The Last Madam

First time in paperback: "Wonderful...Re-creates a little slice of a life otherwise devoured by time. "-New York Times Book Review. In 1916, at age fifteen, Norma Wallace arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legenda [...]
Visa längre beskrivning

First time in paperback: "Wonderful...Re-creates a little slice of a life otherwise devoured by time. "-New York Times Book Review. In 1916, at age fifteen, Norma Wallace arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was arrested at last in 1962. Shortly before she died in 1974, she taperecorded her memories-the scandalous stories of a powerful woman who had the city's politicians in her pocket and whose lovers included the twenty-five-year-old boy next door, whom she married when she was sixty-four. Combining those tapes with original research, Christine Wiltz chronicles not just Norma's rise and fall but also the social history of New Orleans, thick with the vice and corruption that flourished thereand, like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Philistines at the Hedgerow, resurrects a vanished secret world.