Snobs for All Seasons
GREENFELD, JOSH
Snobs for All Seasons Stork Club: America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Café Society By Ralph Blumenthal Little, Brown. 296 pp. $25.95. Reviewed by Josh Greenfeld Novelist...
...How could I avoid reading about it...
...But often the number of patrons within was not much higher...
...He ran through his savings, he drained the trust funds of his daughters, he sold his house, he turned the club into a discotheque, but people had just stopped coming...
...The rumrunning days and the speakeasy fronting and the underworld cozying are all familiar but, the Great Gatsby being fictional, Billingsley was sui generis...
...The Stork Club's resources bled away...
...Helen Keller graced the bistro...
...In addition to a fulltime mistress employed at the club, he had numerous liaisons and frequent oneafternoon stands in his apartment above it...
...author, "What Happened Was This" Gene Fowler liked to tell of the two old newspapermen who wound up a hard night's drinking at the foot of Park Row, slumped against the cornerstone of the building that had been the site of the New York World...
...Sensing this weakness two unions that had long tried to organize the club set up their own picket lines—the Restaurant Workers Union, whose conflict with Sherm went back to the days when it had been an extortion and protection outfit, and the Musician's Union, which had its own dubious history and practices...
...Another night Errol Flynn tried to persuade orchestra leader Don Bader to take his argumentative teenage girlfriend off his hands...
...Not even the Stork Club TV show had done that...
...But their orders were not filled—evidently Billingsley gave a "no service" signal to his staff...
...The next day Baker appealed to the French Consulate for support (she was a French citizen) and called for picketing the Stork Club...
...Billingsley tried to hold on, yet nothing could stanch the outflow...
...As I say, I never set foot in the joint...
...Judy Garland, Henry Ford II, Artie Shaw, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn, Tallulah Bankhead, Orson Welles, and Shirley Temple were among the diners enjoying the Stork Club's famous chicken salad, whose secret ingredient is turkey...
...And Damon Runyon wrote: "Glamour is Sherman Billingsley's chief stock in trade...
...As the controversy raged on, the important consequence was not so much the immediate downturn in business as the fact that it cost the Stork Club its luster...
...A composite column, written over the years, might have read: "Storking: Ernest Hemingway pulled out the $ 100,000 check he received for his recent movie sale to pay his bar bill and received his change in cash...
...Reviewed by Josh Greenfeld Novelist and screenwriter...
...to mark their passionate amour he gave her a diamond and ruby bracelet spelling out "From Sherm to Merm...
...But I recall that when I was growing up in the outer reaches of Brooklyn in the late '30s and '40s, the Stork Club played an integral part in my dream life, representing the end of the yellow brick road into Manhattan and the glittering world awaiting me...
...Ed Sullivan, a confirmed anti-Winchellite, briefly championed Baker but soon chickened out...
...So I miss its passing almost as keenly as I mourn the remembered real archaeology of my long past youth, such as Ebbets Field and Coney Island's Steeplechase...
...Once he learned that Polly Adler, the notorious Madam, had walked in and been seated...
...They considered their clientele the crème de la crème and tried to cater exclusively to that color...
...He also provided complimentary mealson-wheels service for the housebound wealthy, complete with Stork Club ashtrays, bouquets of flowers and sample bottles from a perfumery he owned an interest in...
...Paley razed the Stork Club and converted the lot into a pocket park as a memorial to his father...
...When she refused, he instructed his waiters to remove her table...
...By the way, Admiral," he asked Admiral Bull Halsey, "what year did you graduate from West Point...
...For after Heywood Broun wandered into the Stork Club's first incarnation as a speakeasy and lauded it in print, Sherm knew the Fourth Estate was his Midas tool...
...It ran for five years, despite the fact Billingsley proved a more inept host on the tube than even Hugh Hefner...
...There were the daily columns of Leonard Lyons in the Post, Ed Sullivan and Danton Walker in the News, Louis Sobel and Dorothy Kilgallen in the Journal American, and, of course, the Babe Ruth of the pithy toast and the venomous roast, Walter Winchell in the Mirror...
...Although described by a former employee as someone who "would not run from sex with a three legged porker," he immediately asked Adler to leave...
...Nobody enjoys the presence of celebrities more than other celebrities —it authenticates them to themselves—and the Stork Club was the "in" place of its era, the clubhouse for the blue bloods, the nouveau riche bourgeoisie and the arrivistes...
...His primary lodging became the apartment upstairs...
...Bernard Baruch could be spotted hosting Andrei Gromyko...
...But I read about it...
...He electronically bugged his patrons and spied on the help...
...In 1966 he finally sold the building to CBS founder William S. Paley...
...Blumenthal divertingly limns the rise and decline and fall of host extraordinaire Sherman Billingsley...
...He habitually tore up the checks of those who could afford most to pay them or had a quid to match his quo...
...Humphrey Bogart and Harold Ross have both been barred from the premises because of their fisticuffs—not with each other...
...In 1950 Billingsley bought a five-story Italianate mansion on East 69th Street—with over two dozen rooms, a marble foyer, and towering columns— for $125,000...
...Lavishing his bounty was Sherm's hallmark, and even the Eisenhowers of Pennsylvania Avenue were not immune to it...
...She got the idea and departed without a scene...
...J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Toison remained a steady item at their usual table...
...That same year, at the age of 70, but looking much older because his health had deteriorated dramatically through his years of struggling to hold on to his urban Xanadu, Billingsley died...
...There'll never be another paper like it," they both proclaimed, lifting their bottles in reverential toast...
...The legal limit for a picket line at one point was reduced to a single striker...
...One night F. Scott Fitzgerald came staggering out of the club...
...The closest connection I ever had with it was a redheaded actress from Texas I once dated who appeared regularly on the StorkClub television program playing a Cigarette Girl...
...What was 3 East 53rd Street remains a playground—but a public one...
...Jessel replied smartly, "Abraham Lincoln") On the evening of October 16, 1951, Josephine Baker, both the Cotton Club's and the Folies Bergère's most renowned alumna, showed up at the Stork Club for an after-theater supper in a party that included Bessie Buchanan, the bisexual Baker's lover at the moment...
...In the '40s the club grossed over $1.25 million a year (the equivalent of $12 million today...
...But more important, he had his dream kingdom where he ruled as absolutely as any despot...
...The liquor he sells is largely incidental...
...With a frequency one cannot imagine today, the Stork Club was the setting of their dispatches from the front lines of those we now refer to as the rich and famous—what was then called the Broadway beat...
...What we might have discussed about her work there has vanished completely from my memory...
...Sherm's defenders, who included Walter Winchell, argued jocularly that he was "an equal opportunity bigot...
...And it was l'affaire Baker that ushered in the decline of the man and his club...
...Me neither," was the answer...
...A decade of lengthy court battles, contradictory rulings, costly appeals and counterappeals ensued, always making the tabloid front page headlines...
...Then one turned to the other and asked, "When were you on the World...
...Jack Kennedy's lady of the evening, Marilyn Monroe, had to be whisked out through the kitchen when wife Jackie unexpectedly arrived...
...No one was allowed to table-hop except His Shermship, and he banned whomever he chose...
...Not bad for an Oklahoma kid...
...Things were hardly more sedate on the sidewalk outside, where doorman Albino Garlasco held sway...
...But who'd a thunk, as a Dorothy Parker character might have said, that a dirt poor Oklahoma born former bootlegger, ex-con, and erstwhile speakeasy proprietor would be both its Lord within and St...
...After waiting an hour they left, roused Walter White, the head of the NAACP, whose home number they happened to have, and lodged their protest...
...Unamused, the then liberal New York Post picked up the story and ran with it...
...A one-time chorine, Buchanan would three years later become the first black woman elected to the New York State Legislature, and Blumenthal points out that "Bessie may have had a deeper agenda for the visit...
...After a youthful nuptial fling that went pppfffttt, he wed a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl with whom he enjoyed three blessed events...
...Peter standing guard at its gates...
...It was no secret that the snobbish midtown nightclubs such as the Stork Club discriminated...
...Not so Josephine Baker...
...With him died a world— or at least a demimonde...
...His most torridromance was with Ethel Merman...
...Walter Winchell subsequently described the establishment as "New York's New Yorkiest place...
...Albino offered to call him a cab or drive him home, but Fitzgerald wouldn't hear of it and demanded his car," writes Ralph Blumenthal in Stork Club...
...The following night she indeed struck back on the popular Barry Gray talk radio show, accusing the Stork Club of bias...
...In addition, he had an estate in Pound Ridge, his pied-à-terre above the "store," and his mistress in a Park Avenue apartment...
...In a time when the idle rich flaunted what the Depression poor coveted—no matter what side of the revolution they rooted for ideologically—the Stork Club was cosmopolitan heaven...
...Snobs galore flocked there each night...
...Pickets appeared on East 53rd Street with signs saying things like "FAMOUS NITE SPOT JUST A WHITE SPOT...
...The holy matrimony endured, but not because Billingsley, handsome to a fault, ever abstained from adultery...
...So is the food...
...I never was,' replied his drinking companion, "And you...
...A reluctant and ambivalent Winchell was cast as Billingsley's Goebbels...
...Don't be a wise guy," she said, stalking off by herself...
...But it was the Broadway columnists he most generously comped, always picking up their tabs...
...Tearfully they lamented the passing of the legendary newspaper, praising its high journalistic standards and the pre-eminent quality of its writing...
...I was never in it...
...When George Jessel showed up at "21" one night with Lena Home, he was stopped at the door and asked who had made the reservation...
...I have no intention of suffering deliberate humiliation without striking back," she declared...
...After a brief scuffle, Fitzgerald flung himself behind the wheel, lurching forward and driving over Albino's foot...
...I feel much the same way about the Stork Club...
...Frank Costello was his usual taciturn self...
...Whateverthe case, the Baker-Buchanan party was seated, served a round of drinks and given menus...
Vol. 83 • May 2000 • No. 2
