The Birds Go There

When Leland Hayward and his third wife, Slim, were divorced last May, part of the settlement involved territorial rights in New York nightclubs, to avoid embarrassing encounters. Hayward, for example, was assigned one side of El Morocco, while Slim got the other side and the Champagne Room, too. Very few New Yorkers consider their nightclubs that important, but for a month now they have been hearing the din of a limited war over a 20-year-old police ordinance that requires nightclub employees--from entertainers to hat-check girls--to carry police identity cards. A Citizens' Emergency Committee has filled the air with charges of abuses and shakedowns; the cops have retaliated by combing the cabarets for cardless offenders. This week Jules Podell's Copacabana loses its cabaret license for a knuckle-rapping four days, and Sherman Billingsley's Stork Club is fighting a similar suspension. To many New Yorkers, all this was only a reminder (or revelation) that their city is the most prodigious nightclub town on earth, with some 1,200 licensed cabarets.

Where once--so literature and legend have it--there existed in Manhattan waterfront saloons where savage jack-tars gargled on rotten whisky, and at the same time there were gilded salons where dissipating patricians drank champagne from slippers, most such extremes have disappeared, and the nightclubs of New York today are relentlessly middle class. With some outstanding exceptions, they are also for the birds, including night owls and predatory hawks. And the birds go there.

There are four main species: hard-looking City People, College Students, Way-Out-of-Towners, and You. Within those classifications are countless inevitables: the girl with the white orchid pinned to her evening bag (first nightclub? first anniversary?); the short-haired sophomores being smoked by pipes; the woman with the leopard blouse and the tumbling, bright blonde hair; battered men with battered credit cards, wearing off-white ties. The expense-account mood is almost never really drunken and almost never really blithe. Nobody seems to feel thoroughly comfortable.

Jokes & Jazz. The really cozy just-good-dancing places--like Larue's or Le Coq Rouge, where the beat once was clear, strong and pleasant--have all but disappeared. Also gone, for the most part, is the local, rooted talent. Most entertainers nowadays travel a national circuit whose hub is Las Vegas and whose periphery is TV. The jokes and the songs are the same in New York as they are in Chicago or on the Jack Paar show.

New York night life has none of the exoticism of the Far East, or even the Western lavishness of Las Vegas, where moderately priced sirloins and an hour of Frank Sinatra serve as loss leaders for gaming tables and one-armed bandits. New York has to make its profit in inflated prices and deflated drinks--the minimum at the higher-priced places, such as the Blue Angel and the Latin Quarter, is $7; a highball averages about $1.25. New York has less convention-tickling cheapness than Chicago and more variety than Los Angeles, but a lack of the good-time-Charleyism of San Francisco. While New York probably has more nightclub activity than any European city, it cannot touch the vulgarity of Hamburg or the competitive, nuder-than-thou spirit of Paris, where G-strings are worn only by fiddles, and one hilariously surrealist female statue--at the Port du Salut--has a heart-shaped chamber carved in her left breast, in which two white mice play.

What New York has is jazz, man. The city has taken over the franchise from New Orleans and Chicago, and is now Coolsville itself. The Jazz Gallery is a cold, concrete cave that could be an abandoned subway station; dedicated ears listen while Thelonious Monk passively stirs his piano or Dave Brubeck passionately tinkles his. From Basin Street East to the Roundtable, the Half Note Club to Birdland, the Embers to the Five Spot Cafe, the big cats prowl; and no jazz musician considers his career made until he has made it in Manhattan. There are also places like the Metropole, where the old-timers of Dixieland stand atop the bar and blare forth to people who come in off Seventh Avenue. Wild Bill Davison, Roy Eldridge, Henry ("Red") Allen--they all show up at the Central Plaza, a mammoth jungle gym where teen-agers bring their own bottles and where there are two cops in uniform, so it seems, for every kid.

Brains &; Big Names. An exceptional few New York clubs also have sophistication. They have introduced the human brain to nightclub audiences. Julius Monk's Upstairs at the Downstairs, where all the waiters are job-hunting actors, always has witty, literate revues. To an ever greater degree, the Blue Angel is the Eastern institute for bright nightclub acts, helped Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May to stardom. In their turn, they helped the overcrowded Blue Angel, which is apparently trying to discover how many potential angels can sit on the head of a pin.

In some places the show is the clientele itself, three in particular: the Harwyn, the Stork and El Morocco. Like major-league ball clubs, they all have their stars. The Harwyn, especially nouveau riche, is a dissident Stork offshoot, having been started by former Stork employees, and treasures Frank Sinatra, who almost never slugs a photographer unless another one is there to snap the scene. (Eden Roc, in turn, is a Harwyn offshoot; New York nightclubs sometimes seem to multiply like amoebae.) The Stork itself is no longer particularly chic, and even the end of its feud with Walter Winchell has done little for either party. El Morocco, which still retains its zebra-striped glamour, is nitery-by-appointment to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Like so much citrus fruit, patrons turn up to be graded. Discrimination once occurred at the door and at the velvet rope, but it now occurs more notably inside. Where one is seated is all-important; Big-Namesville may be just a table away from Squaresburgh, but the distance in prestige cannot be measured. The far side of the dance floor at El Morocco might as well be on the far side of the Urals. Restaurants, of course, are similarly ordered; according to bright, ubiquitous Leonard Lyons, best of the New York chroniclers, the rear room upstairs at the 21 Club is "absolute Siberia," while the best table at El Morocco is just inside the door on the right (the Duchess of Argyll, Yogi Berra).

All these social distinctions and celebrity gradations are the patient work of headwaiters, who eat $5 bills while riding home on the subway. Right behind them are the club owners themselves, notably John Perona of El Morocco, a proud, tough member of the 8,000,000, whose daytime chalk-stripe suits shine like awnings in the sun, and the Stork's Sherman Billingsley, who, like any nightclub snob, is forever practicing the difficult feat of looking down while looking up.

Voodoo & Sequins. The large entertainment rooms of the hotels have the clearest, most agreeable atmospheres. The Persian Room at the Plaza is the most attractive, almost always features a lone singer (Lilo, Lisa Kirk, Hildegarde). The Waldorf's Empire Room, whose headwaiter has cultivated the manner of a Habsburg prince, offers the biggest marquee names, second only to the Copacabana. They include oldtimers and almost-old-timers (Nelson Eddy, Lena Home, currently Dick Haymes and Fran Jeffries) as well as occasional newcomers; recently the room sported the Kim Sisters--three Koreans who sing American and yodel, too. The Maisonette at the St. Regis has a small circle of chanteuses who supposedly appeal to society--Julie Wilson, Vicky Autier et al. The Cotillion Room at the Pierre does abridged versions of operettas that suggest only condensed milk.

For every Cotillion Room or Maisonette, the city has at least 100 small, usually drab, sometimes offbeat places, supporting all the piano players whose mothers forced them to go on taking lessons. Each has something reasonably unique, however slight. At 55th Street's Gaudeamus, tourists go for the foam-rubber padding along the edge of the bar, presumably there to protect them if the bar crashes. The best belly dancing east of Scranton, Pa. goes on in the Egyptian Gardens on West 29th Street. The African Room is full of thatch, fronds, voodoo masks, a men's room called Tarzan and a ladies' room labeled Jane.

For all the extraordinary miscellany of New York's night life, no club can touch the Latin Quarter--no, not with a tenfoot pole, for sheer expensive tawdriness. Unlike the Copacabana, which concentrates on headliners (Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr.) and surrounds them with half a dozen pretty chorines and vegetation by Goodyear, the Latin Quarter spends its budget on quantity, on big casts, on halfway talents and halfway nudes. A fanfare brings out the girls--girls dressed in balloons, girls dressed in sequins, girls in high heels clicking along the stage rim, nearly stepping on the ring-siders' elbows. After the updated burlesque comedians, the rubber-legged clown, the croaky grand-opera sextet, the long evening ends with a flourish--figure skaters on a rink the size of the late Serge Rubinstein's bed. Like New York night life itself, all this looks better from a distance. From the back of the huge room, the show seems gay and sexy, but when seen close up, the picture dissolves into the depressing details--forced smiles, smudged and sweating faces, bruises under torn net stockings.

Strip &; Gibbon. One significant fact is that the whole spectacle is anything but wicked. Burlesque has never come back since La Guardia, and the strip joints are more pathetic than inflammatory--particularly since Strip Row on West 52nd Street was closed down in deference to all the big new office skyscrapers and remote Greenwich Village has become almost the last outpost of the skin trade.

Despite some mob money invested here and there, the U.S. is not going to pot in the smoky grottoes of Manhattan, and no Gibbon is going to find his Decline and Fall in them. He would find much expensive tastelessness, along with some great entertainers who are really worth the cover charge, and if his taste is jazz, he would find the best around. But all together, the clubs probably pull fewer rivets out of civilization than, for example, a single lunch counter on 14th Street, which is S.R.O. now in the Nativity season, under a towering sign: THE PRINCE OF PIZZA. As far as its night life is concerned, New York is no longer O. Henry's Bagdad-on-the-Subway.

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