If one were to check the wallets of some of 1930s New York more prominent male citizens, it’s likely one would find a business card bearing simply a sketch of a parrot and a phone number. This card might be inscrutable at first glance, but to those in the know, that card would lead to the home of one Polly Adler, New York’s most notorious and successful madam during the city’s hedonistic Jazz Era. Largely forgotten today, the story of Adler’s remarkable life is rediscovered in Debby Applegate’s entertaining and deeply researched Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age. A century on from Adler’s heyday, Madam comes at a fortuitous time just as the intersection of sex, power and the pursuit of the American Dream again dominates headlines.
It’s the most tired of literary clichés to describe truth as better than fiction, but Adler’s life would have tested the imagination of most of the era’s finest writers. Born around 1900 in what is now Belarus, Pearl Adler’s early days seemed to follow the usual trope for immigrants of the era: a poor Jewish girl flees increasing anti-Semitism and lands in America at age thirteen seeking a better life. Pearl’s ambitions to go to school soon succumbed to the realities of immigrant life in the 1910s, and by her late teens she was trying to make a living in the factories of New York while hobnobbing with the rough characters of Brooklyn’s Brownsville. By the time Prohibition had passed in the early 1920s, Pearl—quickly Americanized to Polly—was madam to a household of women in Manhattan, trying to stay on the good side of the mob while dodging cops, and keeping company with characters with names like Jenny the Factory, Smiling George, and Legs Diamond. But while it wasn’t the life Polly might have chosen for herself, she was good at it—so good in fact, that her ‘house’ became a magnet for many of the luminaries of New York’s glittering society, both of the highbrow—most of The New Yorker’s founding staff could be found at Polly’s most evenings—and the low, especially among the underworld. It’s the description of Adler’s underworld connections and her navigation of New York’s complex web of illicit connections in the judiciary, police and political arenas that Applegate’s thorough research and storytelling shines. But with success came the madam’s number one enemy: notoriety. It wasn’t simply good business for Polly to keep the secrets of Tammany Hall and its criminal underworld connections, it was literally life and death. During the murderous early years of the 1930s, gangster Dutch Schultz used Polly’s apartment as a safe house; ‘protectors’ could turn deadly if secrets were spilled and Polly herself was powerless to get justice for the many times she and her girls were roughed up by customers and so-called friends alike.
Polly Adler survived long enough to tell her own story in her ghostwritten memoir A House Is Not a Home, outliving many of the very characters that had made her own fortune. Yet sometimes in Madam there is the sense that the real Pearl—not the Polly that was the front for her notorious houses—feels at a distance. Her business was in discretion and she literally owed her life to her ability to keep secrets, so it perhaps isn’t surprising that one never gets the sense of what Adler really felt about the course her life had taken or her real feelings about her role in the ‘skin trade’. If anyone could embody the hypocrisy of American attitudes towards sex, corruption and power and the hidden traumas on its players, it was Polly Adler. Thanks to Applegate’s Madam, more of her story will see daylight.