This 1996 article by New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal, was most likely the outline for his book The Stork Club published in 2000

LOOK WHO DROPPED IN AT THE STORK
by Ralph Blumenthal

New York Times July 1, 1996

For a big chunk of the 20th century, from the speak-easy era to the Vietnam War, it was the nation's and perhaps the world's most storied nightspot, a plush oasis where starlets stalked millionaires, a headwaiter pocketed a $20,000 tip, and Ernest Hemingway scuffled with the warden of Sing Sing.

It was, of course, the Stork Club, the fantasy creation of a flamboyant Oklahoma bootlegger, Sherman Billingsley, who fought running battles with racketeer partners and liked to boast that everything he wore and carried, from the buckles on his sock supporters to his collar stays, was made of gold.

Now, three decades after the demise of the Stork in a bitter strike and Mr. Billingsley's death in 1966, several hundred pages of hitherto private pen-and-pencil-scrawled notes by the inveterate socializer recount the birth of cafe society and the antics of its habitues that titillated Americans through years of boom, economic collapse, world war and recovery.

The recollections were to be the basis of an autobiography written with the youngest of his three daughters. But after Mr. Billingsley's death she put the project aside, and books that Mr. Billingsley had said Hemingway and Damon Runyon intended to write about him never materialized. In recent years, the daughter, Shermane Billingsley of Ridgewood, N.J., who as a little girl table-hopped with her father at the club, has sought to revive interest and allowed a reporter to study the material. She said that while the Stork Club had figured over the years in countless news stories, several films and books, including Neal Gabler's recent biography of Walter Winchell, no published account had been based on her father's personal papers.

In the not-always-flattering memoir, Mr. Billingsley confirms what was often suspected but never documented: that the club, last located at 3 East 53d Street (now Paley Park), was founded as a front for a nasty trio of Jazz Age mobsters, including Owney Madden, owner of the Cotton Club. He says he thwarted schemes by Jack (Legs) Diamond and Dutch Schultz to take over the Stork Club and that he was kidnapped and held for ransom by gangsters muscling in on the booming business. "Another way they tried to scare me was to get into my private offices on the seventh floor where no one has the keys to the locked doors except myself," Mr. Billingsley wrote. "They left skull and crossbones two different times. I don't mean pictures or sketches of skulls and crossbones, but real ones. We kept these incidents quiet."

The account chronicles the rise of a celebrity culture well before the age of television (although the Stork Club later had a show successively on all three networks), when all the world's wealth, power and beauty seemed to rendezvous nightly in the Cub Room.

Starting with circulars sent to stars of Hollywood and Broadway whose addresses he obtained from Western Union clerks, Mr. Billingsley boasted of courting the rich and famous with free drinks and gifts, from cases of wine to $5,000 one-gallon bottles of perfume (one of which he grandly presented to a patron celebrating her 100th birthday). "This with the great added help of World War," as he put it, "brought all the movie stars in."

He treasured acknowledgments of his largess. "I am grateful to you for your thoughtful kindness in sending me such a generous selection of attractive neckties," one letter from 1955 began. "At the same time may I once again thank you for the cigars that you regularly send to the White House?" The signatory: President Eisenhower.

But much simmered beneath the glittering surface. An unnamed "ex-glamour girl" left her toddler in the dining room one night and went up to the powder room to swallow a handful of sleeping pills. "I have seen mothers steal their daughters' boyfriends and marry them," Mr. Billingsley wrote. "I have seen girls steal their sisters' boyfriends and marry them. In one case the loser went insane. I know one father that was familiar with his son's wife. These were all high-society folks."

Mr. Billingsley also recounted being summoned by Tallulah Bankhead to her suite at the Gotham Hotel, finding her, he said, naked in bed and beckoning him to join her. "I ran out," he wrote, "her after me still nude, but I got to and into the elevator before she caught me."

Dropping Names (By the Ton)
When it came to dropping names, the club owner had few equals. Vito Genovese, later the boss of his own Mafia family, once worked for him as a whisky salesman. Among his "kindest" guests, he wrote, were "all of the Roosevelt boys, all of the Kennedy boys, their father, mother and sisters, Margaret Truman, Al Smith, Herbert Lehman, Averell Harriman, and Governor Dewey, Barry Goldwater, Dick Nixon and Edgar Hoover."
But the club was also noted for its spats. There was the night Walter Winchell, the Stork's scribe in residence, gave the cold shoulder to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. "I never could understand Walter doing this to an ex-king" Mr. Billingsley wrote, "but Walter had his feelings."

Hemingway one night got into a shoving match with Lewis E. Laws, the warden of Sing Sing, and knocked him down. Mr. Billingsley said his press agent told him not to worry, that "one fight a year is good publicity providing the fighters are big names." Another night, he wrote, Hemingway tried to pay a bar bill with a $100,000 movie royalty check. Mr. Billingsley said he told the author to wait until the night's receipts were in and then coolly cashed the check. It was a place, he said, where a woman could lose a $25,000 compact -- and expect to have it returned.

At a time when the rest of the country reeled under the effects of the Depression and wartime privations, "I saw many people throw their money away," Mr. Billingsley recounted. "One night a customer gave the doorman a $1,000 tip and asked him if it was the largest tip he had ever received. The doorman said no, I received a $2,000 tip about a year ago. The customer asked who gave it to him. The doorman said you gave it to me."
Another night, he said, "a man named Belcher gave Victor Crottor, another headwaiter, a $20,000 tip."
Largely absent from the memoir is Mr. Billingsley's freewheeling love life, as portrayed in the only published nonfiction account of life inside the club, "Welcome to the Stork Club," by a former maitre d', Mearl L. Allen (A. S. Barnes and Company, San Diego; 1980). Mr. Billingsley is also silent on the uproar after the legendary black dancer Josephine Baker and her party charged they were denied proper service at the Stork Club one night in 1951.

Mr. Billingsley himself came from modest beginnings, his date of birth not even recorded although he gave it as March 10, 1900. He was the youngest of nine children of Robert and Emily Billingsley, who traveled west as teen-age newlyweds in a covered wagon to stake a claim to land in the Oklahoma Territory, settling in Enid, a rail depot town on the former Cherokee Strip. It was dangerous country. Mr. Billingsley recalled once watching his father fight off an attack by six wildcats. Young Sherman and his brothers and sisters rode to and from their one-room school bareback on a single horse. "At dusk I was given a warm glass of milk which would put me to sleep, and the first one of the family that went to bed would pick me up and take me with them and that's the one I would sleep with that night," he recalled.

The Birth Of a Bootlegger

When he was still small, his oldest brother, Logan, killed the father of a girl he was accused of getting pregnant, and the family moved to Andarko to be near Logan's jail cell. After he got out he enlisted Sherman in selling bootleg beer to the Indians, hiding it in a child's red wagon. Sherman collected 50 cents a bottle. "All I got out of it was the empty bottles which I sold to saloons for a penny each plus I think becoming the youngest bootlegger that ever lived," he wrote.

After the family moved to Oklahoma City, then a wide-open town of 100,000 with gambling houses, opium dens and brothels, Mr. Billingsley said he entered the bootlegging business in Oklahoma with another brother, Fred, smuggling in the whisky by train and car from Texas. They expanded to Omaha, Detroit and Toledo. "World War I was on and everything was booming," Mr. Billingsley wrote. But at 18 he was caught and convicted in Detroit on Federal charges and sentenced to 15 months in prison and a fine of $5,000. He spent some months in Leavenworth, where he worked in the prison bakery but later won reversal of the conviction. Meanwhile his brother Logan was working with the mob syndicate in Detroit, shipping whisky in boxcar-loads of 1,000 cases at a time from Canada to Cuba and the Bahamas. Logan gave his racketeer partners the slip and turned up in New York, soon followed by Sherman.

New York in 1921 thumbed its nose at Prohibition even more than the West, Mr. Billingsley recounted. He soon learned, he said, "that if you owned a drugstore you practically owned a liquor wholesale business, and if you owned a dozen drugstores you had a dozen wholesale liquor houses -- which I did have soon."

"Money was coming in very fast," he recalled. "My pockets were loaded every night with it, money, money, money." He bought property in the Bronx -- including a parcel still named Billingsley Terrace now overlooking the Major Deegan Expressway -- and dated Ziegfeld girls. He also started a real estate brokerage to help him buy up drugstores for his bootlegging operations.

It was in 1929, he said, when two gamblers he knew from Oklahoma, Carl Henninger and John Patton, came into his real estate office and said they wanted to open a restaurant. He found a three-story building at 132 West 58th Street across from the New York Athletic Club and became their partner "and that was the beginning of the most famous nightclub the world has ever known." "Don't ask me how or why I picked the name," he wrote, "because I just don't remember."

Looking for a Body, Finding a Bar

The fledgling Stork Club scraped by but slowly gathered a following while spurring rivals like the Napoleon Club, El Morocco, "21" and, by 1940, Toots Shor's. One of the first patrons was the writer Heywood Broun, who lived down the block and, as Mr. Billingsley recounted it, mistook the Stork Club one day for a mortuary. "Broun walked in quietly, put his hat down on a table and went back in the rear room to pay his respect to the body but instead of a body he found a bar," he wrote. "He walked over to the bar, had several drinks, liked the place and came back very often, bringing his celebrity friends." Soon, Mr. Billingsley's partners were bought out by another investor, Thomas Healy. One day, he wrote, Mr. Healy confided that he was actually fronting for three men: the gangsters Owney Madden, George Lamange, also known as Frenchy, and Big Bill Dwyer, a former dockworker who built a huge bootlegging and entertainment empire. The trio, who liked to be called "the boys," promised, "we will protect you against everything," Mr. Billingsley wrote. But their relations proved stormy.

One night, he said, after dinner with the hostess Texas Guinan, he was abducted on Madison Avenue, pushed into a car and driven blindfolded to a hideout where he was held for ransom by a rival mobster, Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll. But, Mr. Billingsley wrote, before the payment could be collected, Mr. Coll was lured to a drugstore phone booth on West 23d Street and machine-gunned to death.

"With all these things I had had it," he wrote. He said he tried to buy out his gangster partners but was told: "We didn't pay $10,000 for an interest in the business, we paid 10 for 30 percent interest in everything you do for the rest of your life." Still, he said, he managed to buy them out for $30,000.

With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the end of Prohibition, he opened a new Stork Club -- with a legal liquor license, perhaps the first in New York, he said -- in a five-story town house that he readdressed as the catchier 53 1/2 East 51st Street. But now, he wrote, the dining room union was under the control of the mob boss Dutch Shultz, and he was harassed for payoffs. He fired the workers and recruited a new staff, under police protection. By 1934, he said, business was so good he moved the club to a bigger spot at 3 East 53d Street, just east of Fifth Avenue. The move ushered in the club's glory years. Jimmy Durante, Alfred Vanderbilt, J. Paul Getty, Alfred Drake, Rudy Vallee and Charlie Chaplin, among many other notables, married women they met at the Stork. Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly leaked news of their engagement there.

With the 1950's and 60's, as problems with the unions multiplied after the firing of a kitchen worker, Mr. Billingsley hired Roy Cohn as his lawyer and defied the protesters. Sabotage mounted. Something was put in the plumbing, "so when you drew water it would be a deep dark blue," he wrote. "Salt was put in the sugar bowl and sugar in the salt. Telephone wires were broken and slugs put in telephone slots that would stick." Drapes were torn, upholstery was sliced with razors and mirrors were cracked. Fires started. "Once the elevator was fixed so it would and did drop with me in it." At night when he went home, he wrote, "I would have all lights out in the house, would have to feel my way in and through the house to my bedroom with keys in one hand and pistol in the other hand."

He tried to catch union leaders in threats. "One time I had about twelve tape recordings going in every room in my home where there was a union man who wanted to see me," he wrote. "I even had one recorder over the front door to catch his first and last words." But the demonstrations, changing tastes and dwindling crowds worked to close the Stork Club's doors for good on Oct, 4, 1965. (Two years later it was demolished to clear the site for a vest-pocket park bequeathed by William S. Paley of CBS.) A year to the day after the club closed, Mr. Billingsley, in broken health, died of a heart attack at 66, leaving his daughter his sheaves of notes. "Myself," he wrote, "I can remember every one that was good or bad to me from the time my memories started."