Free The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld by Chris Wiltz Page A

considered themselves married, but I didn’t.”
    Soon after Norma left her location above Pete Herman’s club in 1928, she married for the first time. On any legal paperwork filed over the years, however, she always named Pete as her first husband. Her closest friends didn’t know any different. It’s no wonder: “My first marriage was to Alex Zolman, a racetrack figure, although we’ll dismiss him because he didn’t play as long or important a part in my life as did the other four.” And she never said another word about him.
    Before the other four, though, it seemed as if the men she loved the most she didn’t marry. There were three of them, Andy Wallace first. The next two were her lovers during the ten years that Norma called the most glamorous period of her life.
    Near ten o’clock on a Sunday night, Norma and a coterie of her girls emerged from the shadowy streets of the French Quarter onto CanalStreet, which New Orleans businessmen had turned into the brightest, widest main street in the country in their effort to create a first-class, modern shopping district.
    To Norma’s right was the palatial Saenger Theatre; to her left was McCrory’s, the five-and-dime store with an Art Deco diner. Norma sometimes ate lunch in one of its booths lined with blue mirrors before a long afternoon of shopping. The stores where she was well known for large cash expenditures lined Canal Street almost to the Custom House near the Mississippi River. There were department stores, shoe stores, liquor stores, drugstores, and the furrier where she’d bought the mink she wore over her low-cut red dancing dress on this cold January night.
    Norma and the girls crossed the Canal Street neutral ground, their high heels skittering over its polished red-and-white terrazzo squares as they hurried to beat the streetcar rumbling down its tracks to the river. Burgundy Street, where they crossed, became University Place on the other side. The Meal-a-Minit’s sign, with its thousands of watts from incandescent bulbs, lit the corner in a blaze like high-noon sunlight. Half a block down a Phil Harris movie, Double or Nothing, played at the Orpheum. Across the street was the Roosevelt Hotel (now the Fairmont), where only a couple of years ago Huey Long had held court from a tenth-floor suite, and where the local politicos regularly convened. They sometimes called Norma to send girls, or drunkenly found their way to her house after one of their confabs.
    The lobby of the Roosevelt stretched a city block between University Place and Baronne Street. Its walls were mirrored and marbled, and gilded columns ran its length. Stylish women, wearing long dresses, hats with peacock feathers, and exotic furs (Norma spotted ocelot, fox, and mink) strolled arm in arm with men in tuxedos and sharp double-breasted suits. Others lounged on the velvet-upholstered sofas and chairs, smoking and chatting while they waited for the show at the Blue Room to begin.
    The Blue Room was the hottest nightclub in the city, and also one of the oldest in the country. It was a spacious room with a large dance floor under a midnight blue, star-studded sky, a padded circular bar, and candlelit tables both ringside and on terraces so the Blue Room Orchestra floor show was visible to all. Romantic, swank, and classy,it served the famous Ramos gin fizz and headlined such sizzling acts as the tango duo Enrica and Novello.
    But the headliner that January broke all attendance records. In 1936 Phil Harris was one of the most popular entertainers in the country. He had starred as himself in a 1933 film called So This Is Harris and won an Oscar for best comedy short subject. He was such a star that he played himself in two subsequent films.
    Norma, with her girls, was on her way to see him. At the stroke of ten she breezed through the big double doors to the nightclub, barely stopping to shrug out of her mink, which fell into the hands of the waiter following her. Heads turned as she