Sin in the Second City (12 page)

A shameful arrangement, one the sisters could never understand or condone, but they decided there was no reason to broach the subject of Maurice Van Bever or white slavery. Their relationship with Big Jim required knowing what to discuss and what to keep private. Minna and Ada agreed: Some things were better left unconsidered.

B
ut the true leaders of the Levee district, the sisters quickly learned, were aldermen Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin. Ike Bloom and Big Jim might have operated the assembly line, but Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John owned the factory. Their bailiwick, the First Ward, one of thirty-five in the city, encompassed the heart of Chicago, including the Loop—with its City Hall, office buildings, swanky department stores, hotels, restaurants, and theaters—and stretched south to 29th Street, claiming, too, all the Levee whorehouses, dives, and gambling dens.

The latter racket proved especially lucrative; many bordellos and saloons reserved a room for poker tables and roulette wheels and a wall to hurl dice against. The Everleigh sisters decided that gambling sessions in the Club should not exceed a half hour. “I have watched men, embraced in the arms of the most bewitching sirens in our Club, dump their feminine flesh from their laps for a roll of the dice,” Minna said. “It always amused me to see potential Don Juans, who had deliberately visited our Club for biographical expression, becoming inarticulate except for such phrases as ‘Come seven, baby needs a new pair of shoes’…if it wasn’t unmanly to admit it, they’d rather most of the time gamble than screw.”

Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John took a portion of every dollar generated in the red-light district, through gambling or otherwise, and counted Mayor Carter Harrison II as a personal friend and political sponsor.

“Everywhere the names of the sisters Everleigh and the names of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink, their reputed protectors, were intertwined,” wrote the aldermen’s biographers. “You no sooner said, ‘Yes, I’m from Chicago,’ than your companions wanted a full description of the fabulous Everleigh club, the remarkable sisters, and the even more remarkable aldermen.”

Minna found Michael Kenna smart but aloof. He owned a Clark Street saloon, the Workingman’s Exchange, where he served lunch for free to any bum, tramp, hobo, and downtrodden potential voter who stumbled inside, and offered a mug of beer, “the largest and coolest in the city,” for a nickel.

She pieced together bits of Kenna’s history through conversations with Big Jim and Ike: He was born in the First Ward, quit school at ten, got a job as a newsboy. Rumor had it that an esteemed
Tribune
editor, Joseph Medill, dubbed him “Hinky Dink” because of his diminutive stature: He stood five feet one and weighed about as much as Minna. For this reason, he was also called “Little Fellow.” He didn’t care much for socializing and considered small talk a tedious waste of time. Kenna looked the same now as he had as a kid, with the body of a child and the face of an old man.

Hinky Dink came to power when he was elected to the Chicago City Council a few years earlier, in 1897. It was his idea to establish a standard rate of 50 cents per vote. He also launched the First Ward Democratic Club, of which every registered voter was automatically a member and encouraged to carry an identification card. Through this organization, which numbered forty thousand, he and Bathhouse John controlled both the wealthiest and most depraved sections of Chicago.

Bathhouse John was as gregarious and daft as Kenna was distant and deft. His open, approachable face capped an enormous frame; Hinky Dink reached only as high as his armpits. Throughout his life, Bathhouse, a married man, insisted he had never stepped foot inside the Everleigh Club (a claim his fellow aldermen scoffed at within City Hall corridors), but he took a liking to the sisters, Minna in particular, perhaps because she, too, was the “speaking partner” of a formidable duo.

“Whatever difficulties arose, we were told to see Mr. Coughlin,” Minna explained. “He was the final word.”

At her prompting, he told Minna he’d gotten his nickname as a teenager. Working as a “rubber” in Turkish bathhouses, first on Clark Street and then at the posh Palmer House, he learned about politics and those who contorted its rules. He was fascinated by these men, with their silk suits and overflowing wallets, their glib talk and intricate plots of election day high jinks, their practiced jokes and slap-shoulder bonhomie. He met congressmen and senators, moguls and millionaires—Marshall Field even came, on occasion, for a plunge.

“I formed my philosophy,” Bathhouse said, “while watching and studying the types of people who patronized the bathhouses. Priests, ministers, brokers, politicians, and gamblers visited there. I watched, and learned never to quarrel, never to feud. I had the best schooling a young feller could have. I met ’em all, big and little, from LaSalle Street to Armour Avenue. You could learn from anyone. Ain’t much difference between the big man and the little man. One’s lucky, that’s all.”

He was the city’s poet laureate, he claimed—“lariat,” in his lingo. She’d heard of his composition titled “Dear Midnight of Love,” hadn’t she? It premiered at the Chicago Opera House right before she and Ada came to town. Newspapers all across the country called to interview him—it was a sensation. Minna read the papers, right? Good. Well, every Monday morning, the
Record Herald
printed a new melody of his. There was a ditty titled “Why Did They Build Lake Michigan So Wide?” But one of his best was “An Ode to a Bath-tub,” which went, in part, like this:

I care not for ball games, nor fishing, or money unless to buy grub
But I’d walk forty miles before breakfast to roll in the porcelain tub.

Several of the Club’s journalist patrons confided to Minna that John Kelley, a Chicago society writer, was the creative force behind the alderman’s oeuvre—with the lone exception of “Dear Midnight of Love.” But she didn’t let on to the Bath—why blow his cover? Instead, Minna instructed her orchestra to play “Dear Midnight of Love” at least once every night in the alderman’s honor.

The Everleighs knew instinctively to defer to Bathhouse John, and he returned the favor, recognizing how they would benefit the Levee. Shortly after the Club’s debut, the sisters were invited to an annual party called the First Ward Ball, where Levee denizens celebrated their debauchery with impunity. At the stroke of midnight, the Bath, decked out in a green coat, lavender trousers, and silk pink gloves, rose and approached the sisters. He bowed, took each on an arm, and led them around the floor of the First Regiment Armory, with every lesser madam, pimp, cadet, harlot, and hanger-on trailing behind. Thus commenced his famous Grand March, and without saying a word, he had named these newcomers, Minna and Ada Everleigh, the queens not only of the Ball, but of the entire Levee.

The Everleighs didn’t need anyone to confirm their vaulted status, but they appreciated the gesture nonetheless—as well as Bathhouse’s vow to protect them from enemies, both inside the Levee and beyond.

T
here were some, of course, who didn’t share Bathhouse John’s ardor for the sisters, who wished the Everleighs would return to Kentucky or Virginia or wherever they came from. Each afternoon, Minna and Ada took a ride to the Loop in their elegant hansom, drawn by a team of sleek black horses and driven by a crisply suited coachman. Their choicest girl, bedecked in a frilly confection of silk and glittering jewelry, perched high in the back. While the sisters sashayed into their bank to deposit the previous night’s earnings, the girl remained on display in the coach, preening and patting her hair, lifting a leg to tug at a high-buttoned shoe, letting her dress rise in the process, a curtain ascending. Afterward, the sisters rode through Chicago’s streets long enough to give passersby a good look at what they had for sale at the Club, an advertising technique that both enticed clients and made fellow madams wonder who in the hell these two up-pity Everleigh sisters thought they were, anyway.

The proprietors of the Levee’s finer establishments were shaken when the Everleighs—novices who knew nothing about Chicago before setting up shop here—quickly surpassed them all, in terms of both volume and reputation. One brothel owner, Ed Weiss, used sheer cunning to combat the decline in business. Minna knew that Ed, who ran the resort next door, had put most of the Levee’s cabdrivers on his payroll. When a drunken reveler stumbled into a hansom and asked for the Everleigh Club, he more often than not ended up at Ed Weiss’s door—and rarely knew the difference.

Minna, in spite of herself, had to admire the old shyster.

But a circle of well-regarded madams lacked the innovation for such subterfuge, and hence spent most of their time stewing and sending subtle jabs the sisters’ way. They did not, for one thing, invite the Everleighs to join the Friendly Friends (the Levee ladies’ answer to the pimps’ group, the Cadets’ Protective Association), which served as a sort of labor union for madams, whose members gathered regularly for such genteel activities as knitting and tea sipping.

Clearly, Minna and Ada were unbothered by their exclusion from this society—a nonchalance that enraged Madam Vic Shaw, whose lavish house on Dearborn Street seemed emptier each night. Didn’t the Everleighs realize every step they took within the Levee was on ground that she’d trod first? Those sisters purposely withheld deference and respect, even refusing to follow the aldermen’s rules about where to buy food and wine. Vic Shaw would never forget the last Washington Park Derby, an event Levee madams attended alongside Prairie Avenue matrons. That afternoon, as she was getting dressed, one of her harlots called out, “Come look out the window, quick.”

“There,” Vic Shaw later recalled, “going down the street right in front of my house, were the Everleigh sisters and their girls in a tallyho! Of all things, a tallyho! With four horses, red tassels draped over their ears, and a boy on the front seat tooting a silver horn. Did my blood pressure go up!

“Well, I marched right over to Payne’s livery and I said, ‘I want you to get me a tallyho, only I don’t want four horses, I want six.’ I draped red tassels all over them. I sent my riders uptown to be fitted for custom-made boots and cream-colored pants. I got little yeoman hats and tailored riding coats for my girls. Then I ordered a silver horn twice as long as the one the Everleighs had and we set out for the derby…. On the way, we drove around the block past the Everleigh Club four times, and I kept that poor sucker tootin’ that horn all the way. I’ll be truthful. It never dawned on me to have a tallyho. But when I got the idea, you can’t say I didn’t do it up better than the Everleighs.”

Their whole history was nauseating, all that talk about southern roots and debutante balls and their smashing success in Omaha and being related to that spooky “Raven” poet and some such nonsense. Well, Vic Shaw got where she was without the benefit of any pedigreed background—one of ten children, the daughter of an iron mine worker in Londonderry, Nova Scotia. She ran away from home at thirteen, still named Emma Elizabeth Fitzgerald but already an “apt pupil” who “knew the answers.” First she joined a troupe in Boston and then Sam T. Jack’s burlesque show on West Madison Street in Chicago. She’d come into some money, too, not through a fortuitous inheritance from a wealthy lawyer father like
certain
madams claimed, but by eloping with the son of a millionaire banker. When his family discovered he’d married a minor, they arranged a quick and discreet divorce. She kept her ex-husband’s nickname for her, “Vickie,” his surname, Shaw, and half of his fortune, and opened her brothel on South Dearborn Street.

So what if the finer points and prissy etiquette of the trade eluded her at first? Could one blame her for being beautiful and “more interested in men than in business”? One of her early clients, a wealthy Chicago businessman, told her bluntly, “You’ll have to hire better girls if you want to stay in business.” Soon after, a railroad magnate lodged the same complaint, then pressed $1,000 into her hand with the suggestion that she go to New Orleans and bring back some “thorobreds.” Madam Shaw did just that. “And by 1900,” wrote the
Tribune,
“the year the Everleigh Sisters moved in, she was established as queen bee of the brothels.”

Vic Shaw might not have that title anymore; certain overrated, insufferable madams might have sauntered in on their red-tasseled tallyho and snatched it from her as if it were their preordained right. But Vic Shaw had recourse, little hidden pockets of savvy. She was
still
beautiful, her bosom ornamenting her figure like the prow of a stately ship; no one noticed the years she discarded when she claimed to be twenty-two. She had Roy Jones, a Levee vice king, whom she planned to marry. She had a good rapport with Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. She had “strip-whip” matches, during which whores stepped inside a makeshift ring, wearing corsets and boots or nothing at all, and lashed each other’s backs bloody; the Prairie Avenue set paid good money for these circuses.

She had stunning inmates, especially Gladys Martin, who even sat for promotional photos, her blond head budding from a white fur cape. She had an enforcer named Lillie Kowalski—“Lill the Whipper”—who dressed like a missionary but brawled like a longshoreman, beating up, over the years, more than a thousand harlots. She had an open invitation to all Everleigh courtesans should they ever desire to quit the Club and work for Vic Shaw’s, the original.

Most important, she knew how to deliver a threat.

“Queer ducks, our neighbors,” Madam Shaw told a cop on the beat whom she knew had a taste for gossip and trouble and no qualms about spreading either around. There—those Everleigh snobs would get the message. “They’ve a pull somewhere,” she added, “but it won’t last.”