by Damon Runyon
“Now you can’t stop him,” says Smitty. “It’s his youth. When you’re young you’ve got the courage to do anything. When you get old you lose your nerve. You can’t win because you’re afraid of losing. Youth is a wonderful thing in gambling.”
So I asked him a question.
“If a young man should come to you,” I said, “and told you he wanted to start out as a professional gambler, what would be your advice to him?”
Smitty never hesitated.
“I’d tell him to hang himself first,” he answered.
MR. “B” AND HIS STORK CLUB
The only night-club owner listed in Who’s Who in America is Sherman Billingsley. The fine type following his last and first name in the July supplement to the 1943 edition of that collection of big-shot biographies begins with “. . . owner, Stork Club. Born in Enid, Oklahoma, March 10, 1900. Educated in grade schools in Oklahoma . . .”
Now I have nothing against Who’s Who in America, but that seems to be a mighty dull way to make a reader acquainted with the proprietor and host of a colorful and glamorous institution on Fifty-third Street, Manhattan, U.S.A., which future historians may refer to as the Mermaid Tavern of our time. A Mermaid Tavern complete with debutantes.
I don’t see how anybody can start a Billingsley biography by merely saying that he is owner of the Stork Club and letting it go at that. After all, there is a great deal of difference between the Stork Club and every other night club in the world. It has no floor show, no line of undraped girls and no excruciatingly witty master of ceremonies. The absence of that last attraction may be one reason why so many customers are always trying to beat their way through the front door every Saturday night. It also has no melancholy French blues singer who speaks no English. That seems to be all right with the customers, too. Why, bless your hearts, I could make out a case stronger than the nuts, as the saying is, meaning the three shell game, against any form of entertainment in night clubs whatsoever, and cite the Stork as proof of my contention.
Instead Mr. Billingsley concentrates on nice furniture and interior decoration and good food. He is not afraid to keep the lights on so that you can see what you are eating. I am told that he also serves fine liquor which will not remove the enamel from the teeth. And, unlike other night-club owners, he keeps his peppy and pleasant dance music toned down so that you do not have to shout at the top of your lungs to make the punch line of the story heard above the roar of the brass and the crash of the cymbals.
But the best attraction in the house is the kind of people you see and meet there. The Stork Club is swanky but not snooty. Its clientele is always an interesting mixture of the more bearable members of the Social Register set, the well-mannered politicians, sports people, show people, writers, businessmen, scientists, artists, doctors and lawyers. Seen there frequently are such different types as Ann Sheridan, J. Edgar Hoover, Morton Downey, Ambassador James W. Gerard (he prefers the secluded Table Fifty-seven in the Cub Room), Alfred Vanderbilt, Lucius Beebe, Beth Leary, George Jean Nathan and Julie Haydon, Bernard Baruch, Drew Pearson, James A. Farley, Gypsy Rose Lee, Winthrop Rockefeller, Leon Henderson, Merle Oberon, Dorothy Kilgallen, Peter Arno, Gene Tunney, Helen Hayes, David O. Selznick, Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago, Dorothy Lamour, Garson Kanin, Paul Gallico, Leonard Lyons, Mrs. Harrison Williams and, of course, Walter Winchell. But the trade at the Stork consists mainly of nice people from the big and small towns of America whose names you never see in the Broadway columns. And, last but hardly least, those beautiful debutantes and their undergraduate escorts. What I am trying to point out is this: the Stork Club, unlike most other night clubs and restaurants I know, is not a hangout for any particular kind of mob.
A lot of people who have never been there have the mistaken notion that you cannot get by the plush rope on the front door unless you are an established movie star. The man who has charge of the rope, a fellow named Frank Harris, who knows the names and faces of more than twenty-five thousand people, tries to keep out the characters who are inclined to tap dance on top of the tables and fight waiters. On a busy night he has to turn away as many as five hundred people, but only because they lack reservations and there is no room for them. These people can never understand why there is no room. It is a simple matter of arithmetic.
The Stork Club can hold only five hundred people comfortably, and Billingsley feels that it is smarter business to seat five hundred comfortably than eight hundred uncomfortably. The turnover of customers is not frequent. Between eleven in the morning until four the following morning, the club serves about twenty-five hundred persons. The Stork, by the way, is one of the few big clubs in the world that keeps its doors open for three hundred and sixty-five days a year. It is quite a lively place at noon on Sundays. People go there from church for a big Sunday breakfast, bringing their children with them. The dance floor is usually filled with fox-trotting couples eight or nine years of age.
When you enter the door of the club, after checking your coat in the small reception hall, you pass first through a bar and cocktail lounge which seats sixty people. Twelve hundred drinks are consumed at the bar daily, in case you are interested. Adjoining the bar are the main ballroom—large and square, with enough space for three hundred—and, off to left, the Cub Room, a small quiet place holding one hundred people. It is designed for quiet conversation. There is no orchestra in the Cub Room and no dance floor. A customer in the Cub Room who is overcome with the urge to rumba gets up and leads his lady outside into the main ballroom. Upstairs from the Cub Room is the Blessed Event Room, an even smaller chamber with room for forty people, although sometimes sixty squeeze in there. It is used for small private parties and, occasionally, for the overflow from downstairs. The exclusiveness that is often mistakenly attributed to the whole Stork Club is really confined to the Cub Room. At lunchtime only men eat there. It is usually reserved at night for celebrities and for established and respected customers. One of the few celebrities who shuns the Cub Room is Tommy Manville. He prefers the main ballroom where more people can see him.
In order to reach the powder room at the Stork Club, ladies from the bar and the main ballroom must pass the door of the Cub Room. Billingsley sees to it that the choicest available celebrity is seated in the Cub Room at Table Fifty, directly opposite the door. Then the lady who returns from the powder room will sit down breathlessly at her table in the main ballroom and announce that she has just seen Tyrone Power. It helps business.
Through these rooms every day at lunch and all evening long, wanders the landlord, nodding here and waving to somebody over there and sitting down for a few moments of conversation at this table while he scribbles initials on an order which sends a free bottle of champagne to that table. Sherman Billingsley is a soft-spoken man with a cherubic smile and an easygoing air of Oklahoma informality about him.
He is American to the core. He refuses, like many American males, to wear formal evening dress. While his assistants and many of his customers wear a stiff shirt and black tie, Mr. B always makes his appointed rounds in a conservative business suit and a rather loud and flowery cravat. He forbids his employees to wear moustaches on the ground that they look unsanitary. There is one exception to this rule—the Stork Club chef, Gabriel Beaumont, who used to preside over the kitchen of Louis Rothschild in Vienna. “Oh, well,” Sherman shrugs, “he has to be different.”
As he passes through the Stork Club, Mr. Billingsley is constantly followed. Fred Hahn, a former waiter, stays near him and watches every move he makes from seven o’clock in the evening until closing time. He even accompanies Mr. B to the theater and to prize fights. Hahn rarely speaks to his boss. Every few minutes he passes him a slip of paper with a message on it. “Doris Duke has just come in,” the message may read. Or, “Do you want the music to stop at three fifteen?” Mr. B will glance at it without interrupting his conversation and shake his head or nod. “Governor Green of Illinois and Bing Crosby are here; both want Table Sixty-one.” He scribbles a solution and
hands it to Hahn while he asks Leon Henderson about the stock market. He passes another table and stops to say hello, rubbing his right index finger against the side of his nose. Hahn knows this means a gift of perfume for each lady at the table, just as the adjustment of his handkerchief in the Billingsley coat pocket means free champagne and a turn of the ring on his little right finger means no check for this party.
Hahn has held his job for two and a half years. His predecessor was a former waiter who operated smoothly with Mr. Billingsley until a photographer from Life magazine did a picture story about their teamwork. The pictures showed the Billingsley shadow taking notes with a pad and pencil and receiving hand signals from his boss. “Fame ruined him,” Mr. Billingsley said. “He began to strike picture poses all over the club every night.”
Mr. B’s hand signals give away three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gifts to the customer every year. Mr. B belittles the cost of his generosity. “You must remember,” he says, “that I don’t spend as much on gifts as other night clubs do on floor shows. And I spend nothing on newspaper advertising.” The Stork Club gifts range from automobiles, wrist watches, expensive jewelry and solid-gold cigarette lighters to dice and cigarette holders. He specializes in perfume—which is free to every lady in the powder room—and lipstick, which comes in three shades named after his three daughters, Jacqueline, Barbara and Shermane. He gives dolls to the little girls at lunchtime and official major-league baseballs to the boys. He used to send Franklin D. Roosevelt bow ties. On Sunday night before the war, he staged balloon parties which he hopes to resume again soon. At these parties the patrons would scramble for hundreds of floating balloons to which were attached one-hundred-dollar bills, tickets for free parties at the Stork Club and coupons which entitled the bearer to receive silver cocktail sets, pedigreed dogs, and even horses.
Sherman says that he began to give away perfume years ago when he found a seaman who was bringing the stuff by the suitcaseful from the British West Indies where the expensive French brands can be picked up cheaply. It seems that there were two kinds of bottles in the seaman’s bags. One bottle was large and fancy and the other was small and plain.
“I never knew anything about perfume,” Mr. B recalls. “I naturally gave the large, fancy bottles to the important ladies and the little ones to the kids.”
One evening Mr. B had the finger put on him in a nice way by his friend, Beth Leary. “Now don’t misunderstand me, Sherman,” she said. “I appreciate these big bottles of perfume you’ve been giving me. But the kind of perfume I like best—and it’s very expensive and hard to get—is the kind in the little bottle you just gave that child at the next table.”
Quite often, of course, an expensive gift ends up by mistake on the table of somebody Billingsley hates and never wants in the club again. And then there was the time he asked his people to find out the latest married name of a society lady and to send something to her home. A few weeks later he saw her in the Cub Room. “That was a nice case of champagne you sent to my maid,” she said.
Although Mr. B does not believe in advertising, he knows the value of publicity. When a public figure arrives in town, he receives a gift from Mr. B and an invitation to the Stork Club, where, he is casually reminded, the seclusion of the Cub Room will protect him from autograph hunters and drunks. When he arrives, Don Arden, the Stork’s publicity man, takes his picture and sends it to the wire services and to his home-town newspapers. The club’s file of pictures is larger than that of most newspapers. Many an editor finds in it a desperately needed photograph when every other source has failed him. On November 28, 1940, Arden noticed Jesse Livermore, the Wall Street tycoon, dining in the Cub Room with his wife. Arden asked if he might snap a picture. “Go ahead,” said Livermore. “This will be the last picture made of me because I am going away for a long time.” Two hours later a wire service called Arden and asked if he had any recent pictures of Livermore. The financier had just committed suicide in an East Side hotel. The picture of Mr. and Mrs. Livermore, with a Stork Club ash tray prominently in the foreground, ran in practically every big paper in the nation.
Once upon a time a Stork Club photograph showing two men sitting at a table full of liquor was published in the home town of one of the men in the Middle West. A few days later, Mr. Billingsley heard from him. “You’ve ruined me,” he said. “I own the dry paper here, and I’m the campaign manager for a politician who is running for office on a dry program. You sent that picture to the wet paper in town, and they are running it on the front page every day.”
A few weeks later the same man entered the Stork Club. “I don’t like the way you run your publicity,” he told Billingsley, “but I like the way you run your club. So I’m back.” He is still a regular customer.
It is no accident, of course, that Mr. B has encouraged such nationally published columnists as Winchell, Lyons, and Louis Sobol and Dorothy Kilgallen to use his club as a headquarters. On the other hand, the number of important people who frequent the premises make it advisable for the columnists to spend time there. It is a wonderful place for news. Stories of the marriages and divorces of celebrities are always being revealed by Stork Club communiqués. The marriages of Sonja Henie and Dan Topping, Gloria Vanderbilt and Pat di Cicco, Brenda Frazier and John “Shipwreck” Kelly, and Victor Mature and Martha Kemp were all announced there. So was the divorce of Lana Turner and Artie Shaw.
Anything can happen in that house on Fifty-third Street. Leonard Lyons tells, for example, about the evening in November 1941 when American-Japanese relations were strained to the breaking point. A reporter, sitting in the Cub Room, heard for the first time about an important statement on foreign policy made by Prince Konoye in Tokyo that afternoon. He asked for a telephone. The call went through quickly and Table Fifty talked at length with the Japanese governmental official.
Spending most of his waking hours in such an atmosphere, Mr. B has quite naturally developed a rather startling store of strange information beneath his slightly receding hairline. He knows at a glance that the red-faced man at the corner table is now cheating on the lady with whom he had previously been cheating on his wife. He hears some things about the stork market and the stock market long before the rest of us. He also knows that the favorite dish of Annie Sheridan is not caviar or filet mignon or lobster thermidor. It is canned salmon, served with chopped onions and vinegar. He knows that Amon G. Carter and Larry Fisher of the Fisher Body Fishers bring their own steaks with them from Fort Worth and Detroit, respectively, and have them cooked in the Stork Club kitchen. He knows that Carole Landis adores a half grapefruit with flaming cognac in its center and that Beatrice Lillie likes a drink which consists of one-half lime, one teaspoon of sugar, two jiggers of crème de menthe, one white of egg and one scoop of vanilla ice cream, shaken well and poured in a Tom Collins glass. He is glad that the war is over because during it the amateur generals were always drawing maps on his table cloths, adding twenty-five per cent to his laundry bill which runs around thirty thousand dollars in normal years. He knows that there is a girl somewhere in Texas who thinks that she is married to his son. Mr. B has talked to her on the phone and assured her that he never had a son. But she knows better because she is sure that her husband would never lie to her. “Why don’t you two make up?” she asks Mr. B. “Why do you keep up this silly quarrel?”
Incidentally, Mr. B is accustomed to having strangers pose as his relatives. During the war he received a letter from a sailor named Billingsley who had been telling everybody on his ship that Sherman was his brother. Now the ship was unexpectedly heading for New York, the sailor explained with a red face, and his shipmates were demanding that he take them to the Stork Club to be wined and dined. If they found out the truth, his life would be miserable. Would Mr. B be a good sport and help him out by putting on a brother act? Mr. B did just that and earned the sailor’s lifelong gratitude.
As Sherman elbows his way through the bar and the ballroom and the Cub Room, one of his
problems is to avoid the bores who want him to sit down and spend the whole evening at their table. If he imbibed alcohol, the quantity of drinks he would be forced to accept out of politeness might double the Stork Club’s annual liquor consumption. (As it is, he sells and gives away thirty-three thousand six hundred bottles of Scotch and fourteen thousand and four hundred bottles of champagne each year.) But fortunately for his health he has not touched the stuff in years. He does not smoke, either.
One especially busy Saturday night, when the place was filled with people he wanted to talk with, a headwaiter told him about a customer who was extremely anxious to see him. Mr. B recognized the name as that of a gentleman who had owed him nine hundred dollars for several months. “Tell him I’m busy,” he told the headwaiter. In twenty minutes the headwaiter was back again. The gentleman said it was urgent. “Oh, all right,” Sherman grumbled. “Tell him I’ll talk to him in the pantry.” The pantry is a very noisy spot. Mr. B calculated that an interview taking place there, amid the clatter of dishes, could not possibly last long. The guest waited in the pantry almost ten minutes before Mr. B arrived.
“Sherman,” he said, “I just had a good week in the market. I want to pay you that nine hundred dollars I owe you.”
Such incidents and his experience with customers in general lead him to believe that most people are fundamentally honest. Considering the great number of checks he cashes in a day, remarkably few of them bounce. If Sherman knows you, he’ll cash a check for almost any amount. And he will cash a check for anybody if it isn’t over twenty-five dollars. If one of them turns out to be made of rubber, he figures that the money is well spent. “Those guys never come back to the club,” he says. “And it is worth twenty-five dollars to me to get rid of such people.” When a big check comes back to him unpaid, it is usually due to an honest oversight on the customer’s part; he forgot to cash in some coupons that month or there was a mix-up in his bookkeeping. “You can tell about business conditions from the number of bad checks we get,” Mr. B observes. “Very few of them during the war. Nowadays there are more.”
