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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 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 Adler was thirteen, her parents sent her with a cousin to the United States to avoid the gathering wave of pogroms. Halfway through the journey, her cousin decided to turn back home, leaving Adler on her own.
World War I prevented the rest of her family from immigrating to the U.S. until after the end of the war. The war also prevented her from receiving the monthly allowance sent by her father. In the U.S., she lived for a time with friends of her family 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, where she lived for a time with cousins. Adler worked as a seamstress and at clothing factories, and attended school sporadically. 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 charged $150 for abortions. The doctor took pity on her when she said she only had $35; he accepted only $25 and 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 shared an apartment with an actress and showgirl on Riverside Drive in New York City. The street was known among Yiddish speakers 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 sleazy underbelly of show business. They gave her the nickname "Polly."
It was at this apartment in 1920 that Adler was introduced to Nicolas Montana, whose business was procuring women to work in brothels. Montana set her up in a furnished, two-room apartment across from Columbia University, where she soon began to procure prostitutes for Montana and his friends, earning $100 a week. 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 prostitution, determined this time to succeed in it. 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.
One building in which she plied her trade was the Majestic Tower, 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, a Gobelin tapestry, hidden stairways and secret doorways.
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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 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 Adler was thirteen, her parents sent her with a cousin to the United States to avoid the gathering wave of pogroms. Halfway through the journey, her cousin decided to turn back home, leaving Adler on her own.
World War I prevented the rest of her family from immigrating to the U.S. until after the end of the war. The war also prevented her from receiving the monthly allowance sent by her father. In the U.S., she lived for a time with friends of her family 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, where she lived for a time with cousins. Adler worked as a seamstress and at clothing factories, and attended school sporadically. 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 charged $150 for abortions. The doctor took pity on her when she said she only had $35; he accepted only $25 and 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 shared an apartment with an actress and showgirl on Riverside Drive in New York City. The street was known among Yiddish speakers 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 sleazy underbelly of show business. They gave her the nickname "Polly."
It was at this apartment in 1920 that Adler was introduced to Nicolas Montana, whose business was procuring women to work in brothels. Montana set her up in a furnished, two-room apartment across from Columbia University, where she soon began to procure prostitutes for Montana and his friends, earning $100 a week. 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 prostitution, determined this time to succeed in it. 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.
One building in which she plied her trade was the Majestic Tower, 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, a Gobelin tapestry, hidden stairways and secret doorways.