Empire of Sin (17 page)

But Anderson and Arlington were hardly the only entrepreneurs making good on Basin Street. The two blocks between Customhouse and the edge of the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 on Conti were teeming with similar establishments, all operating under the aegis of a female entrepreneur and all competing for the higher-end segment of the market. “
These places were really something to see,” pianist Clarence Williams would later say of the Basin Street houses. “They had the
most
beautiful parlors, with cut glass and draperies, and rugs, and expensive furniture. They were just like millionaires’ houses.” And the women on offer in these palaces were—at least to impressionable eyes—as elegant and refined as the furnishings. “The girls would come down dressed in the finest of evening gowns, just like they were going to the opera. They were just beautiful. Their hairdos were just-so, and I’m telling you that Ziegfeld didn’t have any more beautiful women than those. Some of them looked Spanish, and some were Creoles, some brownskins, some chocolate brown. But they all had to have that figure.”

That so many of the prostitutes on Basin Street were mixed-race was one of the District’s great paradoxes. The rest of New Orleans may have been subject to the hardening Jim Crow regimen of strict black-white separation, but in Storyville, for the right price, white men could relive the fantasy of the city’s more racially fluid past. No blacks were allowed into the Basin Street brothels as customers, and darker-skinned black prostitutes were largely confined to the backstreets of the District. But sexual contact across the color line was not only tolerated here, it was actively promoted, at least in the District’s first years. Early Storyville, in fact, was arguably
the most racially integrated square mile in the entire American South.

Two of the finest houses on Basin Street made a particular specialty of interracial sex. Mahogany Hall—an elaborate, iron-balconied mansion at 235 Basin, just two doors down from Josie Arlington’s—was the fiefdom of Lulu White, a legendary madam whose so-called “stable of octoroon beauties” soon became one of the Tenderloin’s biggest attractions. Lulu White herself—who advertised as an octoroon but who was, by most reports, substantially darker-skinned than the label would imply—came from mysterious origins. Depending on the source of the story, she was born in 1864 or 1868, either in Cuba, Jamaica, or (most likely) on a plantation in rural Alabama. What’s known for sure is that she was already well established in the New Orleans vice world by the late 1880s.
Often in trouble with the law, she was arrested frequently through the ’80s and ’90s but somehow rarely served time in jail, thanks to the influence of some wealthy patrons. It was those same wealthy patrons (connected with the local Democratic Ring) who assisted her financially when, shortly after the creation of Storyville, she sought to build a brand-new establishment on Basin Street. White razed the existing structure on the site and spent a small fortune creating a showpiece—a four-story brick palace with five parlors (one of them, like Josie Arlington’s, paneled entirely in mirrors), numerous boudoirs (each with a private bath), cut-glass chandeliers, and an ornate elevator built for two.
The furniture alone was said to cost over $2,000. And here at Mahogany Hall, Miss Lulu White held court, always bedecked in a formal gown, a bright-red wig, and so many diamonds that she was said to rival “
the lights of the St. Louis Exposition.” A figure of exaggerated flamboyance (White was supposedly a model for the screen persona of actress Mae West), she insisted that no luxury was too great for the patrons of her house, where, as Louis Armstrong later recalled, “the Champagne would flow like water.” Given the treatment afforded most people of color in 1900s New Orleans, Lulu White’s success and status within the confines of the District was nothing less than astonishing.

Nor was it unique. Faux refinement may have been the stock-in-trade of all the Basin Street madams—their genteel, high-society affectations offered up with an ironic wink and a knowing leer—but
the madam who played the role most convincingly was Willie V. Piazza. Also self-described as an octoroon, Piazza was one who by general consensus could credibly “
passe pour blanc.
” Though she called herself a countess, Piazza was apparently the daughter of an illiterate woman of color (possibly a former slave) and a first-generation Italian hotelkeeper from Copiah County, Mississippi—the place where Robert Charles had grown up. The countess, according to popular lore, was a sophisticated, well-read woman who spoke several languages fluently, smoked Russian cigarettes in a long, jewel-studded holder, and wore a monocle offset by an expensive diamond choker. How she had acquired her education (her brothel at 317 Basin boasted an extensive library of literature in several languages) remains a mystery, but one that her patrons were apparently disinclined to look into very closely. A woman of discerning musical tastes, she reportedly slept on a mattress embedded with a music box; she also furnished her brothel’s parlor with a perfectly tuned white grand piano, on which only the finest musicians were allowed to play. She was something of a fashion icon too. Her finely styled outfits—and those of her house’s ladies, reportedly “
the most handsome and intelligent octoroons in the United States”—were carefully studied by local dressmakers, allegedly to be copied for the ensembles of customers belonging to the city’s “better half.”

But luxury houses like those of Piazza, Lulu White, and Josie Arlington accounted for only a portion of the new economy brought about by the creation of Storyville. By the time Tom Anderson’s Annex opened in 1901, there were already
an estimated 1,500 prostitutes of all kinds operating in the District, with perhaps 500 more imported seasonally for the high tourist traffic in winter. These 2,000 women, and the subsidiary businesses that their activities supported—the bars, gambling houses, dance halls, restaurants, honky-tonks, and other entertainment establishments of the District—provided work and profits to a large and varied population of New Orleanians, from pimps to chambermaids, from musicians to cabdrivers and bartenders. In the eyes of the progressive reformers who had created Storyville, then, the experiment seemed to be working. The city’s ineradicable vice industry had, to an extent, been isolated and rationalized. And while the reformers did not exactly approve of the goings-on in Storyville (though some of them profited from it, as
landlords of property in the District), they could at least content themselves that a framework had been built by which respectable and disrespectable New Orleans could peacefully coexist. While not entirely out of sight
or
mind, sin in the Crescent City was at least on the way to being contained.

From the perspective of those who did business in the District, on the other hand, the experiment was a smashing success. Big money was being made—not just by corporations or old-money elites but by individual entrepreneurs of a lesser class. And for Tom Anderson in particular, who was now in a position—if not to “reverse the positions of good and evil”—at least to ensure that the denizens of Storyville had a voice in the state legislature, the future was bright indeed.
Even the Storyville mayor’s personal life had taken a turn for the better. Sometime before the advent of the District in 1898, Tom had taken up with a lovely young
woman from Kansas named Olive Noble. She, too, was a prostitute (working under the professional name Ollie Russell), but she was soon styling herself as “Mrs. Anderson” and setting up housekeeping in the apartment above her “husband’s” Arlington Restaurant on Rampart.

Of course, there were difficulties, not least of which was the
other
Mrs. Anderson, whom Tom had not yet been able to divorce. And while apparently quite enamored of his new concubine (who was seventeen years his junior), the mayor of Storyville was not above straying occasionally with his other constituents. Ironically, these two problems managed to work each other out. One night, after hearing that Anderson had been consorting with another woman, Ollie confronted him in the bar of the Arlington Restaurant. She ended up taking a shot at him with a small pistol, though somehow managed only to shoot herself in the foot. Even so, the misadventure ultimately redounded to her favor. The foot wound turned out to be minor, and the incident apparently gave the real Mrs. Anderson the solid grounds she needed for a favorable divorce settlement. Naming Ollie Russell as co-respondent, and citing the shooting episode as evidence of infidelity, Kate Anderson proceeded to launch her own divorce suit. This time, the divorce was granted, on highly favorable terms to her. And when it became official in 1899, Tom Anderson, though somewhat poorer, became free to marry his true love—that is, Ollie herself, eager to become the third Mrs. Anderson.

It didn’t happen—at least not for a while. The death of Tom’s beloved mother intervened in January 1900. Anderson was left with the problem of what to do with his now twenty-year-old daughter, Irene, who had come to live with him and his mother four years earlier, after her graduation from the convent school. Tom couldn’t leave Irene alone in the house on Canal Street; nor could he, with good conscience, expect her to live with him and his ex-prostitute “wife.” But here again, a fortuitous solution presented itself. In late 1900, he introduced Irene to George Delsa, a bartender at his Arlington Restaurant. The two apparently liked each other immediately and were soon engaged to be married. When that wedding occurred in 1902—with Tom dressed in his best tuxedo to give away the bride—the difficulties with his personal life seemed to be past. He and Ollie could finally live what he himself called a life of “ideal bliss,” free of complications. After the heartbreak of losing the beloved wife of his twenties and the anguish of disassociating himself from the hated wife of his thirties, he was apparently entering his forties in a state of domestic
and
professional hopefulness. And the fact that his brand of respectability was not identical with that of the
Daily Picayune
or the denizens of the Pickwick and Boston Clubs—that seemed not to trouble him at all.

But to at least one member of the Storyville aristocracy, the Basin Street version of respectability was not enough. For Josie Arlington, the so-called queen of the demimonde, the yearnings for legitimacy and Victorian standards of propriety had, if anything, grown even more acute since the creation of Storyville. Granted, she was making money on Basin Street—lots of money—and it was said that she, unlike many other madams, had at least some rules about what kind of behavior could take place in her house. (“
I’ll never have a girl ruined under my roof,” she once allegedly said, explaining why she would never hire a virgin as a prostitute.) But she still had designs on a more “normal” life as a wife and mother. And she was determined to realize those designs, in one form or another, in the person of Anna Deubler, her brother Henry’s young daughter.

By all accounts,
Josie’s relationship to Anna was one of complete devotion. Josie was “
in love with Anna,” one friend later said. In conversation, “there was hardly any other topic but Anna”; Anna was “her whole pleasure in life.” The girl was seventeen years old in 1901, yet somehow Josie and Tom Brady—known to her as “Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom”—had kept her entirely in the dark about the family’s source of income. Josie, who lived mainly at the Basin Street brothel, paid rent for her brother and his family to occupy a home in Carrollton, safely distant from Storyville. In this way, she hoped—like the reformers—to draw a boundary around her life of sin, keeping her dear Anna safely on the other side. But now that the girl was getting older, her aunt feared that Anna might eventually discover the true identity of Aunt Mary. And so Josie arranged for Anna to go to a convent school a thousand miles from Basin Street—at St. Joseph’s Academy in Emmetsburg, Maryland. Her motive was plain; according to one friend, “She didn’t want her niece to know what life [Mary] Deubler was leading.” So, while Arlington herself may have been ineradicably sullied by the life of Storyville, she was determined to keep her beloved niece pure and untouched by it. Anna, it seems, was to be Josie’s surrogate in the respectable world to which she herself could never truly belong.

The arrangement proved satisfactory for about a year. Anna happily pursued her studies at St. Joseph’s, and during the summer holiday, Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom rented a vacation cottage for the whole family in Pass Christian, a gulfside resort in Mississippi. Here they could pretend to be the respectable family that Josie yearned for. But when the Bradys traveled up to Emmetsburg to take Anna for her second year at the academy, they encountered trouble. They telephoned the school from their hotel and spoke to the Mother Superior, who coldly informed them that Anna was no longer welcome at the school. Do not come, the nun said, “or you will hear more than you want to hear.” Apparently, the father of another pupil from New Orleans had told the Mother Superior about Mrs. Brady’s true identity. Now Anna was being unceremoniously expelled.

What Josie told her remarkably naïve niece is not known, but evidently she found some way of explaining the necessity of returning immediately to New Orleans. And once there, her aunt went to work finding an alternative plan that would ensure that Anna remained comfortably ignorant of the source of her upkeep. The solution Josie ultimately found was extreme: If Maryland was not distant enough to keep Anna free of the taint of Storyville, maybe a different continent would be. And so Josie Arlington, aka Mary Brady, made arrangements for a surrogate to run the brothel for a few months. She and her “husband” were going to take Anna Deubler to Europe.