Fall of the Velvet Rope

If eras, like humans, have a moment when life finally leaves them, then an era died last week. Cafe society's birthplace and most famous watering spot, Manhattan's Stork Club, closed up.

It was at the Stork Club that General Douglas MacArthur was feted after his ticker-tape return from Korea, that Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier first revealed their engagement, and that Ernest Hemingway and Louis Untermeyer resorted to fisticuffs over some forgotten difference of literary opinion. For a quarter of a century, everyone who was not just an everyone dropped in. J. Edgar Hoover, Joan Crawford, Brenda Frazier, Rocky Marciano, Orson Welles, Helen Hayes, George Jean Nathan, Mary Martin, Tommy Manville, James Farley, Tallulah Bankhead, a freshman Congressman named Jack Kennedy--all came to be swept past the velvet rope.

Admitted, Established. A small-time bootlegger with three months at Leavenworth to his credit, Oklahoman Sherman Billingsley had spent Prohibition managing a few New York speakeasies, including one called the Stork Club. When Prohibition ended, Billingsley took the name, and in 1934 set up shop with the dispassionate intent of getting rich off the rich. The idea collided with a need. Once again there were people with money, some of it old, quite a bit of it new, some borrowed, and not too much of it blue-blooded. And many of them craved a place where they could be both respectable and seen, not necessarily in that order. For the group that was to become known as cafe society badly needed the reassurance of being noticed and fussed over. Sherm, as they came to call him, was delighted to do the fussing. And Walter Winchell was installed at a table of his own to do the noticing.

What made it go was Billingsley's basic formula: exclusiveness and effusiveness. He became a kind of unacknowledged dictator of cafe society, and the mass of its members, basically insecure, welcomed the leadership and authority. For they knew that if they were admitted into the upper sanctuary, the Cub Room, they were established.

Pathetic Absolution. Sherm also had standards, grandly banished any of those guilty of incurring his displeasure. At one time or another the banished list included Humphrey Bogart, who told Billingsley, "You stink," New Yorker Editor Harold Ross, who published an unflattering profile of W.W., Josephine Baker, who complained about slow service and had the added disadvantage of being a Negro, and Jackie Gleason, whom Sherm declared "a drunken bum."

But if you were accepted, Sherm made it as nice as could be. Regulars soon learned his coded hand signals and chuckled knowingly when the Coke-drinking, table-hopping host pulled his ear. That meant that a watching waiter should call him to the phone. A pull at his nose meant, "These are unimportant people--don't cash any checks for them." Favored guests were lavished with everything from an orchid to a car (he gave away more than two dozen over the years).

But by the end of the '50s, the Stork's business was thinning. In 1960, Billingsley pathetically issued absolution to all the banished. They did not come back. Their successors may still be called cafe society by some, but they have definitely moved out of the cafes and are more often called the Jet Set. Their haunts now are more likely to be art openings, opera-house lobbies, fashion shows, charity balls or dinner parties of their own. Talent, cleverness and achievement provide their own entree, and the new Jet Set no longer needs Billingsley's imprimatur to distinguish the In people from the Out.

When the door was locked last week, a sign announced, "Stork Club closed . . . will relocate." That seemed an empty promise. There was hardly anyone left who cared.

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