Skip to content

Cart

Your cart is empty

The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

Sale price$ 17.99

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 tape-recorded 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.

 
Norma Wallace knew all of the Crescent City’s dirty little secrets, and used them to protect her own interests — she never got so much as a traffic ticket, until the early 1960s, when District Attorney Jim Garrison decided to clean up vice and corruption. After a jail stay, Wallace went legitimate as successfully as she had gone criminal, with a lucrative restaurant business — but it was love that would undo her in the end.
 
The Last Madam combines original research with Wallace’s personal memoirs, bringing to life an era in New Orleans history rife with charm and decadence, resurrecting a secret world. Christine Wiltz expertly chronicles not just Norma's rise and fall but also the social history of New Orleans, thick with the vice and corruption that flourished there.

The Last Madam: A Life in New Orleans Underworld - Aunt Sally’s Pralines
The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld Sale price$ 17.99