Cleo Lythgoe- Queen of the Bahamas

The barber had him in the chair with his face still lathered when she came through the door.

She had heard what he’d been saying about her — about her liquor, which was the same thing. Word travelled fast in Nassau in 1923; the whole town ran on one trade and everyone drank in the same hotel bar. She didn’t wait for the shave to finish. She took him out into the street with the soap drying on his jaw and walked him down to her office, where she explained, without raising her voice, what would happen if he said it again.

He didn’t say it again. He left the island.

The reporter who wrote that down was a British newspaperman named H. De Winton Wigley, sent out from London to watch the whiskey trade at its height. He published his account that same year. What he found at the center of it was a dark-haired woman in a white dress who held a wholesale liquor license, ran a flotilla of boats, and was not crossed twice by anybody in Nassau.

The stenographer

She was born Gertrude Lythgoe in Ohio, the last of ten children, to English and Scottish immigrant parents. Her mother died when she was small. What she had was a good head for figures and the kind of schooling a bright girl could get if she pushed, and she took both of them to New York and went to work as a stenographer for a British liquor importer.

That is the whole origin story, and it is worth sitting with, because it explains everything that follows. She didn’t marry into the liquor trade. She learned it from a desk — the shipping, the invoicing, the customs paperwork — for years before anyone thought to make it illegal.

Then in January 1920 the United States made it illegal, and Gertrude Lythgoe understood something that most people in the room did not. Prohibition had not destroyed the liquor business. It had moved the profitable end of it about two hundred miles offshore.

Market Street

She went to Nassau.

The Miami she lands in is a decade past its boom — the hurricane behind it, the crash behind it, repeal already visible up ahead.

She arrived, not to a syndicate, not as somebody’s partner — she set up her own wholesale house, with her own name over it, on Market Street.

She lived at the Lucerne Hotel, which was where the rum-runners and the journalists and a fair number of confidence men all lived, and where you could learn more in a hotel bar in an evening than in a month of correspondence.

Her connections were in Scotland, and that turned out to be the business. She brought in genuine Scotch, and she brought it in unwatered, and in a market swimming with cut liquor and bathtub gin and worse, that was not a nicety. It was the entire proposition. Everyone knows that my liquor is the very best, she said, and the reason she could say it was that she’d spent a decade learning what very best meant.

The men she sold to knew it. Bill McCoy built his own reputation on the same principle — clean goods, honestly described — and the two of them held each other in high regard for the rest of their lives without ever marrying, which the newspapers of the day found almost impossible to write about without speculating.

What the papers wanted

The press adored her, and not for her business acumen.

She was called the Queen of the Bahamas and the Queen of Rum Row. She was mistaken for Russian, for French, for Spanish. She got the nickname Cleo because somebody thought she looked like Cleopatra, and it stuck so thoroughly that it followed her into the title of her own book forty years later. Men who had never met her sent letters to newspaper editors about her.

What she said, repeatedly, to anyone who asked, was that she didn’t need a man to tell her what to do.

Underneath the coverage was a working operation with real exposure. She was charged with importing more than a thousand cases into New Orleans and stood trial for it — and was acquitted, which in that era and that trade was not a formality. She dealt with intimidation the way she dealt with the man in the barber’s chair: directly, in person, and with a pistol in the desk drawer if the conversation required one.

The papers wanted a beautiful woman with a gun. What they were actually looking at was a wholesaler with excellent supply lines and no tolerance for anyone damaging her reputation for quality.

The thing that finally moved her

Nothing in the trade drove her out. Not the Coast Guard, not the courts, not the competition.

In the spring of 1926 an American reporter named Virginia Swain sat down with her and filed a piece that ran under a headline about a woman rum-runner who couldn’t sleep. Cleo told her she had come to believe there was a jinx waiting for her — something that meant to kill her and finish her business — and that she intended to get out.

And she got out.

That is the part I keep turning over. She had beaten everything the outside world sent at her, and then she walked away from the most profitable position in the trade because of a conviction she couldn’t have defended to anyone and didn’t try to. She quit at the top, on a feeling, and she was right to — though she couldn’t have known that, and being right was never the point.

Bill McCoy went to prison. Mickey Duffy was shot dead in a hotel suite in Atlantic City. The men who stayed in the business mostly stayed until it took something from them.

Gertrude Lythgoe lived another five decades. She left Nassau by the middle of the twenties, and what she did next was run a rent-a-car company in Detroit for something like twenty years. That is not an anticlimax. Almost nobody in that trade got out clean, and fewer still got out early enough to have a whole ordinary life afterwards. She died in California in 1974, having never married anybody.

There’s a version of this story where she’s remembered the way the newspapers wanted her — the beauty with the pistol, the Queen of Rum Row, a woman defined by how she looked to the men writing about her. That isn’t what happened, and the reason is that she outlived them all and got the last word. The Bahama Queen appeared in 1964, when she was in her seventies. Her account, her order, her emphasis. It’s worth your evening.

That is what makes her the kind of woman I keep writing about. Not the pistol and not the nickname. A woman who learned a trade from a typewriter, saw where the money had gone, talked her way to it, sold clean goods, broke no law anyone could name, and then chose her own exit at the top and took the next fifty years for herself — one of the women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America, on terms she set.

The trade Edith walks into when she arrives in Florida half a dozen years after Cleo leaves Nassau is a late, thinner version of the one Cleo left at its peak. Edith’s a widow at a crossroads, and turns to the only trade she knows. She is fiction; Cleo was not. But the arithmetic they’re doing is the same, and I’ve never been able to write one without thinking about the other. Their world is the world of the Rum Runners’ Chronicles.

My Cleo is younger than the woman who lived, and I gave her a father, a family firm, and a reluctant fiancé that the real one never had. Gertrude Lythgoe came up from nothing, alone, on her own nerve. That’s a marvelous novel and somebody should write it — it simply isn’t this one. Mine is Red Sky at Night, twelve miles off Miami in 1932, and it’s free if you’d like it: download your copy.