Debby Applegate
Excerpt from Madam: The Biography of Polly
Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age (Doubleday, 2021)
From Chapter 6 - "Thumbs Up With The Mob"
Polly Adler wearing her first, fabulous mink
coat, strolling the boardwalk in Atlantic City in 1924 with a pal. Photo from
the Polly Adler Collection courtesy of Eleanor Vera.
After three years of Prohibition, by the summer of
1923, New York City’s underworld was booming.
“It was becoming increasingly fashionable to make money any way you
could – except by working for it,” remembered Polly Adler. “It wasn’t only
angle-shooters and corner-cutters and big-city sharpies who were on the
‘get-rich-quick’ kick.”[1]
Nobody was raking in the chips like the bootleggers,
grifters, gamblers who orbited around Arnold Rothstein, aka the Big Bankroll,
the Big Jew Uptown, or the Brain. Some were primarily bookmakers and game
runners, others had been thieves, drug dealers and strong-arms for hire before he
took them under his wing. But in the
last three years, Rothstein’s proteges had become New York’s “hoodlum
aristocracy.”[2]
Polly was always cryptic about how she met Arnold
Rothstein, saying only that he was “a man whom I was one day to know well.”[3] But that winter of 1923 her brothel became a
favorite hangout of the Brain’s criminal cabinet. “My clientele consisted mostly
of gangsters and hoodlums,” she remembered, “some of whom were to become the
big shots of the day.”[4]
Arnold Rothstein, c. 1920-1928. New York
World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Collection (Library of Congress).
It was as gamblers that Polly became intimate with the
bullet boys. Rothstein’s informal
syndicate of law-breakers ran private high-stakes poker games and floating
craps games, immortalized in the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls. To elude cops and stick-up men the games
shifted every night through empty garages, hotels, warehouses, and the back
rooms of speakeasies.
The most important of these early patrons – her “benefactor,”
as one of Polly’s well-informed friends put it – was the rising “King of the
Bootleggers,” William V. Dwyer.[5]
“Big Bill” Dwyer was a roly-poly man, with a disarming smile and expressive
blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. Rothstein had financed Dwyer when he
began expanding his operation from robbing industrial alcohol from government warehouses
into international smuggling. Big Bill
had, in one gangland lawyer’s description, “an easy way about him and a fine
sense of humor.”[6] He was a glad-hander, who loved the theater
and saloon life and preferred grease to violence.
William Vincent “Big Bill” Dwyer when he
was known as “The King of the Bootleggers.” Photo in the public domain.
Dwyer had recently joined forces with another of
Rothstein’s proteges, Francesco Castiglia, who went by the moniker of Frank
Costello. (It never hurt to have an Irish name when conversing with cops). They were joined that fall of 1923 by Owney
Madden, recently released from Sing Sing, who enjoyed a reputation as one of
the most vicious of the city’s Irish gang leaders.
Big Bill and Owney were partners with another of
Rothstein’s proteges, “Smiling George McManus,” in a number of lucrative
gambling schemes. George McManus
was a brawny, barrel-chested fellow, with a lantern jaw and a wide crooked grin
that lit up when he was in good spirits.
His family had deep ties to the NYPD, which frequently came in handy.
Big Bill and Owney were partners with another of
Rothstein’s proteges, “Smiling George McManus,” in a number of lucrative
gambling schemes. George McManus
was a brawny, barrel-chested fellow, with a lantern jaw and a wide crooked grin
that lit up when he was in good spirits.
His family had deep ties to the NYPD, which frequently came in handy.
Both were extroverted Irishman -- Dwyer from Hell’s
Kitchen, McManus from Harlem -- who relished the limelight and the role of
lavish host. They also shared that most
valued of traits in a madam’s estimation: a total disregard for the value of
money. Dwyer was famous for never
allowing anyone to pick up a check, no matter high the bill, and McManus was
beloved by waiters, entertainers and gold diggers up and down the Avenue for
dropping $20 tips without blinking an eye.
George McManus in 1929, when he was on
trial for murdering Arnold Rothstein. Author’s collection.
That fall McManus and Dwyer, along with Owney Madden’s
brother Marty, were running the hottest regular crap game in New York, with
action running as high as $700,000 some nights. There was nothing like shooting craps to
stoke the appetite for a prostitute, Polly soon discovered. “Money meant
nothing to these fellows,” she remembered with pleasure; “they sometimes spent
five hundred or more in an evening. Whoever won the crap game paid the bill.”[7]
The games didn’t start till nearly midnight and ran till
four or five in the morning. Winners
looking to celebrate their good luck had to worry about muggings and
kidnappings, so providing a place that was safe, secret and always open into
the wee hours quickly made her joint the preferred after-hours clubhouse of the
late night dice-tossers.
“It had not occurred to me to sell drinks until one of the
bunch remarked that I was a sap to let them buy their booze from a bootlegger
and cart it up to my apartment,” recalled Polly. “Why didn’t I get smart and
sell them drinks at a buck a throw? I
took his advice, and, in his own words, cut myself in for a nice piece of
change.”[8]
She encouraged the johns to buy drinks for the girls,
padding the bills further. Of course, a
tipsy girl was an uninhibited playmate, but a sloppy drunk was no use to
anyone. So she employed an old trick of brothels,
serving the girls cold tea brewed to match the golden color of rye and
whiskey. On a good night, her bar bills
dwarfed her profits on the bedrooms.
McManus and Dwyer were two of the most popular men
on Broadway, and with their seal of approval her house quickly gained a
reputation among underworldlings as, in her words, “a sort of combination club
and speakeasy with a harem conveniently handy.”[9]
But the gangsters came at a high price. “They were a wild bunch all right,” she
mused. Like most of the male half of Broadway, they all adored practical jokes
and pranks, the more elaborate the better.
“They liked a joke all right -- when it was on someone else,” especially
George McManus.[10] “The
kids with him played the jokes and he would get a hell of a kick out of it at
my expense.”[11]
Polly could tolerate the pranks, the chiseling and small
cons. Unpaid loans and bad checks – stiffs -- were regular thorns. “I have
enough stiffs to paper my garage,” she groused while going through a box of old
papers years later. She was freshly
annoyed by one dated October 22, 1923.[12] “It was given to me by
one of the McManus gang telling me that he was president of the bank. I was
gullible enough to believe that,” she remembered. “It probably was the bastards
[sic] way to teach me not to believe everything told to me.”[13]
But it was the ever-looming threat of violence that really
wore on her nerves. The brass knuckle boys were notoriously unpredictable,
especially when they were on a losing streak or a drunken, coked-up spree. To prevent friendly arguments from turning
fatal, she requested the boys check their guns at the door, along with their
felt fedoras and bulky overcoats. “I
usually hid them in the stove,” she remembered, “figuring it wasn’t likely
anyone would get a yen to bake a cake.”[14]
While that cut down on random gunplay, it didn't do much to
improve their manners. George McManus, in particular, was a dangerous wildcard.
“McManus was always quiet, and a gentleman when sober,” said Polly.[15] But when liquored up, his mood could suddenly
turn mean, and his jokes became cruel and dangerous.
Nonetheless, it was a price she was willing to pay. The gamblers and bootleggers were spending
like mad and her reputation was spreading fast.
She bought herself some swell clothes and showy jewelry. “I had a big important project those days,”
said Polly. “I was saving up to buy a mink coat.”[16] On Broadway, a full-length mink was the sin qua non of the fashionable flapper,
just as monogrammed silk-shirts and spotless white spats marked the new status
of the bootlegger. “I talked about it so
much that when a guy was trying to make a point at craps, he’d holler, ‘Come
on, little Joe! This is for Polly’s mink coat,’” Polly recalled. “They told me
it brought them luck.”[17]
Business was so brisk that it wasn’t long before she had
the cash in hand. The night she brought
the coat home the fellows passed it around, while Polly chuckled gamely, playing
the good sport and watching nervously in fear they would spill cigar ashes or
drinks on the precious mink before she could safely stow it away.
Later that evening, as she’d returned from the kitchen, one
of the gang called out, “Put your coat on, Polly. We’d like to see it again.”
But when she opened the closet, it had disappeared. Polly began to panic. The fellows made a show
of helping her search, clowning around as they bustled about the apartment.
Suddenly, one of them cried out, “You little dope, why did you put it out on
the fire escape?” The boys roared with laughter.
“I laughed loudest and longest of all – with relief,”
remembered Polly.[18]
But not every joke was so funny. Between answering the phones, keeping an eye
on the bedrooms, and serving drinks – “whiskey for the guys, tea in highball
glasses for the girls” -- it was
inevitable that there would be screw-ups. One night, McManus picked up a glass,
took a deep gulp, and began gagging and sputtering. “I knew what had happened even before he
swiveled around and hurled the glass again the wall, splattering tea far and
wide,” remembered Polly. “Of course he knew he had got the drink meant for his
girl of the evening, and at the rate he was paying, each drink cost more than
several pounds of tea.”
Everyone in the room froze, awaiting his response.
“Okay, Polly,” McManus said evenly, “so you got to make a
living…Well, fix me another drink.”
But McManus “couldn’t stand being played for a sucker,”
Polly remembered. “He had to get even.” [19] The next evening he doctored a tray of
drinks with Mickey Finns, a mild poison or emetic, usually a horse laxative
mixed with crushed ice that induced vomiting or diarrhea. Several of the johns spent the rest of the
night vomiting in the alley, and the girls were so sick they couldn't work for
three days. It could have been worse though; he could’ve used choral hydrate,
better known as knock-out drops, employed in clip joints to rob customers.
It was a devil’s bargain, courting them as customers. But as she put it, “there was nothing I could
do about it. I had chosen running a
house as my profession and whatever the customers did, I had to take it and
keep smiling.”[20]
References
1. Polly Adler, A
House is Not a Home (Rinehart, 1953), 144.
2. Art Cohn, The Joker is Wild: The Story of Joe E. Lewis
(Bantam Books, 1957), 113.
3. Adler, House,
32.
4. Adler, House,
55.
5. “Special
Adler Supplement,” 4, Virginia Faulkner’s Notes for A House is Not a Home;
New York Times, February 2, 1934,
9.
6.
Leonard Katz, Uncle Frank: The Biography
of Frank Costello (Drake, 1973), 63.
7.
Adler, House, 56.
8. Adler, House, 56.
9.
Adler, House, 96.
10.
Adler, House, 56.
11.
Polly Adler to Virginia Faulkner, Dec. 10, 1951, Faulkner Notebook, 13, Faulkner’s
Notes for A House is Not a Home.
12.
Adler to Faulkner, Oct. 13, 1951, Faulkner Notebook, 17, Faulkner’s Notes for A
House is Not a Home.
13.
Adler to Faulkner, Oct. 13, 1951, Faulkner Notebook,
13, Faulkner’s Notes for A House is Not a Home.
14.
Adler, House, 56.
15.
Adler to Faulkner, Dec. 10, 1951, Faulkner Notebook, 13, Virginia Faulkner’s Notes
for A House is Not a Home.
16.
Adler, House, 57.
17.
Adler, House, 57.
18.
Adler, House, 58.
19.
Adler, House, 56.
20. Adler,
House, 58.
DEBBY
APPLEGATE is a historian based in New Haven, CT. Her first book, The Most
Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the 2007
Pulitzer Prize for biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize
and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. Her second book Madam:
The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age was published by Doubleday
in November, 2021.
https://debby-applegate.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Polly-Adler-Madam-The-Biography-of-Polly-Adler-Icon-of-the-Jazz-Age-105313019559817
