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The Last Madam: A Life In The New Orleans Underworld

Amazon.com Price:  $12.31 (as of 02/05/2019 13:02 PST- Details)

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Description

In 1916, at age fifteen, Norma Wallace arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was once arrested at last in 1962. In a while before she died in 1974, she tape—recorded her memories-the scandalous stories of a powerful woman who had the city’s politicians in her pocket and whose lovers included the twenty-five-year-old boy next door, whom she married when she was once sixty-four. Combining those tapes with original research, Christine Wiltz chronicles not just Norma’s rise and fall but also the social history of New Orleans, thick with the vice and corruption that flourished there—and, like Midnight within the Garden of Good and Evil and Philistines on the Hedgerow, resurrects a vanished secret world.

In truth, they referred to as themselves “landladies” in New Orleans, though that did not change the nature of their business: running houses of prostitution within the city’s wide-open French Quarter. Beginning in 1920, when she was once still in her teens, Norma Wallace managed a high-class bordello for an affluent and influential clientele, evading the police and asserting her sexual freedom “like a man” regardless of the nominal confines of several rickety marriages. Obsessive love for a man 39 years her junior and her first-ever jail term after all put Wallace out of the business within the mid-1960s, but her memories were still vivid and raunchy when she tape-recorded material for an autobiography within the two years before her suicide in 1974. Novelist Christine Wiltz makes good use of those recordings in an earthy narrative filled with great anecdotes, from how the name of Wallace’s dog became local slang for an out-of-town customer to the time an undertaker’s premises served as her temporary place of work. Wiltz also interviewed many of Wallace’s lovers and associates; she draws on popular journalism and scholarly monographs with equal acuity to flesh out Norma’s story. Her perceptive biography of a colorful and complex woman is equally satisfying as a social history of 20th-century New Orleans. –Wendy Smith

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