Unlike many of the women in John’s life, when Louise Wooster died she was rich and a legendary figure in her community—a strange honor for a Birmingham, Alabama, madam.
During her “little rehearsals” before the war with John at her Montgomery brothel, John had convinced Lou she could become an actress and then told her he had to leave immediately, promising he would send for her. After waiting in vain, Lou said she tried to become an actress on her own. She gave it up, she said, because of illness. With no other means of support, she went back to prostitution.
In 1871 Lou relocated to Birmingham, Alabama. Iron ore mining and related iron and steel industries were drawing men from all over the South. With so many men and so much money, “Bad Birmingham” was a Mecca for ambitious prostitutes.
By 1873 Birmingham had grown too fast. Public sanitation had been almost totally ignored. Many homes and businesses didn’t have clean water. In June, the city had its first case of cholera.
Although thousands of Birmingham’s residents fled the city to escape the plague, Louise and many of the city’s prostitutes stayed to nurse the sick in brothels-turned-clinics, saving dozens of lives.1 Somehow none of them came down with cholera themselves.
Lou knew the meaning of “location, location, location.” After Birmingham was back on its feet, she bought a two-story home and started her own “high status” bordello. It was directly across the street from City Hall. Three saloons and a livery stable were close by, and it was within shouting distance of the nearby police station (on the payroll, of course) in case a visitor became violent.2 By 1887, Lou was one of Birmingham’s wealthiest citizens. She owned several more buildings, land, elegant furniture, and jewelry and gave generously to Birmingham’s charities.3
Though Lou’s affair with John Wilkes Booth had only lasted a few weeks, it had remained a vivid memory. She was one of many who didn’t believe John had died in 1865 and gave numerous interviews to reporters, showing them letters and mementos (but never letting them read or touch them) she claimed John had sent her after his alleged death. Lou also kept a scrapbook of newspaper articles questioning whether it was actually John or another man who died at the Garrett farm.4
“The woman’s story may or may not be true in every particular,” the Chicago Times told its readers, “but no one who hears the story from her lips can doubt the sincerity of her belief that Booth is not dead.. . .She believes that Booth still lives—that somewhere in some distant land perhaps he is a homeless wanderer, and that one day the fates may bring them face to face.”5
The only record of Louise Wooster’s affair with John Wilkes Booth is her own Autobiography of a Magdalen that she co-wrote with a Birmingham minister in 1911, two years before her death.6
The “Magdalen” in the title is a reference to the New Testament’s Mary Magdalene, the reviled prostitute who saw the error of her ways and became one of Jesus’ most devoted followers. Lou’s book is likewise a story of redemption. Since much of it is pure invention (she claimed her father was “old Puritan stock” from New England, that her mother’s family were wealthy Southern planters, and that she attended a fashionable boarding school in Mobile), other parts of her narrative, including her affair with John Wilkes Booth, could also have been made up. What wasn’t made up was her fixation on the man. That fixation likely came from somewhere, and John had a predilection for prostitutes. It is entirely likely he spent some time “rehearsing” with Lou at “Big Lize’s” when he was in Montgomery.
Lou retired in 1901 and died twelve years later in May 1913 of kidney disease. She was buried alongside her sister, who was also a Birmingham madam.7 Journalists may have been skeptical of what Lou told them about her affair with John Booth, but they knew a good story when they saw it. News articles with titles like “Booth’s Sweetheart Dies,”8 “Assassin’s Sweetheart Dead,9 “Booth’s Sweetheart Buried,”10 appeared simultaneously across the country following her death.
For their part, Birmingham residents cared more about the time Lou cared for their cholera victims than they did about her affair with John Booth. According to local legend, many of Birmingham’s prominent gentlemen anonymously sent their drivers in empty carriages to escort her remains to the city’s Oak Hill Cemetery as anonymous tokens of respect. The cortege of empty carriages was said to stretch for blocks.11 Margaret Mitchell, who lived in Birmingham for a time before writing Gone with the Wind, is said to have based Belle Watling, the novel’s kind-hearted Atlanta prostitute, on Lou.12
In 2004, an opera, Louise: The Story of a Magdalen, based on her life, won an international composition prize for opera.13 Lou has also been memorialized as the namesake of an award given by the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Public Health: the Lou Wooster Public Health Hero Award for exemplary service.14