Ann Arbor Jewish Book Festival Program

HYBRID LUNCH & LEARN PROGRAM

With Author Debby Applegate, Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age

Moderated by Chuck Newman

12:00 PM | Lunch at the JCC | Author Will Join Virtually

In Roaring Twenties New York City, when the nightclubs closed down, the in-crowd didn’t go home.  Everyone went to Polly’s place, the “speakeasy with a harem” run by “The Female Al Capone,” as the newspapers dubbed her. Polly “Pearl” 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.  Polly’s pals — luminaries like Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Lucky Luciano, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Parker, Bugsy Siegel and Desi Arnaz – made the Jazz Age roar.

No one would’ve guessed that Pearl would become “the First Lady of the Underworld” when she arrived in America as a 13-year old Russian Jewish immigrant. But Polly’s life became a topsy-turvy Horatio Alger tale – a childhood that could be a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a wild ghetto adolescence out of a Henry Roth novel, blossoming into a glittering epic of parties and power worthy of 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.

Applegate immerses the reader in Polly’s world and uses her 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.

Deb­by Apple­gate is a his­to­ri­an whose first book, The Most Famous Man in Amer­i­ca: The Biog­ra­phy of Hen­ry Ward Beech­er, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biog­ra­phy and was a final­ist for the Los Ange­les Book Prize and the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Award. She was a Sterling Fellow in American Studies at Yale University, where she earned her Ph.D., and now lives in New Haven, Connecticut where she continues to haunt the stacks of the Yale Library.

Debby is also the author of numerous book chapters and articles and has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal among other publications.  She has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Marymount College; served on the boards of organizations including the Yale Summer Cabaret, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and the New Haven Review; and is the chair of Biographers International Advisory Council.