Call them Madam

In late February of 1902, when Prince Henry of Prussia arrived in New York City to accept the yacht built for his brother, Kaiser Wilhelm II, then ruler of Germany, he was asked by members of the press what sight in America he would most like to see. Bored reporters waited for the expected official reply: the White House, Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. Instead, Prince Henry answered, "The sight in America I would most like to see? I would like to visit the Everleigh Club in Chicago."

The members of the press were stunned with disbelief, then alive with delight. Thereafter, they took the prince to their bosoms. For as they knew, and the more sophisticated male population of the United States (and apparently Europe) knew, the Everleigh Club was neither an attraction ordinarily discussed openly nor was it a men's club in the ordinary sense. It was, as one periodical kindly pointed out, a club that "no one ever joined... or resigned from"; it was "a Chicago 'mustn't': a house of ill--but very great--fame."

After presenting the United States Government with a statue of Frederick the Great, Prince Henry received his gift from the United States Government in return. He was escorted to Chicago, and there, after depositing a wreath on the Lincoln monument, taking a guided tour of the Loop and suffering a reception at the Germania Club, he was granted his one wish. At midnight on March 3, 1902, Prince Henry of Prussia was the guest of honor at a great party--the local newspapers called it an "orgy"--given by the two Southern sisters who were the madams of the Everleigh Club, and their retinue of 30 beautiful and uninhibited hostesses.

It was a long and raucous night. Ten dancing girls, attired in fawnskins, wildly striking cymbals, amused the Prince while he solemnly discussed Schiller with Aida and Minna Everleigh, the proprietresses of the internationally renowned resort. Later in the proceedings, during a moment of high hilarity, the prince toasted the Kaiser (and the Everleighs) by drinking champagne from a girl's silver slipper, thereby popularizing a custom that would know its full flowering in the 1920s. For the prince, the occasion had been extraordinary and memorable. For the Everleigh sisters, the royal visit had been enjoyable--but routine.

During the nearly dozen years in which it flourished, the Everleigh Club rarely went a week without the appearance of some celebrity, either American or international. In the two years before Prince Henry's visit, and for almost a decade after, famous foreigners from every nation, after making their official rounds of the stockyards, lake front and municipal monuments, climaxed their sight-seeing with an evening in the Everleigh Club.

The club's popularity was well deserved, because few bordellos had ever existed, or existed then, that could compete with its opulence and lavish hospitality. In the time of its greatness, the Everleigh Club enjoyed constant comparison with other competing maisons de joie in America and abroad, but almost always to its own advantage. Typical among domestic competitors was The Castle in St. Louis, a three-story brick house managed by the plump and affable Negress Babe Connors, whose teeth were inlaid with diamonds. In this sporting house, Paderewski once accompanied the entertainers' bawdy songs on the piano, and in its rooms a Republican national platform was once written, and from within its walls Ta-ra-ra-ra Boom-de-ay swept on to plebeian acceptance. Here, the young girls, octoroons, "girls in long skirts, but without underclothing, would dance on a huge mirror." Typical among the Everleighs' foreign competitors was the House of All Nations in Budapest, a $100,000 house of ill fame on Andrassy Street, where a reception parlor featured "portraits of the women, nude, from which you made your choice. You then touched an electric bell push under the photograph and it was covered, so that the next visitor would know the lady was engaged."

Yet, despite such unique and imaginative competition, the Everleigh Club of Chicago, from its rise in 1900 to its fall in 1911, was the most renowned and unusual brothel in the world, overshadowing all similarly exotic establishments before and since, from Paris to Shanghai.

The founders of the Club--"the most famous madams in American history," the late Polly Adler called them--came from an old Welsh family that had settled in Virginia in 1679. The father of the Everleigh sisters was a successful and educated Kentucky attorney who spoke seven languages. Their mother counted Edgar Allan Poe among her ancestors. Of the children produced by this couple--there were at least five, two sons and three daughters--the most prominent were to be Aida (although the press often referred to her as Ada), born in February 1876, and Minna, born in July 1878. As youngsters, the sisters showed great promise--Minna had begun reading books at the age of five--and when they were adolescents, they were enrolled in one of the finest Southern finishing schools, where both excelled in elocution and play-acting.

In their respect and affection for each other, the sisters were almost as close as Siamese twins. Sibling rivalry was not yet a part of the common language. And so when Minna, at the age of 19, fell in love with a Southern gentleman and was married to him in an expensive ceremony, it was not surprising that Aida, aged 21, married the Southern gentleman's brother shortly afterward. Minna's marriage was of brief duration. "Her husband was a brute--suspicious and jealous," observed a friend. A few weeks after the honeymoon, Minna left her husband and her old Kentucky home and fled to Washington, D.C. It was only natural that within a week, for the same reasons, Aida left her husband to join her sister.

Since the Everleigh sisters had inclinations toward theatrical careers, and were attractive, they auditioned for several stock companies going on the road, and were accepted by one such company. At the time, the younger of the sisters, Minna, was the more aggressive of the pair. She was a blue-eyed redhead, slender, lively and ambitious, with a keen business mind and a love of reading. Aida was a quiet and trim blonde, and she worshiped her younger sister.

For several months the sisters were on the road as actresses, touring the country from New York to Texas. This experience with their fellow troupers gave them an enduring aversion toward all actors. Years later, Minna would still say, "I don't like actors, as a rule. They all have a little of John Barrymore in them, all of them assuming a hundred different guises." Finally, disenchanted by the exhausting and uncomfortable life of the road-show player, and discouraged by the lack of chances for advancement, they began to look about for a more stable and ladylike means of existence. Then a series of events occurred that would soon cast them in new roles.

En route to appearances at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, they learned that their father had died and left them an inheritance of $35,000. While wondering if they could become independent by investing this money in a different field, they overheard an actress friend one day drop a remark that gave them the idea for a business. The actress had complained that her parents considered the stage no better than "a den of iniquity" and the career of actress no better than that of a prostitute or madam. Although the Everleigh sisters joked about it at first, they soon began to discuss more seriously the possibility of investing their inheritance in a career which, though it was considered no more respectable than acting, might nevertheless be far more profitable.

Before investigating this new business, however, they decided to meet more people and learn what else was possible. In Omaha, they quit their theatrical troupe and determined to become a part of the city's community life. Using family connections, they got themselves invited to dinners and soirees in some of Omaha's better homes. But their beauty and gaiety were not appreciated by their married hostesses. Soon they found themselves ostracized by the upper-class wives, and Minna began to speak darkly of avenging herself on them by establishing a home that their traducers' husbands would be only too glad to visit.

But it was not alone a desire to even the score with a handful of snobbish wives that turned the Everleigh girls to prostitution. According to one who was to become their closest friend and confidant, Charles (continued on page 180)Call Them Madam(continued from page 118) Washburn, a police reporter on the Chicago Tribune in that period, what turned the Everleighs to their real career was their deep bitterness toward males in general. "It is doubtful if Minna and Ada Everleigh ever forgave the brutal treatment they had received from their husbands," wrote Washburn in an early biography of the sisters; "theirs was a stored-up bitterness toward all males from which they could not escape. Even though they refused to admit it, their every action indicated a score to be settled. The way they studied men, their insight into the whims of men and their determination to make men pawns in their parlor were the antics of the spider and the fly."

In Omaha, Minna Everleigh made a hasty but shrewd study of the attractions available to customers attending the mammoth two-million-dollar Trans-Mississippi Exposition, and she found these attractions limited indeed. Determining to improve upon the amusements available, she bargained for and purchased a brothel that was doing poorly but was situated near the exposition grounds. With what remained of their inheritance, she enhanced the run-down house of prostitution by adding new interior decorations, the best of foods and wines, and the most attractive and talented of females, many of them recruited from among road-show actresses she had met. Then she and Aida threw open their doors.

The big spenders, attending the Exposition in droves, quickly found their way to the Everleigh boudoirs. By the time the exposition ended, Minna and Aida had increased their capital worth from $35,000 to $75,000, a considerable sum for two young girls at any time, but a fortune at the turn of the century.

With the closing of the Exposition, the Everleighs realized that they had lost their more affluent clientele. Big money men, among the natives of Omaha, were too few. So the Everleighs looked elsewhere for a site worthy of their knowledge and gifts. Studying their atlases and their private notes, they could find no community not already serviced by a house offering what they had to offer. At last they returned to Washington, where they sought the advice of Cleo Mait-land, the most prosperous madam in the capital city. Without hesitation, Madam Maitland advised the young Everleighs to do their prospecting in Chicago. The metropolis--Herbert Asbury's "gem of the prairie"--had a safe and sophisticated red-light quarter of considerable dimensions in a hedonistic political district, the First Ward, known as the Levee. For courageous investors, the growth possibilities were limitless. And above all, added Madam Maitland, there just happened to be a house she had heard of that could be had for a song.

The house available in Chicago was really two adjoining three-storied stone mansions with a total of 50 rooms, and a broad walk-up from the street. It was located at 2131 South Dearborn Street. It had been built in 1890 at a cost of $125,000 by one Lizzie Allen, madam, as a supplementary side show for visitors in search of culture at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. After the fair, and shortly before her death, Madam Allen had leased the house and sold its furnishings and inmates to Effie Hankins, madam. Now Effie Hankins, full of years and wealth, was ready for retirement. She was also ready to deal with the Everleighs. She offered the huge seraglio at her bottom price--$55,000 for the furnishings, the girls on the premises, the good will, and a long-term lease at a rental of $500 a month.

On February 1, 1900, the Everleigh Club of Chicago had its grand opening--and on that day, for connoisseurs of joy and students of earthy Americana, its legend began. It was also the debut of Minna and Aida under the name of Everleigh. Their family name had been commonplace. Now, on the eve of history, they sought something uplifting and appropriate. One of their beloved grandmothers had always ended her letters to them, "Everly yours." So Everly it was, spelled Everleigh.

For its grand opening, the house had undergone a drastic transformation. Effie Hankins' white servants had been replaced by colored help, and Madam Hankins' hostesses (uncouth, used wenches in abbreviated costumes) had been replaced by Aida's hostesses ("comely and skilled... no amateurs... the choicest talent in the country" garbed in costly evening gowns). The kitchen was of the best--the wine was imported, the dishes and hospitality Southern--and the furnishings and decorations were unmatched by any other brothel on the face of the earth.

To help make the opening night a festive one, a Washington Senator sent flowers. The Midwest's leading wine companies and packers supplied gifts of their best food and drink. The first customers were millionaire Texas cattlemen whose party spent $300 in a few hours. Despite freezing weather, the Everleigh sisters grossed $1000 on that historic first night. For fledgling madams, aged 21 and 23, it was an auspicious beginning.

During the nearly dozen years of its heyday, following its opening night, the Everleigh Club achieved a world-wide reputation largely because of the brilliance and good taste of its proprietors, the extraordinary abilities of its prostitutes, the distinction of its service and the splendor of its interior.

To each male seeker of escape through fleshly indulgence, this was no mean house of ill fame. Once inside its doors, the customer was quickly divested of any fears he may have held of crass commercialism. This was at once a men's club and a great lady's home that offered culture, beauty, domestic warmth, gracious living--and expert sex encased in the thinnest chrysalis of exotic romance.

From the moment of a customer's entry into the Club, every effort was made to seduce his senses. The 50 rooms, in buildings rising three stories high, were decorated by Minna to represent a Mid western Mohammedan paradise, assaulting and captivating a client's eyes, ears, palate and emotions. The rooms, decorations and niceties were not expected to satiate every facet of every man's taste. There was simply something available for every man, no matter what his predilections.

On the main floor, there were 12 spacious, soundproof reception parlors: the Gold Room, the Silver Room, the Copper Room, the Moorish Room, the Green Room, the Rose Room, the Red Room, the Blue Room, the Egyptian Room, the Chinese Room, the Japanese Room and the Oriental Room. The Gold Room featured gilt furniture, gold-trimmed fish bowls, 18-carat cuspidors that had cost $650 each, golden hangings and a $15,000 miniature gold piano. The Copper Room was paneled in copper and brass; the Moorish Room had thick and priceless Oriental carpets and incense burners; the Blue Room had blue divans with leather pillows on which were sewn prints of Gibson Girls, and there were college pennants hung on the walls.

Also on the first floor were an art gallery with a reproduction of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, a library with shelves holding 1000 books (mainly classics of biography, history, poetry and fiction, all to Minna's taste), a vast dining room with silver dinner service and a great Turkish ballroom with a towering, water-spouting fountain centered on a parquetry floor whose woods formed mosaic patterns.

To reach the boudoirs of love upstairs, guests were led through a forest of potted palms and Grecian statuary and up one of the two thickly carpeted mahogany staircases. In any one of the 30 boudoirs, the customer and the beautiful girl of his choice could enjoy quiet privacy and incredible luxury. The basic boudoir was furnished with a marble inlaid brass bed, a mirrored ceiling, a shower or a gold bathtub, freshly cut roses in vases, imported oil paintings and concealed push buttons that rang bells for champagne. Yet each bedroom had its individuality. One had an automatic perfume sprayer over the bed. Another had a silver-white spotlight directed upon the divan. A third had a genuine. Turkish mattress on the floor, covered by a white cashmere blanket. And on special occasions, Minna Everleigh, who was partial to butterfly pins on her gowns, loosed live butterflies to flutter disconcertingly about the boudoirs and parlors below.

After his first inspection of the opulent palace, Jack Lait, who was to become editor of the New York Mirror, exclaimed passionately (if sacrilegiously) to reporter friends, "Minna and Ada Everleigh are to pleasure what Christ was to Christianity!"

At the Everleigh Club, a visitor was never rushed from the entrance to a bedroom on the second floor. He was given the illusion--at least until he received his bill--of being the guest of honor at a dinner in a wealthy home. Edgar Lee Masters, author of Spoon River Anthology, recalled in 1944, six years before his death, what it had been like to call upon the Everleighs. Masters, who was in his early 30s when the club was at its peak, described a visit to the brothel. He noted that, of the two sisters, Minna "somehow was the larger personality, the more impressive figure." Often, he said, "she came to the door when the bell rang. Her walk was a sort of caterpillar bend and hump, pause and catch up. She was remarkably thin. Her hair was dark and frizzled, her face thin and refined. 'How is my boy?' was her cordial salutation."

Minna's boy was soon fine. He had been given to understand that he was expected to spend no less than $50 during the evening. In the Turkish ballroom, near the splashing fountain, or in one of the colorful parlors, he would order a bottle of French wine for $12 (later, if he wished another bottle sent to a boudoir upstairs, the cost would rise to $15). After exchanging pleasantries with friends he recognized, he would listen to one of the three four-piece orchestras playing, most often, Stay in Your Own Back Yard or a miserable tune composed by the alderman of the First Ward and one of the two dominant political figures of the Levee, John Coughlin (endearingly known as "Bathhouse John"). This song was Dear Midnight of Love. The customer was waited upon, hand and foot, by colored valets and maids, and flirtatiously but decorously engaged by one of the club's 30 attractive girls.

If he came to the club for dinner, as well as for more desired pleasures, the guest was next escorted into the dining hall. There, on damask cloth, with music still echoing in his ears, he would partake of pleasant or roast turkey or guinea fowl, served with more wine. Dinner, without wine or feminine companionship, was $50 minimum. If he had brought along business associates and engaged hostesses for them, his dinner party might cost him $1500.

Finally, at a much later hour, all appetites sated save one, the male guest would make his choice from those girls who were still available. The price for the enjoyment of the girl and her boudoir was $50, to which he was expected to add a generous tip. The girl gave half the fee to the madams and retained the other half. There were rarely, if ever, according to the documents available, any complaints from the paying customers.

Evidently the 30 Everleigh girls were satisfying in every way. In his 1936 biography of the sisters, Come into My Parlor, the Everleighs' old friend, Charles Washburn, quoted Aida on her method of recruiting the Club's girls.

"I talk with each applicant myself," said Aida. "She must have worked somewhere else before coming here. We do not like amateurs. Inexperienced girls and young widows are too prone to accept offers of marriage and leave. We always have a waiting list.

"To get in, a girl must have a pretty face and figure, must be in perfect health, must look well in evening clothes. If she is addicted to drugs, or to drink, we do not want her. There is no problem in keeping the Club filled."

Actually, the Everleighs left little to chance. To possess beauty, good health and experience at lovemaking was not enough to become an Everleigh prostitute. Weekly, the sisters gave their girls instructions in make-up, dress and Southern manners, and required that they read books drawn from the Club's library.

Minna Everleigh constantly tried to educate her girls to her own tastes. She was given to quoting Lord Byron and Guy de Maupassant, and to saying, "I don't believe in using coarse words." She begged her girls to try to appreciate the therapeutic value of soothing music. She liked the violin, but it was the guitar that she called "the voice of love and passion." Above all, she hoped that her girls would treat their clients with respect and affection. "I love men," Minna once told a friend. "I esteem them highly."

According to Charles Washburn, it was Minna who delivered the standard good conduct lecture to new female arrivals.

"Be polite, patient and forget what your are here for," Minna would explain. "Gentlemen are only gentlemen when properly introduced. We shall see that each girl is properly presented to each guest. No lining up for selection as in other houses....Remember that the Everleigh Club has no time for the rough element, the clerk on a holiday or a man without a checkbook.

"It's going to be difficult at first, I know. It means, briefly, that your language will have to be ladylike and that you will forgo the entreaties you have used in the past. You have the whole night before you and one fifty-dollar client is more desirable than five ten-dollar ones. Less wear and tear. You will thank me for this advice in later years. Your youth and beauty are all you have. Preserve it....Stay respectable by all means. We'll supply the clients; you amuse them in a way they've never been amused before. Give, but give interestingly and with mystery. I want you girls to be proud that you are in the Everleigh Club."

The girls felt like ladies, and they were proud--and so were the customers who had an opportunity to be with them. As a result, their customers came from the highest echelon of every profession and business. Understandably, some of the most celebrated customers--among them "a certain famous actor, a certain famous dramatic critic and a certain famous novelist," as well as a renowned aviator of the period--did not wish their names made public, and they never were. But many others were as delighted to speak of their adventures in the Everleigh Club as they were to reminisce over their days at Harvard or Yale.

Edgar Lee Masters remembered one highly regarded Chicago attorney who spent his annual two-week vacation in the Club. Grown weary, to the point of madness, of trying cases, he would go to see Minna and her girls. Handing Minna $500 or so, he would retire where he could drink wine and eat fried chicken, and discuss the perplexities of life with Maxine or Gertrude or Virginia.

There were numerous other front page figures who occasionally visited or were habitués of the Everleigh Club. Among these were celebrities of the literary world such as Ring Lardner, George Ade and Percy Hammond; celebrities of the sports world such as James J. Corbett and Stanley Ketchel; celebrities of the theater such as John Barrymore; celebrities of the gambling world such as "Bet a Million" Gates; even celebrities of the circus such as The Great Fearlesso.

The Club was also a haunt for millionaires. In 1905, the 37-year-old Marshall Field, Jr., was found alone in his Prairie Avenue mansion, dead from a shot in the abdomen. Headlines, based on rumors, shouted that he had been murdered in the Everleigh Club and then removed to his own quarters, although Minna vehemently denied that he had ever visited her house and police officials stated that the fatal shot was self-inflicted and accidental.

The Club's clientele ranged from gangsters to Government officials. Pat Crowe, a bank robber who also kidnaped young Edward Cudahy, was often a guest. Once, the members of an august Congressional committee arrived in Chicago from Washington bent on investigating something or other of national interest; their daytime researches proving fruitless, the Congressmen did all of their nighttime homework inside the Club.

For the Everleigh sisters, it was a profitable and gay life, but it was not an easy one. Persistently, they were troubled by rival bordello owners, criminals and reformers. In 1910, Nathaniel Moore, son of the Rock Island Railroad magnate, was killed in another brothel through the use of knockout drops, and then he was robbed. An effort was made to plant his corpse in the Everleigh furnace, but the Everleighs, forewarned of the plot by some admirers, prevented the act in the nick of time. Another time they were held up by a dope addict who had entered the Club, and only quick thinking by Aida saved their jewels. And once a guest in flannel underwear tumbled down the stairs to shout that the house was on fire. When the Chicago Tribune learned of the blaze, the night editor desperately tried to locate reporters to cover the story--only to discover that his three top reporters were already occupied in the Club at that very moment.

But reformers created the greatest problem for the sisters. Some were harmless. Once, Lucy Page Gaston, head of the Anti-Cigarette League, burst into the Club and cried out to Minna, "You alone can stop your girls from going straight to the devil!" Cooperatively, Minna inquired, "How, Miss Gaston?" And Miss Gaston shouted, "Make them stop smoking cigarettes!"

Other reformers were more dangerous. Gipsy Smith, the London evangelist, invaded Chicago, gathering crowds, and entreated them with fervor, "A man who visits the red-light district at night has no right to associate with decent people in daylight!" To acquaint Chicago's young men with the evil that was rampant in their city, Smith led a march of 20,000 persons into the Levee for a glimpse of hell. After the march ended, at least a fourth of the males, who had never been in the Levee before, stayed behind, and many of them made their debuts in sin at the Everleigh Club that same evening. "We are glad for the business," Minna told the press, "but I am sorry to see so many nice young men coming down here for the first time."

In order to survive the attacks of their enemies, the Everleighs openly bought police and political protection. Minna once told the police that in 12 years, the houses of prostitution in the First Ward had paid $15,000,000 in graft. Of this sum, the Everleigh sisters had paid $120,000, plus special assessments needed to buy off state legislators in Springfield and encourage them to vote against bills unfavorable to brothels. Most of this money had gone to two colorful aldermen on the City Council, "Bathhouse John" Coughlin and Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna, who were the political powers of the First Ward. The aldermen, in turn, had bribed the city police force and the legislators.

Despite this continuing drain on their resources, the Everleighs made an annual profit (in a day when the income tax was negligible) of $120,000. While they dwelt amidst luxury, it was a business required luxury arranged primarily for their guests. As for themselves, they were careful with their money and invested it wisely. Before their middle years, if their business had continued as usual, they could have expected to be millionaires several times over.

But business did not continue as usual. There was a new mood in the land, a mood of growing community pride--and prudery--which infected the citizens of Chicago deeply. Minna, a self-styled "freethinker," had always distrusted organized religion, but especially did she fear the Catholic Church. "It is against such women as the Everleighs," she would say. But now, in Chicago, churches of all denominations united to assert pressure, and the Chicago City Council was forced into establishing a vice commission and into allocating a sum of $5000 to pay its investigators. In 1910, the commission issued its 399-page report. In Chicago, alone, said the report, there were 1020 brothels occupied by 4000 prostitutes and managed by 1880 madams, and among the foremost of the madams were Minna and Aida Everleigh. The commission unequivocally damned this traffic in flesh, asking. "Is it any wonder that a tempted girl, a girl who receives only $6 a week working with her hands, sells her body for $25 a day when she learns there is a demand for it and men are willing to pay the price?"

Little was done about this report until a new election placed in office as mayor the reform-minded Carter Harrison II. At first he moved slowly, issuing a general ukase that ordered "disreputable women" moved from their places of activity and "disorderly flats" closed. He was still reluctant to shut down one of the city's most favored attractions. But then, one day, Mayor Harrison was shown an illustrated brochure that the Everleighs had published. With disbelief, he read:

"While not an extremely imposing edifice without, it is a most sumptuous place within. 2131 Dearborn Street, Chicago, has long been famed for its luxurious furnishings, famous paintings, statuary, and its elaborate and artistic decorations....Steam heat throughout, with electric fans in summer: One never feels the winter's chill or summer's heat in this luxurious resort. Fortunate, indeed, with all the comforts of life surrounding them, are the members of the Everleigh Club."

The blatancy of this advertising, a blot on his fair city and his regime, infuriated and finally prodded Harrison into action. He summoned his police chief and aldermen, and they came on the run. He demanded that the Everleigh Club be closed at once. He would listen to no reason, no entreaties. The Everleigh Club must vanish from the Chicago landscape and the sisters must be banished forever.

There was no reprieve from this executive order. On October 24, 1910, Minna and Aida were informed that the end had come. Their protectors could no longer protect them--although possibly, just possibly, a $20,000 assessment, wisely distributed, might stay the closing order, at least temporarily. Minna would not have it. If it was over, she was ready to quit. She and Aida took the bad news philosophically, but their 30 girls dissolved in tears. And so the front door was locked to "members," the shutters fastened, the furniture draped, the servants dismissed, and the girls packed off to lesser houses in more hospitable communities.

Minna and Aida, who had enjoyed a leisurely and restful trip around the world a year earlier, now decided to travel once more. They left for Europe, mainly to visit Rome, to relax and absorb culture, and to see if the bluenoses of Chicago would meanwhile change their minds. After six months, they returned, and hearing that they would have protection once more, they opened a new Everleigh Club on Chicago's West Side. This was in August of 1912. But when, to their normal protection fee, another sum of $40,000 was added, and when the city's reform government appeared more intractable than ever, the Everleighs agreed that a comeback was impossible. They auctioned off their luxurious furnishings--all except Aida's beloved miniature gold piano, and Minna's own beloved marble-inlaid brass bed, leather-bound books, favorite paintings and several other sentimental ornaments--and they left Chicago forever.

But they did not go empty-handed. In addition to furniture and artifacts worth $150,000, they departed from the Mid west with $1,000,000 cash, $200,000 in jewelry and $25,000 worth of unpaid bills run up by trusted clients. They also took with them happy memories, no residue of bitterness, and an intimate knowledge of the opposite sex. Minna had learned, for one thing, that most men preferred to gamble with dice or cards rather than to make love to a woman. "Real men, we found," said Minna, "would rather gamble any day than gamble with women." This, she felt, was because dice were less unpredictable and less risky than women. Both sisters believed that they owed their success to the married men who attended their Club, and that they would have earned another million "if it weren't for the cheating married women" who competed with the Club's girls. Minna believed that most men were repelled by sexually aggressive women. She liked to remind her girls, "Remember the old saying, 'What a man sees in a woman, he gets.' " She believed, also, that women were dependent upon men. "A woman needs a man's guiding hand, especially in business matters." Had the madams ever indulged themselves in love affairs with their clients? Minna remained silent on this subject. Aida was always ready to speak of one wealthy young lover who had wished to take her to New York as his wife. Why had she refused to legalize their affair? "My sweetheart took a terrible dislike to our gold piano," said Aida. "He said it was...unbecoming. I couldn't forgive him for that."

In 1913, when they embarked upon retirement, Minna Everleigh was 35 years old, and Aida Everleigh was 37. They wanted only peace and anonymity. At first they could find neither. The recent past trailed after them wherever they fled. When a close friend and a former client--Big Jim Colosimo, an amiable gangster--was murdered in his Italian restaurant in 1920, supposedly by a former aide, Johnny Torrio, or by the young Al Capone, the Everleighs were found and questioned. When a skeleton was dug up behind their old property in 1923, the Everleighs were again interrogated by the police. When a prostitute who had worked for them for six years was found murdered in New Orleans, her hands cut off and her jewels stolen, the Everleighs were once more visited by the police. When Mrs. W. E. D. Stokes tried to divorce her millionaire husband, and he countercharged that she had once been an Everleigh girl, the sisters were hounded by the sensation seeking press.

Peace, they realized at last, could only be gained through complete anonymity. And so, having given up the Everleigh Club, they now gave up its name and their names forever. In 1914, they buried their past, their old identities and, calling themselves by yet another name, they became two retired, independently wealthy ladies, dwelling off Central Park in New York City.

The Everleighs disappeared from public notice so entirely that after several decades it was assumed that they were dead. But from time to time there appeared in print a hint that they might still be alive. In 1936, Charles Washburn stated in his book Come into My Parlor, that the sisters were very much alive and that he had visited them. He had seen the remaining marble-inlaid brass bed, the gold piano, the books and oil paintings, and the statue of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne. The sisters traveled extensively, he wrote, they attended the Broadway theater and they read books and newspaper columnists. They had lost a good part of their invested fortune in the stock-market crash of 1929, but they still retained most of their jewelry. They rarely had visitors. They had purchased a radio, but except for that, they usually avoided outside companionship--and there were no gentlemen callers. "They own a home in New York, free and clear," Washburn reported. "All they ask for the remainder of their lives is a roof and one quart of champagne a week."

Eight years later, there was a suggestion that they might even then still be alive. In a 1944 issue of Town and Country magazine, Edgar Lee Masters stated that Minna and Aida "knew that the people who were throwing stones at them might well have been stoned for sins of their own. Still they kept their peace. They disappeared with smiles upon their faces, and, when last heard of, were living lives of unobtrusive gentility in New York City."

In 1944, because I had the notion that I wanted to write a play or a novel based on the Everleigh Club, and also because I was consumed with curiosity, I set out to learn for myself whether the sisters were still living. Finally, through the help of several friends who had known the girls in gayer days, I was able to locate them.

They dwelt as Southern gentlewomen, and recluses, in a brownstone they owned at 20 West 71st Street in New York City. They had become Minna and Aida Lester, former Chicago "socialites," and in our numerous exchanges, over the telephone and in their correspondence, they persisted in maintaining this masquerade. The real Everleigh sisters, they said, were merely friends of theirs. Then and thereafter, I played their game. I would ask them questions about the Everleighs. They would pretend to visit the Everleighs, on my behalf, and return to me with the answers.

Aida was 68 years old and Minna was 66 when I first talked with them. The Manhattan brownstone had been their home since 1915. Because their enemies, "plotters of the South Side Levee, had sought to cause them trouble," Minna told me, they had lived relatively isolated lives. The long-secret years of decline had been uneventful. In the Wall Street crash of 1929, according to Minna, they had "sustained severe losses from defaulted mortgage investments." Still, as Washburn reported, they had retained their jewelry and continued to live comfortably, if carefully.

From 1914 until 1937, as Aida and Minna Lester, the sisters enjoyed an active retirement. They had belonged to ten women's clubs and attended endless meetings and teas. From time to time, they gave "large parties." They went to movies constantly, although they considered modern actresses "too lustful," and they went to plays, among them Rain-- all about Sadie Thompson--which they found particularly false and which they detested. Occasionally, they traveled to Virginia or California to visit relatives. But with the advent of World War Two, their Lester lives changed. They ceased traveling, going to the theater, participating in club activities, giving parties. They brooded over Hitler, and more and more, they found their reality in the happier past.

After the War, they remained antisocial. Besides, Minna was devoting herself to a book she was writing, Poets, Prophets and Gods, and she felt that women's organizations and teas were incompatible with authorship. They rarely went out of doors, agreeing that New York had become too crowded and busy. They did not even go to church. They were still, Minna told me firmly, "free thinkers." Their days were filled with reading and correspondence. They read the New York Herald Tribune in the morning and the New York Journal American in the evening. In between, they reread Byron, Shelley, Poe. De Maupassant and the Brownings. They exchanged letters with a limited number of old clients who knew their true identities, and with numerous relatives, and after every Christmas they faithfully replied to the hundred cards they'd received. And each New Year's Eve, alone but together, they finished off a bottle of vintage champagne. They never quite forgot what they had once been. Aida still had her gold piano, and Minna wrote to me of "the haunted past" and the "vanished splendor" of the Everleigh Club.

In September 1948, at the age of 70, Minna Everleigh died at Park West Hospital in New York City, and the obituaries referred to her as Everleigh, not Lester. One wonders what the unsuspecting members of those ten women's clubs now thought of their beloved fellow "socialite." After maintaining the lonely brownstone for a number of years, Aida Everleigh moved back to the old family house in Virginia, where in January of 1960, at the age of 84, she, too, died.

With her passing, a golden era of gracious sinning had come to an end in America. Sex in an atmosphere of easy and silken luxury, in a lavish private club, in an exotic boudoir, seductive and exciting, was no more. It had been replaced by sex in the electronic market-place--the telephone, the uninspired apartment; and the welcomed guest had become a mere "trick." Gone were the 30 attractive hostesses, and in their place, only one brittle callgirl--a statistic and a case history for sociologists and psychoanalysts.