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

my head and I’d fall asleep again. We stayed like that all night.” Wayne paused before he said, “She always knew it couldn’t last forever.”
    After Norma’s death, Wayne moved into the Bush house. He and Jean married the following year, 1975. Many of Norma’s things are still there—a copper kettle on the hearth, a ship’s lantern beside the door, both from the restaurant; and her furniture—tables, lamps, chairs, and most notably the sofa that was in her private apartment on Conti Street. It dominates one end of the dark-paneled living room. It’s a sexy sofa, a broad contour, a wide bench seat with one continuous cushion that curves into two sharp, pointed ends, hard, stylized lines that were ultramodern in the 1950s, and brass-tipped stiletto legs. The sofa once was covered with plush, sensual, siren red velvet. Now it’s covered in white Naugahyde; it has about as much bounce as a silicone job.
    And the bullet hole is still visible in the ceiling of the Bush kitchen, a small, almost unnoticeable depression in the textured acoustic tile.
    “Norma used to tell me she was never going to get old,” Wayne said. “She used to say she hoped her death would be that her husband caught her in bed with a sixteen-year-old and shot her.” Her vision of her death was violent, romanticized, but in that vision she was still sexy and powerful enough to command a sixteen-year-old’s attention.
    Norma’s life revolved around sex, money, and power; her scandalous escapades made front-page headlines. In her autobiography shewanted to be perceived as a smart, classy, glamorous, and generous woman who was independent yet always had a powerful, sexy, and usually younger man in tow. But the reality was much more complicated, an ambitious, domineering, yet vulnerable woman who was glamorous, yes, but also vain and afraid of growing old. She proudly attached herself to a man thirty-nine years younger, saw herself through his eyes as sexy and seductive and through the public eye as outrageous and exciting, but she did not see that her pride was leading her into the dark embrace of obsessive love.
    Norma Wallace made a fortune selling the art of seduction. She practiced that art in her personal life and was herself seduced by a young and beautiful man, largely because she had no vision of growing old as a privilege and an achievement. In her work life Norma’s power rose from knowledge and experience; in her personal life she relinquished her power to an obsession.

CHAPTER TWO
    The Tango Belt
    When Norma returned to New Orleans from Memphis in 1916, she found that the French Quarter was considerably more populated than she remembered. There were throngs of exotic people, most of them residents, since the Quarter was not the tourist mecca it is today. There were European Creoles, as well as the Creoles of Caribbean and African ancestry who plied their trades in the streets, from the vegetable vendors to the musicians, from the bricklayers to the chimney sweeps carrying the palmetto fronds they used to clean the chimneys. Norma found that life for French Quarter residents had improved in some ways, but in other ways it remained unchanged.
    By 1910 sewage systems were completed in the Quarter, and over the next few years people began to use indoor plumbing. Gone were the horse-drawn wagons that collected the contents of the courtyard privies. The familiar streets Norma walked were cleaner than before, but wagons carrying coal, kerosene, ice, and wood still rumbled over the Belgian blocks that paved some of them (ballast from European ships), and the horses made their scatological contributions to the remaining filth.
    The stark contrasts that visually define New Orleans were no-where more in evidence than in the French Quarter, from the diversepopulation to the residents’ abodes. The softly colored façades of the shuttered, stucco row houses were laced with wrought- and cast-iron balconies, intricate and beautiful, which