the Everleigh sisters. She was not satisfied with this section, and wanted to enlarge it, but not until she read my guest column in The Hollywood Reporter had she known how to get the necessary information. What she wanted from me was permission to use a few paragraphs of my column to expand her own section on the Everleighs. I agreed to this at once. When Polly Adler’s book, A House Is Not a Home , finally was published in 1953, it was a best seller and a national sensation. Acknowledgment of my own minor contribution to the Everleigh saga I found in a footnote on page 314. Polly Adler had written:
“Until Minna’s death, in 1948, only a half-dozen trusted friends knew that the sisters were living the life of respectable clubwomen at a home they owned near Central Park in New York. I am indebted to Irving Wallace, one of the few who knew their secret, for this information.”
After that, Polly Adler, a pudgy, Jewish middle-aged lady with a passion for knowledge, and I became fast friends. Often, I would sit in her living room, studying her voluminous scrapbooks, gorging myself on her delicious homemade chopped chicken liver, while she questioned me about the profession of writing and about the Everleighs. And when I was not eating, I would steadily interrogate her about her life as a madam—the unprintable and libelous parts that were not included in her book—and she would discourse freely on her girls, her famous clients, her philosophy about the sexual lives of men and women.
Several times, Polly Adler sought my advice on the second book that she was in the process of preparing, a sequel to A House Is Not a Home , a book about the prostitutes who had worked for her and what had happened to each of them. Once, I know, she traveled across the United States with a tape recorder, looking up the girls—one had become a narcotics addict, another the respectable wife of a wealthy realtor—and putting down their stories on tape. But this provocative book, like Minna Everleigh’s own, was never to be published. On another occasion, Polly informed me with great glee of a marvelous evening she had just enjoyed. Alfred C. Kinsey, renowned throughout the world for his sex surveys. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, had visited Los Angeles and had wanted to meet her. And she had wanted to meet him. She had invited him over for a Jewish dinner, and he had accepted immediately. “A wonderful man, that Dr. Kinsey,” she told me. “We had so much in common to discuss. But you know, I found him surprisingly prim and puritanical. One thing I will say for him. Just like you, Irving, he never left a crumb of the chopped chicken liver!”
Polly Adler followed my career as avidly as I had once followed hers. When I published my second book, a collective biography of American eccentrics and nonconformists, Polly bought a dozen copies, asked me to inscribe them, and then she wrote me:
“Thanks for autographing the books for my friends. Hustling for The Square Pegs is a pleasure. Too bad my time is limited. Can’t do an extensive hustling job comparable to the old days.
“Your book rates it! I loved it!—Especially Victoria Wood-hull [a former prostitute, advocate of free love and equal rights for women, who ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1872]—what a dame! Lucky for me she wasn’t around in my day. I couldn’t buck such competition.”
One of the last times I heard from Polly Adler—just a few years before her untimely death in June of 1962—was on the occasion of the publication of my novel. The Chapman Report . The book told the story of the effects of the visit of a university sex survey team on a group of women living in a suburb of Los Angeles. Polly read it in one sitting, and telephoned me in a state of great excitement. “Irving,” she exclaimed, “I adored it! Where in the hell did you pick up all that information? Why, I’ll be damned, but you know
“Until Minna’s death, in 1948, only a half-dozen trusted friends knew that the sisters were living the life of respectable clubwomen at a home they owned near Central Park in New York. I am indebted to Irving Wallace, one of the few who knew their secret, for this information.”
After that, Polly Adler, a pudgy, Jewish middle-aged lady with a passion for knowledge, and I became fast friends. Often, I would sit in her living room, studying her voluminous scrapbooks, gorging myself on her delicious homemade chopped chicken liver, while she questioned me about the profession of writing and about the Everleighs. And when I was not eating, I would steadily interrogate her about her life as a madam—the unprintable and libelous parts that were not included in her book—and she would discourse freely on her girls, her famous clients, her philosophy about the sexual lives of men and women.
Several times, Polly Adler sought my advice on the second book that she was in the process of preparing, a sequel to A House Is Not a Home , a book about the prostitutes who had worked for her and what had happened to each of them. Once, I know, she traveled across the United States with a tape recorder, looking up the girls—one had become a narcotics addict, another the respectable wife of a wealthy realtor—and putting down their stories on tape. But this provocative book, like Minna Everleigh’s own, was never to be published. On another occasion, Polly informed me with great glee of a marvelous evening she had just enjoyed. Alfred C. Kinsey, renowned throughout the world for his sex surveys. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, had visited Los Angeles and had wanted to meet her. And she had wanted to meet him. She had invited him over for a Jewish dinner, and he had accepted immediately. “A wonderful man, that Dr. Kinsey,” she told me. “We had so much in common to discuss. But you know, I found him surprisingly prim and puritanical. One thing I will say for him. Just like you, Irving, he never left a crumb of the chopped chicken liver!”
Polly Adler followed my career as avidly as I had once followed hers. When I published my second book, a collective biography of American eccentrics and nonconformists, Polly bought a dozen copies, asked me to inscribe them, and then she wrote me:
“Thanks for autographing the books for my friends. Hustling for The Square Pegs is a pleasure. Too bad my time is limited. Can’t do an extensive hustling job comparable to the old days.
“Your book rates it! I loved it!—Especially Victoria Wood-hull [a former prostitute, advocate of free love and equal rights for women, who ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1872]—what a dame! Lucky for me she wasn’t around in my day. I couldn’t buck such competition.”
One of the last times I heard from Polly Adler—just a few years before her untimely death in June of 1962—was on the occasion of the publication of my novel. The Chapman Report . The book told the story of the effects of the visit of a university sex survey team on a group of women living in a suburb of Los Angeles. Polly read it in one sitting, and telephoned me in a state of great excitement. “Irving,” she exclaimed, “I adored it! Where in the hell did you pick up all that information? Why, I’ll be damned, but you know
Similar Books
