‘Dirty Helen’ memoir revised
New version has photos and is faithful to subject’s foul mouth
She came into the world sweet Helen Worley in smalltown Indiana, and by the time she left us in 1969, she had earned the naughty nickname Dirty Helen in Milwaukee.
In between, she was married six times, had children and grandchildren, moved about the country, worked as a prostitute and madam in a brothel, befriended gangster Al Capone, and finally settled in Milwaukee where she became the foul-mouthed but good-hearted proprietor of a speakeasyturned-tavern named the Sun Flower Inn.
Her rollicking 1966 memoir has been revised and renamed “Good Time Party Girl: The Notorious Life of Dirty Helen Cromwell.”
The book is named for Helen’s favored term for her sexwork vocation.
“I was certainly not just a streetwalker, and the term harlot is too archaic for me. Hooker? That’s a hell of a word! And I can’t stand prostitute,” she says in her book, which she
penned with help from a California ghostwriter named Robert Dougherty.
The original, “Dirty Helen,” contained no photographs, and now that’s been rectified. And the new version prints Helen’s favorite curse words instead of their sanitized substitutes.
“In no place on Earth does anyone but Ned Flanders say ‘screwing-A,’” said Christina Ward, who led the revision. Ward is vice president of Feral House & Process Media, which publishes nonfiction from, in her words, the darker corners of culture.
Everyone is invited to the release party for the book at 7 p.m. Aug. 23 at Great Lakes Distillery, 616 W. Virginia St. Helen’s drink of choice, bourbon, will flow.
Helen’s great-granddaughter, Lori Ruwe, plans to travel here from Cincinnati with family members for the party. She provided Ward with many of the photos in the book.
“I’d like to see where the bar was. It’s a parking lot now. I’d like to walk where she walked,” said Ruwe, who never met Helen nor visited Milwaukee. Her grandfather, Phil, was one of Helen’s two sons.
The Sun Flower, named for the tall yellow weeds out front, was at 1806 W. St. Paul Ave. Everyone from neighborhood stumblers to pro athletes to politicians to millionaires drank there. Helen ran it from 1926 to 1960.
In those years, Helen’s turns as a woman of paid pleasure were less frequent, but she did allow younger women to take customers upstairs. She understood the power of a woman to separate a man from his money, and she had done it in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and even Superior.
Ruwe, 57, read the book as a teenager but didn’t fully understand the choices her great-grandmother made until she read it again years later.
“You do what you have to for your kids. It was a means for her to survive,” Ruwe said.
Today, Ruwe’s young grandchildren have heard about Helen and sometimes wear her jewelry for fun. And her daughter Ashley named her business Dirty Helen Paper Co. in honor of the greatgreat-grandmother who showed how to survive in a male-dominated business.
Ward, who lives in Cudahy, researched Helen’s life and visited her family. She asked me for articles about Helen that we have in our archives. Gossip writers at the Journal and Sentinel years ago treated Helen as a comic figure.
“But really, what are they laughing at? “Ward said. “Here was a woman who built a 40-year-long business with nothing but ham sandwiches, friendship with Capone, and a filthy mouth. She knew it was schtick and as an aging woman, one who sold herself for ‘companionship,’ she knew more than anyone that her aging body was no longer a viable commodity. How many other business owners get to claim that they owe their success to maledicta?” (I looked it up. Maledicta means offensive words.)
People have whispered about whether Helen slept with Capone, but she describes him in the book as a friend. She was well aware of the allegations against him, but she found him sweet and supportive of her business.
The other well-known person connected to Helen is Joseph McCarthy, who went on to become a U.S. senator from Wisconsin and to think everyone was a Russian spy. Helen put young Joe to work in her bar and helped pay for him, and other young men, to attend Marquette University, she says in her book.
Helen wrote that she liked Milwaukee from her very first day here. She bought the bar for a mere $300. As her health failed later in life, she ran out of money and lost the business.
A bed believed to belong to Helen was removed from the building and placed in storage for many years. It was sold at auction this year for $1,300. Cedarburg Auction owner Tarq Durante said the bed was customized for performance with mirrors on both the headboard and footboard.
She died at age 83 on May 21, 1969, of a blood clot embolism at the Muirdale sanatorium in Wauwatosa. She is buried in her native Indiana at Crownland Cemetery in Noblesville. The marker says Helen Cromell, the correct spelling of her last husband’s surname. She called herself Cromwell because it was easier to pronounce.
When Helen wasn’t cursing everyone out, she was urging them to “live a little.” From reading her book, I’d say she lived a hell of a lot.
Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Follow him at Facebook or on Twitter @columnboy.