Getting Screwed (5 page)

By then, like many young working girls of the time, Adler had discovered the dance halls, where she would go every Sunday afternoon and dance her worries away. Through a connection, she was introduced to a beautiful young actress from a wealthy family whom she identifies in her memoir as Joan. Joan offered Adler a place to stay in her family's nine-room apartment on Riverside Drive, and under Joan's wing, Adler began making friends with “celebrities, directors, writers and composers, all smoking opium.” But having seen what drugs were doing to Joan, who had become addicted to cocaine and heroin and was sabotaging her acting career, Adler had no inclination to join in. In 1920, Tony, a bootlegger friend of hers who was having an affair with a married woman, asked Adler to take an apartment (he'd pay the rent) so he could meet his mistress on the sly. Still unemployed, Adler agreed. In time, Tony asked her to find him “a new girl,” and that was the beginning of Polly Adler's career as one of New York's best-known madams.

In the early years of Adler's business, much of her clientele consisted of gangsters and hoodlums, “most of whom died with their boots on.”
⁴⁵
But in the mid-1920s, she moved her operation to a spacious apartment on Seventh Avenue and began entertaining young men from Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools. In time, she says she was able to re
strict her clients to “the upper brackets” of New York's social, financial, literary, and theatrical worlds. In 1927, when her house was raided by police, the customers bailed her and her girls out almost as soon as they were booked, and the case was quickly dismissed. Many of the prostitutes who worked for Adler were struggling actresses, singers or dancers, showgirls between jobs. “Not one of them had any intention of staying in the business,” she writes. One of her “smartest” girls got married; another was a student of journalism at Columbia University who left the business when she graduated and became a well-known novelist. One can't help wondering who that well-known novelist was. Adler never tells; in her memoir she writes, “I have kept [her] secret, as I have kept many secrets.”
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Adler does acknowledge that prostitution was a hard life, in large part because it was illegal, and she could understand why so many sex workers became addicted to alcohol and drugs. In her memoir, she writes, “Whoring is a slow form of self-destruction. . . . By becoming a prostitute, a girl cuts herself off not merely from her family but also from such a great part of life. She is isolated not just by social custom but by working conditions and she has to some extent deprived herself of her rights as a citizen for she has forfeited the protection of the law. It is not syphilis which is the occupational disease of the prostitute, but loneliness.”
⁴⁷

Adler was speaking from firsthand experience. According to her memoir, she received several marriage offers over the years. The most serious proposal came from the leader of a popular New York swing band in the '20s, with whom she had a long-running affair. Adler says she loved him but had qualms about marrying a guy who liked to hit the bottle too much. She also knew his band's reputation would suffer if he married a madam. In the end, she turned him down and remained single the rest of her life.

In 1929, like many other Americans, Adler lost all her savings in the stock market crash. But paradoxically, her business was better than ever. “Men wanted to go out and forget their troubles,” she writes. “The atmosphere, at times, was more like an insane asylum than a bordello.”
⁴⁸

The good times, however, were short-lived. In 1930, then Governor Franklin Roosevelt asked the New York courts to investigate corruption by judges, court magistrates, and local police and named Judge Samuel Seabury to head the inquiry. The Seabury Commission soon uncovered massive bribing of New York's vice squads, court officers, and judges to ignore the city's flourishing gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution activities. At one point, Adler was warned that she was about to be served with a subpoena because she had “paid thousands of dollars in bribes to keep my house running smoothly and my girls and myself out of jail.”
⁴⁹
She fled town, ending up in Miami for an extended vacation.

Adler eventually returned to New York, got back into the business, and almost immediately came under the thumb of Dutch Schultz, a notorious Jewish gangster of the time. Against her will, she says, Schultz made her establishment his headquarters. She describes Schultz (whose real name was Arthur Flegenheimer) as “businesslike, cold and incisive, colorless and deadly,” and says she never lost her fear of him.
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In 1935, she tried to leave the “whorehouse business” and invest in a legitimate concern, such as a factory or restaurant, but her notoriety got in the way. “I exhausted all my contacts, but every door was closed to me, sometimes with a tactful lie, sometimes with the blunt announcement that people couldn't afford to be associated with me,” she writes.
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In the 1930s, the Great Depression swelled the numbers of women who turned to prostitution, but the dangers of being harassed, arrested, and prosecuted for prostitution grew in the years before World War II. Congress passed a law forbidding prostitution in designated areas where there were troops, and the military pressured local authorities to clamp down in an effort to once again combat venereal disease among soldiers.

Ironically, research published in the early 1940s showed that the vast majority of venereal disease cases among soldiers came from casual sex between soldiers and girls they had picked up, not from sex with prostitutes.
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A 1944 study for the U.S. Army, which traced the individual contacts of infected soldiers, found that 32 percent of sexually transmitted infections among white soldiers came from “friends,” 62 percent from
“pickups,” and only 6 percent from prostitutes.
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Even so, the military's actions resulted in the arrest and detention of thousands of women for prostitution-related offenses.
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As prostitution became more dangerous, more women engaged in “treating” — a practice in which a man took a woman out or helped her financially (paid her rent, for instance) in return for sexual favors. Treating still involved the exchange of sex for money, but it was not as explicit, says Elizabeth Clement in
Love for Sale.
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Polly Adler saw the writing on the wall. In 1943, her house was raided yet again. (She was arrested sixteen times in all but pled guilty only once and spent thirty days in jail.) The latest raid occurred when Adler was sick in bed with pleurisy, and she ended up in Bellevue Hospital. This case, like most of the others brought against her, was dismissed, but her heart was no longer in it. “Everything was an effort, the ringing of the business phone was like a dentist's drill on an exposed nerve, and though I would try to be gay and amusing, I usually ended the evening locked in my room crying into my pillow,” she writes.
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In 1944, Adler got out of the business for good and moved to Los Angeles, where she enrolled in the Los Angeles Valley College to pursue a lifelong dream: an education. In 1945, she began writing her autobiography,
A House Is Not a Home.
It was published in 1953 and became an unexpected best seller, selling more than two million copies in two years.
⁵⁷

Even then, controversy dogged Adler; there were reports that immigration officials were looking into her prostitution-related activities in the years before her naturalization as an American citizen in 1929. Adler handled the news with her usual aplomb. “I know nothing about it except what newspapermen have told me,” she said to one reporter. He looked around her sunlit cottage in Burbank, which was filled with ceramic dancing girls and lovebirds, and asked: “What about this place, Miss Adler? Is this house a home?” Polly Adler replied, “It certainly is.”

The Modern Sex Workers' Rights Movement

A
fter living quietly for almost two decades in her modest Burbank cottage with carefully trimmed hedges, Polly Adler died of breast cancer at the age of sixty-two. Her death merited a flurry of obituaries, one of which described her as a “notorious madam of the 20s” who ran a “swank establishment” in New York City.
¹
Her clientele included police officers, well-known politicians, and industrial magnates, the obit noted, adding: “Her choice of clientele probably was responsible for the fact that, although arrested numerous times, she only spent 30 days in jail.”

In her best-selling memoir
A House Is Not a Home,
Adler herself railed against the corruption of New York's finest, detailing how she was forced to make regular payoffs to cops to keep her and her girls from getting arrested. When police did raid her brothel, she would “cup a C-note in her palm” and go around shaking hands with each cop. “Sometimes law enforcement gave me more trouble than my rowdiest clients,” she wrote.
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Adler was particularly upset when she was forced to give fifteen cops a free and very costly (for her) party at her brothel so they wouldn't arrest her, at least not on that particular occasion. During the party, one drunken cop named Johnny explained that he fully intended to bust Adler at some point so he could get himself a promotion. “ ‘The thing is you're newspaper copy, sister . . .' ” he told her. “ ‘And my boss goes for headlines, and he goes to bat for the boys that grab 'em off for him.' ”
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Johnny and the other cops proceeded to consume Adler's liquor supply and trash her apartment, “trampling cigarette ends and cigar butts into
the carpet, burning, marring and staining what they did not smash.” She concludes:

Almost everybody, I guess, would find it easy to understand why I loathed pimps and drug peddlers, but the average law-abiding citizen would hardly go along with me in my detestation of cops unless he too, at some point or another, had locked horns with a crooked bull. I didn't resent the honest cop, and I was able to stay in business because of the dishonest variety. But the members of gendarmerie who really started my adrenalin flowing like wine were the boys who believed in playing it both ways, and who wouldn't have turned a hair if their own mother happened to be the one caught in the middle.
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Had she lived longer, Adler might have found a kindred spirit in Margo St. James, a cocktail waitress who was arrested for prostitution in San Francisco only six months after New York's most notorious madam died in June 1962. It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and St. James, a fun-loving freethinker who grew marijuana plants in her backyard, had become an indispensable part of the love-in. Her parties attracted local musicians, artists, poets, and writers. The comedian Lenny Bruce and author Ken Kesey (
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
) were regulars at St. James's place, as were some of the undercover narcotics agents who drank at Pierre's bar, where she was a cocktail waitress. As the novelist Herb Gold told
San Francisco
magazine for a cover story about Margo St. James, “She was jolly. It was fun to visit her. She was like an organizer on the scene, the sexual side to the beat revolution.”
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While St. James was a huge flirt, she prided herself on the fact that she was a party girl, not a prostitute. So when a stranger called and wanted to hang out, saying a friend had given him her name, St. James invited him over, thinking he was some horny football player from out of town who had gotten her name from one of the San Francisco 49ers. “He was not my type, rather scrawny and homely, but being a friendly country girl, I tried to put him at ease,” she recalls in an afterword she wrote for the 1980 book
Prostitutes, Our Life.
After hanging out for a while, the man offered St. James money for sex. She refused and told
him to leave. At that point, “He flashed his badge, said he was a cop, and told me I was under arrest for
soliciting him
!” she writes. “Several other cops broke in the back door and hauled me off to jail, charging me with running a ‘disorderly house.' ”
⁶

At her trial, St. James, then twenty-five, insisted that she did not sell sex. While it was true that some of her roommates were prostitutes and that she herself enjoyed partying with guests, she told the judge she had never turned a trick in her life. But the judge convicted her of prostitution anyway, saying, “Anyone who uses that language is obviously a professional.”
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St. James was kept in jail until she agreed to be tested for venereal disease and get a penicillin shot. In those days, police routinely kept women accused of prostitution in jail until they had agreed to a penicillin shot even if they didn't have venereal disease. (This practice, known as quarantining, has since been outlawed in most states as a violation of women's rights; men arrested as johns were never quarantined or tested.) St. James was bailed out the next day, but as a convicted prostitute, she could no longer work in any club in town. The police saw to that. “They would come into the club and say, ‘You can't hire her here; she's a whore,' ” St. James recalls. “And then I'd go to work at another club and they'd do the same thing.”

This was not the first time that Margo St. James had found herself in a tough spot. She had grown up on a farm outside Bellingham, Washington, the oldest of three children. When she was eight, her parents divorced. She was sent to live with her father and his much younger new wife, who was only ten years older than St. James. St. James worked on the family farm, milking cows and learning how to drive a tractor by the age of ten. But she hated living with her father; as she noted in a later interview, “My father believed that if you spared the rod, you spoiled the child, so I got a lot of whippings. My teachers even spoke to my father about it because they could see the marks on my legs in gym class.”
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At age fourteen, she went to live with her mother in Bellingham, but as she acknowledges, “My mom was single and dating. I was running around and not too supervised.”
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As a freshman at Bellingham High, she lost
her virginity and spent a lot of time having sex with high school boys behind the football bleachers. When St. James was seventeen, she got pregnant, and she and her boyfriend, the high school baseball star, drove all night to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where marriage licenses were issued with a minimum of questions asked. But the marriage didn't take. “I didn't want to get married, I didn't want kids, but my mother's doctor refused to give me an abortion since I wasn't eighteen,” St. James says. “My husband never wanted to leave home. We argued a lot.”

St. James left her husband and three-year-old son in 1958 to move to Seattle, where she worked at the Seattle Colony Club as a hatcheck girl, janitor, bartender, and de facto manager. But the club was on its last legs, and what she really wanted to do was go to art school in San Francisco. “I got a ticket and my trunk and took the train,” she recalls. “And I met a nice cab driver who took me to this cheap hotel in Oakland where musicians and artists lived. I love music and there was a jazz club right across the street.”

In San Francisco, with no money or connections, St. James started working as a B-girl in the after-hours clubs. She was an attractive brunette with a slim, athletic build and a megawatt smile. As she recalls, “I only drank phony drinks with men for money and led them on but delivered no sex. I was very proud of the fact that I was not a hooker. . . . By day and early evenings (the clubs didn't open until the bars closed at 2 a.m.), I was a latter-day beatnik and good-time girl in the Italian neighborhood of North Beach.”
¹⁰

In 1961, St James landed a bona fide job as a cocktail waitress at Pierre's on Broadway and made enough money on tips to move out of her $30-a-month hotel room into a larger apartment on Grant Avenue and Green Street, which soon became known as the St. James Infirmary (a prescient nod to the medicinal qualities of pot). “I was having a good time,” St. James says. “My ass was my own, as Flo Kennedy [the late African American lawyer, civil rights advocate, and feminist] always used to say.”

But after her arrest for prostitution, she couldn't find a job at any of San Francisco's night spots. So to pay off her bail, she went to work (for
free) for the bondsman who had bailed her out. She also began her own process-serving business with the lawyers she met while working for the bondsman. But she remained furious at the judge who had convicted her. (She later helped defeat the judge when he ran for re-election.) In the course of her work, she met “some of the best legal minds in the city,” including the dean of the Golden Gate University Law School, who told her that if she passed a college equivalency test, she would be accepted into his law school. She passed the test and started taking law courses at night in 1963. A few months later, she filed an appeal of her conviction. After her first year, though, she flunked what she calls the “baby bar,” the test that all first-year students at the night school had to take. Later that summer, she won the appeal, and her conviction for prostitution was overturned. Shortly afterward, she quit law school.

In her afterword for
Prostitutes, Our Life,
St. James says she quit law school because she “couldn't stand the hypocrisy it supported.”
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In a more recent interview, she says she didn't really want to practice law; she still had dreams of going to art school. To support herself, she began saying yes to the lawyers and judges who were constantly soliciting her for sex. “I wasn't making a ton of money, just enough to pay the bills,” she says. “I wanted the fun more than anything.”

Some of her clients at this time were narcotics agents and men from the Alcohol and Beverage Commission whom she had met at Pierre's. Others were businessmen. “That's when they still had two-hour lunches,” she says with a husky laugh. For a few months one year, a local cosmetics company paid the rent on her roomy new apartment on Alpine Terrace. “These businesses wanted a whorehouse they could go to and take their customers to,” she recalls. “I always had a couple of roommates who weren't averse to working.”

In 1967, when St. James was thirty, she fell in love with Roger Somers, an architect and musician, and moved out to the woods of Marin County with him. They lived in a community known as Druid Heights where neighbors shared in the gardening and cooking. Alan Watts, the famous British-born author who wrote many books about the value of integrating Eastern philosophy into Western life, was the philosopher in resi
dence there. To augment her income, St. James began cleaning houses, and Watts soon became one of her most reliable clients.

By the late 1960s, the sexual revolution was in full flower across the United States, and the women's movement was gathering steam. Millions of young women across the country were discovering their sexual independence, and commentators of the time predicted that the new era of sexual freedom would finally put the kibosh on prostitution. After all, if men could freely have sex with women outside marriage, what was the point of paying for sex? But if anything, the freeing of sexual mores actually gave rise to a consumer ethic that put sexuality on display in a way that had never been permitted before. Sex became a product, and as Roberts notes in
Whores in History,
the advertising media began selling sex as “the archetypal form of entertainment with which the glamor of consumer goods was (and is) associated.”
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This new permissiveness extended toward commercial sex, and by the 1970s, the United States was seeing a proliferation of strip clubs, massage parlors, and pornography. Explicitly pornographic magazines such as
Screw
and
Hustler
emerged to give
Playboy
and
Penthouse
competition for the American male's eyeballs.

Although the sexual revolution did cut into the trade with some young men, who discovered they no longer had to pay for sex, many middle-class married men continued to patronize prostitutes, researchers found.
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It seemed safer to pay for an encounter with a discreet and accommodating hooker than embark on an unpredictable affair that might threaten one's marriage and standing in the community. But while male clients, or johns, as they were known, were rarely arrested, the prostitutes who serviced them were routinely harassed by police. Streetwalkers took the brunt of it. Police used prostitution busts to enhance their arrest statistics and earn money for the state in fines, and the ease of arresting streetwalkers meant that cops spent a disproportionate time patrolling tenderloin districts. Some critics at the time even publicly questioned whether such patrols left other neighborhoods open to more violent crimes.
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