The Sunday Gentleman Page 8

  After that, except for exchanges of greeting cards on various holidays, this was the last communication I was to have from the Everleigh sisters. I was fully occupied in my efforts to make a living as a free-lance writer, and I neglected to continue my correspondence with Aida and Minna. I was unable to visit New York, as I had promised Minna I would, and so I had no opportunity to speak to them on the telephone.

  I kept meaning to write, and postponing it, and then, a year and a month after Minna Everleigh’s last letter to me, I learned that she was dead.

  I sent my heartfelt condolences to Aida. I added a written obituary to a number of others that had been published. Even though I had been born in Chicago after the Everleigh Club had closed its doors forever, and the sisters had left that city, I felt that I had been a part of their time and a small part of their lives. My father, my uncle, my closest male relatives had been, in their youth, in Chicago when the Everleigh sisters had also been young and renowned. These members of my family had seen or at least known of the celebrated millionaires’ bagnio when princes and senators, prizefight champions and authors had enjoyed the scaled-down gold piano and fancy cuspidors, the rich library and boudoirs, the thirty beautiful girls and the sisters themselves.

  I liked to believe that all of that glory and wonder had not been for our fathers and grandfathers alone. I had been one of the lucky ones to share a part of it. For I had known the Everleighs, too. True, I had known them four decades late, when they seemed to have become two characters out of Arsenic and Old Lace, when they had become pretenders named Lester, when they had become respectable clubwomen who belonged to ten women’s societies and lived in lonely dignity off Central Park in New York City. Yet, through them, by mail, by telephone, I had become intimate with their enemies, the “plotters of the South Side Levee,” with their affection for Byron and Shelley and de Maupassant, with their attitudes about women and race, with their genteel distaste for the bawdy, with their old Virginia background and family.

  I had known them, and now I missed them, missed the departed Minna and wondered what would happen to Aida, poor Aida, so alone.

  For me, it had been a memorable experience, that friendship with those two nice old ladies. Remembering them, I remembered a remark that Wilson Mizner, the inimitable wit, publicist, and gambler, had once made, and which has been widely quoted ever since. Said Mizner, “Always treat a whore like a lady—and a lady like a whore.”

  And so I knew this, finally, about my friends: No man ever had to treat the Everleigh sisters like ladies. Despite their place in history, they were Virginia ladies born, they were ladies in their Chicago youth, and they were two nice old ladies in New York at the time when they befriended an inquisitive and admiring writer and enlisted man from far away.

  WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

  I wrote fragments of the preceding memoir shortly after Minna Everleigh’s death in 1948, and only recently reworked these into their present form. I began writing this story, so to speak, during my Sundays. I wrote it for no one else. It was for myself, until now.

  To report what has happened since 1948, I must go back to the time of Minna Everleigh’s death, upon, which I have already remarked.

  Minna’s death was widely reported by the press, and it stripped away the pseudonym Lester after so many decades and left Aida and her to history as Everleigh forever. Minna died on September 16, 1948, and The New York Times gave her passing prominent display in a news story that I suspect she would have appreciated above all others. The story read:

  “Minna Everleigh, one-time owner with her sister, Ada, of the Everleigh Club, a Chicago landmark in the period from 1900 to 1911, died yesterday in the Park West Hospital, 170 West 76th Street, at the age of 70. She had been living in the city under an assumed name for more than 25 years.

  “The Everleigh Club, closed during the reform raid in 1911, was located on South Dearborn Street and drew its patronage from cattle barons, actors and royalty. It was known for its floor shows, its string music and its $100 ‘minimum’ evening charge.

  “Miss Everleigh and her sister, members of a prominent Virginia family, lived circumspectly and inconspicuously, their chief diversions being theatre-going and writing poetry. When the Club was closed, the sisters confided that they had made a million dollars and were planning to spend the rest of their lives as anonymously as possible—they wanted people to think that the Everleigh sisters were dead.”

  The New York Daily News mentioned that Minna left behind “several oil paintings, a gold piano and an estimated $100,000 worth of diamonds,” and recalled that Minna had remarked several years earlier, “I like to see old friends but not old customers.” Time magazine, headlining its obituary THE WAGES OF SIN, reported that the Everleigh Club had been “the most luxurious bordello which the U.S. ever saw,” and concluded, “Last week Minna died…a wealthy and dignified dowager. Ada sent her body to Virginia for a burial befitting a Southern gentlewoman.”

  I had conveyed, as I have said, my letter of condolence to Aida Everleigh, sent it to Aida Lester at the old address. I had no idea if she ever received it. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Then, three and a half months later, there came an airmail envelope made out to me. The return address read, “Aida Lester, 20 W. 71st St., New York, N.Y.” But the imprinted postmark, dated December 31, 1948, read, “Charlottesville, Va.” Inside I found an old-fashioned holiday greeting card bearing the legend, “Best Wishes for the New Year” and a bright print of a bubbling champagne glass. Inside the card, written in blue ink, was the following message: “New Years Eve 1948. We are wishing for you a Happy and Prosperous 1949. From our Family to yours—Cordially Aida and Minna Lester.”

  That was ail, and that was the last I ever heard from Aida Everleigh. But it made her bereavement, and her future, clear to me. To the unimaginative outside world, Minna might be considered as dead. To Aida, she would never die, and, for Aida herself, she would continue to be “Cordially Aida and Minna Lester.”

  After receiving Aida’s card, my mind kept returning to Minna’s death, and I decided to write a brief but personal remembrance of Minna for the people in show business, whom Minna had always followed and for whom she had felt (except for her loathing of actors) an affinity. In those days, a friend of mine, Irving Hoffman, a celebrated public relations man, cartoonist, intimate of the greats, conducted a lively column “Tales of Hoffman” in The Hollywood Reporter, a daily trade journal dispensing information to people in the motion picture and theatrical business. Hoffman had often asked me to write guest columns for him, and from time to time I had done such columns, and now I wanted to do one more. I wrote my farewell to Minna Everleigh for Hoffman’s column, and he published it. I did not realize that it would bring the modern-day successor to the Everleighs into my life, but it did.

  A few days after my column appeared, I received a telephone call from a person who had a deep, husky male voice. The voice, I learned in a moment, belonged to a female, and the caller was none other than Polly Adler. Of course, I recognized her name at once. Polly Adler had been a front-page figure between 1920 and 1944 when, with a handful of attractive girls who worked in a variety of magnificent apartments in New York City, she had been America’s leading call-house madam. Her friends—one or two of them also were clients—had ranged from pugilists like Mickey Walker to gangsters like Al Capone, Frank Costello, and Dutch Schultz to entertainment personalities like Wallace Beery and Robert Benchley. Driven out of Manhattan in 1944, she had spent the last five years in retirement in a middle-class bungalow in Burbank, California, while she industriously attempted to acquire a college degree by attending evening classes at Los Angeles City College.

  Now, it appeared, Polly Adler was completing an autobiography about her adventures as a purveyor of pleasure. In one section of her book, she had made passing reference to her foremost predecessors, the Everleigh sisters. She was not satisfied with this section, and wanted to enlarge it, but not until she read my guest colu
mn in The Hollywood Reporter had she known how to get the necessary information. What she wanted from me was permission to use a few paragraphs of my column to expand her own section on the Everleighs. I agreed to this at once. When Polly Adler’s book, A House Is Not a Home, finally was published in 1953, it was a best seller and a national sensation. Acknowledgment of my own minor contribution to the Everleigh saga I found in a footnote on page 314. Polly Adler had written:

  “Until Minna’s death, in 1948, only a half-dozen trusted friends knew that the sisters were living the life of respectable clubwomen at a home they owned near Central Park in New York. I am indebted to Irving Wallace, one of the few who knew their secret, for this information.”

  After that, Polly Adler, a pudgy, Jewish middle-aged lady with a passion for knowledge, and I became fast friends. Often, I would sit in her living room, studying her voluminous scrapbooks, gorging myself on her delicious homemade chopped chicken liver, while she questioned me about the profession of writing and about the Everleighs. And when I was not eating, I would steadily interrogate her about her life as a madam—the unprintable and libelous parts that were not included in her book—and she would discourse freely on her girls, her famous clients, her philosophy about the sexual lives of men and women.

  Several times, Polly Adler sought my advice on the second book that she was in the process of preparing, a sequel to A House Is Not a Home, a book about the prostitutes who had worked for her and what had happened to each of them. Once, I know, she traveled across the United States with a tape recorder, looking up the girls—one had become a narcotics addict, another the respectable wife of a wealthy realtor—and putting down their stories on tape. But this provocative book, like Minna Everleigh’s own, was never to be published. On another occasion, Polly informed me with great glee of a marvelous evening she had just enjoyed. Alfred C. Kinsey, renowned throughout the world for his sex surveys. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, had visited Los Angeles and had wanted to meet her. And she had wanted to meet him. She had invited him over for a Jewish dinner, and he had accepted immediately. “A wonderful man, that Dr. Kinsey,” she told me. “We had so much in common to discuss. But you know, I found him surprisingly prim and puritanical. One thing I will say for him. Just like you, Irving, he never left a crumb of the chopped chicken liver!”

  Polly Adler followed my career as avidly as I had once followed hers. When I published my second book, a collective biography of American eccentrics and nonconformists, Polly bought a dozen copies, asked me to inscribe them, and then she wrote me:

  “Thanks for autographing the books for my friends. Hustling for The Square Pegs is a pleasure. Too bad my time is limited. Can’t do an extensive hustling job comparable to the old days.

  “Your book rates it! I loved it!—Especially Victoria Wood-hull [a former prostitute, advocate of free love and equal rights for women, who ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1872]—what a dame! Lucky for me she wasn’t around in my day. I couldn’t buck such competition.”

  One of the last times I heard from Polly Adler—just a few years before her untimely death in June of 1962—was on the occasion of the publication of my novel. The Chapman Report. The book told the story of the effects of the visit of a university sex survey team on a group of women living in a suburb of Los Angeles. Polly read it in one sitting, and telephoned me in a state of great excitement. “Irving,” she exclaimed, “I adored it! Where in the hell did you pick up all that information? Why, I’ll be damned, but you know more about sex than I do!” I demurred to the literary madam, but she went on, “Irving, every woman should read this book. I’m sending copies to all my old girls, and some of my old competitors.” I thanked her. Then after a contemplative pause, she said, “I’d like to have sent a copy to poor old Aida Everleigh. Too bad, but maybe what happened was for the best, what with Minna so long gone.” I agreed that it was too bad about Aida, and I knew in my heart that what had happened had been for the best.

  For earlier in that year, after over eleven years without her sister, Aida Everleigh had died. She was eighty-four years old when she died on January 3, 1960, although one Chicago newspaper ungallantly made her ninety-four, and The New York Times made her ninety-three.

  The news of Aida’s passing was not as widely reported as Minna’s had been. The Everleighs’ old reporter friend and Boswell, Charles Washburn, learned of her death and wrote the primary story for the Chicago Tribune, and almost all other obituaries were based on his story.

  Washburn’s account, which appeared in the Tribune of January 6, 1960, began, “Ada Everleigh, the senior half of the famed Everleigh sisters and one of the most notorious madams of all time, was buried secretly Tuesday in a grave next to her sister, Minna, in a small Virginia cemetery not far from Washington, D.C.” Then, Washburn’s news story went on, “Unknown for nearly 50 years in life, she had requested to remain unknown in death. Only a few relatives attended the services. Minna died in New York City, Sept. 16, 1948.” Next, the story revived some of the gaudy Everleigh Club’s history, then reported, “After Minna’s death, Ada returned to her native Virginia. Ada died last Sunday of old age, but no word reached this reporter until Tuesday. What few pictures she had were sent recently to the Chicago Sunday Tribune for safe keeping. Other evidence of her identity was long since destroyed.” There was generous mention of the girls of long ago. “Everleigh Club sirens wore evening gowns and were properly introduced to the guests. The prices were $25 and up for going up the mahogany staircases. This, remember, in an age of nickel beers and 10 cent whiskey.” And finally, one of the senior Everleigh’s witticisms was memorialized. As the Everleigh Club closed its doors for the last time, Aida had made a farewell speech to the personnel, and her last words were “We are going from bawd to worse—retirement.”

  There would be no bottle of champagne in the days before next New Year’s Eve at 20 West 71st Street—or at a certain house in Virginia.

  I wondered what had happened to Aida’s gold piano. And I wondered what had become of Minna’s manuscript, “Poets, Prophets and Gods.” And then, I wondered who in New York City now had the telephone number, Endicott 2-9970.

  3

  The Amps

  The army captain had assured me, just before I left on the trip early that winter, that I would not have to look at surgery. “No operations, nothing of the sort,” he had said. “I can’t stand them, either. They make me vomit. No. This has only to do with artificial limbs. The limbs themselves, see?”

  But when, after twenty hours on the train, I reached the dismal Terminal Station in Atlanta, I knew everything about this assignment was going to be bad. I had expected, somehow, that it would be a sunshiny day, but now outside it was dirty gray and the rain was slashing down and people were fringed unhappily around the depot.

  I went into the cafeteria, had some milk and toast, then figured it was late enough in the morning to call. I telephoned the hospital but the colonel wasn’t in yet. He had given me his residence number, so I phoned there and his wife answered. He had just left. Was I the sergeant from New York? Well, he had tried hard to find me a room, and thought that he had one at the Briarcliff. I said thanks.

  I called the Briarcliff and they had something for me at five dollars and a half a day, and I thought: Christ, five-fifty a day when the army is paying me two dollars a day for quarters. But I took it.

  It was still raining. There were plenty of cabs at the depot curb, different from New York. The cabs were informal, without yellow paint and skylights, and the drivers didn’t wear those caps. I got into the first cab. The driver was an angular-faced, unshaven Southern boy. He asked where to, and I told him, and he said, “That’s four miles.” I said I couldn’t help it. He asked, “Are you new here?” I said yes. He started the car. He said, “This is the old part of town. The depot is in the old part.” I accepted the apology. We drove up the hill and away from the old part.

  He settled back, obse
rving again my uniform in his rear-view mirror. “Furlough?”

  I said no, then I thought I’d tell him and impress him, so I said, “I’m a writer from the Signal Corps. I’m going to be at Lawson Hospital for a few weeks gathering material for a movie.”

  “On the amps?”

  “Yes.”

  He was impressed. “Will it be in the movie theaters?”

  I wondered what he would think if I told him that the working title of our movie was Construction and Use of Provisional Prostheses. But I said no, it was only a training film to be shown to specialists.

  After that, he was disinterested.

  At the Briarcliff—“Atlanta’s Finest Hotel”—I promptly dispensed with my one obligatory task. I jotted messages on a half-dozen postcards, the phony, planned kind expected by friends from a Yankee on his first visit to Georgia—“I have arrived safely with my typewriter and carpetbag.”

  With that out of my system, I inquired how to reach Law-son General Hospital and was told it was fourteen miles out in the country. I caught a rickety trolley on Ponce de Leon Avenue, and when I asked the elderly lady behind me where I got off to transfer, she replied that she had lived in Atlanta twenty-five years but wanted to die in Long Beach, California. She had visited Long Beach last year, during the summer, and when people learned she was from Georgia they always asked when Georgia was going to join the Union. “I found out that was a joke,” she said, “so I always laughed with them.”

  I asked her where I got off to transfer. She said where West Peachtree meets East Peachtree, and even in Long Beach everyone had heard of Peachtree Street. I thanked her, and when I rose to leave, she reminded me, loudly, not to forget that this was Southern hospitality. “We give our time to everyone. We have plenty of time, but no money.”