I was first introduced to historian Debby Applegate by an interview she gave on the New York Times Book Review about her recently released Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age.

But instead of starting with this book I circled around and read first her Pulitzer Prize-winning work of a few years earlier: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.

It took me quite a while to figure out why Madam was a fitting coda to the biography of Beecher, one of America’s first celebrities of the modern era.

“Americans have little appetite for examining the dreary mechanics behind the spectacle of our dreams” Applegate laments in the closing paragraphs of Madam.

This seemed to me pretty much what Applegate was doing in the first biography.

In telling this story she was telling a rather unvarnished version of the powers behind New York in a way, I think, that befits the tradition Robert Caro started with The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

Who after all are the heroes of American myth: gangsters like Dutch Shultz and Al Capone, the sturdy men in blue and the courts of Law and Order, Broadway and Wall Street.

Polly Adler, a 12-year-old Jewish immigrant from Belarus, was corrupted at every stage of the way by the free-for-all big city. When it came time to pay her dues, it usually meant big-time protection payments to lawyers and district attorneys, to judges and cops and vice squad detectives.

This began with the puritanical inclinations of the first Jewish relatives who take her in once she landed in America. It was cultivated by the lures to a single and poor young woman promised by the rides of Coney island and the early dance halls of Brooklyn and Queens, and solidified by a rape, abortion, and later an intoxication by men wielding power.

The usual spin was that Polly “bribed” the cops. The reality was that Polly was fitting in with a tradition of corruption that originated with the Democratic machine of Tammany Hall.

The crooks were every bit the tool of the politicians. Poverty and the grinding wheels of American style capitalism kept everybody in line.

It was this system that made it easy for hoodlums to beat the crap out of Polly’s “girls” when they so wished, and it was the same system that kept quiet Franklin Roosevelt’s preference for felatio from prostitutes when he was Tammany Hall’s favourite choice for the White House.

And I couldn’t help but share Polly’s terror when one of New York’s most brutal and unpredictable killers, Arthur Simon Flegenheimer, a.k.a. Dutch Shultz, suddenly decided to make Polly’s apartment his operations base during a bloody gangland war.

Applegate deftly highlights Polly’s disgust for the lure of narcotics and alcohol and their affects on the johns and her employees, things for which Polly had a ringside seat at the beginning of her long association with prostitution.

These are also part and parcel of “the dreary mechanics” of the American way and American style celebrity. ( )

Arriving in Americas as a 13-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant, Polly Adler’s “wit and charm made her America’s most famous queen of vice in the Roaring Twenties”. Her brothels were also swinging salons where the culturati and high society partied with the elite of showbiz, politics, and organized crime that made the Jazz Age soar. “Madam” will keep you reading to the very last page!

Born into a poor Jewish family in a shtetl in what is today Belarus, Polly Adler arrived in the US in 1913. Ambitious, clever, and with limited formal education, Adler was determined to make more of herself than earning a pittance for backbreaking, dead-end factory work. By the early 1920s, Adler had set up her own brothel and was soon New York City's "top supplier of party girls". Her establishment was visited by a list of johns who make up a who's who of the great, good, and gruesome of the Roaring Twenties: the Marx Brothers, Desi Arnaz, Franklin Roosevelt, mob guys, and European royalty. Adler made a fortune and became a small-time celebrity, before retiring to post-war California where she went back to school and wrote a best-selling memoir.

Debby Applegate writes with clear affection for her subject, but without glossing over the less savory aspects of Adler's career or ignoring the grit that lay beneath the Twenties glamour. There is a lingering sense at the end of Madam that there are key aspects of Adler's life that are now unknowable—as Applegate says, Adler “hid far more of her story than she shared, even from herself.” Still, a briskly readable combination of biography and social history. ( )

I have to say Polly Adler was a mighty impressive woman. She started out in a Russian shtetl and ended up being hostess to American politicians (including FDR), gangsters, police, artists, and top businessmen. She got knocked around physically and legally for decades and managed to stay on top. All kinds of deals were made in her homes because men knew they could plot and plan and neither she nor her "girls" would spread their secrets. So, respect for Polly Adler, not much for her Johns. ( )

Polly Adler lived a very unique version of the American dream. Born into a Jewish family in Russia around the turn of the twentieth century, Polly immigrated to the United States just before World War I. Young and in need of a way to support herself, Polly tried a number of trades before she was pulled into the world of brothels, madams, and sex. Before long, Polly was a madam herself, running her own bordello patronized by some of the most notable men of New York in the 1920s and 30s. Adler had connections with politicians, mobsters, Hollywood actors, and lived to write her own story in the form of memoirs in the 1950s. A fascinating woman, and a biography that offers a fresh perspective of the iconic Jazz Age. ( )