Sin in the Second City Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  State Steet...

  Author’s Note: The Girls Who Disappeared

  Cast of Characters

  Photos

  Prologue: Angels of the Line

  PART ONE

  THE SCARLET SISTERS EVERLEIGH

  Striped Skunk and Wild Onions

  Another Uncle Tom’s Cabin

  Getting Everleighed

  The Demon of Lust Lies in Wait

  Lovely Little Lies

  The Stories Everyone Knew

  Lords and Ladies of the Levee

  Great in Religion, Great in Sin

  Knowing Your Balzac

  Invocation

  Millionaire Playboy Shot–Accident or Murder?

  PART TWO

  FLESH AND BONE, BODY AND SOUL

  Midnight Toil and Peril

  Ultra Décolleté and Other Evils

  The Brilliant Entrance to Hell Itself

  The Tragedy of Mona Marshall

  Men and Their Baser Mischiefs

  Dispatch from the U.S. Immigration Commission

  More Immoral Than Heathen China

  The Organizer

  It Don’t Never Get Good Until Three in the Morning

  Dispatch from the U.S. Immigration Commission

  Judgment Days

  Have You a Girl to Spare?

  Dispatch from the U.S. Immigration Commission

  So Many Nice Young Men

  Immoral Purposes, Whatever Those Are

  PART THREE

  FIGHTING FOR THE PROTECTION OF OUR GIRLS

  Millionaire Playboy Dead–Morphine or Madam?

  Girls Going Wrong

  A Lost Soul

  The Social Evil in Chicago

  Painted, Peroxided, Bedizened

  You Get Everything in a Lifetime

  Dangerous Elements

  Just How Wicked

  Fallen Is Babylon

  Little Lost Sister

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  Illustration and Photograph Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOR LAURA DITTMAR, MY SCARLET SISTER

  Chicago, a gaudy circus beginning with

  the two-bit whore in the alley crib.

  —THEODORE DREISER

  State Street in Chicago, circa 1907.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE GIRLS WHO DISAPPEARED

  In 1905, a woman named Katherine Filak said her first and final good-bye to the red-roofed cottages and soaring church spires of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and boarded a boat to America. Twenty-one years old and a devout Catholic, she prayed about what lay ahead: work as a domestic and abuse from strange neighborhood men, who tricked her into reciting English curse words. She raised six children, my grandmother among them, and experienced a heartbreak not uncommon to immigrants at the turn of the last century. A sibling who accompanied her on the trip from Europe ventured to Chicago and was never seen again.

  This sibling’s disappearance became her lone defining trait—my great-grandmother, I’m told, refused to speak of her—and over time I’ve imagined this lost relative’s face, retraced unknown steps, filled in the blanks of her life by probing the city that might have taken it. Chicago in that year experienced a particularly brutal crime wave; not since a mild-mannered killer stalked the grounds of the 1893 World’s Fair had its citizens experienced such fear. “A reign of terror is upon the city,” declared the Tribune. “No city in time of peace ever held so high a place in the category of crime-ridden, terrorized, murder-breeding cities as is now held by Chicago.”

  The daily tallies of muggings, rapes, and homicides were troublesome enough, but a new threat—unfamiliar, and therefore especially menacing—prepared to creep through Chicago. Young girls stepped from trains into a city steeped in smoke and sin—a “stormy, husky, brawling” city, as Carl Sandburg so affectionately wrote—and vanished without warning or word. Stories abounded, growing more detailed and honed with each retelling. Predatory men met these girls at depots. They professed love at first sight, promised work and shelter and protection. Instead these girls were drugged, robbed of their virtue by professional rapists, and sold to Levee madams, and were dead within five years.

  Most of the brothels in the city’s thriving vice district were indeed wicked, block upon block of dingy, anonymous, twenty-five-cent cribs, but one, in remarkably short order, became as well known as Chicago itself. In these pages I tell the story of the Everleigh Club and its iconic madams, their libertine clients and bitter rivalries, and their battle to preserve the empire they so lovingly built. I want to stress that this is a work of nonfiction; every character I describe lived and breathed, if not necessarily thrived, on the Levee’s mean streets. Anything that appears in quotation marks, dialogue or otherwise, comes from a book, archival collection, article, journal, or government report.

  Before opening their world-famous Club, the Everleigh sisters, too, were girls who disappeared, and they reconstructed their histories at a time when America was updating its own. To that end, this book is also about identity, both personal and collective, and the struggle inherent in deciding how much of the old should accompany us as we rush, headlong, into the new.

  KAREN ABBOTT

  * * *

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE MADAMS

  MINNA EVERLEIGH: The outspoken co-proprietor of the Everleigh Club handled promotion, disciplined courtesans, and mingled in the parlors with her “boys.”

  ADA EVERLEIGH: The quiet, elder Everleigh sister interviewed prospective courtesans, balanced the books, and was considered the brains of the operation.

  VIC SHAW: The established queen of the Levee until the Everleighs’ arrival resented the sisters’ success and did everything in her power to ruin them.

  ZOE MILLARD: A prominent madam in Vic Shaw’s league who shared her dislike for the Everleigh sisters.

  THE LORDS OF THE LEVEE

  BATHHOUSE JOHN COUGHLIN: This powerful alderman of Chicago’s First Ward ordered graft payments, threw an annual ball for denizens of the Levee, and wrote famously awful poetry.

  HINKY DINK KENNA: Bathhouse John’s diminutive, quiet First Ward partner, his shrewd political machinations kept Chicago’s Democratic machine running smoothly and profitably.

  IKE BLOOM: The clownish yet menacing owner of the notorious Freiberg’s Dance Hall, he organized graft payments on behalf of the aldermen and was a frequent visitor to the Everleigh Club.

  ED AND LOUIS WEISS: The Everleighs’ neighbors on either side hatched several schemes to lure clients away from the Club–and ultimately became the sisters’ greatest threat.

  BIG JIM COLOSIMO: A prominent First Ward henchman and brothel keeper, Big Jim was the predecessor to Al Capone. He was also a close friend of the Everleigh sisters despite the fact that he ran an interstate white slavery ring.

  MAURICE VAN BEVER: Influential French brothel keeper and Big Jim’s partner in the white slavery ring.

  THE MINISTERS

  ERNEST BELL: A reverend who opened his Midnight Mission in 1904, he preached against segregated vice districts and held nightly open-air sermons outside the Everleigh Club.

  MELBOURNE BOYNTON: The pastor of the Lexington Avenue Baptist Church and one of Bell’s main “saints” helped to escalate the war against the Levee district.

  DEAN SUMNER: Head of the flock at the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul and chairman of the Chicago Vice Commission.

  THE POLITICIANS

  CLIFFORD ROE: The young, ambitious Chicago state’s attorney used a note tossed from a brothel window
to launch America’s obsession with white slavery–and his own career.

  EDWIN SIMS: The U.S. district attorney in Chicago entered the fray by raiding French brothels in the Levee and persuaded the federal government to take action.

  JAMES R. MANN: A U.S. congressman and sponsor of the White Slave Traffic Act, otherwise known as the Mann Act.

  MAYOR EDWARD DUNNE: Chicago’s Democratic mayor from 1905 to 1907, Dunne faced the public’s growing anxiety about dance halls, nickel theaters, saloons, and the “social evil.”

  MAYOR FRED BUSSE: Dunne’s successor, a Republican who served from 1907 to 1911, was sympathetic to saloon keepers, and was eager to stay on good terms with Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John.

  MAYOR CARTER HARRISON II: The son of Chicago’s favorite mayor, Harrison, a Democrat, succeeded Busse in 1911 and planned to protect the Levee district–a task that proved more difficult than he expected.

  * * *

  Minna Everleigh

  Ada Everleigh.

  PROLOGUE

  ANGELS OF THE LINE

  1905

  As soon as the bullet pierced Marshall Field Jr.—the only son and heir of Marshall Field, founder of the splendorous department store, the man who famously said, “Give the lady what she wants”—Chicago made the story even bigger than it really was. Amplifying things, good or bad, was what Chicago did best.

  In the days following November 22, 1905, rumors about the shooting spun through the city’s streets. The fruit cart vendors whispered to the newsboys who shouted to the hansom drivers who murmured to the society women who were overheard by servants who gossiped with bartenders who bantered with pimps and whores and drunks. Did they hear the wound was just like the one that killed President McKinley? Tore through his abdomen, caught a corner of the liver, grazed the stomach, and skidded to a halt outside the spinal cord—lucky for Marshall Junior. He was in his bedroom at the Prairie Avenue mansion, home alone with his son and the hired help, when a hollow boom split the air. A cry followed, thin and drawn out like taffy.

  The family nurse and the butler scaled the stairs in flying jumps and found him slumped in a chair, wan face seeking cover in the curve of his shoulder. Goodness, the blood—it was everywhere. Veining across his shirt, fissuring down the wall. His automatic revolver came to rest on the tip of his shoe. He tried to straighten, treaded the air as if it were a lolling wave. “I shot myself,” Marshall Junior said. “Accidentally.”

  But it couldn’t have been an accident. Who really believed that Field dropped his gun, and that the trigger could slam an armchair with sufficient force to explode a cartridge? A reporter at the Chicago Daily News said it was impossible—he took an identical, unloaded revolver and hurled it several times to the floor. Not once did the thing go off. Marshall Junior must have pointed the gun at himself; it was the only way. And a suicide attempt made sense. He had suffered a nervous breakdown the year prior, in 1904—this act could be a decisive sequel.

  No, what really happened was sadder than suicide, more pitiful than a nervous breakdown: Field had sneaked off to the Levee district for a tryst at the Everleigh Club. So what if he was married, the father of three—he had money and status and power, and men with those things always went to the Everleigh Club. A prostitute shot him, maybe in the Gold Room or the Japanese Parlor or beneath the glass chandeliers suspended like stalactites from the ceiling. Later, as the sun deserted the sky and the streets gripped the fog, those Scarlet Sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, ordered his unconscious body smuggled out and planted in his home.

  Those Scarlet Sisters heard all about their alleged hand in the incident, how they stood idly by while one of their harlots blasted the poor man, then directed the covert removal of his bloody body.

  “We are a funeral parlor,” Ada Everleigh said, “instead of a resort.”

  Her younger sister, Minna, gave a blunt, trumpet-burst laugh. Ada parsed her words as if they were in limited supply, but damned if she didn’t load each one before it left her mouth.

  The Chicago rumor mill operated as predictably as the Everleighs’ regular clients; no matter how gossip began, or where it twisted and turned, it ended up, invariably, at the doorstep of 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street. Nonsense, every bit of it. The sisters had decided long ago to permit no stains, blood or otherwise, on their house.

  Neither would the Everleighs add their own voices to the din. Discretion paid—but also had its price.

  Even Chicago’s newspapers kept their distance from the speculation for fear that Marshall Field Sr. would pull his advertising dollars. He certainly wouldn’t appreciate reports that his son, currently lying in critical condition at Mercy Hospital, had visited a whorehouse, even one as dignified as the Everleigh Club. Still, journalists staked out the sisters all week, trying to score something—anything—that would be safe to print. Minna and Ada waited in the front parlor, expecting yet another newsman.

  All thirty Everleigh Club harlots remained upstairs in their boudoirs, preparing for the night ahead, running razors under their arms, down and between their legs—clients didn’t have a smooth woman at home. They packed themselves with sponges, made certain they had enough douche, checked cabinets for the little black pills that, along with three days of hot baths, usually “brought a girl around” from any unwanted condition. They yanked and tied one another’s corsets, buttoned up gowns made of slippery silk, unrolled black stockings over long legs. Hair was wound tight with pins or left to fall in tousled waves, depending on the preference of their regulars. A dab of gasoline—the newest fad in perfume, if you couldn’t afford an automobile—behind the ears, across the wrists and ankles, between the breasts. Eyes rimmed in black and lashes painted, standing stiffer than the prongs of a fork. Each courtesan had a name chosen by her peers. Once she entered this life—the life—she discarded all remnants of the one she’d left behind.

  Minna navigated the silk couches, the easy chairs, and the grand piano, the statues of Greek goddesses peering through exotic palms, the bronze effigies of Cupid and Psyche, the imported rugs that swallowed footsteps. She had an odd walk, a sort of caterpillar bend and hump, pause and catch up, as the poet Edgar Lee Masters, a friend and frequent client, described it. She came to rest before a wide-paneled window and swallowed, her throat squeezing behind a brooch of diamonds thick as a clenched fist. Holding back the curtain, she surveyed Dearborn Street.

  Arc lamps stretched up and out, unfurling bold ribbons of light. The air was thick and yellow, as if the varnish manufacturer on the next block had slathered his product across the sky. Visibility was reduced to the next street, or the next corner, or sometimes just the next step. No matter: Minna didn’t have to see the Levee district to know what it was up to.

  Panders, an underworld term that served as both verb and noun, were outfitted in dandy ties and jaunty hats, lurking in corners and alleys. Eugene Hustion and his wife, Lottie, the “King and Queen of the Cokies,” weighed thirty pounds of cocaine and half as much morphine. Soon their salesmen would make the rounds. Funny thing was, Minna knew, Lottie was a college graduate who spoke five languages, and in her spare time composed music and painted portraits.

  Down the street, at the House of All Nations, johns lined up at the $2 and $5 entrances—too bad the suckers didn’t know that the same girls worked both sides. Blind men cranked hurdy-gurdies, spinning tangled reams of melody. The air reeked of sweat and blood and swine entrails, drifting up from the Union Stock Yards just a few blocks southwest. Mickey Finn hawked his eponymous “Special” at his Dearborn Street bar. Merry Widdo Kiddo, the famous peep-show girl, warmed up her booth, breasts twirling like pinwheels behind the glass. Levee piano players—“professors,” they were called—cracked their knuckles before plucking out the hiccuped notes of ragtime.

  Minna watched a figure turn the corner of 21st Street onto Dearborn and waited for the solemn gong of the bell. She patted the dark, frizzed coil of hair at the nape of her neck and reached for the door. From knuckle to wrist
to elbow, waist to bodice to neck, she was ablaze in jewels. Diamonds played with the parlor light, tossing tiny rainbows against the wall.

  “How is my boy?” she said, her customary greeting for every caller.

  The boy this time was Frank Carson of the Chicago Inter Ocean, a once respected newspaper that had declined in recent years. Minna invited him inside with a slow-motion sweep of her arm. He was no stranger to the Everleigh Club; every reporter in the city knew its phone number, Calumet 412, by heart.

  Carson saw precisely what the Everleighs wished him to see, and knew what they wished him to know. Both sisters had a prim, close-lipped smile, genuine but guarded, as if a full-on grin risked conveying complexities best left unmined. The younger one, Minna, was the talker. She spoke in clipped, staccato sentences, shooting words from her mouth—it was so good to see her boy, it had been far too long since his last visit, he should stop by more often. She broke occasionally for a frenetic drag of a gold-tipped, perfumed cigarette. Ada stood next to her sister, quiet. Her eyes were darker, her hair lighter, her figure fuller. Her hands were wind-chill cold.

  Frank Carson knew they ran a clean place with clean girls; their house doctor never forged the reports. He knew that Sunday was “Beau Night” at the Everleigh Club, when girls were permitted to see their sweethearts, to accept flowers and hold hands, to experience all the thrills of dating as if they lived in homes. He knew there had been a shooting at the Club two years earlier, an unfortunate incident that was no fault of the sisters’. He knew the Everleighs brought a bit of decency to a profession rife with shame.

  He knew Prince Henry of Prussia had visited the Club three years earlier and sipped champagne from a courtesan’s shoe. He knew they had the ear and respect of the most powerful men not only in the Levee district, but in the entire city: Big Jim Colosimo, Ike Bloom, Bathhouse John, and Hinky Dink Kenna. He’d heard they’d come up from Virginia or Kentucky or a farm someplace in Indiana—Minna insisted that their southern accents were part of an act. They’d been married, the story went, to vicious, violent men. He knew a fellow Chicago journalist, Jack Lait, declared the sisters were “to pleasure what Christ was to Christianity.”