The Sunday Gentleman by Irving Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

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 fifty dollars, to which he was expected to add a generous tip. The girl gave half of the fee to the madams, and retained the other half. There was rarely, if ever, according to the documents available, any complaint from the paying customers.
    Evidently, satisfaction was constant because the thirty 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, experience at lovemaking, was not enough to become an Everleigh prostitute. Weekly, the Everleigh sisters gave their girls instructions in makeup, dress. Southern manners, and required that they read books drawn from the club’s library.
    According to Charles Washburn, it was Minna who delivered the standard good-conduct lecture to new female arrivals.
    “Be polite, patient and forget what you 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 check-book.
    “It’s going to be difficult, at first, I know. It means, briefly, that your language will have to be lady-like and that you will forgo the entreaties you have used in the past. You have the whole night before you and one $50 client is more desirable than five $10 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—“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 best days at Harvard or Yale.
    Edgar Lee Masters remembered one highly regarded Chicago attorney who spent his annual two-week vacation in the club. “Colonel MacDuff, a mighty Chicago lawyer, used to stay for days 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 habitues of the Everleigh Club. Among these were celebrities of the literary world such as Ring Lardner, George Ade, and Percy Hammond; celebrities of the sporting world such as James J. Corbett and Stanley Ketchel; celebrities of the