Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age by Debby Applegate
Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age by Debby Applegate
Simply put, everybody went to Polly's. Polly Adler (1900 - 1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels were more than oases of illicit sex, where men paid top dollar for the company of her girls; they were also swinging salons where the culturati and high society partied with the elite of showbiz, politics, and organized crime -- and had a hell of a time doing it. Polly's pals -- luminaries like Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Al Capone, Duke Ellington, Dorthy Parker, Desi Arnaz, and, by her own account, Franklin D. Roosevelt -- made the Jazz Age Roar.
No one would've guessed that Polly would become "the first lady of the underworld" when she arrived in America as a thirteen-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant. But her life became a topsy-turvy Horatio Alger tale -- a childhood worthy of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a wild adolescence cut out of a Henry Roth novel, blossoming into a glittering epic of parties and power echoing F. Scott Fitzgerald. Then Polly wrote her own ending penning a memoir that shocked the squares of the 1950s and sold over two million copies.
Debby Applegate uses Adler's rip-roaring life to unpack what made this era so corrupt, so glamorous, and so transformational, showing how this riotous collision of high and low gave birth to modern American culture.
Doubleday, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2021
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.