A House Is Not a Home

There are a number of remarkable women's twentieth century memoirs. At the top of my list are Emma Goldman's Living My Life, Gypsy Rose Lee's Gypsy and Polly Adler's A House Is Not a Home. Besides being exceptionally well written, these three women's memoirs document active and successful lives lived outside the pale. Emma was an anarchist, Gypsy was a stripper and Polly was a brothel madam.

Polly Adler's A House Is Not a Home (New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1953) describes Polly's life from its humble beginnings in Russia near Poland to New York City's most successful and notorious madam in the 1920s and 1930s. That bare sentence doesn't even touch what her memoir encompasses. I chose this selection because in it Polly describes lower class brothels and their workings. Her relationship with other madams and their girls gives an impression of her own nature.

Polly Adler's A House Is Not a Home, pp 301-305:

But of the million-odd prostitutes in America, only a very small percentage are fortunate enough to be employed in the first-class parlor houses and call houses. While I seldom came in contact with the madams who ran cheap whorehouses, I had learned something about them from Rose Blake, a well-known out-of-town madam, whom a patron had brought to my house one night after a big fight at the Garden. With her was one of her girls, Trixie, and from them I got a fairly comprehensive picture of the operation of the lower-priced establishment which goes in for quantity rather than quality, and depends on volume of business and a quick turnover for profits.

Rose's house was in Pennsylvania in a wide-open town. "I have ten girls working for me regularly," she said, "and when the mines are in full operation, I increase my staff to fifteen or twenty. My girls work in shifts, as we are open from eight in the morning till midnight. The girls alternate. Those who start at eight and quit at four will take the four to midnight shift the following week. Of course the night shift is the busiest."

"How many men a day visit your house?" I asked.

"From two hundred to two hundred and fifty," she said, smiling at my look of amazement. "My girls must have contact with twenty-five men a day to net thirty dollars a day. I run a strictly three-dollar house." (Of the seventy-five taken in, half would go to Rose, and the odd seven-fifty would go for tips, personal expenses and so on.)

"Well, Rose," I said, "I guess you're better oft than I am. With all the raids and shakedowns and my high overhead, I'm always winding up on the wrong side of the ledger. But you must make quite a profit."

"My average gross is eight thousand dollars a month," Rose said, "and I know that sounds like a real bundle. But let me tell you where it goes. I pay five hundred dollars a week to the Chief of Police for protection. The collector doesn't tell me how this money is passed around, so I don't know. All I know is that it costs me fifty dollars a week per girl to stay in operation, and when I have fifteen girls with me, the five hundred jumps to seven hundred and fifty. The two uniformed cops who patrol my beat get one hundred and forty dollars weekly, or twenty dollars a night. Then there's rent. I pay five hundred dollars a month for a house in the slums on the outskirts of town, a house nobody in his right mind would pay fifty a month for. But I'm told that the landlord is a friend or relative of the police officials, and this is the only place they'll let me keep open. Actually I operate with two partners, the landlord and the police.

"I, as the madam, am an outcast," she went on, "but my partners rake in the profit and still stay respectable. What's more, I have to help them stay that way. I'm expected to take at least one pinch a month, more at election times. They warn me in advance of a coming raid, and I see to it there's only one girl and the housekeeper around to take the rap. The girl's bail is set at three hundred dollars and the housekeeper's at five hundred. We forfeit the bail so they won't have to appear for trial. Thus the city becomes my third partner, because these pinches cost me from eight hundred to one thousand dollars a month." She hesitated a minute. "What gripes me most is the parade of compulsory charities. Every month they hit me for tickets to the Policemen's Ball, or the Firemen's Outing, for contributions to the church bazaars and baskets of food for the poor. . . . There are lots more, all of them compulsory. So just to meet this monthly pay-off, my house has to bring in eight thousand a month."

I had been running over the figures she had given me and now I said, "Supposing the graft you have to pay off adds up to five thousand dollars. If your house makes eight thousand, is the other three thousand yours?"

She laughed. "Aren't you forgetting running expenses? Besides the graft, I have to have two maids and a housekeeper. The maids get fifty each a week, the housekeeper a hundred. I have fifteen mouths to feed, including my girls and the cops who drop in around midnight for a snack. My table costs me around two hundred dollars a week. This is partly because the grocer jacks up the prices for me — everybody gets his cut, you know — and besides, he's like the others on the outside, figures all we do is coin the money."

I said, "Yes, and there's laundry."

She smiled again. "You keep thinking of my house in terms of yours. You see, we use trick beds. These look like regular beds, but instead of a box spring, there's a mattress over the slats — it's easier on the girls' backs. Then, we don't use sheets but just throw a cotton spread over the bed and the pillow, and put a small rug on the foot of the bed for a man to rest his dirty shoes on. I hand out paper towels and Lifebuoy soap."

I broke in, "What's a man doing in bed with his shoes on?"

"Listen, all he's got is fifteen minutes. You don't think he's going to waste time taking his shoes off, do you? Why, even with the girls' trick dresses — zippers all the way down front so they can peel them right off and nothing underneath to take off — still the men complain they don't get ready fast enough."

When I asked about paying the girls, she told me that each girl was paid off at the close of her shift when she turned in her "lace curtain" — the card that bore a punch mark for every customer entertained. "If her lace curtain matches the card on which the housekeeper keeps her tally, everything's fine. I have a special puncher that makes a different mark that can't be copied. Each punch-hole means a dollar fifty, and if I left it up to the girls and didn't have my special punch, their cards would be like old lace at the end of the first hour." As it was, she said, a girl was timed from the moment when a customer entered the bedroom, and after fifteen minutes the housekeeper tapped to indicate that time was up. "Of course a man is privileged to remain longer, but the girl must collect at fifteen minute intervals."

At this point the maid beckoned to me, and I excused myself to Rose and went to see what was the matter.

"You better straighten yourself out with the girls," whispered the maid. "They're on my neck, complaining about that Trixie who came here with Miss Rose. She hasn't left the bedroom since she got here." She pointed to the bill of the guests present. "You can see for yourself, no other girl's name is on it, only Trixie's. She sure works like lightning."

Later, when I called Trixie aside to give her her share of the money she had earned that night, she declined it saying, "Split it among your girls. They work here. I'm just vacationing." I insisted, but she was firm. Remembering what Rose had told me about her girls having contact with twenty-five men a day, I realized this must have seemed just a light workout to Trixie.

The kid puzzled me. Here she was, a cute little blonde with all the qualifications to work in a high-class call-house, and yet she chose a three-dollar house in a coal-mine territory. When I asked her about her home town she said, "My home is in whatever town I'm booked. I make the same circuit every year and, like a good actress, I have no trouble getting return bookings. My 'landladies' tell me I increase their business when I'm performing in their houses. They start billing me with their customers weeks in advance as 'Bedroom Trixie.'

"But I guess you'd call Detroit my home. Six months out of the year I work there in the two busiest houses. I never leave the bedroom, except for my meals, from the time I start to work. That's why they nicknamed me 'Bedroom Trixie.' Right now I'm staying in New York because my man had a stroke. He's under a doctor's care here, and I'm going to stay with him until he gets well. But the doctor's bills are terrific, and I have to get to work. Can you refer me to a house with lots of action?"

"You scored a hit with my patrons, Trixie. You can keep dates for me."

"Jack may object if I work in a call-house. There's not enough money in it. And, besides, I never worked in a high-class house. I probably wouldn't know how to get along with a better class of men."

"A man's breeding, education, social or financial position," I said, "have nothing whatsoever to do with the way he behaves when he enters the bedroom of a whorehouse. So be at ease."

Early next evening Trixie phoned me. "My sweetheart gave me permission to give your house a tryout," she announced. She remained in New York until Jack had his second stroke — this one fatal. After that she drifted back to the "circuit" again, and the last I heard of Trixie she was working in a crib in Panama. It made my blood run cold to think of it. Panama was one of the lowest spots on the face of the earth for a prostitute — the bottom of the barrel, the last port of call.

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