Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52881 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Actually, they called themselves "landladies" in New Orleans, though that didn't change the nature of their business: running houses of prostitution in the city's wide-open French Quarter. Beginning in 1920, when she was 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" despite the nominal confines of several rickety marriages. Obsessive love for a man 39 years her junior and her first-ever jail term finally put Wallace out of the business in the mid-1960s, but her memories were still vivid and raunchy when she tape-recorded material for an autobiography in 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 business. 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

From Publishers Weekly
Mystery 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 Wiltz, who makes excellent use of Norma's tape-recorded, unpublished memoirs (Norma died in 1974), understands that this tale is necessarily one of corruption and acquiescence in mid-century urban America: Norma could not have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.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Wiltz'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 citys 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 towns 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 subjects 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 Wallaces 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 Wallaces 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 Wiltzs 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 Wallaces own shoddy finery. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Good book and an Excellent Book if you are From New Orleans
New Orleans is one of the most visited cities in the USA. Even the casual visitor has been told the stories of prostitution and corruption in the majestic French Quarter. The story of Norma Wallace based in part on her audio taped autobiogaphy gives the present day reader the best look at what this life was really like. The writer is convincing, by naming names and places, that the world's oldest profession was almost respectible, even in the last half of the 20th century. The research done to write this book is amazing. The opinion you form of Norma, by the end of the book,is surprising. A good book and a must if you are familiar with New Orleans

Underside of the Underside
I was a young investigative reporter living in the French Quarter in the era Christine Wiltz writes about, and I saw it all -- the political payoffs, the crooked cops, the upscale whores and the spavined sluts, the overstuffed and pompous city fathers, the pimps and touts and junkies. What a rich mix it was! Wiltz, a native Orleanian, put the odor of pralines and boiled crawfish and "buster" crabs back in my nostrils for the first time in 50 years. She's caught the era perfectly, and with considerable writing skill. "The Last Madame" is as authentic as an open grave in the St. Louis Cemetery.

Colorful And Tragic
When the subject of this book shrugs off being shot in the ankle because she got a 7-carat diamond ring out of the affair, you know this is no ordinary person. Norma Wallace was one of the last Madams' of New Orleans. For more than 4 decades she ran her various houses that were the locations where young men were brought for their introduction to the carnal pleasures of adulthood, where actresses and actors frequently paid visits, and where a good percentage of politicians and law enforcement officers also passed some time. The book is not a glorification of what was at times a brutal existence. The book and the behavior of many is entertaining, but when reality becomes a bit too easy, incidents that were absolutely horrible brought reality back with great intensity.

This is a story of a woman who knew what she wanted at a very young age, and who by the 1920's was making 100,000 per year. To survive and thrive during changes in political landscapes she was not only an exceedingly shrewd businesswoman, she was also a grand manipulator of politicians, and law enforcement. She managed to fit in 5 marriages, a relationship with a nationally known gangster, and the creation of a wildly successful restaurant business in with all her other interests. This woman was one of the original practitioners of multitasking.

All of this came with a price, the same man who was a gangster might try to kill her one night, her jewelry that was valued at 70,000 decades ago and which she wore daily would make her a target. And for 40 years there was always some new rookie cop or politician that wanted to make his mark by closing her down.

The story is wild, amazing and true; the read is almost as fast paced as her life.