Decor Meets the Law

Dapper, boyish Sherman Billingsley, 44, seemed tired as he bowed over ladies' hands at cocktails. In the summer he likes to go to the Atlantic Beach Club at Long Beach, Long Island, to dabble in the surf and suntan himself for a hard winter in doors. But now he was losing his tan; all last week Billingsley had been kept from the beach by New York's hen-shaped May or LaGuardia. On the previous Saturday night the Mayor had sent four uninvited characters into the lush decor of Billingsley's famed blue-and-gold Stork Club, had taken it over in the name of the city.

Posters were tacked up announcing that the club would be sold for taxes on Monday. July 31.

In all his crackdowns on New York enterprises, battling Mayor LaGuardia had more or less left the nightclubs alone. Some time last spring he decided to correct this oversight. The Mayor put his city auditors to work on the nightclub books to see if they were making a profit on the city sales tax.

Satisfied that there was some cheating, the Mayor loosed his first attack against three clubs: tiny La Vie Parisienne (which seats 75 people, calls itself "the most intimate room in the city"), alleged to owe $13,693 in back city taxes; big, garish Copacabana (which The New Yorker recently described as "life in a boiler factory") allegedly owing $37,370; and the Stork Club, top playground of all, allegedly owing $181,029.

The Mayor claimed that the clubs padded the tax charges on guest checks. At the Stork, the check is usually placed face down on the table, with the total written on the back. Only an outlander who should not be at the Stork Club at all would turn the check over and tot up the bill. If he did, the city contends, he would find that the total had been padded. The club pays the correct tax, then keeps what's left, said the city, to cover "breakage." Mayor LaGuardia, who, unlike ex-Mayor Jimmy Walker, never goes to nightclubs, wanted to take over that extra money for the City. Billingsley, suave host at the club which draws the bottle-top of the bourgeoisie, could easily pay the Stork's $181,029.

But he thought this was a matter of principle; he would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. He got a court injunction to stop the threatened sale until his case is heard. Almost as important, the injunction also removed from the club the mustached custodian and his three men who kept their eyes fixed on the cash register, and were gen erally a deterrent to mirth and gaiety.

Trouble, Off & On. But Sherman Billingsley was still tired. He had to pore over thousands of checks and his books to see if he could get himself out of the jam mathematically. And the law loomed just outside the Stork's door.

Sherman Billingsley knew what trouble was; he had been in it, off & on, ever since he was a boy in Oklahoma.

Born in Enid, John Sherman Billings ley quit school after the fourth grade. At twelve he had his own soda-pop stand.

A year later he was selling bootleg liquor in his three brothers' chain of Oklahoma City drug stores (Oklahoma was dry).

One day the Governor of the state, the head of the state prohibition enforcement and a group of armed ministers appeared in the doorway of the Night & Day Drug store. Sherman Billingsley was serving a bottle of beer and a tray of drinks. He dropped the glasses, heaved the beer bottle at a whiskey jug and broke both of them.

The dry-law man, seeing his evidence disappear, poked his revolver into young Sherman's ribs. Billingsley shoved the gun aside. Gunfire broke out overhead. The ministers had discovered a gambling den on the second floor; not used to revolvers, they had fired a fusillade in their excitement. This so startled the dry-law man that he pulled his own trigger and a .38-caliber bullet grazed Sherman's waist.

Billingsley eventually found his way to New York. There he beat prohibition on a grand scale. He opened a speakeasy, brazenly advertised the place for what it was by setting up a canopy with the words "Stork Club" on it. At his present location, 3 East 53rd St., he converted to legal liquor with such aplomb that the Stork became world-famed.

Beautiful Girls. Billingsley's secret lay in a professional approach to society. He lured the rich and celebrated by inviting the best-looking young debutantes to make the Stork their playground. Says Billingsley: "Beautiful women are the only deco ration worth a damn in a nightclub."

In return for their patronage (the Stork grossed $1,250,000 last year), the customers are overwhelmed with good food & drink, and decor. The L-shaped main dining room, which seats 160, is festooned with golden silk draperies, has a ceiling and chairs covered with yellow and grey satin, and walls paneled with mirrors and dark-blue velvet. The oval dance floor is enormous for a New York nightclub--15 ft. by 20 ft. People dance beneath crystal chandeliers to the uninterrupted music of two bands, working in shifts.

Besides decor the Manhattanites who patronize the Stork Club (average at tendance: 2,000 people on week nights, 3,000 on Saturday) can get almost any drink or delicacy they call for. Samples of the menu: Chicken Hamburger a la Winchell $1.50; Green Turtle Xeres (a soup) 60-c- ; Breast of Guinea Hen Under Glass $2.25. Ice cream is 50-c-; coffee with cream 35-c-. Old members get free use of a private telephone exchange, an all-night bank, a barbershop and a gymnasium.

Beautiful Gifts. To keep customers happy, Billingsley hands out gifts on Christ mas, birthdays, at weddings, and at any other time he feels like it. He has given away diamond pins, platinum-and-diamond cigaret cases (some of them worth "a couple of thousand dollars"), $85 cigaret holders and gold-fitted handbags, 1,000 solid-gold victory pins valued at $35 each.

Most unusual gift was an electric bicycle for reducing hips.

At first Billingsley also got a kick out of the city's tax bill because it "was worth more publicity than we could ever get for $181,029." Now he thinks the publicity is good only for La Vie Parisienne. He is sentimental about the people who have offered to put up the Stork's $181,029: "George Jean Nathan offered, for one. And Lew Myers, a fine old lonesome man who visits his wife's grave every day."

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