by Damon Runyon
One of the rubber checks he took during the war came from a second lieutenant. A few days later he mentioned it to a friend. A major who was sitting with the friend proceeded to give Sherman a long lecture on how to check on the identity of Army officers. “Ask for their AGO card,” he said, showing his and explaining how the identification system worked. The next day Mr. B read in a newspaper that the major had been arrested for impersonating an Army officer.
The Stork Club’s law firm, Goldwater and Flynn (Ed Flynn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx), finds that most of Mr. B’s legal work consists in bringing suits against night clubs in other cities who use the Stork Club name. They have won such battles in Buffalo and Philadelphia, and now they are waging similar ones in San Francisco, Denver, Boston, Baltimore and Chicago. Mr. B does not ask damages. He merely tries to stop the use of the name and recover court costs. His argument is a long column of figures showing the amount of money he has spent building up the identity of the name since he opened his club at 132 West Fifty-eighth Street in New York, back in 1929. Mr. B today has not the vaguest idea how that place happened to get called “Stork Club.”
Besides protecting the name of his business, one of the main problems in Mr. B’s life is trying to get enough sleep. He maintains that he once went a whole week without closing his eyes. “A shower and a change of clothes is just as refreshing as sleep,” he says. But still he wishes he could have more slumber. He blames the lack of it on Leonard Lyons who always appears at the Stork Club when the doors are closing at four in the morning, and demands another round of the continuous gin-rummy game which Lyons and Billingsley have been playing for years. This means that Mr. B gets home at five-thirty instead of four-thirty.
Still he manages to be on the premises at lunch-time, bright and cheerful. In the afternoon he either goes home again to spend a few hours relaxing with his family or gets involved in business discussions. At five he is sitting at the table nearest the front door, reading the stock prices. After the dinner crowd begins to thin, he usually retires to his three-and-a-half-room apartment above the club for a shower, a rubdown and a nap, reappearing downstairs around ten-thirty or eleven. Sometimes it is hard to wake him from these evening naps. One Saturday the waiter who was supposed to arouse him shook him vigorously and, hearing a muffled response, left the room. When Mr. B finally did come to, he looked at the clock and discovered to his horror that it was seven-thirty Sunday morning.
“Can you imagine a character like me being wide awake at that hour on that day in New York?” he says. “I went for a walk. I met a few people who knew me and they pointed at me and began to laugh. When I went home, the neighbors were thunderstruck. They thought I’d lost my job. I felt like a fish out of water.”
Mr. B compensates for his meager sleep by taking very good care of his health in other respects. He eats generously but never sits down to a big meal. He has snacks several times a day. He is extremely partial to Canadian bacon and green vegetables. He often walks from the Stork Club to his Park Avenue apartment, a distance of more than two miles. In the summer he spends his mornings in the sun at the Atlantic Beach Club.
While he rests in his apartment upstairs, Mr. B keeps in touch with everything that is going on downstairs in the Stork Club by means of a two-way telephone system. By snapping a switch he can listen to the conversation in the service bar, at the telephone switchboard, in the lobby and in the kitchen. Knowing that the boss may be overhearing their words, employees are careful to ask the price before ordering tomatoes from the grocer. The telephone system enables Mr. B to prevent bus boys being persecuted by waiters or captains and also enables him to give orders to the entire staff at one time without taking the time to assemble them in one room.
The success of the Stork Club is largely due to the kind of relationship that exists between Mr. B and his help. The boss, as every employee in the club calls him, makes it a point to know everything about everybody who works for him. No one is allowed to quit or to be fired without talking to Mr. B.
Several of his twenty-seven captains—those gents in black suits who take your order and supervise the service of the white-coated waiters—started working for him as bus boys and were fired as bus boys. After talking to the boss, they decided to give the job another try. Mr. B follows a policy of filling vacancies by promoting somebody within his organization. This makes for loyalty and general contentment. A few years ago a private detective, hired by the Stork Club to pose as a bartender in order to check on the cash register, liked it so well he quit the detective racket and stayed there.
There are three hundred people working in the Stork Club on a payroll that runs around $600,000 a year. There are fifty-three in the kitchen alone—one head chef, one night chef, one saucier, two assistant sauciers, two roast cooks, eleven cooks, two garde-manger (that baffled me, too: it means the men who store and cure the meat), two assistant garde-manger, two oystermen, four pantrymen, four vegetable men, four silvermen, eight dishwashers, two porters, three food checkers and four stewards. I won’t even attempt to guess at the earnings of the Stork Club waiters because a lot of their income is derived from tips, and waiters do not like to broadcast how much they make a week from tips. Stork Club customers, however, are pretty good tippers.
The largest tip in the history of the Stork Club was twenty-five hundred dollars which a wealthy advertising man from Michigan gave to Arthur Brown, a former day manager. On another occasion the same man asked Frank Harris, the guardian of the velvet rope at the main entrance, what was the biggest tip he had ever received. “One hundred dollars,” said Harris. Our friend promptly handed him two hundred and then asked who had given him the one-hundred-dollar tip. “You did, sir,” Harris replied.
Because he has to say no to so many people, Harris holds probably the most unenviable job in the house. He lives in constant fear of saying no to the wrong people. There was the evening, for instance, when he found himself faced by a large party with no reservation. He explained that there was no room. The leader of the party, a Paramount executive on his first trip to the Stork, said to Harris, “You tell Billingsley that if we are not in the Cub Room within five minutes, there will never be a movie called ‘The Stork Club.’” Naturally, they got in.
Then there was the time when Mr. B was engaged in a feud with Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who, as mayor of the City of New York was threatening to have the ABC Board revoke the Stork Club liquor license. That would have meant Mr. B’s ruination. One night Sherman received word that two ABC men were at the front door and wanted to see him as soon as possible. This, thought Mr. B, mopping his brow, is the end of everything. He approached them with nervousness. “Can I do something for you?” he asked them.
“Yes,” one of the ABC men said, pointing at Harris. “Can you fix it so this guy will let us go inside and have a drink?”
Not long ago a well-known killer, formerly employed by the Luciano mob, found himself on the wrong side of the velvet rope. He informed everybody present that he was planning to come back again and that, if he could not get in, there would be a dead doorman in the Stork Club. Mr. Billingsley walked up to the mobster and said to him, “If you think you’re so tough, let’s see you stand where you are for the next five minutes.”
“What do you think you’re going to do?” the gangster demanded.
“I’m going to call your bluff by calling the cops.”
The character beat a sullen retreat.
As it said in Who’s Who, Sherman Billingsley was born in Enid, Oklahoma, on March 10, 1900. One of his biographers, trying to tie him up in some way with the Abe Lincoln tradition, uncovered a tattered photograph of a tacky frontier dwelling and announced that it was Mr. Billingsley’s birthplace. Sherman showed it to his mother. “Law, no honey,” she exclaimed. “You weren’t born in that house. You were born in the back room of a little old grocery store.”
Sherman’s father, a Kentucky mountaineer by origin, was a jack-of-all-trades, and he happened to be running
a grocery store in Enid that month. There were nine Billingsley children in all. Six of them are now living. He has three brothers—Logan, Ora, and Fred—in New York. One sister, Lottie, is married and living in Oklahoma. The other sister, Pearl, lives in New York. She makes the sensationally good Stork Club pies.
Soon after his birth, Sherman and the Billingsley family moved from Enid to the Oklahoma town of Anadarko, where at a tender age Mr. B made his first business contact with Demon Rum. There were a number of Indians living near Anadarko. The sale of alcoholic beverages to Indians was then and is now forbidden by law. When he was seven, one of Sherman’s older brothers brought joy to his childish heart by presenting him with a little red wagon. Then his brother carefully placed in the wagon one dozen bottles of beer. On top of the beer he put a blanket, and on top of the blanket he put Sherman’s nephew, aged two.
“Now, Sherman,” he said. “You just pull your wagon down by the Indian village and you just stand there. When an Indian takes a bottle of beer out of the wagon, you take fifty cents off him.”
Thus Sherman was introduced to that phase of the liquor traffic known as rumrunning. In fact, it may be that Sherman was the youngest rumrunner in history. The baby nephew can scarcely be considered as a contender for the title because he was not actually an active participant in the transactions. He was asleep during most of the business hours. The Indians removed the beer bottles from under him with great care so as not to wake him up.
At the tender age of sixteen Mr. B was already embarked on a modified form of his present business. He and his brother Fred had opened the Lyric Drugstore at First and Robinson Streets in Oklahoma City. In a dry territory, such as Oklahoma was in those pre-Prohibition days, certain angles of the drugstore business bore a family resemblance to certain angles of the night-club business today. Not everybody bellied up to the soda fountain in dry territory drugstores calling for a strawberry ice cream or a nut sundae. The majority of applicants for refreshment called for a shot in the arm, as a jolt of redeye was then known. The drugstores could get whisky from the warehouses on government withdrawal permits. The government assumed the whisky was for medicinal purposes. And who should say, when a man called for a slug, that he wanted it to make the drunk come, not to relieve the pains and aches aforesaid? I mean, was the drugstore clerk or soda puller to make a mere call for a dram a case for the D.A.?
No one seemed to think so in those good old days. We used to have drugstores like that in Colorado Springs which was dry territory many years ago, and I always thought the whisky tasted rather funny. It was one reason why I quit drinking whisky. Anyway, the Lyric ran for two years under the firm of Billingsley and Billingsley and did fine.
There were similar ventures in other parts of the country. Then Sherman became a wholesaler of legitimate liquor in St. Joseph, Missouri. This was still pre-Prohibition, and Missouri was a wet state, though hard by was Nebraska which was dry. The dryness thereof Sherman made it his business to alleviate.
He began riding the bleak Western roads through the dark of night with loads of liquor for the relief of thirst in such towns as Omaha. It was what they called rumrunning. He was young, and it was the high excitement that youth craves. I would not be surprised if today, as he sits in the lush elegance of his Stork Club, absently nodding to passing celebrities, there are times when he sees beyond the lights and the gay crowds the lone reaches of some black and muddy road in the back country of Nebraska and hears above the oompah of the rumba number only the steady hum of his motor as he drives furiously through the night. I find it almost impossible to reconcile these facts of his early career with his shrinking and gentle personality, but of course every man changes when responsibility takes him by the elbow and starts guiding his steps.
Afterwards, Sherman worked in the equally dry sections around Des Moines. Then he became owner of three grocery stores in Detroit. There, Fred Armour, an Oklahoma schoolmate, worked with Mr. B. He has worked with him ever since. Today Fred is day manager of the Stork Club and runs its concessions.
In the early ’twenties, Sherman came to New York and invested his Detroit earnings in a Bronx drugstore, which soon expanded into a string of drugstores in the Bronx and Westchester County, Harlem, Staten Island and Brooklyn. He also delved into real estate, and built a four-block residential district known as Billingsley Terrace. In 1925, he married Hazel Donnelly. Their oldest daughter, Jacqueline, who is now nineteen, drops into the Stork quite frequently. Barbara, ten years old, often throws a luncheon party for her schoolmates. Shermane, the youngest Billingsley girl, does not pay much attention to her father’s business. She is only two.
The first Stork Club, which opened in 1929 on a site on West Fifty-eighth Street where a Western Union office now stands, looked not unlike the current establishment. And like 21, El Morocco, and the Colony in those Prohibition days, it was a speakeasy.
The management of a speakeasy had its headaches. On the one hand there was the law. The Federal agents who raided the Stork Club had to use a member’s card to get by the door. When they completed the raid, they would hand the card to Mr. B with a smile. The name and number were carefully obliterated, of course. Mr. B went frantic trying to figure which of his customers was in cahoots with the Department of Internal Revenue.
Finally he designed a membership card which was really two cards; the second one, bearing the same number, was glued tightly to the first one. After the next raid, Mr. B accepted the telltale document from Federal agents and split it in two. Inside he found the number of the guilty member, who, to this day, remains on his blacklist.
On the other hand, when the speakeasy proprietor was not worrying about the law, he pondered about the underworld. When the Stork Club became popular, Mr. B was visited one evening by two notorious racketeers who inquired politely what valuation the owner placed on his business. Sherman, whose original investment amounted to something like six thousand dollars, allowed it might be around thirty thousand.
The more repulsive member of the team licked his thumb and placed ten one-thousand-dollar bills on the table.
“We now own one third,” he announced.
The owner of a speakeasy in that era could hardly turn down such a proposition. The gangland powers had too much influence with the sources of liquor supplies. There was also the possibility of being put out of business in a manner that might leave you somewhat maimed for the rest of your time on this earth.
Sherman, to put it mildly, did not care for the arrangement. He found himself owning pieces of other speakeasies in which he had no particular interest. He was forced to do business with certain friends of his new partners. These same friends often appeared in the Stork Club at inopportune moments, frightening the regular customers. But Mr. B was advised strongly by acquaintances whose judgment he respected to do nothing about it.
Finally there was a meeting of the partners in the Stork Club cellar at which Sherman attempted to buy back the one third of the stock. “We don’t own one third of the club,” he was informed coldly. “We own one third of you.”
But after a year Mr. B got out of the alliance rather easily. He merely paid thirty thousand dollars to regain full ownership of his own business, three times more than he had received under the original shakedown.
The underworld was not pleased. At that point, however, Mr. B was a good friend of several very influential people. One of them, highly placed in New York politics, let it be known around town that if anything happened to Sherman there might well be a general crackdown on rackets and several mobsters would find themselves forthwith in the pokey, or as the British prefer to call it, the gaol.
In the meantime, the Stork Club became famous. It started to attract the Social Register trade. The free champagne and perfume and the free publicity really paid off after Sherman moved to Fifty-first Street, near Park Avenue. The Vanderbilts and the Astors were followed by the Washington politicians and the Hollywood glamour girls. Now, in the Fifty-third Street location, where he
has been since 1934, Mr. B does a two-million-dollar business annually.
The present headwaiter of the Stork Club is a short, fat and bald little man named Victor Crotta. When Mr. B opened the original institution in 1929, he hired Victor as headwaiter. Victor stuck it out for a few months. Then he handed Sherman his resignation. “I don’t think you are going to be a success,” he said.
Victor opened a restaurant of his own on Fifty-second Street and later gave that up to go into the liquor-importing business. In October 1942 he dropped in to see Mr. B and asked if he could go to work for him again. “I think you are going to be a success,” he said.
Victor’s second guess was undoubtedly correct.
ESSAY AND ANNOTATIONS
by Daniel R Schwarz
We have arranged the Broadway stories in chronological order because subsequent stories are on occasion dependent on knowledge of earlier plots or themes and because characters often recur.
RUNYON’S WORLD
Manhattan is both island and seaport, and the geographic limits of the port area did not allow much room for expansion. Yet New York took off in the 1890s and, stimulated in 1898 by the consolidation of its five boroughs into one city, gradually grew into America’s leading urban center. By 1900, electrification had made New York a city of bright lights. Glamorously lit, Broadway began to flourish as out-of-town tourism and business visits vastly increased, in part because public transportation improved. The subway was an image of speed and dynamism, of nervous energy and accelerating stimulation. Its opening in 1904 was an important event, bringing hordes to Times Square—the hub of New York’s mass transit system—and its immediate surrounding area.