Madam Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel by Maryjean Wall (review)

Maryjean Wall opens her preface by stating that Belle Brezing “is a window through which we are able to view several salient aspects of the Lexington of her time” (vii). Brezing, born in 1860, was the most prominent madam of a house of ill-fame (to use the contemporary term) in this Kentucky city during the decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the city and surrounding countryside was developing as a center of horse breeding and racing. The demise of her business coincided with the Progressive Era reformers who gained power in Lexington politics in the early twentieth century. By the time Brezing died in 1940, the city’s well-known red light district had disappeared, while Brezing had disappeared from public view within the confines of her house that had once hosted some of Lexington’s most prominent citizens.

Wall’s goal was to revise Thompson’s Madam Belle Brezing (Lexington: Buggy Whip, 1983) to place more emphasis on Brezing’s role as a business-woman and real estate owner benefitting from the wealth that the horses brought to Lexington (ix). To do that, this sports writer cum historian weaves a fascinating story that combines urban history, women’s history, political history, economic history, and the history of sports, all focused on Lexington, with side stories usually related to the people who came to the Lexington area because of the horses. Her sources include the E. I. “Buddy” Thompson Papers at the University of Kentucky Libraries, which contain the records from two collectors who scavenged through Brezing’s trash so that we can learn details such as where she shopped. Wall also uses public records and some sketchy interviews she has conducted of people who remembered Belle Brezing,

The book’s title is more a teaser than an accurate reflection of its contents. Wall alerts the reader in her preface that the book is not only a biography and that “the reader will quickly discover that Belle disappears at intervals throughout the narrative” (x). The challenge for the reader is that, not only does Belle disappear into discussions of horse breeding, it is not always clear why Wall includes so much other information that appears extraneous. For example, Wall states that the Everleigh sisters from Kentucky “showed Belle’s influence” in their Chicago brothel without stating or clarifying whether or how Minnie and Ada Everleigh even knew Belle Brezing (85).

Nor is it always clear why information that should have been readily available is not included. While there are interesting photographs, the most glaring omission is a map of Lexington and the surrounding countryside, even though much of the story is specifically place-based. The reader learns where horse farms were located, and that patrons of Brezing’s brothel took carriages from the Phoenix Hotel, the headquarters of the horse breeding and racing elite, to her mansion for evening “entertainment,” for instance, but a simple map would have made all this much more understandable. The reader does not gain a sense of how quickly Lexington grew over the course of the story, although it was not hard for this reviewer to find that the population was 21,567 in 1890 and 35,099 in 1910. Wall gives extensive details on some of Brezing’s patrons but does not use readily available information, such as the 1910 census of the population, to tell us anything about the five women who were “inmates” living at Brezing’s house of ill-fame at 153 Megowan Street with her and her housekeeper that year. Only one of the five, “Alice Ely” to census takers but really Debbie Harvey, appears later in the book, when she was murdered.

Overall, in spite of some distracting or missing information, Wall provides an interesting study on one aspect of prostitution in a small city in the upper South. Because Wall emphasizes the key businessmen and sportsmen openly supporting Brezing...