Starred review from September 13, 2021
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Applegate (The Most Famous Man in America) chronicles the astonishing rags-to-riches tale of Pearl “Polly” Adler (1900–1962), “the proprietress of Manhattan’s most renowned bordello,” in this spirited account. In effervescent writing, Applegate chronicles how Adler, after escaping anti-Semitic Russia for New York City in 1913, survived judgmental relatives, sweatshop work, and rape before stumbling into a job procuring women for Nick Montana, “the Henry Ford of the sex trade.” In 1920, Adler opened her own brothel and catapulted to the upper echelons of New York society as her house “became a favorite oasis of the bootleggers and bookmakers... eager to blow their ill-gotten gains.” As Applegate writes, “For the first time in American history, the luminaries of politics, finance, and show business were mingling as equals.” With notoriety, though, came vice raids and, eventually, a stint in jail in 1935 for “running a disorderly house.” Still, nothing could dim Adler’s fiery ambition; after retiring to California in 1945, she wrote her autobiography, and, like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, “cannily turned the cult of the party into a ladder to climb out of the gutter.” The result is a rollicking examination of one of the country’s most sensational hostesses.