CABS: Debby Applegate
13 November 2022 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
$12.00DEBBY APPLEGATE
Madame: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
Sunday, November 13 @ 7 PM, The Dayton Woman’s Club (225 N Ludlow St, Dayton, OH 45402)
Jazz concert, followed by the author
Cost: $12
Madam is the biography of Polly Adler (1900−1962), the most infamous and influential madam in Jazz Age New York. Her 1953 memoir, A House is Not A Home, sold 2 million books and became a 1963 movie starring Shelley Winters. More than a biography, this is a colorful and unusual history of Jewish life told through the perspective of a “good Jewish girl” from a Russian shtetl who immigrated to Brooklyn and rose to become “the female Al Capone” and one of the most renowned Jewish-American women in the 20th century. Her brothels were underworld salons that catered to everyone from the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers to Walter Winchell, Frank Sinatra, Desi Arnaz, the Algonquin Roundtable, Dutch Schultz and Meyer Lansky, and, it was rumored, Franklin D. Roosevelt.