Sin in the Second City (9 page)

There are, in short, a dozen missing years in the sisters’ lives.

Minna and Ada filled them in as best as they could, replacing tragedy with intrigue, parallel lives designed to fit over the ones they actually lived. They hailed not from the Blue Ridge Mountains, but from Bluegrass County down in Louisville, Kentucky. True, they said, their ancestors were a prominent Virginia family, but they were forced to flee Richmond when Benedict Arnold and his troops invaded in 1781. Minna, in fact, was even known as “Kentucky’s most intelligent woman.” (They also claimed to be from Evansville, Indiana, admitting their southern accent was part of the act. “The farm in Evansville—we couldn’t stand it,” Minna would add, laying it on thick. “This mortgage or that mortgage, the suffering, the hardships…we always liked nice things.”)

Their father, they told friends and biographers, was a wealthy lawyer who spoke seven languages. Minna and Ada were his favorites, and he paid for their prestigious finishing school and elocution lessons—“born actresses,” he always called them. Minna learned to read before she was five, and literature was in her blood. “Do you know I’m related to Edgar Allan Poe?” she asked Irving Wallace. “You’ll laugh like hell, but it’s true. On my mother’s side we’re the same breed as Poe’s mother.” A bevy of black servants plaited the sisters’ hair when they were young and hemmed couture gowns after they became women and were careful to shield the girls from evidence that the world could be an ugly place. They were the only madams in history who had started out as debutantes instead of whores.

The sisters said they never chased boys—who needed them, really? They grew up believing Daddy was the only man who mattered; marriage was a trap silly girls fell into. Nevertheless, Minna claimed, she was only sixteen when a “southern gentleman” flattered her into dating him, then coaxed her into marriage. (“Lester” was his name, the story went, although she also alternately implied that was her maiden or middle name.) She demanded a grand ceremony at high noon, recalling her father’s wry warning to be wary of men after dark.

Order whatever you please, her father said, and Minna—perhaps remembering the parties she had witnessed at the Walnut Hills mansion—later described a lavish reception that impressed society. She strove for simple elegance: glossy invitations, a modest spread of mushroom-and-clam bisque, boiled breast of bone chicken, hominy pyramids with cheese, rolls, olives, nuts, ice cream, and, of course, champagne. She and the bridesmaids carried bursting arrangements of lily of the valley. A rose motif latticed the damask tablecloth. Rose-petal candies, rose etchings on the crystal goblets.

The cake must be round, to assure eternal love. The mere mention of a rectangular confection shocked Minna into dismissing the caterer. The new chef draped her cake with blossoms to match her bouquet, and treasures lay hidden beneath the icing. She cut the first piece herself; then, in turn, each member of her party cut a slice, hoping to find a lucky trinket. There were sets of fortune’s tokens: a ring to foretell the next to be married; a dime to indicate the wealthiest (a custom from which Minna suggested John D. Rockefeller Sr. got the idea for his “Rockefeller dimes”); a wish-bone for the luckiest and a thimble to signify the old maid. The bridegroom had his own cake: dark chocolate, rich and laden with fruit. To close the festivities, servants tucked pieces in small white boxes and handed them out as souvenirs.

Minna devised a bleak ending for her fairy tale. Her husband proved to be a brute, she claimed, often closing his hands around her slender neck, fingers nearly meeting. He applied enough pressure to make his point, leaving red imprints on her skin. “No other man,” he warned, “shall ever take my place.”

She calmed her husband by agreeing with him but confided her misery to her sister. Ada wrote herself into Minna’s story, adding an identical plot-line. She married another “Lester,” the brother of Minna’s husband, and he, too, had a penchant for strangulation.

Enough was enough.

Within the year, Minna packed her things, telling her sister that any fate was better than a silent windpipe, and took a train to Washington, D.C. Ada joined her a few days later. Good riddance to Louisville and Victorian marriage, to the horrors of a half-known life. They never went back, advising their beloved parents to forever extinguish the window lamps lit on their behalf.

“It is doubtful if Minna and Ada Everleigh ever forgave the brutal treatment they had received from their husbands,” wrote Charles Washburn in 1936. “Theirs was a stored-up bitterness toward all males from which they could not escape. The way they studied men, their insight into the whims of men and their determination to make men pawns in their parlor were the antics of the spider and the fly.”

Washburn was a friend and helped perpetuate the myths about their privileged Kentucky upbringing and cruel husbands. But his words were essentially true, reflecting the sisters’ experiences—ones they never acknowledged or discussed—during all those missing years. Men in general, the sisters concluded, were gullible but not to be trusted; greedy but frivolous with money; predatory but easily trapped.

Naturally, Minna gave a different impression in her remarks to Irving Wallace.

“Irving,” the former madam spider cooed, “I love men. I esteem your sex highly.”

A
fter fleeing their marriages, they joined a traveling stock company, saving money and meeting characters unlike anyone they’d known back in Kentucky. While on the road, the sisters said, they learned of a $35,000 inheritance (the equivalent of about $816,000 today). Their father died, according to one version (Montgomery Simms, of course, was still very much alive and well), while others made oblique reference to “estates in the South.” By 1892, however, even Montgomery’s scheming brother Isaac had a run of bad luck, losing most of his wealth and land during the Cleveland administration, and it’s unlikely that the sisters’ newfound fortune was acquired through a family connection.

Their last show was in Omaha, Nebraska, where they found themselves stranded, unsure of what to do next. A casual remark from one of their cast mates sparked an idea they never would have had on their own.

“My mother would be angry if she knew I was on the stage,” she joked. “She thinks I’m in a den of iniquity.”

Now there’s an idea, the sisters thought. What about a high-class resort? Men were brutes—let them pay to be made fools of. The sisters could enjoy revenge and comic relief at the same time.

There was another underlying motive. Minna and Ada noticed they were none too welcome among Omaha’s women. Although “polite society” typically shunned show folk, the sisters were deemed sophisticated enough to attend several local parties. Yet there were never any second invitations. Pity we’re too charming and worldly—and intimidating—for Omaha’s housewives, they mused. As a test, Minna and Ada hosted a grand luncheon, but only a few townswomen graced the occasion with their presence.

The sisters were furious. So the women refused to visit, but their husbands surely would—especially if the invitations were to a brothel.

What a hilarious, delicious idea. It took one uproarious weekend to develop a plan, and the rest of their careers to weave these revenge tales into legend.

I
n 1989, a Virginia woman named Evelyn Diment wrote to Irving Wallace, adding another possibility to the sisters’ missing years:

Dear Mr. Wallace:

I have just received and started to read your book, THE GOLDEN DOOR [
sic
]. In your AUTHOR’S NOTE: How it Began, you write at some length about your meeting and friendship with the Everleigh née Lester sisters, Minna and Aida…almost all of what they related as their family history which they told you was a fabrication of the truth (a total lie), I know, because these two women were my Great-Aunts. The real truth of their career beginnings were sordid and they were subjected to degradation, not even spoken about ever until the last several years.

I am sorry to have to say this, after your “long friendship” with Aunt Minna and Aunt Aida, but they hoodwinked you from start to finish about their family background and lives before they opened their, perhaps, never to be rivaled House of Pleasure. I suspect that they were trying to protect their real family from embarrassment, and managed to do so quite effectively.

My eldest brother, who is now sixty-six years old, was rushed to New York City after swallowing, as an infant, an open diaper pin which lodged in his throat. The family stayed with Aunt Minna and Aunt Aida while in New York during this family crisis.

I wish I could know with certainty where “your” truth and fiction overlap in your book, because in your first page, in which you have Aunt Minna recounting the story of their Kentucky background, lawyer Father, etc., to the young reporter—
there was not one word of truth in it.

I wish I had known you around 1944, you could have gotten, at least, a portion of the unvarnished truth of their beginnings, et cetera. Not the concocted version Aunt Aida and Aunt Minna told you.

Most sincerely,
Evelyn E. Diment

Evelyn further claimed that the sisters “lied about their background. They were struggling because they were at the end of the Civil War and there were very few ways to make money. Their plantation was lost because they couldn’t pay the taxes. They began as prostitutes and they became madams. Their father put them in the business, and then these women made a marvelous success out of it…. Southern families have away of keeping things very quiet. And if anyone knew anything, they kept their mouth shut.”

Whatever may have happened during the family’s hardships, the sisters cared enough for their father to have his body relocated from Missouri to Virginia after his death in 1915. Today they are buried alongside him, their mother, and little sister Willie in St. Paul’s Cemetery in Alexandria.

Minna and Ada rest side by side, together in death as they were in life. If they didn’t marry men named Lester—if Lester is, in fact, a name they adopted, in the grand tradition of prostitutes, upon entering “the life”—then it is a secret the sisters took literally to the grave.

In bold lettering, their markers read:

MINNA LESTER SIMMS

1866–1948

AIDA LESTER SIMMS

1864–1960

I
n Omaha by 1895, the sisters were ready to invest their $35,000 “inheritance.” Most likely they convinced a powerful acquaintance—a cattle baron, maybe, or a railroad mogul—to back their burgeoning enterprise. “It is hardly conceivable,” wrote
Real West
magazine, “that a couple of amateurs could break in without proper connections and set up an elaborate brothel in competition with existing houses at any time.”

They found a run-down parlor house at 12th and Jackson streets, a shabby, fraying part of town, and began renovations. Ada sent notice to their old actress friends who sought work, promising good money and clean quarters. The sisters sat for painted portraits, Victorian-style glamour shots more suggestive of European royalty than the proprietors of a whorehouse. Ada donned a hat topped with a sprig of flowers and a lacy-sleeved, swollen gown so tightly corseted that her breasts seemed to beg for emancipation. Minna wore a bonnet and a dress layered with frothy ruffles. She reclined on a velvet chaise longue, one leg extended, a high-heeled foot pointed daintily.

Business was steady, but Omaha had seen better days. The financial panic of 1893 had ravaged the town, but its leaders—mindful of how expositions had benefited other cities like Louisville, Cincinnati, and, most notably, Chicago—had a solution. The town’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition was to run for five months, from June 1 to November 1, 1898.

The sisters sensed an opportunity to corner the market on exposition visitors, and rented a building in the downtown business district at 14th and Dodge streets. Such an optimum locale was bound to lure fairgoers who tired of the usual attractions and sought bawdy midnight indiscretions.

The exposition grounds were laid out in a fashion similar to those of the Mall in Washington, D.C., covering 108 city blocks. Myriad recent inventions were among the 4,062 exhibits—flushing toilets, faucets, X-ray machines, incandescent light bulbs, and an incubator for premature infants—all of which consistently drew large, drop-jawed crowds. Visitors tasted Jell-O and Boston baked beans for the first time. They saw Buffalo Bill Cody, by this time one of the most famous men in the world, and the same cast of scouts, cowboys, rough riders, and crack shots that had awed the crowds at the Chicago World’s Fair.

More than 2.6 million people passed through Omaha during the exposition, and the sisters welcomed their share of the visitors. Though mentioned only in prudent, late night whispers, Minna and Ada made a lasting impression on the locals. A Mr. Tom Knapp, who grew up to be the Omaha city welfare director, delivered telegrams as a young boy to the Everleighs at their place of business.

“They were some punkins,” he recalled seventy years later, in 1968. “They were some lookers.”

By the time the exposition closed in the fall, the sisters had doubled their initial investment. What should they do with $70,000, and where could they go? The moneyed crowd fled as soon as the fair displays were hauled away, and Omaha’s native population—a blue-collar mix of Germans, Swedes, and Danes—was not interested in champagne and $10 admission fees.