‘The Best Goddamn Madam in America’ in the 1920s; The UWS’s Neglected ‘Female Outlaw’

By Marjorie Cohen

In 1913, teenager Pearl Adler landed on Ellis Island from Yanow, a shtetl in what is now Belarus. She wore a torn shawl and carried a potato sack filled with everything she owned; nothing distinguished her from other new arrivals.

But in just a few years, Pearl would 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.”

By 1920, Polly Adler had opened her first brothel on the Upper West Side, near Columbia University. She was well on her way to becoming, in her words, “the best goddamn madam in America.”

Before she reached the UWS, Polly had worked in a Springfield, Massachusetts paper factory, dropped out of night school at the fourth-grade level, and moved to Brooklyn, where she slept on a cousin’s couch and worked in a corset factory for $5 a week. She found excitement in Coney Island’s dance halls, with their ragtime music and cocaine. Recalling that time in her life, she wrote in her autobiography, “I wanted to spend the rest of my life there.”

Instead, she moved to a small, dark Manhattan apartment on Second Avenue and East 19th Street. Debby Applegate, the author of an excellent biography of Polly, Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, quotes a contemporary source describing her new neighborhood as “the underworld asylum—pimps, thieves, gunmen, and gamblers on every corner….”

Polly was barely five feet tall and 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.” In her autobiography, she wrote that she had to be a madam, not a prostitute, because “I was never pretty enough to be a hustler.”

Her career as madam began on the Upper West Side, where she opened her first brothel in a two-bedroom apartment across from Columbia University. She apparently prospered: in 1920, she moved into a nine-room apartment on Upper Riverside Drive, a  neighborhood considered “Allrightniks Row” or the “Gilded Ghetto.” Applegate adds that it’s also where “the better class of hoodlums lived.” She quotes one investigator’s report from the 1920s saying that at least 500 UWS apartments were devoted to unlawful purposes and that there were 5,000 “loose women” living or working in those apartments.

Peter Salwen, author of Upper West Side Story: A History and Guide, writes that some of Polly’s UWS competition included Sadie “The Chink” on West End Avenue and West 81st Street and “Dago Jean” on West 68th Street. All of them, he writes, worked out of “solid middle class house fronts” that “concealed most unrespectable goings on.”

It’s estimated that Polly moved 50 or 60 times over the course of her more than two decades in the sex trade. There’s no record of all the locations, but Jim Mackin, author of Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, lists five addresses for Polly 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. A New York Times article from 1943 refers to Polly’s last arrest at 151 West 74th Street.

Applegate says that the interiors of Polly’s bordellos were decorated “in gaudy whorehouse style” with a nod to “aristocratic fantasies of exotic harems.” One had a Chinese-themed room where clients and prostitutes could relax with a game of mahjong. Once, during a raid, a vice squad officer referred to Polly’s house as a ‘’joint.” Polly was indignant. “This isn’t a joint. This is an A-No.1 high class house,” according to a New York Times account of the arrest.

Polly flirted briefly with a legal lifestyle, renting a space at 2719 Broadway between West 103rd and 104th streets, where she opened a lingerie shop. When business wasn’t what she’d hoped, she went back to her tried-and-true trade, where her guest list included underworld types like Lucky Luciano, Legs Diamond, Bugsy Siegel, and Arnold Rothstein, who may have bankrolled some of Polly’s real estate investments.

Author Applegate lists other well-known clients: Walter Winchell, Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, and Mayor Jimmy Walker. Duke Ellington and Fats Waller played background music. Writer Dorothy Parker was a regular – not for the sex, but for conversation with Polly.

Polly’s “girls” were usually young, uneducated, and new to New York. A doctor checked them regularly, and Polly supplied ample condoms and told them they couldn’t stay in “the life” forever; they needed to read to educate themselves.

At one point, Polly was making $60,000 per year—the equivalent of nearly $1 million today. She was arrested 17 times, according to Applegate, but convicted only once; she served 24 days in the Women’s House of Detention for possessing “a motion picture machine with objectionable pictures.”

By the 1940s, “the life” had become too much for Polly. She moved to California in 1945, bought a small house, earned a degree from Los Angeles City College, and, with a ghostwriter, produced her autobiography, A House is Not a Home. It sold millions, and Polly planned a sequel but was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1962. A 1963 movie based on her life starred Shelley Winters as Polly and Raquel Welch as a call girl; it tanked at the box office

In her book, Applegate wonders why Polly’s criminal friends became “cultural icons” when Polly has, for the most part, been ignored. Applegate’s answer: “There is no corresponding myth of the female outlaw who uses sex as her weapon against the world.”

But there are some recent signs that Polly is still remembered here. A speakeasy-style bar in midtown called Polly claims to recreate the atmosphere of the madam’s New York. And a young Brooklyn-based opera company called Killer Queen recently premiered Madam: The Life and Story of Polly Adler, with a libretto by Bea Goodwin inspired by Applegate’s book and music by Felix Jarrar.

A longer version of Polly’s story will be available on the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group’s website.

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