The Sunday Gentleman (7 page)

Eight years later, there was a suggestion that they might even then still be alive. In a 1944 issue of
Town and Country
magazine, Edgar Lee Masters stated: “[Minna and Aida] knew too that the people who were throwing stones at them might well have been stoned for sins of their own. Still, they kept their peace. They disappeared with smiles upon their faces, and, when last heard of, were living lives of unobtrusive gentility in New York City.”

And so it was in 1944 that I made up my mind to learn whether the Everleigh sisters were really alive, and if they actually were, to learn exactly what names they had assumed and precisely where they were residing. Perhaps I was inspired by the adventure of a Bostonian, Captain Edward Silsbee, the ardent Shelleyite, who had learned, fifty-seven years after Shelley’s death and fifty-five years after Byron’s death, that Shelley’s friend and Byron’s mistress, Claire Clairmont, was still living at the grand old age of eighty-two in Florence. Silsbee had determined to meet her. And he had met her, and this, in turn, inspired Henry James to write his novelette.
The Aspern Papers
. In this, the hero-publisher learns the mistress of a great romantic poet, long dead, is still alive in Venice, and resolves to meet her. As Henry James’s hero reflected, “The strange thing had been for me to discover…that she was still alive: it was as if I had been told Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or the famous Lady Hamilton, for it seemed to me she belonged to a generation as extinct. ‘Why she must be tremendously old—at least a hundred,’ I had said.”

Thus, I, too, was inspired, and determined, to meet Minna and Aida Everleigh, almost a half century after they had reigned as two of history’s foremost caterers to the pleasure of the human male.

In April of 1944, while I was a sergeant in the United States Army Signal Corps, I was ordered to Washington, D.C., and New York City. Before that special assignment, I had been excited by the idea of doing a three-act play loosely based on the lives of the Everleigh sisters and their club. Nights, when I had time, I had jotted endless notes on the construction of this play. The notes were fragmentary, but among them were:

“Setting of Act I is the Golden Room of the Everleigh Club in 1905…Problems and conflicts for sisters: Attractive gentleman wants to marry Aida Everleigh and take her away from it all…Fictional judge, based on real Chicago attorney who took his annual vacation in club, has vacation interrupted when given information that he has been picked to head Vice Committee investigating club…Minna trying to help a married client who is having troubles with his wife…New and dangerous madam down the block trying to get club raided and steal Everleighs’ best girls…Enemies in Levee, or single reformer outside, pressing to pin responsibility for a murder on Everleighs…Then last straw: Everleighs’ respectable and chaste niece arriving, accompanied by her older brother, from Kentucky, to stay with her respectable aunts, the Everleighs, while she meets family of rich young man who wants to marry her (his father is a meat-packing millionaire)…Sisters desperate to keep little niece from knowing what they do and desperate to keep truth about their house a secret from her. Sisters must figure out how to disguise brothel and girls, maybe set up a Potemkin facade…Act I curtain is, of course, arrival of niece in midst of tumultuous and embarrassing situation in club…Act II curtain is when niece’s potential father-in-law, the meat-packer, an occasional visitor to house, discovers the niece there among the girls…Act III Minna must save impending marriage of niece as well as solve a municipal political crisis, thereby saving the club from being closed.”

Since I wanted to use the Everleighs as characters, their club as the setting for the play, and some episodes from their lives, it was imperative that I discover if they were alive. If they were, I would have to obtain their permission to do this play. More important, as I have indicated, play or no play, I simply had to meet them to satisfy my own curiosity.

Now, knowing that I would be in the East on an army assignment shortly, I bestirred myself to locate someone who had known the Everleighs personally in the good old days, and who could tell me if they were still around, and if so, how they could be reached. I wrote to Charles Washburn and Edgar Lee Masters, and received no response from either. Then I remembered that Jack Lait, editor of the New York
Mirror
, had known them, and perhaps still knew them. But it would not do, I suspected, to confront Jack Lait as a stranger. If he knew the Everleighs’ secret, he would be loath to share it with someone whom he did not know. And so I sought for a go-between, a friend of mine who might also be a friend of Lait’s, and I found this necessary link in the person of a well-known public relations man, the late Mack Millar.

A week later, in New York, I telephoned Lait at the
Mirror
and invoked the name of our mutual friend. I told him that I’d like to see him for a few minutes about a personal matter. He invited me to come right up. I found Lait at his desk, pencil and copy in hand, looking busy and suspicious.

The moment that I mentioned why I had called upon him, he smiled and became more affable. But he was careful, also. I had to explain what I wanted of the Everleigh sisters, and what I would do with it. Lait listened, but remained noncommittal.

“Tell me one thing,” I asked. “Are both of them still alive?”

“Sure they are alive. Their neighbors think they’re two eccentric and retired clubwomen, with independent means. No one knows about their past. To everyone around—they’re just two nice old ladies.”

“I wish you’d tell me how I could get hold of them.”

Lait considered me a moment longer, and then he suddenly sat up in his swivel chair. “Okay, Sergeant. You’ve got an honest face, sort of. Just be secretive and discreet about the whole thing, remember.”

“I promise.”

“Okay. Their names are Minna and Aida Lester—got that?—Lester. They own a brownstone at 20 West 71st Street, right here in New York. You want their telephone number, too? Okay. It’s Endicott 2-9970. But look, I wouldn’t just call them up cold. I don’t think you’d get anywhere. Here’s what I’d suggest. Write them a letter. You can use my name. Write them, introduce yourself, and tell them what you have in mind. And then, sit back and hope. There you have it. Now you’re on your own.”

I thanked Jack Lait profusely, and left. The following day, before I could either write or telephone the Everleighs, the Army Signal Corps recalled me to my station in Los Angeles.

During my first free evening in Los Angeles, I sat down and composed a long and friendly letter to Miss Minna Everleigh and Miss Aida Everleigh, and I addressed the envelope to “Miss Minna Lester, Miss Aida Lester, 20 West 71st Street, New York City 23, New York.”

Less than a week later, I had my answer. It came, as all the Everleigh letters I subsequently received would come, packed bulkily into a long manila envelope, secured by silver sealing wax. The letter that was contained within was written in blue ink, in a wild and almost indecipherable scrawl, each letter of each word an inch high. This first Everleigh letter, like the correspondence to follow, was unrestrained and extravagant in its phrasing, and highly original in its punctuation. Minna, the letter writer of the pair, showed contempt for periods, commas, and semicolons, but was much devoted to dots, dashes, and exclamation points. I reproduce her first letter exactly as it was written. What follows actually covered twenty good-sized pages when written in Minna Everleigh’s generous hand:

Sunday—May 7—1944—New York—

Sgt Irving Wallace

Dear Sir

Your letter addressed to my sister, Aida Lester, and to me—lies on my desk…There is truth in the axiom that asserts “A Letter Mirrors the Soul of the Writer”…Your letter portrays culture, courtesy, intellect, literary and dramatic genius…Therefore, this candid heart-prompted response…

Dear Sgt Wallace—

Aida and Minna Lester’s past is not linked with the Everleigh Club on South Dearborn Street—Chicago—Illinois…Aida Lester and I lived in Chicago during the first decade of the Twentieth Century—but in a fashion far remote from the famous sisters’ exotic lives…Your time is precious—“brevity is the soul of wit”—suffice it to say that many times false rumors linked our puritan lives with the sensational career of the sisters referred to in your letter!!

Aida and I traveled in Europe prior to World War I—finally returning to our own dear Land—made our home since 1915 in New York at our present residence 20 West 71st Street New York…Meantime rumors linked our names with the sisters of the Dearborn Street resort!!!

Finally, we took action—Aida Lester and I—we located the sisters of Dearborn Street—Chicago!!! They proved their innocence of linking their names with ours—I will not take time explaining—plotters of the South Side Levee—their enemies—had sought to cause them trouble—prompted by political Levee gangster feuds!!! These sisters reside in New York City!!! Still fearing their foes, they live isolated lives—Since the panic of 1929, they have sustained severe losses from defaulted mortgage investments…

After receipt of your letter yesterday, I visited the sisters to whom you had addressed it…They recall the honor of having known Mr. Jack Lait of the New York
Mirror
—gifted columnist—journalist—famous author…Sister Aida Lester and I have not had the pleasant privilege of meeting him—hope some day to have that pleasure…To make a long story short—dear Sgt Wallace—the sisters you addressed desire to avoid all publicity…(The Everleigh Sisters)—Interested in your plan to dramatize the Everleigh Club they yet ask to be forgotten!!!

I asked them if they would consider pecuniary considerations for such assistance as they might concede to you for the setting and background of their club on Dearborn Street—Chicago??—Their Answer was that they have an Album of photographs of the parlors and rooms of the Everleigh Club—They might part with those—but they must shun publicity. Finally, the Sisters agreed that they might sell their Album—for cash sum—not for financial percentage of profits after the play is produced:

Dear Sgt Wallace—I have given you a candid account of my visit to the Everleigh sisters with whom my name and my sister, Aida Lester’s, has so often been linked…I enclose clippings that suggest the past should be forgotten in this swift epoch!! Forget the Everleigh Club and the haunted past portrayed in the photographs of its vanished splendor shown in the album the sisters possess!!! Did not Byron declare “The past is nothing and at last—the future can but be the past”!!

However, if you still wish to have those Everleigh Club photographs—let me know! ! ! ! Remember—the Everleigh Sisters names were Marie and Alice!!! The names Aida and Minna were borrowed from my name—and Aida Lester’s when we were socialites in Chicago long ago!!!

And now—forgive this long letter—dear Irving Wallace!!! Pardon my having no writing paper that is proper size for your chic airmail envelope—so beguiling—with its special stamp!!! If you still desire that Everleigh Club Album—state so in reply dear Sgt Wallace…Were it mine to give it would be freely given!!!

May your heart’s desire be granted!!! Let me know this message reached you!!! Truly your friend and admirer

Minna Lester

The eleven clippings that Minna enclosed consisted of an Associated Press story about a warrant officer in the South Pacific who wanted to hear the voice of his four-day-old son on the long-distance phone, and heard nothing until he instructed his wife to spank the infant; a newspaper photograph from a Mickey Rooney film; a sexy advertisement for a “Shar-Loo” slip; a newspaper photograph of Major Jimmy Stewart being decorated by a lieutenant colonel; a newspaper photograph of a radio actress; an advertisement for a newly published book on the Marines; newspaper photographs from a film called
The Hitler Gang
; a political cartoon of Adolf Hitler; three more cartoons about Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler facing defeat; and a picture from
The New York Times
drama section showing the sheet music and the casts of five musical comedy successes created by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammer-stein n.

I was strangely moved by this first letter from a sixty-six-year-old former madam of the world’s most elegant house of rendezvous in recent times—moved by her elaborate and pathetically transparent story of having been a “socialite” who had known the real Everleighs, and knew them still. And I was touched by her lovely, banal quotations, and by her need to sell the precious album of photographs of the Everleigh Club.

I wanted to write her immediately, write her anything, but write her nicely, yet I did not—and soon I could not. I found myself traveling around the country to various army installations, researching and writing material for top-priority military films. I had neither time nor energy to devote to Minna Lester, friend of Minna Everleigh. Too, I began to have misgivings about my play project, about the possibility of securing clear-cut legal rights to use the Everleigh Club from one who was an Everleigh and yet denied it. How much of what Minna had written me, I wondered, was conscious pretense based on elementary caution and how much was the sublimation of an old lady who had come to believe in a dream identity that she had invented for herself out of Wish? Did I want to become seriously involved with such a person? I did not know. I had no time to think it out I was on army time.

But suddenly, late in 1945, I
knew
. I was being transferred from Los Angeles to the Signal Corps post on Long Island, New York, and I would be very close to 20 West 71st Street and to the “socialites” named Aida and Minna Lester. The play that I had in mind was one thing, but the lesser one, I decided. If I could reach the real Aida and Minna Everleigh, and from them secure the rights to their story for my play, that would be fine. More interesting to me, to that persistent curiosity built into every writer, was the desire to know firsthand more about those remarkable and legendary sisters, those sweet relics of the bawdy past.

And so, shortly after my arrival in New York, on my first free Sunday—December 16, 1945—I sat down at the desk in my room in the Royalton Hotel on West 44th Street and addressed myself to “My dear Minna Lester.” I had made my decision. I would join their game, on their terms.