|
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.
_____________________________________________
Sherman Billingsley, owner of The Stork Club
_____________________________________________
JJM
Who was your childhood hero?
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
Sherman Billingsley
and his brothers were considered by Michigan authorities, in fact, to be
the largest whiskey runners in the country. How did he get out of bootlegging
and settle in New York?
RB It's an interesting story. He came to New York
looking for his brother Logan, who was really the head of the bootlegging
operation. Logan was on the lam from a syndicate who were wondering what
happened to money he had been entrusted with. Billingsley came to New York
looking for Logan and liked it here, He decided to open up a few drug stores,
which was the classic way to bootleg liquor during prohibition. You would
open up a drug store and get a permit from the government to sell alcohol
because it was considered "medicinal." By altering the certificate it would
enable you to buy a large supply of medicinal alcohol, and suddenly you were
in the alcohol business. Billingsley did very well with that, but then the
big boys started moving in - Dutch Schultz and Owney Madden - and it got
too dangerous. So, he opened up a restaurant with two partners and that is
what became the Stork Club. Of course, he got moved in by the gangsters as
well.
|
Sherman Billingsley in the 1930's |
Owney Madden |
JJM The Stork Club was in fact a front for the
mob…
RB It was. He opened it himself with two guys,
and it was presumably legitimate then. But the mob quickly moved in, as they
did with almost all the nightclubs at that time. Nobody could run a nightclub
without having a secret mob partner. They didn't let anyone make money that
they could be making. So, suddenly Billingsley found himself with Ownie Madden
and two other guys - real leg breakers and scary characters - and they bankrolled
him in some other ventures. Billingsley was their front in a number of other
clubs for awhile, until, by his own account, he bought them out of the Stork
Club and ended up running it himself. By the 1950's, it was pretty clear
he was running it by himself. |
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 But why was that? The famed journalist Walter
Winchell's support helped, but what was it that made all these stars want
to go there?
RB A lot of things. First of all Billingsley was
very generous to his friends, and he started off by putting a lot of people
"on the cuff." They ate and drank free, and these celebrities told their
friends. Rich people like nothing better than getting stuff for free, so
they started going there and that drew other people. Walter Winchell was
the most famous and powerful journalist of his time. In 1940 he was making
$800,000 a year, which was highest salary in the country. Imagine what $800,000
a year was like during the last years of the depression! He was so powerful
that when he wrote in his column that "so-and-so" was seen at the Stork Club,
it immediately made people want to go there. Plus, Billingsley was a master
manipulator. He put his name on everything. The Stork logo was on everything.
He produced his own perfume, suspenders, belts, jewelry, you name it. He
had his own TV show for a while also. So, his fame spread wider and wider
and people had to be seen there. |
Walter Winchell and Sherman Billingsley |
 |
JJM He was ahead of his time, for sure. You
go to a place like the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, they sell their
own merchandise as well…
RB I would say he pioneered that. He put the Stork
logo on ties and on everything he possibly could. Then he gave them out to
his friends as party favors. People loved that stuff and it became kind of
a symbol of the elite, to have something from the Stork Club, especially
the ash trays. |
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 You said that during the war, the Stork
Club came to represent the home front normalcy and "why we fight."
RB Today, you might think that in wartime, people
would resent rich people carrying on, eating all the food they wanted, and
drinking all the liquor they could get their hands on, while in the rest
of the country everything was rationed. But in a strange way, the fighting
man looked back on the Stork Club as some fond icon of America. They painted
the logo on bombers. They set up little Stork Clubs in the Pacific on these
tiny Pacific islands they were fighting the Japanese for. In Europe and North
Africa were little Stork Clubs. Guys would write in from the war zone, saying
to hold a reservation at the Stork Club for me as soon as the war is over.
So, it became a symbol of what we were fighting for. Billingsley, of course,
fed into this by giving out victory pins and treating servicemen very well.
They would get free drinks and their uniform would get them in the
door. |
 |
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.
Filming The Stork Club Show |
JJM Who owns that material? The networks?
RB They have all disappeared. I think there was
seven shows left, and I saw all seven. I am not aware of any others. CBS,
as far as I know doesn't have them. They might exist in the cache somewhere.
Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy, who were the host and hostess of the show,
had some and they donated them to the museum of television and radio. |
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 had a ton of labor trouble during his
ownership. He repeatedly stood up to the unions who attempted to organize
his workers, even the unions led by mobster such as Dutch Schultz. What was
his relationship with his workers like?
RB It was very paternalistic. I think he felt he
was very good to his workers. He was paying them more than a lot of other
places paid. For that, I think he felt he should be given special consideration.
He did not want his workers to join the union. He hated unions because he
always identified them with gangsters, which is what the situation was when
he started out. During prohibition and for a good time afterwards, the racketeers
controlled the unions, and it was a shakedown scheme. You had to pay off
the bosses in order to ensure you weren't getting a labor action or strike
called on you. So, he never forgot that. Even when the racketeering influence
waned, he always thought of the unions as crooked. So, he couldn't stand
that and chose to pay his workers well. They did very well at the Stork Club,
got great tips, and he expected that to give him their loyalty and not join
the unions. Well, when some of them decided to join the union anyway, during
the organizing wave of the 1950's, he went nuts, and started retaliating,
firing people. That is when the trouble started. But his labor problems
went back to the 1930's. |
On strike
Stork Club cheerleaders |
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.
Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover (center) and Luisa Stewart. New Year's Eve, 1936 |
JJM He had some pretty powerful allies, a
significant one being J. Edgar Hoover.
RB Interesting story. He got to know Hoover
through Ethel Merman, who was Billingsley's mistress for some years in the
late 30's and early 40's. Hoover and his companion Clyde Tolson, his deputy
director, were great fans of Merman. They came to New York to see her, and
they all met at the Stork Club. Billingsley loved the idea that Hoover was
a regular at his club, and he came to use Hoover a lot to investigate problems
at the Stork Club. Hoover liked to party and he liked the social world, so
they got quite close until they had a falling out when Billingsley's middle
daughter eloped and Billingsley wanted Hoover to investigate where they had
gone and arrest her suitor. The FBI didn't really do that and didn't want
to get involved. Billingsley slammed down the phone on Hoover, which
was not taken well. |
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?
| RB Yes. This remains one of the more
enduring mysteries of the time. The popular conception is that Josephine
Baker, who was a black singer and erotic dancer, and quite an imposing figure
in her time, was denied service at the Stork Club. The Stork Club, like most
institutions of its time, were not particularly hospitable to minorities,
especially blacks. This was a fact in America in the 20's and 30's and 40's.
It was a segregated society, particularly when it came to nightclubs and
country clubs, universities, law firms. Blacks were second-class citizens,
there is no doubt about it. Some black celebrities were admitted to the Stork
Club, but generally the bar was much higher for blacks. With that said, Josephine
Baker came by one night with a party of friends and they were served drinks
and admitted to the Cub Room, where they were seated. They ordered wine and
food and it didn't come for a long time. In my book I suggest that Billingsley
ordered they not be served when he noticed them, and that may indeed be the
explanation. But, for whatever reason the party stormed out after waiting
and set in motion an apparently well prepared scenario of picketing and
demonstrations against the Stork Club. It was a flash point, and it was really
one of the first civil rights issues in American history. It really galvanized
society. The New York Post jumped on it - a liberal paper with
a black reporter - and clearly there was some justification for it, but it
also seems from my research that Josephine Baker had been preparing to make
this social statement. Whether or not she was really discriminated against
that night, they were prepared to make an issue of something. They did, and
the Stork Club never quite recovered. |
Josephine Baker |
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…
Walter Winchell |
JJM So many people got involved in this. The
issue became less about discrimination and more about who was on which side
of the argument.
RB Yes, the argument became much larger than the
immediate issue of the argument. It became a metaphor stand-in for other
fights of society. For example, the New York Post was very eager to
get its mitts on Walter Winchell. They hated him, who had become quite
conservative by then and was an ally of Joseph McCarthy and the red-baiters.
So, the Post was trying to get at Winchell. He had been at the
Stork Club the night all this occurred, but apparently not present at the
time of the alleged incident. Still, the Post took out after Winchell.
When Winchell was attacked, he lashed back and found out that Baker had supported
Mussolini and Ethiopia and it became really quite ugly. This is why I found
it so fascinating from today's standpoint, that it became a metaphor for
a lot of other things that were going on. It was really the first civil rights
struggle before the Montgomery bus boycott. It sensitized the country to
the inequities of what was going on. |
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 What effect did all of this exposure have
on the Stork Club's business?
RB This, coupled with a lot of other things that
were happening at the time really conspired to spell the doom of the Stork
Club. In the 50's it was still riding high, but there were various social
forces under way that were going to destroy it. One was the move to the suburbs.
People weren't hanging around anymore at night, at least not in the same
numbers. Instead of going to nightclubs, they were catching commuter buses
and trains to get to their homes in the suburbs. Television came along and
people liked to spend their evenings around the tube, watching their favorite
programs. The privileged classes of society who made up the core of the Stork
Club's clientele was shifting too. Society didn't have the same class
distinctions as it had before. A great democratization had taken place after
the Second World War, so the Club sort of lost the patronage of these affluent,
aristocratic types. That, coming on top of the labor troubles that he started
to get in the 50's again, coming on top of the taint of racism, all put nails
in the Stork Club's coffin. |
Ernest Hemingway, Sherman Billingsley, John O'Hara |
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.
Flo Pritchett and Lt. John F. Kennedy at the Stork
Club |
JJM Before reading your book, when someone would
mention the Stork Club, the first thing I would think about was that it was
a mob place, and the second thing I would think about was that is where Kennedy
got laid a lot…
RB He did, and I tell the story of how he would
meet Marilyn Monroe there. Gregory the maitre d' would hustle Marilyn out
of the kitchen whenever Jackie showed up. All the Kennedy's liked the Stork
Club. I think Joe went back to the bootlegging days with Sherman. But,
Jack had his 39th birthday at the Stork Club, which was just before he ran
for the first time for President. When he was torpedoed during World War
II, he recovered in New York and went to the Stork Club as quickly as he
could and started meeting his ladies there. |
| JJM Billingsley was such a philanderer, if anyone
knew how to protect a philanderer, it would be him.
RB You know, it was pretty discreet at the time,
and that is something else we have to remember, that this was an era where
a lot was concealed from the public. The newspapers didn't cover these stories
and people like Billingsley could have loving relationships with his family
and his wife and still have plenty of girls on the side and nobody put their
nose into it. It wasn't written about, it was considered part of what
people did. It was certainly a different world.
JJM The Stork Club was more than just a club, it
was a centerpiece to American culture.
RB If it were just a nightclub, I wouldn't have
written about it. To me, it was just a way into the story of what was New
York like in this most fascinating time. It was a very different time
when the city really pulsated. Now, you might say that New York is the center
of the entertainment universe, but that was a time when movies loomed larger
because that was the only form of celluloid entertainment that existed and
people just thrived on these images of Times Square and New York night clubs.
New York was really a beacon, an icon, and writing this book was a wonderful
chance to relive that period. I felt like I was back in the 30's and 40's
when I was writing it.
|
 |
________________________________________________________
The
Stork Club
America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Cafe Society
by
Ralph Blumenthal |
_______________________________
Ralph Blumenthal products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
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.
*
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
|
