MADAM

A portrait of the savvy woman who dominated New York’s brothels during the 1920s and ’30s.

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Applegate places notorious madam Polly Adler (1900-1962) at the center of a vividly detailed social history of Manhattan’s netherworld, peopled by gangsters and bootleggers, bookies and racketeers, corrupt policemen and politicians, and a seemingly endless stream of “working girls.” Adler arrived in America from Russia in 1913, sent by her father to pave the way for the rest of her family. After enduring a few hard years with relatives in Springfield, Massachusetts, she lived with cousins in the teeming Brownsville section of Brooklyn, earning $5 a week from backbreaking labor in a corset factory. Dance halls—all the rage at the time—were her refuge and delight. Applegate draws on Adler’s published memoir, her ghostwriter’s notes, abundant archives, and contemporary sources to trace her rise from an ambitious, clever young immigrant to “Manhattan’s top supplier of party girls.” By 1920, Adler set up her own “call flat” and was on the road to fame and wealth, with customers that grew to comprise a who’s-who of “luminaries of politics, finance, and show business.” Among many others, clients included New York’s mayor Jimmy Walker, governor Franklin Roosevelt, Algonquin writer Robert Benchley (Dorothy Parker came, too, as a drinking customer), the Marx brothers, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, bandleaders Paul Whiteman and Desi Arnaz, playwright George S. Kaufman, and kings of crime Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, and Dutch Schultz. Always on the lookout for recruits, when Katharine Hepburn visited once, Adler suggested working for her as a better alternative to acting. Avoiding prosecution required “an endless round of daily payoffs” to protect herself, her “girls,” and her customers. “In a world of villains,” Applegate observes, “she became known as someone a villain could trust.” Feisty and free-spirited, Adler claimed her goals in life were “To have money and have fun.” She amply achieved both.

An animated, entertaining history.