The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld Read Free

finished it. But Norma had tried a permanent move to the country once before. It hadn’t worked then, and it didn’t work this time.
    Norma’s photograph was on the cover of New Orleans magazine in June 1972. The piece inside told her story. Her white hair shone, and she wore her trademark dark glasses. She held a bird in her hand, a baby chick. She seemed to have the whole town in her hand. She was presented with a key to the city at the Press Club. Reporters, politicians, former clients, and the curious waited in line for her autograph. The piece was so popular that the magazine ran it again in an anniversary issue four years later.
    For years Norma Wallace had money, power, and influence. From her Poplarville retreat—her exile, as she called it in the magazine—she now achieved something more: recognition from the establishment,respectability. She seemed to have it all, except she was on the verge of losing her young husband.
    Twenty-five years later Wayne sat in the kitchen at his Bush, Louisiana, house, a country house dressed with dormer windows and carriage lamps at the door, where he and Norma moved three months before her death, and recalled their last days together.
    He’d met Jean, the woman he eventually married, while he and Norma were still in Poplarville. “Norma knew I was fooling around,” Wayne said, “but then, I wasn’t trying to keep it much of a secret. She told me she wasn’t staying out in the country all by herself anymore, that she had decided to sell the Poplarville property. I was against it—I loved the place—so I put what I thought was an outrageous price on it and told her if we could get that, then okay. It sold almost immediately. We moved here to Bush. Well, I moved my things here, but I wasn’t really living here. I took the trailer we’d lived in while I was building the house in Poplarville and went to Bogalusa. I was going to stay there until I could figure out what I was doing.”
    Bush, Louisiana, is a sleepy little town across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. A far remove from the life of a French Quarter madam, it has more in common with the Bible Belt than with Sin City to the south. Norma’s motives for moving to Bush were puzzling. If she was lonely or afraid of being out in the woods in Poplarville without Wayne, Bush wasn’t much of an improvement. Its only advantage was a shorter drive to New Orleans, about an hour door to door.
    Two months before the move to Bush, Howard Jacobs of The Times-Picayune wrote a two-part profile of Norma from Poplarville, which ran June 30 and July 1, 1974. Jacobs quoted Norma: “When Wayne and I first moved here, the settlers living within twenty miles were consumed with curiosity about our relationship, and one of ’em tried to wheedle a little matrimonial information out of me. She said, ‘A lot of people are asking me what was a woman of your age doing with this young man.’ I said, ‘You tell ’em I’m a rich old lady and I’m supportin’ ’im.’ This shook her up so much that she dropped the subject like a hot potato.”
    But Wayne was supporting himself by that time, collecting his paycheck and keeping it, something he’d never done at the restaurant;he’d signed all his checks there back over to Norma. Now his pay-checks gave him something he had not had for almost ten years—independence.
    “After I went to work and Norma found out I was seeing a woman my own age, she told me the only thing that would come of it was that I’d have a bunch of kids and have to work like a dog until I was sixty.
    “The funny thing is, Jean and I had been on again, off again; when Norma died we hadn’t been together for a couple of months. But I didn’t tell Norma that. I came over here the Thursday before it happened, and I ended up spending the night on the living room sofa. I fell asleep with my head in her lap. I woke up a number of times, and every time I did, she was still sitting there, wide awake. She’d stroke