We are thrilled to have, as our speaker today. Debby applegate she is a graduate of Amherst College and has her ph. D. In american studies from Yale University. She is a historian her previous was the most famous man in america a biography of Henry Ward Beecher and he was a minister sort of a progress administer. But in her acknowledgments she talked about how interesting it was to move from a minister to a madam who is ran a number of houses of prostitution in new york. So her latest book is the biography of polly adler, icon of the jazz age. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography, and it was one of the new york society of libraries best books about new york and was also a finalist for the us Angeles Times book prize and. The National Book critics circle award and shes been married to bruce torgan. 36 years. So i read the book. Its a fascinating, fascinating book. One of the things i didnt realize is that is as much about the history. New york during the 2030s and forties as it is about about polly and her her. Im not going to say too much because i know i want you to hear more from her, but youre from new york or you lived in new york. You love new york to visit. This is such a wonderful book because i could picture the map of new york in the city and the streets and how she went up and down and east and west trying to find a safe safe place to run her houses across the tution. And you will be amazed when you read the number of men and women who made use of her services in multiple industries. So with that, the other thing i want to say is, is how exciting it was to see all of the libraries she used to do research for this book and how much help she got from librarians. So im going to go with that and i hope you didnt say too much. Im going to turn it over to polly. So to polly polly, to debbie to talk about polly, you have. Im going to start by saying all my knowledge is theoretical. So am not i am not polly adler or a by any stretch i have that kind of stamina. So it is i cannot tell you what a joy it is to be here. Well, first of all, because you guys are alive and i havent been in a room most of my my book presentations have been on zoom, which is the dullest possible way to go speak to readers. But even i love librarians. You are my tempter and my angels, the people who have sent me down more rabbit than i could ever my way out of. But thats the part that i actually really like. And to be here at this particular conference, which i did not know until we had lunch, that this is one of the largest conferences in. The country by far, and that in this particular moment when you are all on the front, even the retired librarians are on the front lines of the culture wars right now. You have always been heroes to me, but this particular moment, it seems to me you should maybe start wearing bullet proof vests. Sorry, i should. That that was perhaps speaking too lightly, actually. So and this book in particular, when my first book even more was dependent upon librarians, but this book is really reflects ill talk about this a little bit as i go along. It reflects a shift so i started writing it in 2008 and library have changed so much in that period of time. What we can do where we can do it, whats available and i feel like everything about this book reflects that. Its amazing, that amazing combination of, old school libraries, old dusty volumes that nobody else would look at but thank god you guys are saving for the rest of us. And that cutting Edge Materials that are still coming out to day and was part of the reason the book took so long every single week there would be another new thing to see so my first book, the most famous man in america, about the minister, did have some sexual peccadilloes for sure. That was one of the charms of the book, but it was a much bigger deal than i realize to go from would be saints to unrepentant sinners. Much bigger deal. And of course, to go from the 19 century Henry Ward Beecher, probably best known, is remembered best known now as. The little brother of Harriet Beecher stowe. So it was a very different milieu to go to 1920s new york, which is the into a land of gangsters and bootleggers and more cops than i ever thought possible. So in this case, we really its much more of a dark of history and of course, that made research a very different thing. I mostly work out of the Yale University where as you may or may not be surprised. They have a really excellent collection on congregational ministers. And when i started using interlibrary loan i by the way, won the prize for best user. Eventually over a loan many years in a there also kids dont know what interlibrary loan is anymore but that that they finally were like they kept asking me what are you because i was ordering things about how to tell syphilis, gonorrhea or you know joke books about bordellos and. They finally said, oh, well just Start Building our collection. So if you ever at Yale University, you can thank me that theyre and collection is much bigger. Of course, polly did not think of herself in this this way as the underbelly she preferred to herself as a Horatio Alger hero in her own way, as she put it once. So this is the biggest difference from. The last time i published a book, a cynical person might say that my life has been typical american Success Story from the arrival at ellis island. The ladder rung by rung, 5 a week, 10 a week, 100 a week, a mink coat. A better address from neighborhood trade to an International Clientele from a nobody to a legend. Now there is some truth that Portrait Police speak with a heroine as she like to call it, was more than an oasis of illicit sex. These brothels that she ran in manhattan were, for many people, impromptu salons of a certain sort, where the low brow, the high brow happily mingled as she remembered from the parlor of house. I had a backstage three way view. I could look into the underworld, the half world and the high slumming intellectual bulls, broadway bohemians, newspaper reporters loved pollys blunt realism. Her of louche wisecracks. Many in the underground gay community, both male and female, found her parlor a relaxing a place where they could relax and be themselves without being judged. Executives in the new fields of radio, Motion Pictures and advertising employed her girls as party favorites, if you will, and grease to woo clients. Wall street traders packed passed along stock tips on their way to the bedroom racketeers used her parlor as an informal where they could confer with politicians and judges away from eyes. Entertainers knew they had hit the big time if they could afford an evening with one of her girls crooked cops made her place their home from home and everyone from park avenue aristocrats to Lower East Side bootleggers appreciated her ironclad discretion. No one beating polly on the street would have taken her for the proprietor of a famous bordello. She was was tiny. Like many of her generation, she was barely five feet tall. Even in her highest high heels. She had a very cute little cupid of kind of face. She did have a weakness for mink and flashy jewelry. But no more so than any good manhattan gold digger. Pearl so, as her parents called her, was born in 1900, more or less, in the a Russian Village in around in what is now belarus. She was an unusually clever and selfpossessed child like the daughters in. The stories of sholem aleichem. She was eager to shake off the confines village life, to go out and see the world and make something of herself in yiddish, which i did not know. And i still do not know as fully, but i know a lot more now. They might have said she wanted to be a mensch or somebody, a person her family unusually supported her ambitions, most girls did not. That sort of treatment. But as the old yiddish saying says man plans god when polly 13 her, he decided the family should go to america the golden land of america. The problem . It takes a lot of money to send a large that way. So he decided he was going to send them in installments. And as the oldest girl, she oldest child, she would be the first to go. She was only about 13 at this time. So she goes, she lands ellis island in december of 1913 and she goes to stay with friends of her father, people she did not really know actually. Then tragedy struck before her parents could immigrate. World war one breaks out. All travel is stopped. Most mail is stopped. Now polly is stranded among strangers. Shes forced to quit school, take a job in a paper factory earning 3 a week, working six days a week, nine hour days. Shes miserable, shes poor. Shes so she decides at the age of 15 she is going to light out for a better life and moves brooklyn, new york, where she has some cousins she can live with. Like many working girls of that era, she had not a lot of education, not home life, no money. But what she had was freedom. And thats what she put herself good use for. She threw herself into thrills of the ragtime dance, went to coney island, became obsessed with coney island. That was one of the joys working on this book. She had a million, million. She had it. She had a several pages. But you know what . It felt like a million pictures of herself as a young girl taken on the streets of coney island. And that alone was one of my favorite research. She promenade at avenue. She became girl. She became crazy for clothes. She did not know it then. But this would be the great turning point of her life. There is a wiseguy, a question i am sure you have probably heard it. Certainly. Who has ever worked in a sex trade, has heard it, and it has always been asked at least once, what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this well, polly, like most women in her position, hated that question. And she, for good reason, was always cagey on the subject of how, at the age of 19, she went from being a girl, sewing corsets to becoming a a hustler, as she would have said. She did offer some explanation. Yes, there were traumas along the way. She raped by the boss at the factory where she lived. She an illegal abortion. She lost her job after that, she was kicked out by her cousins. Yet still, i think its hard to explain to anyone who has not experienced that kind poverty and that kind of loneliness, those feelings of powerless and hopelessness that people in that position feel so, like many young women in that position, she decided that selling sex would be a much quicker and more reliable path a glamorous, new, life filled cash, pretty clothes and camaraderie. It started to seem to her like a badge of smarts, even a badge of honesty in honor, even in a rotten that had nothing in it for her. So she opens her first brothel in 1920 in a two bedroom apartment right across from columbia university, where butler library. Now, i not sure why she must have done some market research. Its this is the same year that prohibition takes effect. And let me tell you this, it is a huge success right from the beginning. She insists that shes only going to do it for a little while. Shes going to shes making so much money, shes just going to save it up and open a legitimate business. And in fact, over to quickly, very quickly, two years she did as she had saved enough money to open a dress shop, but she quickly soured legitimate business. She had become addicted to what we guess we would the economists would call the high Profit Margins that profit prostitution offered in an era when the man, the average white man made 3,000 a year and women made half that, if they were lucky, she was soon pulling in 60,000 annually. And thats thats in 1922 money thats the equivalent of 1,000,000 about in todays dollars. That was less a year ago. But, you know, inflation has changed that for the first time. Almost the most important part is she had power over her circumstances. So in 1923, she quits legitimate business and she goes back into the sex trade. Then this is another fateful turn. She is taken up by the gambler and political fixer Arnold Rothstein. If you were a sports fan, you remember him as the gambler who is accused of fixing the 1919 world series. If you are a musical theater. Rothstein secret floating games inspired the Broadway Musical all guys and dolls. He he played a big role in boardwalk empire. If you watched that, who looked did a good job . I must say . Arnold rothstein introduces you to all the up and coming bootleggers and criminals and gangsters that is rising big shots, names you like you might recognize, like Lucky Luciano meyer lansky, bugsy siegel likes diamond, pollys house very quickly becomes the favorite house of all the criminal classes. Theyre the ones who are rising and have money to spend and are dying to spend it somewhere that makes them fancy all makes polly more ambitious. As she said. I had always told my girls, if you have to be a prostitute, be a good one. Well, same applied to me. If i had to be a, i would be a good madam. In fact, now she declares, i was determined to be the best madam in all of america because she couldnt advertise like a legitimate business. She had to master alternative forms of publicity. So she does things like she begins taking a posse of her most beautiful girls through the best nightclubs and speaking fees, parading them through, picking new clients as she went along, she cultivates gossip columnists and journalists like Walter Winchell, who became one of her oldest and most enthusiastic clients. They would not put her name in print, but they spread her name through word of mouth and all of this works very quickly. She becomes, you know, this is a silly phrase, but she becomes a sort forrest gump of 1920s. She turns up on all the cultural hotspots. Now, this was, of course, one of the great things about this, because i had discovered polly adler in the stacks of the yale library just looking a read literally. This is why i ventured out openstack x. So i just pulled out a little red volume. That was her memoir from the 1950s, which of course is not fully honest as you can like any memoir and let that be a lesson to you. I cant trust memoirs, but that as i was doing my research it becomes very clear that she becomes darling of the gossip column lists. And so things start to up. That was one of the things as you started as you people. Thank you so much. I started digitalizing things i could see that over. She was not a secret person. She was a wellknown person who was constantly the papers. She becomes deeply involved in the world of show business and tin pan alley. She counts entertainers like names that we would still like. Milton berle. Desi arnaz. Garfield. Duke ellington. Fats waller. George gershwin. Dozens of hollywood screenwriters, producers and directors she can see them as both customers, real friends. She many of the great athletes of the era, this golden age of sports i learned much more about boxing than i thought i would. She becomes a favorite hostess of the yankee state team and Madison Square garden crowds, including entertaining luminaries like jack dempsey, joe dimaggio, who apparently asked for cotton sheets, did not care for the silk sheets because his knees kept slipping. I footnoted it. I dont know if its actually true, but i do have a footnote behind that pseudo her brother becomes the after hours for the adventurous writers, actors and playwrights who at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch that is you know cultural influencers some of whom we remember like Dorothy Parker and George Kaufman and robert benchley, their stamp of approval because they are clearly what we would now call cultural influencers brings along the big moneymen from madison avenue, park avenue, wall street, broadway, hollywood. She counting true american aristocrats like jock whitney and Winthrop Rockefeller and the vanderbilt boys, as she just them as customers and friends but the bread and butter of her business was, as you might imagine, conventions and business meetings. I dont know what you people have been doing for this week, but you know, theres a lot of freedom in these places. Midtown manhattan at this time is, of course, the center of of business in the united, maybe even in the world for a while. And it is also the center of, a flourishing party girl racket that caters to the expense account men who come, who really this perhaps is one of the most shocking. I know there were a million shocking things, but this was one of them that just how much prostitutes and party girls are used as grease for the wheels of commerce. How . I dont know at. Well, we can discuss this afterwards. Common. This is still, but its certainly was surprisingly common back then and she becomes the leading provider of professional girls. So you know at this one of my favorite moments was running into and reading Sherwood Andersons autobiography. Of course fame is now is a novelist and short story writer, but he had been an advertising man. An advertising man of all of all of them are the ones who are most likely to need a stud to book, as they called it, or a little black book. But it was common anywhere you had or clients or salespeople, as he describes, everyone would have a book. They had a number of women in them who were good, was the phrase that they often used. And so after evening of drinking, youd be hanging out with your potential clients and somebody, as he puts it would inevitably suggest. What about some so a few phone calls later they would find themselves the whole party. You guys in know somebodys apartment and having a good time and not that maybe even they were in a brothel because the money is exchanged. So or even on credit that many of the girls he might not even realize. One might not even realize that the girls were paid. I guess because i, i did spend some time quizzing the men in my life how common this would be now and mostly seemed not very common but i do think there are a lot of people who still use strip in this way. The psychologists refer it as the power of shared transgression which to say rebelling against rules, indulging in forbidden together and getting away with it together can create a sense, instant camaraderie and a delicious feeling of secret power as