Sin in the Second City (7 page)

“Be polite, patient and forget what you are here for,” she said. A diamond clasp, shaped like a butterfly, gripped her throat. She had grown tremendously fond of the insects, of how their short lives revolved wholly around the process of change. “Gentlemen are only gentlemen when properly introduced. We shall see that each girl is properly presented to each guest. No lining up for selection as in other houses. There shall be no cry, ‘In the parlor, girls’ when visitors arrive. Be patient is all I ask. And remember that the Everleigh Club has no time for the rough element, the clerk on a holiday or a man without a checkbook.”

The girls clucked, shifted their weight, fidgeted beneath mountainous gowns.

“It’s going to be difficult, at first, I know,” Minna continued. She walked slowly up and down the line, a commander instructing her troops, arms folded, heels clacking. “It means, briefly, that your language will have to be ladylike and that you will forgo the entreaties you had used in the past. You have the whole night before you, and one fifty-dollar client is more desirable than five ten-dollar ones. Less wear and tear. You will thank me for this advice in later years. Your youth and beauty are all you have. Preserve it. Stay respectable by all means. We know men better than you do. Don’t rush ’em or roll ’em. We will permit no monkeyshines, no knockout drops, no robberies, no crimes of any description. We’ll supply the clients, you amuse them in a way they’ve never been amused before. Give, but give interestingly and with mystery. I want you girls to be proud that you are in the Everleigh Club. That is all. Now spruce up and look your best.”

From then on, Minna would refer to their girls as “butterflies.” And she had an idea: On special occasions, why not import swarms of the insects and release them in the conversation parlors to flutter and float among the guests?

I
nitially, some of the butterfly girls doubted the sisters, whispering behind their backs that the $50-minimum rule was absurd. “Just a bluff,” one harlot sneered before the Club’s doors opened for the first time. “Who is going to pay fifty dollars for a good time? I’ve heard of southern hospitality, but not at these prices.”

At 8:00 p.m., several men sought admittance, but neither their credentials nor their wallets were sufficiently impressive. One look and Minna could tell they didn’t belong: eyes shifty, hands shaking, feet restless. Before she could give them the boot, Ada told them, kindly, that they were at the wrong house.

Moments later, a group of actors stood, shivering, by the entrance. They worked at the Alhambra Theater, currently offering a play called
The City of New York.
A few of the girls had slipped out during the afternoon for a matinee, were “thrilled by the leading men,” and had invited them to the premiere of their resort, opening under new management. More evidence that the harlots doubted the sisters’ standards, since an actor’s salary averaged just $40 per week. These men, too, were politely advised to seek their kicks elsewhere in the Levee.

Then came a group of Texas cattlemen who passed muster handily and spent $300 within a few hours. Madam Cleo Maitland, who so helpfully referred their building, sent flowers, as did a U.S. senator who knew the sisters from Omaha. A few friends from their theatrical troupe sent telegrams full of good wishes. Ike Bloom, a powerful Levee district leader known as “the King of the Brothels,” came by early to pay his respects and promised the sisters he’d be in touch. Minna asked Ada if she could perhaps take a break—traffic was ebbing, and she had some reading to do.

Minna took her copy of the
Chicago Daily News
to the Gold Room. One headline in particular caught her eye:
RITES FOR P
.
D
.
ARMOUR
,
JR
. The young son of the famous Chicago meatpacker had died suddenly in San Francisco five days earlier, and his body had finally arrived home for funeral services. His father, Philip Danforth Armour Sr., was so upset by his heir’s untimely death that he couldn’t receive the body at the train station. Masses of men whose lives were connected to the great Armour enterprise filed past a coffin buried beneath a vast tumbling of flowers. Burial was at the prestigious Graceland Cemetery.

Minna was so engrossed in the article that she didn’t notice a harlot tiptoeing up behind her. The girl backed away quietly and found her fellow courtesans.

“We’ve got her all wrong,” she whispered, impressed. “Minna knows the swells all right. I caught her reading about the Armour funeral and she acted like she had known him. She’s been holding out on us.”

Ten minutes later, a loyal servant who had overheard the girls’ chatter cornered Minna and relayed the conversation. The madam laughed, a screeching peal that orbited the room.

“I never heard of Armour until today,” Minna confided. “Don’t tell anyone I told you.”

She and Ada had great fun and satisfaction tallying the opening night proceeds. The gross business was about $1,000, a resounding success for a Thursday evening, and from then on the courtesans could expect to pocket more than $100 per week.

Come Friday, no one posed further questions or made snide asides. One hundred dollars a week was an unthinkable salary in other houses.

Besides, the Everleigh butterflies were exhausted.

THE DEMON OF LUST
LIES IN WAIT

There are no good girls gone wrong,
just bad girls found out.

—M
AE
W
EST

I
n January 1886, as William Stead neared the end of his prison sentence for purchasing thirteen-year-old Lily Armstrong, a magazine titled
The Philanthropist
made its debut. The editors, all members of the New York Committee for the Prevention of the State Regulation of Vice—which had, over the years, defeated four proposals to legalize prostitution in that city—picked up where their British counterparts left off, printing Josephine Butler’s impassioned defense of her friend.

“You may believe it or not as you please,” Butler warned, “but I think we are living on the top of an inferno, walking about on a volcano which may burst at any moment and destroy us…. Mr. Stead tore aside the curtain and revealed the abyss of crime and misery.”

Despite lurid narratives about virgins for sale, purity campaigns in Europe would hold Americans’ attention for only so long. Trying a new tack,
The Philanthropist
editors shifted the focus to American victims. An article titled “The Traffic in Young Girls” warned of “an organized agency, by which, from rural districts and other cities, honest girls are lured to Chicago with expectation of work, and are then lost forever to friends, honor and hope…in one shape or another the demon of lust lies in wait at every door.”

Still, not even a ripple of reaction among the American public. The editors continued to search for a story as dramatic as Stead’s own “Maiden Tribute.” They found it in January 1887, when authorities raided a Michigan lumber camp and arrested a group of nine women on prostitution charges.

Eight of the women accepted their prison sentences without protest, but one spun a salacious tale of torture and forced captivity. She thought she was going to the camp for work, making $14 a week plus “extras,” but when she arrived her bosses locked her in a cage. Thirteen vicious bulldogs served as her constant guards. She was bound and gang-raped, her virtue forever lost. Few believed the den keepers’ assertions that
all
of the women, including this alleged white slave, knew full well what they had been hired to do at the lumber camps—a job description that made no mention of cutting trees. The public was so moved by the woman’s story that she was pardoned and released from jail.

Newspapers across the country seized the story, and
The Philanthropist
followed every twist and turn, underscoring its relevance to the average American. “These atrocities are committed against the womanhood of our country,” declared one editorial, written by a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union leader. The WCTU, founded thirteen years earlier in 1874, protested alcohol partly because women, already disenfranchised, were also barred from saloons, where ward leaders mingled and men argued about politics. White slavery gave women a chance to insert themselves into political discourse; America’s women would best know how to protect America’s girls. “When we see the condition of things in which the foreigner of the North,” the editorial continued, “because all of the den keepers without exception are either foreigners or of foreign extraction, and have not been long in this country—when these foreigners of the North work as they do for the enslavement of our American girls…what shall we say of this condition of things?”

As a result of the scandal, Michigan lawmakers passed a bill that increased fines for owning a brothel, reformers raised troubling suspicions about immigrants, and America’s sporting girls learned a valuable lesson in nuance: People reviled prostitutes, but pitied white slaves.

LOVELY LITTLE LIES

Ada