The more successful Polly became, the more hounded she was - by the police, by Tammany Hall, by the Broadway mob. That same year Prohibition went into effect, and the party was on. Already attracted to the seediness and pleasures of Coney Island, she was easily lured by the underworld, and by 1920 was living with a showgirl as her roommate on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive (“Allrightnik’s Row” in the city’s Yiddish slang, indicating you had made it). Her father had arranged for her to live with a family in Massachusetts, but once acclimatized, she made her escape to relatives in Brownsville, N.Y. Mid-journey, the cousin begged off, but Pearl had the wherewithal to continue on alone. With pogroms mounting, he packed her off at 13 for the golden land of the United States, accompanied by a cousin already heading there. Years later, after Pearl’s birth records were lost to fire and war, her parents would guess that she had been born in 1900, making her, in her father’s words, a child of the 20th century. Pearl Adler, gifted with neither height nor looks, grew up in the Russian Pale not far from Pinsk to a peripatetic tailor who considered himself a bit of a dandy.
Pearl to Polly, shtetl child to savvy New Yorker, Brooklyn corset factory girl to Manhattan’s most notorious brothel owner: “Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate, tells a fast-paced tale of radical, willful transformation.
MADAM The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age By Debby Applegate
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