Madam Polly: “The Best Goddamn Madam in America”

Written by Marjorie Cohen, member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group Planning Committee

​NB: In researching this post about one of the most important and often-forgotten figures of Jazz Age New York, I consulted several sources, but the one that was the most informative and  by far the most fun to read was Debby Applegates’ 2021 biography of Polly Adler: Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age The book, published by Doubleday, is an impressive piece of research and the very model of a page-turner.

The best goddamn madam in America
 
In 1913 when she was 13 years old, Pearl Adler landed on Ellis Island from her home in Yanow, a shtetl in what is now Belarus. Pearl was traveling alone and when she stepped off the boat, wearing a torn shawl and carrying a potato sack filled with all her worldly possessions, there was nothing much to distinguish her from the rest of the boys and girls on the dock.

​No one would have guessed then that this teenager would soon be featured in newspaper headlines as Polly Adler, “The Jewish Jezebel”, “Queen of Tarts”, “First Lady of the Underworld” and the “Pushiest Procurer of the Jazz Age”.

Polly when she was retired and living in California

​Polly’s family had planned to send her off to Pinsk, not far from Yanow, to continue her studies at a gymnasium (secondary school) but instead, they packed her off to America. The hope was for the rest of the family-- her mother, father and eight siblings-- to follow and settle into a happily-ever-after life in the Goldene Medina, or the Golden Land, the Yiddish term for the US.
 
Polly’s mother Gittel, loved her but could never remember the date she’d been born  and her father, Moshe, a tailor, doted on her as though she were a son. Moshe recognized his oldest daughter’s confidence, intelligence and potential, sure that she was headed for success. And, if success is measured by wealth, power and influence, Moshe was right. But, Polly’s chosen profession wasn’t what her father had in mind. Applying her ample common sense, knowledge of business and math, her gift for managing people and making friends, she wielded tremendous influence on her time and place. Beginning in 1920 a thoroughly modern Polly was well on her way to becoming, in her own words,“the best goddamn madam in America” .
 
What’s a nice girl like you….
 
​Polly’s first stop in America was Springfield, the home of a friend of a friend of her family. Shortly after she arrived, she found  a job at a  paper factory, working six days a week and making $3 a week. She enrolled in night school but dropped out at the fourth grade level. Tired of the boredom of  the New England life and miserable with her job and her digs, she headed to Brooklyn, to the Brownsville apartment of a cousin. Things weren’t much better there where she slept on a couch and worked in a corset factory for $5 a week.
 
Craving fun and excitement and wanting to escape Brownsville,  at the time described as a “huge cesspool of illiteracy and hoodlumism,” she found what she was looking for in Coney Island with its dance halls, ragtime and cocaine.“I was convinced that I wanted to spend the rest of my life there.”
 
It wasn’t long before Polly realized that her dream was to have money, lots of it, and all of the luxuries that money could provide. She loved glitzy jewelry, mink coats and  flashy clothes and wanted a luxury car to park outside a huge Upper East Side apartment.  She ended up having all of that but first she had to move out of Brooklyn and head to Manhattan. Her first Manhattan apartment was on Second Avenue and 19th Street, far from anything that could be considered glamorous. One undercover investigator described her new neighborhood as  “the underworld’ asylum --pimps, thieves, gunmen and gamblers on every corner….”

​​A portrait of Polly
 
Polly herself said that she had to be a madam, not a prostitute,  because “I was never pretty enough to be a hustler.” When Walter Winchell, a regular at Polly’s, objected to the  fact that an up and coming bandleader had fallen in love with her, he called her “a broken-down old whore and an ugly one at that.”
 
Although Polly never admitted to being a prostitute herself, it is generally believed that she did go on a number of  “dates” in her late teens and early 20s. As a young girl, she modeled herself after Theda Bara, the actress and ‘it’ girl of the time, wearing heavy eye makeup and vamping it up for photos.
 
Polly was barely 5 feet tall in heels, dark, and somewhat plump. Her obituary in the New York Times described her as “a woman who looked more like a housewife than the proprietor of a bordello.” She was known for her sharp sense of humor and wisecracks delivered in a Yiddish accent with a voice “like a foghorn.” Her good business sense, air of self-confidence and iron-clad discretion made her popular with both her clients and her employees. Duke Ellington was a fan: “She was a petite, gregarious lady with great charm, whom everybody loved.”
 
Polly made no excuses for what she did: “If I was to make a living as a madam, I could not be concerned with either the rightness or wrongness of prostitution…if there were no customers, there certainly would be no whorehouses. Prostitution exists because men are willing to pay for sexual gratification, and whatever men are willing to pay for, someone will provide.”
 
Moving on Up: Polly heads to the Upper West Side
 
Just as Prohibition was signed into law, Polly headed up to the Upper West Side and that’s when the games began in earnest. Polly opened her first brothel in 1920, a two-  bedroom apartment right across from Columbia University. With all those post-adolescent boys living across the street, that turned out to be a sterling marketing decision. Location, location, location.
 
It’s estimated that Polly moved from fifty to sixty times over the span of her career. Her   story is, like most other New York stories, a real estate tale as well as a portrait of an era.  
 
What was the UWS like when Polly and her “girls” and their clients lived and worked there? Peter Salwen, author of Upper West Side Stories writes that there have been many famous people who have lived on the Upper West Side and that “most of them were up to something worth mentioning when they were here”. He counts Polly as one of these. 
 
Upper Riverside Drive, where she moved into a nine-room apartment with an “actress” friend, was considered “Allrightniks Row” or the “Gilded Ghetto”. It’s where “the better class of hoodlums lived” and investigators reported that at least 500 apartments on the Upper West Side were devoted to unlawful purposes and that there were 5000 loose women living or working in those apartments. “Are you married or do you live on 72nd  Street?”  was considered a reasonable question at the time.
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Salwen lists some of Polly’s competition on the Upper West Side: Sadie “The Chink” with a parlor house on West End Avenue and 81st Street; Cokey Flo’s sleep-in house in a West End Avenue brownstone; Dago Jean on West 68th Street; and Babe Wagner who oversaw “a high class whore house on Central Park West.” The Upper West Side was a place of “barely skin deep respectability” where “solid middle class house fronts concealed most unrespectable goings on,” often involving prostitution and gambling.
 
The Upper West Side was unlike the Upper East Side, where the city’s Protestant elite lived and Jews and immigrants were distinctly unwelcome. According to Applegate, “The Upper West Side admitted all comers, regardless of where born or what they did for a living.”
 
Polly liked to think of herself as the hostess of  a non-stop party where there was sex, of course, but also conversation, deal making and deal breaking, political debates  and celebratory dinners fueled by plenty of bootleg booze; more clubhouse than cat house, a speakeasy with a harem.
 
As Polly explained,  “I was a creation of the times--of an era whose credo was ‘Anything economically right is morally right.’” 

​Polly’s Friends
 
Polly’s customers were the bold-face names of the day. The most famous, the most infamous and those in between. But, they all had something important in common--they loved, loved, loved to party and they had the money to party a la Polly.
 
There were criminals like Lucky Luciano, Legs Diamond, Myer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Arnold Rothstein, the underworld high roller and fixer who may have bankrolled some of Polly’s real estate investments.
 
The uber- literary crowd that commandeered a table at the Algonquin Hotel at lunchtime almost every day were regulars at Polly’s. Her favorite of the Algonquin circle was the humorist and actor Robert Benchley,  ”the kindest, warmest-hearted man in the world. Petty, gratuitous meanness always infuriated him, and he despised snobs and hypocrites.”
 
George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker were regulars at Polly’s, too. Parker wasn’t there for the sex; she liked Polly’s conversation and she and Benchley were said to have helped Polly choose books for her “library”. Wallace Beery, Mayor Jimmy “Beau James” Walker; Walter Winchell, the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra and Desi Arnaz were all clients. Duke Ellington and Fats Waller played background music for the hard- partying crowd and jazz, dancing and bootleg booze kept the party rolling.
 
Polly was discreet about her profession but she did have a calling card that she gave to people whom she trusted. The card has a line drawing of a parrot and a phone number. One blogger posed an interesting question:  “Was Polly’s card in your grandfather’s wallet?”

Polly's calling card

Polly’s Apartments
 
There’s no record of all of the apartments that Polly had in the course of her more than two decades in the sex trade, but it’s certain that several were on the Upper West Side. Jim Mackin, author of Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823289301/notable-new-yorkers-of-manhattans-upper-west-side/ has uncovered five addresses for her north of West 72nd Street: 620 West 115th Street, 303 West 92nd Street, 587 Riverside Drive, 411 West End Avenue and 201 West 77th Street. 
 
Polly began her trade in small apartments but her digs got grander and grander as her reputation spread. The bigger apartment buildings that were popping up on the Upper West Side were just what she needed to keep her clients’ social life under the radar and provide her girls with places to live and work in relative anonymity. Rents were manageable, particularly after the Great Depression, when landlords had a surplus of vacant apartments.  
 
She was proud of her “houses” and favored elaborate Louis the XVI style interiors, brocade and velvet. One of her bordellos had a Chinese-themed room where clients and prostitutes could relax with a game of mahjong or, if they preferred, could drink high quality bootleg booze at a bar with a Tutenkhamen vibe. Once, when a vice squad officer raided one of Polly’s locations, he made the mistake of referring to her house as a ‘’joint”. Polly was indignant.  “This isn’t a joint. This is an A-No.1 high class house.” 
 
Polly’s Black maid, Showboat, was a close confidante and responsible for much of Polly’s business success. Behind the scenes, Showboat catered to the clients’ needs and kept the food and booze flowing. Benchley told Polly that, “The Waldorf just isn’t in it with you when it comes to service.”
 
Polly flirted briefly with a legal lifestyle, renting a space at 2719 Broadway between 103rd and 104th Street, where she opened a lingerie shop.  According to Salwen, opera diva Rosa Ponselle was a customer. Business wasn’t what Polly had hoped so she  closed the shop after just a year and went back to managing prostitutes. ​

Polly’s “girls”
 
Polly’s girls were well cared for. She had a doctor in to do regular checkups, supplied ample condoms and taught them how to behave in polite society, encouraging them to read in order to improve their lot. She reminded them that they couldn’t stay in “the life” forever and that they needed to educate themselves.
 
Her girls were stunners, usually young, uneducated, new to New York and from working class backgrounds. Some called themselves dancers or actresses or singers but, much like Polly, they wanted to enjoy life’s finer (as in expensive) things and knew that a regular job wasn’t going to cut it. At one point Polly was making $60,000 per year--the equivalent of nearly $1,000,000 today-- while the average per annum at the time was $3000 for men and $1,500 for women.
 
Polly speculated on how her girls and other prostitutes were viewed by most people:
“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.”
 
Recruitment was no problem; she insisted that she turned away thirty or forty applicants for every one she hired. Two of Polly’s girls were the actress Dorothy Lamour and the torch singer Libby Holman. It is possible, too, that comedian Martha Rae may have gone on a few “dates” arranged by Polly.
 
Since she couldn’t advertise her services in newspapers and magazines, Polly paraded her girls around town instead. It was her way of marketing her goods. She made sure that doormen, hat check girls and waiters at the most popular (and expensive) clubs knew what she had on offer. She was a master of underground advertising.

Polly and one of her girls

Polly and the Law

Polly had no love for the vice squad cops and talked about how much they siphoned from her profits, about the hundred dollar handshakes required to keep them happy. .  She was arrested seventeen times but convicted only once. One terrific photo in Applegate’s book catches Polly exiting a paddy wagon in Yorkville in 1935, cursing the photographers and hiding her face from the cameras in the collar of her mink coat..
 
According to Applegate, the vice squad was only one group that wanted a piece of the action from Polly. Even her own family got into the mix, happy to take money from her even though they were open about their disdain for her profession and barred her from their Passover seder table. 
 
Polly was clear-eyed about the legal risks she was taking by procuring, helping distribute bootleg liquor and at one point, in 1935, letting Dutch Shultz use her apartment as a hideout. She met Schultz (ne Arthur Flegenheimer) at a cocktail party where he told her, “I like a dame that keeps her mouth shut. You got a lot of moxie, Poll. You know, at this moment Vince Mad Dog Coll [a widely- feared underworld assassin] would part with fifty grand if he could lay his hands on me.” So, Dutch and his crew of bodyguards moved in with Polly. 
 
Polly became quite fond of one of the bodyguards, Bo Weinberg. “Bo had committed more murders than any other man I ever knew, but even when he was drunk there never seemed to be an ounce of malice in him.”
  Polly was drawn into two major vice crackdowns in the city. The first in 1931 was initiated by Governor Franklin Roosevelt and led by Judge Samuel Seabury who was  charged with investigating corruption in the magistrate’s court. The second in 1935 was organized by newly-elected Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia who vowed to clean up the mess that Polly’s client, the party-loving Mayor Jimmy Walker, had left behind. When called in to testify, Polly’s memory seemed to fail her. She always maintained that she had given  absolutely nothing away.
 estigation, instead of making life difficult for Polly, made it easier. “The police were no longer a headache; there was no more kowtowing to double-crossing Vice Squad men, no more hundred-dollar handshakes, no more phony raids to up the month’s quota”.
 
In spite of her seventeen arrests, Polly served only 24 days of a 30-day sentence in the Women's House of Detention in the Village. Cops had found “a motion picture machine with objectionable pictures” in one of her apartments. She empathized with the aging prostitutes she met in jail, saying that “The only ‘reform’ offered these women is a term in jail with bad food and harsh treatment.”
 

Polly under arrest

Polly leaves “the life”
 
By the 40s, “the life” had become too much for Polly. She wanted a fresh start. In 1945 she pulled up stakes and moved out to California, bought a small house, a dog and started to grow roses. She had two goals: one to complete her education and the other to write a tell-all book about her life as a madam.
 
She felt certain that her book, A House is not a Home would shake up the 1950s and she was right. It sold millions of copies and for 13 weeks held second place on the New York Times’s best-seller list, losing out to Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking at number one.  She earned an associate’s degree from Los Angeles City College and was allegedly planning to write a sequel to her book when she was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1962.
 
A movie based on Polly’s life, starring Shelley Winters as Polly and Raquel Welsh as a call girl in her first Hollywood role, was released in 1963. Bosley Crowther, the venerable New York Times movie critic, skewered it, writing that when it replaced a film about Cleopatra at the Rivoli movie theater, “the letdown was so abysmal it could set movies back twenty years.”
 
In the final pages of Applegate’s book, she asks an interesting question: Why is it that Polly’s criminal friends have become icons of the twentieth century when Polly has, for the most part, been ignored?  Comparing her to her underworld compatriots, the author says “There is no corresponding myth of the female outlaw who uses sex as her weapon against the world”.
 
Recently there have been a few encouraging signs that Polly is beginning to be remembered in her adopted town. A speakeasy-style bar in midtown called “Polly” has recently opened, claiming to recreate the atmosphere of Jazz Age New York; and a young Brooklyn-based opera company called Killer Queen just premiered Madam:The Life and Story of Polly Adler with a libretto by Bea Gordon inspired by Applegate’s book, and music by Felix Janar..
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