Polly Adler

Pearl "Polly" Adler (April 16, 1900 – June 9, 1962) was an American madam and author, best known for her work A House Is Not a Home, which was posthumously adapted into a film of the same name.

In 2021, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Debby Applegate published a comprehensive account of Adler's life and times entitled Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age with Doubleday.

Of Russian-Jewish origin, Pearl Adler was the eldest of nine children of Gertrude Koval and Morris Adler, a tailor who travelled throughout Europe on business.

Her early education was from the village rabbi.

The family lived at Yanow, a city of Imperial Russia, (later in western Belarus) near the Polish border, when, with the number of pogroms increasing, her parents sent her, at age 13, to accompany a cousin to America.

Halfway through the journey, her cousin decided to turn back at the first opportunity, ultimately leaving Adler on her own.

World War I delayed the rest of her family from immigrating to America until after the end of the war.

The war also prevented her from receiving the monthly allowance sent by her father.

She lived for a time with family friends in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she cleaned house and attended school and, at age 14, began working in the local paper mill; the following year she moved to Brooklyn, living for a time with cousins.

Adler worked as a seamstress and at clothing factories and sporadically attended school.

At the age of 17, while working in a corset factory for $5 a week, she was raped by her foreman and became pregnant.

She found a doctor who was charging $150 to perform abortions.

The doctor took pity, when she said she only had $35 and accepting only $25 told her to "take the rest and buy some shoes and stockings."

Ostracized by her cousins, she moved to Manhattan and continued working in a factory.

At 19, she began to enjoy the company of theater people in Manhattan, and became an apartment mate of an actress and showgirl on Riverside Drive in New York City.

The street was known in the city's Yiddish slang as "Allrightnik’s Row", suggesting that its residents had "made it".

Her new friends were involved in vaudeville, Broadway revues, Tin Pan Alley, burlesque and the even sleazier underbelly of show business.

They gave Pearl the nickname "Polly."

At this very apartment, in 1920, she was introduced to Nicolas Montana, whose business was procuring women to work in brothels.

Montana set Adler up in a furnished, two-room apartment across from Columbia University, where Polly soon began to procure prostitutes for Montana and his friends, earning $100 a week for her troubles.

One evening, Adler was arrested and charged with procuring, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

After a brief attempt to run a lingerie shop, she returned to her previous role in the sex industry, determined to succeed with it.

This time, she made a point of befriending the police, slipping a $100 bill into a cop's palm whenever she shook his hand.

As Adler's business grew, she invested in a series of improvements, moving to grander accommodations and updating the interiors where necessary.

There has been speculation that New York State Supreme Court justice Joseph Force Crater, who vanished on August 6, 1930, died in Adler's brothel.

Adler was a shrewd businesswoman with a mind for marketing.

She determined that gaining publicity would be to her advantage, and she cultivated newspaper coverage by dressing flamboyantly, making grand appearances at nightclubs and drawing attention to her beautiful employees.

She also made large bribes to city and law enforcement officials to keep her business open.

Adler's brothels were distinguished by drink from the best bootleggers, food from her own private cooks, good hygiene and well-selected, mostly working-class girls.

It was reported that during the early days of the Depression, Adler was able to turn away up to 40 young women for every one she hired.

In the early 1930s, Adler was a star witness of the Seabury Commission investigations and spent a few months in hiding in Florida to avoid testifying.

She refused to give up any mob names when apprehended by the police.

One building in which she plied her trade was The Majestic, at 215 West 75th Street, designed by architects Schwartz and Gross and completed in 1931.

It included a bar styled to resemble the recently excavated Tutankhamun's tomb, a Chinese Room where visitors could play mahjong and a Gobelin tapestry as well as hidden stairways and secret doorways.

Her brothel's patrons included Peter Arno, Harold Ross, Desi Arnaz, George S. Kaufman, who had an account and would pay for the services rendered at the end of each month, Robert Benchley, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, who would chat with Adler while her male friends partook of the services, Milton Berle, John Garfield, New York City mayor Jimmy Walker, gossip columnist Walter Winchell and mobster Dutch Schultz.

Adler retired in 1945, later attending high school and earning an associate degree at Los Angeles City College.

In 1953, she published a bestselling memoir, ghost-written by Virginia Faulkner.

A House Is Not a Home was published by Rinehart and Co. and sold two million copies in both hard cover and mass-market paperback.

Her notoriety led her to be included in Cleveland Amory's 1959 Celebrity Register.

She died of lung cancer in Los Angeles in 1962.