. Mardi Gras, however Christianized it has become, is at heart a pagan rite. No other big U.S. city practices voodoo like New Orleans. Voodoo came in the slave ships, and it has never entirely left.
New Orleans, with its rituals of drinking, gambling, and lovemaking, is a city that takes worldly pleasures seriously. But there is something more than hedonism going on here.
Which brings us to NORMA WALLACE, who was from about 1930–1960 the madam of the biggest whorehouse in New Orleans. Norma knew all sorts of people. Mayors, governors, gangsters, prizefighters, big businessmen, the occasional movie star, and plenty of old-fashioned “southern gentlemen” were her clients. She waded through all sorts of business problems, relishing the exciting ones, and tolerating the annoying ones. She had a very high tolerance for the problems that arise when temperamental people come together and negotiate around money and sex.
Norma grew up poor, as Norma Badon, and had painful memories of begging for food in the streets. She sold her body for a time, but very early decided she was going to be a madam, not a sex worker. She asked for a loan from another vivid New Orleans character, Peter Gulotta, a 5'2" bantamweight boxer who fought under the name “Pete Herman” and was a terror in the ring. Gulotta loaned Norma enough to open her first brothel.
She married five times. As she aged, her men got younger and younger. The man she probably loved the most was Wallace, whose last name she took. When people asked her why she didn’t marry Mr. Wallace, Norma would say ‘Well, he shot me.’
When people startled, Norma would add ‘Only in the ankle.’ Also, Mr. Wallace impressed Norma by apologizing with a seven-carat diamond.
One of her husbands, or boyfriends, was “Golf Bag Sammie” Hunt, an Alabama-born Chicago gangster of the Al Capone era. Sammie liked to carry his machine guns in a golf bag. He bought Norma Wallace mink coats and the property that became her most famous brothel, a compact three-story house at 1026 Conti Street, on the western edge of the French Quarter.
The house had previously belonged to the photographer Ernest J. Bellocq, who photographed ships and machinery by day and spent his nights prowling “opium dens” and other grimy spots in Storyville, snapping poignant candids of the people there. His dutiful pictures of ships and machinery have been largely forgotten but those candids of Storyville are hard to shake off.
Norma didn’t allow drugs at 1026 Conti Street, and she didn’t allow pimps in the door, either. Parrots and monkeys, though, were most definitely on hand. The parrots were feisty. They were kept in a cage at the foot of a staircase, and often squawked out insults at customers and sex workers alike who were climbing up to the third floor where strip tease was going on.
Politicians did not insult Norma or her place of business, possibly because many of them were clients of hers. Just to be safe, Norma liked to keep an eye out when they were undressing and note anything unusual: a birthmark; or a phallus of an unusual shape. She kept abundant records in a little black book, and if politicians made nasty noises, she was not above telling them what she knew, and advising them that their best option was to let sleeping dogs lie.
Norma had no trouble with the police; they loved her, for the most part, because she took care to make them look good. Several times, it was Norma who found out first that a dangerous criminal was planning to be at her whorehouse.
One of these that Norma helped catch was Alvin “Creepy” Karpis who, in his day, was one of those Public Enemy #1 guys, almost as feared as John Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd. In 1936, Norma arranged the capture of Creepy Karpis, almost tied it up in a bow for the officers, and then did the right thing and told all the reporters that it was one more case of the brave and brilliant New Orleans police force cracking a tough case with some sterling detective work.
The cops took note of Norma’s generosity, and put out the word that her house was not to be raided. Most New Orleans cops felt prostitution was a victimless crime anyway; it had gone on since time immemorial, and it would continue until the end of the world. So Norma — and her patrons — never had to worry about cops interrupting the proceedings.
She rose at noon, and sipped her coffee, slowly preparing herself for the evening. When the clock struck 7:00 p.m., the first johns began to trickle in, and Norma was working all night. She dressed well, and carried herself well, and had style and wit like Dorothy Parker. She was also a canny businesswoman who neither fraternized with the customers nor argued with them. She kept things running.
Norma was open-minded. She had a theory that there were three genders: the male, the female and “the otherwise” — and she made all three feel welcome in her house.
When a sex worker in her brothel hoped to move up in the world and open her own place, Norma was happy for her. She was always willing to offer advice and help a woman get started in the business. She figured there was a bottomless market in New Orleans for vice so her competitors were unlikely to cost Norma much business.
She tried running a restaurant once. It was called Tchoupitoulas Plantation, and it did very well for awhile but Norma found it frustrating. Running a restaurant, you don’t just hire the waitresses and the maitre d’, you have to cook the food, and there has to be a lot of it, and it has to be good. The customers just sit there, waiting for your staff to do all the work. You need a big kitchen.
A brothel was much more her thing. All you needed was the house, and the women, some private bedrooms and a big pile of fresh sheets and towels. The customers and the “wait staff” cooked up what they wanted all by themselves.
In 1963, when Norma spent three months in jail for running a house of prostitution, she found it discouraging. In the first place, no one should have wanted to arrest her, and in the second place she should have been able to wriggle out of any legal trouble. It was degrading being a prisoner. It was low-class.
In 1965, she married her fifth husband, a 22-year-old guy named Wayne Bernard. In 1931, Norma was 30 years old. But she claimed she was still 30 in 1941, and by 1951 she would only admit to being 35.
One by one, the old New Orleans night spots faded into history: the Dew Drop Inn on LaSalle Street, where Little Richard once performed. The Golden Dragon, where Louis Armstrong played his trumpet. The Hideaway Club, where young Fats Domino used to play piano. And Norma’s place.
In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina did a number on 1026 Conti Street, but a contractor has since bought the building and lovingly restored it. In recent years, Norma’s business has been described by a new generation of progressive or feminist historians, as a political statement, almost as an act of resistance to the sexist status quo. Norma never described it that way herself. To her, it was a straight business.
Norma died in 1974, by suicide — she seems to have grown bored, and boredom was one thing she refused to tolerate. She killed herself with a gunshot to the head while she was in the hospital. Her husband Wayne Bernard was distraught when he heard the news.
But before she died, Norma dictated a lot of stories into a tape recorder. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” she told her tape recorder one night, “but every now and then around about seven in the evening, that bell rings in my head. I still miss the action.”