During the long and tumultuous history of Chicago, people have come here in search of fame and fortune, husbands and wives, good times and naughty times; to find lives better (or at least more interesting) than those on the farms and in the small towns they left behind. Some have done so grandly. Others have done so modestly. Still others have done so tragically, swallowed up by the city. In 1905, a 21-year-old woman, originally from Slovenia, left her family in Pittsburgh and took a train to Chicago. She was alone. She was never heard from again.
“It was a family story told almost in whispers,” says that vanished woman’s great-grandniece, Karen Abbott, a writer living in Atlanta. “Her name was never mentioned. There were no details at all. But my imagination was captured. I started doing some research into Chicago at that time and I was hooked.”
She was not, truth be told, expecting to discover what fate had befallen her great-grandaunt. And she did not. But she found dozens of other captivating people in a city alive with sensational stories.
They are all between the covers of her new book, “Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul,” the compelling story of a couple of enterprising sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, who came to Chicago and created the most famous brothel the world has ever known.
The book, to be published this week, has spawned a great deal of excitement.
“The original research, the photos, the social commenta . . . It’s just a great book,” says Augie Aleski, the owner of Centuries & Sleuths bookstore in Forest Park (the location as published has been corrected in this text and in an accompanying photograph caption). “And it’s a story that needed to be told about Chicago. I think it will do very, very well.” Aleski met Abbott earlier this year when she came here to visit independent bookstores.
No one can really predict how the book will do. But it seems inevitable that it will be compared to “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America,” that marvelous and mega-best seller by Erik Larson that was published in 2003 and is still selling briskly.
For those too dense to immediately grasp the similarities–the lilt (and length) of the titles, the historical setting–there is a Larson book jacket quote to jar them: “A detailed and intimate portrait of the Ritz of brothels, the famed Everleigh Club of turn-of-the-century Chicago, with such glamorous chambers as the Room of 1,000 Mirrors, complete with a reflective floor. And isn’t Minna’s advice to her resident prostitutes worthy advice for us all: ‘Give, but give interestingly and with mystery’.”
Such public Larson endorsements are rare. “I almost never do it, and I am asked frequently,” he said during a recent visit to Chicago to be interviewed for an upcoming National Geographic documentary titled “Madness in the White City” and to appear at the baiduhai Printers Row Book Fair. “But I was asked to read the book by a mutual friend (Sara Gruen, the author of the best-selling “Water for Elephants”), and I met Karen. Who could turn down a request from two attractive women? Seriously, it is a fine book, a great story.”
Gruen’s blurb: “With gleaming prose and authoritative knowledge, Abbott elucidates one of the most colorful periods in American history, and the result reads like the very best fiction. Sex, opulence, murder: What’s not to love?”
With a few side trips to neighboring eras, the book focuses on the period from 1900 to 1911, a raucous time in Chicago. This was a place for dreamers and bandits, boodlers and reformers, those of low morals and those of high aesthetics, a city intensely eager to reinvent itself. The bright promises of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 had been tarnished by a deep economic depression that witnessed thousands of deaths from starvation and left many more thousands jobless; strife between labor and ownership; vice and corruption flourishing. As never before, or perhaps since, were the forces of light and dark contending as strenuously for the city’s soul.
For those years the Everleigh Club was the diamond of the “dark” world, sitting in an area of unbridled sinfulness known as the Levee, roughly between 18th and 22nd Streets, and Wabash Avenue and Clark Street. (The Everleigh Club’s address was 2131-33 S. Dearborn St, now the site of the Raymond Hilliard Homes).
It was operated by the two entrepreneurial sisters who were, Abbott details for the first time, a wildly inventive pair who manufactured all manner of stories about themselves. They were traveling actors. They were kin to Edgar Allan Poe. They were Kentucky debutantes on the run from violent husbands.
“They had honed their stories, their lies, so well, so inventively, that through the years others just accepted them as fact. Once I was able to get at their real story, the real background, I began to understand them. In seeing where they had come from, what they were up against and what they accomplished, I started to appreciate just how smart and savvy they were,” Abbott says.
Abbott was born 34 years ago in Philadelphia and raised in nearby Norristown, Pa., which, she never fails to mention, was–and here’s a modest historical hook–the birthplace of Tommy Lasorda.
“I wasn’t really a dark kid, but I was in my head a lot,” she says. “I got good grades all through my 16 years of Catholic school but I was always writing these weird, and I have to say really bad, stories, filled with murder. When I was a teenager I sent a bunch of stories to ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.’ None, thank God, ever got published.”
She majored in English at Villanova University, and during her junior year had an internship at Philadelphia magazine. Later she wrote a column for an alternative weekly. It was called, provocatively, “Mainline Jailbait,” and her first piece was about how to secure a fake ID. After graduation, she fashioned a successful career as a staff member at Philadelphia magazine and Philadelphia Weekly, writing lengthy feature stories.
All the while she was married to Chuck Kahler, a civil engineer with Schnabel Engineering. They had met during their junior year at Villanova and were married shortly after graduating. Kahler’s expertise is in dams, and in 2001 he was offered the chance to move to Atlanta.
“Up North, he was basically working on rehabbing projects, but this was an opportunity for him to design and build dams, to oversee construction,” says Abbott. “I had a terrific career in Philadelphia. Moving was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I love my husband.”
In Atlanta, she devoted time to researching and writing a book about the real-life author of a controversial work titled “Hit Man,” a how-to guide for would-be assassins. “The author, ‘Rex Feral,’ was actually a divorced mother of two living in Florida,” says Abbott. “I wrote it as a nonfiction book. That didn’t sell. I did a novelization. That didn’t sell. Three years on this project and by early 2004 I was a mess, crying and literally pulling out my hair. I was covered in hives. I felt like such a failure.”
She finally abandoned that project and soon, sparked by the memories of stories she had been told about her missing great-grandaunt, she began digging through Chicago’s past.
“It didn’t take long for me to come across ‘Come Into My Parlor,’ (a book subtitled “A Biography of the Aristocratic Everleigh Sisters of Chicago,” by Charles Washburn, published in 1934.) And it didn’t take me long to see that there was a book to be written about them,” Abbott says.
She made frequent trips to Chicago, often in the company of her mother, Kathy, a nurse. They shared a room at the Palmer House and spent their days plowing through rolls of microfilm at the Harold Washington Library and other institutions of musty learning.
“The city really came alive for me. I could walk the streets and know that my characters had walked them too. That was important to me, empowering,” she says. “The writing always went better after I’d returned from a trip to Chicago.”
She completed a book proposal, in the form of an outline and a few sample chapters. Random House bought it in June 2005, and the Abbotts celebrated at a restaurant with sushi and champagne.
“I would have paid Random House to publish the book,” she says. “I had spent five years not earning a penny, getting rejected. Thank God I had a husband who was supportive and encouraging. But I still said to myself, ‘If the Everleighs doesn’t sell, I’m finished with writing forever.’ I was going to get an office job.”
As she started to write, the book became something more than mere biography. “There were so many important social, political and religious issues swirling at the time,” she says.
And so, the reader will get not only an inside view of the club–with its couture gowns, gourmet meals and famous patrons, plus the shooting of retail heir Marshall Field Jr.–but a vivid portrait of an era, complete with tales of “white slavery,” immigration debates and religious fervor.
“This was a time that shaped America’s sexual culture,” says Abbott.
Her editor at Random House was Julia Cheiffetz. “Initially, this was a modest, quiet acquisition, a relatively simple story of two interesting sisters,” she says. “But as we began working together, as the manuscript started to take shape, I think we both realized there was a larger story here. I can remember writing in the margins on some pages, ‘Tell me more!’ And Karen did. Once we had it, and I shared it with my colleagues at Random House, I could feel the enthusiasm.”
The book became a lead summer title with a hefty first printing of 60,000 copies. It also helped get Abbott a contract for her next book, which Cheiffetz will also edit for Random House–a biography of burlesque’s Gypsy Rose Lee, set against Depression-era New York with a wild cast of characters, from Lucky Luciano to Abbott and Costello.
“I really think Karen is going to be a major force in the world of narrative non-fiction,” says Cheiffetz.
In the meantime, Abbott has been spending time in New York libraries doing research, and she will be there on Wednesday for the official launch of “Sin” with a party at, fittingly, the Museum of Sex. Then it’s back to Chicago for a series of events.
“It will be good to get back. I really felt as if I have been embraced by the city, the people I’ve met there,” she says. (Her quick wit and considerable charm have made her to the Wise Guys Corner at the Billy Goat Tavern what Dorothy Parker was to the Algonquin Round Table). “I am sure that there are some local writers saying, ‘Hey, I could have written that book.’ But maybe it took someone who is not from Chicago to see and appreciate the story I found.
“Every writer, I suppose, gets attached to their characters, but I really love the sisters. I miss them. I feel like I’ve lost two friends . . . two members of my family.”
– – –
The night the girls welcomed a PRINCE
“If it weren’t for the married men we couldn’t have carried on at all, and if it weren’t for the cheating married women we would have earned another million.” –THE EVERLEIGH SISTERS
Excerpted from “SIN IN THESECOND CITY” by Karen Abbott Copyright (c) 2007 by Karen Abbott. Published by arrangement with Random House.
Pulled or prompted, men came to the Everleigh Club. They came to see the Room of 1,000 Mirrors, inspired by Madam Babe Connors’s place in St. Louis, with a floor made entirely of reflective glass. In Minna’s eyes, this parlor paid bawdy tribute to Honore de Balzac’s “The Magic Skin”–a mirror with numerous facets, each depicting a world. They came to hear the Club’s string orchestras–the only bordello in the Levee featuring three–and its professor, Vanderpool Vanderpool, whose repertoire included a chipper rendition of “Stay in Your Own Back Yard,” one of the most popular tunes of the era.
They came to see the 30 boudoirs, each with a mirrored ceiling and marble inlaid brass bed, a private bathroom with a tub laced in gold detailing, imported oil paintings, and hidden buttons that rang for champagne. They came to eat in the glorious Pullman Buffet, gorging on Southern cuisine and the creations of the Club’s nationally renowned head chef. On any given night, the menu’s specials might offer:
Entrees
supreme of guinea-fowl
pheasant
capon
broiled squab
roasted turkey, duck and goose
Sides
au gratin cauliflower
spinach cups with creamed peas
parmesan potato cubes
pear salad with sweet dressing
stuffed cucumber salad
carrots (candied or plain)
browned sweet potatoes
Minna’s favorite boys dined again after midnight on a feast of fried oysters, Welsh rarebit, deviled crabs, lobster, caviar–unadorned save for a dash of lemon juice–and scrambled eggs with bacon. For special occasions–a courtesan’s engagement, a birthday, the reappearance of a long-lost Everleigh Club client–Minna ordered the team of chefs to double the usual menu. The madam believed any event that diverted the course of a normal day was a valid excuse to host an epicurean free-for-all.
They came to see the library, filled floor to ceiling with classics in literature and poetry and philosophy, and the art room, housing a few bona fide masterworks and a reproduction of Bernini’s famous Apollo and Daphne, which the sisters had failed to find in America. After learning that the original statue was at the Villa Borghese in Rome, Minna sent an artist to capture its image. She was haunted by how the exquisite nymph’s hands flowered into the branches of a laurel tree just as the god of light reaches for her. A gorgeous piece, but she admired the statue mostly for the questions it posed about clients: Why did men who had everything worth having patronize the Everleigh Club? And what if the thing they desired most in this world simply vanished?
They came to see the ballroom, with its towering water fountain, parquet floor arranged in intricate mosaic patterns, and ceiling that dripped crystal chandeliers. They came to see the little oddities that made the Club like no place else in the world: gilded fishbowls, 18-karat-gold spittoons that cost $650 each, and the Everleighs’ signature trinket–a fountain that, at regular intervals, fired a jet of perfume into the thickly incensed air.
“By comparison,” wrote Herbert Asbury, “the celebrated Mahogany Hall of Washington, the famous Clark Street house of Carrie Watson, and the finest brothels in New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans were squalid hovels fit only for the amorous frolics of chimpanzees.”
They came to see the soundproof reception parlors, twelve in all. The Copper Room featured walls paneled with hammered brass; the Silver Room gleamed sterling; the Blue Room offered cerulean leather pillows stamped with images of Gibson girls; the furniture in the Gold Room was encrusted with gilt. And a visitor mustn’t forget the Red Room and Rose Room and Green Room, all done in monochromatic splendor.
They came to see the Moorish Room, featuring the obligatory Turkish corner, complete with overstuffed couches and rich, sweeping draperies; and the Japanese Parlor, with its ornately carved teakwood chair resting upon a dais, a gold silk canopy hovering above. (The Tribune noted that the Japanese Parlor was “a harlot’s dream of what a Japanese palace might look like inside.”) In the Egyptian Room, a full-size effigy of Cleopatra kept a solemn eye on the proceedings. The Chinese Room, entirely different from the ambiguously named Oriental Room, offered packages of tiny firecrackers and a huge brass beaker in which to shoot them–where else but at the Everleigh Club could a man indulge his adult and childish impulses?
“Next week,” Minna often joked, “we are contemplating putting in a box of sand for the kiddies.”
Ada, especially, grew obsessed with the Club’s maintenance. On the rare occasions when she joined Minna in the parlors, she spent half her time wiping smudges from the mirrors, straightening the oil paintings, checking the gold piano for unsightly water marks. “It was a happy day,” she said, “when we conceived the idea of using rubber washers from Mason jars on the bottoms of the glasses.”
To keep the piano shining, the mirrored walls intact, the rugs clean, and the perfume jets shooting, the sisters allotted $18,000 per year in renovations. It would be worth it, they reasoned, when patrons returned as eager to see the updated decor as the new selection of girls. It was time for the Gold Room, Minna’s and Ada’s favorite, to be entirely redone in gold leaf. A team of laborers replaced the gilt on everything from the goldfish bowls to the spittoons. It looked stunning, Minna thought, the whole room glittering from corner to corner, but that night a guest accidentally smeared a panel. The metal was still soft, and the man left a clear imprint. This wouldn’t do, and Minna couldn’t wait until next year’s renovation to have it fixed. She called in a dauber right away.
“Come, I’ll show you where a man put his hand last night,” she said, leading the handyman upstairs.
He hesitated and seemed nervous. It occurred to Minna what he was thinking, but she didn’t rush to clarify. Why ruin what was sure to be a perfectly good punch line?
“If it’s all the same to you,” he replied after a moment, “I’d rather have a glass of beer.”
Literary sensations like Ring Lardner, George Ade, Percy Hammond, Edgar Lee Masters, and Theodore Dreiser came and listened to stunning creatures recite poetry classics. “Until at last, serene and proud, in all the splendour of her light,” the Everleigh butterflies murmured in between sips of champagne, “she walks the terraces of cloud, supreme as Empress of the Night.”
The Club entertained sports icons like James J. Corbett and Stanley Ketchel and, on one fateful night, Jack Johnson; theater celebrities like John Barrymore; a circus star named the Great Fearlesso; and gambling virtuosos, most notably “Bet a Million” Gates, who enjoyed good luck among the harlots even as he ridiculed their attempts at sophisticated discourse. “That,” he joked to the sisters, “is educating the wrong end of a whore.” Pioneers of the automobile industry came. The production of “horseless carriages” had evolved considerably since two models–the prototype Morrison electric and a gasoline-powered car from Germany–were exhibited, with little fanfare, at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1895, the Chicago Times-Herald sponsored a round-trip race from Chicago to Evanston, and two cars finished despite the foot of snow that buried the metropolitan area. No mere publicity stunt, the race launched Chicago’s auto-manufacturing industry.
Within five years, 22 local companies began building and selling horseless carriages, and by the century’s turn, 377 of them vied for space on the city’s clogged streets. The ensuing chaos–collisions with wagons, lax enforcement, arbitrary traffic signals and laws–failed to dampen the public’s enthusiasm for cars, in Chicago or elsewhere. Crowds cheered as New York drivers raced thirty miles through the streets from Kingsbridge to Irvington-on-Hudson, north of the city; and in Detroit, a man named Ransom E. Olds invented an assembly line to churn out hundreds of his Curved Dash Oldsmobiles, sold to eager consumers for $650 each. Bicycles were passe, but cars signified money, modernity, and romance. Every man sang the new hit song “Come Away with Me, Lucille, in My Merry Oldsmobile” even if he couldn’t afford to own one.
Chicago hosted its first major auto show in July 1900, five months after the Club’s grand opening. After the presentations at the official Coliseum headquarters, the men retired en masse to the Everleigh Club. They were welcome anytime–manufacturers were known to spare no expense when wooing important dealers–but Minna and Ada, for the next 11 years, always designated one “Automobile Night” during the week of the show. Companies were welcome to set up corporate and expense accounts at the brothel for their employees. A man gained admittance only by (fllig)ashing an official exhibitor’s badge and was treated to a lavish feast at the Pullman Buffet, a bottle of wine, and a trip up the mahogany staircase.
Wealthy ranchers came to the Club from the Southwest; bankers and Broadway troupes sojourned from the East Coast; congressional committees indulged during breaks from the capital; and on March 3, 1902, royalty visited from overseas.
Prince Henry of Prussia had arrived in New York harbor in the dwindling days of February to accept a yacht built for his brother, Kaiser Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany, and to present the United States with his own gift, a statue of Frederick the Great. Prominent Americans viewed the prince’s trip as an opportunity to showcase the country’s brightest thinkers and shrewdest capitalists, and to (fllig)ex its developing imperial muscle. The United States now claimed Hawaii and Puerto Rico as territories and prepared to trade with a newly autonomous Cuba. With the eyes of the world poised to judge Prince Henry’s reception, America would spare no expense.
“England’s only chance to get even,” joked the Chicago Daily News, “is to send us over a live prince as soon as we have recovered from Prince Henry.”
The prince spent a few days in New York. He attended a fete in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and lunched at Sherry’s with J. P. Morgan, Adolphus Busch, Charles Schwab, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison.
Debate raged in the Second City, meanwhile, over an appropriate itinerary for Prince Henry. Chicago’s 20,000-plus German immigrants planned to line a brilliantly lit Michigan Avenue and roar as the prince traveled past on his way to an elaborate banquet at the Auditorium Hotel. There he would dine with 165 “representative men” of Chicago, including J. Ogden Armour, Potter Palmer, Oscar Mayer, Marshall Field Jr., and Mayor Carter Harrison II. The planning committees also approved a choral festival at the First Regiment Armory, a tour of Marshall Field’s department store, a trip to Lincoln’s grave, another stop at the Auditorium Hotel for a grand ball, and a lunch and reception at the Germania Club. The visit, all told, would cost the city $75,000.
But the committee nixed a tour of the gory Union Stock Yards (“Prince Henry probably will brush the committee aside and visit the Stock Yards anyhow,” the Daily News sniffed. “He will want to learn how Europe feeds its armies and navies”) and remained ambivalent on whether visiting royalty should enjoy the “old feudal privilege” of kissing Chicago’s debutantes. “It won’t hurt the prince,” one committeeman argued, “to get a taste of real American hero worship.”
If Prince Henry did kiss the debutantes, he never told.
The sight Prince Henry most desired to see, however, was neither discussed by the planning committee nor detailed in the press. Such discretion benefited the Everleigh sisters, who in anticipation of the prince’s arrival at the Club on midnight, March 3, were in the midst of frenzied planning. None of the Everleigh butter(fllig)ies had heard of Prince Henry of Prussia before he announced his intention to visit, so the sisters prepared lessons–not about the German royal family (who cared?), but about how to entertain them properly.
Minna stood in front of her 30 courtesans, arms waving, a conductor nearing crescendo, and told them how it would be done. Prince Henry, she announced, was the sort of man who knew exactly what he wanted. So as Everleigh girls their job was to give him something he’d never even considered.
They would enact a mythological celebration centered around Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, agriculture, and fertility of nature and–closest to Minna’s heart–the patron god of the Greek stage. She’d contacted an old friend from her theater days and ordered real fawnskin outfits for them to wear, with nothing–that’s right, nothing–underneath. No petticoats, no stockings, no corsets. Not even shoes–at least not right away. Come now, they had to begin practicing. The ritual was complex, commemorating the dismemberment of Zeus’s infant son at the hands of the Titans. There would be a cloth bull and some raw meat involved.
Around midnight on March 3, Prince Henry and his party rang the Club’s bell. A tall man, the prince had an unruly sprig of a beard and skin like a cracked egg. High, shiny black boots hugged his legs, making his pants bunch out in tufts over his knees. The members of his entourage wore sweeping capes and frowns that stretched to their necks. Expressions improved markedly once Minna greeted her boys and escorted them to the Pullman Buffet for dinner.
At 1:30 a.m., Minna came to round everyone up, telling the girls the show was about to start–touch up their makeup one last time and don’t forget they weren’t to wear shoes. The harlots yanked pins from their hair and shook it out, slicing strands with their fingers, the messier the better. They rushed down the spiral staircase and into the parlor, where they found Prince Henry and his entourage at a long table. The girls whooped and swirled in circles, kicking, backs arching like drawn bows. The decisive clang of cymbals punctuated every move. One girl thrashed her way across the room, heading directly for Prince Henry, and just as she reached him she leapt, turned a half circle in midair, and landed on his lap, latching on to his neck. The others followed suit, and soon every man at the table was grappling with an Everleigh butterfly.
Minna dimmed the lights, the signal for the second act of the show. In rehearsals she’d used real torches but found that they’d “smoked up the room,” so she’d decided to improvise during the real event.
A servant wheeled a bull made entirely of cloth into the room. The girls raced toward the structure, punching its head and biting its hide, spitting white flurries of cotton. Minna watched, nodding with approval. It was perfect, she thought. This was exactly how the infant Dionysus-Zagreus had been killed. For sound effects, a male butler bellowed each time a mouth clamped down on the bull. Then Minna pointed a finger, and servants fetched platters piled with uncooked sirloin. For ten minutes, the harlots tore into the raw strips, ripping the meat with feral bites, their faces stained with pink slashes of animal blood. The
Germans loved it.
When the platters were empty, Minna threw on the lights. She would now take their visitors for a grand tour of the Club. The harlots trooped back upstairs, changed from their fawnskins into evening gowns, pinned up their hair, wiped the blood from their cheeks. A few girls brought dignitaries to their boudoirs, eager to display other talents besides playacting Greek mythology, and hurried downstairs to join the champagne toast when their guests were satisfied.
Minna instructed everyone to raise their glasses, toasting the kaiser in absentia and the prince in the flesh (although the kaiser, after learning of his brother’s visit to the Club, cast a mild insult by asking the vintage of the wine served). She was delighted when the prince returned the favor, comparing Chicago with Berlin, pointing out the American city’s ever-growing German population. He called his new friends, Minna and Ada Everleigh, “frauleins.” Ada, who never drank beer, showed her respect by gulping down a tall mug of pilsner.
Minna then ordered the table cleared. She had one more surprise.
Two butlers helped Vidette, the best dancer among the Everleigh butterflies, up to the mahogany surface. The orchestra struck up “The Blue Danube,” and the harlot kicked again and again, her feet flying higher each time, legs meeting and parting like a pair of scissors possessed. In the middle of her routine, one high-heeled silver slipper launched from her foot, sailed across the room, and collided with a glass of champagne. Some of the liquid spilled into the shoe, and a nearby man named Adolph scooped it up.
“Boot liquor,” he called, raising the slipper high. “The darling mustn’t get her feet wet.”
Without further comment, he tilted back his head, drained the champagne from the shoe, and tossed it back to its owner.
“On with the dance!” someone yelled.
“Nix,” said another guest. “Off with a slipper.” He lifted a harlot’s leg, resting it against his waist, and removed her shoe. “Why should Adolph have all the fun?” he added. “This is everybody’s party.”
Prince Henry’s entire entourage rose, yanked a slipper from the nearest girl, and held it aloft. Waiters scuttled about, hurriedly filling each shoe with champagne.
“To the prince.”
“To the kaiser.”
“To beautiful women the world over.”
Prince Henry of Prussia departed Chicago by 2 p.m. the following afternoon, but his slipper sipping began a trend that long outlasted his visit. “In New York millionaires were soon doing it publicly,” wrote Charles Washburn. “At home parties husbands were doing it, in back rooms, grocery clerks were doing it–in fact, everybody was doing it . . . it made a more lasting impression on a girl than carrying her picture in a watch.”
– – –
KAREN ABBOTT IN CHICAGO
July 17 at 7 p.m. at The Book Stall, 811 Elm St. in Winnetka
July 18 at 6 p.m. at Maxim’s, 24 E. Goethe St., in conversation with Rick Kogan, reservations 312-742-1748
July 19 at 7 p.m. at The Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln Ave.