![]() ![]() The good times definitely were rolling in New York. The years of World War II were the club's boom time. Billingsley charged them heavily for the privilege. They could produce a stolen ashtray as proof of the passage. All were thrilled to get past the rope, to be able to say later that they had dinner at the Stork Club and danced to the music of one of its three bands. He could be a businessman with his wife or mistress, a kid with his prom date or a flush tourist from the Midwest. The Big Names, and the shrewdly calculated ''exclusivity'' of the club, were essential to Billingsley's strategy, but the ultimate object of the ritual was the poor anonymous mark who was allowed past the golden rope. In particular, he refined a formula that persists to this day in the thumping darkness of the city's hip-hop clubland: (1) make it difficult to get into your joint by placing a man at the door with a rope (Billingsley's rope was golden) (2) pamper Big Names, most frequently by picking up their tabs (3) create a private enclave within the larger establishment (in the Stork it was the Cub Room) where Big Names could be seen but not annoyed by fans (4) allow a house photographer to record the presence of the Big Names and rush the photos to the tabloids. He had a genuine talent for running a saloon. Together, they helped create the journalistic plague we now call the culture of celebrity.Īs described by Ralph Blumenthal (who had the cooperation of one of Billingsley's daughters and was able to draw on the club owner's personal files and an unpublished memoir), the man who ran the Stork was not a mere Winchell courtier. For years, one of those friends was Sherman Billingsley. Courted by presidents, earning $800,000 a year during the Depression, riddled with his own uncertainties and dark furies, the increasingly monomaniacal Winchell used his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies. The prime time of the Stork Club was also the prime of Winchell. The basic medium for recording that now lost world of the Stork Club was the gossip column, specifically the syndicated daily epistle produced by a complex man named Walter Winchell. Admission to the holy place, along with a good table, was an achievement rejection was a humiliation. These were people who did not stay home at night they went out to see and be seen, to audition for one another, to scheme and lie and laugh, to drink hard, to pick up men or women and above all, in the Stork Club, to be socially ratified. From the late 1930's to the mid-1950's, Billingsley's place at 3 East 53rd Street was the headquarters of what was called cafe society: the social merging of the children of the old rich with movie stars, gossip columnists, prewar Eurotrash, politicians, judges, some favored cops, a few good writers and a sprinkling of former bootleggers. It tells us how the phenomenon of the Stork Club happened, what forces shaped its glittering moment and how it died.Īs in so many New York things, American uncertainties about class were the heart of the matter. This evocative, well-researched book by a veteran reporter for The New York Times is an important addition to our social history. It was a key New York social institution, its owner one of the most powerful arbiters of the era's overlapping contests for status. Under Billingsley's command, the Stork Club became famous all over America. Most night places, after all, have short lives they come and they go, and they go much faster in New York.īut in its heyday, the Stork Club was not an ordinary urban watering hole. Today's obscurity should not be a surprise. The once grand Stork Club and Sherman Billingsley, its arrogant, swaggering proprietor, are now almost completely forgotten. ![]() America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Cafe Society.
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