Word: billingsley
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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...
What made it go was Billingsley's basic formula: exclusiveness and effusiveness. He became a kind of unacknowledged dictator of café 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...
...picked up the check for 59 of her visiting Alabama "kissin' cousins." She could hardly keep them straight, and small wonder. After all, her Alabama grandmother on her father's side had been married four times and had 13 children. She asked "Uncle John" Patillo, of Billingsley, if he would "take me walking through the pine trees like when I was a little girl." Uncle John allowed as how he might not be up to it these days. "I'm 87, you know...
Attorney Orzel Billingsley said, "All of us in Birmingham believe in non-violence, but none of us is so naive to believe that, if our churches continue to be bombed, our people can keep fighting on the basis of love and non-violence...