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 Clubis 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.
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