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Pearl "Polly" Adler (April 16, 1900 – June 9, 1962) [1] [2] was an American madam and author, best known for her work A House Is Not a Home, which was 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 ...
Dec 1, 2021 · Just seven years after arriving at Ellis Island, Polly Adler ran a highly successful bordellos in New York, catering to an exclusive clientele.
- Russian Immigrant
- Female Entrepreneur
- Success on The Great White Way
- Highest Circles
- Quiet Retirement
She was born in Yanow, Russia, in 1900, eldest child of a Jewish tailor, and grew up amid brutal anti-Semitic pogroms. In 1913, her father sent her to accompany a cousin with a ticket to America. But the cousin got scared and refused to board the ship, so Polly sailed alone, arriving with only the clothes she’d stuffed into a potato sack. Heading t...
She became a madam in 1920, as Prohibitionwas kicking off a decade-long national bacchanal. A pimp offered her an arrangement involving an apartment near Columbia University where he entertained his mistress. When he wasn’t using the place, he said, Adler could run it as a whorehouse. “I jumped at his offer,” she recalled. To staff the joint, she r...
Success kept her moving her operation to larger, fancier apartments. She hired beautiful women, including Ziegfeld Folliesshowgirls eager to earn extra dough. Her big break came in 1923, when gangster “Smiling George” McManus—proprietor of Manhattan’s famous high-stakes floating crap game—began bringing winners to Polly’s to celebrate. “Whoever won...
In August 1924, seeking to attract old Manhattan money, Polly brought a bevy of beauties upstate to Saratoga Springs, where patricians gathered for the thoroughbred racing season. The angle worked. “At last I’d made contact with the clientele I’d been looking for,” Adler recalled. Years later, one of her blueblood customers, John Hay “Jock” Whitney...
Polly prospered for another decade, investing her profits in stocks. But she wearied of the grind. Working long days and longer nights for 25 years, she’d been robbed, slugged by drunks, arrested a dozen times, and denounced in headlines as “New York’s Vice Queen.” In 1945, she decided it was time to retire. She moved to Los Angeles, bought a two-b...
Nov 7, 2021 · In her book, "Madam," Pulitzer Prize-winner Debby Applegate traces Polly Adler's rise from immigrant sweatshop employee to owner of one of New York City's most popular bordellos, catering to...
Jun 13, 2022 · “No one starts out to be a whore,” the notorious madam Polly Adler once said. No one starts out to be a madam either, let alone the most successful and glamorous one of Prohibition-era New York. But that’s exactly where Adler ended up during her reign: sitting atop the glittering swell of New York City’s nightlife by catering to its ...
Nov 9, 2021 · Madam is a Horatio Alger-style success story with a walk-on-the-wild-side twist. Adler – her real name was Pearl – came to America at thirteen ahead of her family, only to be cut off from her parents when the outbreak of World War I stranded them in Russia.
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Polly’s pals — luminaries like Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Lucky Luciano, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Parker, Bugsy Siegel and Desi Arnaz – made the Jazz Age roar. No one would’ve guessed that Pearl would become “the First Lady of the Underworld” when she arrived in America as a 13-year old Russian Jewish immigrant.
