Club was closed, the sisters confided that they had made a million dollars and were planning to spend the rest of their lives as anonymously as possible—they wanted people to think that the Everleigh sisters were dead.”
The New York Daily News mentioned that Minna left behind “several oil paintings, a gold piano and an estimated $100,000 worth of diamonds,” and recalled that Minna had remarked several years earlier, “I like to see old friends but not old customers.” Time magazine, headlining its obituary THE WAGES OF SIN, reported that the Everleigh Club had been “the most luxurious bordello which the U.S. ever saw,” and concluded, “Last week Minna died…a wealthy and dignified dowager. Ada sent her body to Virginia for a burial befitting a Southern gentlewoman.”
I had conveyed, as I have said, my letter of condolence to Aida Everleigh, sent it to Aida Lester at the old address. I had no idea if she ever received it. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Then, three and a half months later, there came an airmail envelope made out to me. The return address read, “Aida Lester, 20 W. 71st St., New York, N.Y.” But the imprinted postmark, dated December 31, 1948, read, “Charlottesville, Va.” Inside I found an old-fashioned holiday greeting card bearing the legend, “Best Wishes for the New Year” and a bright print of a bubbling champagne glass. Inside the card, written in blue ink, was the following message: “New Years Eve 1948. We are wishing for you a Happy and Prosperous 1949. From our Family to yours—Cordially Aida and Minna Lester.”
That was ail, and that was the last I ever heard from Aida Everleigh. But it made her bereavement, and her future, clear to me. To the unimaginative outside world, Minna might be considered as dead. To Aida, she would never die, and, for Aida herself, she would continue to be “Cordially Aida and Minna Lester.”
After receiving Aida’s card, my mind kept returning to Minna’s death, and I decided to write a brief but personal remembrance of Minna for the people in show business, whom Minna had always followed and for whom she had felt (except for her loathing of actors) an affinity. In those days, a friend of mine, Irving Hoffman, a celebrated public relations man, cartoonist, intimate of the greats, conducted a lively column “Tales of Hoffman” in The Hollywood Reporter , a daily trade journal dispensing information to people in the motion picture and theatrical business. Hoffman had often asked me to write guest columns for him, and from time to time I had done such columns, and now I wanted to do one more. I wrote my farewell to Minna Everleigh for Hoffman’s column, and he published it. I did not realize that it would bring the modern-day successor to the Everleighs into my life, but it did.
A few days after my column appeared, I received a telephone call from a person who had a deep, husky male voice. The voice, I learned in a moment, belonged to a female, and the caller was none other than Polly Adler. Of course, I recognized her name at once. Polly Adler had been a front-page figure between 1920 and 1944 when, with a handful of attractive girls who worked in a variety of magnificent apartments in New York City, she had been America’s leading call-house madam. Her friends—one or two of them also were clients—had ranged from pugilists like Mickey Walker to gangsters like Al Capone, Frank Costello, and Dutch Schultz to entertainment personalities like Wallace Beery and Robert Benchley. Driven out of Manhattan in 1944, she had spent the last five years in retirement in a middle-class bungalow in Burbank, California, while she industriously attempted to acquire a college degree by attending evening classes at Los Angeles City College.
Now, it appeared, Polly Adler was completing an autobiography about her adventures as a purveyor of pleasure. In one section of her book, she had made passing reference to her foremost predecessors,
The New York Daily News mentioned that Minna left behind “several oil paintings, a gold piano and an estimated $100,000 worth of diamonds,” and recalled that Minna had remarked several years earlier, “I like to see old friends but not old customers.” Time magazine, headlining its obituary THE WAGES OF SIN, reported that the Everleigh Club had been “the most luxurious bordello which the U.S. ever saw,” and concluded, “Last week Minna died…a wealthy and dignified dowager. Ada sent her body to Virginia for a burial befitting a Southern gentlewoman.”
I had conveyed, as I have said, my letter of condolence to Aida Everleigh, sent it to Aida Lester at the old address. I had no idea if she ever received it. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Then, three and a half months later, there came an airmail envelope made out to me. The return address read, “Aida Lester, 20 W. 71st St., New York, N.Y.” But the imprinted postmark, dated December 31, 1948, read, “Charlottesville, Va.” Inside I found an old-fashioned holiday greeting card bearing the legend, “Best Wishes for the New Year” and a bright print of a bubbling champagne glass. Inside the card, written in blue ink, was the following message: “New Years Eve 1948. We are wishing for you a Happy and Prosperous 1949. From our Family to yours—Cordially Aida and Minna Lester.”
That was ail, and that was the last I ever heard from Aida Everleigh. But it made her bereavement, and her future, clear to me. To the unimaginative outside world, Minna might be considered as dead. To Aida, she would never die, and, for Aida herself, she would continue to be “Cordially Aida and Minna Lester.”
After receiving Aida’s card, my mind kept returning to Minna’s death, and I decided to write a brief but personal remembrance of Minna for the people in show business, whom Minna had always followed and for whom she had felt (except for her loathing of actors) an affinity. In those days, a friend of mine, Irving Hoffman, a celebrated public relations man, cartoonist, intimate of the greats, conducted a lively column “Tales of Hoffman” in The Hollywood Reporter , a daily trade journal dispensing information to people in the motion picture and theatrical business. Hoffman had often asked me to write guest columns for him, and from time to time I had done such columns, and now I wanted to do one more. I wrote my farewell to Minna Everleigh for Hoffman’s column, and he published it. I did not realize that it would bring the modern-day successor to the Everleighs into my life, but it did.
A few days after my column appeared, I received a telephone call from a person who had a deep, husky male voice. The voice, I learned in a moment, belonged to a female, and the caller was none other than Polly Adler. Of course, I recognized her name at once. Polly Adler had been a front-page figure between 1920 and 1944 when, with a handful of attractive girls who worked in a variety of magnificent apartments in New York City, she had been America’s leading call-house madam. Her friends—one or two of them also were clients—had ranged from pugilists like Mickey Walker to gangsters like Al Capone, Frank Costello, and Dutch Schultz to entertainment personalities like Wallace Beery and Robert Benchley. Driven out of Manhattan in 1944, she had spent the last five years in retirement in a middle-class bungalow in Burbank, California, while she industriously attempted to acquire a college degree by attending evening classes at Los Angeles City College.
Now, it appeared, Polly Adler was completing an autobiography about her adventures as a purveyor of pleasure. In one section of her book, she had made passing reference to her foremost predecessors,
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