Polly Adler

April 16, 1900 — June 9, 1962 — Yanow, Russian Empire (present-day Belarus)

Polly Adler was a Russian-born American madam who became one of the most notorious and celebrated figures of Prohibition-era New York City. Her lavish brothels served as social hubs for gangsters, politicians, writers, and celebrities during the 1920s and 1930s. Later in life she reinvented herself as an author, penning the bestselling memoir A House Is Not a Home, which was later adapted into a film.

Early Life and Immigration

Pearl 'Polly' Adler was born on April 16, 1900, in the small town of Yanow in the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus), the daughter of a tailor. At age 13, she immigrated alone to the United States, settling with relatives in Brooklyn, New York, while the rest of her family remained behind, planning to join her later. World War I disrupted those plans, cutting Adler off from her parents and siblings for years. She worked grueling factory jobs, including in a corset factory and a paper box factory, to support herself, receiving little formal education. These difficult early years in tenement New York exposed her to poverty and the underground economies that would later shape her unconventional career, setting the stage for her transformation from immigrant factory girl to one of the city's most talked-about entrepreneurs.

Queen of the Jazz Age Underworld

In the early 1920s, Adler opened her first brothel in Manhattan, quickly building a reputation for discretion, glamour, and connections. During Prohibition, her establishments became legendary gathering places where bootleggers, mobsters like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, politicians, journalists, and literary figures such as Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker mingled. Adler cultivated relationships with police and city officials to protect her operations, navigating raids, arrests, and shifting political tides with remarkable resilience. She ran multiple houses over roughly two decades, becoming a fixture of New York's Jazz Age nightlife and a symbol of the era's contradictions between Prohibition-era morality laws and rampant vice. Her business was raided repeatedly, and she was arrested numerous times, yet she managed to avoid serious prison time, in part through savvy negotiation and bribery. By the late 1930s, mounting legal pressure and changing times led her to retire from the profession, closing her operations for good around 1943 and stepping away from the underworld life that had made her famous.

Later Life, Authorship, and Legacy

After retiring, Adler moved to Los Angeles, where she pursued higher education, eventually earning a college degree in her fifties. She then turned to writing, producing her memoir A House Is Not a Home in 1953, a candid and witty account of her years running brothels and mingling with the era's underworld elite. The book became a bestseller and was adapted into a 1964 film of the same name starring Shelley Winters. Adler died of cancer on June 9, 1962, in Los Angeles. Her story has continued to fascinate historians and readers; in 2021, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Debby Applegate published Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, offering a definitive account of her remarkable life. Adler remains an enduring symbol of Prohibition-era New York, remembered as a shrewd businesswoman who turned a marginalized profession into a platform for social influence and, ultimately, literary success.