The Last Madam - A Life In The New Orleans Underworld (Paperback)

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, who she married when she was 70 and he was 29. Christine Wiltz used those tapes and interviewed Norma's former prostitutes and the men who frequented them to create The Last Madam, a chronicle of Norma's rise from a life of poverty to that of a wealthy underworld grande dame with powerful political connections who, when asked if there were any politicians she didn't have in her pocket, had to think a minute before answering, the President. This is also the social history of New Orleans over five decades, thick with the vice and corruption that flourished in the city's Old World atmosphere - and told with the steamy, seedy glamour that lived in New Orleans as nowhere else.