It became the after-hours place not only for gangsters, lowlifes and politicians, but also for the Algonquin Round Table and for writers at The New Yorker. Her brothel was distinguished by good hygiene and well-selected вЂњgirls.вЂќ (When the Depression hit, Polly was able to turn away up to 40 young women for every one she hired - an acceptance rate analogous to that of the Ivy League these days.) But as the business evolved, her brothel also offered less tangible services: It took on the appearance of a literary salon, with drink from the best bootleggers, food from her private cooks and good company from Polly. 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 ManhattanвЂ™s Riverside Drive (вЂњAllrightnikвЂ™s RowвЂќ in the cityвЂ™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 PearlвЂ™s birth records were lost to fire and war, her parents would guess that she had been born in 1900, making her, in her fatherвЂ™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 ManhattanвЂ™s most notorious brothel owner: вЂњMadam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age,вЂќ 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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