Nuala O' Faolin's new nonfiction book, The Story of Chicago May, brings to life a gorgeous Irish redhead from the 1890s who became a notorious prostitute, thief and blackmailer known as America's "Queen of the Crooks."
As she follows the fortunes of this defiant beauty, who escaped a miserable existence as the overworked daughter of an Irish subsistence farmer, O'Faolin conjures the sounds, sights, dirt and danger of Chicago's redlight district, the New York City Tenderloin, and international underworlds. From the beginning of her odyssey, blue-eyed May cashed in on her looks and brazenness. She stole her family's life savings to outfit herself in the latest fashions, buy a first-class steamer ticket to America and mingle with the gentry aboard ship - after all, that's where the money was. Arriving at Castle Gardens without a passport, she charmed her way into the country with a phony story.
As she follows the fortunes of this defiant beauty, who escaped a miserable existence as the overworked daughter of an Irish subsistence farmer, O'Faolin conjures the sounds, sights, dirt and danger of Chicago's redlight district, the New York City Tenderloin, and international underworlds. From the beginning of her odyssey, blue-eyed May cashed in on her looks and brazenness. She stole her family's life savings to outfit herself in the latest fashions, buy a first-class steamer ticket to America and mingle with the gentry aboard ship - after all, that's where the money was. Arriving at Castle Gardens without a passport, she charmed her way into the country with a phony story.
So thoroughly has O'Faolin researched the story's details, having even visited the actual locales, that she can re-create them in full-dimensional reality. We wear the clothes the characters wear, feel the pinch of whalebone corsets and high-button shoes. In the Chicago of wooden buildings and sidewalks made of boards, before Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over the lantern and burned the city down, we watch a chambermaid keep down the dust by sprinkling a hotel lobby with water, part the hotel curtains in May's room, drop a few coals in the stove, and keep an eye out for the law as she and her comrades roll a rich drunk.
It seems almost everyone in the demi-monde was drunk, all day every day. Brothel women drank absinthe before breakfast and wine the rest of the time, preferably champagne because it could not be watered down and re-corked by a barkeep. Alchohol flowed freely everywhere. A popular drink, enjoyed by such respectable figures as Thomas Edison and William McKinley was the Vin Mariani, a mixture of wine and raw cocaine. An amazing range of drugs was easily obtainable; a hot punch composed of whisky, hot rum, camphor, benzine and cocaine cost six cents. Among the substances that took the sharp edges off fin-de-ciecle life O'Faolin lists "opium, laudanum, morphine, chlorodyne, chloroform, hashish, quinine, anti-pyrin, bromide, cocaine, the injection under the skin, the sugared pilule, the drops from a phial, the tiny opium cigarettes...." Police sometimes brought tourists to the opium dens in New York's Chinatown, which of course were under their "protection." Drug overdoses, intentional or accidental, were frequent--there was even a convenient saloon in the Tenderloin known as McGurk's Suicide Hall.
Chicago May made friends with the police, who were so corrupt they were literal partners in crime, taking a percentage of the earnings of prostitutes, sneak thieves, burglars, pickpockets, and the operators of brothels and gambling parlors. One of May's powerful protectors was the infamous Charles Becker of the NYPD, who was later executed in Sing Sing for murdering a gambler. He often let her go when she was caught, and she testified for him when his arrests were questioned.
At the turn of the century, bureaucracies were so lax that May could get away with giving fraudulent information for her police bookings and many marriage certificates, from her name, age and nationality to her mother's maiden name and the omission of prior marriages -- all false and unquestioned. She is officially recorded as May Duignan, her true name, in County Longford, Ireland, but she never used the name again. In America, the land of fresh starts, you were known not by your family name but by where you came from: Bitter Creek Newcomb, Texas Jack, Klondyke Flo.
At the turn of the century, bureaucracies were so lax that May could get away with giving fraudulent information for her police bookings and many marriage certificates, from her name, age and nationality to her mother's maiden name and the omission of prior marriages -- all false and unquestioned. She is officially recorded as May Duignan, her true name, in County Longford, Ireland, but she never used the name again. In America, the land of fresh starts, you were known not by your family name but by where you came from: Bitter Creek Newcomb, Texas Jack, Klondyke Flo.
