Adler, Polly (1899–1962)

Successful American madam who ran an opulent bordello in the heart of Manhattan from 1920 to 1945. Name variations: (aliases) Ann Bean, Pearl Davis, Joan Martin. Born Pearl Adler in Yanow, a White Russian village near the Polish border, on April 16, 1899; died on June 10, 1962; eldest of nine children of Isidore (a Jewish tailor) and Sarah Adler; became a naturalized citizen, May 20, 1929; never married; no children.

Polly Adler was born in Yanow, a White Russian village near the Polish border, on April 16, 1899, the daughter of a Jewish tailor who was by nature temperamental. In her autobiography A House Is Not a Home, Adler recalled him as a man "with big ideas and a correspondingly large sense of his own importance. In his eyes … a wife's place was either in the kitchen or in childbed, and Sarah, my subdued self-effacing little mother, alternated uncomplainingly between them."

In 1913, with the family planning to follow, Adler was packed off to America, accompanied by an older cousin. But after reaching Bremen, her cousin had second thoughts about embarking, and the 14-year-old Adler (the youngest in steerage) sailed on the Naftar alone. With her belongings in a potato sack, Adler arrived at Ellis Island knowing no English. She was put on a train to Mt. Holyoke, Massachusetts, where she was to stay with acquaintances of acquaintances until her family could arrive to claim her. Though her foster family was civil, the warm and affectionate Adler had to deal with their indifference. World War I effectively scuttled the family's dreams of joining her, and Adler's brief stayover turned into four years.

As World War I in Europe took its toll, Adler's father could no longer mail her school money out of Russia. Thus, at 16, the "A" student had to quit school and get a job. For the next two years, she worked in a paper factory for $3 a week. Restless and discontented, she decided to seek out a cousin in Brooklyn. To her surprise, she was greeted warmly, offered the couch, and was soon settled in a job at a corset factory at $5 a week, out of which she paid $3 for room and board and $1.20 for carfare and lunches. Up at 6 AM, home for supper, she then walked a mile each way to night school.

In April 1917, with the United States entering the war, Adler found employment manufacturing soldiers' shirts. The 18-year-old, who had now reached her full height—4'11"—went on her first date and was soon caught up in the dance-hall craze. Though reformers were convinced dance halls were the "gilded hell of the palais de danse," Adler noted that the Nonpareil Dance Hall was "more like a gymnasium, and, as in a gymnasium, the goings on though strenuous were disciplined." Becoming a regular, she entered dance contests, competing for candy, Kewpie dolls, cups, and cash. But by the time she was 19, she was still sleeping on the leather couch, "still grindingly poor, still minus an education, still without a place in the sun."

Then a new supervisor came on the job. On their first date, he managed to get her alone. When he made an advance, she rose to leave. Recalled Adler in her autobiography: "Instead of answering, he went over to the door and locked it. When I resisted him, he knocked me cold."

A month after the rape, she realized she was pregnant, but the supervisor would have nothing to do with her. Adler chose to have an abortion. "I tried to put all this nightmare behind me," she wrote. "But though I went through the motions of living, I was changed—I had lost heart. I no longer had hope." Moving to Manhattan, she found a room on Second Avenue and 9th Street and for the next year worked at the Trio Corset Co. It was a time, she wrote, of "unrelieved drabness, of hurry and worry and clawing uncer tainty."

The year 1921 brought prohibition. While attending a party, Adler was befriended by an actress. Open and warm, the actress shared her show-business friends with Adler and invited her to share a nine-room apartment on Riverside Drive. At first, Adler was thrilled. Soon, however, she learned that the actress was hooked on opium and the joie de vivre of the revolving guests turned into "hop" parties. Throughout her life, Adler steered clear of drugs, and she was uncomfortable with the problems of her self-destructive roommate. When Tony, a known gangster, offered to pay the rent on a new apartment if he could use it once in awhile for trysts with a prominent married woman, Adler jumped at the chance. She now had a room of one's own—sort of.

Now that I can look back over the whole story, it seems obvious that this was my first big step down the so-called primrose path. But then it never even occurred to me to think of Tony's plan and my part in it as being moral or immoral. It did not touch me personally. It simply paid the rent…. I am aware that in the judgment of the stratum of society which decides these things I should have drawn myself up and said, "No thank you, keep your dirty money! I'd rather sew shirts for five dollars a week." … My feeling is that by the time there are such choices to be made, your life already has made the decision for you.

Before long, Tony's prominent married woman had moved on and he was casting about for a new girlfriend; he proposed to Adler payment of $100 for a "girl" and $50 for a finder's fee. By now, Adler knew many women who were openly available for a price and gladly deposited the $50 into her bank account. Tony, who was making good money bootlegging, began to spend two nights a week at her apartment. Supplying him with two women a week, Adler was now taking in $100 weekly and finding the economic freedom heady. She began to give her address to those she thought discreet, and before long three women were coming in several nights a week to entertain acquaintances. Adler was soon arrested for running a disorderly house and listed in the police files as a procuress, but a trial was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Her reputation already ruined, the 22-year-old began to run a full-time house, while worrying that her family would find out in Russia's little town of Yanow. By the spring of 1922, having saved $6,000, Adler decided to go legit and launched Polly's Lingerie Shop with a friend who was not in the procuring business. "Among our best customers were Rosa Ponselle and her sister," boasted Adler. But the shop failed in 1923, and Adler took an apartment in the West 70s and reopened her house for business.

She was fussy about clientele. Businessmen were tightwads, gamblers too rough, so she decided to target the upper brackets of society: theater people, artists, and writers. Her house became a gathering place for intellectuals, tycoons, playboys, those in high positions in government, and the exceedingly wealthy—in short: café society. Polly Adler's was a place to "meet friends, play cards, arrange a dinner party, kill time—a sort of combination club and speakeasy with a harem." She recalled:

I had begun to receive women as my guests. But at first it was only those who were so rich or so famous or so intellectual or so uninhibited that they could go anywhere. Now, however, dropping in at my place had become the thing, and from this time on I was running what amounted to a coeducational bordello.

She was learning her trade. Savvy about raids, she could slip a quick C-note [$100 bill] where it counted. Prospering, she moved to the 50s near Seventh Ave, employed a domestic staff of three—cook, housecleaner and personal maid—and engaged an interior decorator. The place was done up in period French. "Louis Quinze and Louis Seize," noted Adler, "which is sort of traditional for a house." Showgirls would arrive each night from Ziegfeld's or Earl Carroll's Vanities to pick up loose change. Adler, who knew the benefits of fame, now worked at getting her name in the columns, at becoming the "notorious Polly Adler." Her business card contained the logo of a parrot on a perch and the words: LExington 2-1099, New York City.

After a summer season at Saratoga in 1926, Adler moved her house to 59th and Madison. She had a reputation for running an honest, clean, nomadic house; her women were attractive, experienced, and underwent weekly examinations. The rule of the house: "Be a lady in the parlor and a whore in the bedroom." Her main complaint: invasive questions by the slumming demimonde.

Many of my customers never seemed to realize that a prostitute is just as much a product of our so-called culture as is a college professor or a boot-black, and, as with them, her choice of occupation has been dictated by environmental and personality factors. No woman is born a whore and any woman may become one.

Though Adler noted that it would lessen a man's pleasure to think that a woman was submitting to him from necessity, she confessed that "despite all the feigned transports of ecstasy (for purposes of increasing the tip), to ninety-nine out of a hundred girls going to bed with a customer is a joyless, even distasteful, experience."

After a major raid on July 22, 1927, Adler's entrance into the courtroom caused quite a stir among the court officials, "for there were my girls," she wrote, "tall and beautiful, gliding down the aisle like swans on a mirrored lake, with me bustling along after them like Donald Duck."

On May 20, 1929, Adler became a naturalized citizen of the United States. A few months later, she was in hiding in Miami, one step in front of a subpoena, trying to avoid an appearance in front of the Seabury Commission (1931). Though she was not in jeopardy, Adler had no intention of "singing" in front of Samuel Seabury who was engaged in weeding out the malefactors of the New York judicial system. By fleeing a subpoena, she became even more infamous, making every front page in town. In the 1931 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies, Mark Hellinger offered a satire on Grand Hotel, with Helen Morgan playing the moody Russian ballerina "Mademoiselle Polly Adlervitch." But Polly Adler was lying low. She eventually returned to face the music, but would not name names.

Though she was soon released, Adler was flat broke and out of luck. By living outside the law, she had no recourse to the law when she was reluctantly introduced to gangster Dutch Schultz at a party and he asked for her phone number. "There were two things I could do. I could give it to him or I could give it to him." Adler hated gangsters, calling them bully boys, but when Schultz told her to find an apartment under his auspices, she felt she had no options. To her horror, the apartment became gang headquarters. She never lost her fear of Schultz.

By now, Adler had been arrested 11 times, but there had been no convictions. In order to meet their monthly quota, on March 5, 1935, the police carried out another raid. Adler was bound over to be tried at Special Sessions and her "girls" were slated for the Lower Courts. The social climate was curiously sympathetic. "The police tap this woman's wires, set spies on her, and in other ways keep her under surveillance as if they suspected her of being the Lindbergh kidnapper," wrote an indignant columnist for the New York Daily News. Even Judge Jonah J. Goldstein showed compassion while sentencing:

I don't think it's fair to spotlight the women and whisper about the men. It takes two to commit the offense, although under the law only one is brought in. Even though the men are in places of that sort by choice, the procedure in these cases, as in prohibition, makes only the seller and not the buyer liable to prosecution. There is no logic in this distinction, but I am compelled to administer the law as it is written.

Adler received her first prison term: 30 days and $500 fine. While in jail, the town's reigning celebrity was interviewed repeatedly. Forever flip, she was quoted by Dorothy Kilgallen as saying of her cell, "It's not bad. Of course it ain't big, but it's home." Adler enjoyed the interview; she admired Kilgallen, but forever resented the misattributed "ain't."

Once released, Adler was under constant surveillance. She longed to get out of the business, knowing that if the town were raided, she'd be the leading scapegoat. With the help of her friends of the cognoscenti, in her late 40s, she returned to college in Los Angeles, around 1948, and began to write her autobiography, A House Is Not a Home. In it, she quotes everyone from Shakespeare to Clare Boothe Luce . Writes Adler:

The literature of all countries teems with novels and stories and plays about prostitution, and the prostitute as a character has fascinated the men with the noblest minds, the giants of letters, no less than the hacks and the pornographers. But the great to-the-life portraits in the gallery of "fallen women"—the Nanas and Sonyas and Sadie Thompsons are as few and far between as the Zolas and Doestoievskis and Maughams who created them. The overwhelming proportion of writing on this subject—both fiction, and what purports to be factual—is cheaply sensational, or distorted by prejudice, or uninformed, often all three. In this kind of writing, the prostitute comes in two standard models. Either she is presented as a brazen hussy who arrived in the world equipped with marabou-trimmed garters, black silk stockings and a sexy leer (heart of gold optional), or as an innocent victim, a babe in the woods, seduced and abandoned by a city slicker, or maybe shanghaied by a white slaver while on her way from choir practice. And, depending in which category she belongs, her life, when there's no company in the parlor, appears to consist entirely of (a) sitting around in a dirty kimono drinking gin, or (b) weeping and wailing and hammering her fists against the door until someone shuts her up with a smack on the chops.

Polly Adler, however, was not the only one to profit from prostitution. She writes of "the pimp, the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician—these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin." A huge bestseller, the book's profits kept Adler in the style in which she had grown accustomed until she died in 1962.

sources:

Adler, Polly. A House Is Not a Home. NY: Rinehart, 1953.