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Ralph Blumenthal
For an entire generation, when Cafe Society was at its pinnacle, New York's Stork Club was the world's most storied night spot. It's walls housed glamour and celebrities waited in line for the chance to be seen. Americans from all over the country, and soldiers fighting overseas, dreamed of visiting New York and being among the witnesses to the Stork Club's elegant culture. From its inception in the Roaring Twenties as a speakeasy for Jazz Age gangsters to its heyday in the 50's when Jack wooed Jackie there, and headwaiters reaped $20,000 tips, everyone from Marilyn Monroe to J. Edgar Hoover gathered at the Stork Club. In Stork Club: America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Cafe Society, and in our exclusive interview, New York Times journalist Ralph Blumenthal retells the story of this most emminent place to be.
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Sherman Billingsley, owner of The Stork Club _____________________________________________
RB I guess I grew up, like most boys my age, with sports and war heroes. My sports heroes were Joe Dimaggio, Mickey Mantle. The Dodgers were my first favorite team until the disastrous 1953 pennant race. JJM You stopped liking them then? RB I was a fair weather fan. I immediately deserted the Dodgers and gave up and went to the Yankees. I was born in 1941, and I grew up sensing the war all around me. Even though I was little, I had heroes like MacArthur, Patton, Roosevelt - people who were doing great things for the country. Those were the people I looked up to when I was young. JJM When did you know you wanted to be a writer? RB I guess in college. I went to City College of New York. I wandered into the newspaper office one day, and joined the paper, The Campus. That was it. I was smitten. I just loved the idea of knowing things before other people, getting under the skin of the administration, and being looked up to. It was fun feeling the power of a writer, of a journalist. Before that I had been an English major and always liked writing, but once I joined the paper that was it for me. JJM When was that? RB That would have been 1959. JJM When did you join the New York Times? RB In 1964. After graduation I went to Columbia University Journalism School one year on a Masters program. I then joined the Times as a copy boy. I did a lot of writing on my own. It was a good time at the Times, a time of a lot of change. Abe Rosenthal had just come in. He was shaking things up amid a new administration. The city was being shaken up as well. It was the 1960's, a time of great liberation and experimentation and young people being promoted at the paper. Read more about Ralph Blumenthal. JJM So you came in just as the Stork Club was going out… RB As a matter of fact, it's funny, because in my research I came across an article I did on the sale of the Stork Club property to William Paley, just as it was being ripped down. I had forgotten all about that until I did my research some 30 years later. JJM What was that made you write the story? RB I always loved history and I love New York and the era of elegance and glamour. I never made it to the Stork Club - it was a little beyond me - but I went to a lot of jazz places. I love to recall that era of elegance and the time when the city really was the center of the social and entertainment world. JJM Damon Runyon started writing a book that he called "The Saga of Mr. B of the Stork Club." Was any of his work ever published, or were there any other books about the Stork Club prior to yours? RB Yes, there were a few. Runyon's piece ran in Cosmopolitan, after he died. He never got far with it, producing only a 17 page manuscript. A former maitre d' wrote a book called Welcome to the Stork Club, which I don't much care for, but contained a lot of reportedly verbatim conversations with the Stork Club's owner, Sherman Billingsley. That was basically it. There have not been other memoirs. Billingsley tried to write his own book many times. He collaborated with a few people, but any time anyone got too close to his real story, he backed off because he couldn't face the fact he had been in Leavenworth, or that he had a bootlegging background. He did have some skeletons in his closet, so he didn't take too kindly to the notion of a book.
JJM What exactly was Café Society? How did it originate? RB Café Society started in the years after the First World War, when the old prohibitions of class started breaking down. Instead of the wealthy society types entertaining at home, they started entertaining outside. They would hold dances and parties in public. That was considered quite a breakthrough. It became a great melting pot, not only of high society, but nobility, ordinary people, wealthy people. They all started mingling in these café's. That is what became known as Café Society. People were going out, but it was still a refuge for the wealthy and the privileged. JJM How did the Stork Club exemplify the Café Society? RB The Stork Club drew an interesting clientele. It drew movie stars and celebrities, and the very wealthy, the captains of industry, showgirls, and aristocrats, as well as ordinary people and sightseers who managed to get in. So, it was also that kind of melting pot. But it became the one place to be seen in New York.
JJM So what came first? Winchell's interest in the Stork Club or the stars beginning to appear there? RB Well, when the Stork Club started in 1929, there was a lot of competition. It was still during prohibition, when there were a lot of speakeasies in New York. There were so many clubs in New York, they were killing each other. The new Stork Club was not doing well. But, Texas Guinan, who was a wonderfully colorful nightclub hostess from Texas, met Billingsley, and since he came from Oklahoma, she took a liking to him. Winchell was a friend of hers and suggested to him to stop by this club owned by this guy from Oklahoma, and he did. He and Billingsley hit it off, and they used each other. Billingsley needed the publicity and Winchell needed a place to hang out and meet his friends. As soon as he started writing up the Stork Club, celebrities would flock there, and he would get more material. So, despite the fact they had some falling-outs, Billingsley and Winchell became friends. Winchell gave him a big boost. JJM The image of the Stork Club carried over well beyond the citizens of New York. The whole country was well aware of its appeal… RB Yes, he had a show called The Stork Club Show that ran from 1950 - 1955. It eventually ran on all three networks. It wasn't filmed in the Cub Room of the Stork Club, but in a specially built studio upstairs. The studio looked like the Stork Club, and he had his celebrity guests in the studio. He went around from table to table, chatting people up. That is what people around the country saw. Thus, it exemplified the glamour of New York, all these celebrities there together in the Stork Club. It started off with images of a gloved hand pouring champagne into a glass, which would sometimes slop over because it was live TV. But it seemed to echo the elegance the country was searching for.
JJM The chapter on the TV show was absolutely hilarious… RB It was prone to a lot of gaffes, and Billingsley was kind of wooden, not the perfect host. He was a very charming man, but we forget what TV was like at its inception. It was a very innocent medium, and people would freeze in front of the camera. There was no tape - everything was live - so if something didn't work, it would happen in front of millions of viewers. Things like that regularly happened. Dishes fell down, Billingsley fell down, he would get tongue-tied. Once Hayes and Healy were lip-synching a song and the record skipped. These things became kind of notorious.
JJM He did some amazing things with his employees. Some of the memos he wrote in an effort to communicate with them indicated he was pretty paranoid. He even went so far as taping conversations of his key employees. What was the source of this paranoia? RB Remember, he was a bootlegger from Oklahoma, in an illegal business. He was always on the boundaries of the law, if not on the far side of it, and he believed people were conspiring against him. He had a lot of tough opponents - the gangsters that moved in on him certainly gave him a lot of grief. A lot of people were "on the take" in New York, a lot of political corruption during the era of Jimmy Walker, Frank Costello…So, he wasn't that far off in terms of seeing plots all around him. But that was the way his mind worked. He was quite distrustful, and often he caught his employees cheating. I like to the story of how he used to stand at the exit and watch his employees try to sneak stuff out. Often he would spot a guy trying to smuggle out cheese in a napkin, and he would stop him and hand him a loaf of bread, and he would say, "Here, have some bread with your cheese, don't come back!" The employees were always trying to pull some scam. It was said you could go through the employees' locker room and you could smell the steaks in their lockers.
JJM Hoover investigated a variety of fairly trivial complaints of Billingsley's, the type of complaints you wouldn't expect the director of the FBI to get involved with. RB Yes, it was really penny-ante stuff. Every time Billingsley got a threatening note - which was very often - he turned it over to the FBI, and the FBI did a complete investigation. This was a day when there were plenty of other things that should have occupied the FBI's attention. There was organized crime, there were a lot of security risks in the country, there was a lot of political agitation and corruption, yet Billingsley would get Hoover to assign his agents to find out who had sent this latest threatening note to him. Often it didn't get very far. JJM In fact, once or twice it was discovered these threatening notes were coming from inside the Club. RB Yes, often threats came from a disgruntled employee and it got to be kind of buffoonish. On one occasion they were trying to figure out where a threatening note came from and they investigated an elementary school . They thought the paper had come from this one neighborhood where there was a school and they interviewed fifth and sixth graders to see if they had sent the note. JJM There was a part of the story I would like to focus on for a couple of questions. Billingsley was described as "an equal opportunity bigot." You spent a good part of the book on the circumstances around Josephine Baker's claim of discrimination against Billingsley and the Stork Club. Can you explain what happened to incite this claim?
JJM The person she attended the dinner with was hopeful that she and Baker and their male escort could perhaps create a scene? RB Yes. Roger Rico, the French star of South Pacific, was her host that night at the table. His wife and Bessie Buchanan, who was Josephine's friend and who later became the first black Assemblywoman in New York State, and her husband, Charles, who ran the Savoy Ballroom, were with them. Even Adam Clayton Powell, Jr, one of the great civil rights pioneers, realized later that Baker had gone there with an issue. So, it looked like it was something they cooked up together. But, as I say, the larger truth was that of course blacks were not given equal access…
JJM It was reported in all the major media. The newspapers were fighting over it, and Ed Sullivan got involved… RB That's right. Sullivan hated Winchell, so he used this as a chance to pile on. Winchell, of course, fought back. It became a celebrated feud. This is one of the joys of writing history because you find out so much of the atmosphere and the tenor of the times. It's like a window back into what New York was into the 50's and you understand so much more about how the city and the country developed. JJM You mentioned something about Louis Armstrong, and how he came out and decried what Baker had done. RB Yes. Josephine had lost a lot of support, even among black leaders who would ostensibly be in her corner. Armstrong didn't like her very much. He thought she was an opportunist. As I said, Adam Clayton Powell had supported her in a march in Harlem and then realized she was really just out for herself. She was a bit of a weirdo and a kind of a nut-job in many ways. Although she certainly had many admirable qualities, including serving in the resistance against the Vichy regime in France, she also had a dark side and this may have been it. JJM Clearly, it affected her career. RB Yes, years later she tried to make up with Winchell and he would have none of it. She said that maybe she had been mistaken. Well, of course, that is quite an admission after the uproar she caused. JJM The Baker saga exposed Billingsley's imperfections to the New York public, didn't it? RB Yes, it provided an opening wedge to go into his history, which is something he had always hidden. JJM It even pitted his older brother against him. RB Yes, that's right, because his older brother, Logan, who was a real maverick under the guise of sticking up for Sherman, said some very racist things. That, of course, just poured more fuel on the fire. So, instead of calming things, Logan said he discriminated against blacks, and he used a very crude "n" word and that of course made everything much worse. JJM Was there a club that cashed in during the time as a kind of "anti Stork Club?" RB There was one, actually. It was very funny, even earlier than this, in the 30's and 40's there was a place called the Café Society, and they really became an anti-Stork Club. They had no dress code, the waiters were better dressed than the clientele, and they welcomed blacks. It was a left-wing communistic kind of place because the guys who ran it were clearly active members of the Communist Party, the Josephson brothers. But it was a pleasant counterpart, in a way, to the Stork Club because it was much more democratic, it would welcome ordinary people and encouraged, for example, Billie Holiday. She first performed "Strange Fruit," the wonderful anti-lynching lament, there. You have to remember that the appetite of the public was for glamour, and the Stork Club was much more in tenor with its time in terms of what the people dreamed about and wished for and aspired to than these so-called democratic clubs. That was the image the country had before it, right or wrong. It filled a need, and it was that dream of glamour that drove places like the Stork Club to the heights they attained. This was through the Depression and World War II, when people needed something to dream about. As I said in the book, the Stork Club survived the Depression, survived World War II, and was finally brought down by prosperity. JJM Is there a club in New York today that symbolizes what the Stork Club symbolized then? RB Not at all. 21 still exists, and that goes back to that era, but 21 is really a restaurant. There is no entertainment, no bands. You might say that Studio 54, in its heyday of disco in the 70's approximated the popularity of the Stork Club, although its tenor was obviously very different. Studio 54 catered to wild misbehavior, drug taking, promiscuity - none of these things would have been permitted in the kind of pristine, austere setting of the Stork Club, where Billingsley policed behavior with an iron fist. But in terms of popularity, you have to pick a place like Studio 54 to approximate it. Because virtual reality has replaced so much of what going out in person used to represent, the era of where people go out to be seen is probably gone. JJM Yes, it really feels that way. It is a complete turnaround from where Café Society was, where people left their homes to be seen. It seems as if we are going the other way now, where there is more status in having so much in your own home to entertain yourself with, so you don't have to go anywhere. RB Right, and you can be seen without leaving the house. There is teleconferencing, you are interviewed in your home. In that sense, you don't have to be seen in person anymore, you can just have your image flashed around. But, this was a time, I like to say, that when you came in from California or Europe, the first place you would go to was the Stork Club because you wanted to let it be known that you were in town, and that is where all the important people would see you, and they would go to their friends and say "guess who I saw at the Stork Club?" That is how fame spread, but it was all in person.
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Ralph Blumenthal products at Amazon.com
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Interview took place on January 14, 2002 * If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Josephine Baker biographer Ean Wood.
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