Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part story about the famous Everleigh Sisters and their links to Greene, Madison and Charlottesville. Part one ran in the Nov. 5 issue and covered the early lives and families of the sisters and how they got started in the brothel business.
Ada and Minna Simms were devoted to each other their entire lives. Ada was roughly 5 feet 3 inches tall and “never weighed more than 135 pounds,” as she bragged to friend and biographer Charles Washburn. He further described her rosebud lips, medium-sized chest, expressive eyes and long hair. Minna was about 5 feet 2 inches tall with reddish hair, grayish/blue eyes, long hair and a more “boyish figure.”
“Ada let Minna do all the talking,” Washburn described in his 1936 book, “Come Into My Parlor. “Two distinctly different types: Minna led and Ada followed, and never did their lines cross. It was a powerful combination. … Together theirs was a shameless life in a ‘life of shame.’”
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The Scarlet Sisters—who went by the names Minna and Aida Everleigh—opened up their own brothel during the 1898 Trans-Mississippi International Exposition in Omaha, Neb., and parlayed that $70,000 earned into creating the infamous Everleigh Club in Chicago.
“How about operating a high-grade resort?” Minna outlined in Washburn’s biography. “Men were brutes! Make them pay! A form of vengeance with the comedy relief. They saw the drama in everything.”
The sisters told Washburn they took a cross-country train expedition after the fair shut down, with their $70,000 in hand. They said they visited the most famous madams to find the best place to open a shop for themselves before settling on Chicago. I can find no real record of such a trip, and in truth find it difficult to believe they traveled seeking the best place to open a brothel in under a year’s time. It is verifiable that the sisters purchased the 50-room mansion at 2131-33 Dearborn St. in the Levee District of Chicago in 1899 from a previous madam, and let all the workers go. That doesn’t leave much time for a cross-country jaunt.
The Everleighs had big dreams for their bordello. Their “butterflies” (as they called the prostitutes) would be treated differently than they were in other abodes. Each girl would dress in fine silk evening gowns, unlike other establishments where girls wore lace chemises or only underwear in an attempt to lure customers. They would read works of poetry and other fine literature and were not permitted to drug their clientele to steal from them. Additionally, courtesans received half their earnings without deductions, unlike at other common houses.
Where they got the idea for decorating their own brothel is not one with a definitive answer, however. In reading descriptions of a couple brothels in Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans from around that time—and according to a newspaper article the sisters were living—it appears the sisters may have borrowed a few ideas from houses in that area. Looking through old Blue Books that are online, which listed the houses and some of their names, I couldn’t find a definite link between any house and Minna or Aida, but I believe they may have gotten their start in one such house there. Lulu White, one of the most famous Storyville madams, wore tons of jewelry—a habit Minna adopted as the madam of the Everleigh Club. Minna loved diamonds and draped herself with them daily, including diamond butterflies—a nod to her girls. White’s Mahogany Hall had five parlors—including a mirrored parlor—and 15 bedrooms, elegant furnishings, artwork, Tiffany stained glass windows and large chandeliers, as evidenced by famous Storyville photographer E.J. Bellocq’s images. Josie Arlington’s place, Chateau Lobrano d’Arlington, offered opulence and was known as an “expensive $5.00 house.”
The sisters definitely spent big dollars creating their brothel, though. The “three-story pleasure palace,” as it has been referred to, included 12 themed parlors, two mahogany staircases, a music room, an art gallery, a library, a grand ballroom, a fountain that would spritz the air with perfume, a Pullman dining car as a portion of the dining room, mosaic patterns on the floor and crystal chandeliers that dangled from the ceiling. There were private nooks for each of the 30 butterflies with brass beds—including the room of 1,000 mirrors; Minna and Aida had their own private boudoirs and there were servant rooms in the basement.
The soundproof parlors had their own names that represented the theme: Moorish; Gold; Silver; Copper; Red; Rose; Green; Blue; Oriental; Japanese; Egyptian; and Chinese. A $15,000 gold piano was a key part of the Gold Room, as were $600 gold spittoons. No better description of the rooms can be found than that of Herbert Asbury in “The Gangs of Chicago:”
“In the Gold Room the furniture was encrusted with gilt; in the Copper Room the walls were paneled with hammered brass; in the Blue Room everything was collegiate, with pennants and pillows of blue leather ornamented with pictures of Gibson girls; in the Moorish Room was the inevitable Turkish corner with its voluptuous couches and draperies; in the Japanese Room was a heavily carved teak-wood chair resting upon a dais, the whole covered by a canopy of yellow silk. The Tribune once said that the Japanese Room was ‘a harlot’s dream of what a Japanese palace might look like inside.’”
The club opened on Feb. 1, 1900, with an entrance fee of $50, and if that’s all a man spent in the night, he was not invited to return. Champagne was $12 a bottle. Dinner could cost up to $500 for 10 guests. Few ever got out for less than $100 for the night and many paid well over $1,000 for one. That first night, the club grossed $1,000 and each girl received $23 for their time, an unheard-of proposition for courtesans at that time.
Minna, herself, embraced the philosophy of French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac. “Pleasure is like certain drugs; to continue to obtain the same results one must double the dose, and death or brutalization is contained the last one,” Balzac wrote in 1834. Using that, Minna advised the courtesans to play coy cat-and-mouse games with the potential suitors, noting that taking on one $50 client a night is better than taking on five $10 clients a night.
Chicago reporters were always welcome visitors at the club and spent so much time there that editors often called the club when a story broke, according to Washburn, who was a Chicago Tribune copy boy in 1904 and cops reporter in 1912.
Many big names were known to visit the club, including John Barrymore, of the theater; James “Gentleman John” Corbett, a heavyweight boxing champion; the Great Fearlesso, a circus performer; and more. Prince Henry of Prussia, visiting the country to receive a gift for his brother, Kaiser Wilhelm, asked to visit the brothel when he hit the shores of New York in 1902. Around midnight on March 3, Prince Henry and his party rang the club’s bell. The butterflies would not be dressed in usual formal attire; instead, Minna arranged for them to enact a mythological celebration centered on Dionysus, the Greek God of wine. Washburn called it a “Dionysiac orgy.”
Marshall Field Jr., heir to the Marshall family fortune, died from an accidental gunshot at his home in 1905, but word rang out that he was killed at the Everleigh Club. Washburn notes there is no evidence it happened at the club, and the sisters had denied it, as well, but rumors abounded.
The sin of “white slavery,” as many then called prostitution, became a focus of the temperance movement, especially in Chicago. Numerous reformers would visit in attempts to shut down the district.
In his “Gangs of Chicago” book, Asbury said it was the sisters’ own choices that brought the downfall of the Everleigh Club. The sisters would ride every afternoon, usually with one of their beautiful harlots, as a way to advertise the Everleigh Club. In 1911, Minna wrote and published “The Everleigh Club Illustrated,” an elaborate brochure with photos of the rooms inside the brothel, not dissimilar to the Blue Books of Storyville. When word came down that the city would shut the club down in fall 1911, the club had its most successful days ever. In October 1911, Mayor Harrison—in an effort to clean up the vice in Chicago—ordered the shuttering of the Everleigh Club specifically.
The building was sold in 1924 and razed in 1933.
After retirement, the sisters attempted to live in Chicago, but they were too well-known by all and disliked by other women to continue their lives there. They bought a brownstone in New York City in 1913 and began going by the names Minna and Aida Lester. They brought with them many of the books, the brass marble inlaid beds, much of the artwork and the gold piano. They even created something called the Lester Poetry Circle with other members of the community.
They lived the rest of their lives off what they made in those 11 short years as the madams of the Everleigh Club.
Their father passed away in Mexico in 1915, according to a death certificate. The sisters likely paid for his body to be brought back to America because he’s buried at St. Paul’s Cemetery in Alexandria next to their mother, their sister Willie and, later, the two of them. In the 1920 census, Warren was living with Minna and Aida in New York and listed as a stepbrother on the form. At some point he moved back to Los Angeles with his wife, Guadalupe, whom he met and married in Mexico.
Minna passed away in 1948 at the age of 82 in New York. Aida moved back to Charlottesville and lived with a nephew until her death in January 1960, just shy of 96 years old.
Research is still ongoing and with the coronavirus pandemic, visiting libraries in Virginia and beyond has been impossible.
Anyone who has additional information about the family can email tbeigie@greene-news.com.