Tag Archives: women’s biography

On Reading (and not yet finishing) Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age By Debby Applegate

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Back in the summer of 2024, I started reading Debby Applegate’s biography of Polly Adler, the (in)famous Manhattan madam of the 1920s. It was an obvious choice for me: a story about a little-known woman—today, not back then—written by a woman who turned what she learned in graduate school into a Pulitzer Prize winning writing career. Applegate won that award for her first book, The Most Famous Man in America, a biography of the nineteenth-century minister Henry Ward Beecher.

(That book also serves as the sample proposal in the extraordinarily useful Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner (Applegate’s literary agent) and Alfred Fortunato. My copy is dog-eared now. It is the resource I turn to when I need to write a book proposal. Now I am reading Tilar Mazzeo’s How to Write a Bestseller: An Insider’s Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction for General Audiences, which may prove to be equally valuable.)

Madam is Applegate’s second book. (I admire an author who takes their time to conduct quality research.) I knew going in that it would be good. My interest in Madam extended beyond character to setting. Right now I want to read as much as I can about New York City in the 1920s to get background information for my current book-in-progress about Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker.

Polly Adler was born around 1900; Jane in 1891. When Polly arrived in New York City from Russia in 1913, Jane had already been there (from Kansas) for five years. Both changed their first names to make a break with their pasts. The two young women struggled to gain a foothold in the city so they could live the life of their dreams. Each got what she wanted, mostly, in some way.

It is not unreasonable to think their paths may have crossed in New York in the 1920s, though trying to imagine that encounter makes my head spin. Polly opened her first brothel at the beginning of that decade that was known for its roar. By 1924, as Applegate writes, “her house had become an after-hours clubhouse for the adventurous Broadway bohemians who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch.” Jane Grant was a member of the legendary Round Table that met at the Algonquin. As was her husband, the talented editor Harold Ross. Their home was another “after-hours clubhouse” for the Round Tablers, though the entertainment they provided did not include Polly’s specialty.

(I have come to think of Jane as the anti-Polly.)

With some trepidation, I looked for Harold Ross’s name in the index of Madam and found it. (Jane’s is not there.) I could hardly bring myself to read what was on the corresponding page—would he turn out to be a rat or a super rat? But according to Applegate, Ross was “one of the few who failed to fall for Polly’s charms.” The lone time friends dragged him to her brothel, he carried along a stack of manuscripts, which he read “while the fun eddied around him.” This left me with a lot to think about.

I read about a quarter of Madam before I set it aside. It had nothing to do with the quality of the biography, which is as excellent as I anticipated, but rather because I started to consider it an ideal model for my book on Jane Grant. Too ideal. I am still very much at the beginning of my project, and I started to worry that I would imitate Applegate’s style. I do not want to cross the line between modeling and imitating. I need space, considerable space right now, to identify that boundary, to develop my own style and voice based on how I think Jane’s story needs to be told.

This is not the way I typically respond to the secondary (or published) sources I read for my book research. Every so often, though, I encounter a book—whether during leisure reading or work reading—I admire so much that I am overwhelmed by a sense of futility. (Also known, perhaps, as imposter syndrome.) As in, why should I continue to do what I do when someone has already published the perfect gem of a book. (Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, about Mildred Harnack, was the last book to strike me like that.)

The feeling eventually passes, and, of course, I go on to do what I do, because what I write ends up different than what anyone else writes. And maybe it is as good, maybe not. But that is what happens. I write the best book I can.

When I’m ready for my first round of revisions on the (still in progress) rough draft, I might pick up Debby Applegate’s book again. Or maybe I will wait for the second round. But I know I will finish reading that biography. I need to find out what happened to Polly Adler. And I need to pay close attention to how Applegate makes me care.

Up next: more on this year of Jane Grant.

A 2912 Tale of Photographs, Memories, and Momories, Part II: Irene senior and Irene junior

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I’ve been trying to write this second part of the 2912 Tale since last November. Every time I get to a certain section of it, my brain refuses to move forward. I keep thinking, nope, this is too much. Even though I’ve been writing and publishing for close to thirty years, for this part of the Tale, words fail me. Repeatedly.

Anyway, a quick reminder of the preceding post: Back in October, as I sorted through family pictures with my sister Kathi, I was hit with both memories and momories—my term for the stories our mom (aka Irene junior) told. I know that what I’ve been calling momories are really a form of oral history, the process of verbally passing along information and stories to the next generation. But for me, calling them momories makes their provenance clear and keeps our mom centered in my memories.

As Kathi and I went through those snapshots, we ran across a few of our mom that I didn’t remember seeing before. They had our mom’s careful all-capitals printing on the backs, where she jotted a few identifiers. These jarred a couple of more momories that made me further ponder the relationship between Irene junior and her paternal grandmother, Irene senior.

The first photo is of Irene junior at about a year old, with her father George, Irene senior’s firstborn son, who is holding her hands to help her walk. They are in the yard of the tiny summer home (always called the cottage) owned by Irene senior and her husband Edward (who died before we were born) near a small lake in northern Illinois.*

The second, which I found as startling as the one of Irene senior sitting on a donkey in Capri, shows our mom, probably no more than twenty years old, wearing a strapless swimsuit, smiling at the camera. This picture was probably taken in that same yard at the cottage. Despite the smile, Irene junior did not like warm weather and direct sunshine.

I have a momory about an incident that took place at the cottage probably sometime between the 1940s and early 1950s. Irene junior would have been old enough to be in the room when it happened—the only bedroom in the house, where a small group of female relatives, including her mother and grandmother, changed into their bathing suits before heading down to the lake—but I don’t remember her saying how old.

A younger married woman first raised Irene senior’s hackles by not modestly turning away from the others as she removed her clothing. Flashing portions of her naked body, this woman complained about her husband, said she wasn’t happy in her marriage, and wanted to leave him and get a divorce. Irene scolded the woman—I don’t remember if our mom said it was a niece, perhaps, or a younger cousin—telling her to stop talking foolishly, to behave herself, and go on home with her husband. Our mom related that the young woman felt properly chastised and indeed continued in her marriage, never again mentioning leaving her husband. Nana, our mom said in a tone ladened with finality, didn’t approve of divorce, so there was no divorce in our family.

Lately I’ve been considering that momory alongside another one that should be prefaced by this piece of information. At some point early in our parents’ marriage (or maybe just after they’d become engaged—my memory of the momory is faulty here), Nana bought our dad Mike a pair of sturdy leather work boots. Even if this had been a birthday or Christmas present, it was a generous gift and not inexpensive.

I have wondered if the boots might have been Nana’s way of apologizing for a remark she made, not in Mike’s presence, but one all the members of the Berwyn bungalow household probably chuckled about as they gleefully relayed it to him. Our mom still laughed about it decades later whenever she brought it up; our dad did something like an eyeroll when she did.

The story went like this: While our mom waited for our dad to pick her up for one of their first dates, Irene senior watched as he got out of his car and headed up the concrete front steps of the bungalow. She noted his appearance—loose-fit khaki pants, a Hawaiian-style shirt, dark sunglasses, probably a cigarette in his hand—and announced, “A hoodlum’s come to pick up our Irene.”

(Mike, about 10 years before he met Irene junior, cultivating that “hoodlum” appearance.)

Nana must have changed her mind soon after having an actual conversation with our dad. The two of them ended up liking each other. The work boots she bought for him were a thoughtful gift. Mike learned land surveying in the army, a trade he continued in civilian life, and quality footwear made a huge difference to his on-the-job comfort.

(Mike, somewhere in Korea sometime in 1951, wearing boots similar to the ones Irene senior later gave him.)

Our dad kept those boots for the rest of his life, carefully cleaning and polishing the leather, getting the soles and heels replaced when they wore down.** They probably reminded him of Nana and of that early kindness. He cried when she died, our mom told us. We understood the weight of that sentence. We never saw our dad cry so Nana must have been really special to him.

I sometimes think about the momory of that event at the cottage—our mom’s pronouncement that Nana would not tolerate divorce—and the momory of Nana’s first glimpse of our dad that prompted the hoodlum comment which may have led her to buy the boots. Then I imagine the connections among all these, and the subsequent strong bond between our dad and Nana that prompted his tears at her death.

But to explain how I’ve imagined those connections, I’d have to delve into two family secrets of 2912. That’s what brings me to a dead stop every time I reach this point. I’ve tried to write about them, and I still can’t. While the cat has long been out of the bag about both secrets (at least within the family), they are entangled in many other issues that seem too daunting to unravel. So every time, I just stop writing.

Why bring this up now? Well, sorting through those photographs made me think about it. Plus I’m at the beginning-ish stage of a new book project, which involves a lot of research, some of which ends in frustration because of what’s missing. Or what I believe is missing.

Researching and writing biography requires tracking down a variety of sources, including pictures, letters, and memoirs. I rely on not only what other people decided to save in terms of physical artifacts, but also what they chose to write about, whether as notations on the backs of photos, information passed along in correspondence, and/or remembrances included in memoirs and/or autobiographies.  

Decisions and choices like these produce silences in the archives leaving researchers to constantly ask how materials have been selected and saved, but also, very specifically, what’s missing and why it might be missing.

I’ve imposed some silences in my family’s archives by saving some photos and pitching others and by sharing some specifically collected and very consciously edited memories and momories.

After Kathi and I finished looking through all those pictures back in October, I headed off for my first major research trip for a book about Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker magazine and lifelong women’s rights advocate. And there, in the vast collection of her papers, I faced silences. More on that in the next post.***  

(Jane Grant, c. early 1940s, Jane Grant Photograph Collection, PH141, University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections.)

Some asides:

*Decades later, when our parents Irene and Mike took us to the cottage in the summer, the first thing my dad had to do when we arrived was clean up the outhouse, especially to get rid of the spider webs. None of us siblings would go in there if we saw spider webs. Even in the 1960s, the cottage lacked an indoor toilet. Our mom disliked being at the cottage, probably because, with four children, she had more work to do during what was supposed to be a vacation. But, because of the four of us, our parents could only afford cheap vacations. The cottage was free to use, within a couple of hours’ drive, and was right near a lake that kept us busy during the long summer daylight.

**After Mike died, Charles, my husband, took the boots. They were still in relatively good shape, but after many decades they only fit one pair of feet so had finally outlived their usefulness.

***It’s Women’s History Month, so I hope to post one or two pieces about Jane Grant and what’s been happening with my research. This year, the National Women’s History Alliance has chosen the theme of “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” which is a good match for my Jane Grant project.

My 2023 Reading, Part Two: Nonfiction (Plus a Bonus)

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The best narrative nonfiction books I read in 2023 comprise an unusually short list. I think there was something about my reading mood last year that affected my reactions to books. “Best” and “favorite” are subjective, anyway, so I’m sticking to that as an explanation.

All of these books deal with the past, and all but one are biographies. The outlier of the group, though, could be described as a collection of mini-biographies. Here they are, roughly in the order of my admiration.

In Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo traces the perilous journey from enslavement to freedom of Ellen and William Craft. The Crafts fled Georgia with Ellen disguised as an invalided white man and William posing as her “servant.” Their life in the “free” North was dangerous because of the Fugitive Slave Law, yet the couple became part of the great abolitionist movement in the years prior to the Civil War. It’s an unforgettable story of moral and physical courage.

Catherine McNeur introduces readers to Margaretta and Elizabeth Morris in the dual biography Mischievous Creatures. The historian makes a convincing case that the largely self-taught sisters, one an entomologist, the other a botanist, made significant contributions to scientific knowledge in the decades before the Civil War. Margaretta and Elizabeth are fascinating women, and McNeur expertly weaves in the science without slowing down the story of the women’s accomplishments and the barriers they faced because of their gender.

Leaning heavily on literary analysis and historical context, David Waldstreicher recreates the life of an eighteenth-century Black poet in The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. Kidnapped and enslaved as a child, Wheatley learned how to read and write while living in Boston and began turning out poetry as a teenager. This is a finely detailed story that took me some time to read, but I thought it was wonderful.

I learned a lot about South Africa from Jonny Steinberg’s dual biography, Winnie and Nelson. Steinberg traces apartheid through the lens of the Mandela marriage, focusing on Nelson’s long imprisonment and Winnie’s increasing political influence. It’s a riveting and important book.

Emma Southon’s lively voice adds an extra layer of enjoyment to A Rome of One’s Own, which reveals the history of the Roman empire through the lives of twenty-one mostly-forgotten women. This serves as a nice reminder that there was more to Rome than gladiators and pontificating politicians.

There were also a couple of other books I liked, both biographies. I appreciated learning more about the Queen of Crime in Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley, and it was interesting to find out about the intrepid twentieth-century journalist Elsie Robinson through Julia Sheeres and Allison Gilbert’s Listen, World!

Now for the bonus: memoirs. Last year, I included them in with the other nonfiction I read, but this time I decided it was more appropriate to give them their own category. While it’s true they are nonfiction, memoirs are very different from the historical, fact-based nonfiction that I usually read.

There are three memoirs I read in 2023 that I keep thinking about.

I’m certainly not the first person to rave about poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, but I may be among the last to have never run across her poem “Good Bones.” Its last line was turned into the title of her lyrical story of the unraveling of her marriage and her enduring love for her children.

Love for her children is a strong undercurrent in Life B, author and book critic (known in online circles as The Book Maven) Bethanne Patrick’s clear-eyed account of her decades-long struggle with double depression. She hits and maintains a sweet spot of narrative voice that is neither too bleak nor too Pollyanna-ish. I rooted for her all the way through.

Marsha Jacobson rounds out this trio of devoted mothers. In The Wrong Calamity she describes how she survived an abusive marriage, established herself as a successful businesswoman (even earning a Harvard MBA) and as a role model to her daughters, then suffered a shattering disappointment with her second marriage. Like both Smith and Patrick, Jacobson shows restraint in parceling out the gritty, personal details of these relationships, giving readers just what they need but never tipping into a salacious tell-all.

That’s it for my 2023 reading recap. I’m delighted (and slightly relieved) to report that 2024 is off to a blazing start. I could hardly bear to put down Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made and Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren, plus I’m swiftly moving through Mott Street by Ava Chin.

Up next: some pieces that are more or less connected to my new book project.