Synopses & Reviews
The definitive account with guns, diamonds, and champagne that never stops of the extraordinary world of the Stork Club and of the ex-bootlegger who ruled it with a velvet fist.
From the Roaring Twenties to the chaotic sixties, Sherman Billingsley's Stork Club was America's most enchanting nightclub. It was a glittering world where starlets stalked millionaires, where Jack wooed Jackie, and where Prince Rainier wooed Grace Kelly. It was where Hemingway knocked down the warden of Sing Sing, headwaiters reaped $20,000 tips, and where Walter Winchell, the Stork's famed scribe-in-residence, snubbed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. From Orson Welles to Joe DiMaggio, J. Edgar Hoover to Frank Costello, they all came to the Stork.
But simmering beneath the romantic surface of the ultimate cafi society rendezvous was a tale of mob and muscle, and of an impresario every bit as colorful as the club itself. In Stork Club, prizewinning New York Times journalist Ralph Blumenthal tells the seductive and enthralling saga of the world's most storied nightspot and its owner, with exclusive access to Billingsley's private papers.
Sherman Billingsley, a former bootlegger from Oklahoma who came to New York after a brief detour to Leavenworth, founded the Stork as a speakeasy front for Jazz Age gangsters. The club reached its apotheosis in the 1940s, drawing movie stars, political bosses, gangsters, aristocrats, and generals. It outlasted World War II and the Eisenhower fifties, but midway through the sixties the club fell victim to a ruinous battle over unionization, lingering charges of racism, and most of all, a changing culture. Billingsley himself barely survived the closing of the club he died on the first anniversary of the Stork's demise.
Stork Club is the first book to tell the complete story of what Winchell called "the New Yorkiest spot in New York" and of all the backroom drama behind the parlor room glamour.
Review
"A glorious evocation of the onetime epicenter of celebrity in all its glamour, its excess, and its idiocy. It is a story that has long needed telling, and Stork Club tells it with both punch and polish." Neal Gabler, author of Life: The Movie and Winchell
Review
"When I was a kid in New York, the Stork Club was the place to be. Ralph Blumenthal has brought us back into that wonderful world of high and low society." Bernie Brillstein, film and television manager, author of Where Did I Go Right?
Review
"A generously vivid account of a rarefied segment of twentieth-century Americana, casting Gatsbyesque characters against a glittering background of show business glamour, politics, greed, and infamy. A most arresting read." Bobby Short, entertainer
Review
"A reporter for The New York Times tells of the rise and fall of the golden-roped nightclub that epitomized New York glamour during World War II. In its heyday, it was the ultimate "in" spot, where celebrities and gossip columnists rubbed elbows with politicians and bootleggers. "This evocative, well-researched book...is an important addition to our social history," Pete Hamill wrote in these pages in 2000." The New York Time
Synopsis
With guns, diamonds, and champagne that never stops, the Stork Club has been the touchstone of glamour and celebrity for much of the century. Now in a paperback edition, a "New York Times" columnist provides the definitive profile of Sherman Billingsley and his ultimate cafe. 77 photos.
About the Author
Ralph Blumenthal has been reporting for the New York Times since 1964 and led the Pulitzer Prize-winning Times team that covered the bombing of the World Trade Center. He is the author of Once Through the Heart and Last Days of the Sicilians and a coauthor of Outrage.