Face the Music by Peter Duchin & Patricia Beard

Author:Peter Duchin & Patricia Beard [Duchin, Peter & Beard, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Balloon Night at the Stork Club

Sherman Billingsley left his native Oklahoma in 1929, after serving a brief jail term in Leavenworth for bootlegging. He arrived in New York, and bought dozens of drugstores, which sold “medicinal liquor” over-the-counter, and stronger brews behind the scenes. He was so successful that a powerful mob leader insisted on owning 30 percent of his business. When Billingsley opened a speakeasy, the deal was the same. In 1931, he was raided by Prohibition agents, but soon reopened on West 51st Street, just off Fifth Avenue. The Volstead Act was repealed two years later and he established the Stork Club in the same location. The mob took a cut there, too. Billingsley tried to become independent, but he didn’t make any headway until he was kidnapped and held for ransom by Mad Dog Coll, a rival of his mob partners. The ransom was paid, although it’s not clear by whom, and he was freed unharmed. After that, the original gang backed off. If his underworld connections had become public, the club would have lost its cachet.

Billingsley, like Cesar Balsa and John Perona, was determined to attract the cream of café society. Every year, he invited a dozen of the most popular debutantes to be his guests, and as he expected, they attracted their friends. Everything was “on the house” for the girls. They wore Sortilège, the club’s exclusive perfume, and tapped their cigarettes in the famous black ashtrays with the Stork Club logo. The ashtrays were such popular souvenirs that Billingsley was constantly buying replacements.

On Sundays, balloons were held above the dance floor in a net that was pulled aside at midnight, when women crowded the dance floor, raising their arms to catch a balloon that might contain a ticket that entitled them to win a hundred-dollar bill, a piece of jewelry, and in one case, the papers for a pedigreed puppy. Some lucky guy even won a Cadillac. It’s said that Billingsley’s gifts cost the club $100,000 a year, the equivalent of about $855,000 today.

Balloon Night justified my sense that there was something “off” about the place. The Maisonette would never have tried a stunt like that. Yet the club became so prestigious that even Benny Goodman played there. As one author wrote, the Stork Club name was “synonymous with fame, class and money, in no particular order.” So much cash poured in that one night, when Ernest Hemingway arrived with a $100,000 check he had received for the movie rights to For Whom the Bell Tolls, he asked Billingsley to cash the check—some of the money was probably used to pay off a long-standing tab. Billingsley had enough in the safe to accommodate Hemingway, but said he’d have to wait to collect until closing time at 4:00 a.m.

Favored guests could use the club’s private barbershop and its limousine to drive them wherever they wanted to go. The select few were admitted to the Cub Room, an inner sanctum guarded by a maître d’ known as “St.

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