Displaying 1 of 1 2000 Format: Book Author: Wiltz, Chris. Title: The last madam : a life in the New Orleans underworld / Christine Wiltz. Publisher, Date: New York : Faber and Faber, [2000] ©2000 Description: 244 pages , 8 unnumbered pages of plates : photographs ; 24 cm illustration photograph graph Subjects: Wallace, Norma, -1974. Prostitution -- Louisiana -- New Orleans -- History. Prostitutes -- Louisiana -- New Orleans -- Biography. Notes: 044592 ; *044593 LCCN: 99043956 ISBN: 0571199542 9780571199549 Other Number: 42295906 System Availability: 2 # System items in: 2 # Local items: 2 # Local items in: 2 Current Holds: 0 Place Request Add to My List Expand All | Collapse All Availability Fiction/Biography Profile Genre NonFictionHistorySociology Topics MadamsProstitutesProstitutionWomen-owned businessesAmerican historyCrime Setting New Orleans, Louisiana - South (U.S.) Time Period 1920s-1960s -- 20th century Large Cover Image Trade Reviews Publishers Weekly ReviewMystery and nonfiction writer Wiltz (Glass House, etc.) offers an affecting portrayal of the woman who for 40 years ran the last successful high-class brothel in New Orleans, and of her vanished demimonde. Born into poverty in 1901, Norma Wallace became a streetwalker in her teens, but by the early 1920s had decided that a more comfortable, profitable living lay in being a "landlady"--running a discreet, lavish, politically protected house of prostitution. Shrewd and ambitious--and a strict madam--she quickly became an underworld force within the wide-open New Orleans of the 1920s-1940s, enjoying numerous romances along the way with a Capone-linked gangster, then-blind champion bantamweight Pete Herman and entertainer Phil Harris, among others. Norma's first serious arrest came only in 1962, and it sped her retirement a few years later. Wiltz, who makes excellent use of Norma's tape-recorded, unpublished memoirs (Norma died in 1974), understands that this tale is necessarily one of corruption and acquiescence in mid-century urban America: Norma could not have prospered without the ritualized, baroque corruption of local law enforcement as well as the town's leading economic lights and political figures, who often checked their pious selves at Norma's door. Wiltz thus elevates a sometimes impeccably assembled historical narrative above its elementary bawdy elements into something more elegant and fragile: the resurrection of a secret world, like those uncovered by Luc Sante and James Ellroy. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reservedBooklist ReviewNorma Wallace was the queen of the French Quarter madams, presiding over hugely lucrative, high-class bordellos favored by the New Orleans elite and visiting celebrities from 1920 through 1964. Wiltz, a New Orleans mystery writer and aficionado of the city's seamier side, based her vivid chronicle on Wallace's tape-recorded reminiscences, but she places the saga of Wallace's rise from abject poverty to wealth and power within an alluringly atmospheric history of the city's underworld. Shrewd and adaptable, Wallace always stayed ahead of the game, protected by her customers--gangsters, politicians, judges, and cops--and her loyal employees. Glamorous in her tailored suits and signature dark glasses, she married and divorced often, kept young men as lovers, and relished her celebrity status into her seventies, when she confronted old age with the same chutzpah with which she always faced adversity, and put an end to her now legendary life. Wiltz's anecdote-rich portrait of the invincible Wallace fulfills her compelling subject's dream of being remembered as sexy, tough, daring, and successful. --Donna SeamanKirkus ReviewWiltz's biography of Norma Wallace, proprietor of New Orleans's longest continuously operating bordello, exposes the madam's sordid tricks of the trade, yet somehow manages to strip the most titillating frills away from her story. Wallace, learning early in life that sex could pay for many things she otherwise couldn't afford, began her life of prostitution in Memphis at the ripe age of 14. With a savvy knack for self-preservation, she returned to her roots in New Orleans and established her own sporting house, beginning her celebrated career as a New Orleans sexual institution. The city's richest families patronized her establishment, as did movie stars, foreign dignitaries, and local officials. With such a range of clients, Wallace gained access to all the town's dirty secrets, making her more than a match for the many reform-minded district attorneys and mayors who hankered to shut her down. In addition to Wallace's professional life, Wiltz (Glass House, 1994, etc.) depicts her subject's search for domestic bliss with five husbands and many more lovers, including a former boxer punched nearly blind, a hit man for Al Capone, and a young Louisiana buck 39 years her junior who helped her try to go legitimate as the owner of a family restaurant. Wiltz also roams beyond Wallace's professional and romantic affairs to spotlight her state's infamously crooked politics, the licensed depravities of the French Quarter, and Wallace's humorous attempt to realize a pastoral ideal in the backwoods amid a community of righteous citizens. Though using Wallace's illustrious X-rated career to balance a wider range of Big Easy corruption should produce surefire pleasure, only the most ravenous consumers of brothel culture will stand for Wiltz's cutesy wordplay (almost 20 percent of the chapter titles pun on ``trick'') and pedestrian prose. The real shame here is that Wiltz dressed up her story so licentiously instead of borrowing more of Wallace's own shoddy finery. Summary "Sexy, shrewd Norma Wallace ran the last of the legendary houses of prostitution in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Two years before her death in 1974, she began to tape-record her memories - the salacious stories of a smart, glamorous, powerful woman whose scandalous life made front-page headlines, and whose husbands and lovers ran the gamut from movie stars to gangsters to the boy next door, thirty-nine years her junior, who became her fifth and final husband." "Christine Wiltz's The Last Madam is a chronicle of Norma's rise from a life of poverty to that of a wealthy grande dame - a New Orleans legend with powerful political connections who was given the keys to the city. She answered to no one, and surrendered only to an irrational, obsessive love, which ultimately led to her surprising and violent death. This is also the story of New Orleans over five decades, a story thick with the vice and corruption that flourished in the city's steamy Old World atmosphere."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Librarian's View Syndetics Unbound Displaying 1 of 1
