106. Helen Cromwell — Good Time Party Girl with Christina Ward

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone, welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: That's me, hi. The subject of today's episode wrote a salacious memoir about her wild life as an early 20th century American, um, business woman... I'm trying to think of a tactful way of describing it.

KIM: Oh, Amy, don't worry about tactfulness. She wouldn't give a damn about that. Following her Edwardian era upbringing, Helen Cromwell was a call girl turned madame, bootlegger and speakeasy owner who was the life of every party and had a mouth that would make a truck driver blush. Half a century ago, she wrote a memoir called Good Time Party Girl, the Notorious Life of Dirty Helen Cromwell, 1886 to 1969.

AMY: It is such a page turner. I couldn't put this book down.

KIM: Same. It's an exhilarating read. We were both just texting each other as we were reading it going, "Oh my God. Oh my God."

AMY: Yeah. So Cromwell may have had a teensy bit of help from a ghost writer when it came to fashioning her life into a book, but the stories and the voice are all hers; I kept kind of thinking this woman is the Forest Gump of prostitutes, basically, because from the famous people she encountered to the history she lived through, not to mention the obstacle she overcame, your mind is blown. I found myself cheering this woman on through every gob smacking page .

KIM: Yeah. In the midst of all its eyebrow-raising passages and many shocking revelations, which we'll talk about, the book is remarkably poignant and full of heart. We are so excited to tell you all about Dirty Helen Cromwell and introduce you to our guest who succeeded in getting her memoir back in print. So let's read the stacks and get started 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is Christina Ward. She's the vice president of Feral House, the publishing imprint which reintroduced the world to Helen Cromwell's Good Time Party Girl in 2019. Christina has a passion for discovering lost and forgotten writers from history. Uh, we love that.

AMY: And I think it's fair to say also that she has quite a passion for food. She wrote the 2019 book American Advertising Cookbooks, How Corporations Taught us to Love Bananas, Spam and Jello. So if you've ever wondered where those horrifying culinary concoctions of the 1950s sprang from, Christina has the answers on that in her book. She's also the author of Preservation, the Art of Canning Fermentation and Dehydration. So something tells me there's some homemade jam hanging out in your pantry, Christina. Thank you so much for joining us. 

CHRISTINA WARD: There is! This is going to be so much fun. I love talking about Dirty Helen and all the other forgotten women of history who are a little outside what we consider the normative. And my last batch of jam I made was a peach with Old Monk rum, a very dark, robust rum, and it tastes fantastic.

AMY: Ooh. I wonder if you can work the Dirty Helen liquor into a jam somehow? We'll talk about the Dirty Helen booze later on in the show, but...

CHRISTINA: Yeah, I know I can.

KIM: I'm sensing a, uh, jam of the month club. I wanna be part of it if that happens. Anyway, so Christina, tell us about how you first learned about Helen Cromwell and your involvement in bringing back her memoir.

CHRISTINA: I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and my father-in-law, Joe , used to be a vice cop in Milwaukee. He joined the force in the late forties and had all these great stories. And one of the things a lot that beat cops did was visit a lot of the neighborhood taverns on their beat. And one of them was the Sunflower Inn owned by Helen Cromwell. Now at that time, Helen was at the very end of her life and career, but she was notorious in Milwaukee. The bar had set up itself after a speakeasy, and how she got her name was because of her filthy, filthy mouth. So people came in for the personality. And so Joe told me about Helen, and Joe had a copy of her original memoir that she wrote. When I finally read it, I was like, I need to publish this. We need to bring this book back. People need to know about this incredible woman and her amazing life.

AMY: Yeah. All right. So after reading the first chapter or two of Good Time Party Girl, I texted Kim right away. She hadn't started it yet. And I was like, "Oh, get ready for this." Okay. So listeners, imagine if Anne of Green Gables or Maud Hart Lovelace's, Betsy, Tacy and Tib dropped constant F-bombs and described losing their virginity. That's basically what reading the early chapters of this memoir felt like.

KIM: Yeah, it's the other story you always wanted to hear, right? It's the other side.

CHRISTINA: I think that there's this crazy mythology of how everything was Little House on the Prairie. When Helen really starts talking about her story, this is a teenager in, you know, 1900, 1901. And she's talking about having hot pants, and so...

KIM: It's a different kind of coming of age story than you're used to from that period.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, absolutely. This is gonna be a real different take on growing up during that time period.

KIM: Yes. She vividly recounts her youth in Indiana, as you said. It's at the turn of the 20th century, and even knowing what we were getting into, the level of frankness that she had in terms of the profanity and the sexuality was totally unexpected. It's kind of a reminder that today we maybe have a more cleaned up idea of what that Gibson Girl type young woman was like, right? These passages are pretty racy.

CHRISTINA: It is racy. And I think it's a much more accurate reflection of what it was like to be a woman of that time. Not to say that there weren't very chaste and churchgoing young women, but on the other end of the spectrum, there were also, and I think that, you know, as women, we know this, that, you know, you're wrestling with your urges, you're going through this great hormonal change as a teenager and discovering your power as a woman and the power of femininity. And Helen talks about how empowering it was for her to feel attractive.

KIM: It's kind of crazy how, um, cleaned up and how asexual all the characters are that we usually read from that time, period. I mean, it's so unrealistic, but so pervasive.

AMY: Yeah, if you think about it, these young women are often married off at a pretty young age, so you can't be expected to think they go from being like this completely innocent little girl to suddenly a married woman. I, They have the, uh, normal course of...

KIM: Hormones.

AMY: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And this exemplifies, I mean, she really describes it all. It's wonderful.

KIM: Let's talk about, she loses her virginity at 16 and she writes about it.

CHRISTINA: So here, Helen had the hots for Phil. Phil was a recent, new resident of the town from the very robust, sophisticated town of Cincinnati. She instantly fell in love with this very, uh, handsome, dark haired, dark eyed, mysterious stranger.

AMY: So basically, they're kind of sneaking around town trying to see each other behind her parents' backs. Finally, they make a plan to get away together one night at a hotel room.

CHRISTINA: Yes. So they finally have sex, and she's actually in, in remembrance of the event, questions, as we see sometimes written in romance novels, the concern of the size of, of, Phil, and whether she can accept that, and finds out happily that she can and did and enjoyed the process and wanted to repeat it as many times as she could.

KIM: Yes,

AMY: She's quite frank, yes. So needless to say, Helen's Midwestern parents feel that they need to do something to keep their wild child in check. They are not quite sure what she's been getting up to with this boy, but they know it's not good. So they decide to ship her off to stay with some relatives in New York. It ends up being a kind of out of the frying pan into the fire sort of scenario in terms of tawdriness, right?

CHRISTINA: Absolutely. So she goes to visit her cousin, who's actually much more sophisticated than she is. And so they're hanging out at a hotel with college age friends at Lake Saranac on, you know, the New York finger lakes, which was a retreat for many of the Gilded Age millionaires and playboys . And so she finds that partying with all of these college folks and her young cousin is that they're way more promiscuous than she ever was. But she wasn't as interested in just casually having sex with a lot of guys, because at that time she was just really in love with Phil. But it did open her eyes as to a world that lay beyond Indiana.

AMY: There is one story, which we're not gonna go into, from the New York days. Um, there's one party on a yacht. You guys have to read this. That's all I'm gonna say.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, it's, it's pretty outrageous. But again, if we take away the time period, if you thought about what would happen if you put a bunch of really super hormonally influenced teenagers on a boat with a bunch of booze, , you know...

AMY: It's called the Bravo TV series Below Deck. 

CHRISTINA: Right. I think, 

AMY: The 1900s version of that.

KIM: Yeah. It's like Spring Break.

CHRISTINA: People have been doing these kinds of things forever, but Helen's version of her experiences, I think, are just so wonderfully unique, because not everyone had the capability to write about their teenage adventures.

KIM: Yeah. Just the fact that she had no filter, and just told it like it was.

CHRISTINA: Absolutely. And no shame either. I think that's a refreshing element of it. She tells her story without regret, really, or any kind of judgment. She's like, "Take me as I am. I had a great time and I've got the stories to show for it."

KIM: I love her. I love her. 

yeah, so when her stint with the New York relatives came to an end, that absence that she had from Phil, it only made her heart grow fonder. And this led to the first of many life changing decisions. Christina, can you tell us what happened? 

CHRISTINA: Yeah. So she came back from visiting her cousin, Adele, in New York, and her father was trying to send her off to college. And she made a choice. She eloped. She actually did the train switch, which, you know, you think never really happens, except in movies, but that's what she did. So she was put on a train to go off to college, um, and she got off at the switching station at that town and jumped on the train to Cincinnati where Phil had moved back to with his mom. And that was it. The die was cast for her new life in Cincinnati.

AMY: And as a Cincinnati native, I loved this whole part of the memoir. In fact, I was excited to discover that that first saloon that her husband, Phil, operated in the West End was about four blocks away from a flag factory that I worked at every summer in high school and college. So that flag factory has been around for a really long time, since 1869, so I can picture Helen Cromwell walking past that flag factory in the neighborhood she was living. Right there. I guess we could say this is the point in her life where, you know, even though she's done this totally rebellious thing and eloped, she's having a very conventional life right now, correct?

CHRISTINA: She is. And so she got married. She has the first of her sons. Um, Phil who's now her husband works in the brewing industry. I'm gonna take a small historical aside here, and if folks aren't familiar with how brewing and bars worked at that time period, bars were not independently owned by a person as much as they were called a tide house. So the breweries actually owned the bars, almost like a franchise. A lot of times the bosses there would be kind of low level gangster-ish, let's call it mob light, that would actually manage these bars. And so Phil was actually working as a bar manager for one of those kind of mobish families that were related to the breweries. And so Phil was working all night and kind of enjoying the pleasures of the nightlife, where Helen was at home with the kids. And she was getting tired of it. Really tired of it. It was like she got married and just was put on the shelf and put away. And so that became a real hard thing for Helen to stomach.

AMY: Yeah, so she's bored. So then she makes the decision to go get a job. 

CHRISTINA: Yeah. Helen was always fashion forward, loved fashion. And so she went to one of the finer dress makers and got a job working as a sales lady. So Helen was always a people person and always really a self starter, if you will. 

AMY: And part of the reason she took that job, too, was because she wanted the clothes. She would get a discount on the clothes, and she was always very stylish.

CHRISTINA: Oh, very stylish. It was something that she was renowned for, even up to the end of her life. She was always finally coiffed and with hats. She was a connoisseur of millinery and fine clothing. She was always turned out to the nines.

KIM: So the section of the book where Helen finds out about Phil's infidelity is absolutely heart wrenching. Can you explain what happened for our listeners? 

CHRISTINA: Yeah, so Phil took up with a woman who was a known companion in that hierarchy of sex work. So this was a woman who kind of affiliated herself with other mobsters, and Helen found out and she was devastated. Just absolutely devastated. And she confronted Phil, asked him to give her up. And he wouldn't. He just wouldn't. And the other woman became increasingly bold, and what finally set Helen off was she called the house. She called the house where she lived with her children, with Phil's children. And that was enough to set her off. And Helen, when she had a temper, she had a temper. So she went looking for this woman and when she found her, she beat her up. She stole her diamond ring and she, 

that Phil had given this woman, she took it and she, she did some damage.

This

woman. 

AMY: Literally, the claws came out, because I think she raked her fingernails down the woman's face. 

KIM: She did it from her eyes down to the point of her breasts or something she says, and her hands were bloody. And she broke her arm too.

CHRISTINA: Right. And broke her arm. So, what that represented for Helen, I mean, she loved Phil. She gave up her college education, her whole family, ran away, and that's what she gets in return. Some Schmo who's, you know, messing around with a woman who Helen definitely felt was uglier than she was . And that Helen made a point of that. She was really offended, uh, by the fact that she felt that she was much prettier than the woman that Phil took up with. And so Phil was really upset that she did that, and she gave him the ultimatum of like either she goes, or I go .

KIM: By the way, she's pregnant with their second child during all of this too, by the way. 

AMY: So basically she, even though she's married, she has gotten interest from a man, wanting to take her out. Normally she would say, "No, I'm a married woman," but because her marriage is in shambles, her husband's stepping out on her, she has this thought like, "Maybe I should do it too." But she doesn't want to. So she pays her husband a visit at the bar and says, "Let's just try to make our marriage work." And if he would've said, yes, she would've turned down this date, but he very rudely says, to hell with you. And at that point, the switch flips and she realizes now, okay, I'm going on this date. And that date was the turning point, right?

CHRISTINA: It was an absolute turning point. She gave Phil every chance to do the right thing, and he refused. And so she was like, "Fine. A man asked me out on a date, I'm gonna go." 

AMY: But key point, at the end of the night...

CHRISTINA: Yes

AMY: He left her some cash.

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: And she's like, "What is this?" 

CHRISTINA: She was like, if somebody's gonna give me money to do that, why not? And so she never called herself a prostitute or anything like that. She looked at herself as just, you know, compensated for showing a man a good time.

KIM: Yeah. And what I love about her story is that it's not shown as like, oh, well look, what happens when someone chooses that life and their life is ruined. Like, she is thriving, basically.

AMY: Oh, yeah. She's having the time of her life. 

Yeah, 

CHRISTINA: Yeah, absolutely. She was always sad that her marriage ended, but at the same time, she very much looked at it as like, you know, Phil tossed it all away. And so forget him.

AMY: We should talk about the collateral damage, though. 

CHRISTINA: Yeah, she has to make what's come to be called the Sophie's Choice. So she has the two sons, the older son, Phil Jr, she decides to leave with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law. But Donny, who was the youngest, she did not want to leave Donnie behind. And so when she left, she took Donny with her and split the brothers up, and that caused a lifelong kind of ripple effect for the family, even to this day. Um, she goes west, as so many people did, because the west was where, you know, new starts, new beginnings and new opportunities. And she meets up with a fellow that she had met at the dress shop in Cincinnati. And it turns out that he was a not so low level gangster. He was a bank robber. And he offered Helen a lot of money if she would stay with him to hide out for six months. And then he would also pay for Donny to go to school at a good private boarding school. And so Helen did that. 

AMY: And I think there was a little bit of an explanation for leaving the one son. She knew the alternative would be losing both kids.

CHRISTINA: Yeah. She was very concerned, especially when we think about the laws at that time, women did not have many rights at all, especially, in Helen's situation, she would've been accused of immorality, being an unfit mother, and she would've had both sons taken away had she proceeded to divorce court. And that's something to bring up as well, because Helen did not go get a divorce. Neither did Phil. So essentially, Helen was a bigamist. By my count, at least six times.

AMY: She just kind of failed to mention that Cincinnati husband.

CHRISTINA: Yeah. She would go get married again whenever it was convenient for her again. So starting out, she's looking to try to establish some personal autonomy for herself that she can support herself, and make her own choices for her life. And that becomes like an overarching thing throughout her entire career is she's always trying to be independent.

AMY: Then she decides, okay, I'm not really wanting to turn tricks anymore. I think I have the business acumen to start my own brothel.

CHRISTINA: Yeah. She's in New York doing a little bit of, kind of, you know, companionship for pay, as well as working her dress job. And she meets a young man who she falls in love. Again, she falls in love and it turns out he's a very wealthy son of, um, a rug importer out of Chicago, but he's also a pretty wounded veteran, so it's a bit of an ill fated, love story. And that's how she winds up in Chicago. 

AMY: And he knows what her line of business is. I found that fascinating.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, he was totally accepting of her career choices. Of course, he requested that she not engage in the bed business while he was around, um, but her being independent was always very important to her. After her experience with Phil, she did not like giving up that independence or autonomy to a man. Um, but that is how she got to Chicago, and through his family is how she was introduced to the Chicago crime families. And Al Capone's the guy who really helps shape the next part of her life.

AMY: She claims that she and Al Capone were always just friends, that it was platonic, but they did have an enduring camaraderie with each other.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, it's funny, she was very protective of Capone. The family thinks she probably was sleeping with Capone, um, but some of the researchers who are experts in Capone think actually he wasn't. He would've not wanted to mix business with pleasure, and he saw her as a business woman, as someone with potential. So her first job actually for Capone in Chicago is filling in helping out one of his, um, brothels.

AMY: A really gross brothel the way she describes it. Yeah, I feel like she's so frank in the whole memoir that I don't know what it would benefit her to hide that if they were sleeping together. So I don't know. She really made Al Capone look like a complete sweetheart in the book. 

KIM: Oh, this is just like the best mini series waiting to happen. I mean, or best not even mini the best TV series. Do you wanna talk about how she transitioned from running a brothel to opening her own speakeasy? It was the Sunflower Inn, which would become legendary in Milwaukee. So how did she get there from running a brothel?

CHRISTINA: So she's in Chicago and the man that she loved, he died. And she wanted to get out of Chicago, and Al Capone gave her some business advice, which was go up to Superior, Wisconsin and open a brothel there. And then with Capone's money and support, she went up to Superior, Wisconsin, which sounds like "Where? Why?" But at that time, Superior, Wisconsin was a port city on Lake Superior, and it had huge international traffic. So if you were gonna open up a brothel, going where lots of sailors are is a good business plan. And so she did that, and she was very bold in running it and hiring women and being actually really fair with women, with pay. She, herself, was not actually sleeping with men. She was getting older. She felt that she was ready to get out of the brothel business and essentially turned over everything to one of the girls who was working for her and was gonna go back to Chicago. Uh, she got on the train, made a stop in Milwaukee and met a couple people and sussed out Milwaukee as like this could be a good place to retire from sex working. And so her retirement plan was then to open a proper speakeasy. Again, great business sense. Milwaukee was an industrial town and she noticed how the police were operating here in Milwaukee and noticed that all the fancy nightclubs, the fancy speakeasies that were operating at night, were the ones that were getting busted all the time. So she decided, very smartly, to open her speakeasy for the daytime and to cater to workers, to working men. And so she was open from like 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Those were her hours.

AMY: Interesting. So, and, so she had a workaround when she was a madame. With the police, she just basically paid them off and she never had any worries that she was gonna get busted. Now, running a speakeasy, she has to be a lot more careful. She devised a lot of clever ways to keep the booze hidden. I 

CHRISTINA: I, I think Milwaukee during Prohibition was a funny place to be because just like Cincinnati, we had an economy built on beer breweries. And so Prohibition wasn't as greatly enforced here in Milwaukee, uh, during that time period, as it was in other places. All the local cops were just like, "eh." Nobody paid much mind to it. Um, but they had a, uh, an out of town FBI guy that started cracking down and, and giving everybody fits. And so that's where you see all the workarounds and that's where Al Capone helped her. The other thing that was interesting is, Milwaukee was kind of a Switzerland of mafia, if you will. So even with the proximity to Chicago, Capone did not run Milwaukee. And the families that were doing stuff here actually had affiliations with Kansas City. So the Kansas City mob and then the Chicago mob, they kind of agreed just to keep Milwaukee neutral . And everyone knew that Capone was helping Helen. That she was gonna get the booze from Capone and that his system for, you know, hiding things and rigging things, it was all Capone's. And so she had that protection. So that was one of the other elements that kept her pretty safe. Nobody was really gonna mess with her because they knew that they were gonna answer to Capone.

AMY: I thought it was funny when she mentions in the memoir that she was actually even a little bummed when Prohibition finally ended and she was able to sell booze legally. What do you think she meant by that?

CHRISTINA: Well, I think that there was that element of danger that becomes exciting. You become addicted to the adrenaline of it, and so it was a good run for her and she had it down. And she didn't have a lot of competition either. So when Prohibition ended and more bars were able to reopen it increased her competition and that's what made her miss, uh, the, monopoly, if you will.

AMY: So needless to say, when you're reading this book, you will find, or at least I found myself shouting, "Oh my God." Like, I would say that out loud, throughout the course of reading it, um, I'm thinking of the moment where the cops are coming to bust the speakeasy. She realizes she's gonna have to escape out the bathroom window. A woman is sitting on the toilet and she literally hurdles over the woman. Well, she first says get outta here. And the woman's like, what are you talking about? She jumps on the woman's legs and hurdles herself out the bathroom window. So like just crazy stories.

CHRISTINA: And, and that was Helen. The first time I read the book, I had the same reaction. Like "What? No way, come on." And so I did some fact checking on some of the stories. As much as I could. I could not find the woman in the toilet who she jumped on, though I did seek out people who had been to Helen's and everybody corroborated... every, every story, just assume it's all true. A few of the ones that I could actually corroborate, I'm thinking of the story that she tells a little bit later of getting in a cab to go down to Louisville for a day.

AMY: Oh, yes. From Milwaukee to Louisville. I'm just gonna take a cab.

CHRISTINA: I, "Hey boys, I have this party I'm supposed to go to, what do you think?"

And the cab drivers at the bar, he's like," Jump in. We're gonna go." And so sure enough, drive down to Louisville. And the party is for her bourbon supplier, the infamous Van Winkle family from Pappy Van Winkles, very sought after bourbon. And so I've talked to Julian and talked to his aunt who remembers the story and they corroborated. Yes. It's part of their family lore that this infamous bar owner in Milwaukee. Um, and one point I'll. they said that she came just with a fur coat and nothing else on. I've heard a lot of stories of Helen showing up naked in a fur coat. So, I think she may have done that once and then it becomes kind of added onto the lore. Um, but yeah, they remember Helen. And it goes to say there's enough of these stories that I was able to corroborate. So every time you read it and you go, "Oh my God, I can't believe that," you should probably believe it.

KIM: Yeah. And she's name-dropping all these people too, um, who turned up for a drink at the Sunflower Inn. There's names like Randolph Churchill, Gloria Swanson, Joseph McCarthy, to name just a few. 

AMY: And he didn't just drop in for a drink. He worked there. Supposedly. Allegedly. 

CHRISTINA: Oh, not allegedly. 

So yeah. So that's again, part of doing this research. So after Prohibition, Helen goes legit and she also switches her hours a little bit. So she starts opening at night, and her place becomes like the in spot. So you've got business magnets, you've got celebrities, it's kind of an insider thing. All right, you had your dinner, you're dancing at the night club. Where do you go now? We're going to Helen's. The place was physically small. She famously had four bar stools. That's it. Nothing else. She had a piano player and four bar stools. You had to stand or sit on the floor, and she only served bourbon or scotch. That was it. That's what you got. 

AMY: If you tried to order something else, she would very loudly, so that the entire bar could hear, cuss you out. So it became like a running joke

KIM: Yeah, you get heckled. 

CHRISTINA: And, and a rite of passage, and no one was immune. So for our professional baseball team at that time, like the Milwaukee Braves, they would bring rival teams in, you know, players. They bring Joe DiMaggio in and have Helen curse him out. And so it became like a high comedy and it became a real hopping, fun place, and that, for a lot of people, is that memory of the Sunflower Inn and that later period when they went legit. So thirties up until her closing in the early sixties, it was a landmark and Helen was a local celebrity.

KIM: Yeah. And as you said too, I mean, there's all this name dropping, but there are also people that she does, you know, out of respect for their situation or whatever not reveal their names. Which of course is very interesting.

AMY: Enticing as the reader. You're like, who is it? Is it a Kennedy? I want to know! 

CHRISTINA: Yeah. It, you know, and that's where some of 'em, I couldn't figure out, but where the bar was located was fairly close to Marquette University, so the college boys would come and, and hang out at Helen's too. And she was so supportive and outgoing to a lot of the Marquette boys. And the students that were having a hard time, she'd hire them. And one of them was Joe McCarthy. The infamous Wisconsin Senator, who was responsible for like kind of what they call the Red Scare hearings. She paid for him to finish. She paid for the tuition of five different guys to finish Marquette. Um, I could not find any official documentation of that, but I did hear a few family anecdotes. I had two different people come forward to say, you know, my grandpa told me a story about Helen giving him money to finish school.

So I think that was a reflection of she was still a mother. And so she found a way to, um, be maternal to some of the young fellows who were frequenting the bar.

AMY: So in the Sunflower Inn, one of the items of decor was this giant, giant painting of a naked lady, like lounging on a couch and she kind of always would tell people that was her. Um, then we know from the memoir, it's not her, so that she, or did she say, or did you tell us that?

CHRISTINA: I think I told you that, because that's the research and here's the fun part: so Helen always claimed it was her and nobody disabused her of that. And it's a very kind of a Rococo style lounging woman fully nude. Is it tacky? I guess it depends on your taste, but interestingly only about six months ago, I got another version of that story, which is really interesting. So my research found that that painting was originally in the Grove Hotel, which was again, a Milwaukee hotel. It went out of business and somehow, alright, Helen, got that. The story I just heard was a different restaurant had bought the painting from the auction when that hotel went out of business in the 1930s, but Helen always wanted the painting. She had seen it and she wanted the painting. And this woman who was the granddaughter of the folks who owned that restaurant, she claims that Helen had two Capone associates go into the restaurant and convince her grandfather to give the painting to Helen.

KIM: An offer you can't refuse.

CHRISTINA: And 

oh, so I don't know. So it might have been acquired a little in a shady way.

AMY: So this leads to my next question, which is we know that Helen was not being straight about that painting. Maybe this is an example of, you know, take everything with a grain of salt, who knows, because she obviously was telling tales about that painting.

CHRISTINA: Yeah, you know, unreliable narrator? To what extent? Um, because again, some of the stories that I thought were pretty outrageous, I was able to verify as happening, and yet then there's something you find out, you know, just six months ago that, oh, there's a different version of that story. For me, I want to believe Helen. So I think any reader should approach this with like, it's the gift of the storyteller to embellish a little bit to make the story a little better, but it's about 80% point and 

AMY: what I was gonna say. I believe her also, but it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. What matters is these are damn good yarns.

CHRISTINA: Highly entertaining. And again, that snapshot of a woman who completely lived her life under her own terms who fought against a bad first husband to just the general patriarchy to carve out a life that she wanted to live, not the life that someone else wanted her to live.

KIM: Yep. And I mean, any autobiography you feel like if it's 80% true that's pretty good. That's good enough for me, right? Um, so she actually developed this memoir with help from a journalist friend named Robert Dougherty. Do you have any idea how much of the actual writing she did on this project? It really does sound like her voice, but...

CHRISTINA: It's very much her voice. And so I did speak to, um, Dougherty's daughter, who says that she remembers Helen. Helen would visit her dad when they were working on this. What Dougherty did was help take all of her writing and her notes and anecdotes and make it into something that's readable. So it's definitely Helen's words, Helen's voice. And so Dougherty really, I, I guess, a better term he was very much a developmental editor and he helped put the whole thing together and construct it, but what his daughter told me, again, the thing that's so fascinating and interesting to me is that for all of Helen's notes and all of the stories that are in the book, she said there's another box filled with more of the notes with even more stories. And I was like, 

AMY: my gosh. 

CHRISTINA: me. I need that.

AMY: We need the sequel!

KIM: Development execs out there, there's more! You could, you could run this series for years.

CHRISTINA: I want more Helen. 

AMY: Yeah. I definitely think her voice rings out so clearly from this book. Even if she did have a little help piecing it together. There's one point where she tells the reader that she gave a man her "boom-boom look," and I'm like, Robert, doesn't say, boom-boom look, that's a Helen term, you know? she would say when she'd meet a guy and she knew she was gonna be doing quote unquote business with him, she'd say "I had a live one on the hook," you know? Her personality shines through on every page. There is also a ton of foul language in her memoir. And I know, Christina, that kind of came into play when you were reissuing this book, right?

CHRISTINA: It was one of the things I did for modern readers is... the first edition that was published in 1969 had, like, fake swears that you kind of, you know, "oh, crud," um, right. "Fiddlesticks." "Oh, fudge." Um, but you know, we're adults, we're modern readers. So one of the things I did was unbowdlerize all of the language. I put the swears back in, because that is actually how Helen spoke. Um, and it's one of the things that is then in meeting people, older folks who had stories of Helen, some of the insults that she gave, um, entertaining as they were, were, just blush-inducing. She could, like a poet, turn out a curse that was just beautiful and insane and filthy. It's like the "Aristocrat's Joke" times a 

AMY: I love it. 

KIM: Oh, she's so great. 

CHRISTINA: She is. 

KIM: As you said, she earned her nickname, Dirty Helen, not for her career as a professional bed partner, but for her dirty mouth. And in a world that was then and still is stacked against women, she used sex and her feminine wiles as a way to claim her power. It worked for her and it allowed her a degree of liberty that was unusual for women at the time. Christina, what do you admire most about Helen Cromwell's story?

CHRISTINA: Her tenacity. Her tenacity. At the face of every potential hardship, she always chose herself. She chose to advocate for herself to figure out a way that she could support herself. She never made a decision that was going to make her beholden to someone else. 

AMY: I am listening right now to a podcast called Heidi World, which is all about Heidi Fleiss and her story. And I think having just read this book, and then listening to her story, it's definitely making me think a little bit more about sex work. And, you know, I think I always came to it with the idea that, you know, these women are being degraded and they have no other option and they're reduced to having to do this in order to survive. And Helen's story is not that at all. Like, she had full agency over her decisions and her choices and it worked for her. It made me think about things a little bit differently, I guess.

CHRISTINA: Well, I'm, I'm glad for that because that's, again, this story of a woman entrepreneur of an unlikely life. But yet one that is just as valid as, you know, any other coming of age and business woman's career biography. And I think that that is part of the reason I wanted to bring it back. These unlikely lives, these women, if we can kind of recast, stripped away of some of the cultural trappings and some of the moral trappings about what they do and what the choices they made, I think that we can, um, reevaluate and think about our own experiences as well as maybe start new conversations. I would love for anyone listening to this to go and talk to their grandmothers right now. If you've got a grandma, ask grandma if she had hot pants at all and who it was for. You know, let's start talking more...

AMY: Um, your Thanksgiving assignment, everyone.

KIM: Yeah, I wish I'd asked my grandmother some of that stuff because I have a feeling from a few little things I've heard whispered that there was definitely more there to the story than I ever knew. I'm gonna go digging. She's not around anymore, but I'm gonna go digging.

AMY: Um, but yeah, just the idea of like, we're talking a lot right now about giving women freedom over their bodies and this, this applies too.

KIM: That's a great point, Amy.

CHRISTINA: Absolutely. That is such a good point. And I think the more we tell the stories of the women who were, you know, a little bit -- or a lot a bit -- outside of what we think is quote, unquote "normal." The word normal... I wanna throw that out the window. All the choices that women are making about their lives, their work, if it's the right choice for you, then it's the right choice.

AMY: So today we can still see Helen's legacy in the form of, uh, a scotch? What is it?

CHRISTINA: This is a barrel-strength bourbon. I was talking to a friend of mine who owns a distillery here, Guy Rehorst of Great Lakes Distillery. His family was in the bar business before he started the distillery and so he has memories from his grandparents bar of, you know, meeting up as the young boy. He met Helen. I wanted to bring the book back and Guy was on board a hundred percent. He's like, "We've gotta work together. Helen deserves a bourbon!" Again, because all that was served at the Sunflower was either scotch or bourbon. And so we partnered to introduce Dirty Helen Bourbon. And then of course, every bottle has a little kind of micro-history of Helen's story. So people can get the book, they can get bourbon. The book is sold worldwide anywhere. For the bourbon though, you have to come to Milwaukee and you have to buy the bourbon in town.

AMY: All right. So listeners, if you're driving through That's Milwaukee. Yeah. You, you know where to stop. Um, that's great. I love it. Um, and actually it's only, you know, 10:00 AM here in Los Angeles, but if it weren't so early in the morning, I think I would've poured myself a little glass of scotch or bourbon in her honor.

KIM: Amy, I think Helen would sanction you drinking at 10:00 AM. It wouldn't have stopped her.

CHRISTINA: It would not have stopped her. 

AMY: That's true. Anyway, Christina, thank you so much for dropping by the show to tell us about this unforgettable personality. I had a blast reading the book and I've had a blast talking to you about her.

KIM: This was so much fun. 

CHRISTINA: Thank you so much for the opportunity. I'm Helen's biggest fan and I will always take every opportunity I can to tell folks about her. And I encourage people to, again, talk to your mothers, talk to your grandmothers and, uh, ask 'em if they had hot pants.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Get the dirt, get the dirt... 

KIM: And tell us! We wanna hear about it. We'll do a follow up show about all of your grandmothers.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. We'll see you guys back here next week.

KIM: Our theme song was written in, performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.