A Russian Jew, she bravely traveled to New York alone in 1913 at the age of 13, although most of her family later followed. She struggled to make a living, finally turning to prostitution. She quickly realized this could be her ticket to success. Her plan was to retire early and find a good man to marry. It didn't quite work out that way.
Not a very attractive woman herself, she realized she would do better as a madam, and she worked tirelessly to hire better girls to attract better, meaning richer, customers. Prohibition came at just the right time for her, and soon she was selling illicit booze as well as illicit sex. She made big money, much of which went to bribing cops, many of whom betrayed her.
Later in life, Adler told her own story in her best-selling book A House Is Not a Home, published in 1953. The book was ghost-written and left out most of the names and most of the details. Applegate provides these in her account. The men who flocked to Polly's read like a Who's Who for that period of history: among them, George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Milton Berle, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Wallace Beery, Paul Whitman, John Garfield, Joe DiMaggio, Huey Long, James Thurber, Desi Arnez, Walter Winchell and even the infamous Judge Crater, as well as such gangsters as Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't come to her, but she claimed she sent girls to him.
Some of the more than 600 women who worked for Polly Adler later became famous, including Martha Raye and Dorothy Lamour.
In the end, Applegate's book is less the story of a notorious madam than a history of an era, or a series of eras — the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, Broadway, the Jazz Age, organized crime and World War II in America. It is all there in this book, and Polly Adler was right in the center of it all.
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