Sin in the Second City (15 page)

“Boot liquor,” he called, raising the slipper high. “The darling mustn’t get her feet wet.”

Without further comment, he tilted back his head, drained the champagne from the shoe, and tossed it back to its owner.

“On with the dance!” someone yelled.

“Nix,” said another guest. “Off with a slipper.” He lifted a harlot’s leg, resting it against his waist, and removed her shoe. “Why should Adolph have all the fun?” he added. “This is everybody’s party.”

Prince Henry’s entire entourage rose, yanked a slipper from the nearest girl, and held it aloft. Waiters scuttled about, hurriedly filling each shoe with champagne.

“To the prince.”

“To the kaiser.”

“To beautiful women the world over.”

Prince Henry of Prussia departed Chicago by 2:00 p.m. the following afternoon, but his slipper sipping began a trend that long outlasted his visit. “In New York millionaires were soon doing it publicly,” wrote Charles Washburn. “At home parties husbands were doing it, in back rooms, grocery clerks were doing it—in fact, everybody was doing it…it made a more lasting impression on a girl than carrying her picture in a watch.”

W
hile the Everleighs made special accommodations for European royalty, they also welcomed those from the opposite end of the social scale. Madams couldn’t be part of the underworld and entirely exclude the underworld—thieves, kidnappers, burglars, safecrackers. The sisters knew, from their own history, that those who subverted the official rules often created better ones, that the right sorts of lies could become the bones of truth.

They believed there were two types of men, “depraved blue nosers and regular fellows.” If a member of the former group lodged a complaint, Ada was summoned to smooth things over. “
There, there,
” she soothed, blaming the trouble on the heat, on an inferior grade of champagne, on a girl’s lack of refinement—never on the client himself. Minna handled the bruisers, the visitors who would sooner throw a punch than notice the label on a bottle of wine. “What kind of a man are you?” she’d chide. “Brace up, pardner, you’re not that sort, and we are sure you can lick any man in the house.” Then she would convince him, discreetly but firmly, that he didn’t want to. Minna’s men, just like most of her butterflies, were products of the lower classes and also considered on a case-by-case basis.

Clarence Clay was one hoodlum who made the cut. A thief with impeccable manners, Clarence would dart down to the Cort Theater near Randolph Street, crack open a safe, pillage the contents, and return to the Everleigh Club as if he’d slipped away to use the bathroom. Minna always knew what Clarence was up to but never betrayed him. He was amiable, never hurt anyone, and spent plenty of money.

The Everleighs had to be mindful, too, of criminals among the ranks of their courtesans—some of whom weren’t as harmless as Clarence. “Honesty is its own reward,” Minna told her girls, and in her own interpretation of the concept, she meant her words sincerely. “Never have any black marks on your record. What would your future husband say if he suspected you had mistreated a man? Keep on being good girls, even if it hurts.” The sporting life wasn’t shameful, Minna emphasized, but some of the people attached to the business were. Vic Shaw, for one—no doubt livid that Prince Henry steered clear of
her
house during his tour—interfered with Everleigh courtesans at every opportunity, encouraging them into “vicious pathways.”

A harlot named Daisy took such a detour, sneaking a notorious bank robber—one who had not been approved by Minna—through the Club’s doors. He carried two fat satchels and checked them with a servant. Daisy escorted the robber upstairs to her boudoir and commented, casually, that she had never seen a thousand-dollar note before.

“Send for either one of the two satchels checked downstairs and I’ll show you,” said the thief, perched halfway up on his elbows. “They’re filled with big bills.”

Daisy pushed the intercom button in her room and asked a servant to fetch the bags. The servant surmised what was happening and decided this was a situation that called for Miss Minna. Together they climbed the stairs to Daisy’s room.

Minna flung open the door and saw the thief prone on the bed. Daisy was removing a container of powder from her dresser. “Excuse Daisy for a few minutes, please,” Minna said, sighing.

Daisy stepped out into the hallway.

“No knockout powders in this house, you know that,” Minna whispered in the harlot’s ear. “And I’ll give you ten minutes to get your friend off the premises. We do not cater to his kind. He’s nervous and suspicious. He’ll go quietly. Tell him anything.”

The thief took his satchels of cash and left. Daisy disappeared. She didn’t report for work that week, or take dinner in the Pullman Buffet, or tell the servants which gowns to clean. Minna and Ada wondered, between themselves, if the girl had met a bad end with her bad man. They never heard from her again, but they did get news about the bank robber. He was found in a Levee alley, not far from the Everleigh Club, his skull lopsided, his forehead frayed open like the petals of a flower. A few hard blows from a hammer.

No one paid much attention to the murder, but the cops came to the Club and sat in the parlor. Could the sisters offer any insights into the case?

Minna shrugged. “I do not know,” she said, “of any hardware dealers among our patrons.”

The Everleighs were relieved that whatever transpired between Daisy and her robber had done so outside of the Club. No gossip for the sisters’ enemies to gather and collect, or false footnotes to ink beside their venerable name. But two madams couldn’t guard all four corners of every parlor, and Daisy wasn’t the only harlot tempted by vicious pathways. Some butterflies were limited simply by their inferior bloodlines and coarse histories; Longfellow’s poetry would never mean more than a stream of memorized words.

Myrtle, from Iowa, whose rear end was “of the slapping kind,” as one man put it, was common in every way but her looks. She loved to show off her gun collection. Any john who was lucky enough to climb the stairs with her heard about which trinket she’d bought in which pawnshop, how much it had cost, how pretty she looked cocking it.

“I think I’d be the happiest girl in town if I could find a diamond-studded revolver,” she told one wealthy customer, and he promptly had one made for her.

One night, Myrtle decided to have a showdown among her most devoted admirers. She ordered them to choose a gun from a secret drawer in her boudoir and then meet her downstairs, in the Gold Room.

Myrtle shook her bottom one last time, for emphasis, before lounging on a chaise.

“Fight over me, boys,” she teased. “I love it.”

Growls and threats and curses gathered in an angry chorus and filtered down the hallway, attracting Minna’s attention. The men were a fumbling knot of gray silk and derby hats. Something gleamed silver, quick flashes that played hide-and-seek amid the vortex of bodies. Minna had to look twice to be sure. Revolvers—two, three, four, five of them.

Her body tightened; a muffled pounding filled her ears. She flung a hand and found the light switch and made the room black.

“Gentlemen,” she cried into the dark, “you are in the most notorious whorehouse in America.” This was no time to measure words. “How would it look to your relatives and friends to see your names splashed across the front pages tomorrow morning?”

After turning up the lights, she gathered Myrtle’s guns one by one. The men bade one another a good evening and left, properly, through the front door.

A
fter Myrtle’s antics in the Gold Room, the sisters, understandably, became wary of guns. When trouble came, as the sisters feared it would, it didn’t knock at the mahogany doors. Instead it waited, lying dormant inside heads and silent inside mouths until it passed, undetected, into the Club. And then it was too late.

On May 25, 1903, a balmy spring night, a woman named Helen Hahn went out driving with Larry Curtis, a bookmaker and investor. Earlier that day, Curtis had a streak of luck at the racetrack, winning $4,500, and Helen was helping him celebrate. A stenographer at the Chicago Opera House, she lived in a modest home on the northwest side, and was curious about the way life moved outside of her own.

“As we were returning toward town,” Helen said, “I spoke of the fascination slumming had for me.”

Curtis asked her if she might like to see some of the parlor houses along the Levee, perhaps a certain place in particular—“one of the most gorgeous establishments that ever prospered in a red-light district.”

Within minutes they arrived at the Everleigh Club, and navigated clusters of laughing couples until they reached the Japanese Parlor. Corks popped in quick succession, a muted series of fireworks. Roving plumes of incense smelled by turns musky and sweet.

“I found myself in a close little room, luxuriously furnished,” Helen later said, “with colored servants going softly to and fro. There was music coming through the palms which hid what I afterward learned was the ballroom, and everything was much different than I expected…. Suddenly the sliding door between the two rooms was thrown open and a man in evening dress entered.”

Later, on the police record and in newspaper reports, the man’s name would be given as William H. Robinson. Levee gossips whispered that he was from Chicago and the son of a well-known millionaire—so well-known that during his foray into the Levee district, he announced he was “traveling incognito” under a pseudonym.

Whatever his real name—and the Everleigh sisters, of course, would never say—Robinson had started the evening accompanied by a friend and two showgirls. After dinner, the foursome ventured to the Everleigh Club.

The sisters were busier than ever. Six months earlier, final renovations within the “New Annex” at 2133 were completed. The additional parlors, boudoirs, alcoves, music and dining rooms generated more traffic, but with it came a greater potential for trouble. Neither Minna nor Ada was near the Japanese Parlor when Robinson pulled open the sliding door. No one to suggest to Robinson that he shoot off firecrackers instead of his mouth, no one to remind Curtis that he wasn’t the sort to respond.

“I was sitting at the piano,” Helen said, “but just drumming with the soft pedal on, and not playing so it could be heard out of the room,” when Robinson lurched in and said something “ugly” about her, so ugly that she turned her head and pretended not to hear.

“[Curtis] sprang up as the man entered,” Helen continued, “but he was so startled by the man’s remarks that he did not say a word for half a minute. The intruder started for me and I turned around. The first thing I saw was a revolver and an instant later it went off.” Curtis looked at the gun in his hand as if he’d never seen it before, a strange and sudden appendage, smoke curling up from the barrel.

Elsewhere in the Everleigh Club, its proprietors froze in midstep and quieted in midsentence, and then rushed toward the aftermath of a sound they never wanted to hear.

Robinson lay on the floor of the Japanese Parlor, unconscious. A ring of blood bloomed above his heart. A young woman sat at the piano nearby, weeping meekly into her palms. The sisters arranged for Robinson’s transportation to People’s Hospital on Archer Avenue and told a group of courtesans to summon the 22nd Street police. Two detectives stopped Curtis from making a getaway in a closed carriage.

Robinson’s heart was spared, but the bullet embedded between his ribs, possibly puncturing a lung. He was revived and his wounds dressed. The following morning, he told police he was “too weak” to proceed with prosecution.

It was a lucky break for the sisters, and not the only one. Scandal, especially one involving gunshots and a millionaire’s son, could dull the shine of a high-class resort, dilute all their talk of decency and uplift. Their journalist friends reported the story—they had to—but kept the coverage shallow and benign. Salacious mentions of “wild midnight orgies” in a “resort of considerable notoriety” didn’t hurt the situation, and the Everleighs were not asked to comment at all. Hinky Dink Kenna was a doll, furnishing $1,200 for Curtis’s bond. The two showgirls who had accompanied Robinson were fired, and his friend vanished altogether. Helen Hahn threatened to kill herself until learning that Robinson survived, then returned to her quiet life as a stenographer. Her urge to go slumming was sated for good.

Robinson became incognito once again. “The police,” the
Daily News
pointed out, “show little interest in the case.”

But one person in particular was
very
interested. Ten houses north on Dearborn Street, Vic Shaw asked discreet questions and took careful notes, built a cache of possibility in her mind. She wouldn’t confront the Everleighs directly—“Silence,” she often said, “is louder than a brass band”—and she hoped her quiet skulked behind those sisters all day long, seeped into their dreams. Next time a millionaire playboy met with trouble in the Levee, Vic Shaw would collect all the words she had stored up, and set them into motion.

INVOCATION