Reading not your thing? You can also listen to the Old Pros podcast episode on Belle Brezing found here
Old pros turn difficult circumstances and bad reputations into transcendent personal brands. Belle Brezing (1860-1940) was supposed to be “ruined” early in life, but instead became Lexington, Kentucky’s most successful madam, inspiring the Belle Watling character in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and giving the good people of Lexington something to talk about for over 100 years.
Belle Brezing was born June 16, 1860 Mary Belle Cox, the second child of Sarah Ann Cox, a sex worker and dressmaker. Sarah married a saloon owner named George Brezing, whose name Belle adopted. The marriage was riddled with abuse, which led to very public divorce in 1866.
Despite lots of evidence of George’s violence and drunkenness the local papers painted Sarah as an unchaste woman which preemptively ruined the reputation of her two daughters just as Belle was beginning her first day of school.
In 1871, Belle’s older sister Hester married and left home. One year later, a then 12-year-old Belle began a two year relationship with a then 36-year-old Italian man named Dionesio Mucci. She documented other affairs with boys her own age, including John Andrew Cook, in a diary that Dionesio gifted her.
In 1875 Belle married James Kenney, she was then 15 and pregnant. The Lexington Daily Press mocked the couple and Belle’s already scandalous reputation.
The marriage was short-lived. James Kenny left town 9 days after the body of John Andrew Cook, presumed lover of Belle’s, was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head outside of Belle Brezing’s back gate. Police ruled Cook’s death a suicide, although the local papers, and many neighbors, claimed it was murder.
There’s no archival evidence to prove that Belle Brezing and James Kenny ever communicated after his departure, but their daughter Daisy May was born in March 1876. Belle Brezing’s mother, Sarah Ann, died 2 months later, leaving her daughter and granddaughter homeless. A neighbor, Mrs. Barnett, kindly took custody of Daisy May, and Belle Brezing began her career as a sex worker.
Although she never returned to her mother’s custody, Daisy May received financial support from Belle Brezing for the rest of her life. As a toddler, Daisy May was diagnosed with developmental disabilities and, at Belle Brezing’s request, was enrolled in a private institution in Newport, Kentucky.
After her mother passed, Belle Brezing was transient for 2 years before moving into Lexington’s then most upscale brothel, owned by Jennie Hill. After two years in Jennie Hill’s house, Belle Brezing opened her first brothel at 314 N Upper Street. She opened her second house in 1883 at 194 N Upper Street.
Belle Brezing excelled at creating an atmosphere that romanticized southern culture, attracting wealthy men from all over the country who traveled to Lexington to bet on and buy horses. She maintained relationships with powerful men, and leveraged her public persona and private relationships to build an enduring business and brand. But Lexington was growing less tolerant of high profile brothel owners.
In 1889, moral reformers went after vice in major cities across the country and championed to crack down specifically on sex work. Belle Brezing was indicted for “keeping a bawdy house,” a charge pardoned by then-governor Luke Blackburn.
Belle Brezing’s most famous house opened in 1891 at 59 Megowan Street using a loan from Philadelphia millionaire William Singerly. The opening party is still a legend in Lexington. The Megowan house caught fire in 1895, but was rebuilt. She created and curated an atmosphere that attracted the most powerful men in the region – but it wasn’t enough.
Her brothel didn’t survive the temperance movement. In 1915 anti-vice policies closed down all brothels on the hill. Belle shut down her business but lived the rest of her life in the Megowan house as it decayed around her.
She developed uterine cancer and a morphine addiction to manage the pain. She died on August 11, 1940 the age of 80. Her funeral attracted hundreds of people, glowing obituaries, and her personal possessions were sold to people who wanted to own a piece of her legacy, which lives on in Lexington and around the world.
