Wicked Women Page 4

  Having managed to get herself on the guest list for many more engagements, Tessie was able to convince Frank that she was no longer political poison and was now worthy of a church wedding. Frank consented to a public ceremony but was adamant about Tessie retiring from the business.

  This time she acquiesced and transferred the management of the house to one of her employees. Given the magnitude of the sacrifice, Tessie expected Frank to do something for her. At her request he promised to make all the arrangements for the reception and agreed to her guest list, choice of music, and location.

  Once a priest who would marry them was secured, a wedding date was set. Nearly two years from the date Frank and Tessie were initially married, the two renewed their vows. The second ceremony was held in the rectory of St. Mary’s Cathedral on July 11, 1911.

  Within hours of the nuptials, the Darouxes were exchanging insults. Frank had disregarded all of Tessie’s requests for the reception, and she verbalized her irritation in a toast where she announced that she was returning to her parlor house business as quickly as she could. Toward the end of the evening, the pair had once again reconciled. Frank took that opportunity of brief calm to present his wife with a wedding gift. News of the expensive gesture of affection was published in the San Francisco Chronicle the following day, with the headline “$10,000 Pearl Necklace Wedding Gift to Bride/Frank Daroux Marries Miss Theresa Donahue.”

  After a brief honeymoon Frank and Tessie returned to the lives they had made for themselves. Frank kept active in politics and oversaw business at his gambling dens. Tessie focused on her brothel. Religious groups staunchly opposed to parlor houses began a crusade to drive them out of business. Madam Wall’s place was a prime target. Frank did nothing to stop the powers that be from threatening her livelihood. But that was the least of her problems. Unbeknownst to Tessie, her husband was betraying her in a more profound way.

  The Darouxes’ relationship had always been a volatile one. They never shied away from quarreling in public. Frank grew tired of the embarrassing outbursts and was frustrated with the way it was diminishing his influence on key political figures. His attention eventually turned to a less combative woman he met at a fundraiser. In 1915 the two began having an affair. Tessie found the pair and vowed to kill the woman if she came near her husband again. Frank stayed in the marriage another two years before walking out on Tessie and filing for divorce.

  Like all of the other disagreements Tessie and Frank had in their eight years of marriage, the fight over how their union would end was made public as well.

  Tessie made it clear to all who would listen that she did not want to lose Frank, and she contested the divorce numerous times. After a long and vicious court battle, the marriage was finally dissolved.

  Tessie returned to her house to nurse her wounds. Her heart was broken. She couldn’t accept that Frank was officially out of her life. In a desperate attempt to win him back, she secretly followed him around, waiting for a chance to speak with him and convince him to return to her.

  The evening Frank was shot, the two had quarreled over Tessie’s threat to appeal the divorce. Frank warned his ex-wife that he’d “break her” if she went through with the action. He hurled a string of obscenities at her as he turned and walked away. She heard from a friend that Frank and his mistress were going to attend the theater that evening, and she decided to confront the two there.

  “Then I didn’t know what I did,” Tessie explained to the police after the shooting. When asked about the gun, Tessie told authorities that she bought it because of the other woman. “That woman took my husband away from me,” she cried. “For three or four years she has been going with him. It made me mad.” Tessie pleaded with police to take her to the hospital where Frank was so she could see him.

  As they transported the sobbing madam to the sanitarium, she professed her undying love for her “darling husband.”

  Frank was conscious when Tessie entered the emergency room. The three bullets she had emptied into his upper torso had missed his vital organs. Doctors expected him to make a full recovery. The police escorted Tessie to his bedside and asked Frank if she was the one who shot him. “Yes, she shot me,” he responded. “Take her away. I don’t want to see her.” According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Tessie Daroux lifted her handkerchief to her face in a gesture of horror and reeled back into the arms of the officer.”

  Madam Wall was booked on a charge of intent to kill and held without bail for three months. Bail was finally granted when Frank was given a clean bill of health. In a move that surprised everyone, Frank announced to authorities that he had made a decision not to press charges against Tessie. She took the news as a sign of his continued affection for her and filed an appeal on the divorce. Frank had hoped the incident and his willingness not to prosecute would drive Tessie away. Once he found out that she was appealing the divorce, he changed his mind about pressing charges.

  The shooting and subsequent court activity were front page news. The scandal wreaked havoc on Frank’s political future. His peers informed him that he was a liability and suggested relocating. Frank agreed and reversed his decision again about having Tessie prosecuted and made arrangements to marry his mistress.

  Days before Frank was to marry the other woman, Madam Wall again took gun in hand. This time she set out to kill her rival. When she found her eating lunch at a popular restaurant, Tessie shot through the glass window at the future Mrs. Daroux. Her aim was poor, and the woman was not hit. Tessie was arrested, and, while she was being held, Frank remarried. With the stipulation that Tessie not be released until they left town, Mr. and Mrs. Daroux agreed not to press charges. Frank and his bride then moved to the East Coast.

  Madam Wall went back to her parlor house, boxed up all of the busts and paintings she had of Napoleon, and stored them away. She never fully retired from the trade and remained a controversial figure throughout the duration of her life.

  On the morning of April 28, 1932, Tessie pulled an impacted tooth that had been bothering her. That evening she died of a hemorrhage following the extraction.

  Newspapers marked her passing with an obituary Tessie had preapproved.

  “One more bit of ‘the San Francisco that was’ has drifted off in that uncharted Sargasso that holds the old Barbary Coast, the Poodle Dog, the Silver Dollar, the Bank Exchange, the Mason Street Tenderloin and those other gay haunts that made San Francisco famous through the Seven Seas,” proclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle on April 30, 1932.

  Mrs. Teresa Susan Wall Daroux was sixty-two years old.

  Lottie Deno

  The Cosmopolitan Gambler

  “She subdues the reckless, subjugates the religious, sobers the frivolous, burns the ground from under the indolent moccasins of that male she’s roped up in holy wedlock’s bonds, and points the way to a higher, happier life.”

  Author Alfred Henry Lewis’s description of Lottie Deno, 1913

  A broad grin spread across Doc Holliday’s thin, unshaven face as he tossed five playing cards facedown into the center of a rustic, wooden table. His eyes followed a petite, gloved hand as it swept a pile of poker chips toward a demure, dark-haired beauty sitting opposite him. Lottie Deno watched the infamous dentist, gambler, and gunfighter lean back in his chair and pour himself a shot of whiskey. Doc’s steely blue eyes met hers and she held his gaze. “You want to lose any more of your money to me or is that it, Doc?” “Deal,” he responded confidently. Lottie did as he asked and in a few short minutes had managed to win another hand.

  A crowd of customers at the Bee Hive Saloon in Fort Griffin, Texas, slowly made their way over to the table where Lottie and Doc had squared off. They cheered the cardsharps on and bought them drinks. Most of the time Lottie won the hands. The talented poker players continued on until dawn. When the chips were added up, the lady gambler had acquired more than $30,000 of Holliday’s money.


  “If one must gamble they should settle on three things at the start,” Doc said before drinking down another shot. “And they are?” Lottie inquired. “Decide the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.” Holliday smoothed down his shirt and coat, adjusted his hat, and nodded politely to the onlookers. “Good evening to you all,” he said as he made his way to the exit. Lottie smiled to herself as she sorted her chips. Holliday sauntered out of the saloon and into the bright morning light.

  Historians maintain that it was only natural that Lottie Deno would have grown up to be an expert poker player—her father was a part-time gambler who had taught his daughter everything he knew about cards. She is recognized by many gaming historians as the most talented woman to play five-card draw in the West.

  Lottie was born Carlotta J. Thompkins in Warsaw, Kentucky, on April 21,1844. She was the eldest of the two girls her parents would have. Her mother and father had amassed a substantial amount of money tobacco farming. They lavished their children with every advantage possible, including travel. Her father took his oldest child with him on business trips to New Orleans and Detroit. At both locations he escorted his daughter to the finest gambling houses and introduced her to the art of poker, roulette, horse racing, and faro. Lottie’s seven-foot-tall nanny, Mary Poindexter, accompanied the pair on every journey. By the time Lottie was sixteen, she was a skilled card player often in need of protection from gamblers she fleeced. Mary made sure her charge never got hurt.

  The attack on South Carolina’s Fort Sumter in April 1861 outraged many Southerners, prompting them to enlist in the Confederate Army. Lottie’s father was no exception. Six hundred and eighteen thousand men lost their lives over the course of the Civil War. Lottie’s father was killed in the first engagement he fought.

  The news of Thompkins’s death devastated his daughters and wife. Lottie’s mother’s health immediately began to fail.

  The now seventeen-year-old girl assumed the role of head of the family and took over the business of the Thompkins plantation. Distant family members, who felt it was inappropriate for a female to be in such a position, persuaded Lottie’s mother to send her away. She agreed and Lottie was sent to Detroit to live with friends. Her mother hoped she would meet a suitable man to marry there.

  Lottie arrived in the city at the peak of the social season, and the limited funds her mother supplied her with did not last long. Expenses had been much more than anticipated. Back home in Kentucky, Lottie’s mother and sister were struggling financially as well. The war had left the plantation in disarray, and the lack of workers prevented the crops from being planted. When news of the hardship her family was enduring reached Lottie, she decided to get a job.

  An invitation to visit a gambling fraternity provided a way for her to earn an income. Lottie’s talent for winning at the poker tables gave her enough money to send home and support herself in style. No questions were asked as to how Lottie came into the money and no explanation was offered.

  Lottie not only jeopardized her social standing in the community by frequenting the gambling house, but also exposed herself to a cast of unsavory characters. It was there she made the acquaintance of a charming but ruthless gambler named Johnny Golden. Golden was from Boston and was of Jewish descent. Lottie’s mother and other family members, as well as a large percentage of the population at the time, were anti-Semitic. Lottie was strongly chastised for her association with Golden, but that only made him more endearing to her.

  The couple gambled together and lived together unmarried for a time. Johnny was not as lucky in cards as Lottie. His misfortune at the poker table, combined with the difficulties he experienced as a Jew, led to the two parting company. Golden headed back east and Lottie moved on to Louisiana.

  News of her mother’s death reached Lottie just as she was settling into a hotel in New Orleans. She was brokenhearted and lonesome for her sister. She wanted to make sure her sister was generously cared for and given the opportunity to continue her education. In an effort to make that happen, Lottie found steady poker games on the riverboats that traveled the waterways through the southeast. She made a lot of money, enough to put her sister through private school. Once the sister graduated, Lottie purchased a train ticket for her sibling to meet her in San Antonio, Texas.

  Lottie was restless and bored with New Orleans when she set out for Texas in May 1865. San Antonio was an exciting city, teaming with new gambling parlors and betting houses. Games of chance weren’t restricted to evening entertainment, either. The opportunity to make a fortune was open to professional gamblers and gaming enthusiasts twenty-four hours a day.

  Wearing fashionable garments of lace and tulle and batting their long lashes at unsuspecting gamblers, women enticed men to roulette and dice tables. Whether the men won or lost, the women received a share of the bets placed on the games from the gambling den.

  The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, X-2946

  Lottie played poker at the Cosmopolitan Club, a posh saloon and casino near Alamo Plaza. After seeing her play, the owner of a rival business known as the University Club offered her a job as house gambler at his establishment. A house gambler used money the saloon provided to play poker. The professional card player would invite patrons to join in a few hands with the express purpose of separating them from their cash or property. The house gambler received a percentage of the winnings.

  Lottie’s beauty and the novelty of seeing a woman gambler attracted a lot of men to the saloon. She waited at the poker table like a spider waiting for her victims to wander into her web. Many University Club patrons referred to Lottie as the “Angel of San Antonio.”

  Dressed in the finest styles available in New Orleans, dealing cards and batting her large, dark eyes at customers, she was a popular inducement. Besides five-card draw, her specialty was a game called faro. The game, which originated in France, was one of the most popular in the West.

  Frank Thurmond, the owner of the University Club, had more than a professional interest in Lottie. Not long after she began working at the saloon, the two became romantically involved. Their love affair was short lived, however. Thurmond was forced to leave town after stabbing a disorderly patron and killing him. Lottie left the area soon afterward to find him. It was rumored that Frank had headed west. Lottie did the same. She arrived in Fort Concho, Texas, in early 1870 needing additional travel money to go on. She quickly found a game at a local saloon and in no time was impressing cowhands and drifters who sat across from her at a poker or faro table.

  Lottie refused to say what had brought her from San Antonio to Fort Concho. She was afraid she might cause trouble for Frank if she admitted publicly that she was looking for him. It was the evasiveness about where she came from and where she was headed that prompted people to start calling her Mystic Maude.

  From Fort Concho she traveled to Jacksboro, San Angelo, Denison, and Fort Worth. At each stop she gambled, winning hand after hand. When one town was played out, she moved on to another. Her actions led many to speculate that she was waiting for a man to meet her. Some guessed he might be an outlaw. Lottie avoided conversation on the subject and redirected the curious back to the cards she dealt them.

  A few humiliated gamblers who had the misfortune of losing to Lottie believed she was a cheat. “The likelihood of a woman being able to win enough pots to make a living playing cards is farfetched,” a saloonkeeper in El Paso told a newspaper reporter in 1872. “That could only happen if she were crooked.”

  If Lottie was dishonest at cards, she was as good at not being detected as she was at the game. Most onlookers focused on her winnings rather than her actual game. The fortune she amassed in one night at the tables in Fort Griffin, Texas, brought her a lot of attention and a new name.

  She had won several hands in a row and was stacking her chips in a neat pile when a drunk ranch hand standing nearby yelled out, “Honey,
with winnings like them, you ought to call yourself Lotta Dinero.”

  Of all the handles she had acquired in her career, it was the name she thought suited her best. She shortened the nom de plume to Lottie Deno and used it the rest of her life.

  Fort Griffin had a reputation for being one of the roughest towns in the West. Outside of a few shady ladies, the burg was populated primarily by young, rowdy men, former Confederate soldiers distressed about the way the Civil War had ended. It was a volatile environment where Lottie thrived and had great success as a gambler.

  Lottie hosted a regular game at the Bee Hive Saloon in Fort Griffin and was treated like royalty by the men who frequented the business. Bartender Mike Fogarty treated her especially well. Fogarty, it would later be determined, was in fact Frank Thurmond. Still fearful of being found out by the law, Thurmond and Lottie would steal away to a nearby town for secret rendezvous. The couple’s true relationship remained hidden from the public until they were married in December 1880.

  In addition to seeing thousands of dollars come and go, Lottie witnessed her share of violence at the tables. Most of the time she watched disinterested at the explosive action of the drunken miner or cowboy who lost numerous poker hands. The atmosphere of a smoky saloon, the endless supply of alcohol, and distractions from sporting girls helped create the occasional sore loser.

  One evening when Lottie was dealing faro, an argument involving a pair of fledgling gamblers broke out at a table adjacent to her. The fight became physical and shots were then exchanged. Fort Griffin sheriff Bill Cruger intervened, killing both men who drew on him as he hurried into the saloon to settle things. With the exception of Lottie, everyone in the saloon had fled when the bullets started flying.