Queen of Tarts

A House Is Not a Home. Polly Adler was a flashy flesh-peddler who flourished in Manhattan during the '20s and '30s and liked to think her establishment was the Versailles of vice. It was indeed a fancy whorehouse. Her furnishings were French antiques. Her customers were bankers, bluebloods, politicians, policemen, racketeers. Her girls were class. Her prices ($20) were competitive. And along with everything else there was Polly, a short, swart woman with crocodilian charm and a heart of ill-got gold.

Polly didn't actually tell all in her bestselling memoirs, which were published in 1953, but what she told has now been translated into a matter-of-fact movie that relates the shoddy story of Polly's lurid life, with little sympathy and less sensation, as a footnote to the social history of the '20s. Not a sexy scene in it.

Polly (played by Shelley Winters) was born in 1900 in a White Russian ghetto. Her father, a tailor, decided to send his children one by one to "the golden land," and when Polly was twelve she arrived in America with everything she had in the world slung over her shoulder in a potato sack. At 16 she was working in a Brooklyn sweatshop. At 18 she was raped, or so she claimed. At 21 she became a madam by mistake.

A gangster she knew set her up in a fancy flat, not as his mistress but as a housekeeper for his mistress. When he ditched the girl he asked Polly to find him another. Soon she was finding girls for his friends, and soon after that she began to take money for her services. By 1923 she had a fancy house of her own, and for the next 20 years she was known as the organizational genius of the sindustry. Half the headwaiters in Manhattan were on her payroll; so were hundreds of police officials; and she had friends at the highest levels of the city, state and federal governments. Nevertheless, in 1945 Fiorello La Guardia finally forced Polly to shut up shop.

Was she downhearted? Not noticeably. Lugging a trunkful of filthy lucre, Polly enrolled at U.C.L.A. and three years later, with the help of a good rewrite man, published her class thesis: A House Is Not a Home. In 1962 the old cat died a literary lion.

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