Background
Pearl Pauline Adler was born on April 16, 1900 in Ivanovo, Russia (now Belarus). She was the daughter of Morris Moshe Adler and Gertrude Koval.
(Polly Adler's "house"―the brothel that gave this best-sel...)
Polly Adler's "house"―the brothel that gave this best-selling 1953 autobiography its title―was a major site of New York City underworld activity from the 1920s through the 1940s. Adler's notorious Lexington Avenue house of prostitution functioned as a sort of social club for New York's gangsters and a variety of other celebrities, including Robert Benchley and his friend Dorothy Parker. According to one New York tabloid, it made Adler's name "synonymous with sin." This new edition of Adler's autobiography brings back into print a book that was a mass phenomenon, in both hardback and paperback, when it was first published. A self-consciously literary work, A House Is Not a Home provides an informal social history of immigrant mobility, prostitution, Jewish life in New York, police dishonesty, the "white slavery" scare of the early twentieth century, and political corruption. Adler's story fills an important gap in the history of immigrant life, urban experience, and organized crime in New York City. While most other accounts of the New York underworld focus on the lives of men, from Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York through more recent works on Jewish and Italian gangsters, this book brings women's lives and problems to the forefront. A House Is Not a Home is compellingly readable and was popular enough to draw Hollywood's attention in the early 1960s―leading to a film starring Shelley Winters as Adler. The book has been largely forgotten in the ensuing decades, lost both to its initial audience of general readers and to scholars in women's studies, immigration history, and autobiography who are likely to find it a treasure trove. Now, with a new introduction by Rachel Rubin that contextualizes Adler's life and literary achievement, A House Is Not a Home is again available to the many readers who have come to understand such "marginal" life stories as a special refraction of the more typical American success narrative.
https://www.amazon.com/House-Not-Home-Polly-Adler/dp/1558495592?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1558495592
Pearl Pauline Adler was born on April 16, 1900 in Ivanovo, Russia (now Belarus). She was the daughter of Morris Moshe Adler and Gertrude Koval.
Restless, inquisitive, and ambitious, she was tutored by the village rabbi in preparation for the female gymnasium at Pinsk. She entered a scholarship competition, but before the results were known, her father decided in 1912 that she should be the first member of the family to go to the United States.
While living with friends of the family in Holyoke, Massachussets, Adler helped with household chores and attended local schools.
The outbreak of World War I prevented her family from joining her as planned, or sending further funds. She therefore had to quit school.
During the World War I Adler worked in a paper factory. Then she moved to Brooklyn, where she worked in a corset factory and then a shirt factory while attending night school.
In 1920, hoping to find her more remunerative work, a friend introduced Adler to a clothing manufacturer. Through an actress friend of the manufacturer, Adler was introduced to a world of fast-moving, opium-smoking theater people and "kept" women. A bootlegger-gambler who was having an affair with a married woman asked Adler to keep an apartment for them. Since this seemed an improvement over factory work, she agreed to accept payment for this arrangement.
Established in a Manhattan, Adler was launched on a new career, frequenting dance halls and speakeasies to find more clients and "girls. " But after her first arrest on the charge of being a procuress she decided to start a legitimate business.
In 1922, having saved $6, 000, she and a friend opened a lingerie shop (it was at this time that she changed her name to Polly). She was arrested again soon afterward--she claimed that the charges were trumped up. When her shop became insolvent within a year, Adler resumed work as a madam, serving a clientele that included gangsters and hoodlums. At their suggestion she began selling liquor as well. She paid off policemen, made deals with rival madams, and stayed in apartments "hardly long enough to powder my nose. " The decor of her bordellos was eclectic--Louis XV and XVI, which she claimed were "sort of traditional for a house, " contrasted with rooms furnished with Egyptian or Chinese pieces. When the police went to raid one of her Saratoga Springs, New York, parties, where she had taken her "best girls" for the social season, the prohibition agent Moe Smith, a guest, talked the police out of arresting her.
Thereafter, as Adler's social contacts expanded, her New York "house" also became a "salon" where prominent people drank, played cards, and arranged business deals. Despite several more arrests, by 1929 Adler was making a great deal of money from her business and the stock market. She had a joint stock account with Irwin O'Leary, a vice squad officer and friend who was dismissed from the force in 1931 because of his association with her.
On May 20, 1929, Adler became a United States citizen. Although she lost a lot of money in the stock market crash later that year, her in-house business, especially at the bar, picked up. In November 1930 Adler learned that she was about to be subpoenaed by the Seabury Committee, which was investigating corruption in the New York City criminal justice system. Anxious not to disclose her role in buying judicial favors, she fled to Miami while the press speculated on her whereabouts and hinted at her links with Vivian Gordon, a prostitute who was murdered after agreeing to testify before the committee. While Adler was in hiding, John C. Weston, who had been a special prosecutor in the Women's Court for eight years, told of taking some $20, 000 in bribes in exchange for dismissing 600 cases. As part of his defense, Weston claimed that he had feared Adler's "influence. "
After this testimony she was especially sought as a witness. In eleven previous appearances in the court she had never been convicted; moreover, she had not even been fingerprinted. Thinking that the focus of the investigation had shifted to those higher up in the judicial and political system, Adler returned to New York. Subpoenaed on May 6, 1931, she refused to reveal any information, alleging that "two magistrates and a Supreme Court Justice are on my string. "
The press, though, reported that she told a "tale of millions in graft, of gilded palaces of shame run in connivance of the Vice Squad, of the most sordid depths of New York, and of gangsters harbored in the scented boudoirs of 'Polly Adler's girls. '" Samuel Seabury questioned Adler about her financial association with O'Leary, and asked if there was truth to the rumor that Mayor James Walker had attended one of her parties, which she denied.
The climax of the investigation occurred on May 23, 1932, when Seabury confronted Walker, bringing about the mayor's resignation in September.
In some respects the Seabury investigation was actually advantageous for Adler. While attention focused on those who failed to enforce the law, those who were breaking it enjoyed a reprieve--there were very few arrests for prostitution in 1931, with policemen asking not to be assigned to the stigmatized vice squad. And it had become harder to stage frame-up arrests or to ask for payoffs.
In the early 1930s, Adler also had to contend with Arthur ("Dutch Schultz") Flegenheimer and his entourage. He was a dangerous, capricious, and unruly patron, but she had no choice but to keep a large apartment for his convenience. Since he was hiding from his archrival, Vincent ("Mad Dog") Coll, Adler lived in terror of being caught in the crossfire of gang warfare.
The problem was resolved when Schultz left town shortly before Coll's murder in February 1932. In October 1934, Adler rented an entire floor at 30 East 55th Street, Manhattan, with a staff that included two cooks, two maids, and four "girls. " Tipped off that the police knew about her gambling operation, she promised to close.
When she returned from vacation, she found another cleanup campaign, this time under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, in progress. Her place was raided in March 1935, three women were charged with vagrancy, and Adler was charged with operating a disorderly house and possessing obscene films. The attendant publicity turned the spotlight on her swank "silk stocking bordello, " a plushly furnished apartment with a game room, bar, and contents valued at $35, 000.
After many postponements Adler stood trial. The film possession charge was dropped, but on May 10 she was sentenced to thirty days in the Women's House of Detention and fined $500 for being a procuress. Released six days early for good behavior, Adler again considered pursuing a more respectable career. But she felt permanently tagged as a madam and eventually reopened a "house. "
She avoided questioning during Thomas E. Dewey's 1936 vice investigation by vacationing on the West Coast. In the early 1940's Adler claimed that she did as much social greeting as Grover A. Whalen, New York City's official greeter; those welcomed at her house, she said, included people listed in Who's Who, the Social Register, and Burke's Peerage.
On January 13, 1943, while she was ill with pleurisy, her place was again raided. She was taken to a prison ward of Bellevue Hospital. When her case was dismissed about two weeks later, she finally decided to retire. On her attorney's suggestion Adler began her autobiography in June 1945. She later moved to Los Angeles, where she completed her high school education and attended college.
Her autobiography, A House Is Not a Home (1953), was a best-seller, although some reviewers insinuated that it had been ghostwritten. (A film based on the book was released in 1964).
Adler subsequently moved to Burbank, California. She never completed her second book, which was to have been about her New York City customers. She died on June 9, 1962 in Hollywood.
Adler is mostly known as a madam who operated a series of increasingly upscale brothel catering to gangsters and the fashionable upper classes. A rags-to-riches immigrant who prospered in a climate of hypocrisy, Adler thrived by collaborating with the very officials who outwardly most condemned her life-style. She was able to remain in business despite her arrests and notoriety partly because of the renown of many of her guests. Her book "A House Is Not a Home" became a best-seller.
(Polly Adler's "house"―the brothel that gave this best-sel...)
Quotations:
"Prostitution exists because men will pay for sexual gratification, and whatever men are willing to pay for, someone will provide. "
"The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels; the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid--these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth. "
"What it comes down to is this: 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. "
Four feet, eleven inches tall and stocky, Adler was described as crude and tough but endowed with great natural intelligence. Her personal life was subservient to her goal of becoming "the best goddamn madam in all America. "
Adler never married.
